Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2015

— Joey King, Veterans For Peace board member and chair of VFP’s Latin America Working Group


    
The U.S. Marines will soon deploy to Central America, according to a May 9 report in the Miami Herald (and Stars and Stripes). Most of the 280 troops will be headed to Honduras, which, since the U.S.–backed coup in 2009, has become the “murder capital of the world.”

Veterans For Peace does not buy Pentagon claims that the Marine deployment is about disaster preparedness. Over a century of U.S. intervention in Latin America has been a continuing disaster for the peoples of the region, as explained below.

U.S. interventionism in Latin America continues some 191 years after throwing off Spanish colonial rule. The Miami Herald article reports that approximately 280 U.S. Marines are landing in Central America any day now. The operation has no codename, but it's the fruit of about a year's planning by the U.S. Southern Command to insert a newly formed expeditionary outfit into the U.S.-run swath of the Soto Cano air base in Honduras for about 200 days — the longest, largest known Marine deployment onto Central American turf in years. About 90 of the Marines will be going to Guatemala, El Salvador and Belize.

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2015

— Rodrigo de la Rosa
    

More and more cities have begun to pave the way toward economic justice by supporting the nationwide initiative of increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland, OR, have committed themselves to this goal within the next few years. In states such as Texas, where the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, this change would more than double income in households earning less than $15,000 per year. Although the campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour began as a fast food worker campaign, it has now been implemented in many other service sector jobs and has ultimately become a working-class campaign. In California, where the minimum wage is currently $9 per hour, a single mother or father earns $17,280 per year; that’s $6,570 below the poverty level for a single person without dependents. In San Diego the campaign to earn $15 an hour has been going for a little over a year and has already gained an outstanding amount of support.

This campaign not only advocates for economic justice, but it will also have an impact on military recruitment, because the most powerful factor that drives people in working-class communities into the ranks of the military is POVERTY.

High school students in low-income communities have programs such as JROTC that serve as a gateway and recruitment tool for the military. Military recruiters conduct more class visitations and attend more career fairs than college recruiters in low-income schools. Meanwhile, programs such as JROTC and military recruiters are much less present in schools in affluent communities.

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From Draft NOtices, April-June 2015

—Rick Jahnkow
    

California’s large population has one of the lowest Selective Service registration rates in the country. This would make a future return to the draft less likely because so many men (yes, it’s still male-only) would be beyond the government’s reach. For the seventh time, however, Selective Service is asking the California state legislature to boost registration compliance by making it mandatory and automatic in order to receive a California driver’s license. The last such proposal failed less than a year ago.

Proposed this time by Assembly member Cristina Garcia (D-Downey), Assembly Bill 82 seeks to use DMV records to automatically register males with Selective Service when they apply for a license or license renewal. Its first hearing was scheduled for the Assembly Transportation Committee on Monday, April 6, 2015. Based on past patterns, there is a good chance the bill will make it past this first committee, in which case an avalanche of letters to legislators will be needed to stop it again.

If anyone did not know, even immigrants -- regardless of their legal status -- are supposed to register for a possible future draft. So this time around, Selective Service and its allies are trying to win over Democratic votes for the bill by exploiting the plight of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Their tactic is to tell legislators that a large number of undocumented people who are failing to register with Selective Service by age 26 are being permanently barred from receiving college financial aid and possible citizenship. And if those legislators truly care about the welfare of these young people, they should pass AB 82.

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Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS

When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:

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