DUMMERSTON — There was a rally for peace in Brattleboro on April 15 outside the main post office sponsored by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
In Windham County, it's likely that people are dying because they don't have health insurance. In 2010, more than 44,000 Americans died because the U.S. does not have universal health care, which Europe and Canada have. A small percentage of the military budget could provide free health care for every American.
Almost half (45 percent) of this year's entire federal budget of $2.9 trillion is being spent on war.
Here are the 2012 voting records of local members of Congress, from Peace Action's website (100 is best, 0 is worst):
• Vermont: Senator Patrick Leahy, 75; Senator Bernie Sanders, 75; U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, 91.
• New Hampshire: Senator Kelly Ayotte, 0.
• Massachusetts: Senator Edward Markey, 100.
John Ungerleider, a professor at SIT, said when asked if the U.S. would be more likely to be attacked if the military budget was cut by 50 percent: “Of course not.” The best way for people to get the government to cut military spending is to donate to, and/or volunteer for, a group like the American Friends Service Committee, he said.
Melvin Goodman, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, worked for a decade at the CIA as a foreign policy analyst. In his 2013 book National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism, Goodman writes, “The United States has the most secure geopolitical environment of any major nation, but sustains a defense budget that equals the combined budgets of the rest of the world.... We have more than 700 military bases and facilities around the world; few other countries have any....
“Since the end of World War II, the United States has fought inconclusive wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; conducted dubious invasions of Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama; and mounted counterproductive covert operations around the world, including those in the Congo, Chile [which resulted in the installation of dictator Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and killed thousands of his political opponents], El Salvador, and Guatemala. Only Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991 can be termed a success.”
The U.S. has a long history of stealing resources from Africa. This story is told in the books Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild and Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll, and in the film Lumumba by Raoul Peck. The average life expectancy in the African nation of Swaziland is 32. In the U.S., it's 77.
While the chances of dramatically cutting U.S. military spending may seem small, in 1989, the chances of Nelson Mandela - who was then seven years into a life sentence in prison - becoming president of South Africa were also small. Yet in 1994, Mandela was elected president, and one of the world's most brutal and racist governments was overthrown.
In the United States, 156 years ago, ending slavery and granting women the right to vote both seemed unlikely.
Mass movements of ordinary people have won justice.