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IPJN has conference calls to discuss local actions and plan upcoming events. Please join us. Information is sent out through our Yahoo group. Minutes are posted on Conference Call Minutes page to the left on the home page.
NEW: See the IPJN NO Drone Toolkit with information, resources, sample letters and action ideas. Let us know what your community is doing.
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As Hoosiers gathered at the Statehouse to voice their opposition to so-called, "Right to Work" legislation, Democratic legislators caucused and refused to allow the quorum needed to proceed. If you don't already know, a vote may be around the corner on the "Right To Work" legislation that will effectively aid the de-funding of labor unions in Indiana and thus further the neoconservative aim to dismantle labor unions. Everyone should call their elected officials and make their voices heard.
OCTOBER 2011 HUMAN NEEDS NOT CORPORATE GREED!
   
A Call to Action - Oct. 6, 2011 and onward
October 2011 is the 10th anniversary of the invasion of
Afghanistan and the beginning of the 2012 federal austerity budget. It
is time to light the spark that sets off a true democratic, nonviolent
transition to a world in which people are freed to create just and
sustainable solutions.
We call on people of conscience and courage—all who seek peace,
economic justice, human rights and a healthy environment—to join
together in Washington, D.C., beginning on Oct. 6, 2011, in nonviolent
resistance similar to the Arab Spring and the Midwest awakening.
A concert, rally and protest will kick off a powerful and sustained
nonviolent resistance to the corporate criminals that dominate our
government.
Forty-seven years ago, Mario Savio, an activist student at Berkeley,
said, "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so
odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't
even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the
gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and
you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who
run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine
will be prevented from working at all."
Those words have an even greater urgency today. We face ongoing wars
and massive socio-economic and environmental destruction perpetrated by a
corporate empire which is oppressing, occupying and exploiting the
world. We are on a fast track to making the planet unlivable while the
middle class and poor people of our country are undergoing the most
wrenching and profound economic crisis in 80 years.
"Stop the Machine! • Create a New World!" is a clarion call
for all who are deeply concerned with injustice, militarism and
environmental destruction to join in ending concentrated corporate power
and taking direct control of a real participatory democracy. We will
encourage a culture of resistance—using music, art, theater and direct
nonviolent action—to take control of our country and our lives. It is
about courageously resisting and stopping the corporate state from
destroying not only our inherent rights and freedoms, but also our
children’s chance to live, breathe clean air, drink pure water, grow
edible natural food and live in peace.
As Mother Jones said, "Someday the workers will take possession of
your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar
of profit!"
We are the ones who can create a new and just world. Our issues are connected. We are connected. Join us in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6, 2011, to Stop the Machine. For more information: www.october2011.org.
INDIANA DRONES: AN ACTION PLAN By Fran Quigley
As
requested during the IPJN conference call last night, I am sharing the outline
of a proposal for coordinated statewide action addressing drone warfare
activities here in Indiana. The backdrop for this action is the presence
of significant drone manufacturing, research and support here in Indiana (for a
three-part series on “Indiana Drones,” see http://www.nuvo.net/indianapolis/home-grown-drones-part-iii-in-a-series/Content?oid=1859790
) and increased concern about domestic use of drone technology for law
enforcement purposes (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/22/AR2011012204111.html
)
- Specifically, I suggest a campaign that
would include:
2.
A series
of demonstrations outside the drone warfare support sites here in Indiana,
coinciding with media and public outreach. (Perhaps one site each Saturday
during the month of May, for example.) Ideally, these events would be
coordinated by activists in the local area of the drone activity with
attendance and support from around the state.
3.
Continued
public education about the legal and moral issues surrounding drone warfare.
This could include contributions to blogs, websites, local newsletters, letters
to the editor, etc.
4. Formal outreach and connection with
national and international groups opposing drone warfare. Kathy Kelly of Voices
for Creative Nonviolence, for example, confirmed last evening that she and her
colleagues would like to be supportive and present for Indiana actions.
I will be speaking on “Indiana
Drones” and meeting with Bloomington-area activists on March 2, and some folks
suggested last night that that we organize a drones workshop and planning
meeting at the Midwest Peace and Justice Summit on March 26. I agree that the
Summit presents a good opportunity to share ideas, allow organizations and
persons to commit their support, assume tasks and plan next steps.
I look forward to suggestions of
improvement on this proposal, and I especially look forward to working together
to address this deadly and disturbing new form of violence and militarism
happening right here in Indiana.
Fran Quigley, quigley2@iupui.edu
Stuart Mora, an Indianapolis Hyatt Hotel employee and organizer for UNITE, a union for hotel workers, is speaking at the IPJN Fall Strategy Session that took place on September 11, 2010 in Indianapolis.
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NOTE: Additional
information about Indiana peace and justice activities can be found here
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Published in the Bloomington ALternative on February 5, 2011.
INTERVIEW: Activists Hugh Farrell and Mary Sackley
February 5, 2011
 Photograph by Steven Higgs The “green scare” is in full swing, with
COINTELPRO-style targeting of environmental and animal rights
activists. The green scare, according to the Center for Constitutional
Rights, is “the repression of environmental activists by designating
them as terrorists.”
The challenge for activists is to peacefully protest
and avoid criminalization of their dissent. Nowhere is that situation
more evident than in the case of two I-69 protestors, Hugh Farrell and
Gina “Tiga” Wertz. After a nonviolent protest Wertz was charged with
intimidation, a class A misdemeanor, two counts; conversion
(unauthorized use of someone else's property), a class A misdemeanor,
two counts; and corrupt business influence (racketeering), a class C
felony. Her bond was set at $10,000.
Farrell was
charged with two counts of intimidation, two counts of conversion and
corrupt business influence plus felony racketeering; his bond was set
at $20,000.
"Now that we’re done with the case, we’re trying to figure out the repression that was used against us."
All four misdemeanors are related to an alleged nonviolent action on
July 9, 2007, in which activists removed the furniture from offices of
two private, for-profit companies that had contracts with the Indiana
Department of Transportation (INDOT) to work on I-69. They posted
eviction notices on the doors to protest the eviction of property
owners and confiscation of land and homes in the highway's path.
In early March 2010 the judge dismissed the felony
racketeering charge. That left the four misdemeanors, which carried a
maximum prison sentence of four years. In the end, the defendants'
attorneys worked out a plea bargain consisting of unsupervised
probation for two years.
Mary Sackley is another local activist; she is one of
16 citizens who protested an asphalt company’s participation in
construction of the new-terrain highway with two lockdowns in 2008 at
the asphalt company’s headquarters.
Here Farrell and Sackley talk about what their lives are like today, two years after the protests.
***
LG: Hugh, how has your life changed since your case ended?
HF:
I’m still under judicial control, which means that for another year and
a half I’ll have probation restrictions, which means I can’t be
arrested and am subject to additional surveillance.
"I was specifically targeted because I was providing communication in between the protestors and the police."
LG: What happens if you’re arrested?
HF:
I have a two-year sentence, so if I get arrested, that immediately
becomes unsuspended, and I’d do two years [of prison time]
automatically. SEE THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW AT: www.bloomingtonalternative.org. HOOSIERS RALLY FOR PEACE IN AFGHANISTAN
By Harry Targ, West Lafayette,October 20, 2009
Speakers Link War on Afghanistan to Justice and Environmental Issues
Seventy Hoosiers rallied against escalating war in Afghanistan on Saturday,
October 17, in Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana. They came from as far away
as Fort Wayne, Manchester, Bloomington, and West Lafayette to demand that
President Obama choose diplomacy rather than increased military operations in
that troubled land.
The October 7 Coalition that organized the rally as the
culmination of several days of anti-war events around Indianapolis included
traditional peace groups and others such as Iraq Veterans Against the War,
Central Indiana Jobs With Justice, Women in Black, Code Pink, and Earth House.
The opening plea for a reconsideration of the military commitment to war in
Afghanistan was made by Reverend Mmaja Ajabu, Minister of Social Concerns,Light
of the World Christian Church. Reverend Ajabu recalled that when he went off to
the Vietnam War forty years ago he thought he was engaging in a noble cause. He
said it did not take him long to realize that he was not engaged in a cause
which justified killing and dying in battle. In fact, he suggested, most soldiers
have a radical change of consciousness when they are planted in the middle of a
war that is not about their interests.
Dave Lambert, Fort Wayne veteran of the military and the peace movement,
documented in passionate prose the utter futility of wars, from Vietnam, to
Iraq, to Afghanistan. Concerning the impact of war on soldiers, he referred to
National Guard Specialist Jacob W. Sexton, on leave from service in Kabul, who
just days earlier had shot and killed himself in a Muncie movie theatre.
Timothy Baer, Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, identified ten
historically-grounded reasons why the United States needed to withdraw from
Afghanistan including cost, growing unpopularity of invading forces, and
massive violence against civilians.
Dave Pilbrow, North Meadow Circle of Friends, linked issues of war and peace to
devastation of the environment. Not only war, but the allocation of resources
for war-the military/industrial complex-needs to be challenged if the human
race and nature are to survive.
Shehzad Qazi, a student at Indiana University/Purdue University and member of
an undergraduate think tank on international security issues, and Lori Perdue,
Code Pink, demanded a negotiated solution to the war in Afghanistan. Qazi
asserted that what we call the Taliban is a loose coalition of forces with
differing perspectives on the willingness to negotiate with their enemies.
Lori Perdue said that she had initially favored an attack on Afghanistan after
9/11 and was moved to that position by the terrible treatment of women in
Afghan society. She later realized that the position of women would not be
improved by a U.S. war on the country. Women’s rights and peace can only come,
she argued, through an all-parties conference to end the war. As the primary
victims of the Afghan war, women needed to be at the negotiating table.
Peace Activists Rally and March While Jobless and Homeless Convene for
Food
After the speeches, participants marched through downtown Indianapolis chanting
for an end to war and money for health care and jobs, not for warfare.
Meanwhile, across the grassy mall from the American Legion monument where the
rally was held, and just across the street from the large and elegant
Indianapolis public library about 75 people, the same number as those rallying
for peace, lined up for free food provided every other Saturday to those
without work and housing. This assemblage was mostly African American, while
the peace rally was mostly white. The peace rally was in front of the sculpture
depicting the history of the U.S. war on Vietnam. So at the same time, a block
apart there was a protest against another Vietnam and an assembly of those
needing free food, as the country was spending billions of dollars to kill
Afghan people while neglecting to feed its own citizens.
Harry Targ, representing the Lafayette Area Peace Coalition, had reminded the
assembled protestors of the tragedy of President Lyndon Johnson 45 years ago.
As president, Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, declared
a war on poverty, and called on Americans to create a "Great
Society." The goal remained unfulfilled due to the cost of the brutal war
on the Vietnamese people.
Tim King, rally organizer and moderator, interspersed speeches with relevant
statements from Dr. Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and former President
Eisenhower who said in 1953 that "Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Postscript on the Rally and March Against the War in Afghanistan
Reflections on the rally and march stimulated both praise and self-criticism.
What was praiseworthy was the numbers, group representation, sense of
determination of participants, and emotional and intellectual power of speeches
and chants. The rally was the culmination of networking and organizing of
multiple events in a city and state with strong conservative traditions in the
context of a political environment dominated by an enormous array of issues:
health care, global warming, jobs, and unparalleled Wall Street corruption.
However, the peace movement in Central Indiana, and everywhere, must continue
to connect the issues that impact on peopleÂ’s lives. Metaphorically peace
activists must strategize about crossing the mall from the Vietnam War memorial
to the food distribution line. While the peace movement bridges some of the
divides between people in terms of gender, and religion, for example, more work
can be done to overcome barriers of class and race.
Finally, peace and justice activists need to figure out ways to overcome
inertia, issue-fatigue, and the overuse of traditional tactics, to mobilize
masses of people everywhere to be part of the struggles to create peace and
justice. The dilemmas peace and justice activists face in the heartland of
Indiana are similar in substance to the problems all progressives face.
Please visit my blog:
www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
       
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'Stop war and save the planet'
by Linda Greene
October 31, 2010
Author and activist Barry Sanders
says the Pentagon is the world's largest polluter, contributing to everything
from climate change to human toxicity. Its use of depleted uranium in Iraq, for
example, is producing "astronomical" numbers of deformed Iraqi
fetuses.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee
Barry Sanders told a Bloomington audience that one morning, as he awoke, two
questions came to mind: How much pollution does the military produce? How much
pollution does the U.S. military produce in a year, month or day? As an
ordinary citizen, not a military expert, he set about trying to answer these
questions.
Sanders said he felt complicit in
the military’s pollution since it was taxpayers’ money that funds the military.
What drove his quest was the assumption that “an informed citizenry is a much
more powerful collection of people than those who care little or not at all.”
Sanders spoke Oct. 20 at the
Universalist Unitarian Church on the ecological costs of militarism. A Ph.D.
and author of The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, he
for many years was professor of English and the history of ideas at Pitzer
College of the Claremont Colleges in California. He now lives in Portland,
Ore., where he is writer in residence at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
The Green Zone (2009) is Sanders’ latest book. His one-hour lecture was
spiced with humorous observations and amusing digressions.
Seventy percent of those alive today
can expect to be alive by 2050, but “the earth as a habitable place might not
be alive,” according to Sanders. Scientists say the planet must decrease its
output of greenhouse gases by 70 percent by 2020. If we quit polluting from
this moment on, he said, “It would take 40 years for the gases to work
themselves out of the atmosphere.”
Sanders quoted a famous line from
the Pogo comic strip: “We have seen the enemy, and he be us.”
Sanders extensively researched every
outlet he could find to find answers to his questions. He discovered that
“citizens cannot find answers to the most basic information about the
military.” Most information about the military amounts to “military secrets.”
"The
Pentagon’s use of fuel, Sanders said, amounts to a monumental daily spill of
oil, larger than the BP oil spill."
“The best one can get is a rough outline, an approximation,” he said.
Sanders’ outline says the Pentagon
is the single largest polluter in the world.
Sanders found some startling facts,
vetted by military officers, in his search for information about the Pentagon’s
pollution. All the world’s militaries together emit two-thirds of the
ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons released. The United States manufactures
about 25 percent of the world’s goods and consumes 25 percent of the world’s
fossil fuels.
In one year the U.S. military uses
enough oil to power all our mass transit for 22 years. The Pentagon uses 25
percent of the world’s supply of jet fuel, and of all branches of the military,
the Air Force is the largest consumer of oil. According to environmentalist
Bill McKibben, Sanders said, jet fuel is 20 or 30 times more corrosive to the
atmosphere than gasoline.
In the first three weeks of “Shock
and Awe” in Iraq, the U.S. military used 40 million gallons of fuel, the amount
used in the entire course of World War I. According to the Pentagon’s own Web
site, in 1999 the U.S. military paid $3.5 billion for 110 million barrels of
petroleum. As the Web site points out proudly, that’s enough petroleum to fuel
1,000 cars driving around the world 4,620 times, or 125 billion miles.
"Last
year, Sanders noted, the military spent more than $8 billion for close to 400
million barrels of petroleum, enough for 1,000 cars to drive over 400 billion
miles."
Last year, Sanders noted, the military spent more than $8 billion for close to
400 million barrels of petroleum, enough for 1,000 cars to drive over 400
trillion miles.
The Humvee gets four miles to a
gallon. The M1 Abrams tank gets 0.2 miles per gallon; it requires 10 gallons
just to fire up the tank.
Those figures are nothing compared
with the F4 Phantom fighter jet, which uses over 1,500 gallons of fuel per
hour. That doesn’t count the fuel needed to keep tankers aloft when refueling
the jets in midair. The Air Force’s M15 uses 25 gallons per minute and 160 at
peak thrust.
The M15 is outdone by the B52
Stratocruiser, which uses 3,340 gallons per hour. In a year’s worth of driving
a car, the average American uses 5,000 gallons of gasoline. At the height of
the Iraq war the Pentagon was using 1 million gallons of fuel per day.
***
The Pentagon’s use of fuel, Sanders
said, amounts to a monumental daily spill of oil, larger than the BP oil spill.
Yet the Pentagon’s use of oil is off the record and exempt from official
international discussions of solutions to climate change.
"All
the world’s militaries together emit two-thirds of the ozone-depleting
chlorofluorocarbons released."
The U.S. military pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere not only because
of its fuel usage but also because of its bombs and what the military calls its
new, improved napalm, Sanders said.
The U.S. uses arms made with
depleted uranium (DU), which has a half-life of 4 billion years and has
contaminated much of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Sanders. DU is in the
Iraqis’ bloodstreams and human milk.
A psychiatrist refugee working in a
teaching hospital in Portland told Sanders the Iraqis are seeing an
“astronomical” number of deformed fetuses. Iraq is the world’s worst or second
worst environmental disaster ever, Sanders said.
***
The military is a kind of “shadow
country over which we have no control,” Sanders asserted, and the metaphors of
war “have wrapped themselves like tentacles around our imaginations.” He would
like to see all metaphors of war purged from our language.
"To
take on the military ... is to take on corporate America. Both know only money,
and withholding money from the Pentagon is a way to stop war."
Sanders said he used to be antiwar. Today he advocates no war because he’s
“dedicated to life on this planet.”
To take on the military, Sanders
pointed out, is to take on corporate America. Both know only money, and
withholding money from the Pentagon is a way to stop war.
Sanders wants to see the creation of
the largest coalition possible to bring war to an end. War is largely
responsible for global warming, and we can’t separate global warming from the
wars in the Middle East, he said. Thus, one can’t separate the peace movement
from “the crisis we call global warming.”
It’s time, Sanders said, “to come
together and put an end to our perpetration of craziness.” Those who
“desperately want to see the continuation of the planet” must struggle to ban
war. He went on to say, “We have to extricate ourselves from the profound
desire to eradicate all life from the planet.”
“War is now obsolete. … The earth
has had enough; listen to its cries,” Sanders said. Human beings hunger for
“the ultimate thrill of joyous living, life without hate, without greed,
without animosity and without the need for more and more.”
“The greenest you can get is to stop
war and save the planet,” he concluded.
Linda Greene can be reached at lgreene@bloomington.in.us.
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