A planning meeting for the Maine Campaign to Bring Our War $$ Home will be held on Saturday, Dec 4 from 12:30-3:30 pm at the Addams-Melman House (212 Centre St) in Bath. All are invited and please bring your own lunch.The meeting will follow the weekly Advent vigil at Bath Iron Works on Washington Street from 11:30-12:30.
This meeting will be an opportunity for us to review the statewide effort here in Maine and discuss what the next steps will be as we continue to build public consciousness about the important link between war in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan and the economic collapse here at home.
In the last vote by the House of Representatives (last summer) on the war funding supplemental bill our two members of the House from Maine (Mike Michaud and Chellie Pingree) voted against more money for war. Then in the recent election they were both reelected by comfortable margins while across the country many Democrats lost their seats in Congress.
Our challenge now is to find ways to turn our two Republican Senators from Maine (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins) away from their continued support for endless war funding.
The Bring Our War $$ Home effort has also grown nationally, in particular due to Lisa Savage's efforts to get national CodePink to make the campaign a priority. In addition activists in many states have taken up the call.
Despite Republican efforts nationally to sell themselves as being able to solve our national fiscal crisis they will be unable to make a serious dent in the problem as long as Congress is spending $8 billion per month on the war in Afghanistan.
The public will increasingly be looking for answers to the economic crisis and since neither the Democrats or Republicans will take on military spending in a serious way the opening is widening for the peace movement to inject this issue into the public debate. But in order to be successful at this there must be a serious and sustained campaign to bring this issue alive. A one-time event or appeal won't do the job.
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