Every year on April 22nd, people celebrate and honor Earth Day through neighborhood clean-ups, community festivals, and projects to educate the public about the need to reduce our carbon footprint. Veterans For Peace has honored Earth Day by discussing how militarism impacts the environment. We hope to spread the message about the environmental costs of war, a topic that isn’t often discussed when leaders debate climate change and enact environmental policies. Instead of working for a cleaner, cooler future, our tax dollars are being spent on human death and environmental destruction.
Following an introductory presentation showing the links between militarism and climate change, a panel of experts will discuss how to proceed in uniting the peace and climate movements to avoid increasing militarism and worsening the climate crisis.
Moderator: Marcy Winograd of CODEPINK
Panelists:
• Ann Wright, author, activist, retired U.S. Army Colonel and U.S. State Department official
• Dr. David Vine, Professor, Department of Anthropology, American University and author of The United States of War
• Erik Edstrom, Afghanistan war veteran and author of UN-AMERICAN: A soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War
Presented by the Veterans For Peace Climate Crisis & Militarism Project: CCMP warns that an arms race resulting from the invasion of Ukraine will hinder efforts of major polluting countries to lower their CO2 emissions and will doom any meaningful international agreements later this year at COP27. In other words, we are no longer “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” we are running.
Clearly, there are no winners in the terrible war in Ukraine — except one: U.S. and British military contractors who will carry all their increased profits all the way to the bank.
Big Campaign contributions. 700 lobbyists. Militaristic think tanks. Government advisory boards. Hiring 1700 former Pentagon officials and stacking the government with their own people. These military contractors have numerous ways to determine Pentagon budgets, shape our foreign policy, create war fever, and pick our friends and enemies.
The result is $768,000,000,000. That’s $768 billion dollars. Democrats and Republicans in Congress just passed the most bloated military budget ever. That’s also $768 billion worth of new fossil fuel emissions to be created by the single biggest single source of carbon pollution on earth: the U.S. war machine.
The organizing for the new War Industry Resisters Network is full speed ahead. We’ve had over a hundred folks join our organizing calls and over 500 join our previous webinar. Join us as we continue to resist the dangerous war profiteering companies!
You can also join our next and final organizing meeting before the week on Thursday, April 14, 6:30 pm EDT. Zoom Link.
Affordable, accessible, culturally competent, and comprehensive healthcare is crucial for the immediate and long-term pandemic recovery of our communities.
More than 1 million New Yorkers remain uninsured and on average, 50% of New Yorkers with private health insurance struggle to access healthcare due to cost and barriers to care. If the U.S. had a public health and universal healthcare infrastructure comparable to those in other high-income countries, an estimated 40% of COVID deaths could have been avoided. Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved.
New York lawmakers have a historic opportunity to respond to the ongoing healthcare crisis by passing healthcare reforms that bring immediate relief to New Yorkers and that put our state on the road to universal healthcare.
Join Campaign for NY Health and state legislators to hear from upstate advocates about the systemic changes that are needed in order to make healthcare a right in our state and to learn what you can do to help win healthcare for all this year.
Co-sponsored by Campaign for New York Health, NYS Poor People’s Campaign, New York State Nurses Association, Coalition for Economic Justice, Melanated Moms, Syracuse United Neighbors, ARISE.
