Brief-ings

Website to Help High Schoolers

Opt Out of the Military

NJ Peace Action, Central Jersey People’s Org for Progress and NJ HS Anti-War (a Facebook group) have launched a new website www.optout-nj.org, a website loaded with resources to enable high school students and their parents to opt-out of sending students’ contact information to the military. Please use this website and send out information about it.

Contact: Madelyn Hoffman, Executive Director, NJ Peace Action, 673 Bloomfield Avenue, 2nd floor, Bloomfield, New Jersey 07003; 973.259.1126 (phone); 973.259.1139 (fax); www.njpeaceaction.org. Φ

Photo: http://www.optout-nj.org/

Former OPW Staffer Arrested

Former OPW staffer Chani Geigle-Teller spattered red paint around at Portland City Hall last month to protest lack of police accountability in the beating death of James P. Chasse Jr. three years ago. Geigle-Teller was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and released. Φ

Photo: http://www.facebook.com/radchani

Sign of the Times

For 20 years, a billboard near New York’s Times Square has calculated the U.S. national debt. Now there’s a similar ticker to figure part of our ecological debt.

In June, Deutsche Bank lit up a sign near Madison Square Garden that will tabulate the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere. The current quantity of CO2 is 3.64 trillion tons, the highest level in about 800,000 years. The number is increasing by about 800 tons a second.

Bank officials say they made the sign — which is lit up by 41,000 low-energy diodes — to encourage conversations about climate change. Of course, bankers rarely do anything without thinking of their own financial interests. Deutsche Bank is heavily involved in the markets that trade greenhouse gas emissions. So as the numbers on the sign change, so too will the bank’s bottom-line. Φ

Earth Island Journal, Autumn 2009

Photo: http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/issues/current/

Pentagon Opposed Anti-Rape Amendment

The all-white, all-male Republicans who opposed Al Franken’s anti-rape amendment have drawn considerable opprobrium, but few have noticed that the Pentagon also opposed the amendment. According to The Huffington Post, “‘The DoD opposes the proposed amendment,” reads a message sent from the administration to the Senate on October 6, the day the amendment passed by a 68-30 vote. “The Department of Defense, the prime contractor, and higher tier subcontractors may not be in a position to know about such things. Enforcement would be problematic, especially in cases where privity of contract does not exist between parties within the supply chain that supports a contract,” reads the DoD note. “It may be more effective to seek a statutory prohibition of all such arrangements in any business transaction entered into within the jurisdiction of the United States, if these arrangements are deemed to pose an unacceptable method of recourse.'”Φ

Photo: www.nndb.com/people/476/000022410/