Category Archives: Clarence Kailin Chapter 25

No Nukes in Madison ~ Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)

Back from the Brink Background

Back from the Brink Page – Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) Wisconsin

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) Wisconsin is launching a campaign calling on Madison to support a “Back from the Brink” resolution.

The resolution endorses the 2017 United Nations ban of nuclear weapons, calls for specific steps to prevent nuclear war, and a commitment to nuclear weapons-free contracts and investments.

Support Back from the Brink  

 


In 1983, the Madison City Council passed an ordinance declaring the city a “nuclear free zone”. We are asking our City Council members (Alders) to pass a Back from the Brink Resolution which builds on this ordinance and commits the city to nuclear weapons free contracts and investments. Our City already has a socially responsible investment policy in place; it no longer invests in fossil fuel companies. We are asking the City do the same regarding nuclear weapons production.

Some say nuclear disarmament is an issue that should be taken up with our Senators and Representatives rather than our City Council members. But national policy has local consequences.

Plans are underway to expand the Truax Air Force base in Madison and bring in F-35 fighter jets designed to carry B61 nuclear bombs. If nuclear capable F-35’s were stationed here, Truax would become a nuclear target.

In the event of a nuclear-armed F-35 crash, Madison could be exposed to air, ground and water contamination with plutonium, even if a nuclear chain reaction did not take place.

No F-35’s – Safe Skies Clean Water Wisconsin


Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War is a national grassroots initiative seeking to fundamentally change U.S. nuclear weapons policy and lead us away from the dangerous path we are on. The Call lays out five common-sense steps that the United States should take to reform its nuclear policy. We are asking individuals and organizations around the country to endorse The Call and build support for the U.S. government to adopt it as its highest national security priority. Join the effort and help build a safer world for our children to inherit.

 

The Gaza Freedom Flotilla comes to Madison July 24-25

Since 2008, the Freedom Flotilla movement has sent 35 ships attempting to break Israel’s illegal, US-backed military blockade that has devastated Gaza and denied 2 million people –half of them children — access to food, clean water, fuel, medicine, employment and basic human dignity for 13 years.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition is composed of civil society organizations and initiatives from many countries. We have been challenging the illegal and inhumane Israeli blockade of Gaza for many years and are committed to continuing the struggle until the blockade is unconditionally lifted and Palestinian people everywhere realize their full rights.

On Wednesday and Thursday July 24 and 25th, the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project (MRSCP) welcomes the Gaza Freedom Flotilla’s North American Boat to Gaza campaign to Madison with two days of activities.

On Wednesday evening, a pontoon will give visibility to the crisis in Gaza on Lake Mendota offshore from the Union Terrace and The Edgewater. We will also be leafleting the crowd on shore.

 

Anyone interested in helping with these efforts in Madison, please email [email protected]

 

On Thursday, former flotilla participants Kathy Kelly (Voices for Creative Non-Violence) and Kit Kittredge (NA Boat to Gaza Campaign) will talk about Gaza, the importance of the flotilla and plans for the next international sailing in 2020 at 7 pm at James Reeb Unitarian Congregation, 2146 E. Johnson Street, Madison.


This free event will feature a display of Gaza children’s artwork as well as refreshments & dessert including baklawa; donations to benefit the Flotilla and another Maia Project clean water system for kids in Rafah will be appreciated.

For more information, contact MRSCP at [email protected] ,The Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, or check out the face book event, The Gaza Freedom Flotilla Comes to Madison!.

Welcomed by WORT RADIO. (Kit Kittredge and Kathy Kelly, fresh from the Freedom Flotilla’s activities in Chicago, will be interviewed live on WORT’s A Public Affair by host Allen Ruff from noon-1 pm on Thursday 7-25.

Kathy Kelly will also be a guest on The Morning Buzz with Jan Miyasaki between 8 and 8:30 am on Wednesday 7-24 … tune in at 89.9 fm or listen live on line.)

Note: If you can’t attend but would like to support either the Flotilla or the Maia Project, you can donate as follows:

Flotilla: Online donations here.
Or send a check payable to Nonviolence International with “US Boat to Gaza” in the memo line to:
Nonviolence International (for Ship to Gaza 2020)
4000 Albermarle Street, NW, Suite 401
Washington D.C. 20016.

Maia Project: Online donations here.
Or save the online fee and send a check payable to MRSCP marked “water” to:
MRSCP
P.O. Box 5214
Madison, WI 53705

Veterans and Unions Defend VA Healthcare from Privatization & Greed

On June 24, VA union workers, Veterans for Peace, military members and veterans and supporters held a rally at the VA Madison Main hospital on Highland Avenue:  We say no to privatization, and we say VA employees deserve rights, a fair contract and good faith bargaining.

We are determined to protect our VA healthcare, educate those around us as to the situation and expose what is not being stated in the mainstream, corporate media (which is almost entirely owned by six massive multi-national corporations.)

We demand that the so-called “Veteran Community Care Program”:

  1.  Have a separate budget because if they meet the goals for private care, the entire budget will be eaten up and then some.  (They seek to spend all the money and dismantle our VA.)
  2.  Require all private sector personnel and facilities meet the same high standards that the VA meets.
  3.  Be redesigned so that elected representatives, veterans organizations and veterans are all involved.

The private sector cannot offer the specialized care that veterans need, but the privatizers don’t care. VA personnel have the skills and ability to deal successfully with post traumatic stress and the damage from depleted uranium. The VA is the best  place to get help with exposure to agent orange and exposure to burn pits. The VA has the most specialized care and experience  to deal with Gulf War Illness.

 

 

As Vietnam veteran and VHA patient Skip Delano points out:

“the private sector healthcare system does not have the capability or the capacity to meet the needs of veterans. They will be sent to providers who may know little or nothing about their special problems and may fail to diagnose critical conditions like PTSD, Agent Orange, or burn-pit exposure, or military sexual trauma, to name only a few.”

The next major demand on the horizon is poisoning from Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) The government and big business have been hiding the effects that they found years ago.

In 2009 PFASs were listed as persistent organic pollutants under the Stockholm Convention, due to their ubiquitous, persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic nature.

First, veterans were hit with the massive privatization program called Veterans Choice, passed by the Republican Congress in 2014 and signed by President Barack Obama. But 70 House Democrats thought the Choice program was not the way to improve the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ veteran healthcare. They voted “no.”

The second punch was President Donald Trump hitting unionized VA workers with a “bad faith” proposed bargaining contract to replace the present contract covering 260,000 VA workers. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union members make up more than half of the VA’s 460,000 workers, and one-third are veterans.

VA management’s proposed labor contract guts worker rights and prevents medical staff from reporting serious medical errors or threats. Trump proposes that a disciplined worker would be prohibited from filing a grievance against an unjust disciplinary action.


Purchased politicians have also been busy working to undermine any workers who have bargaining power left.  The billionaires like to have slaves instead of negotiations.  You can see that in many years of Koch money and where it is spent.

“Members of Congress weighed in on the contract negotiations between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the American Federation of Government Employees June 5, calling on the agency to improve what they say are “anti-labor policies” outlined in the new contract…”

Over 100 Congress members accuse the VA of anti-union behavior

You have to ask yourself, “Why?”  Cui bono?

I think that it is obvious, like most everything else, certain politicians seek to make the rich richer by taking from the rest of us.  That seems to be how the politicians line their pockets.

The profiteers and their puppets seek to privatize our health care for the same reason they want to privatize the schools, the Post Office, the prisons, utilities and other assets that belong to Americans: they want to take our assets and they want to take them at the lowest possible prices.

I’m not letting go of what is mine so that some billionaires and some politicians can get richer.
If and when, privatization is accomplished, veterans will not get endless care. There will be vouchers or similar methods to limit care, much more so than today. It will become more and more about balancing budgets. It will become the same debate that they like to have with safety net programs. “We can’t afford this.” It’s a game called ‘starve the beast.’ Which is just an extension of the rich getting richer while the rest suffer.

For those who still want private care, fine, but don’t destroy our VA in order to get your care. The VA has had ways of getting private care for veterans when needed, all along.

Study after study has shown that VA care is rated better than private care.  At this point, the wait times are shorter at the VA than in the private sector.  The VA system is better, why not fix the problems in the system and expand it?  The VA would be even better with more staff, nurses, doctors, clinics, hospitals.

VA Now Has Shorter Wait Times Than Private Clinics 

Journal of General Internal Medicine, Report: VA care as good or better than other U.S. hospitals

Rand study finds VA care equal or better than private sector


Links:

Contact Coordinator Skip Delano at [email protected] to get involved

To help us, complete this survey 

Privatization, like that promoted through the new Mission Act, will be devastating to us veterans in the end. The powers that be are baiting veterans with offers of whatever care they like in the private market. But when the privatization is done, those of who are not wealthy will be up a creek. They mean to use up the funding for the VA with this private care, and as they replace VA care… they are eliminating those services at the VA.

Listen in to A Public Affair from WORT radio Madison : Suzanne Gordon, author of Wounds of War 


To help veterans, please contact your U.S. senators and representative. Just say, “Stop privatizing the VA — fix, fund and staff it, and fill the 50,000 VA vacancies.” The politicians on the right can’t seem to come up with a healthcare plan that would solve the mess that is private insurance in the US, but they are determined to destroy the VA healthcare system that many of us veterans depend upon.

Memorial Day Peace Rally 2019

Veterans for Peace, veterans, friends, supporters and family all gathered at the Gates of Heaven at James Madison Park in Madison to honor the dead and rally for a peaceful tomorrow on May 27, Memorial Day, the peace rally is an annual event.

Finding peace and comfort in uncertain times was a theme that accompanied a week-long installation of the Memorial Mile along Atwood Avenue on the shores of Lake Monona. The Mile gives remembrance to the deaths of over 7.000 military members who have died in ongoing military actions around the world.

“The traditional Memorial Day programs have, we feel, a very militaristic flavor, and our program is really a peace event,” according to Veteran for Peace, David Giffey, who acted as emcee.  The Veterans for Peace rally is, in part, focused on communicating the great costs of war.

 

The event began as the band, Old Cool, led by singer Sandy Nowak along with Dan Hildebrand and Arvid Berge sang to remember the military members and other victims of war and to hope for a better future.

 

 

 

The Class of 2019 students from area high schools were recognized for their winning essays on topics about peace and nonviolence.  Veterans for Peace-Madison received 30 essays this year.

Ashley Cornwell, from Baraboo, read from her essay dealing with conflict resolution through diplomacy. We can do much more to communicate better and in working to understand how others feel and what they think.

Priest, poet and former Madison police chief David Couper addressed the peace rally. Couper spoke during the peace rally about his path to nonviolence and read his poetry, including a poem about what it means to be a patriot.

 

 

Our goal is to abolish war, said David Giffey, we can be advocates for peace and be patriotic.  The cost in lives, the cost of displacement of human beings and the opportunity costs are all  immense and avoidable.

 

 

Giffey read the names of Veterans for Peace who have passed away including Clarence Kailin, Joey Camarrano, Jim Ellsworth, Sidney Podell, Dr. James Allen, Jeff Goldstein, Charles Sweet, Dr. Eugene Farley, Joel Gaalswyk, John Oliger, and Ed Garvey.  Since Memorial Day, we have also lost Bob Kimbrough, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and veteran of the Korean War.


Melissa Sargent, a state representative from the local Madison area; spoke on peace, government, the civil rights of citizens and immigrant communities.

Give a listen: Audio of Melissa Sargent’s May 27 speech, courtesy of WORT FM and Gil Halsted.

Sargent honored the dead while reflecting on the moral injustices of war. The effect of violence and war on the military members cascades down to spouses and family members, and the impact continues long after the immediate conflicts are ended.

Melissa Sargent:  “This Memorial Day, it was my pleasure to speak at and to be a part of the Veterans for Peace rally. While we were honoring those who have sacrificed their lives for our country, we also recognized the moral injustices of war and that the cost of war encompasses more than the loss of those killed. With lost loved ones, post-traumatic stress disorder, civilians who are impacted and injuries that continue after wars are over, too many people have had their lives torn apart by war.

While we cannot bring back those whose lives have been lost, we can continue to strive for peace in the future. We must lift one another up, and take small steps towards peace each and every day. I know that when we each do better, we all do better. We are stronger together, and together we can build strong and peaceful communities.”


As the attendees filed out of the synagogue, musician Sean Michael Dargan played somber tunes on his bagpipe lending to the sense of seriousness of the loss of these human beings, and we were handed carnations.

 

 

 

 

The red flowers were then placed on and near the Lincoln Brigade monument.

 

 

 

The Lincoln Brigade were volunteers who fought the fascists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, which initially the US government was not opposed to.  At least until, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini gave fascism a bad name.

More info on the Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War

 

Photographs taken by Paul McMahon, Heartland Images. Thanks to Paul.  Thank you to Norman Stockwell, publisher of the Progressive Magazine, for all of your technical expertise and hard work.

Veterans for Peace-Madison includes veterans from a variety of conflicts around the world.  We meet every third Wednesday of the month, our meetings are open to the public.  We invite you to attend.