WILPF In Washington.

NATIONAL PRO-DEMOCRACY CONVENTION

Congress has seen a flurry of new bills addressing electoral reform introduced recently. Perhaps the best is Congressman John Conyers' (D-MI 14) Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act of 2001. (HR 1170)

Meanwhile, the Pro-Democracy Campaign launched in January has issued a call to citizens to convene in Philadelphia in late June to organize for change. The National Pro-Democracy convention will run from June 28 to July 1 to push for voter rights. A 10-point Voters' Bill of Rights circulating among groups in draft form is garnering widespread endorsement. Cooperating organizations and activists meeting in Philadelphia will focus on national, state and local strategies for sustaining the popular outrage after Florida and turning it into effective action to reclaim democracy.

One of the 10 reforms promoted is a WILPF UFORJE legislative priority to restore the franchise denied to 3.9 million former prisoners. Conyers has also vowed to reintroduce his bill reinstating federal voting rights, which died in the 106th Congress. Please talk to your representative and urge co-sponsorship of this bill.

To get your copy of the proposed Voters' Bill of Rights and find out more about the Pro-Democracy Campaign, see www.ippn.org or send request to Independent Progressive Politics Network, P.O. Box 1041, Bloomfield, NJ 07003.

MARKETING WAR

"An experienced petty officer admitted that he simply missed sonar readings showing the fishing boat closing in and that when he did notice, he overrode the computers. The captain explained that he had taken extra time to sign photographs for the 16 civilians on board, but that he failed to notice that nine officers were not where he had ordered them to be and that the sonar officer failed to update a chart tracking nearby vessels. And he never clearly explained why he abbreviated four safety procedures that might have averted the collision, which killed nine."

-- from a New York Times article by James Sterngold, 3/25/2001.

Who can doubt that the nine Japanese people who died in the collision between the U.S. Navy nuclear sub marine USS Greenville and Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru were victims of Pentagon marketing? The story told at the court of inquiry laid bare the blatant reciprocity of U.S. corporate interests and our tax-supported military operations.

Defense industry PACs spent more than $7 million on candidates in the 2000 election cycle. Another $4.3 million went to the parties in "soft" money. These high-return investments are a fraction of the weapons and war industry's total marketing budget. Lobbying expenses totaled more than $48 million in 1998. (Center for Responsive Politics, www.opensecrets.org.)

These amounts do not include advertising monies or the salary and expenses of corporate officers enjoying Navy jaunts. Or of representatives guarding corporate interests as members of the State Department's Defense Trade Advisory Group. In 1995, 57 of the 60 members of this influential body came from the arms industry.

The marketing done by the weapons industry and the Pentagon control Congressional military spending decisions, pushing the sum in fiscal year 2001 to a grotesque $310 billion. A recent, highly readable book about the deadly interplay is worth picking up.

Private Warriors, Ken Silverstein, New York Verso, 2000: The author's fact-packed thesis is that America's Cold War veterans -- Pentagon bureaucrats, national security establishment staffers, intelligence operatives, soldiers and arms dealers are as great a threat to world peace as dispossessed Russian arms experts and nuclear scientists. Chapter one treats you to a test drive in an F-16 simulator at the four-day arms shows in Rio in 1999. Six thousand Pentagon, Commerce and State Department employees (1,000 of whom work in more than 70 of our embassies around the world) promote weapons companies' sales abroad full-time, a bureaucracy partly supported by 3 percent commissions. Silverstein's biographies include Frank Gaffney, director of the Center for Security Policy, a founding member of the 1970's Committee on the Present Danger, whose alumni now dominate Bush II Administration policy.