Fred Askew is a freelance News and Editorial photographer based in New York City. His work is published internationally in journals, newspapers and magazines. One of his themes is the anti-war movement.

His photographs have appeared in Time Magazine, The New York Times, Le Monde, El Pais, New York Magazine, Artforum Magazine, The Village Voice, Clamor Magazine, YES Magazine, Index Magazine, The Indypendent and other publications.

BUSD (Berkeley) has just passed a sister resolution to the OUSD Resolution protecting students form the JAMRS database that we passed last year.  This was after a 2 year campaign that paved the way for Oakland to pass our resolution.  Now it has gained momentum and sister districts seem very willing to follow suit.

SFUSD (San Francisco) will also vote on a JAMRS resolution next week so we are slowly making the BAY-Area an unwelcoming zone to JAMRS and the ways it invades young people's privacy to make them easier to recruit.

Please consider working with your local board of ed to pass a similar resolution.  When framed as a student privacy issue it seems uncontroversial and yet it is a very practical way to undercut aggressive recruitment in public schools.
Attached is the BUSD Resolution signed.

Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers 2020-2021 is a plan book for educators who believe their students can and will change the world. It is designed to help teachers translate their vision of a just education into concrete classroom activities.

Source: NYCore: New York Collective of Radical Educators

According to popular discourse, video games are either the divine instrument of education’s future or the software of Satan himself, provoking young men to carry out all-too-real rampages. Much like discussions surrounding the Internet, debates on video games carry the vague, scattershot chatter that says too much about the medium (e.g. do video games cause violence?) without saying much at all about the particulars of games or gaming conventions (e.g. how can death be given more weight in first person shooters?).

Because of the pressures and incremental gains of on-going C-R operations and the problems the military has in enlisting personnel during good economic times (translated: low unemployment), there has been some talk of a draft re-instatement. There is no serious talk of reinstating the draft.  The SSS budget is approximately the same as it was in 1980 when Jimmy Carter resumed draft registration (25 million) so in real dollars adjusted for inflation, it is less. Hardly an indication of getting ready to reinstate the draft. If this were to be a universal draft for universal service, there might be some national benefit in that. This statement is opinion-  and debatable. However, if draftees would be targeted primarily toward military service (a certainty), we would be ready to provide whatever assistance we could in helping our youth apply for conscientious objector (CO) status. - Submitted by JMCNRICK- Sep 4, 2011

Voters are often told that candidates for the U.S. Congress lack any foreign policy platform because they don’t know enough about the topic and don’t plan to focus on it. The following is meant to quickly remedy that situation. Below is information on:

• The Federal Budget
• The Militarization of Other Nations
• Foreign Aid
• U.S. Bases
• The Rule of Law
• War Powers
• Wars
• Nuclear Weapons
• “National Security”
• Sanctions
• Global Cooperation
• Intersectionality
• Jobs
• “Leading the World”
• U.S. Public Opinion
• Examples of Successful Candidates’ Platforms
• Unwarranted Influence
• Recommendations

Setting aside mandatory spending (including Social Security, Medicare, and other spending that Congress does not address annually) as well as payments on debts, and looking only at discretionary spending (the money Congress spends each year at its discretion), over half in recent years has gone to military spending.

Military spending (discretionary and otherwise) includes a budget of three-quarters of a trillion dollars for the Pentagon, plus hundreds of billions more for nuclear weapons in the Energy Department, military activities of other departments including Homeland Security, the budgets of 17 secretive agencies, debt for past wars, and the Veterans Affairs budget.

U.S. military spending dwarfs the cost of most infrastructure and social needs spending legislation, the cost of any other item (or dozen items) of discretionary spending, and the military spending of any other nation. In 2020, U.S. military spending was more than the military spending of the next 11 biggest spenders combined, nine of which nations were U.S. weapons customers pressed by the U.S. government to increase their military spending. The next 14 biggest spenders below the top 12 were the only others to spend over 1% of U.S. military spending, and of those 14, 11 were U.S. weapons customers.  

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