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Peace Week for Fleet Week Los Angeles 2022

Codepink San Pefro protest at Fleet Week LA 2022March 31 2022 / Gary Ghirardi / NNOMY -  I received an invitation from Rachel Brunke, a newly joined steering committee member of NNOMY and an organizer for Codepink San Pedro, to come up from our office in San Diego and participate in their Peace Week activities during the Memorial Day weekend.

Getting out of the The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth office and making it up to the Navy’s Fleet Week at Los Angeles Harbor was an eye opener on a few important levels.

Fleet Week is five days of celebratory militarism all packaged over Memorial Day with out a sign of the purpose of that day of remembrance for those who fought as combatants in US wars and lost their lives. Fleet Week is a window into the comfortable relationship the military enjoys with all types of corporate sponsors including the Fox Network, Princess Cruises, Wells Fargo Bank, UPS, Delta Airlines, Clear Channel and many more plus  governmental entities like the City of Los Angeles and of course The United States Government.

The festivities include Navy ship tours, live entertainment, exhibits and displays, food trucks, live competitions and aerial demonstrations with jet fighter and attack helicopter fly-overs; it is a city fair of war without mention of the suffering that war causes to all involved.

A peace action is planned to run concurrently as a counter event held every year at what the organizers named Peace Park located across the boulevard in front of the Battleship Iowa museum. With local peace group push back by Codepink San Pedro, San Pedro Neighbors For Peace and Justice, Military Families Speak Out and the Veterans for Peace Jim Brown Chapter, the park is actually its own commemorative site from Labor struggle days in the 20’s and 30’s, originally the location of a dock workers bar where the workers gathered and organized.

America’s Child Soldiers JROTC and the Militarizing of America

Cadet Pfc. Brian Briones, a member of the Zama Middle High School Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, holds a rifle as a member of the color guard during the Trojan Battalion’s 2020 Cadet Ball at Club Trilogy, Naval Air Facility Atsugi, Japan, Feb. 29, 2020. - Photo DOD08/09/2021 / Ann Jones / Tom Dispatch - Congress surely meant to do the right thing when, in the fall of 2008, it passed the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA). The law was designed to protect kids worldwide from being forced to fight the wars of Big Men. From then on, any country that coerced children into becoming soldiers was supposed to lose all U.S. military aid.

It turned out, however, that Congress — in its rare moment of concern for the next generation — had it all wrong. In its greater wisdom, the White House found countries like Chad and Yemen so vital to the national interest of the United States that it preferred to overlook what happened to the children in their midst.

As required by CSPA, this year the State Department once again listed 10 countries that use child soldiers: Burma (Myanmar), the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Seven of them were scheduled to receive millions of dollars in U.S. military aid as well as what’s called “U.S. Foreign Military Financing.” That’s a shell game aimed at supporting the Pentagon and American weapons makers by handing millions of taxpayer dollars over to such dodgy “allies,” who must then turn around and buy “services” from the Pentagon or “materiel” from the usual merchants of death. You know the crowd: Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman, and so on.

Navy desertions have more than doubled amid suicide concerns, as sailors feel trapped by contracts

The number of sailors who deserted the Navy more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, highlighting the lack of options contract-bound sailors face when they’re desperate to leave.

A uniform hat at a Naval Academy graduation in Annapolis, Md., in 2008.Chip Somodevilla /May 18, 2022 / Melissa Chan / NBC News - The number of sailors who deserted the Navy more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, while desertions in other military branches dropped or stayed flat, pointing to a potential Navy-wide mental health crisis amid a spate of recent suicides, according to experts and federal statistics obtained by NBC News.

Among a fleet of more than 342,000 active sailors, there were 157 new Navy deserters in 2021, compared with 63 in 2019 and 98 in 2020, Navy data shows. The total number of deserters who were still at large in 2021 grew to 166 from 119 in 2019. Most of them were 25 and younger.

“That’s staggering,” said Benjamin Gold, a defense attorney for U.S. service members.

In the wake of several suicides among sailors assigned to the warship the USS George Washington, the new desertion figures highlight the lack of options for sailors when they’re desperate to leave the military but are bound to multiyear contracts that many of them signed just out of high school.

Military law experts said the nearly unbreakable contracts — which can require up to six years of active duty — leave sailors with extreme alternatives: die by suicide or flee and face harsh consequences, including spending years behind bars as patriots-turned-pariahs.

“They feel trapped,” said Lenore Yarger, a resource counselor with the GI Rights Hotline, a nonprofit nongovernmental group that specializes in military discharges.

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