A New Strategy: Divesting From Arms Manufacturers

So I was just reading this article on Truth Out:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43467-congress-keeps-funding-a-war-machine-that-the-public-should-divest-from

...about a new movement to try and get institutions (and individuals) to divest from arms manufacturers.

Image from CodePink

I think most of us realize that obscene amounts of money are made from war, and the profit motive is probably the biggest cause of conflict in the world today. They never say that, at the outset at least, but just recently Gen. Mattis admitted that we didn't actually have any evidence of that supposed sarin gas attack by Assad against his own people that was the excuse for us to bomb a Syrian air base:

and https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-has-no-evidence-of-syrian-use-of-sarin-gas-mattis-says (pbs article) ...the WaPo article that Lee mentions? I searched for it, the link was on page one of Bing search, but when I clicked on it, WaPo said IT COULDN'T FIND IT. Mattis, according to the pbs article, carefully said he wasn't "rebutting the reports" that it happened, merely that we have no evidence. But just like WMDs in Iraq, funny how our government thinks it's justified to make war without actual evidence of the things it claims are the "reasons." Who needs evidence when there are weapons contracts to be signed? /sarcasm

Anyway...

If you're not real involved with the environmental movement, divestment has been a tactic they have been employing for several years now. 350.org spearheaded a divestment campaign starting in 2012 (https://350.org/divest/), and divestment came up as a way to support Standing Rock, by asking your bank(s) to divest (http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/how-to-contact-the-17-banks-funding-the-dakota-access-pipeline-20160929) from big oil/their projects. New York City recently announced they are divesting $5bn from fossil fuel investments, and is suing five oil companies to boot (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/nyregion/new-york-city-fossil-fuel-divestment.html). Divestment is a way to put the squeeze on in a language they understand and a metric they care about: money.

Today, Divest From The War Machine is working to do the same against arms manufacturers: http://www.divestfromwarmachine.org/about_campaign

From the site:
"We are demanding that our universities, religious organizations, individual investors, retirement funds, mutual funds, and other financial institutions in the United States stop making a killing on killing."

DFTWM is a campaign started this last October by CodePink: http://www.codepink.org/divest_launch

There is also a group called The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (https://nwtrcc.org), for people wanting to refuse to pay taxes for war.

So contact your bank, your retirement account if you have one, your university, your city, your church if you go to one, and encourage them to divest from war. Public pressure on their funding can be effective. Just think about the attempts to silence the BDS movement by making it illegal to do so! First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you ...then you win.