Action Alerts

I believe well written opinion letters to major news media have more impact than standing on street corners holding signs or singing to the converted few there. Remember to read and follow the editorial guidelines, and don't forget to include your organization or affiliation in your closing. The editors prefer the latter so they can keep your comments in context. I also include a website link as a courtesy for background checks. One thing I haven't been good about, thoroughly checking my facts & references -- make sure your links aren't obsolete and resources are up-to-date and accurate.

I sent a letter timed for World Water Day (March 22) published last month in the San Jose Mercury News, which has largest circulation in our area. Included "Save the Water" Campaign in close.

I'm sure some of your can write very effective and passionate letters about taxes and military costs, too, targeted to your home communities, no matter what size. Please share your successes so others may want to get it a try.

Here's the letter I sent to our local news editor last week timed to Tax filing deadline.

Our local San Jose CA WILPF will not be doing a Tax Day Rally at Post Office this year--find it less and less productive effort as tax filers use online filing and other means to get theit taxes on time.

To: Letters@mercurynews.com

Tax day deadline is fast approaching. We Americans are concerned about our economy, mortgage crisis, healthcare and ongoing Iraq war. What really irks me is how our taxes are spent.

The costs of current and past wars takes from 43% to 54% of our taxes. Check out www.fcnl.org/wartaxes or www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm with pie charts and analysis delineating these costs.

Forty years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. prophetically observed, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs for social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

Why are we spending so much for a questionable war while people and companies at home suffer bankruptcies and foreclosure? We need to demand that our money be better spent.

Shirley Lin Kinoshita

I’VE ALWAYS PAID MY TAXES (G)
(Tune: "Yellow Rose of Texas")

I’ve always paid my taxes,
I paid them right on time,
I never even cheated - I coughed up every dime.
But now I know my money goes
Straight over to Iraq
For bombs and tanks and missiles
And I WANT MY MONEY BACK!

I used to think my taxes went
For things that made us great -

NOTE: November Scientific American has articles on nuclear weapons

Can you define torture? President Bush wasn't able to when he was asked this week. How reassuring is his claim that "We don't torture" if he can't say what it is that United States isn't doing?

According to the Justice Department, the U.S. is legally allowed to do things to prisoners that most people would consider torture. In a 2005 secret legal opinion that still defines government practice, the
department said that painful physical abuse -- including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures -- is not cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and isn't torture.

The U.S. needs to end the word games and secrecy. Congress needs to shine a light on what the CIA is doing to U.S. detainees by restoring the courts' power to independently review the way our government is
treating every single person it holds against their will.

Your senators can help to open a window on torture by supporting and championing the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act (S. 185). Habeas corpus is the right of all prisoners to have a court consider why they are in
prison and how they are being treated. As of mid-October, 32 senators have cosponsored this legislation, and 56 senators voted for the bill on the Senate floor in September. But in today's partisan Senate,
legislation needs 60 votes to come to a vote and avoid a filibuster:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/CCKCHTFSZY/MKSUHTFVKX/1491663841.

The United States should be dismantling nuclear weapons, not building new ones. But instead, Congress will be voting soon on whether to approve the Bush Administration's latest request to pursue a new generation of nuclear weapons. Don't let the administration further devastate our nation by building a new, unneeded arsenal of civilization-shattering nuclear weapons. Please call your Senators and Representative to ask them to vote "no" on funding a new generation of nuclear weapons.

The Administration requested $119 million to develop the nation's first new nuclear bomb in two decades, officially called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). It is both hypocritical and counter-productive for the United States to build new nuclear weapons at the same time that it is trying to convince countries such as Iran and North Korea not to develop nuclear arsenals of their own. The false rationale the Bush administration gives for building this new warhead is to maintain long-term confidence in the reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. The truth, however, is that multiple independent studies have shown that the nuclear weapons stockpile will remain "safe and reliable" for at least another 50 years.

April 5, 2007