Peace House organizes information distribution to bring attention to the Pentagon’s share of the national budget

Ashland.news staff report

Peace activists will be outside Ashland and Medford post offices from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, April 15, income tax filing deadline day, distributing leaflets showing that as much as 50 percent of each income tax dollar this year will go to fund present and past military expenses.

Less than 40 percent of each income tax dollar this year will fund life-enhancing programs such as health, education, environmental protection and public safety, according to the flyer they will distribute. The flyer, published by the War Resisters League, also shows that, since 2012, the U.S. has spent more on warmaking and preparations for more warmaking than all the rest of the world combined.

This action is sponsored by Peace House, an Ashland-based nonprofit.

“It’s a strange understanding of ‘national defense’ to keep spending billions on unneeded and vastly expensive weapons systems while inflicting harm on your own people,” Peace House Executive Director Elizabeth Hallett said in a news release.

According to Peace House, last year the Ashland postmaster threatened to have Peace House volunteers arrested for handing out leaflets if they didn’t leave the area of the post office. This year Peace House has proactively sent a letter to local post office leadership saying such an order is both unconstitutional and a violation of the U.S. Postal Service’s own regulations. (Click here to see a copy of the letter.)

“Some 10 years ago, authorities at the Central Point post office had one of our leafleteers arrested, but the (Jackson County) District Attorney, Beth Heckert, refused to prosecute, knowing that the charge of trespassing was baseless,” says the letter, signed by Herbert Rothschild, a former chair of the Peace House board. “Several years later, the (postmaster) of the Phoenix Post Office similarly threatened one of our volunteers, but he convinced the Phoenix police to have (the postmaster) call (the Postal Service) legal office in Portland, who set her straight.”

An ongoing overhaul of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex is projected to cost more than $1.7 trillion before it is completed, according to Peace House.

“Replacing our land-based ICBMs and other components of our arsenal is not only unnecessary to deter other nations from attacking us, it also has touched off a second nuclear arms race,” Michael Niemann, a Peace House board member, said in a prepared statement. “So, Russia and China are following suit. This costly folly is making us less safe, not more.”

Peace House is holding a symposium called “The New Nuclear Arms Race” on Friday, April 25, at Southern Oregon University. Kevin Martin, national president of Peace Action, the nation’s largest nuclear disarmament and peace organization, will give the keynote speech. It will be free and open to the public.

“In my lifetime the United States has fought three major wars of choice, one in Vietnam, one in Afghanistan, and one in Iraq,” Allen Hallmark, another Peace House board member and a Vietnam War veteran, said in the Peace House release. “We lost all three, but we lost none of our freedoms. What we lost were lives, moral standing in the world, and something like $7 trillion. And yet, we’re still letting the military-industrial complex control our foreign policy and our federal budgets.”

Ever since the Vietnam War years, the federal government has significantly reduced the apparent percentage of military spending as part of the national budget paid on American taxpayers by including in the budget trust funds such as Social Security and Medicare. That makes it seem that Congress is spending much more on human care than it is, because the trust funds are not funded by Congressional appropriations but are self-funded.

Source: Peace House news release. Herbert Rothschild was a board member of Ashland.news from 2021 through 2023. Peace House was the fiscal sponsor (accepting tax deductible donations) for Ashland.news until it received its own nonprofit status in 2022. Email Ashland.news at [email protected].