Don’t Collaborate With the War Industry
Image by Edgar Serrano.
As residents of a Vermont town that recently passed the AFSC Apartheid-Free Communities pledge, we write today to ask our Vermont state and federal representatives to stop collaborating with the weapons industry made up of corporations like GlobalFoundries, General Dynamics, and Israel’s Elbit Systems that, besides building deadly weapons, have been exposed as causing severe harm to our pristine Vermont environment.
American and Israeli weapons are being used to continue the genocide in Gaza and the apartheid system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and we oppose this warmongering system. We strongly object to Vermont being a home to these global corporations. We object especially given that our delegation to Washington, Senators Sanders and Welch and Representative Balint have brought legislation to stop the flow of offensive weapons to Israel. Besides being part of an industry that makes things that kill and oppress people, including in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, these companies also produce surveillance tools that abridge our own rights and freedoms. But that is a whole story of its own.
Voters in Winooski, Plainfield, Thetford, Newfane, and Brattleboro passed the Apartheid-Free pledge and joined together to stop support in Vermont for Israeli apartheid and occupation that makes genocide possible. At our own town meeting in Thetford, residents were reminded that in the 1980s Vermonters protested South African apartheid which resulted in the passage of a Vermont divestment bill. As Vermont voters who have signed on to the AFSC pledge, it is our task to take on the powerful weapons companies in Vermont.
The means of collaboration with these weapons companies is through our
congressional delegation’s and state government’s political aspirations to bring high tech jobs to Vermont. Our state government is also dedicating 4.5 million dollars to make Vermont a high tech hub, and as Governor Scott’s office boasts in a press release last year, “to transform the Green Mountain State into a world leader” in semiconductor production. We ask our representatives at both the state and the federal level to oppose these chip-making industries in Vermont that make targeting systems that kill civilians even though touted as “smart.” We believe that now more than ever Vermont’s business-as-usual exposes all of us to the moral hazard of Israel’s ongoing genocidal actions. We are therefore compelled to inform fellow citizens that Vermont officials are in fact collaborating with a system fueling genocide in Gaza and the apartheid system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The weapons industry, furthermore, is a double-edged sword in Vermont. Besides being for war, the manufacture of these weapons and weapons components is ruining our environment. The largest employer in Vermont, Globalfoundries, is a major polluter. A recent article in Seven Days exposed this tragic situation: “Water samples submitted to state regulators since 2023 show 17 different PFAS present in wastewater regularly released into the [Winooski] river from the Essex Junction plant.” These “forever chemicals” linger in the environment causing cancer, birth defects, reduced immune system function, and learning and behavioral problems for children–and there is a growing call to eliminate their use. Additionally, the vast amounts of water and electricity required to make these chips puts a strain on our environment. This high tech industry is really a manifestation of the war industry in Vermont, and it is misusing our resources as well as creating a toxic environment for Vermonters.
The online news site Vermont Digger reported that the Department of Defense has awarded nearly 200 million dollars to defense contractors General Dynamics (Williston) and Elbit Systems (one of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers based in Haifa, Israel) to supply the army with the Iron Fist Active Protection System. A General Dynamics brochure states that the system works by launching a small warhead from atop a vehicle “defeating or destructing the threat through a shock wave effect.” At the same time, another of Vermont’s large weapons manufacturers, Globalfoundries, participates in the trusted foundry program for the department of defense, producing chips for aerospace and defense systems. Globalfoundries exposes itself as a war-maker by showing the controversial F-35 fighter jet in its own promo about the “trusted foundry program.” Nothing subtle here.
As we’ve said, while these companies, and the contracts our politicians help bring in for them, build weapons of war, they also hurt our Vermont environment and will cause health problems going forward. Marguerite Adelman of the Vermont PFAS/Military Poisons Coalition contends that “after the celebrated grants and contracts have been fulfilled, Vermont citizens will be paying personally with their health and their money for a very long time.”
Vermonters don’t want these lethal things produced in our state with our tax money. We want be promoting education, health care, energy self-sufficiency, basic needs that continue to require our attention. We are asking our Vermont representatives to not collaborate with a system designed for making wars. Let’s set a good example in Vermont, and truly work towards peace and a healthy environment
Lynne Rogers and Duncan Nichols live in Thetford, Vermont
Assailing the U.S. Institute of Peace
Getty and Unsplash+.
Amid Russian attacks on Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, and civil wars in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, violence persists in corners of our world unfamiliar to most Americans.
At home, on the other hand, the Trump administration liquidated the voting board of the United States Institute of Peace last month, a prelude to destroying its operation in a subsequent invasion by DOGE crusaders who were accompanied by armed police to protect Musk’s minions from unarmed fellow citizens at work. With USIP’s board eradicated and its staff terminated, the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State signed papers commandeering USIP’s assets, then ordering that its home—across Constitution Avenue from the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall—be reassigned to the General Service Administrative for unspecified alternative purposes.
My summary sounds like a joke concocted to confirm the notion that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. If only. USIP has been erased like a village that a hurricane swept away or an earthquake devoured. Web searches now end with, “Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access usip.org”.
Peace, like justice, have become suspect. Neither remains a treasured value or American ideal.
Who knew that Ronald Reagan was a closeted radical, in 1984, when he signed legislation funding a nonpartisan, independent think tank to “promote international peace and the resolution of conflicts among the nations and peoples of the world without recourse to violence.” He and Congress recognized that averting violent conflicts is preferable to intervening once they begin, a war-and-peace variation on a familiar healthcare objective: prevention.
Preventing cancer is preferable to radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery; avoiding diabetes is preferable to managing potential consequence like heart and kidney disease, stroke, or blindness. Violence always leads to more violence, and preventing its most deadly form, war, is patently preferable to the death and destruction that inevitably follow.
A decade ago, Marine Corps General Zinni wrote that USIP’s “entire budget would not pay for the Afghan war for three hours, is less than the cost of a fighter plane, and wouldn’t sustain even 40 American troops in Afghanistan for a year.” Today, the Pentagon’s budget of more than $800 billion is nearly 1,500 times USIP’s $56 million, and the Department of Defense’s workforce of military and civilian personnel, three million combined, is 6,000 times larger than USIP’s (former) roster of fewer than 500.
John Lennon’s “give peace a chance” is suddenly passé.
USIP’s motto, “Making Peace Possible,” is tacit in a 2020 press release, “Over its 35 years, the Institute has trained tens of thousands of peacebuilders from 198 countries and territories in the skills needed to prevent or reduce violence.” A common USIP tool to do so is conflict transformation. Its specific efforts to analyze and prevent conflict, now shuttered, include:
* more than 300 programs in 16 countries with priority in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tunisia;
* four priority areas: strategic rivalry; violence and extremism in fragile states; global shocks; and American peacebuilding, which includes fostering reconciliation and building institutions that manage conflict without resorting to violence;
* mitigating the risk of conflict where “China and Russia are attempting to expand their cultural, economic, military, and political influence;”
* stabilizing distressed communities in Central America’s Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) through dialogue between police services and civil society and facilitating consultation between governments and citizens in high-migration districts.
If President Trump’s disdain for peacebuilding were not disorienting enough, consider the qualifications of USIP’s new acting president: Nate Cavanaugh, now 28, the founder of Brainbase, an intellectual property and trademark licensing management tool that he created in his dorm room as a freshman, his only year of college.
