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Student Peace Action Network is a grassroots peace and justice organization working from campuses across the US.. We organize for an end to physical, social, and economic violence caused by militarism at home and abroad. We campaign for nuclear abolition. We support a foreign policy based on human rights and international cooperation, and a domestic agenda that supports human and environmental concerns, not Pentagon excess. War is not inevitable. We push for practical alternatives..

Ongoing Events:

Honk for Peace every friday at 5pm at the Bell Tower

Critical Mass last friday of every month, Next Ride April 29, at 4:30pm at Bell Tower. Bike Flier.

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

With the overwhelming amount of change to be influenced, SPAN has decided to focus on two campaigns for this year, again, these are open for dispute. Come to the meetings and help us decided how to tackle these institutionalized problems:

Meetings are held every Thursday at 5pm in the SOURCE office of the Talley Student Center.

OCTOBER 7th is a National Day of action against Militarized Schools, come join us!


SPAN will launch its Flunk the War Machine campaign with a coordinated national Week of Action October 26 - October 30 which will raise awareness about campaign issues through education and action. You can click here to download Week of Action materials, or contact us and we will mail them to you. Many of you have exciting plans for the week, and we'd love to hear about them.

Week of Action
Endorsed by: Campus Greens - United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) - Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) - Quixote Center, Quest for Peace - Young Communist League - Â Project YANO - Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft

Our Current Campaigns:

1. Debunk the military's proclaimed right to access students' name and contact info - pass a local provision to the NoChildLeftBehind Act. The overall longterm goal is the demilitarization of schools. MId-range goals to that end will include promoting alternatives to the military and helping more students make educated choices about enlisting; turning the "opt-out" provision to "opt-in", where access to records must be authorized , not assumed, and helping other students understand the reach of the PATRIOT Act, toward a goal of overturning these unjust laws.

2. Immigrants rights / Repeal the Patriot Act - While all people are clearly subject to the Act's, and its associated Executive orders, increased
powers of surveillance, immigrant communities are especially targeted. For instance: The PATRIOT Act allowed Attorney General John Ashcroft to "Special Register" thousands of immigrant men with the Department of Homeland Security based on their country of origin. Thousands of non-citizens, primarily those from Muslim and Arab countries, but also Latinos, South Asians, Israelis and others have been deported without due process. Thousands of men,mostly of Arab and South Asian origin, have been held in federal custody, often without being
charged of a crime. The government has disregarded court orders to release the names of those imprisoned. Finally, immigration court hearings of many of those detainees have been closed to
the press and the public. The use and abuse of multinational corporations' power over the world's "free trade" can be hindering to a stable world community. This campaign would include teach-in's about globalization, free trade, stability in the third world, Freedom Rides, etc. It also includes direct actions, letter writing to the Chancellor and the student body president.

Minor Campaign
We agreed to adopt as a third minor campaign an ongoing attempt to make ourselves visible to the campus and surrounding communitty. One way we are doing this is through our Pronounce Your Peace events every friday from 4-6pm on the corner of Cates and Dan Allan drive. We table and wave big distracting signs in attempts to create an open discussion on the on going colonial wars in the middle east and the global south as well as to discuss other issues of human rights campaigners world-wide. Come join US!

*for more information on the national network's campaigns and to view their resource lists, please visit the SPAN website .

contact ncsu_span@hotmail.com if you have any questions.

New SPAN officers, as of 4 September 2003:

Court Jester - Piper

Treasurer - Gypsy

Minister of Information - Marcq

Fearless Misleader - Dante
New positions available!

PLEASE MASSIVELY DISTRIBUTE THE MEETING FLIERS POSTED TO THE
  • RIGHT
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    SPAN's philosophical geneology :

    After September 11, 2001, the "war on terrorism" began creeping into high schools and universities in a handful of sneaky and particularly nasty ways. Of course, there's the obvious: anyone who's checked their financial aid package or school budget lately can see where the money for war(s) and lavish Pentagon spending is coming from. But some underhanded legislative provisions passed in the name of the "war on terrorism" are affecting our schools and communities, too--in ways many students may not know about. Just as we believe bombing multiplies rather than decreases the danger of terrorist attack, we believe that using the "war on terrorism" as a front for pushing existing agendas is cynical and wrong. SPAN is launching its new campaign, Flunk the War Machine, this Fall semester. The campaign works toward the demilitarization of our schools by addressing parts of the No Child Left Behind Act, PATRIOT Acts I & II, weapons contractors on college campuses, and related issues of recruitment, civil liberties violations, and racial profiling.

    This campaign was proposed by Kate Amos of Torrey Pines High School in San Diego and Kathryn Bransford of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. It was voted on by SPAN chapters and affiliates this past March. What follows is a brief summary of the campaign and its goals. The campaign Week of Action will take place October 27-31 on SPAN campuses nationwide--please email span@peace-action.org to find out more information about the Week of Action and with ideas to build this campaign.


    Background:

    The No Child Left Behind act (NCLB), among other troubling things, requires secondary schools to provide military recruiters with access to facilities AND to all student records and contact information. If schools do not comply, they risk losing all federal aid. The only recourse for students is an "opt-out" system in which individual parents must sign a letter saying they do not want their child's contact information released to military recruiters. (SPAN believes a better alternative would be an "opt-in" system, where school administrators would be required to send letters that ask for explicit, written permission from parents that they are willing to release their child's information.)

    Part of the reason that the Pentagon lobbied for this new provision is the significant level of resistance that recruiters have encountered from schools in the past. According to Alternet, "Prior to this provision, one-third of the nation's high schools refused recruiters' requests for students' names or access to campus because they believed it was inappropriate for educational institutions to promote military service." Under NCLB, educators and school administrators have had their arms twisted into compliance.

    The Pentagon seems to have targeted our schools for invasion, and social justice suffers as a result. All too often, high school students who can't afford college view enlisting as a necessary economic choice, or they do not know what other options they have after graduation. The Pentagon's advertising claims are just as unscrupulous as any other ads marketing products to youth, and young people should know what they're buying and what the price is. If they ultimately choose to enlist, that choice should be within the context of a solid understanding of what their other options are and what a career in the military is actually like. Many students who join up discover afterward that the promises of education, job training and career advancement never materialized. The NCLB increases the risk that more students will be coerced, lied to and misled by recruiters who have only the Pentagon's interests at heart.

    The war on terrorism also skulks its way onto college campuses by way of USA PATRIOT Acts I and II. This legislation gives unprecedented power to the Attorney General and a small cluster of others--restricting civil liberties, further dividing communities, and contradicting the values America is supposed to stand for. Students are targeted by these laws in highly specific ways. The Patriot Act empowers law enforcement agencies to seize student records for use in on-going "terrorist" investigations. It forces librarians at universities to provide, upon request, any student records they possess and other documents such as internet sign-in logs. It also authorizes the creation of a federal database to store information on international students, which is already in place on many campuses. These laws have been used to legitimize racial profiling practices, such as the recent raid on the dorm room of the President and Vice-President of the Arizona State University chapter of the Muslim Students Association.

    Additionally, the presence of weapons contractors on our nation's college campus is an issue of growing concern. A driving force behind wars is the military-industrial complex, which is made up of large companies who profit from war by selling their expensive weapons to the Pentagon. Currently, many powerful political figures (like Dick Cheney) have ties to these weapons contractors (like Halliburton). These companies need a few different things to keep their stock prices up. One: They need wars. Two: Between wars, they need politicians who can be frightened (or financed) into spending nearly $400 billion/year on defense (that's forty times what we spend on humanitarian assistance). Three: They need intelligent individuals to conjure up new weapontry. And they need a place to do this research. That's where you come in: Unlike many companies, weapons contractors are permitted to do product develop at American universities. This is the military-industrial-academic complex. The Department of Defense has had close ties with America's universities since the creation of the atomic bomb at the end of WWII. Chances are the Department of Defense is on your university campus. Find out if the DOD is in your science labs.

    Specific goals, tactics, allies and timelines will be discussed at the council meeting and on the SPAN campaign planning message boards (if you are a SPAN member, you can participate in the planning already happening on the message boards), but the overall longterm goal is the demilitarization of our schools. Mid-range goals to that end will include promoting alternatives to the military and helping more students make educated choices about enlisting; turning the "opt-out" provision to "opt-in," where access to records must be authorized, not assumed; and helping other students understand the reach of the PATRIOT Act, toward the goal of overturning these unjust laws.

    For more information contact lustreplasmate@riseup.net

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