2010-09-24 Conscience Canada. I deducted the military portion from my income tax quarterly instalment. $16 Billion for Lockheed Martin fighter jets.

The way of killing wars makes it less likely that we will be able to succeed where we must:  making progress against climate change, poisoning of the Earth, widening disparities and injustice, etc.   $16 billion on the machinery of war means we are following the American model – – huge indebtedness from the investment in war to the point where we don’t have the money to meet our true needs.

At this point it has to be no-holds-barred, all our strength, or we won’t make it.  The military machinery and mentality of the U.S. and the Harper Government will take us all down;  they are spending our resources in the wrong place.  I will push with everything I have to help get us onto a path with a future, the “new economy” or the “empathic economy” or the “moral economy”.  We are at the tipping point.  There is so much traction from all the good that is going on.  Just need to take a minute and push this fighter jet mound of snow out of the way.  Push hard and then we’re unstuck and over the hump.

We have responsibility and the power to exercise the responsibility.  Or so I see it, and that is why it makes sense to me that I should deduct from my income tax payment, proportionately, the amount of my taxes that will go to help pay the $16 billion dollars for Lockheed Martin fighter jets.  There is an organization of people that has been making a statement in this way since the 1970’s  = =  Conscience Canada.   You place the money into a trust fund that they operate.  I phoned them;  I am grateful that they have thought through and set up this vehicle for registering protest.  It is a way for me to exercise my power.

I explain my action in the letter to Tony Clement (  need the hyperlink ).    There are good suggestions on the Conscience Canada website:  http://www.consciencecanada.ca

…   I regret to inform you that as long as Lockheed Martin has ANYTHING to do with the Canadian census, I will find it very difficult if not impossible, to be encouraged by you.

Furthermore, you are now generating $16 billion dollars of debt for Canadian tax-payers,  to purchase Lockheed Martin fighter jets that can only be used for coercive and  violent ends (war).  This puts me in a position where I cannot pay my income tax in full.   My installment payment made on September 15^th deducted a representative portion for the amount of public money you are transferring to this corporation that is in the business of making money from killing people and the environment.  I sent the amount deducted from my income tax payment to Conscience Canada  http://www.consciencecanada.ca . 

I am frustrated by the obsolete thinking displayed by the Government.  I cannot understand it.  Is it “boys with their toys” (fighter jets, bam! bam! bam!)?  …  Have you seen the photographs of, or driven past the miles and miles of discarded military equipment lined in precision formation on the American desert?   If you believe that misappropriating billions of dollars on war machinery that becomes obsolete (thereby not funding the true needs of the society), that bombing people and their land to oblivion does not create terrorists, if you can show me one example from history where it has been a successful strategy in the long term, please enlighten me.   

In a later email I want to relate this to:

–        An interview on American PBS (Public Broadcast), Sept 16, “Charlie Rose” in conversation with New York Times columnist David Brooks.   I interpreted Brooks to say that a reason the Obama strategies have not worked is because they required a buy-in from the American public which did not happen.  That was the mistake of the Obama administration:  they did not understand that the American public does not trust the Government.  They would not get the buy-in they needed to make things work.

–        I heard Brooks, who is a mainstream journalist, describe the times as being “pre-revolution”.  Which surprised me – – I still wonder if I heard right – – it is unexpected to hear a mainstream journalist on relatively conservative PBS make such a statement!  And if I heard right, he said that the American financial structure will not survive for more than another 10 years.

–        The addition by the RCMP of “coup d’etat” to the list of four threats faced by Canadians is not independent of the situation in the U.S.

–        Which reminds me (recent CBC Radio, “The Current”) :  the ratio of individual debt to GDP in Canada is second in the world only to the U.S.  And we are rapidly closing the gap so that we will be a contender for the #1 spot.  That makes our economy very vulnerable.  Once defaults on debt-repayment start you get a domino effect, as in the American housing market example.   It’s another reason why we as tax-payers don’t need $16 billion more in debt for fighter jets.  (UPDATE:  by December Canadians overtook the Americans on the individual debt ratio.  We are #1 in the world in indebtedness.  Makes for a very shaky financial foundation.   It is like the deliberate manufacture of the conditions for civil unrest which in turn becomes the justification for bringing in the American troops eventually, under the Troop Exchange Agreement, Feb 14, 2008).