George Washington wanted A DEPARTMENT OF PEACE

Plus notes on the peace conference.

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=09-13-05&storyID=22293

Tomorrow morning (Wednesday), Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) will take to the floor of the 109th Congress and put forward a Department of Peace bill. It will be the third time this bill, H.R. 1673 (number from the 108th Congress) has been read. It has never gone to a committee and therefore has never actually been voted upon on the floor of Congress. But maybe, just maybe, this time the outcome will be different.

Never before in the bill’s existence have more than 1,800 Americans died in a foreign land, nor have hundreds of thousands been left homeless in a major American city, nor has the president ever had approval ratings lower than Richard Nixon had in 1974 at the height of Watergate. The mood of the country has changed since July 2001 when the bill was first introduced, and clearly the fervor and numbers of DOP activists supporting the bill has changed too.

The Department of Peace will address all of the above—war, homelessness, and poverty—and even more, according to Dorothy Maver, executive director of the Peace Alliance and former national coordinator of Rep. Kucinich’s (D-Ohio) long-shot 2004 run for the Presidency.

The Peace Alliance is based in Michigan, and under Maver’s leadership turned out more than 500 pro-DOP activists, post-new-agers, politicos and celebrities for this, the third Department of Peace Conference. Even as a bizarre contingent of Pentagon-organized, pro-Bushies paraded through this nation’s capitol on their way to hear country musician Clint Black’s Patriot’s Day (“Iraq and Roll”) post-march concert, the pro-DOPers’ patriotism was practiced in laborious sessions of honing their lobbying message.