Would you be willing to spread the word about http://www.draftresistance.org? It’s a site dedicated to shattering the myths surrounding the selective slavery system and building mass civil disobedience to stop the draft before it starts!

Our banner on a website, printing and posting the anti-draft flyer or just telling friends would help.

Thanks!

Scott Kohlhaas

PS. When it comes to conscription, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

Likewise, volunteerism and charity appeal most to people who HAVE time and money to volunteer—aka, the people not targeted by the above-mentioned methods. This suggests that the best approach might be to put serious effort into these non-mandatory programs. The poor and recently-arrived get a leg up and a chance to become more fully a part of this country, but the wealthier people’s volunteerism isn’t discounted either.

As for Beowulf’s question about financing. . . if Bush had canceled his tax cuts and taken the time to build up the military BEFORE invading Iraq, would we be in the situation we’re in today? More broadly, ANY solution to the problems facing our country is going to require money. If we can’t pay for non-mandatory, or for a draft, then we can’t pay for much of anything else.

It’s not universal, it’s not mandatory, and it’s not expensive compared to some of the other ideas floated out there. But it could transform the way young people perceive, prepare for, and pursue public service.

You’re certainly right about the governer of LA as well as the Mayor of New Orleans. LA has always been a nortoriously corrupt state. The Katrina fiasco confirmed it.

However, there were still a great many problems with FEMA which I think would be resolved with the old civil defense networks.

Today, FEMA is not about “top-down” direction. The spirit of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) is to define common principles for incident command, common terminology and rank structures, and common standards for communications interoperability.

If you have not taken the online courses at FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute (they’re free of cost and take just a couple hours), I urge you to check out http://training.fema.gov/IS/ .

If there is something that has to be done, why rely on the bureaucracy of the federal government to do it when private individuals are more the capable of doing what needs to be done.

FEMA really screwed the pooch on Katrina. They should have had a website listing everything they needed and anything that needed to be done so that people contributing stuff or their time could do so effectively. There were planty of people willing to go down to New Orleans (and other gulf places) to help clean up and rebuild. There were even more people and companies (especially building materials manufacturers) who were more than willing to contribute supplies and what not as well. Many of the volanteers were turned away by FEMA or were required to attend “diversity” seminars and the like before being allowed to work in the affected areas.

But FEMA insisted and insists on running everything top-down, which is why they have been rather ineffectual in getting anything done.

Rather than FEMA, the old civil defense networks ought to be recreated. They were more decentralized and run on the local level than FEMA is. Given the threat of terrorism, not to mention the more mundane economic suffering if the economy becomes bad, decentralized networks of volanteers, like CD, would be very useful in time of need.

It is no coincidence that Carter, one of our more liberal-left presidents, created FEMA as a replacement for the old civil defense networks.