By David Swanson. This article was first published on War is a Crime.

The shout of the Occupy movement, at least in D.C., has been “End the Wars, Tax the Rich!” in that order and in combination. Over half of federal discretionary spending goes to the war machine. We ought to fix that problem first, and then fix the problem that our overlords aren’t actually paying their fair share of the taxes. My friend Leah Bolger is about to face a possible sentence of months in prison for having taken this message to the Super Committee. Remember them?

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But the big, well-funded liberal/progressive groups that are borrowing the language of Occupy and organizing 99% Spring nonviolence trainings are talking about taxing the rich, never mind what the taxes are spent on. I just spoke with someone organizing a bunch of “patriotic millionaires” to come to Washington, D.C., and talk about how they’d like to be taxed more. I suggested that they might also comment on what their money should go to, and I was told that saying more than one simple thing was bad messaging policy.

Really? How about if it rhymes? How do we fix the deficit / End the wars and tax the rich! When we chant that, random people join in marches. Are we sure it’s bad messaging policy? Has that been focus grouped?

The annual Take Back the American Dream conference actually had a panel on war last year. I was on it. But it was far from the focus. Here’s the event’s current “messaging” about its conference this coming summer:

In fairness there’s nothing there about taxing the rich either. But there’s certainly no mention of military spending or war. Perhaps when the full agenda is announced I’ll be pleasantly surprised , as I was last year.

Another upcoming “progressive” conference has just published its full schedule of panels and workshops. This one is called Netroots Nation. In recent years, I’ve always complained that they had nothing on war. They’ve always responded that I ought to have proposed a panel on the topic. I’ve always pointed out that I did in fact do so. I did so this year as well, just as I did for Left Forum and UNAC and other conferences that said Yes and included them. Among the dozens and dozens of panels announced by Netroots Nation, none focuses on cutting military spending, a fact that never ceases to amaze me, as pinching a bit from the military could pay for everything else progressives want. There are a few panels that touch on war, one of which even mentions the Pentagon budget in passing:

Hmm. The goal here seems to be making the Democratic Party the party of militarism. If that’s not entirely clear from the above description, check out this one for another Netroots Nation panel:

Tom Perriello, my former representative, is a proponent of humanitarian war and a faith-based believer in “nationbuilding” who works with an organization that is promoting war in Syria. The problem in this panel will not be that our recent and current wars have killed a lot of people or made us less safe or destroyed the environment or stripped our civil liberties or wrecked the economy, but that they have turned us away from the great Liberal Tradition of favoring war making. Solving the Afghanistan Syndrome is not quite the same goal as solving the Military Industrial Complex problem.

Netroots Nation will also have a panel on “Military Sexual Trauma: The Women’s War,” focusing on rape in the military, and a panel on “COINTELPRO 2.0: Surveillance, National Security and Our Eroding Civil Liberties.” The latter looks excellent, and I think the organizers are taking some risk with some of the panelists, namely that they might point to war as the root cause of the outrages under discussion.

Then there is one more panel, one with some potential to address the core problem, but ultimately a determination not to. There is no indication of who the panelists might be, but here is the title and description:

Now, who are the sponsors of the war on Iraq that are pushing the war on Iran? Are exclusively Republicans creating a new war despite the president inconveniently being a Democrat who constantly talks up the Iranian threat, who forbids the State Department to speak to Iran, who increases weapons sales to Israel, who doubles down on commitments to veto any U.N. accountability for Israel, and who has reportedly promised to arm Israel for an attack on Iran as long as it is delayed until 2013? What is this less-militarized foreign policy? What nation is it in? Surely not ours. Obama has increased military spending, increased military privatization, increased the use of secret agencies for war making, radically expanded the use of drones, openly claimed and used the power to launch wars without even bothering to lie to Congress, seized the power to murder anyone including U.S. citizens and children and U.S. citizen-children, claimed and exercised the power to imprison or spy without charge or justification, expanded governmental secrecy and retaliation against whistleblowers beyond anything Bush ever dreamed, and expanded U.S. military bases abroad. It’s a step forward for Netroots Nation to be opposing Republican wars. It’s just a shame that these folks waited until Obama was waging the wars to launch that now-out-of-place protest.

I’ve been on a number of email threads discussing the complicated question of whether big groups loyal to the Democratic Party are co-opting Occupy. Well, of course, they’re trying to. But much of Occupy has itself been weak on the central problem of the military industrial complex. And individuals who identify themselves with occupy movements or big Democratic groups have all sorts of different outlooks. The co-opting can and does go both ways. Principled activists can educate their neighbors, even at events planned by people who believe that voting for Obama will fix most of our problems. We should never dismiss actual people in the way that we dismiss an ineffective agenda. But in figuring out which events have been planned with useful agendas and which need to be nudged in a better direction, the test should never be merely “Are they trying to drag us into electoral campaigns?” It should also include the question of what is missing. “Tax the rich,” is the very best that the big organizations sometimes offer, and it leaves a whole lot missing.

On March 28th, Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica, spoke in Washington, D.C., about his country’s decision to disband its military. In Costa Rica, war is found only in a museum. I know we should never ever ever learn from that 95 percent of humanity that has the misfortune to not be our compatriots. Nonetheless, the results in Costa Rica, often listed as the happiest country on earth, are at least more interesting than the deadly chaos we’ve brought to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Here’s Arias:

Proposing some options for redirecting part of what the United States spends on war preparation, Arias remarked:

Surely some of those things also touch on “ideals long held dear by liberals”? Arias even has a plan that he proposes could be put into practice:

Speaking from the standpoint of the victims of humanitarian wars, Arias has a different prescription from Perriello’s:

Now there’s an issue we could seize hold of and pressure our government on, if we were independent people speaking to our government as a whole. As fans of one team in a partisan competition, we’re rather disabled. Both teams view weapons as jobs programs and campaign funds, not instruments of death. The fact that these weapons are used for nothing other than murder is left out of our conferences, so we forget to think that we might want to put an end to that.

We can participate in any events we like, but we must eternally emancipate ourselves from mental slavery.

David Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio