Justice for Veterans

With so many victims coming forward, and so much heartbreaking evidence of sexual assault and rape in the military, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and the U.S. Congress must take urgent action to address this epidemic of violence to women, and to many men, in uniform.

These are not isolated cases; these are not cases of “he said, she said.” These are horrifying statistics that harm the credibility and mission of our military. There is a pattern of violence here that cannot be denied, one that subjects its victims to injustice, inaction, denial and retribution.

But now the silence has been broken. These brave victims have stepped forward to say, “No. Not again.” Given their courage, can our national leaders find the same strength to finally face the truth and demand a solution?

We believe the answer is yes. Now that this terrifying reality can no longer be ignored, urgent action must be taken.

We salute U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, new Chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, for her promise to hold an important hearing on what she has labeled this “reprehensible problem.”

Sen. Gillibrand has vowed to find solutions, telling the media: “We have 19,000 sexual assaults a year happening — and only a small handful of perpetrators being prosecuted and discharged.

“The committee not only can shine a light on military sexual trauma, more importantly we want to develop a response to reduce and eliminate whatever level of tolerance there is for this type of behavior.”

We agree. And like Sen. Gillibrand, we insist that real action be made to resolve this violence, to give the victims some sense of closure and to prevent future harm.

One issue often overlooked is how to fairly compensate the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have suffered the consequences of sexual assault and rape. Many have had their lives ruined. Many are haunted by their experiences and can no longer make a living due to related injuries of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other debilitating illnesses.

With nowhere else to turn for help, these victims often come to us as a last resort. They come for some kind of resolution, for closure, for help.

We are here, then, to bear witness to their plight.

Some of these veterans call us from homeless shelters; others phone from cars that have become their homes. Some send us handwritten notes because they don’t have access to a computer. Others are driven to endless research, day and night, searching the global Internet for support and validation. Each individual story is gut-wrenching.

This is wrong. This is immoral. This is unjust.

This is not the way America should treat its warriors.

What these veterans seek, and what we intend to bring them, is acknowledgement, justice and reforms.

Our fights are just beginning in the courts around this country, and we believe a tsunami of claims is imminent as judges awaken to their duty and power to provide a remedy to the men and women who have sacrificed so much for our freedoms and democratic form of government and then been ignored.

We must develop a strategy to redress the wrongs that have been done to these soldiers, sailors and marines.

Surely as Americans, we can figure out a way to provide some modicum of relief to these injured veterans – our children, sisters, brothers, neighbors and friends.

We urge Secretary Hagel, Sen. Gillibrand and the Congress to do a few simple things, urgently.

First, issue a public apology to those who have been harmed. Second, make an appropriation to allow some redress of the financial hardships that have been shouldered. Third, establish a claims process without delay for eligible veterans who have been raped, sexually assaulted and subjected to other forms of violence.

This three-pronged remedy is not unique, nor is it unrealistic. The same model is being used to redress discrimination inflicted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on black, Hispanic and women farmers.  

This remedy will avoid endless courtroom battles for these veterans, who honestly have endured enough battlefields for a lifetime. Let’s not make them fight again at home.

We cannot give back what was brutally taken from the veterans raped and assaulted while serving this nation. But we can apologize for what they have lived through, and we can make a deserved gesture of compensation.

Money will help these veterans get the care, education, housing and stability they need and deserve. A public apology and acknowledgment will validate their plight. And more: it will salute their bravery in coming forward with their stories and it will serve to speed much-needed reforms in our military justice system.

Our veterans deserve no less.

It's Time to Smash the Brass Ceiling

The staggering number of sexual assaults committed against American women serving in the military is 19,000 per year. Only when the law recognizes women who fight as warriors will this number be reduced.

That’s why both a lawsuit recently filed in U.S. District Court in California and last Thursday’s announcement by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that the “combat exclusion” policy of the Department of Defense will be revised are welcome news on many fronts. The end to legalized discrimination will give 214,000 active-duty American servicewomen the opportunity to compete for 238,000 positions across the Armed Forces currently denied them because of their gender. It also means women will be less likely subject to sexual harassment and assault.

Don’t just take my word for it. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, agrees.

“I have to believe, the more we can treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally,” Dempsey is quoted as saying in a story reported in the Christian Science Monitor.

The combat exclusion policy was adopted during the Clinton Administration in 1994 and says women can “be assigned to all positions for which they are qualified, except that women shall be excluded from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground.”

This rhetoric doesn’t reflect the real life experience of soldiers fighting in today’s military theatres, however, and causes real and lasting harm. It both stifles opportunity, and nurtures the abuse of power. So while politicians wrestle with the issues of equality of opportunity and freedom from assault in committee rooms, some women are taking their fight to the court room.

Major Mary Jennings Hegar is a combat helicopter pilot who served three tours in Afghanistan for the Air National Guard. She successfully completed a grueling training program that qualified her to fly medevac missions in extremely dangerous combat conditions on a daily basis in remote mountains. Her helicopter took direct fire regularly, and on one occasion her aircraft was shot down as she was evacuating injured soldiers. Hegar herself was shot and she returned fire. Ultimately she was able to successfully complete the rescue mission. For this she was awarded the Purple Heart, recognizing her “outstanding heroism and selfless devotion to duty.”

Because of the combat exclusion policy, Major Hegar is barred from competing for thousands of advanced positions, leadership training and entire career fields solely because she is a woman. Hegar and others brought suit in federal court alleging the policy violates their rights to equal protection of the law, as secured by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

All women are denied career opportunities like Hegar. Meanwhile half of the women deployed to Afghanistan with her report being sexually harassed, and one quarter report they were sexually assaulted. This is no coincidence. When women are by law declared unfit to carry out essential functions of the armed services because of their gender, they are not treated equally. The official policy that legalizes discrimination creates an automatic power imbalance, with only men at the top. Sexual harassment and assault in the military is about the abuse of this power. Lust and uncontrollable testosterone have nothing to do with it.

The lifting of the combat exclusion policy is good news for women directly and their families, and for the United States as a whole. Equality of opportunity will increase combat-readiness, strengthen the Armed Services, and reduce oppression, harassment and abuse within the ranks. The political attempt to address the issue is welcome, but will be the subject of compromise. Also attacking the issue in the court room is important. A declaration that women soldiers have a constitutional right to equal protection of the law will both serve as a deterrent of harassment and assault, and a much needed remedy.

I applaud Secretary Panetta and the Joints Chiefs of Staff for taking the first step towards aligning America’s military policy with the reality on the ground for our troops. I also am grateful to Major Hegar and others for demanding justice in the United States District Court. We honor the sacrifice of those who serve by forever striving for more freedom, more liberty and more equality.

Follow me on Twitter @dillesquire

Everyone agrees that kids should not be killed at school

How is it that we are even talking about first grade kids being brutally murdered at school?  When did this unraveling begin? When did little boys and girls become sitting ducks for some assault-weapon-wielding maniac?

And when did Americans become afraid to speak up, fearful of pushing for changes that truly are a matter of life and death?

When I was growing up, my parents did not worry that their children would be shot and killed, like trapped prey, in the safe confines of our local elementary school. We walked to school. We played outdoors. We were safe.

Still, even as children, we knew the larger world was a dangerous place. We worried about things like the Soviet Union, the Cold War, nuclear bombs, and the foreign military threat to America.

We knew those threats were thousands of miles away - not over on the next block. And not in the classroom. And we trusted that the adults were grappling with and trying to solve these problems.

All children are afraid of boogeymen.  I cringe remembering movies such as “Night of the Living Dead”  and hiding under our desks in a cold war drill.  I had nightmares over scary movies and a nuclear holocaust for years.

Today, America is living through a national nightmare. But that nightmare isn’t a movie. And it’s not on foreign soil. It is here, at home, in our schools, in our malls, in our movie theaters, on our streets.

The nightmare began with the all-too-easy access that Americans have to assault weapons, which originally were made for use solely by the military and the police. It began with the unchecked power of the national gun lobby. It began when our legislators and members of Congress became more concerned about receiving the NRA seal of approval and campaign contribution checks than their own communities.

We need to take back our country and rein in the gun lobby and other special interests that threaten the safety of our kids. Because, as President Obama told the residents of Newtown, Connecticut, at a heartwrenching vigil, “What choice do we have? Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

American society has been numb to the growing problem of gun violence for too long. We pretended its not been that bad, and won’t get worse, but our denial of symptoms and quest to be pain free has taken a toll. Pills for aches and despair are sold to us ad nauseum, but there is no prescription drug to mask the societal disease of mass shootings.

The gunman responsible for the Newtown murders was reported to be literally numb. He could not feel pain. The teacher who ran the technology club of which he was a member in high school had to make sure soldering tools and other potentially dangerous electrical equipment didn’t burn him. The heinous crimes he committed can not be explained, but numbness to pain is telling. 

If we are going to change, it’s going to hurt a little, and we can tough it out if we allow ourselves to see the humanity in the eyes of our neighbors and political adversaries, and feel their pain. 

The national dialogue has to throw off the wet blanket of “Democrats versus the NRA.” There is more to this country than faceless machines.

Corporations are not people, and neither is the NRA. Blaming a big powerful association for the mass murder of Newtown children and their principle is convenient because true answers are nowhere in sight, but it’s people who are guaranteed constitutional rights, and people who commit atrocious crimes. 

And it will only be courageous people who take meaningful steps to curb gun violence in America -- people who disagree about politics, people who belong to the NRA, and people who don’t. We need everyone at the table talking about a way forward that does not include mass shootings, because there is one thing we can all agree on - it wasn’t the kids’ fault that they were shot and killed in Sandy Hook. 

From this common ground, this fundamental belief in the need to protect innocent children, let’s begin a national conversation about how to prevent a tragedy of this magnitude from ever happening again. In Maine, lets have the courage to speak up with empathy of our neighbors from north and south. Let’s reject the oversimplification of the right versus left, rural versus urban, liberal versus conservative script. It’s obvious the rhetoric of the past is not working -- we are not more free, or more safe.

What I Lost This November

There is losing. And there is loss. In November, in the space of a few days, I learned that harsh life lesson.  

I lost my bid as U.S. Senate Democratic nominee from Maine on Nov. 6. One of my biggest supporters, a woman named Carol, died on Nov. 17.

Carol was the most unlikely of role models. I met her as a child when my parents were divorcing. Carol wasn’t my mother; I have a mother whom I love dearly. But Carol became my second mom, marrying my father when I was nine years old.

In her heart, Carol knew the journey she was about to take with my father and my siblings could cast her in the hurtful role of outsider, aggressor, divider in our family.

So she became the polar opposite. Instead of my family being ripped apart by divorce, a trauma that so many children and parents experience, Carol became a valued addition.

When I was younger I thought our family wasn’t ordinary because of the divorce. Later, I understood that family isn’t always neatly defined. Its possibilities are limitless. And because of Carol’s presence, my life became richer.

Carol was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and faithful conservative; so was my father. And I was always the left-leaning Democrat of the family.

I entered politics shortly after George W. Bush was re-elected, running for town council as a way to cope with my disappointment. One day, Carol wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper, extolling my “peacemaker” role in the family. It was a part I didn’t realize I even played until she pointed it out.

I lost my first election by six votes. The next several races I won. My career in politics progressed: town councilor, state representative, state senator, Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. All along, Carol was there. All along, we held opposite worldviews.

Again, Carol, this most unlikely role model, inspired my love of politics. Through her values and actions, Carol taught me that politics is personal, but not hurtful. People carry beliefs with passion because they care deeply for their communities and their nation. We are all members of a larger, diverse family that doesn’t always agree.

Carol never held back her political viewpoints. Nor did I. The disagreements made us closer as we sought lovingly to understand each other. Carol ardently followed all my campaigns, giving me suggestions and advice. This year, when I ran for U.S. Senate, Carol studied all my debates and sent follow-up emails with comments.

“We liked the answer you gave about old white rich men,” one email read.

Another: “I have a suggestion for you. There is an old saying, ‘It is not what you say, but how you say it.’ Sometimes you sounded sarcastic. Other than that you were good.”  

Yet another: “I know you must be beside yourself with these outside donations, but Cynthia, this is politics, just like lobbying is. If you want to be in politics you will witness this going on everyday. We are sorry you are in this as a profession, it is a dirty one. Hope you don't get caught up in it.”

On Nov. 5, the day before my biggest election and one that I would surely lose, Carol emailed:  “GOOD LUCK TOMORROW! Dad and Carol.”

Carol, 75, learned to use Twitter just to track the campaign Tweets; I was her only “follow.” After I wished my chief opponent, Angus King, good luck on Election Day, she tweeted me: “What a nice thing to do!”

On election night, Carol cried. She wanted Mitt Romney, the Republicans - and me - to win.

She wrote: “Sorry you couldn't do it. I guess it just was not your time. You ran a hard race.... Love, Dad and Carol”

Several days later, Carol died from a stroke.

Then I understood what loss really was. Some things that we fail at can be tried again; some choices can be made anew. Some damaged relationships can be repaired; some families torn apart can be restitched and enriched. Losing the election was tough, but Carol’s loss put that defeat into perspective.

I gave the eulogy at the service, noting her steadfast commitment to our family and her honesty, loyalty, kindness, generosity and patriotism. The people in life who give you unconditional love can never be replaced. But you can always hold fast to their love and wisdom, their teachings and legacy.

Through Carol’s life, I learned that it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. For there are too many improbable destinations for us to even imagine. I am still on my journey and, thanks to Carol’s inspiration and impact, she will always be there with me.

Not to the side, left or right, but to the center of one’s self, where love resides.

There has to be a BETR way forward for Maine.

When more than one fifth of Maine’s kids are living in poverty, why are its taxpayers handing out nearly one fifth of their money to companies such as Verso Paper, Bath Iron Works, Katahdin Paper, S.D. Warren and Nestle?

Maine’s projected $100 million shortfall in the state's Medicaid program, $35 million revenue shortfall in the budget that ends June 30, and a projected $880 million gap in the next two-year budget is going to require every stone be unturned to balance the books. 

What appears to be a "crisis" might be an opportunity to start anew. It's time to take a fresh approach to budgeting instead of the usual demand that every school board pony up its music program, and every town lay off its fire fighters.

One obvious place to begin are business subsidies and “incentives” not tied to job creation or elevating the quality of life for Maine families. Maine taxpayers donate $.17 of every dollar in the state budget to corporations. That’s $379 per person, according to a recent investigation by Louise Story of the New York Times.

The BETR program “refunds” property taxes paid by businesses on equipment purchases, and costs Maine taxpayers $55 to $60 million per year. Interestingly, companies don’t have to create or retain even one job to qualify.

Take for example the case of Katahdin Paper Company, LLC. Between 2008 and 2011, Maine paid $9.8 million back in property tax abatements, corporate income tax credits, rebates and reductions according to the Times story. Piling on, Brookfield Asset Management, the parent company of Katahdin Paper, left state officials with a predicament in 2011: either assume ownership of the nearby polluted Dolby landfill, thereby enabling the mills to be sold, or the corporation would permanently dismantle the mills in order to pay for the costs of closing and cleaning up the landfill.

The State of Maine assumed ownership of a polluted landfill on top of writing checks to a private multinational corporation for millions of dollars to “save” about 220 jobs in East Millinocket. Are these jobs important? Absolutely. Is this the best we can do for future economic prosperity in the region? I don't believe so. 

There may be good reason to provide economic incentives to companies that want to invest in Maine people, add value to communities and create jobs. But cutting deals with corporations without built-in protections, while cutting budgets to early childhood education programs, public safety, and schools that will train the future workforce is something we no longer can afford.

Bangladesh Factory Fire May Have Started in New York

Was the Bangladesh Factory Fire the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of the Global economy? Will this be the international incident that brings to the surface the working conditions of the poor around the globe whose sweat, blood and tears produce the racks of cheap shirts at Walmart?

An over-crowded garment factory, a fire, locked doors, no sprinklers or working extinguishers and workers jumping to their deaths. Eerily similar fact patterns.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City prompted new regulations, safety standards and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. What will result from the Bangladesh Factory Fire?

The "I" in independent

There are those who argue that not belonging to either American political party is important.

This certainly may be true for the rational and busy voter who has no appetite for exhausting crude primary battles and prefers his or her choice in November to be whittled down to two by political junkies.

For the candidate, not knowing where you fit in or where you stand, or worse not able to play well with others might be a sign of something other than "independence."

Recently many of us received word that one unenrolled candidate was enthusiastically endorsing the other unenrolled and uncommitted-on-the-issues candidate for US Senate before anyone else even got on the ballot. Not a knee-jerk endorsement, perhaps, but clearly an uninformed one by one spoiler to the potential next.

I'm not suggesting this was a back room deal. I'll leave that to the Twitterers.

Some of us like being on teams and the challenge of working with others towards a common purpose for the common good. We recognize that all communities are interdependent including the chambers of the US Congress. That one party is having an identity crisis is not an invitation to give up the two-party system in the United States -- a system that has nurtured the leader of the free world -- but rather a call for true leaders to fix it.