Draft GPUS Platform Amendment United States

SECTION TITLE: United States

SUBSECTION TITLE: At home and worldwide

OUR POSITION: Greens believe peace must begin at home.

Our first priority in foreign policy considerations is to create a future without war.

To create world peace, we must walk our talk by eliminating violence in our homes, neighborhoods, schools and communities. We support disarmament and massive reduction of the U.S. defense budget. We oppose the production and use of nuclear weapons. We support a no-first-strike policy and a no-preemptive strike policy.

GREEN SOLUTIONS

DOMESTIC PEACE

1. Support the abolition of the death penalty in the United States and worldwide.

2. Support gun control, to create an America free of gun violence. We endorse bans on Saturday-night specials, which are used almost exclusively for crime; military-style assault weapons; and .50-caliber sniper rifles, which have no ordinary sporting use.

3. Support “Brady Bill” background checks for gun buyers, and waiting periods for record search before gun dealers may sell a gun.

4. Maximize restrictions on police use of weapons and restraining techniques such as pepper spray, tasers, stun belts, and choke holds.

5. Expand opportunities non-military community service.

ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS

1. Call for the immediate start of the negotiation of a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, and for the completion of those negotiations by the year 2012.

2. Declare a no-first-strike policy.

3. Declare a no-preemptive strike policy.

4. Declare that the U.S. will never threaten or use a nuclear weapon, regardless of size, on any nation.

5. Cut off all funding for the development, testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons, and funding for nuclear weapons research.

6. Dismantle all nuclear warheads from their missiles.

DISARMAMENT

1. Sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

2. Honor the conditions set in the Non-proliferation Treaty for nuclear nations.

3. Reverse our withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and honor its stipulations.

4. Sign the Toronto treaty banning the production, stockpiling, use and sale of cluster bombs and land mines, and assist other nations in unearthing and disabling unexploded bombs on their lands.

5. End all stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons and all research, use, and sale of such weapons; and sign the convention that will establish the decrease and inspection of all nations’ stockpiles of such weapons, which the U.S. abandoned.

REDUCE THE DEFENSE BUDGET

1. Reduce the U.S. defense budget by at least 70% from the record high 2010 levels. In 2010, President Obama and the U.S. Congress passed a $626 billion dollar U.S. defense budget.

2. Bring home our troops stationed abroad, except for the military assigned to protect a U.S. embassy.

3. Phase out all U.S. foreign military bases not specifically functioning under a U.N. resolution to keep peace.

4. Close the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, in Ft. Benning, Georgia.

5. Prohibit all arms sales to foreign nations.

6. End all covert actions used to influence, destabilize or usurp the governments of other nations, and likewise prohibit the assassination, or assistance in any form in the assassination, of foreign government officials.

7. End military, political and economic support to prop up repressive regimes.