Mother Jones reported recently that in 2003 the military began building a database on Americans from age 15 up. The creation of Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies (JAMRS) was protested at its inception by peace advocates like AFSC and privacy groups like the ACLU, but nevertheless went on using your tax dollars to create 34 million names database run by Equifax, the friendly folks who provide data on your credit rating. JAMRS connected records from state motor vehicle departments and bureaus, from Selective Service, and from private data brokers who deal in records of consumer behavior.

The New York Civil Liberties Union brought a law suit against JAMRS in 2007, which resulted in a settlement and the Pentagon agreeing to stop collecting social security numbers and sharing them on anyone younger than age 17. According to Mother Jones author David Goodman, “Students may opt out of having their JAMRS database information sent to recruiters, but only 8,700 have invoked this obscure safeguard.”

I’ve written here in the past about the use of the ASVAB test given in high schools across the nation to collect data on students. Test takers can select Option 8 to opt out of that aspect of the test – but only if they know about it.

Preparing for the SAT might be a good way to get into college instead of into uniform, right? Not on the Army’s website March2Success.com. A stealth site run by the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox that collects data on about 17,000 new users each month, the web site offers “free” test taking advice that affluent kids get by paying Kaplan for it. A spokesperson for the Army described the site as  “a great service to schools that normally would cost them.”

A lack of education preparing you for critical thinking may be a prerequisite for failing to understand that $1.2 million spent on developing the March2Success website translates into budget cuts again this year for public schools across the nation.

What does this have to do with counter-recruiting? Everything. Is the real purpose of public schools in America education, or is it warehousing same-age potential recruits to deliver them as a conveniently assembled audience for recruiting messages?

Take the ASVAB — as 621,000 students did during the ’06-07 school year in 11,900 high schools. The Armed Services Vocation Aptitude Battery is given during school time, in buildings funded by local taxes, supervised by staff paid by citizens who thought they were hiring folks to educate their children, not recruit them.

Recruiters lie to high school students all the time when they claim that the ASVAB is a test to tell you which careers you would be suited for. In fact, the test as used by the Army focuses on these “careers”: Clerical, Combat Operations, Electronics, Field Artillery, General Maintenance, General Technical, Mechanical Maintenance, Operators and Food, Surveillance and Communications, Skilled Technical and Special Forces. And, unless you or your family know about selecting “Option 8″ when you take the ASVAB, it will deliver your contact data and your test scores to a recruiter near you.

Then there’s JROTC, the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, one of the best recruitment programs we could have. Educators and school boards around the U.S. have long opposed this militarization of high schools which allocates classroom space and other resources to teaching underage kids how to be recruits, not officers. Despite the acronym claiming it’s a junior version of ROTC, which offers tuition if you agree to enlist at the university level.

Counter-recruiting activists in San Francisco agitated for years and finally succeeded in 2006 in getting a San Francisco School Board vote to phase out JROTC from the district. The military countered by going around the school board and placing an initiative on the ballot last fall supporting JROTC.  The non-binding Proposition V passed by a slim margin, and the San Francisco school board voted 4-3 in May to keep the JROTC program three weeks before it was set to expire, but then laid off all the JROTC instructors. Budget cuts are a double-edged sword, apparently.

The four SF school board members who had voted in 2006 to remove JROTC were no longer on the board by May, 2009. Maybe time for you or a family member to think about running for your local school board?

Locals calculated JROTC cost San Francisco taxpayers nearly $1 million per year. A million that could be spent lowering class sizes from 40+ kindergarteners. But that might be dangerous.

If kids come up through schools which teach them, not what to think, but how to think, they may be a lot harder to recruit.

Then, an amazing victory for a community in Atlanta that didn’t want the military helping to create a public high school for their children. Activists waged a two-month campaign to oppose the establishment of a military-themed high school which the U.S. Marine Corps and the DeKalb County Board of Education had hoped to open on Aug. 10. Relentless watchdogs of their school board, this team of parents, students and community members used media coverage and direct actions to successfully oppose the plan. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Obama’s new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is known in Chicago for having fostered many such schools during his tenure as superintendent of schools. And plans continue for military-themed high schools in other low-income areas around the country. Who’s watching your school board?

More bad news: the Senate voted 93-1 to “temporarily” increase the Army by 30,000 troops for the next three years. The lone dissenting vote came from Senator Russ Feingold (D – WI). Set up for yet another “emergency” war funding supplemental bill? No way, ’cause Obama promised to stop that sort of thing. Didn’t he?

Finally, for all you counter-recruiting activists out there, here’s the real deal in the words of “Nydas” who commented on Digg about an article from the L.A Times reporting on the family of Pfc. LaVena Johnson, who doubts she committed suicide in Iraq as the Army alleges. This is the c-r target audience, talking about the poverty draft:

“I was stationed at balad. It is, in fact, the nicest place to be stationed inside Iraq. No idea what her experience was like, but with 2 swimming pools, 2 Food courts (Pizza hut, popyes, BK, etc.) and the largest PX in iraq, it wasn’t a bad experience for me. Thankfully i never had to leave the base, as i did administrative work, and the worst of the war i had to witness was seeing Iraqi civilians torn up at the Balad hospital when i would pull guard duty. Maybe she went outside the wire and had bad experiences, or maybe she was depressed with things back home, but Balad is definitely not a bad place to be, and certainly not suicide worthy. Food over there was even better than the crap the Army serves us here. God i miss Mongolian BBQ night, and all the free mountain dew i could drink.”