America owes a debt of gratitude to the activists who opposed the Iraq war from the start, and who kept the pressure on.
By Tom Hayden
Los Angeles Times
December 15, 2011
As the United States completes its withdrawal from Iraq, it is worth pausing to remember the determined peace activists who opposed the war from the start, including one who took up their cause and became president.
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Annual Peace Conference Speaker Urges
Cuts in Military Spending to Fund Domestic Needs
Peace Action Executive Director Kevin Martin was the featured speaker at the 2011 Annual Peace Conference this past October 15 in Lincoln. Martin, who has headed up Peace Action’s Washington, D.C.-based national office since 2001, made this visit to Nebraska in part to personally welcome NFP as an affiliate member to what is the largest peace organization in the U.S. with 100,000 members nationwide.
The following article, written by Martin specifically for the Nebraska Report, touches on the main points of his annual conference address, and Peace Action’s timely new campaign during the federal deficit debate to “Move the Money!”
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(and our Nebraska federal officials)
To Cut Military Spending —
Not Funding for Domestic ProgramsWith just one week to go, Congress’s ‘supercommittee’ is racing to come up with a bipartisan plan to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next decade.
On the table for discussion are cuts in military spending and domestic programs like Medicare, Social Security and education, as well as higher taxes for the wealthy.
Congressional failure to adopt a plan yet this year will trigger automatic cuts of $500 billion to the Pentagon and an equal amount on domestic spending.
The Pentagon is wailing that it’s already agreed to cut its budget by $450 billion over the next ten years — and that another $500 billion in cuts would leave America militarily weak and defenseless.
But as NFP has repeatedly argued this past year, Congress could easily cut our national security budget in half — by $500 billion A YEAR! — and America would still be the greatest military power on earth. Between the unnecessary weapons systems, our superfluous military bases in Germany and Japan, and the Pentagon’s chronic inability to account for literally trillions in appropriations, we’re just throwing money at the military nowadays.
As Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration, just stated in the New York Times November 9, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
grossly exaggerates when he says it would be disastrous if projected levels of defense spending are reduced by an additional $500 billion if the bipartisan ‘supercommittee’ deadlocks and automatic cuts go into effect. Adding $500 billion to the $450 billion already being cut would mean total reductions of $950 billion over the next decade, or about 15 percent…
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by Hank Van den Berg
UNL Professor of Economics
While attending two economics conferences in the United Kingdom this summer, I was repeatedly confronted by economists from other countries wanting to know: “What is wrong with Washington?” They were concerned that the debt ceiling would not be raised and a U.S. default would trigger another global financial crisis. My explanations ranged from “I know, it’s really stupid” to “You have to understand American politics”.
Indeed, the debt ceiling debate is a very American phenomenon. We are one of the only countries that has a debt ceiling. More mature countries have figured out that when a legislature debates expenditures and taxes, it directly effects the government’s budget balance and, therefore, its total outstanding debt. A separate debt ceiling is superfluous. But in the United States, we like political theater, so we first have a long emotional political debate about the debt ceiling without actually getting into any substantive discussions on expenditures and taxes. Then, we repeat the whole exercise and actually sort of debate budget items. This way, of course, we can get twice the political mileage out of the subject. The news media loves it!
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The Annual National Security Budget Figure No One Wants You to See
The following article by Chris Hellman of the “National Priorities Project” in Northampton, Massachusetts, was originally posted on the website TomDispatch.com back in March. But with the congressional ‘Super Committee’ facing a November deadline to cut the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next decade, the topic is more timely than ever.
NFP has long supported the work of the National Priorities Project, and Chris Hellman is one of the country’s top experts on national security spending, having previously served as a military policy analyst for the “Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation,” a Senior Research Analyst at the “Center for Defense Information,” and a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues.
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