Members of Main Line Peace Action and DelMont Progressive Democrats of America put together a Power Point presentation on how military spending is screwing around our priorities and our domestic needs. This has now become an eleven-minute YouTube video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v20Vm33Rx10. We hope you’ll look at it and forward it on to your friends.
A group of citizens in Delaware and Montgomery Counties, Pennsylvania (members of Main Line Peace Action and the DelMont Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America, agreed that it would not be possible to make progress in education, renewable energy, healthcare, infrastructure or anything else until we reined in military spending. The Frank-Paul Report on that subject had just been released, the National Priorities Project was generating important statistics on military spending and its effect on localities, and New Priorities, a group of Barney Frank’s constituents interested in the “25% solution,” were starting to spread the word. Our local group committed itself to bringing the message to Pennsylvania on this vital subject and developed a Power Point presentation that became this video on YouTube. We hope you will watch it and share it with your friends. Much depends on it.
Chris Hellman of National Priorities wrote this article for TomGram. He knows his ways around the federal budget, and what he found out about military spending is going to amaze you. www.tomdispatch.com/blog//175361/
Kevin Zeese, Executive Director of Prosperity Agenda, has written this article that beautifully sets forth the position of the Pennsylvania Smart Security campaign (www.smartsecuritypa.org). He points out that we spend much more on military bands each year than we do on public broadcasting, but it is the latter that is threatened. A fighter jet in training uses as much fuel in an hour as an average motorist in two years, but spending on the jet is “off the table.” Citizens who want to understand what’s happening to our budget and our debt, must read this article.
Bernie Sanders added a line to last year’s defense appropriations bill that required the Pentagon to list contractors convicted of fraud and barred from future defense work. The report is out, and many “barred” contractors are still doing DoD work. Worth a read, especially now that we’re so concerned about military spending.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2011/02/department_of_d.html
It’s one thing to campaign on cutting spending (as the Tea Party candidates did), but it’s another to actually make some cuts, especially in the Pentagon budget (where the money is). And if a Republican congressman has a big military base in his district, or if he got buckets of campaign money from defense contractors, what’s he to do?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/us/politics/27pentagon.html?hp
The Cato Institute is a conservative think tank that, like Ron Paul below, we don’t often quote. But on the subject of military spending we agree to a great extent. It is this convergence of thinking beteen the left and the right that makes us optimistic about the chances of really taking a large bite out of “defense” spending.
