The political fight over the next defense budget has begun. So it is time to jump into the debate. The bill being considered would set the base defense budget at about $554 billion. This Republican proposal is terrible for those who oppose current wars or all wars, and for everyone worried about the economic situation and the pain it is causing.
Right now, the House Armed Services and Appropriations Committees are readying the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to send to the floor of the House for a vote in mid-May. It includes funding for expanding weapon systems and raising troop levels. Meanwhile, the House Budget Committee wants to cut $300 billion out of food stamp programs, health care, and other survival programs instead. This would mean another decade of growing military spending on top of the last decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here is an action agenda from the New Priorities Network:
Email your congressperson this week and call them next week, and make these points in your own words.
·Cut military spending. Cut the waste, stop building useless weapons, end the wars, bring the money back to our communities. ·Save Food Stamps, Medicaid, and other vital programs. Don’t leave people to suffer without a safety net. you.
Write a letter to the editor, blog, call-in urging others to let their representative know how they feel about budget priorities. When you make these issues public, you mobilize other people too and greatly increase the pressure on Congress.
Ask sympathetic local officials and organizational leaders to call Congress and send letters to the editor with you. Take this opportunity to contact your allies – sympathetic local elected officials, leaders of organizations and faith groups, people who are trying to make our communities a decent place to live. Ask them to co-sign letters to the editor or mobilize together to visit congressional offices.
You'll find resources to to begin your work against military spending at the New Priorities Network website.
Washington's Wars and Occupations: Month in Review #84/April 30, 2012
Francesca Fiorentini pulls back the curtain on the empire's maneuvers this month in Iran, Afghanistan and Syria.
This Spring, it’s on. Outpourings like the 99% Spring, May Day actions throughout the country, ongoing Occupy projects, and the work against the NATO summit later this month, mean the movement for economic justice and real democracy in the U.S. can't be pepper-sprayed away.
But as attention moves to critical domestic issues, the repression of the Arab Spring and wars of occupation rage on with much too little public debate. Which is how Washington prefers things. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Because despite the collected face of the military wizard, you might see that the men at the controls haven’t a clue. Yet if we are to understand where our tax dollars really went in April, why the country is supposedly broke and why after a decade of “war on terrorism” the world is less safe than ever, we must pull back the curtain on a military policy that teeters between terrible and disastrous.
From Iran to Afghanistan to Syria, U.S. foreign policy has proven itself a two-faced operation: calling for peace and negotiations while consistently undermining both. Let’s look at this month’s highlights.
Sixteen Afghan civilians are massacred in their beds by a U.S. soldier. Trayvon Martin is murdered by self-appointed 'neighborhood watchman.' Shaima Al Awadi, an Iraqi immigrant and mother of five, is found brutally killed in her home in El Cajon, California. The KONY video, with its ‘Western-white-military-force-will-save-the-day' message, goes viral.
Racism, violence and war - deeply embedded in U.S. society - are thrust this month into the national spotlight once again.
And they are not going unchallenged. Powerful calls were heard across the country and the globe to end the pattern of racist dehumanization once and for all. From the Miami Heat's solidarity with Trayvon, to the spike in public opposition to the war in Afghanistan, injustice and killing is facing new opposition. The arguments of the war-makers, scapegoaters and fear-mongerers are losing some of their grip. Spring is opening with new bursts of bottom-up energy, as the 99% mobilize to turn the tide and open new possibilities for a different way of living.
WASHINGTON'S AFGHANISTAN WAR UNRAVELS
A focal point of protest is Washington's unraveling war in Afghanistan.
This month saw one of that war's most blatant incidents of brutality yet - a shooting rampage killing 16 civilians (more than half of them children) by Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a multiply-deployed soldier suffering from PTSD. While Western media responded with copious investigations into Bales’ life - his mental health status, childhood, wife, etc. - the stories and even the names of the Afghan victims were barely mentioned.
Calling on videographers: WRL is seeking 2- to 3-minute videos about NATO and/or the G8. To submit, they say, "shoot your video, upload it to YouTube, tag it as "natog8freefuture," and send a quick email to freeofnatog8 at gmail dot com letting us know you uploaded it. From there, we'll post it to our YouTube channel."
WRL has also put together a Bombs and Budgets curriculum, which, they say, "links economic justice and antimilitarist organizing through a framework that identifies the natural overlaps in these struggles and takes participants from community based organizations through exercises that help them brainstorm how they can strengthen their economic justice organizing work through an antimilitarist lens." Download the curriculum here.
New York Times magazine cover, January 29, 2012 If we're going to go to war with Iran, something we seem to be edging toward, I think that as a citizen, I've got a right to an answer. Why it is worth spilling anyone's blood over Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon? After all there are nine states currently armed with nukes -- the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. Not all of those are anywhere I'd like to live, but so far no country except the United States has ever used the Bomb. So far, nuclear weapons' destructive horror has created a taboo that we can all hope will never be broken. Four states formerly possessed nukes (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and South Africa) but voluntarily gave them up. It's not as if the science underlying nuclear weaponry is a deep dark secret. Making a bomb requires sophisticated technology and some wealth, but the principles are in the public domain. So why should anyone die to prevent Iran from getting the bomb? The most succinct rationale I was able to find came from Thomas Buonomo, a former intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.
During the state of the Union Address on Tuesday, Obama shouted out the DoD as a clean energy partner.
“I’m proud to announce that the Department of Defense, working with us, the world’s largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history -– with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year.”
It's traditional on New Year's Eve to talk about sweeping away the old and ringing in the new. But this year the call for casting off old habits and trying new paths is more relevant than ever.
From Tahrir Square to Liberty Park, from villages in China to the Eurozone, change is in the air. But which way will the scales tip in 2012?
Will state violence and elite-imposed social austerity prevail and trap even more of the global 99% in poverty and despair? Or will the grassroots uprisings that shook everything up in 2011 gain further momentum and score victories against inequality and repressive regimes? Nothing will come easy. The Great Recession still grips the U.S. and Europe and the squeeze on poor and working people has not let up. Carbon emissions went up in 2011 and the climate crisis has deepened. Washington is recalibrating – not ending - its military deployments, now targeting the Asia-Pacific region as the new spot for escalation.
For three weeks protestors had been conducting a peaceful sit-in on Magles El Shaab Street in downtown Cairo to protest the military regime's appointment of Kamal Ganzouri as prime minister, among other grievances. Their tents were set up alongside heavily guarded government buildings including the Ministry of Health and the Prime Minister's Office, where they remained from Nov. 24 to Dec. 16.
Ganzouri, who had served under former president Hosni Mubarak, had said there would be no violence used to break up the sit-in. But protestors had been alleging that military police were kidnapping and beating them. The latest rounds of fighting sparked Dec. 16 began when the boy in this video, who was part of the sit-in, said he was beaten and electrocuted by security officials. When clearing out the sit-in and those remaining inside Tahrir, tents were ripped apart and burned by soldiers. People were brutally attacked.
Among those beaten was a young woman whose image has circulated around the world and reignited the fury beneath the movement for women's rights in Egypt.
The fights this month were different than November. This time, plainclothes police or soldiers, and apparent civilian allies threw rocks, furniture and later molotov cocktails down from tall buildings at protestors, who responded with rocks and molotovs, which only reached the bottom levels of the building. The clashes soon moved down to street level, where soldiers and police threw rocks, fired ammunition including live bullets, and chased and clubbed protestors over the period of about four days. A truce this time was forced by security forces placing blocks of cement on two streets. Entryways to Tahrir are now blocked three ways.
War Times Egypt correspondent Shadi Rahimi sends this video about bystanders swept up in a September Cairo demonstration still imprisoned months later. The brother of one of the prisoners speaks:
Coupled with the proposed Republican budget, proposed increases in Pentagon spending are closely tied to slashing funding for social programs that are already failing to provide the very basics of human existence. Here is a heart breaking exposure of how the currently proposed budget would slash the food stamp program. 
But as attention moves to critical domestic issues, the repression of the Arab Spring and wars of occupation rage on with much too little public debate. Which is how Washington prefers things. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Because despite the collected face of the military wizard, you might see that the men at the controls haven’t a clue. Yet if we are to understand where our tax dollars really went in April, why the country is supposedly broke and why after a decade of “war on terrorism” the world is less safe than ever, we must pull back the curtain on a military policy that teeters between terrible and disastrous.
A focal point of protest is Washington's unraveling war in Afghanistan.
From Tahrir Square to Liberty Park, from villages in China to the Eurozone, change is in the air. But which way will the scales tip in 2012?
