Foreign Policy In Focus

Cross-posted from OpEdNews.

On Tuesday, April 17, the International Peace Bureau and the Institute for Policy Studies will kick off its second annual "Global Day of Action on Military Spending." The event seeks to bring public, political, and media attention to the rising costs of military spending and the folly of war. It also aims to stress the dire need to realign our priorities to address the crises impacting our troubled world.

The annual occasion coincides with the release of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) new annual figures on military expenditures. In 2010 alone, global military spending rose to an all-time high of $1.63 trillion. Organizers of the event are calling for a united focus on "human lives and needs" and new direction in tackling the scourges of poverty, hunger, lack of education, poor health care and environmental issues that threaten the planet.

In America, the Global Day of Action should also be a day when politicians are forced to obey the will of the people. On that day vast constituencies of conscientious Americans ought to send a message to war hungry political candidates and a Congress stubbornly intent on slashing America's safety nets for the poor and disadvantaged while refusing to trim a military budget gone drastically awry.

According to researchers at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will eventually cost Americans between $3.2 and $4 trillion. That amount -- according to several anti-war organizations -- is more than enough to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, fully fund a national health care plan, provide free college education to all high school graduates and completely fund a nationwide renewable energy program.

Even though the primary factor that led to the nation's current deficit dilemma was war spending, bull-headed politicians astonishingly declare they will initiate yet another deadly military adventure in Iran if necessary.

If all other strategies fail, GOP presidential nominee hopefuls Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich said they'd be willing to go to war to keep Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. Ron Paul, who definitely won't be the GOP nominee, was the only candidate who voiced a common sense retort to war rhetoric: "I'm afraid what's going on right now is similar to the war propaganda that went on against Iraq," Paul said.

President Barack Obama also challenged candidates who expressed a need for the U.S. to harden its position against Iran: "When I see the casualness with which those folks talk about war, I am reminded of the costs involved in war," Obama said. It's not the candidates "popping off" about war who will make sacrifices, Obama added, "it's these incredible men and women in uniform and their families who pay the price."

Not only are political candidates and mostly right-leaning legislators ignoring Paul and Obama, they continue to disregard the wishes of the American people. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released in March, the majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the federal deficit rather than taking money from public retirement and health programs. The polling data indicates that 51 percent of Americans support reducing defense spending and only 28 percent want to cut entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and poor.

Romney, the candidate most likely to challenge Obama in the 2012 elections, has introduced a plan that's 60 percent higher than the $525 billion Obama proposed in his FY 2011 defense budget, according to the Cato Institute .

Since the so-called "Super Committee" failed to produce a debt reduction plan, $1.2 trillion in across-the-board defense and non-defense cuts are supposed to kick in automatically. Some Republican lawmakers, like Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who sat on the super committee, vow to fight military spending cuts. The "off limits" approach is unacceptable, said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who insists deficit-reduction efforts include more military cuts: "Under an all-of-the-above approach, the Pentagon should not be treated as off limits," Schumer said. "There is waste in defense just like there is waste in the rest of the discretionary budget."

The military industrial complex is a powerful force supported by war barons and private-sector monopolies dependent on the production of weaponry and exorbitantly-paid privatized security forces to maintain the messes they create. Politicians have turned a deaf ear to the will of the people and are perfectly content with bartering new jobs and the safety of elderly and impoverished Americans in order to protect and increase an already out-of-control military spending budget.

The Global Day of Action on Military Spending is the appropriate time to refute the "propaganda" Paul mentioned and beat back the callous drumbeat of war and more wars. April 17 should be the day we collectively stir the nation's consciousness and direct its attention to issues that really matter. It should be a time of reckoning for morally reckless politicians-a rallying cry for massive reaction. The global day of action is the perfect time to bring international attention to the real costs of war and the desperate need to protect our planet and defend humanity.

Sylvester Brown, Jr. is an award-winning journalist, former publisher of Take Five Magazine and metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

On Tuesday, April 12, people in more than 35 countries, as well as Columbus, Dallas, Kansas City and dozens of other cities throughout the United States will participate in the first Global Day of Action on Military Spending.

Actions will include a protest in front of the White House at noon. Other U.S. cities include San Francisco, New York, Boston, Fairbanks, San Juan, and Honolulu (click here for a full list). There will be actions at the United Nations offices in Geneva, a march in Kampala, a demonstration in Dhaka, a women's peace gathering in Seoul, and much more.

The Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC and the International Peace Bureau in Geneva, Switzerland are the event's co-organizers. More than 100 organizations, including Religions for Peace, Scientists for Global Responsibility, the American Friends Service Committee, Win Without War, and Fellowship of Reconciliation have endorsed it.

This global action will come one day after the release on April 11 of the 2010 figures for global military expenditures by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 2009, the world spent more than $1.5 trillion on the military. Even in the middle of a global economic crisis, military spending has increased, with the United States responsible for nearly half of all expenditures.

"With the U.S. government in a budget crisis, it's urgent that we move from military deeds to human needs," says John Feffer of the Institute for Policy Studies and a Global Day organizer. "Meanwhile, other crises have put a great strain on the world's resources: climate change, earthquakes, global poverty, nuclear proliferation, and the threat of health pandemics. Ever greater funds are necessary to repair the societies that have been damaged by war and conflict, including the latest war in Libya."

"In the wake of the global economic crisis, some governments — especially here in Europe — are beginning to cut military spending. But they won't allocate the savings made by these reductions to social/environmental needs or to combat poverty unless we pressure them to do so," says Colin Archer of the International Peace Bureau and a Global Day organizer.

"This is why we are undertaking a serious worldwide mobilizing effort — beginning on April 12 — to make visible our demands to feed the people, not the military-industrial complex."

The White House action, which will take place at noon, will feature poetry, puppets, and graphic representations of military spending. Representatives of national and local peace and human needs organizations will present "flash facts" that vividly demonstrate how our military dollars can be used more effectively to create jobs, address climate change, and reduce poverty.

Please visit our website, demilitarize.org, for more information about the Global Day of Action on Military Spending, the endorsing organizations, and the specific actions.

The Institute for Policy Studies is a community of public scholars and organizers linking peace, justice, and the environment in the United States and globally. The International Peace Bureau is a Nobel Peace Laureate (1910) with 320 member organizations in 70 countries. 

For more information:
John Feffer: johnfeffer@gmail.com; 202-294-9128
Find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @GlobalDay412.

Also visit Demilitarize.org.

“I think we have started an adult conversation” about the federal deficit, mused Deficit Commission co-chairman Erskine Bowles last year. Well then. Let’s have it.

By now, the commission’s more regressive recommendations have been sufficiently excoriated that we can safely sense where the battle lines have been drawn on domestic issues. Paul Krugman memorably referred to the proposed package as “a major transfer of income upward,” while Nancy Pelosi called its cuts to Social Security and Medicare “simply unacceptable.”

But a comparatively less mentioned aspect of the panel’s recommendations, the proposed $100 billion in cuts to the Pentagon budget, has proven surprisingly resilient under such public scrutiny. While few congressional Republicans have spoken publicly in favor of such defense cuts, the new Congress’ Majority Leader, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), has allowed that such cuts are at least “on the table.” Even the hawkish Senator John McCain conceded that the bloated defense budget should hardly be considered “sacrosanct” while popular social programs find themselves under the ax. Meanwhile, mainstream progressive groups have concocted their own alternatives to the Bowles-Simpson panel’s recommendations, virtually all of which seek even deeper defense cuts than the ones already proposed.

Earlier this month, President Obama surprised even the Pentagon by ordering $78 billion in cuts to its budget over the next five years. This comes in addition to $100 billion in “savings” that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has set aside to “reallocate to combat-related projects.” While some Republican lawmakers have made clear their strenuous objections to cutting the military budget in an era of unnecessary wars, they can take some solace in noting that even with the cuts, the Pentagon’s budget will continue to increase over that same five years.

So this is where we come in. Long the lonely purview of frustrated civil society activists, defense cuts are now finally part of that “adult conversation” our Washington elders are holding on the deficit. But it would be a regrettable mistake for us to surrender this policy conversation on the very cusp of its mainstream debut. Now is the time to make clear that trimming the Pentagon budget must not precipitate a scramble to find faster, sleeker, or cheaper ways to fight our wars. Rather, we should correlate a reevaluation of our budget priorities to a similar reevaluation of our global priorities.

In early April of this year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) will release its calculations of global military spending for 2010. We estimate that this figure could reach $1.6 trillion. Already we’ve tried to show what this means in terms of what we’re not investing in public health, education, and the environment:

Even humbly illustrated by our cut paper flags, the disparity is astounding.

So on April 12, 2011, the Institute for Policy Studies and the International Peace Bureau will host a Global Day of Action on Military Spending. Peace groups, budget priority activists, arms control advocates, and concerned citizens the world over will hold public demonstrations calling attention to the disparity between bountiful global investments in war-making and the worldwide neglect of social priorities. When newspapers cover the SIPRI numbers, perhaps they will illustrate their coverage with photographs of their own readers demonstrating against everything those numbers entail – rather than reaching for a stock photo of a desert tank. 

Budget deficits may have given us an audience, but decades of failed militarist policies have given us a cause. We need public pressure to ensure that these cuts actually happen and that our money is reinvested in the public interest.

Scores of event organizers from some two-dozen countries have already joined us. Don’t let Erskine Bowles or Alan Simpson be the strongest voice you have. If you have ever suspected that your government’s relentless pursuit of military technology has negatively impacted your planet or your community, we hope you will visit us at demilitarize.org and get involved.