City Council Votes Thursday!

CITY COUNCIL SET TO VOTE ON RESOLUTION TO REDIRECT MILITARY SPENDING TO FUND OUR COMMUNITIES

Area labor, community, and faith groups will support with banners, signs, comments

Introduced April 12 by Councilmember Maria Quiñones-Sanchez with six co-sponsors, a resolution is projected for a vote this week calling on Congress and the President to “redirect military spending to fund education, public and private sector family-sustaining job creation, special protections for military sector workers, environmental and infrastructure restoration, care for veterans and their families, and the human services that our cities and states so desperately need.”

Delaware Valley New Priorities, a network of dozens of labor, neighborhood, faith, and peace organizations, drafted the resolution, which also details the human catastrophe in the City: a third of its children live in poverty, more than a third are hungry, more than 300 veterans are homeless on any given night; schools and health clinics are closing; teachers, firefighters and police are losing their jobs.

Members of the network plan to make public comment this week, with support from other members arriving with banners, signs, and handouts. Last week five public comments were made in support of the resolution.

“This resolution asks you to join the majority of Americans who favor cutting the military budget and rebuilding America,” said John Braxton, President of the Faculty and Staff Federation of the Community College of Philadelphia, in public comment on June 7.

Jean Haskell, Philadelphia Granny Peace Brigade, echoed these concerns: “Everyday we Grannys imagine the things that could be done if that money were re-directed back home; and we agonize over the kind of future our grandchildren can expect in this country, which seems to give them less and less each year.”

The resolution contrasts the $2 billion shortfall of the City of Philadelphia over the next five years with the $5 billion spent on wars by Philadelphians since 2001, the 1000 overseas bases funded in more than a hundred countries, the doubling of military spending in the last decade, and notes, “the U.S. military budget could be cut by 80% and still be the largest in the world…”