We Can Cut Military Spending

• From our friends at New Priorities Network.
• Congress is deadlocked and automatic cuts are going to hit March 1 -- half military, half domestic.
• Many Republicans and some Democrats will try to shift cuts off of the Pentagon and put them onto already decimated social programs.
• That'll keep happening for the next three months. There will be opportunities to make deeper cuts on March 27 (re-funding the government for the next six months), April (FY2014 budget), and mid-May (debt ceiling).
• It could even continue for ten years because each year, Congress decides what gets cut.
• So if you are looking at Capitol Hill, it looks pretty dismal.
• But if you are looking at the landscape we have for organizing, it's good and getting better.
• The battle over sequestration has put Pentagon spending in the spotlight and the more the public sees, the worse it looks. Scandals like the F-35, F-22, Osprey, LCS (Littoral Combat Ship -- Pentagon nickname: "Little Crappy Ship"), and nuclear modernization are showing people how the Pentagon really spends our tax dollars.
• The Pentagon's scare tactics are backfiring. By not sending a carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf and threatening to cut troop readiness training, they're making it obvious that they are not about “defending our nation” -- they are about protecting their precious weapons purchases. They are driving a wedge in between the troops' welfare and themselves, a wedge we need to widen. More and more Beltway types are blasting them -- across the political spectrum (Gringrich).
• More economic, racial, and environmental groups are coming over to "cut the Pentagon." SEIU and ATU endorsements were a historic crack in Cold War labor militarism. Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, NAACP... We still have an enormous task to turn those endorsements into working alliances, but the landscape ahead makes that task doable, even promising.

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