A Way Forward: Meeting Community Needs by Reducing Military Spending

by Andrew Heaslet
July 5th, 2010

Costs of Military Spending

States are facing a collective $180 billion budget shortfall for the coming year. What does this mean? It means massive layoffs and job cuts from state service providers – in the last 18 months, 212,000 have been laid off by state and local governments– and more pink slips are to come. On top of job cuts, services the states were providing, often used to help those who can’t find work, are becoming rare.

I find the amount of this shortfall particularly compelling because $180 billion is roughly 25% of what the US plans to spend waging and preparing for war next year. Looking at it another way, total requested funds explicitly for war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2011 tops the projected state budget shortfalls by more than $10 billion.

These very similar numbers illustrate the simple economic principle of Opportunity Cost: With a limited amount of funds, one must choose some things over others. What you cannot purchase because you have chosen something different is called your “Opportunity Cost.” One of the opportunity costs of our billions in war spending is that the federal government is unable to help states in these tough times. More...

Urge Local Political Leaders to Support a Sustainable Economy – Not a War Economy

By Jess Mitchell
July 2010

After studying and teaching English in Thailand for almost a year, it was time to head back home to St. Louis, find an apartment, start my internship, and begin summer classes.

I returned to St. Louis worried because of the major protests that had been going on in Bangkok, Thailand’s capital city, for the previous eight weeks. Men, women, and children from the countryside had decided to set up living quarters in the streets of the biggest financial and tourist districts, refusing to leave until their basic needs were met by a government that would not provide adequate education or health care to its poorest farmers.

Expecting the same sort of ‘no-end-in-sight’ politics in America, I came home to find St. Louis faced with some problems that are, although similar to Thailand’s because they are based on politics, problems whose origins are known and whose solutions are visible.

Some short time abroad has given me new thoughts on what a “peace economy” would look like and how we could easily make these changes in our own communities, with efforts focusing on what we can do in terms of asking our representatives to hear our voice. This has little to do with Republican or Democrat, Tea or Coffee, but more to do with where tax money is spent, something which desperately needs to be addressed. More...

Feasible Spending Reductions

By Jess Mitchell, International Affairs Intern
6/29/2010

While US federal austerity initiatives have focused on belt tightening in services, other countries are taking steps towards fiscal responsibility by tightening their bandoliers.

Ten such countries are also involved in wars abroad, are experiencing recessions and environmental crises, and face internal pressure to maintain their military might; yet, they have created plans to cut down on defense spending because of rising debt, the need for improvement in public works, and the rising demand for fiscal accountability. More...

New START: Good News for U.S. Security

Steven Pifer, Brookings Institute Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe
from Arms Control Today

MAY 2010 —

On April 8 in Prague, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a new strategic offensive arms agreement to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which expired in December 2009.

If the Senate and the Russian Duma consent to ratification of the treaty, the United States and Russia each will be limited to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on no more than 800 deployed and nondeployed strategic nuclear delivery vehicles—a steep cut from START I levels, which permitted each side 6,000 warheads on 1,600 delivery vehicles or launchers. The New START limit on deployed strategic warheads is 30 percent lower than the warhead ceiling of 2,200 set by the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).

The new treaty is supported by a set of effective verification measures, which should provide high confidence that any militarily significant violation would be detected in a timely manner. The verification regime, however, differs from the 1991 agreement. For example, New START is a simpler agreement in several ways, requiring less-demanding monitoring measures.

The new treaty is good news. It will reduce Russian and U.S. strategic forces while allowing the United States to maintain a robust nuclear deterrent. It will provide transparency and predictability regarding Russian strategic nuclear forces. Its conclusion demonstrates that Washington and Moscow are fulfilling their nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) commitments on the eve of the May NPT review conference; that will strengthen the administration’s hand in seeking to tighten the nonproliferation regime. The treaty also should give a boost to the overall U.S.-Russian relationship. Finally, it provides a framework for further reductions in strategic nuclear forces.

This article describes New START, its principal numerical limits, its monitoring measures, and the ways in which it will advance U.S. national security interests. Read the entire article on Arms Control Today.

Voices of Peace, Denise DeGarmo, Coordinator of the SIUE Peace Studies Program

By Jason Sibert

Although she started her academic career in the Peace Studies interdisciplinary program at Southern Illinois University nine years ago, Dr. Denise DeGarmo’s commitment to the cause of peace stretches back three decades.

DeGarmo’s consciousness about the need for an alternative to war started when she was a junior high student in Liverpool, New York in the 1970’s. During that period the United States was still involved in the Vietnam War.

“Vietnam was my first recollection of my being concerned with what we were doing,” she said. “It was in the 1970’s that I saw young men being removed from high school and being sent off to war and coming back dead really quickly.”

But DeGarmo faced criticism from her earliest days as a peace conscious citizen, as her father, Arthur V. DeGarmo, worked for General Electric on defense projects.

“He was very upset that I was asking the questions I did,” she said.

DeGarmo graduated from Liverpool High School in 1972. Following high school she married and started a family but eventually decided on a career as a social worker. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Human Resources from Monroe College in Rochester, New York in 1982 and worked for a decade in gang violence resolution for the non-profit Catholic Community Outreach Center, also in Rochester. DeGarmo felt her social work efforts weren’t getting enough support and started pondering a career as an academic.

The social worker earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1992 and went on to earn a doctorate in political science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2001. She started teaching at SIUE in 2000 and took over as peace studies program coordinator in 2001. More...

Remembering King in 2010

By Michael McPhearson
From King2Obama.org

As our nation celebrates the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., oneof the most influential figures of the 20th century, it is important to remember the breadth and depth of his the message and vision. In the era ofthe first Black President, it would be easy to say King’s dream has been fulfilled and now it is time to move on to new challenges. But this is a misreading of current events and his words.

In his 1967 Riverside Church speech, BeyondVietnam: Time to Break Silence, Dr. King talked about three major demons; racism, materialism and militarism.[i] Today these triplets continue to haunt us. In fact they have become more entrenched. In the speech, King spoke of youth challenging his disapproval of their use of violence when the U.S. was “…using massive doses of violence…”[ii] in Vietnam. He called our government, “the greatest purveyor of violence in theworld today.” This continues to be true as our nation is conducting global military operations and occupying two countries with eyes on one or two others. The U.S. is the largest weapons exporter in the world and has the largest military budget, nearly outpacing all other nations combined. More...

Paranoia or People

By Chrissy Heaslet
2/25/2010
Chrissy blogs regularly as CHaze at http://chaze77.wordpress.com

By now, the entire planet is aware of the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010. Almost immediately their cries for help were heard. President Obama, on January 15, pledged to send $100 million in aid on behalf of the United States. In a most emotional statement, Obama spoke to the people of Haiti, saying, “You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you”.

While any effort to help those in need should be applauded, the disaster in Haiti has become another disappointing example of missed opportunity. The United States was given the chance to do something great for a nation in need, but instead chose mediocrity. While no one can argue that $100 million is a lot of money, when put into perspective, it becomes obvious that America’s priorities are out of balance. The U.S. Department of Defense, for example, has an annual budget of $7.5 billion to spend on its missile defense program. This program is designed to prepare America to defend itself, should a missile reach its shores during a military attack by a foreign entity. It is a massive, money draining department within the U.S. government that deals solely in hypothetical scenarios. More...

Slimming Down the Defense Budget

By Lawrence J. Korb, Laura Conley, Sean Duggan | February 2, 2010
From AmericanProgress.org

The Obama administration’s newly released fiscal year 2011 defense budget request continues to provide real increases to the historically high level of defense spending that the Bush administration initiated after September 11. The $708 billion budget, which includes the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, represents an increase of nearly 3.4 percent from the FY 2010 baseline budget, or a 1.8 percent real increase over inflation.

The budget does not rebalance the defense budget to meet the national security challenges of the 21st century as the Pentagon should have done as a result of the Quadrennial Defense Review—a planning and strategy document also released on Monday that defines our military’s force structure and thus shapes its upcoming budget plans. The FY 2011 defense budget instead tinkers at the margins of reallocating resources to urgent priorities and fails to scale back or eliminate poorly performing or unnecessary weapons programs that are based on threats from a bygone era. More...

Dr King’s Dream Deferred – Does it Explode?

Andy Heaslet
1/15/10

My roommate, Michael, and I were headed to meet some friends in North St Louis and found ourselves driving along about five miles of Martin Luther King Dr. The story in St Louis is the same as most cities in the country, the streets named for this visionary leader run through the parts of our communities that most vividly illustrate how far away we are from realizing his many dreams.

If buildings were standing, they were boarded up, paint chipping off of signs painted decades ago. Businesses that were operational were liquor stores, gas stations with bullet-proof glass, and fast food restaurants. The few people brave enough to travel on foot through this urban wasteland wore worn thrift clothes and were, exclusively, of course, black.

Michael and I started the drive innocently enough, we’ve been there before, we know Chris Rock’s comedy and the unfortunate humor in the joke, but it didn’t take long for our spirits to dim on this short journey. Virtually the entire North Side of our city is in dire straights, but Dr King’s Drive is particularly depressing. More...

Chopping Block: No New Nuclear Weapons Plant in Kansas City
and Remarks by Dr Martin Luther King Jr on Nuclear Weapons

The US Nuclear Weapons Complex currently produces 85% of the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons in neighboring Kansas City at Honeywell’s Kansas City Plant (KCP). The mere presence of this facility is disturbing, but I was blown away last month when it was revealed to me that the city of Kansas City is preparing to give Honeywell and other developers $40 million in tax breaks to pay for a NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS PRODUCTION PLANT!

In addition to these massive tax breaks, they are moving the facility to a productive soy bean field in the southern reaches of the city and plan to have labeled the site “blighted” in order to help secure the land and subsequent bonds needed to fund the project!

And as odd as any part of this proposal is that Kansas City is planning a lease-to-own policy for this property. Meaning this municipality will essentially be the owners of this weapons plant for the 20 years until the facility ultimately becomes fully owned by the developers. (The current facility is on federal property, giving at least indirect control and ownership to the federal government)

Finally, this whole process is being steamrolled through the city council and the developers want to break ground this spring, likely before the UN sponsored conference to review the NonProliferation Treaty (NPT), which the US has signed and ratified, and as President Obama attempts to push the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) through the Senate for ratification. The construction of this facility has the potential to derail vital, global nuclear nonproliferation efforts.

In short, this plant is a boondoggle of epic proportions and cannot proceed unchallenged. Friends in and around Kansas City have expended great efforts to mobilize against this, but they can use our support… please contact your friends and family in Kansas City and ask them to take part in future mobilizations. And please keep your eyes and ears open about larger mobilizations against this expansion of our nuclear arms complex!

Some Kansas City contacts/resources:
http://kcnukeswatch.wordpress.com/

http://www.peaceworkskc.org/

For a more thorough breakdown of the grievances against the new plant, visit the
Nuclear WatchBlog!

In reflection on this issue, at this time of year, I wondered what Dr Martin Luther King Jr said about nuclear weapons in his lifetime. I was not surprised to find that he forcefully spoke out against these weapons of mass destruction. Below is an excerpt from his 1964 Nobel Prize lecture, focusing on the scourge of war and nuclear weapons. More...