The United States Institute of Peace: It's time for Greater Funding, not Less

Conceived during the Carter administration and signed into existence by Ronald Reagan in 1984, the United States Institute is one of our nation's finest investments of taxpayer dollars. Below are some excerpts from the Institute's website.  You can click on the items in blue to get more information, or go visit the entire yourself at: http://www.usip.org/

Who We Are ?

USIP is our country's global conflict management center. Created by Congress to be independent and nonpartisan, we work to prevent, mitigate and resolve international conflict without resorting to violence.

Read more about our work in the field

 

Solving Real Problems in Difficult Places

Through analysis, action and evaluation, USIP trains peacebuilders in the U.S. and around the world.

Read how we work to:

• Save lives
• Increase the government's ability to deal with conflicts
• Reduce government costs
• Enhance national security

Working in Conflict

USIP experts are on the ground, actively engaged in global conflict management.

Read about our work in:

• Afghanistan
• Iraq
• Libya
• Pakistan
• The Two Sudans

Budget Woes

Of course in this new period of budget austerity, the USIP is endangered.  As reported in Wikipedia, the case for the Institute was eloquently made by former U.S. Central Command Commander Anthony Zinni  who wrote an op-ed, published in The New York Times March 7, 2011, in support of USIP. "Congress would be hard-pressed to find an agency that does more with less. The institute’s entire budget would not pay for the Afghan war for three hours, is less than the cost of a fighter plane, and wouldn’t sustain even 40 American troops in Afghanistan for a year. Within the budget, peace-building is financed as part of national security programs, and is recognized as an important adjunct to conventional defense spending and diplomacy. The institute’s share of the proposed international affairs budget, $43 million, is minuscule: less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the State Department’s budget, and one-hundredth of 1 percent of the Pentagon’s."

Zinni wrote after the House of Representatives had voted in February 2011to zero out USIP's budget for  the fiscal year. Subsequently funds were restored, but at a total of $39.5, a 20 percent reduction from the fiscal year 2010 level of $49.2 million. (For more details see: http://www.usip.org/publications/statement-usip-budget.

Friends, the United States Institute of Peace should be receiving more funding, not less. As military budgets are finally beginning to be cut, we must invest in peaceful approaches to increasing our security.   The USIP is a brilliant initiative worthy of your full support as you lobby your congressional representatives regarding spending priorities.

How about McGovern for President?

He's not running, but Representative Jim McGovern from Massachusetts' Third Congressional District espouses many of the positions that I would like to see in a candidate.

Last night I heard McGovern as he accepted the Edward F. Snyder Award for National Legislative Leadership in Advancing Disarmament and Building Peace, given by Fiends Committee for National Legislation. The guy was great; grounded in common sense, humble and funny. More importantly, on issue after issue he recognized how the U.S. must reorient it's spending priorities to build social capital at home.

Check out the following link to see McGovern calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan: http://mcgovern.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=15&parentid=168§iontree=168,15&itemid=562

McGovern's full website is at: http://mcgovern.house.govhttp://mcgovern.house.gov

Go to FCNL to Send a Letter to Your Senators

Now is an ideal time to contact your senators about the need to cut the military budget.  By going to http://capwiz.com/fconl/issues/alert/?alertid=53945576  you can use the letter writing service of Friends Committee on National Legislation to quickly compose and send a letter advocating for the cuts recommended by the Sustainable Defense Task Force (click here) which I've been calling for in this blog for over a year now. 

Below is the basic text of the standard FCNL letter, but you also have the opportunity to provide your own text:

As Congress looks for ways to reduce the federal budget deficit, please support cutting Pentagon spending by $1 trillion over the next ten years, as was recommended by the Sustainable Defense Task Force. Please speak with your colleagues on the congressional "supercommittee" and urge them to recommend this cut in their proposal.

Pentagon spending has nearly doubled in the last ten years. While our states and cities are cutting back services, our country is continuing to pour money into war and military strategies that are not making us safer.

Please let me know if you will support cutting the Pentagon budget by $1 trillion over ten years in any legislation to address the budget deficit.

Please take immediate advantage of this opportunity.


-  Donn

The Council on Foriegn Relations is Coming Around, Too

     In the August 8, 2011 issue of Time,  Council on Foriegn Relations president Richard Hass penned an article entitled  Bringing Our Foreign Policy Home  arguing  for a  doctrine of restoration designed to limit wars of choice while strengthening the US economic, social and political fabric. (Time subscribers can access the article at: http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2084591-1,00.html  )
     The article clearly ties to the Council's  Renewing America project, which you can explore at http://www.cfr.org/projects/world/renewing-america/pr1527?co=C033402 ,  and the arguments sound strikingly similar to those offered in the Pentagon report, A National Strategic Narrative by Mr. Y, envisioning a new national security policy for the United States eclipsing the containment policy so religiously followed since the close of World War II. ( You can access the Pentagon report at my June 3rd Blog at : http://transformthemilitarybudget.blogspot.com/2011/06/voices-of-clarity-and-sanity-at.htmlhttp://transformthemilitarybudget.blogspot.com/2011/06/voices-of-clarity-    
     I'm  choosing to see some hope in the fact that the establishment is moving in the directions argued for here. For more on the Council on Foriegn Relations go to: http://www.cfr.org/about/

Richard N. Haass 
President, Council on Foreign Relations



The Case for Military Conversion

In a recent article published in Truthout,  Ellen Brown  strongly argues the case for conversion of military spending.  The heart of her argument is that military spending, our nation's deeply entrenched, primary jobs program, is woefully inefficient.  As she states:

A 2007 study by Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the University of Massachusetts found that government investment in education creates twice as many jobs as investment in the military. Spending on personal consumption, health care, education, mass transit and construction for home weatherization and infrastructure repair all were found to create more jobs per $1 billon in expenditures than military spending does.

You can access the complete text of Brown's article at:  http://www.truth-out.org/military-jobs-program-there-are-more-efficient-ways-stimulate-economy/1308752213

Voices of Clarity and Sanity at the Pentagon

     The following materials are from the April 26th edition of "On Point," WBUR'S and NPR's public affairs program hosted by Tom Ashbrook.  Please read carefully and then check out the links (that I've posted at the bottom of the page) to the show and to the document, A National Strategic Narrative, which envisions a new national security policy for the United States eclipsing the containment policy that the U.S. has so religiously followed since the close of World War II. 


     This is the most encouraging set of ideas that I can recall emerging from the U.S. military establishment.   

The Pentagon’s ‘Mr. Y’ And National Security

Two Special Assistants to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen say (unofficially) it’s time, strategically, to spend more on education and less on guns. We’ll hear them out.

A National Strategic Narrative

What if the United States has started a new century stuck in the last one, pouring resources into its military and short-changing what should be the real heart of its strength – that is, strength at home?
A strong economy.  A strong society.  The point is raised and made powerfully in a new essay from – of all places – the heart of the Pentagon.
Two top U.S. military strategic thinkers under the pen name “Mr. Y” are pushing hard for a new American vision.  Less bristling with guns.  More spending on education.  For real prosperity and security.
This hour: a Pentagon call for change at home.

- Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Captain Wayne Porter, US Navy, and Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby, US Marine Corps, both Special Assistants to the Chairman for Strategy to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen.
Writing under the shared pseudonym “Mr. Y.” they have published a paper called “A National Strategic Narrative” released by theWoodrow Wilson Center.  Also described as ‘the Y article,’ it was decribed recently in Foreign Policy.com.

Link to the show:

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/04/26/pentagon-security

Link to the Report:

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/A%20National%20Strategic%20Narrative.pdf

Grossly Inadequate Military Cuts in Obama's and Ryan's Plans - Friendly Fascism Revisited

             Representative Ryan

                     President Obama    
    
(Note:  Words in violet or blue, depending on your computer, are hyperlinks to references and sources of additional information.)

According to the  April 13, 2011  New York Times, the cuts in military spending proposed by both President Obama's budget plan and  Paul Ryan's Republican budget plan add up to approximately 400 billion dollars over 12 years.  Compare this amount with the nearly one trillion dollars in cuts over 10 years proposed in 2010 by the bipartisan Sustainable Defense Task Force and you will see just how insufficient these proposals are.

I often hear people say, "at least they are finally looking at some military reductions."  And these people are correct, but the emphasis here should be placed on least.  Instead, we should be making vastly greater cuts in military spending,  rather than sacrificing vital social programs. Furthermore,  as Bertram Gross argued in 1980, the heavy defense expenditure resulting from ongoing limited war since the end of World War II has become "sort of a buffer or balance wheel in the economy"  providing additional protection against depression. (Friendly Fascism, p.154)  Put another way, the military has become our permanent, inefficient, jobs program.  As I have argued  many times in this blog, the United States must prudently, but quickly,  transition a much greater portion of the military budget into investments in sustainable technologies in order to help wean ourselves  from fossil fuel dependence and  reduce the risk of future wars.

Since the crash of 2008, we have been experiencing even  more of the same economic policy that Gross described three decades ago:
To cure stagnation or recession, there are two patent medicines.  The first is more Big Welfare for Big Business - through more reductions in capital gains taxes, lower taxes on corporations and the rich, more tax shelters, and, locally, more tax abatement for luxury housing and office buildings.  These generous welfare payments are justified in the name of growthmanship and productivity.  Little attention is given to the fact that the major growth sought  is in profitability, an objective mentioned only by a few ultra-Right conservatives who still believe in straight talk.  Less attention is given to the fact that the productivity sought is defined essentially as resulting from investment in capital-intensive machinery and technology that displace labor and require more fossil fuels.  The second patent medicine, justified in terms of national emergencies wtih only sotto voce reference to its implications for maintaining employment, is more spending on death machines and war forces.  This, in turn, spurs the growth in the federal deficit.  (Friendly Fascism, p. 213)


Now that the federal deficit is dangerously high, there is a mad rush to cut it back.  In doing so,  the United States needs to judiciously back away from the knee-jerk corporate welfare and on-demand feeding of the national security state that has characterized the nation since the early days of the Cold War.  We need to be creating jobs that will move the country, and the rest of the world, towards independence from fossil fuels.  And we don't need to be doing this at the expense of lower income individuals who are already struggling to get by.  The Sustainable Defense Task Force  has shown the way towards far more dramatic  defense spending cuts. Any effective budget plan needs to go down this path.

"Waiting for Superman" Dodges an Obvious Source of Funding

This past week, I finally got around to viewing Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim's searing documentary on the shortcomings of urban education in the United States. Like so many stylish, well-intentioned efforts tackling the standardized test performance gap between predominantly white, suburban students and inner city, students of color; Waiting for Superman is long on critical description and short on answers.

Of course,  an elephant in the room that  Guggenheim never addresses is how our bloated military budget sucks money away from our urban schools. For example, though Guggenheim briefly alludes to the benefits of tutors working with failing students, he never wrestles with how we might provide such tutors to all underperforming students.

Do we really have to spend as much as we are spending on Cruise Missiles? (Anywhere from $600,000 to $1,500,000, depending whose cost quote you believe.)  And how about all of those other weapons systems? Surely savings can be found in our defense budget, which grossly outpaces those of all the other nations in the world. Through prudent defense cuts we can finance an army of retirees to serve as excellent tutors for our students who are performing below standards.

Have You Heard About the 1.2 Trillion Dollar National Security Budget?

My son, Phil, sent me this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon the other day.

The kid has a point; especially when - against the backdrop of the nation-wide budget and deficit  haggling - you read Chris Hellman's TomDispatch.com article  ( http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175361/  ) projecting U.S. national security spending for this coming year.  Hellman has been tracking military allocations for decades, as a Congressional aide and as a military analyst.  (He is currently Communications Liaison for the National Priorities Project.) When he systematically lays out the real defense amount for 2011,  revealing that it is in the 1.2 trillion dollar range, you can trust his figures.

       1.2 trillion dollars is over one third of the total federal budget, and breaks down to  roughly $3,800 for every man, woman and child in the United States.  For my family of five, that means $19,000 in tax dollars.

       Marshall McLuhan said something to the effect that we go hurtling into the future, while looking through a rearview mirror. I would add that while doing so,  we in the U.S. keep spending like addicts  on  military budgets no longer (and perhaps never) rational.

       We have to back away from this, my friends. We all have to begin insisting that our $3,800  be invested more wisely.

      













 

Carve Out Some of the Defense Budget for the Creator of the Super Soaker

Lonnie Johnson (pictured below) is an American inventor in the Edison mold with approximately 100 patents to his name.  He's the man who invented the Super Soaker squirt gun,  and now he's come up with the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter, or JTEC (pronounced “jay-tek”) which may be able to turn solar heat into electricity, with twice the efficiency of a photovoltaic cell, by using temperature difference generated pressure gradients to force ions through a membrane.

This is the sort of technology that the United States needs to  invest in BIG TIME.  We can do so by cutting the excessive bloat out of the defense budget, but we have to develop the political will to do so. (Have you noticed how the current deficit reduction discussions so deftly avoid military cuts?)

To read more about Lonnie Johnson and the JTEC, click on the following link, which will take you to Logan Ward's November 2010 article in The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/shooting-for-the-sun/8268/

Shooting for the Sun

From his childhood in segregated Mobile, Alabama, to his run-ins with a nay-saying scientific establishment, the engineer Lonnie Johnson has never paid much heed to those who told him what he could and couldn’t accomplish. Best known for creating the state-of-the-art Super Soaker squirt gun, Johnson believes he now holds the key to affordable solar power.

By LOGAN WARD

IMAGE CREDIT: BEN BAKER/REDUX

Go to the Friends Committee on National Legislation Link Now to Urge Defense Cuts

We seek a world free of war and the threat of war

We seek a society with equity and justice for all

We seek a community where every person's potential may be fulfilled

We seek an earth restored.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation maintains a vigilant  watch of  Congressional activities and facilitates timely contact with legislators via email links.  By clicking on the link below, you can send a message to your representative demanding cuts in defense spending as part of the overall deficit reduction effort. It is important that you act now  in conjunction with defense cut resolution amendments being offered during the budget debates.


http://www.capwiz.com/fconl/issues/alert/?alertid=27099501&type=TA

Do We Have Any Hope of Shrinking the National Security State?

     I must confess that, at times, the goal of shrinking the U.S. national security state from its  current behemoth size to something more modest and reasonable seems like a hopelessly, quixotic pipe dream.  After all, the corporate and military interests dedicated to maintaining the status quo are enormously powerful, and they are ruthless in their commitment to self preservation.  Plus, when the nation remains, in one way or another,  perpetually at  war; it's seems impossible to obtain the broad-based  political support necessary to make dramatic cuts in the defense budget.

     Yet,  I remain convinced that substantial military spending decreases will occur in the near future for the simple reason that current expenditure levels are not sustainable.   The national deficit is just too large. Also, much of the U.S. perceived need to project military power around the globe is based on the economy's oil dependence.  Since it's now painfully apparent that we can't remain addicted to fossil fuels,  the U.S. will steadily  increase investing in alternative energy sources.   Then, as oil dependency decreases, the need for a world-wide military presence to maintain control of supply lines will diminish.

      The cycle away from our current high tide of militarism has already begun. It will play itself out over time.  However,  we can't become complacent.  Much hard work remains to rally the support to bring about desperately needed changes, sooner rather than later.

     Saddle up, Amigos.

Fifty Years After Ike's Farewell Address, The Military Industrial Complex Permeates Our Lives. We Must Reign It In.

         

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1/17/60             
                                                                                                            

January 18, 2011

     Yesterday was not only Martin Luther King Day, it was also the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's farewell address in which he warned against the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex.  Plaudits for Ike seemed to be breaking out everywhere I turned.

     NPR's Morning Edition and On Point  ran  stories on him ( You can access the first here  and the second here. The complete text of the speech is available here.)

     Quaker activist and commentator Chuck Fager sent around favorable comments about Eisenhower avoiding nuclear war during the height of Cold War tension.

     Andrew Bacevich's latest article in The Atlantic, The Tyrany of Defense Inc., (click here) extolled Ike's foresight and lambasted our costly national security state.

     And in my American Studies class, I was segueing into my annual pitch regarding Ike's prescient warning.

     Fifty years following the speech, with staggering, wasteful military expenditures dwarfing those of the world's other nations  (click here for international comparisons ), we have neither peace nor prosperity. Nor do we seem to have the critical mass of "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" that Eisenhower hoped would "compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."   


However, we really have no choice but to press the case against maintaining these ridiculous levels of military spending. By March 4, Congress needs to finalize the US budget for 2011. The current military authorization bill calls for $725,000,000,000 in new spending.  (Note: this does not include the continuing costs, such as veterans' medical care,  associated with prior wars.)  Please call or write your representative and senator  and ask for reductions in defense expenditures such as those described in the recent spate of proposals summarized by Laicie Olson of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (available here.)  Billions need to be cut from military spending and reinvested into productive new technologies and vitally needed social programs.


                                                * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  

For further insights from Eisenhower, consider the quotation below from a 1953 speech.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?" 

      –Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953/ (From: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001660)

Gen. Eisenhower speaks with soldiers of the 101st Airborne on the eve of D-Day.  If anyone knew the costs of war, it was Ike.