Portside

We are launching this campaign on April 4th, 50 years after Martin Luther King's profound speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence speech," a speech that recognized the urgent need to end militarism and war. King called for a revolution of values, affirming that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

We are launching this campaign on April 4th, 50 years after Martin Luther King’s profound speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence speech,” a speech that recognized the urgent need to end militarism and war. King called for a revolution of values, affirming that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

The Trump administration’s budget does exactly that. It takes money from urgent social needs to feed the already-bloated Pentagon budget. It proposes to compensate for the additional $54 billion by slashing the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency (even threatening to shut down its already under-funded environmental justice office), the Department of Health and Human Services (slashing family planning and anti-violence-against-women programs), the State Department (thus privileging war over diplomacy), and foreign aid funds (so that the wealthiest country in human history turns its back on the world’s most desperate).

Full statement and partial list of signatories:

“Our environmental and human needs are desperate and urgent. We need to transform our economy, our politics, our policies and our priorities to reflect that reality. That means reversing the flow of our tax dollars, away from war and militarism, and towards funding human and environmental needs, and demanding support for that reversal from all our political leaders at the local, state and national levels.

We and the movements we are part of face multiple crises.  Military and climate wars are destroying lives and environments, threatening the planet and creating enormous flows of desperate refugees. Violent racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia and other hatreds are rising, encouraged by the most powerful voices in Washington DC.

President Trump plans to strip $54 billion from human and environmental spending so as to increase already massive spending on the military. The plan raises Pentagon spending to well over 60 cents of every discretionary dollar in the U.S. budget — even as Trump himself admits that enormous military spending has left the Middle East “far worse than it was 16, 17 years ago.”  The wars have not made any of us safer.

Washington’s militarized foreign policy comes home as domestic law enforcement agencies acquire military equipment and training from the Pentagon and from military allies abroad. Impoverished communities of color see and face the power of this equipment regularly, in the on-going domestic wars on drugs and immigrants. This military-grade equipment is distributed and used by many of the same private companies that profit from mass incarceration and mass deportation.

Using just a fraction of the proposed military budget, the US could provide free, top-quality, culturally competent and equitable education from pre-school through college and ensure affordable comprehensive healthcare for all. We could provide wrap-around services for survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence; replace mass incarceration with mass employment, assure clean energy and water for all residents and link our cities by new fast trains. We could double non-military U.S. foreign aid, wipe out hunger worldwide. The list of possibilities is long.

Instead, the Trump administration plans to take much of their $54 billion gift for the Pentagon from the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency (even threatening to shut down its already under-funded environmental justice office), the Department of Health and Human Services (slashing family planning and anti-violence-against-women programs), from the State Department (thus privileging war over diplomacy), and foreign aid (so that the wealthiest country in human history turns its back on the world’s most desperate).

Among those most desperate are the 24 million refugees who have been forced out of their homes and countries, more than at any time since World War II.  Instead of cruel Muslim bans and cuts to the already meager number of refugees allowed into the U.S., we should be welcoming far more. Alleviating the refugee crisis also means working to end, rather than escalate, the wars that create refugees, and supporting human rights defenders in their home communities.  That means more diplomacy and foreign aid, not more military spending.

With its hundreds of billions of un-audited dollars, the military remains the greatest consumer of petroleum in the United States, and one of the world’s worst polluters. The US needs new green, sustainable jobs across our economy targeted to people facing the highest rates of unemployment and low wages. Military spending results in an economic drain.  Clean energy production creates 50% more jobs than the same investment in military spending.

The U.S. military also serves as a security force protecting the extraction and transport of fossil fuels domestically and from the Middle East and other parts of the world. U.S. military force thus enables the continued assault on the planet and some of its most impoverished inhabitants by ensuring the supply of cheap fossil fuels, all while subsidizing some of the largest corporations in the world.

A December 2014 Gallup poll showed people in 65 nations considered the United States far and away the largest threat to peace in the world.  If the United States was known for providing clean drinking water, schools, medicine, and solar panels to others, instead of attacking and invading other countries, we would be far more secure and face far less global hostility.

We can do this. Reverse the flow. No walls, No War, No Warming!”

Media Contacts:
Phyllis Bennis, pbennis@ips-dc.org, 202-309-1377
Domenica Ghanem, domenica@ips-dc.org, 202-787-5205

Available for interviews:

Phyllis Bennis, New Internationalism Director, Institute for Policy Studies, 202-787-5206 or cell 202-309-1377, pbennis@ips-dc.org
Basav Sen, Climate Policy Program Director, Institute for Policy Studies, 202-787-5215 or cell 202-997-0479, basav@ips-dc.org
Judith LeBlanc, Caddo Tribe, Native Organizers Alliance, 917-806-8775, judithleblanc1@gmail.com

Partial list of signatories*

Michelle Alexander – author of The New Jim Crow
Lindsey Allen – Rainforest Action Network
Olivia Alperstein – Progressive Congress
Medea Benjamin – CODEPINK
Phyllis Bennis – Institute for Policy Studies
Basav Sen – Institute for Policy Studies
John Cavanagh – Institute for Policy Studies
Regina Birchem – Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom
May Boeve – 350.org
Jaron Brown – Grassroots Global Justice Alliance
Peter Buffett – American musician, composer, author and philanthropist
Leslie Cagan    – Peoples Climate Movement NY
Daniel Carrillo –  Enlace
Reece Chenault – US Labor Against the War
StaceyAnn Chin – Poet
Jamie DeMarco – Friends Committee on National Legislation
Michael Eisenscher – US Labor Against the War
Zillah Eisenstein – International Women’s Strike/US
Eve Ensler – V-Day and One Billion Rising
Jodie Evans – CODEPINK
Laura Flanders – The Laura Flanders Show
Jane Fonda – actress & activist
Jeff Furman – Ben & Jerry’s
Dan Gilman –  Veterans For Peace
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. – Princeton University
Rafael Jesús González – poet Xochipilli, Latino Men’s Circle
Stephanie Guilloud – Project South
Saru Jayaraman- Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC-United)
Chuck Kaufman – Alliance for Global Justice
Naomi Klein – author, This Changes Everything
Lindsay Koshgarian – National Priorities Project
Judith LeBlanc – Native Organizers Alliance
Annie Leonard – Greenpeace
Mairead Maguire – Nobel Peace Laureate
Kevin Martin – Peace Action and the Peace Action Education Fund
Maggie Martin – Iraq Veterans Against the War
Michael T. McPhearson –  Veterans For Peace
Stephen Miles – Win Without War
Nabil Mohammad –  Arab-American Anti-Discrimination committee
Terry O’Neill – National Organization for Women
C. Dixon Osburn- Center for Justice & Accountability
Rabbi Brant Rosen – American Friends Service Committee
Lukas Ross – Friends of the Earth
Josh Ruebner – US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
Linda Sarsour – MPower
Mab Segrest – Southerners on New Ground
John Sellers – Other 98%
Adam Shah – Jobs With Justice
Thenmozhi Soundararajan – Equality Labs
Kathy Spillar – Feminist Majority
David Swanson – World Beyond War
Mike Tidwell – Chesapeake Climate Action Network
Opal Tometi – Black Alliance for Just Immigration & Co-Founder, Black Lives Matter Network
Rebecca Vilkomerson – Jewish Voice for Peace
Alice Walker – poet and writer
Vince Warren – Center for Constitutional Rights
Cindy Wiesner – Grassroots Global Justice Alliance
Robert Weissman –  Public Citizen
Kimberle Williams-Crenshaw- The African American Policy Forum
Winnie Wong – People for Bernie
Ash-Lee Woodard-Henderson – Highlander Research & Education Center
Ann Wright – Veterans for Peace
Murshed Zaheed – CREDO Mobile

*organizations for identification only