Tag: military spending

Peacemakers, Warmongers and Fence Sitters: Who Represents You?

Posted on by kathiemm


 Yet as early voting gets under way across the country, Congressional campaigns have focused mainly on domestic issues and personality politics, with almost nothing to say about the war in Yemen or other critical questions of war, peace and record military spending. (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

 (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

By Nicolas J. S. Davies, Medea Benjamin

 Originally published on Tuesday, October 23, 2018, by Common Dreams

As a foreign policy crisis explodes over the apparent Saudi assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, the failure of the U.S. Congress to assert its constitutional war powers over three years of illegal U.S. military action in the war on Yemen and booming U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners is finally coming home to roost.
The UN already reported two years ago that a child was dying every 10 minutes in Yemen, wracked by the war and its consequences, including malnutrition, diphtheria, cholera and other preventable diseases.  Data already showed that more than a third of Saudi-led airstrikes were hitting schools, hospitals, markets, mosques and other civilian sites. But none of the dire warnings by UN agencies and NGOs could trigger the constitutionally required debate and decisive action by the U.S. Congress.  Even now the Trump administration is trying desperately to salvage its blood-soaked arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Yet as early voting gets under way across the country, Congressional campaigns have focused mainly on domestic issues and personality politics, with almost nothing to say about the war in Yemen or other critical questions of war, peace and record military spending.

The elephant in the room that none of them want to discuss is that Congress keeps handing more than 60% of discretionary federal funds over to a military industrial complex whose recent wars have only succeeded in plunging half a dozen countries into intractable violence and chaos, leaving vital domestic priorities permanently underfunded.

To fill this dangerous vacuum and help voters make critical decisions at the voting booth, the CODEPINK 2018 Peace Voter’s Guide and Divestment Record has gathered data on arms industry campaign contributions from Open Secrets and the peace voting records of every Member of Congress from Peace Action, and published them all in one place for easy reference.

We invite voters to check out the Peace Voter’s Guide to see where your Senators and Representatives stand on critical issues of war and peace.  How much money have your representatives collected from the arms industry in this election cycle? How have they voted on critical bills and amendments for war, peace, weapons and military spending during their time in Congress?

You can use the Guide to compare your representatives with their colleagues. You can check out the differences between Democrats and Republicans, and see who are the real hawks and doves in each party.

Figures show that arms companies, including their PACS, have contributed about equally to Democrats and Republicans in the Senate in this election cycle, giving an average of over $180,000 to each Senator. In the House, however, they have given more to Republicans (an average of $46,000 each) than to Democrats ($31,000 each).

The Senators who are most indebted to the arms industry tend to be high-ranking members of committees key to Pentagon funding. In 2017-18, the senator receiving the most weapons industry contributions, $969,550, was Richard Shelby (R-AL). Shelby chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee, the committee that allocates funding for all federal agencies.

The number one recipient on the Democratic side, with $675,8287 in contributions, is Jack Reed (D-RI), ranking member at the Armed Services Committee. Other major recipients, all on key committees, are Tim Kaine (D-VA) with $607,850; Dick Durbin (D-IL) with $550,161; James Inhofe (R-OK) with $478,249; Lindsey Graham (R-SC) with $458,893; Mark Warner (D-VA) with $399,928; and Bill Nelson (D-FL) with $391,800.  The arms industry’s most favored House Reps are Armed Services Chair Mac Thornberry (R-TX-13), with $402,250; Appropriations Committee member Kay Granger (R-TX-12) with $368,410 and another Appropriations member Peter Visclosky (D-IN-1) with $328,583.

When it comes to critical votes on war, peace and militarism, the differences between Democrats and Republicans are more stark. In lifetime voting records tabulated by Peace Action, the average House Democrat has a 72% peace voting record, while the average House Republican scores only 10%. In the Senate, the difference is 69% to 14%.

There are noteworthy outliers, like Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI-3) with an 82% peace voting record and Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA-31) at only 18%. In the Senate, Republican Rand Paul (KY) has a better voting record (62%) than Democrat Joe Donnelly of Indiana (16%), although even Rand Paul would be below-average if he was a Democrat.

And then there are real champions for peace and disarmament in Congress: 16 Democrats and 10 Republicans in the House who have run this year’s campaigns with no arms industry cash at all; and progressive leaders who stand up to vote for peace at almost every chance they get, like Barbara Lee (CA-13), with a 99% lifetime peace voting record, Katherine Clark (MA-5) at 98%, Jared Huffman (CA-2), Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11) and Earl Blumenauer (OR-3) at 96%, and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin with the highest score in the Senate at 94%.

At the other end of the scale, there are 22 Members of Congress (all Republicans) with a 0% peace voting record, meaning that they have never once voted as requested by members of Peace Action, CODEPINK and our partners in the U.S. peace community. They are Senator Tom Cotton (AR) and Representatives McSally (AZ-2), Walters (CA-45), Curbelo (FL-26), Carter (GA-1), Allen (GA-12), Bost (IL-12), LaHood (IL-18), Brooks (IN-5), Poliquin (ME-2), Bishop (MI-8), Emmer (MN-6), Stefanik (NY-21), Katko (NY-24), Rouzer (NC-7), Russell (OK-5), Costello (PA-6), Ratcliffe (TX-4), Hurd (TX-23), Brat (VA-7), Comstock (VA-10) and Newhouse (WA-4).

We invite you to explore the CODEPINK 2018 Peace Voter’s Guide and Divestment Record before you vote. We hope it will help you to find incumbents or challengers where you live whose campaigns are not tainted by big contributions from the arms industry, and whom you can count on to reflect your values by casting decisive votes for peace, diplomacy and disarmament in the coming years.  Please vote wisely. Millions of lives depend on it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Another Way to Struggle against Militarism: War Tax Resistance

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Erica Weiland

[note from KMM: One of the objectives of the Engaging Peace blog is to encourage activism in support of peace and in opposition to war. We strive to educate our readers about different approaches to activism. Today we offer a timely perspective from Erica Weiland, a guest author representing the National War Tax Coordinating Committee.]

taxprotesters
Tax Protesters
Photo by Ed Hedemann, provided by the author.

Year after year, the US government spends money disproportionately for war. Different organizations calculate military expenditure differently, but whether the figure is 27%, 40%, 45%, or 57%, a large chunk of your income tax dollars supports payments for current and past wars and treatment for veterans.

If you’ve ever marched in the street, written letters to Congress, organized civil disobedience actions, prayed for peace, donated to an anti-war organization, or complained about this country’s spending, you know something about putting your time, effort, and money into a movement struggling against war. Another tactic some Americans (and people elsewhere) have adopted is to withdraw their financial support from the government that perpetrates wars.

Methods of war tax resistance can be legal or illegal, on a wide spectrum of risk, with a variety of potential consequences.

Resisters can, for example:

*legally refuse to pay taxes by lowering their taxable income,

*commit an act of civil disobedience by refusing to pay some or all of the taxes owed to the IRS,

*refuse to pay the federal excise tax on local telephone service, which is historically a war tax.

People all over the United States, earning different incomes and in different family and life situations, practice war tax resistance.

Their motivations vary. Some resist

*for reasons of conscience,

*in hopes of growing a movement of war tax resisters to reduce or stop war spending,

*to create a legal precedent for “peace taxes” that can’t be spent for war.

The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is the only national organization devoted to supporting and informing current and potential war tax resisters, helping people get all the information they need to make decisions about resisting war taxes. If you are tired of supporting the war machine with your tax dollars, check them out.

Erica Weiland is the social media consultant for the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

 

$300 billion in social costs (Cost of war, Part 4)

Posted on by kathiemm

[The final post in the series by guest author Neta Crawford]

Now we come to the fourth reason our estimates for the dollar costs of these wars have been too low. Federal spending is not the entire cost of the Iraq war. There are several other huge categories of economic costs.

Targeting military spending
Targeting military spending; photo by Joe Mabel. Used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. From Wikimedia Commons.

There will be at least $300 billion in social costs of these wars, much of it borne by the close family members of injured veterans.

There are the macro-economic effects of borrowing for war, namely increased interest. Further, there is the opportunity cost of military spending.

The two largest opportunity costs are the consequences of the deferred maintenance of U.S. infrastructure and the potential jobs created by other forms of federal spending.

We are constantly told that military spending creates jobs. Indeed, every $1 billion in military spending creates about 11,200 jobs. If there were tax cuts instead and people spent that money themselves, more than 15,000 jobs could be created.

Indeed, military spending produces fewer jobs compared with spending on housing or non-residential construction, health care, or education.

Americans have been told at least three times — in May 2003 when the mission was “accomplished”; in September 2010 when the “combat” phase was over, and in December 2011 — that the Iraq war was won and over. All that was left was promoting democratization and stability.

But is the war really over for either Iraqis or Americans? Iraq remains extremely violent. Thousands of U.S. State Department and private contractors will remain in Iraq for the indefinite future. As Catherine Lutz wrote recently in Foreign Policy, “5,500 security personnel join 4,500 ‘general life support’ contractors who will be working to provide food, health care, and aviation services to those employed in Iraq, and approximately 6,000 US federal employees from State and other agencies.”

The dollar costs of war, as Eisenhower said more than a half-century ago, means dreams deferred or lost for millions. A few years before that, George Orwell’s main character in 1984, Winston Smith, wrote, “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

The next step in a full picture of the Iraq war’s toll would be to account for the death, displacement, and economic devastation the war has caused in Iraq and the region.

Neta C. Crawford is a Professor of Political Science at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War study (www.costsofwar.org).