By Eric Stoner - 08/03/2020 – ( The Progressive) -
To reduce our reliance on policing and prisons, racial justice leaders are urging that resources devoted to law enforcement be used instead to address the root causes of violence, such as the lack of affordable housing, health care, education and jobs.
[...] Making the necessary investments in our basic social safety net, however, will require redirecting far more than the $115 billion spent annually on policing.
The Pentagon, which was granted a whopping $740.5 billion by the Senate on July 23, should be next on the chopping block.
At the same time, the Senate rejected an amendment put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, to cut 10% of the military’s budget, despite being supported by a majority of American voters.
This would have been a small but needed step in the right direction. However, it would not even have rolled back the increase in military spending since President Donald Trump took office.
In the House, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-California, introduced a far more ambitious nonbinding resolution, which calls for $350 billion in cuts to the Pentagon. Similarly, the Breathe Act — championed by Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib, D-Michigan — recommends “dramatically” reducing the Department of Defense’s budget.
While many would dismiss the idea of defunding the armed forces as beyond the pale, some perspective is needed. The Pentagon’s bloated budget could, in fact, be lopped in half, and the United States would still have the largest military in the world, by far.
These legislative proposals are following the lead of the Poor People’s Campaign, which has identified $350 billion in cuts to the Pentagon, and the Movement for Black Lives, which for years has called for an even larger, 50% reduction in military spending.
Organizers have the Pentagon in their sights for good reason. Though police officers kill roughly 1,000 people each year, the death toll of the so-called War on Terror is exponentially higher.
[...] The Pentagon also plays a critical role in fueling the militarization of police. Thanks to the Defense Department’s 1033 program, which the Senate failed to curb this week, more than $7 billion of military-grade equipment has been funneled from battlefields abroad to local police departments in recent decades. From drones and mine-resistant armored vehicles to flash-bang grenades and tear gas, these weapons of war are now being turned on nonviolent protesters.
Defunding the Pentagon would also provide a much-needed boost to our economy, which is reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic.
[links in original omitted] Tons of fat to be trimmed. Policy thought here at Crabgrass is to start by halving, at least, the enrollments of the military academies. Getting fewer invested in sucking federal money away from better aims being the goal, trimming the academies makes sense.
With the bulk of military spending aside
from payroll and unneeded bases around the world and around the nation -
everyone in Congress aware of what's in district that way - closing
bases is a great idea. Why not. Don't just change names away from
Confederate generals, shutter them. But still private sector profiteers
of death are the big ticket spending hole.
War mongering does naught to improve quality of life stateside. It just consumes. It escalates the deficit, and who'd want that? Never mind the split between rhetoric and actuality, those wanting war mongering have vested interests in "War Is a Racket" dimensions Smedley Butler wrote of after the first World War.
So, stop militarization of police forces, spend on US to make citizen live both better and more secure, and set the war mongers to more fertile daily jobs and aims, swords to plowshares, etc.
That the oligarchs and plutocrat-owners of MSM want to keep citizens restless and insecure, we know that, but we outnumber them. If organized to where ballots, fairly counted, could be invested in true progressive candidates who'd deliver, things would be better. Better, that is, for US. For the inner party leech element, perhaps things reformed would erode something they treasure - power and control shared with the oligarchs, private sector and among them - who own the lobbyists and politicians who serve the oligarchs. Can you say "Mitch McConnell?" Can you say "Chuck Schumer?" (Not Mitchell nor Charles - they personalize their names for US, while bending US over.)
Reform has to start somewhere and if it is to be bottom up, it starts local - downfunding policing perhaps to start - and then taking away the perks the ruling class has, by its class warfare imposed upon US with MSM deceits and crooked politicians whose love of lobbyists exceeds love of liberty or duty; that is the big picture goal.
Not in my lifetime, not at my age, but the young are the hope. The Boomers had their chance but got managed into niches opposed to one another by ruler divide and conquer simplicities. And wow, today we hear a lot of "identity politics" which is today's buzzword. A euphemism for divide and conquer. When you have one party's sorry offering saying if you favor Trump over me you ain't black, black people - at least on the Internet - see that as manipulative and condescending. Which it is, as well is blind dumbness auguring big time bad times; with at the margin, yeah a bit better than Trump, but unsavory and unpromising and nasty.
Beside that, I believe Tara Reade. Clyburn and associates have done us in. Bloomberg's half a billion spending; and some deny there is a class war against the 99% - against US? Such a denial, or indifference to it, is killing us prematurely by overwork and stress, and by cheap stupid handling of a pandemic by the sad idiot who has to be moved out.
These are our best and brightest?
FURTHER: Shooting down Boomer hope. It was done. It was policy. No murderer was jailed. CHOP shootings, overnight, at Seattle's "zone" shut down the more localized event enthusiasm. No murderer jailed. Murderers should be jailed.