Reducing Pentagon Budget

Kevin Martin, Peace Action  12-20-11 to jbennet

peaceact@mail.democracyinaction.org

Dear James,

First, let me thank you for your actions and financial support over the past year. With your help, the peace movement succeeded at last in bringing our troops home from Iraq, and opposition to the terrible war in Afghanistan is growing stronger. And, with your support, Peace Action launched Move the Money, our campaign to build common cause with labor and other economic justice groups to reorder federal spending priorities, putting our tax dollars to work for jobs, not war.

Together, we’ve made sure our demands to end runaway military spending can no longer be brushed aside by Tea Party compliant Hawks simply uttering the words ‘threat to national security.”  While not nearly sufficient, Congress did cut military spending this year. We must now set our sights on making even more substantial progress in the year ahead.

I hope you will join me in achieving our goals for 2012 with a year end gift to Peace Action or a tax-deductible gift to Peace Action Education Fund.

The government we elect next November will likely set the economic and political agenda for decades to come.  Make no mistake, sooner or later they will make a decision on how to deal with the economy.  Will they decide to end the war in Afghanistan, cut runaway military spending, and make sure the super-rich pay their fair share, or will they cut Social Security and Medicare and balance the budget on the backs of working people?  The gridlock and inaction will not last forever.

Our opponents are relentless and well funded. They’ve been trying for decades to unravel the social safety net and roll back the regulations that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat.  This challenge, as daunting as it is, must be met with sufficient grassroots pressure to defeat this agenda and put our country on a path to a peaceful and just future.

Peace Action’s campaign to Move the Money will frame our issues on our terms, ensuring our elected representatives and candidates for office focus on the human and economic costs of the war and the waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon budget.  Our Peace Voter activists are already at work in key states like New Hampshire and North Carolina, bird-dogging candidates and posing challenging questions about the corrupting influence of organized money in politics, an endless war and the $662 billion Pentagon budget Congress just approved.

This is a fight we cannot afford to lose.

You can support Peace Action’s work for SANE economic policies using our secure online giving portal.

Thank you again for your attention and work on these important issues and for your kind consideration of this request.

Humbly for Peace,

Kevin Martin

Executive Director   Peace Action

https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/161/p/salsa/donation/common/public/?donate_page_KEY=8137