Dear Friends of Peace and Justice,
United for Peace and Justice – Bay Area has endorsed the New Priorities Campaign, part of the national New Priorities Network. Please take a few minutes to voice your opinion about the budget choices that have been offered to Congress: the GOP Ryan budget, the Obama budget, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s People’s budget.
CAST YOUR VOTE HERE! Does the country need the GOP/Ryan budget, President Obama’s budget or Congressional Progressive Caucus People’s budget? Take the New Priorities Network budget poll. As the President and Congress work on the FY2012 budget, they need to hear from the grassroots about what the federal government needs to do to rebuild the economy.
Please share the poll with community groups, family, coworkers and friends. The greater the numbers, the bigger the impact. Share the poll on community listservs, post it to Facebook and send it out on Twitter. Set up tables at street fairs and conferences; use your laptop, tablet or Smartphone to collect votes.
The New Priorities Campaign is a grassroots initiative to build a broad movement demanding that Congress adopt a budget that reprioritizes our nation’s spending to meet the needs of the people by stopping the wars and cutting the military budget. Click here to read and sign onto the Declaration of Principals.
Budget Background
Right now the President and Congressional leaders are trying to strike a bargain on the Fiscal Year 2012 budget. They have until July 22 to close the deal before the debt ceiling is reached on August 2.
As reported in The Hill: “During discussions over raising the debt ceiling, the White House has floated $300 billion in security spending cuts on top of $1 trillion in domestic cuts over a decade.” This means that “security” cuts are only 23% of the discretionary cuts that Obama is offering – less than one in four of the discretionary dollars on the table. “Security” makes up nearly six in ten dollars of discretionary spending. The President’s budget priorities are upside down!
There are better choices. InApril, members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted on two different blueprints for the FY 2012 federal budget – one introduced by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and the other by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). One (Ryan) was approved, the other (CPC) was rejected. Together they represent opposite ends of the continuum of budget options currently under debate in Washington.
Last month, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the national association of cities with populations over 30,000, adopted two groundbreaking resolutions calling on Congress to slash spending on wars and nuclear weapons, and to redirect those funds to meet urgent domestic needs.
America’s Mayors have voted. Now it’s your turn to help build a consensus for how we can feed the hungry and employ the jobless by ending wars and militarism and redefining security in human and ecologically sustainable terms.
Want to do more? Contact progressive members of congress (e.g., CPC members) and ask them to make public statements or hold press conferences, minimally doubling, to at least $600B, cuts in the “defense” budget as part of any deficit deal.
Thanks for casting your vote, and please get active with United for Peace and Justice – Bay Area and the New Priorities Campaign.
