Brave New Foundation Launches “War Costs” Campaign!

Brave New Foundation, of Rethink Afghanistan, is launching a new campaign to help expose the costs of war and get Congress to cut defense spending. The new website, War Costs, is where you can sign the letter, follow on Facebook and Twitter, and get involved.

Robert Greenwald:

The deal worked out to allow a rise in the debt ceiling gives us our first real chance in more than a decade to make significant cuts to our country’s out-of-control war budget, but we are going to have to fight for them…That’s why Brave New Foundation is moving quickly to launch a new campaign, War Costs, to counter their profit-protection strategy, and we need you with us.

…These guys want you to think that $1 trillion saved over 10 years (or a $100 billion per year cut every year for a decade) would be a catastrophic cut to the national defense budget. The truth, however, is that the war budget in the U.S. has grown so grotesquely large that the cut should actually be much larger. Just to provide some context:

• Defense spending has doubled over the last ten years, and this cut does not remotely approach reversing this massive growth. In fact, even the above-discussed Michael S. Lewis says the cuts would equal only about a 7 percent reduction.
• The U.S. spends 6 times more than the next biggest spender on its military, China.
• The cuts contemplated by the debt deal are less than what we’re currently spending per year just on one of the unpopular wars in which the U.S. is engaged, the Afghanistan War.

…Brave New Foundation’s new War Costs campaign is circulating a petition to House Speaker Boehner, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, urging them to force members of this committee to:

• Stop taking war industry contributions, and
• Publicly disclose all meetings between contractors and committee members.

Please sign the petition, and we’ll deliver your message to House and Senate leadership this week. We also invite you to sign up to get email updates about future activism with the War Costs campaign, which in the coming weeks will take aim at the larger problem of massive war spending, the damage it does to our economy and the corruption it creates in U.S. politics.