Defending Against Defense Lobbyists
Diane Randall didn’t much mind the ceaseless drizzle that
enveloped Port Townsend on the day she was in town last week, considering that
if she’d been at home in Washington D.C. that Monday, she would have been near
the center of what meteorologists had already dubbed the worst storm in history—Superstorm
Sandy, which within a day would leave dozens dead and an estimated toll in
property and infrastructure damage that mounted into the billions of dollars.
The storm had direct relevance to Randall’s visit here,
because she had come to talk about national security, and how we can best use
our public resources to achieve it.
Hurricane Sandy was exposing a huge hole in a defense plan that focuses
on mostly theoretical threats of foreign aggression, but by-and-large fails to
take into account the very real and immediate threats from Mother Nature as the
result of climate change—a failure she finds to be disconcertingly absent from
campaign discourse this electoral season on the part of either party.
Randall is the executive secretary of the Friends Committee
on National Legislation, or FCNL, the D.C.-based Quaker lobbying organization
perhaps best known for the “War is Not the Answer” bumper stickers and lawn
signs that can be seen all around Jefferson County.
She was in town seeking support for an FCNL campaign to trim
at least $1 trillion over the next decade from projected military spending,
declaring that the time has come for the Pentagon to take its fair part in
reducing the deficit, and citing an urgent need to refocus public resources.
To put that proposed cut into perspective: Draconian though
it may sound, it would only reduce military spending to 2007 levels by the year
2023.
“If war is not the answer, the answer is: let’s peacefully
prevent war before it happens,” she told the full-house audience who had come
to hear her talk titled “How we can Protect the Federal Budget from Defense
Lobbyists” at the Community Center that night.
Pointing out that diplomacy is far less expensive than war, Randall
criticized a budget that dedicates 39 cents of every tax dollar on the
military, while spending only about two cents on what the FCNL terms the
“peaceful prevention of deadly conflict.”
“Relative to what the military gets—the Pentagon gets—to
what’s spent on diplomacy and development, which really are the effective tools
for peace, we’re way out of whack,” she observed.
Randall talked of the dangers to funding for vital social
service programs presented by the so-called “fiscal cliff” that will be set in
motion when last year’s Budget Control Act kicks in on January 2, especially in
the face of an intensive campaign on the part of defense industry lobbyists to exempt
defense contractors from their part of the automatic budget cuts.
“Now is the time for legislators to hear from you,” she told
her audience. “They’re certainly hearing
from the defense lobbyists.”
Citing studies showing that legislators are far more responsive
to personal visits or other communications from their own constituents than
from any paid lobbyist, Randall pressed her audience to educate themselves on
the issues by visiting the fcnl.org website and then to develop a respectful
ongoing relationship with their representatives in Congress, and to regularly
let them know what they think.
“If everyone in this
room would talk to their elected officials, that would be a lot of people,” she
said. “I think you could count on the fingers of two hands the number of people
who have gone in to talk with their representatives about reducing defense
spending.”
###
No comments:
Post a Comment