If you missed the speech (maybe watching the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show – what an adorable winner) or want to review it again, please see the transcript here.

Overall the agenda that the President laid out looks pretty bold and wonderful to us at WAND and here is a sampling of a few things we especially liked:

• We agree that looming automatic “sequester” cuts are bad and especially agree that “some in this Congress have proposed preventing only the defense cuts by making even bigger cuts to things like education and job training; Medicare and Social Security benefits.  That idea is even worse.”
• We really like the commitment to provide high-quality preschool for every child. Maybe we’ll send the President one of our “Children Ask the World of Us” posters. We liked many other new efforts supporting education and jobs and needed investments – including raising the minimum wage and increasing the number of high-tech investment hubs. Analysts have been wondering where the funds for these new investments will come from – especially since the President promised not to add to the deficit.  We’re a bit curious about this too but would like to recommend one good place to look for cost savings: the Pentagon.
• When it comes to Afghanistan, we are glad to hear the President’s intent to remove 34,000 troops during this year, but note that still leaves too many. Further, as the transition in Afghanistan moves forward, it is essential to plan how to help Afghanistan create a sustainable peace. One necessary ingredient is the leadership of Afghan women in this peace building effort.
• We were glad that the President highlighted (at least briefly) commitments to reduce nuclear weapons: “We will engage Russia to seek further reductions in our nuclear arsenals, and continue leading the global effort to secure nuclear materials that could fall into the wrong hands – because our ability to influence others depends on our willingness to lead.”  Indeed, and part of our leadership should be moving forward to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) enabling us to more effectively lead in detecting, deterring and confronting nuclear tests like those recently conducted in North Korea.
• It was great that the President noted the Senate’s recent passage of the Violence Against Women Act and called upon the House to do the same. We hope for swift reauthorization of VAWA this year.

The President ended by noting that as citizens, we all have obligations: “Well into our third century as a nation, it remains the task of us all, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the next great chapter in our American story.” As WAND women we are ready to take on the role of citizen authors again this year as we work for sound budget priorities for a safe, secure and thriving America.

Many of WAND/WiLL Women in Congress commented on the President’s State of the Union Speech, to see a sampling of these click here.

Published: August 30, 2012 by The Worcester Telegram & Gazette

Labor Day and school openings seem to go together. For me, it’s time for the social welfare policy course I teach at the Boston University School of Social Work each fall. Throughout the semester I will hear stories from students about their clients who desperately need jobs, housing, education, food, and health care.

Evidence the students present will show that the services and programs designed to help them climb out of poverty continue to dwindle. The narratives are heartbreaking, and often horrific. They are accounts of people who would do anything to improve their lives, make changes, and leave the poverty, hunger, homelessness, joblessness, and loneliness behind.

When, in 1894, Congress enacted legislation making Labor Day a national holiday, the intention was to celebrate the social and economic achievements of American workers and the contributions workers have made to the prosperity and well-being of our country. The hard truth is that our current national unemployment rate is 8.3 percent. Not all Americans who want to work are working and almost one in four American children is living below our national poverty line. Things clearly need to improve in this country for the unemployed and the working poor in order for all of us to truly be able to celebrate the intended meaning of Labor Day.

These sobering statistics can change if we reprioritize how we spend our federal dollars. Two minutes’ worth of federal spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would pay for two high school graduates to attend Boston University for four years each. Two minutes of war. Two undergraduate degrees.

The $16.6 billion in taxes from Massachusetts that went into the Department of Defense’s FY2012 budget could have funded 1.9 million Head Start slots in Massachusetts for a year. Currently, more than 20,000 children who should be enrolled in Head Start in Massachusetts, are not.

Taxpayers in Boston paid $1.3 billion toward the FY2012 Department of Defense budget. For the same amount of money, more than 16,000 Boston elementary school teachers could be hired full-time for one entire school year.

Some say cutting the Pentagon budget means military industrial complex jobs will be lost. However, a shift in dollars to create jobs in other employment sectors would both increase the number of jobs and employed Americans, as well as increase the value of those jobs to our country. This makes good political and economic sense.

The University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute studied how many jobs could be created with $1billion of federal spending; the reality is that investing our tax dollars in education, health care, mass transit, weatherization, or middle-class tax cuts, creates more jobs than Pentagon spending does.

We are spending more than $30 billion per year to maintain our oversized and outdated nuclear weapons arsenal. There are many expensive weapons that the Pentagon does not need or want, but Congress votes to keep the funds flowing anyway. There are ridiculous cost overruns and wasteful spending on military contractors. Procurement scandals are almost the rule rather than the exception.

This spring, Americans learned of a $17,000 oil pan made by a politically connected defense contractor. Defense lobbyists work for corporate self-interests that result in congressional dysfunction.

Congress needs to stop appropriating limited dollars as pork for well-heeled defense industry contractors.

With automatic “sequester” cuts (a plan to cut federal spending over the next decade) scheduled to go into effect in January 2013, it is time to critically examine our Pentagon budget. It makes up 56 percent of federal discretionary spending and has increased every year since 1998.

Some members of Congress want to exempt the Pentagon budget while domestic programs like public education, mass transit, medical research and clean energy are slashed even further. It is far more important to our security to ensure that our economy is prospering through job creation based on innovation and entrepreneurship, than it is to stockpile nuclear weapons and line the pockets of overpaid defense contractors.

This Labor Day, let’s celebrate our economic achievements as a nation, as we have many. Let’s also shift our priorities as a nation. Let’s move forward with a budget and spending plan that is driven by American values like hard work, equal opportunity, humanitarianism and democracy. Let’s get people trained and retrained, and employed and better employed. Let’s pay for programs and projects that help get people out of poverty and into jobs.

And let’s put an end to this outdated, excessive, militarized spending.

Sharon Zimmerman is the deputy director of Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND), an adjunct professor at the Boston University School of Social Work, and sits on the board of Greater Boston’s Association of Parents, Friends and Families of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).

In a call today, military vets, state leaders and budget experts outlined the possible impact of automatic budget cuts on Georgia’s economy and why military and civilian leaders believe U.S. could afford necessary reductions in Pentagon spending.

For Immediate Release:                                                                          Date: August 23, 2012

Contacts:Rachel Wisch, Public Information Officer
Women’s Action for New Directions & Women Legislators’ Lobby
Cell: 202-599-0746 Email: rwisch@wand.org

Sara DuBois, Communications Director
National Security Network
Cell: 202-289-7113 Email: sdubois@nsnetwork.org

Georgia – A Georgia state senator was joined by a local military veteran and experts on national security and the Pentagon budget on a call today to address those fanning fears about automatic budget cuts slated for next year instead of finding a comprehensive, safe and secure alternative budget. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) is expected to speak tomorrow morning at the College of Coastal Georgia in Kingsland as part of a series of town hall meetings discussing these automatic “sequestration” cuts.

LISTEN to the call here

In addition to participation in this call, GA Senator Nan Grogan Orrock and Master Sergeant Bob Farquhar (ret.) will also attend Senator Chambliss’ town hall meeting tomorrow and will be available for comment on-site.

State Senator Nan Grogan Orrock (D-GA-36), President for the Women Legislators’ Lobby of Women’s Action for New Directions, delineated the specific devastating impacts ‘sequestration’ would have on nondefense programs, education and veterans. “The sequestration arrangement calls for across-the-board cuts to both Pentagon as well as domestic spending. Now we hear from the contractors that the Pentagon budget should be sacrosanct, that there should be no cuts there. What that of course would mean is that the cuts to the states, to the programs, to the jobs and services would be even deeper.”

Dr. Lawrence Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration and retired Naval Flight Officer, explained that defense contractors' fear-mongering about the impact on jobs is disingenuous, military bases would not be closed, contracts would not be terminated, and that the Pentagon has ample funds and options to meet 21^st century security challenges. “Even John McCain, who’s opposed to sequester, calls the way the Pentagon manages its weapons systems a scandal and a tragedy… I have to laugh when I see people from companies running around and saying ‘Whoa, if you have these cuts we’re going to have to lay off all these people’…In the last five years, from 2006 to 2011, the defense budget went up by 13%. Lockheed actually had 10% less employees. If the budget goes up and you’re going to lay off people, it’s just really, really absurd.”

Master Sergeant Bob Farquhar (ret.), decorated 24-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, nuclear policy scholar, resident of Bonaire, GA, described a Cold War nuclear program as one area where spending could be reduced or shifted to the benefit of U.S. security. “There’s a B-61 freefall bomb [defense hawks are] wanting to upgrade at a cost of $10 billion, and this was a bomb from the 1960’s. We have roughly 4-500 of them in our inventory, but… why do we need these things anymore? The Cold War is now over for more than 20 years. There’s no rational reason that I can see or that anyone’s been able to provide to me as to why we need to maintain such a large nuclear force. Nuclear weapons are one way that we can save a considerable amount of money.”

Heather Hurlburt, National Security Network Executive director, former White House and State Department speechwriter and policy planning official, detailed the consensus among military and national security leaders that Pentagon spending should be on the table. “The idea that’s being peddled by some members of Congress that we can somehow solve the defense problem separate from the rest of the sequester problem is just not realistic. In fact, our Pentagon leaders know that, and both the current and former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have asked Congress to come up with a comprehensive solution that funds the domestic economy as well as the military going forward.”

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Additional Resources:

-            "Sequestration's Impact on Nondefense Jobs and Services," Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education report, 7/25/12

-            “The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending  Priorities: 2011 Update,” Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 12/11

-            "Spending Even Less, Spending Even Smarter: Recommendations for National Security Savings, FY 2013 to FY 2022--Deficit Reduction: $688 Billion," Project on Government Oversight, 5/8/12

-            “"Execs: Sequestration Hype Could Hurt Firms," William Swanson via Defense News, 7/22/12

-            “"We are only as strong as those three pillars – diplomatic, military and economic – can interrelate," Martin Dempsey, 1/12/12

-            “I have said from the beginning that I think defense has to be on the table," Michael Mullen via Defense News, 7/10/11

-            “Sequester was supposed to be … a trigger so irrational that the prospect of it would … drive the leadership to do what was needed, which was to put together an overall budget package for the nation’s finances that could win wide support, ” Ashton Carter via Washington Times, 5/30/12

-            POLLING ROUND-UP: “Hunt the Hawk,” Slate, 8/1/12