Baltimore sez bring our war $$ home!

CODEPINK's national manager for the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign, C.J. Minster, speaking in Baltimore at teach-in organized by Fund Our Communities coalition. Busloads of big city mayors saw the event as they headed out to dinner.

The 79th annual meeting of the U.S. Council of Mayors convened in Baltimore this weekend. Under consideration: Resolution No. 59, calling on Congress to hurry up and end the wars in order to redirect funding to critical needs in the cities around the country. Initiated by CODEPINK, the war $$ home resolution received endorsements from more than twenty mayors before being approved by the Metro Economies Committee on June 18, sent on to the full plenary of mayors on Monday, June 20.

Among the resolution's sponsors was Joe O’Brien, the Mayor of Worcester, MA who said, “We are spending a billion a month after Osama bin Laden has been killed. And while I appreciate the effort to rebuild nations around the world, we have tremendous needs in communities like mine." Mayor O'Brien will speak on behalf of the resolution during the conference, while City Council member James Kraft spoke about war funding draining resources from Baltimore in McKeldin Square last night.

News coverage of the mayors conference yesterday focused on the war dollars home resolution among many others under consideration: the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, WERU Community Radio in Maine, as well as blogs like People's World all featured it. As candidates and incumbents alike seem to realize, the public has grown weary of austerity measures at home while pouring billions every month into wars abroad. Interesting that this is the first time since Vietnam that the U.S. Council of Mayors has considered a specifically anti-war resolution. (Mayors for Peace sponsors a yearly resolution against funding nuclear weapons, and promoting international cooperation for nuclear disarmament.)

What the mayors saw

Citizens in Baltimore call for funding for jobs, housing, education and transportation.

Perhaps the history of the mayors' conference is a harbinger of things to come. The U.S. Council convened for the first time in 1932 in Detroit, with big city mayors coming together to craft policies that would lead their citizens out of dire economic straits of the Great Depression. FDR's New Deal legislation reportedly drew on many of their ideas.

Another resolution under consideration this year addresses cuts to funding for Community Development Block Grants, a huge source of federal funding to cities in the past.

A Congress that does what corporations want while ignoring its citizens' basic needs does so at its own peril. How can cities with legions of unemployed, under-educated, homeless people lacking health care be secure? Let's all hope the Beltway is close enough to hear the voices raised from Baltimore: fund human needs, not wars!

Mayors want to bring war dollars home

Boston, April 2011

Congress was treated to some low-quality legal counsel this week over the costly and unauthorized bombing of Libya. According to President Obama's lawyers (highly paid by me and thee), the executive branch of the federal government does not need to consult the will of the people as represented by Congress before carrying out airstrikes on other countries – no matter what the Constitution says.

Elected officials under our form of government are supposed to listen to their constitutents, aren't they?

Mayors around the nation appear to be listening, as twenty have now endorsed a resolution calling on Congress to stop funding wars and redirect the money to domestic needs. They hail from cities in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Virginia, Maryland, Florida, Ohio, Michigan Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico, California, Oregon – and the mayor of Hartford, Connecticut just jumped on the bandwagon.

The war dollars home resolution comes before the July 18-20 annual meeting of the U.S. Council of Mayors in Baltimore, and is the first to address military spending at the federal level since the Vietnam War. USCM resolutions guide advocacy in Washington, DC and, if the war dollars home resolution passes, it will be presented to Congress by some of its many sponsors. Perhaps Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore will do the honors since she's right next door and has homeless problems, low-income nutrition problems, jobs problems, and education problems.

Baltimore students protest cuts / Jordan Farrar / People's World

These are problems in common: providing basic services during times of shrinking contributions by the federal government. Big city mayors know what it looks like to have to cut nutrition programs for pregnant women, or Head Start programs for low-income preschoolers. They understand that their city becomes less safe when firefighters have their hours cut, and that it becomes less economically viable when education suffers because teachers are laid off and class sizes balloon.

Why isn't the government in Washington DC clear on these concepts?

Presumably because their vision is clouded by the millions corporate lobbyists spend lavishly entertaining them, and contribute to their campaign coffers when it's time for re-election.

Ordinary folks, 30% of whom told CNN recently they fear becoming unemployed in the near future, are increasingly opposed to continuing these costly endless wars. As many as 2/3 respond to polls agreeing that the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, and a Pew Research Center poll showed a majority identified the cost of wars as the leading cause of the federal budget deficit.

Washington DC ought to be listening. Perhaps if we raise our voices loud enough in Baltimore this weekend, they will hear us all the way to the Beltway.

Austin, Texas rally 2011