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Check CAPA’s Events Page for our latest People over Pentagon and Divest from the War Machine events!
Check out CAPA’s awesome Defund/ Divest friends and partners, including Dissenters, Codepink, World BEYOND War, and more!
OUR GOALS
We know that tremendous needs exist in the U.S.: healthcare, education, racial justice, economic justice, and the list goes on. In the face of these urgent needs, spending nearly a trillion dollars yearly on self-manufactured threats is unconscionable.
As noted in this article by the American Friends Service Committee, in a 2022 national YouGov poll: “56% of survey respondents supported cutting military spending. Key findings include majority support for spending cuts among veterans, current service members and those with family members in the military. The survey also showed strong support for cuts from people of color and people under the age of 45, as well as a plurality of support from Evangelicals.”
The People Over Pentagon campaign educates Chicago area constituents about the excessive amount of money the Pentagon eats up every year. We will continue to demand a minimum 10% cut to the National Defense Authorization Act.
Join the campaign! Email CAPA@ChiPeaceAction.org to get involved.
Support our campaign by sending a letter to your legislators asking them to join the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus and take the first step to reclaiming the US’s financial resources away from war and reinvest them to meet human need!
Unless you are a major corporation like Amazon, you likely paid income tax last year and will again this year. But do you have any idea what our taxes buy? Would it surprise you to learn that in the 2021 budget, military spending will total $969 billion dollars? That is roughly 54% of the discretionary budget. That’s right, over half the money Congress authorizes each year goes to national defense. A reasonable observer might ask, defending us from what? That is more than the next ten countries combined spend on defense and ten of those are U.S. allies.
The U.S. maintains over 800 military bases all around the globe. What is the purpose of all this overkill? We would argue it is not to protect the U.S. and its citizens. It is for global power projection and to protect the interests of an empire we neither need nor desire as a people. For an egregious example of this, see the U.S. support of the brutal Saudi war on Yemen resulting in the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
Will decreasing the Pentagon budget make us unsafe? Not when there are proven, weaponless alternatives like Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) for local and national protection. Read here to find out why we must invest in life-affirming models of safety instead of life-destroying ones.
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If you would like more information, to volunteer, or intern for CAPA please contact us