Real National Security Begins at Home, Say Women Leaders

Times are tough. Wall Street has tumbled, and Main Street is squeezed. As housing values plummet and people lose income, governments are also feeling the pinch. Despite it all, there's one area of the federal budget that continues to grow: defense spending.

A growing chorus of women leaders are rising in protest, seeking to educate voters on the perils of a dangerously unbalanced set of priorities. From spending cuts in state budgets in such bread-and-butter areas as public health and sheltering the homeless, to a dangerous underfunding of port security and an exodus of first responders to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, women are seeing the Pentagon's growing share of the federal budget take a toll on the well-being of their own families. Yet an absence of women in the halls of power helps maintain the status quo, say activists, and a failure to enlist military women as allies in the cause of national security reform has held back the progressive funding agenda.

Women are paying attention to who's getting federal dollars, says Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster who leads Lake Research Associates. In focus groups, says Lake, "we do have women volunteering ?that they wonder how we could find overnight all the money to fight a war and to bail out Wall Street, but we can't find enough money to provide national health care reform. And there's a lot of anecdotal evidence of that."

Meanwhile, in Washington, a consensus is building among defense experts that something needs to be done to straighten out those priorities for the very sake of what all that spending is supposed to buy us: real national security. While tax dollars are poured into the pockets of defense contractors for projects of debatable value or documentable waste, homeland security budgets are starved, leaving the nation vulnerable in the face of attack. Yet defense spending sops up more than half of the federal discretionary budget.

What's pie got to do with it?

At Women's Action for New Directions, field director Bobbie Wrenn Banks has taken to the road with a victual demonstration of the classic pie chart that WAND calls the Great American Pie project.

"We actually use a pumpkin pie ? literally, a pumpkin pie," Banks explains. "And we go into groups and we slice the pie; it represents the discretionary budget." The discretionary budget is the piece of the federal budget that gets negotiated between the president and Congress (unlike such programs as Social Security and Medicare, whose costs are mandatory expenditures). "And over half of that pie ? 54 percent of that pie ? that slice goes to the Pentagon," says Banks. "Then we have very small little slivers of pie that go to environmental concerns, income security, affordable housing..." And that doesn't even cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Banks says. Add in the nearly $200 billion that taxpayers have anted up for the wars in this year alone, and "we're spending nearly $700 billion a year on the military," she says.

Banks' pie show is headed this week to Mississippi, where she'll visit the district offices of Sen. Thad Cochran, the Republican ranking member of the appropriations committee.

Absent a pie-bearing visit from Banks herself, she advises women to take a look at an effort at reform outlined in the Unified Security Budget proposed by the left-leaning group, Foreign Policy in Focus (part of the Institute for Policy Studies), which looks at how the budget is divided among various security needs. "[W]hen you look at the overall security spending pie, it's just so staggeringly lopsided, because 90 percent of our security money goes to the offense, with a 6 percent slice of that pie going to? homeland security, and only a 4 percent slice going to (conflict) prevention." Prevention includes diplomacy, foreign assistance in the form of infrastructure-building, and activities such as those done by the Peace Corps.