If you thought we were going to have a rational, fact-based debate about cuts to the out-of-control military budget in this country, think again. The Pentagon and their war industry allies are mounting an aggressive, fear-based campaign of hyperbole and spin to scare Congress away from cuts that could affect contractor profits. The reason for this propaganda push is simple: if Congress rationally considers how much we should spend on our military, major cuts will follow. And that’s a good thing.

The deal worked out to allow a rise in the debt ceiling gives us our first real chance in more than a decade to make significant cuts to our country’s out-of-control war budget, but we are going to have to fight for them. The war industry is already deploying their favorite kind of stealth weapon on Capitol Hill to protect their profits: money and influence. Members of the newly-announced deficit committee have together taken around $1 million in campaign and PAC contributions from military contractors since 2007, and these companies plan to “cash in” on these donations to stop real cuts to big war contracts. That’s why Brave New Foundation is moving quickly to launch a new campaign, War Costs, to counter their profit-protection strategy, and we need you with us.

The debt limit crisis that’s consumed Washington, D.C. created an unexpected silver lining: the first opportunity in a decade to make real cuts to our runaway military budget. The deal reached to allow a rise in the debt limit “includes about $350 billion in guaranteed cuts for the Pentagon and other defense-related programs, plus up to $600 billion in additional reductions that will be triggered if Congress fails to reach a different agreement” to reduce the deficit. These cuts would have been completely unthinkable to D.C. conventional wisdom as recently as a year ago, but rising public opposition to two unpopular wars and concerns about the budget have finally put this bloated spending in danger. If we seize this opportunity, we can make big strides toward correcting a broken foreign policy that’s made our weapons, not our ideals, the most prominent face of America abroad.

Robert Greenwald joins The Jeff Santos Show to discuss Brave New Foundation’s War Costs investigation and the real opportunities ahead for the deficit committee.

When Brave New Foundation first launched our anti-Afghanistan-War campaign in 2009, 63 percent of Americans favored the president’s plan to escalate the war. Now, roughly 60 percent of Americans oppose the Afghanistan War and a strong plurality of Americans want to remove troops “ASAP.”

Rethink Afghanistan played a critical early role framing the war as a conflict not worth the huge costs, helping to shift the national consensus from supporting escalation to a strong desire to end a failing and unpopular war.

Some of Rethink Afghanistan’s biggest successes include:

- Publishing a full-length documentary that “laid the intellectual track” for opposition to escalation and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

- Busting the myth that there was a national consensus about the need to escalate the Afghanistan War in 2009. Rethink Afghanistan organized online debates among opinion-leaders on both sides of the issue and rallied academics and opinion-leaders to publicly call for other options besides escalation.

- Breaking through the Washington, D.C. bubble: With the financial contributions of Rethink Afghanistan supporters, we were able to run a full-page ad in Politico, a leading Capitol Hill newspaper, calling for the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

And, we ran the first-ever anti-Afghanistan-War TV ad on cable news in D.C., featuring the voices of our supporters telling politicians to bring our troops home, “Because it’s time.”

Thanks in large part to our work, the Afghanistan War has never been less popular, and we will continue to build on our momentum in our new War Costs campaign.

With a multi-billion dollar war industry waging constant P.R. campaigns through a pliant press corps, your individual, local activism in the press is one of the few defenses we have against militaristic bias in the media. Your strong voice in your local press can be a powerful counterweight to the corporate spin machine.

Here are a few quick tips on how to get into the press and affect local reporting:

Follow and Respond to Local Reporters on Twitter.

Many reporters maintain public Twitter accounts, which you can often find listed on their publication’s websites. One way to fight bias towards militarism in your hometown is to follow the reporters who write about national defense or military affairs on Twitter, and then respond to any bias in their reporting in tweet form. That puts your feedback in a public forum and can get the reporter’s attention without having to go through the publication’s gatekeepers.

Write a Letter to the Editor

Letters to the editor are a great way to get your views heard by your neighbors and to respond to war industry bias in the media. Most local papers’ websites describe their rules for letters that will be considered for publication. Pay special attention to their length restrictions: editors generally will discard letters that exceed the maximum number of words. Make sure you write short, simple sentences that contain one idea each. Try to “localize” your letter by including information specific to your hometown. For example, National Priorities Project can provide you with information on war spending and how it affects your community:http://costofwar.com/en/tradeoffs/ 

Write an Op-Ed Piece

Op-ed pieces are opinion articles written by members of the community. You can usually find your local paper’s rules for submitting an op-ed on their website, but if you can’t find it, call the paper and ask the opinion editor. When writing your piece, make sure you are clear about your support or opposition on an issue important to your community. Tie your writing to a news story but, as with a letter to the editor, make sure you localize it. Include a personal story or anecdote that helps the reader relate to you and get interested in the issue about which you’re writing. After you submit your op-ed to the paper, follow up with a phone call to the opinion editor to make sure they received it.

Check back often–we will update this section with tips on how to use War Costs information to affect media coverage in your hometown.

As the war industry’s opening blitz to influence the deficit committee draws to an end, I just wanted to leave our readers with a parting thought. Below is an infographic I created using data drawn from the hawkiest of the hawks–Foreign Policy Initiative (formerly known/reviled as the Project for a New American Century). This shows just how ridiculous the Pentagon’s and the war profiteers’ fear-mongering about “doomsday” budgets really is.

War Costs will create a series of in-depth video exposes unmasking the military contractor money corrupting our politics. We will focus on issues including excessive CEO pay funded by taxpayers, war profiteering and weapons systems we don’t need that are bankrupting the country. Sign up for email updates today to ensure you don’t miss any of these upcoming videos. 

By Staff at “The Alyona Show“

A New York Times/CBS poll shows that 69% of respondents thought that the US should not be at war in Afghanistan. Four months ago, the number was at 53%. So, have we finally said, enough is enough? Robert Greenwald, President of Brave New Foundation discusses.