- by Chuck Kaufman

The one-year old New Priorities Network (NPN) held a strategy meeting Oct. 1-2 in Washington, DC, facing a dramatically different political environment than it did at its founding.  A year ago the discussion was about ways to get ending the wars and cutting the bloated Pentagon budget onto the public agenda. This year, thanks to the crisis over raising the debt ceiling and constant threats of government shut-down, the cost of the wars and the military budget are very much part of the public agenda.

The New Priorities Network was founded to force the issue of war funding and military spending onto the public agenda as a solution to the cuts that cities, counties and states are being forced to make in education, healthcare, and human services. The founding objective was to build cross-movement local coalitions, and the tactic was to build them around campaigns for local government resolutions calling for ending the war and cutting the bloated Pentagon budget to fund local needs. Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ) serves on the “continuations” or steering committee of NPN.

The strategy meeting was attended by 48 groups which were a good cross-section of peace and domestic issue groups, national and local. There was some diversity thanks primarily to the labor movement but there were few students or youth. The strategy discussions were thoughtful and high quality. There was a high degree of unity on tactics. New Priorities Network principles boil down to four: 1) Create jobs, 2) Save social services, 3) Tax the rich/corporations and, 4) End the wars/Cut the Pentagon budget.

What was very significant was that several national domestic issue organizations and coalitions which met with us reported that they have the same four priorities as the New Priorities Network. Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, US Action, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Progressive Democrats of America, none of which are “peace” groups, share NPN’s agenda. In addition to AfGJ, groups which are involved to one degree or another in the Latin America solidarity movement included SOA Watch, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Maryknoll Office of Global Concerns, and Sisters of Mercy. Many representatives of local NPN or peace and justice coalitions whetted their organizer’s teeth in the Central America solidarity movement of the 1980s.

There were two major take-aways that I had from the strategy meeting. The first is that we are at the beginning of the end of single issue organizing. The 40 year campaign by the right-wing to change the social contract, the distribution of wealth, and the very role of government, is coming to a head. No matter whether our issue is Latin America solidarity, labor rights, education, health care, social services or the care and feeding of retirees or pre-schoolers, we are all facing Armageddon. We cannot afford to pursue our individual paths to a better world but must unite to fight back. The alternative is to lose separately.

The second thing that I took away was that we need to link solutions rather than problems. And we have the solutions. The rich and the corporations must pay their fair share of taxes and we must end the wars, demilitarize our foreign policy, and cut the bloated Pentagon budget. The latter is certainly part of the mission of every Latin America solidarity organization. We need to bring our particular Latin America solidarity perspective to the discussion and the organizing. Abolish the School of the Americas, cut military and police training and aid to Colombia, Honduras, Mexico and the rest of the hemisphere, end the fraudulent war on drugs and the war on immigrants, close US bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, and end the militarization of relations with Latin America.

The Latin America Solidarity Coalition and the solidarity movement at large must join forces with these other movements in a struggle for our values or, as I call it, to change the very culture of US militarism. If we fail to take up this challenge then we will fail alone. We will be irrelevant to the most important struggle of our era.

The New Priorities Network is a network primarily projecting the campaigns and analysis of its member organizations, rather than a coalition which takes up a single campaign in the name of the coalition. Its foundation is the existence or creation of local coalitions across movements which agree to work together on the four principles listed above. Communities where NPN coalitions have been established are listed on the website www.newprioritiesnetwork.com (along with a lot of good organizing tools). Local solidarity committees should join existing coalitions and start NPN coalitions where there are none. National solidarity groups should promote this to their bases. We can have a greater impact for our goal of changing US policies toward Latin America by being inside this tent than we can from being outside of it. Time is short. The public agenda moves at its own speed and if we are too slow we will miss an historic opportunity.

 [The author is national co-coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice.]