Fort Greene Peace To Rally Outside Debate, Call On Clinton And Sanders To Cut War Spending

We’re just two days away from the big Democratic Party presidential debate between frontrunner Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on Thursday night inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a lot of residents are eagerly wondering what the two candidates will talk about.

For the members of Fort Greene Peace and Brooklyn For Peace, though, they’re not content to just sit back and wait: they’re planning a rally outside the Yard’s Sand Street gate (at the intersection of Sands and Navy Streets) at 6:30pm this Thursday, April 14.

Why? To demand that the candidates focus on what they believe is a need to reduce “war spending,” or the budget allocated to military and defense efforts. In a statement, they described it as a “need to move the money from war to our communities.”

“The campaigns for president are either calling for even more military spending or just ignoring the issue altogether,” said Charlotte Phillips, MD, chair of Brooklyn For Peace. Phillips describes the federal discretionary budget as poor prioritization, “diverting sixty cents of every dollar to fund the Pentagon and weapons industry [at the expense of] a failing economy and continuing deterioration to our cities and communities.

“We cannot even begin to heal our stressed environment, repair our crumbling infrastructure, build a 21st century public school system, enjoy modern mass transit, create truly affordable housing, train and employ people in decent, middle-class jobs and abolish poverty, homelessness and hunger while we continue on this destructive path of funding war over human needs,” Phillips added.

Fort Greene Peace’s Ed Goldman agreed, noting that the debate’s location is also prohibitive to community-focused discourse.

“It’s unfortunate it’s in a location that has limited access. tucked away in a place that no one can get near and will have a relatively small audience,” Goldman told us. “For example, it could have been at Brooklyn Tech HS which has an auditorium 2.5 times the size at the Navy Yard. And more people of any persuasion could have been there, and they could have put a screen in the park for people to watch.But the Party wants more control.”