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Doing
the New Math So politically, it's my least favorite time of year. I'm not talking about all the hype over who has won the Democratic primaries before a single vote has been cast — that game comes every four years and sorry, no predictions here. We'll find out soon enough with Iowa and the New Hampshire primary coming up. No, I'm talking about the annual Kabuki Theater around the State of the Union. You know the visual. President Bush speaks to the Congress in full assembly, "Hail to the Chief" plays, Vice President Dick Cheney sits in a chair behind Bush (Dan Quayle, we miss ya buddy!) and all through the show Democrats squirm and worry if they are clapping too little — or too much. Ugly stuff. But that's just the parts we see. Behind the scenes, we have a month of political jostling before and after the "SOTU" itself. The Democrats are working on their "pre-buttal" plan to try and anticipate and pre-spin what Bush says, both sides are lining up their ammunition for the budget fight that starts right after the speech, Bush is thinking about impressing us by going to Mars, and White House handlers are scouring the grassroots for the right citizen hero to sit next to Laura Bush. Like I said, ugly stuff. Last year, the main issue was the war. As in, whether we should have one in Iraq. This year, I think the battle is less obvious but arguably as important. It's about the future and what investments we need to make. And we'd better get the math right. Otherwise, a 30-year, Republican strategy for destroying government's role in meaningful public investment (outside of space satellites and homeland security) will continue unabated. This plays out both nationally and in states like Oregon. Nationally, we need to deal with the aftermath of the Bush budget binge. After squandering a trillion dollars on tax cuts, buying off seniors with a dubious drug benefit that doesn't kick in until 2006, and putting America in red ink as far as green eyeshades can see, Bush is now saying we need to trim our belt and cut domestic programs. Trim our belt? After stuffing their pockets with tax cuts, these shameless freaks now want our pants — and the shirts off our backs (or better yet, they want state government to deal with it all). Can we call Bush a big spender without turning ourselves into budget hawks? That's a tight fit. Let's remember how much credit Clinton and the Democrats got for "being responsible" and balancing the budget mess left over by Reagan and his "I Love The 1980s" gang. The answer is zero. Nada. Zilch. So whether it's Howard Dean (he of 11 balanced budgets in Vermont) or someone else, the Democratic nominee needs to be careful before we raise our hands and do it all over again.
Well here's an idea. How about we don't play the Republicans'
game until we stop stacking the deck against smart policy choices? We should play this game at the state level too on Measure 30 and so many other issues (Hello Governor K, are you home?) Here's an example. This week, The Apollo Alliance (www.apolloalliance.org)is releasing an outside economic study showing how major league investments in good green jobs and energy independence would, in fact, pay for themselves, create over three million new jobs and over a trillion dollars in new economic activity. What's not to like? Can we out-trump the Republicans on economics and demand a "policy payback analysis" to all federal or state investments? How would Bush's buddies do if their corporate welfare programs had to be benchmarked against, say, proven pre-kindergarten education investments for kids? Jesse Jackson had it about right years ago in talking about the importance of investing in the front side of life. Before we spend $30,000 a year on a jail cell. Let's get the substantive cost-benefit analysis done to make that case on everything we are in favor of achieving in the next 30 years. Republicans will say each idea costs too much. But once we count the benefits, they won't have a lot less to say while we will have much more to offer. Here in Oregon, for example, we could propose a major bond program to make the state the leading exporter of green technology — or we can keep letting Bill Sizemore and Kevin Mannix set the bar for voters. Whether it's the interstate highway system, the electronics industry or the Internet, there are endless examples of how public investment has catalyzed economic success. This is no-brainer stuff. Voters can get this. So let's do the math. Dan Carol is a Democratic political strategist and a founding partner of CTSG (www.ctsg.com),a progressive consulting firm based in Eugene and Washington, D.C.
Sorrows
of Empire Thirty-six years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech that changed my life. I was a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York city in 1967, during the peak of the Vietnam war. Almost by accident a friend invited me across the street to hear Dr. King deliver a comprehensive anti-war address at Riverside Church. It is not the drama, the excitement of the occasion, nor King's mellifluous voice passing over the hushed sanctuary as he described the holocaust of Indochina. It is not even the way history later vindicated king's teachings on war — everything he predicted came to pass — that makes his 1967 address so memorable to me. It is the vitality of his teachings for our own lives, the immediate relevance to the arrogance and jingoism of our time, that compels me to recall and reread the Peacemaker's masterpiece once again. The economic and moral crisis we are facing today — the ubiquity of violent crime, the endemic clutch of drugs, the growing poverty of the working poor, the ruin of the Bill of Rights, the suffocation of millions of decent lives in the ghettos of our cities — all date back to that fateful turn when American leaders, pressured by big corporations, chose war over peace, empire over civil rights and social progress.
Dr. King saw our crisis coming. "A few years ago," he began from his well-lit pulpit, speaking in reference to America's anti-poverty programs, "there was a shining moment in our struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched the programs [become] broken. I was compelled to see the war as the enemy of the poor." As Dr. King analyzed the hope-wrecking nature of war, I stopped taking notes and listened with my heart as he described not only the devastation abroad and the injuries and scarred lives of the working class youth returning home, but the spiritual costs of imperialism — the mendacity of our leaders, the disillusionment of youth. "A nation," he said, "that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." King reminded his listeners that U.S. lawlessness abroad breeds violence within the United States as well. "As I walked among the desperate, rejected, angry men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? Wasn't our own nation using massive doses of violence to solve its problems? Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly against the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government." King never used the term "blowback," but his message was clear. When America sows the wind, it will reap the whirlwind in due time.
The Vietnam war is past. The cold war is over. But King's teachings about the sorrows of empire, the moral and social costs of militarism, are as timely today as they were 36 years ago. There is still no Marshall plan for our cities, no jobs program for our youth yearning for hope and direction. The near-400 billion dollar military budget is a mockery of social justice. Americans pay more for "defense" than all potential adversaries combined. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal deficits over the next five years will hit $1.08 trillion, a military induced deficit that is robbing our children of housing, education, health care and chances for a better life. U.S. corporations now globalize weaponry and violence for profit, and the U.S. has become the primary font of arms proliferation in the world. Subsidized by American taxpayers, U.S. corporations — Lockheed-Martin, General Electric, General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Hughes Aircraft, to name a few — sell lethal weapons to more than 40 countries. Assault helicopters, tanks, 50-caliber machine guns, hellfire anti-armor missiles, land-mine dispensing pods, Stinger missiles, fighter jets, rifles, guns — mechanized violence has become the main currency of American foreign policy. U.S. companies, along with France, helped Iraq build its arsenal of poison gas and chemical weapons in the '80s. Dr. King once described the sale of weaponry on a world scale as one of the great social crimes of the modern age. King's 36-year-old speech still sears my soul because my own country is still "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." We are all victims, in King's words, of that "deadly western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long." I left Riverside Church inspired by the intensity of the event. The following day, King's patriotic address caused an outcry in the media. TIME magazine called it "demagogic slander, a script for Radio Hanoi." Nevertheless, I can still hear our teacher reciting the words of James Russell Lowell: "Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong." Paul Rockwell (rockyspad@earthlink.net) is a writer and peace activist in Oakland, Calif. who taught constitutional law at Midwestern University. This commentary was first published Jan. 8 by CommonDreams.org
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