The Multiple Costs of Permanent War as a Policy

The military-big oil complex continues to drain our treasury everyday we are in Iraq. Meanwhile our educational system, social welfare and physical infrastructure suffers. As Bush's lackeys have plowed through every protective regulation put in place to protect American consumers from fraud and abuse our economy has lain fallow. And we the hapless public are going to pay through the nose for the next decade for their reign over the various regulatory agencies they rested control of. Add to that the neglect of our social services and physical infrastructure and you have all the makings of a worsening of the recession we are in. This situation is not accidental. Bush and his right wing nut job buddies set out to de-fund and cripple the agencies that protect us from lead in toys, bad drugs, corporate corruption, wildly speculative investment banks, mortgage fraud, pollution, overcrowded highways and plundering of our resources. No wonder the average American feels stressed and overworked. It usually takes both parents working at least one job each to make ends meet. The middle class squeeze is real and directly related to the unprovoked, lie filled, grossly mismanaged war we are trapped in. Bush’s buddies in the military-industrial-oil company-financial and insurance industry-drug company’s complex have prospered at our expense. Big business is God to these people, as you can tell from the pay packages that even incompetent CEO’s get on a regular basis. As our wealth as a nation has been channeled to these greedy and short-sighted thieves our standard of living has deteriorated, our debt has risen and our spirits have been drained. As Bob Herbert of the New York Times states:

The U.S., once the greatest can-do country on the planet, now can’t seem to do anything right. The great middle class has maxed out its credit cards and drained dangerous amounts of equity from family homes. No one can seem to figure out how to generate the growth in good-paying jobs that is the only legitimate way of putting strapped families back on their feet.

The nation’s infrastructure is aging and in many places decrepit. Rebuilding it would be an important source of job creation, but nothing on the scale that is needed is in sight. To get a sense of how important an issue this is, consider New Orleans.

The historian Douglas Brinkley, who lives in New Orleans, has written: “What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

We could have saved the victims of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, but we didn’t. And now, more than 2 ½ years after the tragedy, we are still unable to lift the stricken city off its knees.

Other nations can provide health care for everyone. The United States cannot. In an era in which a college degree is becoming a prerequisite for a middle-class quality of life, we are having big trouble getting our kids through high school. And despite being the wealthiest of all nations, nearly 10 percent of Americans are resorting to food stamps to maintain an adequate diet, and 4 in every 10 American children are growing up in families that are poor or near-poor.

The U.S. seems almost paralyzed, mesmerized by Iraq and unable to generate the energy or the will to handle the myriad problems festering at home. The war will eventually cost a staggering $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. When he was asked on “Democracy Now!” about who is profiting from the war, he said the two big gainers were the oil companies and the defense contractors.

This is the pathetic state of affairs in the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Whatever happened to the dynamic country that flexed its muscles after World War II and gave us the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations (in a quest for peace, not war), the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the finest higher education system the world has known, and a standard of living that was the envy of all?

So, how could this slide into paralysis as a nation with a deteriorating quality of life and a wasted economy be reversed? The congress in all its wisdom wants to bribe us with a small tax rebate to “stimulate the economy”. Forgetting that this plan has already been called basically dead on arrival, how logical is it? Reading Jim Hightower’s column in the March 21^st issue of The Texas Observer puts the rebate in another light, especially in regard to our deteriorating infrastructure.

READY, SET, STIMULATE!

Washington is about to mail $600 checks to you, me, and nearly everyone else (unless you’re poor—then you only get half that). The checks are to prompt us to “go shopping,” as George W. so eloquently sums up our chief duty as citizens. This is Washington’s bipartisan plan to stimulate the American economy and avoid a recession.

Well, they’re a bit late for most Americans, since the working-class majority sank deeply into recession long ago. There’s also a basic flaw in Washington’s stimulus strategy: Most of the stuff we’ll buy with our government checks is made in China or other low-wage nations. So our so-called leaders are shipping $168 billion from our public treasury for a “stimulus” program that will effectively stimulate foreign economies. Smart, huh?

Meanwhile, back at Ranchito U.S.A., there’s lots of stimulating that could be done, returning huge benefits to our people and our nation for every dollar spent. Even as Bush and Congress were telling us to go shopping for foreign stuff, a federal commission issued a startling report calculating that we need to be spending $225 billion a year—for the next 50 years—to maintain and upgrade America’s infrastructure of roads, bridges, and other transportation systems. That cost doesn’t cover our decaying water systems, sewage plants, dams, and schools, nor the exciting potential of building a new, green energy infrastructure.

You want stimulation? Let’s invest our public dollars—and leverage trillions of private dollars—in a grassroots recovery program that will put millions of skilled laborers, entrepreneurs, inventors, small businesspeople, and others to work rebuilding America’s future. A good job at good wages doing good work beats a $600 check any day.

Jim’s proposal sounds like The New Deal put forth by Franklin Delano Roosevelt following the Great Depression. Part of that legislative agenda included creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The largest programs still in existence today are the Social Security System and Securities and Exchange Commission—the primary regulator of publicly traded U.S. firms. It is no coincidence this administrations focus on destroying these programs is putting us back into a recession we have yet to see the bottom of.