The Worst Thing about Drones

I drove Brendan to school this morning--actually, I do that every morning. His school day is long enough as it is. If he had to take the DC metro and bus system to and from school, it would add more than two hours to his day. Throw in his track or basketball practice and he would spend almost 12 hours a day marching in lines under somebody else's command. Call me a slacker, but I think that's a bad deal even for adults, no matter that they get paid for some of that marching.

On the way home, I heard a story about a former Air Force drone operator on NPR's Morning Edition. He's a kid, really, but by the time he was, oh, say 20 years old, he had likely killed more than one innocent and killed at least one child with missiles he fired while sitting in a trailer on an Air Force base somewhere in Nevada.

Brandon Bryant's in college now, but it sounds like he's hurting and probably battling PTSD, a battle a lot of soldiers end up losing. And how can he actually win that fight? To a certainty he knows he killed a child while running no risk to himself at all.

I know this: Left to my own devices that kind of guilt would bring me to my knees.

And he sure as hell is left to his own devices. The American public doesn't even know Brandon Bryant went to war. That's the worst part of the drone program--suddenly almost all war is on the verge of becoming clandestine. And we in the US are going to lose track of our wounded vets when the day comes that none of their scars are visible.

Over the past two generations, we have done so many things to make war more bearable for civilians. We eliminated the military draft. We acquired global military superiority and a whole range of weapons that would allow us to kill wholesale at a great reduction in American dead and wounded. Now, we have drones and a kind of silent combat we can wage from our desks.

It's a game in which we run up the score and always shut out the other side. But our combat vets are invisible and, as has always been the case in war, the children they kill are invisible, too. The collateral damage is mounting. And every drone that explodes in Yemen or Mali or Sudan also blows up something here. Early education funding, maybe, or unemployment spending, to say nothing of the damage to a warrior's conscience.

No-fly zone in Syria should be a no-no

The odds of U.S. intervention in Syria accomplishing much other than increasing the death rate seem very low to me. Sure, destroying Syrian air fields in order to keep Syrian planes on the ground would reduce the rate at which Bashar al-Assad can kill civilians. That would be an unequivocal good.

But a Tomahawk missile costs $1.4 million. And, according to Sharon Weinberger of the Center for Public Integrity, quoting William Hartung, the no-fly zone in Iraq cost $1 billion a year to maintain. The one established in Libya cost more than $100 million in the first day of operations. In a time of sequester, in a time of cuts in childcare funding and unemployment benefits, every missile exploded in Syria also injures Americans.

Arguably, immediately reducing the rate at which Assad kills civilians would make no real long-term difference. After all, he has so many other options, like tanks, mortars and automatic weapons, for a more retail approach to killing civilians. Assad's regime will fall, but the sectarian violence that follows will make victims out of tens of thousands of other Syrians.

This is not a slam at Muslims or Arabs, either. Great power intervention and exploitation in the Middle East has structured the region geographically and politically in a way that ensures continuing power struggles and fratricidal violence.

The Iraq Body Count Project reports more than 100,000 documented civilian deaths in Iraq between 2003 and 2012. Sanctions on Iraq during the period between the first Gulf War and the U.S. invasion of Iraq reportedly resulted in the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraq children. That figure has been disputed, but even Reason.com, a libertarian operation, concedes that sanctions probably caused the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi children.

Tens of thousands of Afghani civilians have died since the U.S. launched a war against the Taliban in 2001. Hundreds of thousands of Afghani civilians died during the Soviet Union's invasion and ten-year war that ended there in 1989. During that period the U.S. gave billions of dollars in aid to various Afghani military governments and to insurgents, many of whom evolved to become the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

And, though U.S. forces have almost completely withdrawn from Iraq, IEDs are still exploding every day, maiming and killing Iraqis. The question must be asked: How, exactly, does U.S. intervention spare civilian lives in the before, during or after the event?

And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone have cost the U.S. somewhere between $4 and 6 trillion, a spending decision that has had adverse consequences in both the Middle East and in this country. A truly humanitarian intervention supported by the U.S. would rely on the UN and NGOs and be exclusively focused on aiding Syrian refugees wherever they might be and finding ways to get Syrian civilians out of harm's way. But the history of other U.S. interventions in the Middle East suggests that only Raytheon, the manufacturer of the Tomahawk missile, stands to benefit from establishing a no-fly zone in Syria.

Robert McNamara and the Dayton Daily News

A little j'accuse from the Dayton Voice

So, I'm finally taking the time to really think about the Dayton Voice--what the experience was like for me, what it was like for others, what we tried to accomplish, how much of Dayton life it chronicled, the Voice in retrospect, and other passing thoughts. Of course, to interrogate only my own self is to make the story of the Voice about me, which it most certainly was not. To get it right, I would actually have to report, talk to others who were with the Voice and of the Voice and for the Voice, readers and writers and photographers and carriers and sales staff and fellow travelers.

And I would have to set aside time and effort to write about Marrianne McMullen and what she did as co-publisher, editor and writer. She reported some of the papers most important stories, like the Dayton Public Schools' reliance on suspension and expulsion, like what prostitution felt like to the women who had fallen into it, like what Jenny Wilcox, wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, experienced during and after her release, like how the Voice was Marrianne's inspiration.

But as important as it is to make sure that my story of the Voice is not some hagiographic fantasy of myself, I'm going to end this post with a pretty complete transcription of a piece I wrote for the April 20, 1996 issue of the paper about Vietnam, Kennedy-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and U.S. media at the time. In that piece, McNamara didn't lie alone," I was, per usual, much more opinion writer than reporter. And so it goes:

"Last week, the Dayton Daily News joined others in the mainstream media in criticizing former Secretary of Defense robert McNamara for hiding the truth about Vietnam. A News editorial chided McNamara for his "late, awfully late" revelations about the mistakes and failures of the devastating war against Vietnam.

"As the News would have it, the prolonged agony of the war was the responsibility of those who governed at the time and especially of an elite few, McNamara included. Americans wanted to trust their government, but the "...leadership at the top carries...the guilt of having hidden the truth from the American people," said the editorial.

"But DDN misses the point--as it must--that it took an enormous collaborative effort to hide the "truth." And the mainstream media was crucial to that collaboration, the News included.

"The media cooperated in a White House strategy of burying inconvenient facts, and omitted critical perspectives in covering the war. Such editorial policy facilitated the physical devastation of Vietnam, submerged the deepening impoverishment of parts of the United States and, ultimately undermined faith not only in American government, but in the media as well.

"After all, the truth about the war was known fairly early. In 1964, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution that authorized President Johnson "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force" to oppose the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. But in March 1968, I. F. Stone reported in the New York Review that the alleged North Vietnamese attack in international waters on U.S. ships--the incident that the Johnson administration used to obtain passage of the declaration--actually had been a violation of North Vietnamese coastal waters and an attack provoked by the actions of the U.S. Navy. The News ought to check its own file library to see when, if ever, the paper reported that the Congressional quasi-declaration of war had been passed in response to an invented incident.

"Anti-war organizing [at the time] was based on a variety of different considerations. The United States, activists believed, had no legitimate national interest at stake in Vietnam and no reason to fight to maintain client regimes in the old outposts of French colonialism. Of course, rich ore and oil deposits in Southeast Asia and Indonesia were at stake, but access to these resources was not an admitted goal of U.S. war policy.

"Instead, we were fighting to stop a communist takeover and protect the "free world," even though a Vietnamese election in 1956 and agreed to by Ho Chi Minh was stopped by the Eisenhower administration. The News can check to see when it reported that Ngo Dinh Diem was installed with the support of the United States in preference to a freely elected Communist government."

"The national news media, and local outposts like the News, were delighted with the spectacle of protest, which they covered, and uninterested in the substance of these protests. The News, which helped to perpetuate the myth that opposition to the war tied the hands of the U.S. military, ought to go back and check its files to see when, if ever, it reported that more tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were dropped on Europe and Japan during all of World War II.

"Thought the media was comfortable with the studied and persistent omission of the facts about the air bombardment of Vietnam, they delighted in reporting about alleged abuses of returning Vietnam vets by war protestors. The News might consider how many times it covered abuses of vets compared to the far more frequent physical assaults on protestors. Further, compare that to coverage of the estimated 200 or more massacres of Vietnamese villagers by American ground forces. These events were common knowledge among Vietnam vets and war protestors. They were "truths" that Washington elites and a cooperative press ignored.

"The cost of the military build-up resulted in severely underfunding anti-poverty programs. That is one reason why Dr. Martin Luther King spoke out against the war. The News might check its files to see how ofteh the paper reported on Dr. king's opposition to the war.

"Yes, it is terrible that Robert McNamara waited so long to confess. After all, 60,000 Americans and 400,000 Vietnamese died in the war. But mainstream dailies told precious little truth about the war and the Dayton Daily News' editorial maintains that tradition. "Awfully late" is too soon to expect an apology from the News."

"McNamara didn't lie alone," Dayton Voice, April 20, 1995.

Cliff diving

Fiscally speaking, Obama's position only gets stronger

Why shouldn't President Obama demand Republican support for ending Bush-era tax cuts for the rich? Because if he doesn't find a way to compromise with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, we will all go over the fiscal cliff?

The truth is Republicans have stronger reasons to avoid the cliff than Obama does and, surprisingly, many more reasons to go over it, as well. Either way, they face political damnation.

If we do take a dive, Boehner and McConnell know that Republicans will get the major portion of the blame. Their refusal to compromise will be portrayed as protecting lower tax rates for the rich. No amount of explaining will change that perception.

Obama will be criticized, too, but not as harshly, and he doesn't have 2014 election worries, either. Republican incumbents (House or Senate) planning on running for reelection will begin their campaigns fearing that intransigence on the fiscal cliff (and the debt ceiling, if it comes to that) will cost them politically.

Theoretically, going over the cliff will position Republicans to reach a "grand bargain" in January that includes tax cuts. The new year will create incentives for both sides to reach a compromise that restores some of the Bush-era tax cuts (except for high-income earners) and maintains the payroll tax exemption that will disappear at year's end.

A January compromise will allow Republicans to claim that they remain the party of tax cuts. Unfortunately for them, to get the cuts that will help maintain their brand (even though Democrats will want them, too), Republicans will likely have to agree with healthcare reforms that they have always opposed, like allowing the government to require competitive bidding for medical equipment and other items purchased by federal health-care programs.

Medicare and Medicaid reforms outlined by the Center for American Progress and generally supported by Democrats are projected to save $385 billion over 10 years, without affecting eligibility or benefit levels. Republicans have their own proposals for saving billions more in healthcare spending, but most of them come from delaying eligibility and raising costs for recipients. The credit for such reforms will go to Obama, not to Boehner, Ryan, Cantor, McConnell, et al.

That same Republican leadership will want to restore some of the cuts to the military budget that will result from going over the fiscal cliff and Democrats will want to do some of that, also. But they won't want it worse than the Republicans will and will be able to bargain for other things they want more, like a little bit more stimulus spending and reduced cuts in education and human service spending.

All of that compromising is going to make Republicans look weak to their core constituencies. It's a painful prospect; agree to tax increases to avoid going over the fiscal cliff and tarnish their anti-tax, anti-government brand, or strengthen the perception that they are defending tax cuts for the rich and agree to a compromise afterward that makes them look like a junior partner in supporting handouts to Democratic constituencies.

The only possible basis for Democrats to oppose going over the cliff is the possibility that doing so will result in instant and significant damage to the economy. (Just three weeks ago in Compromise or Betrayal, I did advocate compromising with Republicans before going over the fiscal cliff. What can I say? Like Obama on gay marriage, my thinking has evolved.)But there are all sorts of ways the government can blunt the immediate effects of tax increases and sequestration, delaying the pain for long enough to pass a fix in January. Obama has lots of cards to play now. After the cliff dive is done, his hand will be even stronger.

Ambivalence

To fight or not to fight in Libya or anywhere else?

That is, or ought to be, the eternal question. Whether the cost in human lives and national treasure is worth the outcome. And whether the outcome is clearly and transparently defined or is oblique and misdefined. For Americans, after all, it has never been simply a question of whether we support or oppose the clear goals of war, but also whether we have been lied to and mislead. There is a dissonance within ourselves and our country that sometimes cannot be resolved.

In my lifetime, that has been the case in Iran in 1950, in Guatemala in 1954, in Vietnam in 1956 and beyond, in Cambodia, in Chile, in Panama, in Granada, in Nicaragua, and so on and so forth. The same questions do not arise in every instance.

Most often, I am persuaded that American goals are not on the side of justice. When the U.S. intervened in Kosovo in the early '90s, many on the Left supported that intervention. The Serbian Slobadan Milosevic seemed bent on the destruction of Albanian Kosovars. But I didn't support that intervention, despite the fact that Milosevic was almost certainly a war criminal. Earlier the U.S. had left Rwandans to their fate. And been indifferent to the plight of civilians in the Horn of Africa suffering from war, expulsion and famine. How could the same country that did not trouble itself over Rwandans, Congolese, Somalians and Ethiopians be judged guileless and innocent of ulterior motives when it rode to the rescue of Albanians?

But we are another decade along now, and are led by a president whom I genuinely believe wishes to solve conflicts and ameliorate suffering, perhaps even in the case of Palestinians. And I am persuaded that many lives have been saved in Libya by the recent U.S.-led intervention. Still, I remain troubled by the notion that the among the few certainties here is that weapons manufacturers will get reorders and that even humanitarian interventions serve the interests of some who don't give a hoot about Libyans or about Palestinians or about the millions of recent dead for whom humanitarian intervention never came. But how could abstention be the answer?

The Libyan War is...

A. a bad idea.
B. a necessary evil. Innocent people are dying. U.S. intervention will keep Gaddafi from murdering his people.
C. not the outcome of constitutional deliberation and process.
D. a sign of Obama's weak leadership
E. a good idea.
F. What kind of phony discussion is this? The war in Libya is another undeclared war based on a (probably incorrect calculation of) national interests that will cost the United States much more than it delivers and will fall far short of any reasonable humanitarian goal.

There is a G, of course, namely that the whole idea of intervention in Libya is confusing and difficult to assess. The probabilities seem fairly high that, if Americans were to respond to a poll asking such a question and offering A through G as possible responses, a plurality would likely admit confusion and choose G. A good number might also support the idea that some sort of humanitarian intervention is necessary. A relative few would be likely to choose A, a bad idea.

On Tuesday, March 22, the Washington Post op-ed page featured five pieces offering some sort of counsel in regard to the choice. The five opinion writers, Anne Applebaum, George Will, Michael Gerson, Richard Cohen and Eugene Robinson, arguably came down on the side of B, C (with a leaning toward A), D & B, D & B, and F (or at least, A), respectively.

Only Applebaum, in "Aim low on Libya," expresses strong support for intervention and excuses the week-long delay in getting there, arguing that quicker or more enthusiastic intervention would have resulted in a widespread perception of American war-mongering. It made sense in this case, she says, to wait for the British and the French to take the lead.

Will doesn't believe that Obama's reasons for intervening were constitutional, persuasive or grounded in a reasonable grasp of history. He calls Obama's observation that Gaddafi has lost all credibility with the Libyan people "meretricious boilerplate [apparently] designed to anesthetize thought." Will helpfully brings history into the discussion, citing the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War as experiences that could teach valuable lessons. His use of history would be even more effective here had he previously bothered to vigorously play the unconstitutional card in regard to the two wars against Iraq launched by the Bushes, father and son.

Michael Gerson, a speech writer for Bush II before he got his job as a Post columnist, endorses the attacks on Libya upfront in "Obama's late arrival," but then spends an additional 800 or so words complaining that Senators Kerry, McClain and Lieberman were quicker to arrive at the public conclusion that intervention was necessary. This appears to be so, but significance ought to be a criterion for the Post's op-ed pages.

Bombing Gadaffi might get us to the end of the "old order in the Middle East" and lead to the "stability and prosperity [that] are powerful antitodes to the violent urges of nihlism and extremism," as Gerson writes. Then, again, maybe bombing, which the United States has engaged in from time to time these last many years, provides some sort of evidence that stability and prosperity are not always antidotes to violent urges.

Richard Cohen, who plays an establishment liberal to Gerson's establishment conservative in the pages of the Post, doesn't like the way Obama governs, either, but makes the case with a little bit more humor than Gerson. In "Uncle Miltie's plan," Cohen does make the helpful point that "the search for a Unified Theory of What Is Happening [in the Middle East] is futile" and details why. All the same, Cohen's chief criticism of Obama appears to be that the president lacks a unified theory. The administration, Cohen concludes, "could have made an argument for staying out [of Libya] or a more forceful argument for going in. Instead it made both. "Milton Berle now plays the White House," he writes. And, no doubt, also haunts Cohen's ambivalent dreams.

Way below the bottom of the fold comes Eugene Robinson's "The dictators we need." Perhaps placement on the page reflects the Post's assessment of the merits of Robinson's argument, but it does have the virtue of clarity. After noting that Gadaffi is a genuine villain, threatening to "turn all of Libya into a charnel house," a blunt description of the allied intevention "clearly intended to cripple the government and boost the revolt's chances of success," Robinson offers a real-politik survey of U.S. relations with other autocrats in the Middle East. He concludes with the observation that the world would be better off without Gaddafi, "but war in Libya is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same standards we set for defiant ones. If not, please spare us all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms. We'll know this isn't about justice, it's about power."

Perhaps Robinson's observation explains why, amidst all the opinions, pro, con and in between, we aren't hearing from Republican budget hawks about the cost of war. We never do.

But surely, in a country where state governments are moving to outlaw collective bargaining rights for public employees, and public school teachers are being pink-slipped for budgetary reasons, some strong right-wing voice could be heard shouting above the din that we are already spent more than one trillion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (see Costofwar.com) and can ill-afford another engagement that will raise the cost by billions of dollars (Tomahawk missles cost $570,000 each, the F-15 that crashed a couple of days ago cost $30 million, the first day of combat in Libya coast an estimated $100 million). Alas, no such voice is to be heard.

Is it reasonable, to follow Robinson, to observe that most weapons manufacturers are Republicans, frequently generous campaign contributors, and huge fans of reorders for expensive weapons and expended munitions? I mean, in what other business does a reorder for a single item gross upwards of one-half million dollars?

On his Nation blog, in "Ten calls from Congress for a debate about war," John Nichols appears clear (oxymoron?) on one point: If it is to happen, Congress should authorize military action in Libya. The point is legalistic, perhaps necessary, historically venerated, and insufficient.

If Libya is a humanitarian tragedy about to happen, then any war effort mounted in response ought to be congressionally authorized. But if action is necessary, congressional authorization is not enough. And if Congress does not authorize, and tragedy occurs, what would be America's share of the blame? Further, by how much would a Congressional vote to authorize be delayed as a consequence of behind-the-scenes jockeying to put off such a vote? So, no, Nichol's apparent position lacks gravity and, hopefully, does the Nation an injustice.

But the Nation did editorialize on March 18 in response to the prospect of U.S. intervention. The editors have much to say and make many useful points about the sorry history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East (Libya's in North Africa, but who's counting?) and in Arab countries. I think the piece is a must-read, but I really can't tell if they mean to endorse no-fly zones or other intervention.

Here's the thing, G (the whole Libya-thing is confusing and difficult to assess) is the most understandable answer, but I keep thinking that if I were to remain mindful of the lies and misrepresentations that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that preceded the first Gulf War, that justified the embargo of Iraq (which may have caused the deaths of 1,000,000 Iraqis, including 500,000 children), that accompany U.S. aid to Israel and support the continuing oppression, dislocation and disenfranchisement of Palestinians, that excuse or obscure the human rights violations of a dozen key American allies, that hide the profits of war to a select few and shed theatrical tears for the losses of many, if I keep all those things in mind, then the only honest and reasonable answer for me to make is F (What kind of phony discussion is this? The war in Libya is another undeclared war based on a probably incorrect calculation of national interests that will cost the United States much more than it delivers and will fall far short of any reasonable humanitarian goal.)

Regardless, having gone to war (again), let us conclude with a prayer, Mark Twain's War Prayer, which includes this (among its many lines):

"help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;
help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;
help us to drown the thunder of the guns
with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;"

and so on.

What Is To Be Done?

A blogger without a clue

Things are bad, very bad ...

1. Natural disaster in Japan could begin a series of cascading events that includes additional earthquakes on other (potentially more dangerous) faultlines near Japan, failure of Japanese infrastructure (e.g. explosions at nuclear reactors and dramatically diminished electrical supply), and severe damage to the Japanese economy with downstream damage to the already weakened global economy while

2. Gaddafi reasserts control in Libya, Libyans suffer mortal punishment and repression, and anxiety over the global oil supply causes another spike in oil prices delivering another blow to the national economies of oil importers while

3. Billionaire capitalists in the United States finance a reactionary populist attack on government and

4. Republicans in Congress block spending for economic recovery, deconstruct healthcare reform, defund social programs, whittle away at Social Security, investigate Muslim Americans, deny responsibility for climate change while

5. Republican governors Scott Walker and John Kasich win a perhaps temporary but decimating victory over unions in Wisconsin and Ohio, and

6. State legislatures with conservative majorities begin a systematic attack on women's reproductive rights, minority set-asides and Latinos born in the United States and

7. Democratic state legislators in Maryland, politically intimidated by socially conservative, church-going African Americans from Prince Georges County, defeat a bill to legalize same-sex marriage while

8. District of Columbia Mayor Vince Gray, elected as a reformer to a term that began in January, finds himself hobbled by nepotism, cronyism and corruption scandals, severely wounding optimism for a DC city government run by grownups while

9. "No HIV testing" signs pop up on storefront clinics in the District and homeless people burst into tears of gratitude for eye contact and

10. I couldn't sleep last night for thinking about the engorged deer tick I found on my back.

So, assuming other issues not mentioned in the foregoing list, like war and peace and military spending are included and leaving aside the deer tick, what is to be done? I suggest three possibilities: one, throw a massive end of the world party and/or legalize marijuana; two, choose denial, in general, or join the Tea Party and pretend none of this is actually happening; or, three, join a diverse, multi-racial multi-cultural organization in your community and live, work and organize like our lives together depend on doing so. Any preferences?

Obama's State of the Union

Can the left live with it?

President Obama's speech last night was definitely not a leftist call to arms. But in the wake of a stinging electoral defeat for Democrats in November, it was, by and large, the speech Obama needed to give; and a speech well within his strike zone. One might have expected progressives to condemn Obama's caution, his willingness to concede space to Republicans with commitments to freeze discretionary spending, take on tort reform and and control Medicare spending, but attacks from the left, so far, are muted and seasoned with approval for some of the things he did say.

Nation writer John Nichols adopted a balanced tone in assessing the State of the Union speech. While noting Obama's declared intention to soften some regulations, continue supporting free-trade agreements, in general, and accommodate other Republican interests, Nichols also applauded Obama's forthright defense of Social Security and government investment in infrastructure.

"Obama has more political capital than he did in the weeks after the election .And he used it to defend Social Security -- rather then embrace calls for slashing benefits or experimenting with privatization – and to renew commitments to classic infrastructure investments in roads, bridges and transit, as well as 21st century projects such as high-speed rail and the development of national wireless networks," Nichols wrote.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), noted that Obama's call for further controlling healthcare costs should be perceived as a way to defend, not attack Medicare. "In reference to Medicare and Medicaid, President Obama stuck to the facts and pointed out that the problem is the broken U.S. health care system, not inefficiencies in these programs. He noted the progress made in controlling health care costs in the Affordable Care Act, but acknowledged the need to go much further in containing costs," Baker said in a written statement released by CEPR today.

The statement also credits Obama with resisting "...the immense pressure from the financial industry and other opponents of Social Security and Medicare by refusing to call for large cuts in these programs in his State of the Union Address. Given the power of these groups, this would have been the easiest path for him to take. However, he instead insisted on the need to protect Social Security and to ensure that future generations of workers can also depend on it."

But Baker was clear about the speech's shortcomings: "The most disappointing aspect of the speech is that it largely skipped over the current economic crisis. This may reflect a view that there is little that Congress will agree to do to at this point. But it still is unconscionable to accept the idea that 25 million workers will go unemployed or under-employed, with millions more losing their home, because of the economic mismanagement by the country’s leaders."

He also took exception to Obama's continuing support for free trade, arguing that an over-valued dollar is the fundamental cause of the continuing U.S. trade deficits, "the largest imbalance in the economy today."

Robert Scheer's critique of the speech must rank among the best expressions of left-wing frustration with Obama's centrism. Scheer's post today on The Smirking Chimp dismisses the speech as "platitudinous hogwash." Obama ignored "... the depth of our economic pain and the Wall Street scoundrels who were responsible—understandably so, since they so prominently populate the highest reaches of his administration," Scheer wrote. "The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole."

Scheer's points are well-taken and only occasionally hyperbolic (the government spent $1 trillion on the Wall Street bailout, not "trillions"). Indeed, there are certainly more bankers and brokers in the Obama administration than there ought to be, but it won't be the presence of Wall Street big shots in the administration that will undermine any moves Obama makes to increase investment in infrastructure and high tech. Nor will they force Obama to compromise his defense of Social Security and Medicaid.

Republican opposition, of course, will be the first cause compromising Obama's ability to move forward with domestic infrastructure investments, with further action to control health care costs, with effective follow-up on Sec. of Defense Robert Gates proposed cuts in the military budget and other initiatives progressives wish to see. But a left that cannot refrain from unnuanced and relentlessly hostile critiques of Obama's performance and agenda could pose a further problem.

Right now most observers on the left seem willing to give Obama the benefit if the doubt. That comes as a little bit of a surprise, given the widespread perception that Obama and Congressional Democrats didn't go far enough with health care or squeeze out a bigger stimulus bill. But the odds are that the left was as chastened by the November election results as was Obama. If so, would it be too much to ask that a progressive follow-up include electing a few more progressives to Congress and organizing to take back a few Congressional districts from the Tea Party?

So Lincoln Won, Now What?

Has progressive zeal gone awry?

Yes, Blanche Lincoln, the Democratic senator from Arkansas, opposed the public option and the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), but that sort of thing from an Arkansas senator shouldn't come as a big surprise. Bill Clinton, our emeritus president, also from Arkansas, did worse. He pushed through a welfare reform that further impoverished millions of families, single mothers and their children, in particular. Clinton also made the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and other pro-business trade agreements, the law of the land. But somehow, most progressives went along, sourly perhaps, but voted for him for reelection, anyhow. The alternative in the era of Newt Gingerich was much worse.

But Lincoln got no such break from labor unions, the Daily Kos and moveon.org. Unions spent more than $10 million in an effort to defeat Lincoln and elect Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in the Democratic primary. From the start it was clear that Halter was no liberal. He simply allowed himself to be framed as a politician to the left of Lincoln. Only true believers practiced in self-deception could pretend that Halter would be an improvement.

Arguably, a better health care bill might have passed if Lincoln had been a supporter of the public option. But had she voted for the public option, she would have faced a true right-wing opponent, more formidable than Halter. And who is willing to claim that Lincoln was the principal obstacle? How about Joe Lieberman, who progressives haven't been able to get rid of either, even though he comes from Connecticut, where it ought to be far easier to elect a liberal? But progressives haven't been able to manage that trick, and even supported Ned Lamont, a multi-millionaire businessman with a thin record of opposition to the Iraq War and no other credentials, in a futile and disheartening effort to dislodge Lieberman in 2008.

"Political movements tend to unravel gradually, but on Tuesday [progressives] seemed to be imploding in real time," wrote the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, an off-again, on-again liberal himself, in "Liberals gather, and yell." A bit hyperbolic, given that Milbank was merely observing a "gathering of progressive activists organized by the Campaign for America's Future," rather than, say, tens of thousands assembled in some amphitheatre at a critical moment for change. But Milbank was writing about the angry demonstrations that continually disrupted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech at the event. Hopefully, the rudeness was therapeutic and activists aren't also considering Pelosi a problem that leftists need to tackle electorally.

Milbank quotes Robert Borosage, organizer of the event, outlining the disappointments stacked up since Barack Obama's election:

"Progressives have grown ever more dissatisfied, and for good reason...Our hopes or illusions were shattered:escalation in Afghanistan, retreat on Guantanamo, no movement on workers rights or comprehensive immigration reform, dithering on 'don't ask, don't tell,' reverses on choice, delay on climate change and new energy."

Borosage isn't sniping from the sidelines. He co-founded the Campaign for America's Future and is a prolific writer and commentator. A piece he wrote for the Huffington Post prior to Obama's 2008 victory, "A New Progressive Era?" provides a helpful comparison between the political reality facing Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time of his 1932 reelection and political reality as it looked to a smart leftist in the fall of 2008.

But how things looked in 2008 seems a far cry from how things are in 2010. There is probably not a single Republican senator who needs to protect himself or herself from a political attack from moderates within their own party. Substantial minority though they are, the rules of the Senate work absolutely in their favor, and vulnerable Republican incumbents face bigger problems from Tea Party activists and the extreme right than they do from Democrats. And for more than a year, since the passage of the stimulus bill in early 2009, Senate Republicans have recognized that recession and widespread economic distress have created a volatile and emotional electorate just as likely to take out their anger on incumbent Democrats as on Republicans. It is this development, and the decision by Republicans to rejigger themselves as the "party of no," that has led to dashing our progressive "hopes or illusions." The hopeless, reactionary mood that characterizes a considerable part of the electorate is part of the wall against which progressive illusions have been shattered.

But why would anyone wish otherwise? Illusions, after all, do not provide a sound base on which to begin building strategy? It was far easier for the Republican minority to develop an effective legislative stance in the chaos created by the worst recession since 1929 than it was for Democrats. Borosage's Huffington Post piece makes clear that, even under ideal conditions, there never was going to be unity among Democrats: "For Obama, the greatest obstacles to pursuing progressive reform are likely to come from his party's conservative Blue Dogs and Wall Street DLC New Democrats." Perhaps, he should also have taken pains to point out that Obama, himself, is no progressive, only a breath of fresh air; a smart leader willing to do the right thing in cooperation with a cohesive progressive movement able to focus effective political power, if such a movement actually existed.

It is still less than two years since Obama's election victory. It is barely 18 months since Obama took office with the country headed toward double digit unemployment. Arguably, the labor movement has less political power to focus now than it had a mere 10 years ago, just before Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and president Andy Stern led several other unions out of the AFL-CIO, in an ill-fated attempt to reverse labor's decline. The fact that AFSCME and SEIU could scrape together $10 million to oppose Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas primary tells us very little about what the labor movement is capable of doing or what it ought to do next. But it looks somewhat like a tactical indulgence, spending money and lashing out becoming a sort of consolation for strategic failure.

Labor, and all progressives, ought to take a closer look at the political realities of this moment. No, we are not out of Iraq, but we are going to be. We are escalating in Afghanistan, but I see no sign that we are really hunkering down for an even longer war there. A higher likelihood is that we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan over the next two to three years because we cannot afford to be there any longer. Yes, that point begs the question of whether or not we could ever afford to be either place. Worse, we will be leaving chaos behind in both countries, the forseeable result of a warlike, confrontational and theatrical foreign policy, but a policy that the Obama administration did not create. More problematically for progressive Democrats is that a specific plan does not exist for reengaging parts of the world which have been long neglected or exploited by U.S. policies.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, perhaps, the biggest foreign policy challenge of all to progressives. Israel has no secure future as an occupying power. But many Jewish progressives believe firmly that Israel should be supported as a Jewish state within pre-1967 borders. Talk about illusions from which we all must one day awaken.

A country cannot be both a theocratic state and a democratic state. Even if it is founded by, or on behalf of, Holocaust survivors. That may help make Israel a sentimental favorite for many, but in the modern world, it is not possible to play fast and loose with the rights of other peoples, no matter the gloss put on the act. If there is to be peace, Israel must give something on many points, forcibly evacuating settlements, returning to pre-1967 borders, acknowledging right of return on some basis, if only for compensation purposes.

And the United States is Israel's principal enabler. Without U.S. foreign and military aid, Israel would be bankrupt. And its weapons industry, now an exporter to all sorts of governments with dubious human rights records, has been built and sustained by U.S. aid. The American administration that finally reduces, ideally cuts off, such aid will help Israel to recognize some part of the injustices that have been perpetrated by the Jewish state, and create a more realistic basis for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ultimately, Israel will even have to choose between being a Jewish state, privileging some, and being a democratic state. But that crisis comes later.

We are facing an environmental disaster in the Gulf that highlights the limits to which corporations can act in a broader interest. The BP oil spill will help build support for climate change legislation, but whatever does pass, it will fall far short of what we wish for. So, obviously, will Wall Street regulation. Most members of Congress, in both the House and the Senate, will fight fiercely against efforts to raise taxes on the rich, and to raise the ceiling on social security taxes to cover more of the salaries of higher-income people. But some modest form of that could happen, especially if progressives let go of dreams and focus a little more on realpolitik.

It is somewhat surprising that so soon after Obama's apparently game-changing victory in 2008, so many Democratic incumbents turn out to be facing difficult reelection campaigns in 2008. And the idea that Illinois Democrats may turn out to be too weak to hold Obama's Senate seat is a major shocker. But the Republican party does not have the stature or the policy proposals to take real advantage of the national bad mood. Any rightward shift by Republican candidates sufficient to satisfy Tea Party activists during primaries will undermine those candidates in general elections. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, looked like a goner in Nevada, until Republicans nominated the extremely right-wing Sharon Angle. The smart money now is on Reid's reelection.

But the survival of moderate Democratic incumbents in difficult races does little for progressives. It simply seems vastly superior to challenging those incumbents in Democratic primaries. It is true that a frightened and panicky electorate is hardly a good audience for complicated progressive policy campaigns. But it should be obvious that expensive campaigns aimed at punishing Democratic incumbents for apostasy are counter-productive, if not also the desperate act of a movement with few, or no, ideas.

What's left then? In "Progessive Strategy in the Obama Era," posted on the Huffington Post website, activist Deepak Bhargava argues that there are no shortcuts. The progressive challenge in a deeply divided country is to admit "that we have a long way to go to win hearts and minds" and to "put the emphasis on organizing and recruitment, and social movements."

Right now the only viable progressive movement, Bhargava says, is the immigration movement. This ignores, I think, an environmental movement that has never stopped educating and organizing on college campuses and in communities. It also glosses over the domestic and international peace mobilizations in 2002 and 2003 that delayed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The related experience of millions of young Americans who took to the streets to oppose war at that time remains important, but it must be conceded that the peace movement proved unable to capitalize on those mobilizations. It is painful to think that most Americans still do not see the logic of peace and justice arguments, and are easily persuaded that government is the problem.

I am no particular fan of organizing efforts like, say, Organizing for America, the substantially web-based effort to keep supporters engaged that grew out of the Obama campaign. But it has kept a million people engaged in political action in some form and connected to each other. This is no small accomplishment. I don't know the numbers for Robert Borosage's Campaign for America, but it, also, aspires to overcome the isolation that demobilizes progressives and to focus them on a longer-term agenda. This is key.

Unless we understand what long-term progress would look like and develop strategies and tactics that teach us patience and allow us to pursue half-a-loaf outcomes, we will founder on frustration and anger with the difficult political reality that challenges us. We will dither away millions opposing Blanche Lincoln. And we will duck the hardest issues, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for which Americans will not admit responsibility. And we will drown in a sea of crude oil, and languish in a stagnant, poorly regulated economy, and bemoan our individual fates.

Failing to Speak Out Against the War

Change we can believe in has not come to Iraq and Afghanistan



Of course, there never was a universal expectation that Barack Obama's election would end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq very quickly. But it seems likely that a good percentage of those who consider themselves fundamentally anti-war did expect that both wars would end sooner rather than later as Obama pursued a more realistic and internationalist foreign policy. I know I hoped for such things, but in the meantime, I've paid little attention to the details, like who's killing whom, who is dying, how much the wars are costing

Where is my anger over this dragging on of war? Perhaps part of the taming of my peace-movement ardor is that it has been so long since we had a president with an interest in some of the issues that are absolute priorities for me. Or at least a president with a commitment to discussion of policy. Are my appreciations of this guy simply self-deception?

We do have an apparent winding down of the war in Iraq. We do have a modest health care reform bill, better than most progressives are willing to admit, albeit far short of what it would take to get U.S. health care costs and life-expectancies in line with all other industrialized countries. The stimulus package that passed Congress in 2009 without Republican support blunted the effects of an economic meltdown that could have been even worse. The bill saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of highway construction workers and state and local government employees. It extended and increased unemployment benefits, and increased government spending on green jobs. Without the bill the current unemployment rate would be markedly higher.

But the Obama administration has been plenty disappointing, as well. The war in Afghanistan is not ending, it is ramping up. And U.S. and allied forces there are likely responsible for 40 percent or more of the thousands of civilian casualties over the last two years. U.S. aid to Afghanistan seems anything but stabilizing. In 2011, the U.S. will give Afghanistan more than $11 billion for its army and police. The amount is about 80 percent of the Afghan GDP. "It's obvious that Afghanistan is not going to be able to afford [to maintain] what we are building for them," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), quoted in "Senators Call for Changes to Troubled, Costly Afghan Police Training Program."

The Obama administration has also missed chances to help working people with mortgage cramdowns, preferring to push apparently ineffective measures that subsidize banks willing to forgive a portion of mortgage principle. The administration has shown a similar willingness to avoid confrontation with or, even, accommodate powerful interests in regard to oil and coal production, credit card regulation, climate change and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

All this is very disappointing, but two considerations make me hesitate to blast an administration that I campaigned and voted for. First, it's hard to imagine a political climate more likely to give a moderate and cerebral president pause. I would have counseled a far more aggressive approach to passing health care, challenging unions to give their full support to a tax on "cadillac" health plans and blue dog Democrats to back off opposition to a public option before Ted Kennedy died. But it would be presumptuous for me to assume that strategy would have succeeded. More likely it would have killed any chance of a bill passing this year. and Kennedy would still be gone and Scott Brown would still be the senator from Massachusetts.

Second, there has been a Democratic president in only 14 of the 42 years since 1968. Jimmy Carter, who has made a far better ex-president than president, held the office for four of those 14 years, and Bill Clinton was president for 8 of them. But Carter was a graduate of the Naval Academy, a nuclear engineer and a Southerner, someone from whom I expected neither progressivism nor peace (but who was actually more progressive and more peaceful than I expected him to be).

During the 1992 Presidential primary, Clinton very publicly left the campaign trail to return to Arkansas where, as governor, he would figuratively preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded murderer, who was reputed to have asked if he could save the dessert from his last meal until after the execution. In refusing to spare the wholly incompetent Rector, Clinton manufactured proof that he could be tough enough on crime to be president. Oddly, Clinton, who failed utterly on health care reform and worked with Republicans to "reform" welfare, led the country into a war over Kosovo that turned out to be generally popular with a good portion of the Left.

But not with me. As the political writer for the Dayton Voice, I wrote a lot about who we were killing and what (and whom) we were bombing, what it all cost in absolute dollars and what we might otherwise be doing with those billions, and who (read weapons manufacturers and military contractors) was profiting. For the Left, and even for some of my colleagues at the Voice, the situation was made more ambiguous by repeated Serbian attacks on civilian populations in Kosovo. For many, saving lives trumped the usual anti-war objections and they supported the U.S. intervention. But I didn't. And I couldn't be silent.

So, now, on the question of continuing American intervention in Iraq & Afghanistan, in the face of hundreds of billions of dollars (the total for both wars is approaching $1 trillion) worth of spending in those places, on the occasion of hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for weapons manufacturers and military contractors, why am I silent?

Iraqi and Afghani civilians are still suffering tens of thousands of casualties annually. Hundreds of Americans who enlisted because they were poor or had no work or were looking for a way to help pay for college are dying in the Iraq and Afghanistan. Why do I remain silent?

Against All Odds

America's futile campaign for military hegemony

Americans use almost five times as much energy per capita as does the average human inhabitant of the globe. Yes, the United States does produce much more per capita than the rest of the world, but not five times as much (US GDP per capita, about 32K; World GDP per capita, about 7K); and the country does not distribute its surpluses equitably, anyhow. The US also produces greenhouse gasses at a substantially higher rate per capita than the rest of the world, making it a principal culprit in climate change. (Readers can find the source for this data here.)

All of this means that a good portion of the world has no reason to be okay with the United State's disproportionate share of energy consumption, or its disproportionate contribution to environmental damage, or its lack of commitment to global equity. Of course, because the United States is also the globe's only military superpower most other countries only politely object to American greed or, even, curry favor by pretending not to notice. Only a very few countries and a few non-governmental organizations like, say al Qaeda or the Taliban, are openly hostile.

But for several reasons, the status quo is not sustainable. The U.S. is currently spending more than $1 trillion every year to maintain its mighty military machine. The country's annual budgeted spending (excluding wars and several other significant expenditures) is currently over $600 billion per year, almost 40% of budgeted global military spending, but because many national economies are industrializing and growing rapidly, the United States will find it increasingly expensive to maintain its current military advantage. And because military deficit spending is a huge contributor to the US national debt, the country will spend between $1.5 to $2 trillion over the next decade on interest payments attributable to that spending.

In decades to come more countries will become hostile to American appropriation of energy resources that need to be shared, and to American consumption habits and greenhouse gas production that have damaging environmental consequences, but the country will not be able to afford the escalations in military power and spending necessary to maintain the status quo.

Wouldn't it make more sense to recognize the inevitable, to concede that 400 million people will not be able to force 7 billion people to accept an unfair distribution of wealth and resources? Wouldn't it make more sense to reorganize our own economy to address inequity and inequality here at home and to prepare ourselves to be an equal partner in a world that will have no choice but to begin sharing both benefits and burdens equally?

Social Security Spending Helps the Economy

Military spending drives the deficit

I could have sworn that my 28th letter to the Washington Post, which follows here, would be the second one that they would publish. Alas, I was wrong, again, but it is the content that matters, not the quarrel. The letter focuses, once more, on how unhelpful it is to talk about the national debt and federal budget deficit without even acknowledging military spending. Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), also addressed the same opinion piece to which I'd responded. I've interspersed Baker's response, which ran in his weekly Beat the Press blog, in the text of my letter.

Editor,

So Robert Samuelson is calling on the Obama administration to be more open about future debt and deficit difficulties (“America’s Candor Gap,” Feb. 8), but his version of fiscal reality lacks some important details, as well. The federal government is projected to spend almost $46 trillion between 2011 and 2020, Samuelson writes, and $20 trillion will go to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Such a “…budget is mainly a vehicle for transferring income to retirees from workers, who pay most taxes,” he continues.

But as income transfers go, Samuelson’s example is relatively benign. Most of the transfer in this instance is from younger workers to older ones and most of the money transferred is spent immediately on goods and services—a reliable exchange that helps to keep the economy going. And, as economist Dean Baker and others have pointed out (see a list of CEPR's many reports about Social Security here), if the cap on Social Security and Medicare taxes is raised, higher income professionals will bear more of the tax burden, making the income transfer even more positive for the economy.

But there is a less benign income transfer that Samuelson does not even mention: military spending of more than $1 trillion annually (the sum of Defense Department spending + national security spending + military spending in other departmental budgets + supplemental war spending + interest on that portion of the national debt attributable to deficit spending on the military in previous years). In fact, 25 percent of the six to eight trillion dollars that will be spent on interest on the national debt during 2011-2020 will be attributable to previous military spending.

Discussing the country’s fiscal hemorrhage without discussing the military budget falls far short of full disclosure.

***************************************************


Readers of this blog may find Dean Baker's report, "The Social Security Shortfall and the National Defense Shortfall" of particular interest.

Baker's response to the same column by Samuelson is here. More about the rise in Pentagon spending compared to the increase in spending for Social Security is here. Finally, it is worth noting that, in the last cited piece, Baker does not use the $1 trillion+ figure for military spending that I use because he includes only budgeted spending for the Department of Defense and does not include the additional spending itemized in my letter to the Post.

Media News That Fails Us

Collaborators in the news room

In 1967, I informed my draft board that I considered both the draft, in general, and student deferments from the draft, in particular, to be immoral and that I wished to be reclassified from 2S to 1A. Ignoring my larger moral argument, the board sent me a new card with a new classification making me immediately eligible to be drafted. I then notified them that I intended to burn my card in public at an appointed time and place. Though they did not show up for the event, they did draft me shortly thereafter, whereupon I departed for Canada, the location of further adventures only tangentially related to the focus of this post.

Since those halcyon days of antiwar protest, I have fervently believed that reducing military spending and ending militarism ought to be critically important to activists regardless of their issue focus. Since the news media, historically, has been the handmaiden of American military interventions, it follows that journalism, journalistic practice and media ought to be another point of strategic concern for all issues activists. A case in point is the major media's abject failure to investigate the full story of the Bush administration's duplicity in making the case for the invasion of Iraq and to tell that story early and often, with the result that the Iraq War has gone on for a tortuously long time at a cost of nearly $1 trillion.

Writer Sebastian Jones has produced a well-researched piece, "The Lobbying-Media Complex" that adds to the indictment of cable and network news media. The story, running in The Nation, gets right to the point in its first three paragraphs, detailing how ex-Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge and retired general Barry McCaffrey appeared recently on news shows as experts on energy and the Afghanistan war, respectively, without the relevant disclosures that the two men have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from energy companies and military contractors.

To end his piece, Jones quotes Arizona State University journalism professor Aaron Brown's observations following 2008 election coverage, which featured endless line-ups and roundtables of analysts sharing little of real value: "We live in a time when there are no shortages of opinions and an incredible deficit of facts."

The point needs augmenting, I think. Having and sharing opinions, after all, seems part of human DNA, but the constitutionally protected function of news media is to uncover and share relevant information that good citizenship requires. Otherwise media is nothing but a toady for the rich and powerful, collaborating with their policy goals.

The $1 Trillion War Fraud

Feb. 10, 2003: Iraq agrees to U.S. surveillance overflights

Seven years ago today, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq was already thoroughly planned (and less than 40 days from actual launch), some 60 weapons inspectors from two international agencies were already in place there and, in a further gesture of surrender, Saddam Hussein agreed to regular U-2 spy plane missions throughout Iraqi air space (you could look it up at This Week in Peace History).

To be forced to agree to the presence of international weapons inspectors and reconnaisance overflights is an act of capitulation, but the U.S. (with cover from 40 other countries) invaded anyway. Though examples of corporate media failure to perform the basic function of investigating and exposing the activities and pretensions of government abound, the persistent and enduring journalistic failure to report the truth about the Iraq War is an act of collusion similar to the "yellow journalism" tactics of William Randolph Hearst's New York Morning Journal, which diligently promoted the Spanish-American War.

In the upshot, the Iraq War, the third longest U.S. war ever (the Afghanistan War is longer, the Vietnam War longest), a product of the de facto alliance of duplicitous government, collaborating media and a rapacious military-industrial complex, has cost the country over $700 billion to date; that cost continues to rise at a rate exceeding $100,000 per minute (about the same rate as the Afghanistan War--to watch the cost of both wars rise, check out this web page of the National Priorities Project). Together, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds $1 trillion; about the amount an effective and urgently needed stimulus package would cost. It ought to be obvious that peace and economic justice are two sides of an ideal coin, but harder to arrive at when the media itself is not interested.

Military Spending Tsunami Threatens Social Programs

Let's discuss this, says the Left

In "No Defense for This Budget" Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel criticizes President Obama's proposal to impose a freeze on all federal discretionary spending except for core defense spending, which will be allowed to increase by two-plus percent. Specific spending for war in Afghanistan and Iraq will increase even more.

"Exempting all security-related expenditures from common sense cuts will have serious consequences for almost everything the government does--from job creation, poverty reduction and alternative energy development, to aid for cash-strapped state and local governments," Vanden Heuvel wrote. Since the freeze in all other discretionary spending means actual cuts in social programs, Obama's proposal means less funding will be available to address the social needs exacerbated by The Great Recession.

In January, Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.) wrote a piece that the rising federal deficit means that the U.S. cannot consistently fund social services without cutting the defense budget by 25 percent. That piece also ran in the Nation and can be found here.

Given the name-calling, general dissing and overall disrespect that characterizes a third to a half of the comments responding to Vanden Heuvel's piece, it is probably a very good thing that there is no comment chain following Frank's article; that chain would have been longer and much more vituperative. Frank, after all, is not only a New England liberal, he is also openly gay. The virtual venom coming from the libertarians. conservatives and troglodytes who police the Nation's website would probably have turned the magazine's server into a quivering shadow of its former self. But the thing is, Frank is calling for a large cut that would be phased in over time. Enough time to create good new jobs for workers who lose there's when weapons plants get shuttered.

Nor is Vanden Heuvel a raving left-winger. "Right now, for those who understand what's at stake with these budget priorities, it's high time to tell your legislators and the White House that if there is indeed going to be any freeze on spending, the exorbitant defense budget should be included in that," she concludes. That's pretty mild stuff in a country driving tanks toward bankruptcy.

One Day, A Non-militaristic Military

Adm. Mullen says let openly gay soldiers serve

No one wants to be regarded as a complete loon. Accordingly, despite my sweeping anti-militarist condemnations of U.S. militarism and our bloated military budget (and weapons industry), I wish to stipulate that, yes, we do need a military. Though the one we have is probably too large by half, it should also be stipulated that the one we need ought to be competitive--larger, for instance, than the Vatican's Swiss Guard, but smaller, say, than the combined military of all Europe.

Further, if we are going to have one, the more it looks like America, the more appropriate (and less militaristic) it will be. It's also worth noting that we may very well be moving toward that ideal. Yesterday, Armed Forces chief Mike Mullen told Congress that it's time to do away with "don't ask, don't tell" and allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Though Mullen's statement will certainly heat up one front in the culture wars, it is good news; progressives should hear it as a call to action. Though it may be premature, someone ought to begin taking nominations for the first female chair of the joint chiefs.

D-E-F-E-N-S-E Spells Predictable Assault on Better Budget Priorities

No progressive budget without cutting military spending

Winding up to blog about federal spending, in general, and military spending in particular. Two weeks ago, I was on Michael James' Saturday morning radio show, broadcasting from the Heartland Cafe, for about twenty minutes. It was fun, but not nearly long enough for big fun. Michael and I connected briefly on a couple of things. Most important, as the show wrapped up, I laid out my best "old man" advice for progressives working on specific causes. Paraphrased, it went something like this: "Whether activists are focused on health care, affordable housing, public education or anything else, everyone ought to include military spending on their priority list. It is difficult to make substantial progress on those other issues as long as militarism and military spending shape the budget to the tune of $1 trillion plus annually."

Here are some websites and posts I'm reading and will use as a source for a longer post on military spending:

The Security Spending Primer from the National Priorities Project. The primer was developed based on the 2009/2010 federal budget, so some of it is about a year old. But the principles and perspective are absolutely current and appropriate to any discussion of the US military budget.

A liberal, broad-brush perspective on the need for Congress and the President to exercise greater control over the relentless growth of tax expenditures, written by Len Burman, a former assistant Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The article ran in today's Washington Post and is available here.

An article in today's Post (about the recent firing of the general in charge of "the Pentagon's most expensive weapons system."The story, "Defense secretary Gates fires general in charge of Joint Strike Fighter program," is here.

A good piece by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, is here.

The Healthcare Bullet That Wounds Us All

Mom scrapes by and yet...

I just spent a week in Chicago with my mom. She was diagnosed with cancer in December of 2006, about six months before Marrianne, Brendan and I completed our move from Chicago to DC. Mom will be 85 in May, but considering her age and her disease she's doing all right. She still has all her marbles and she is still living at home on her own.

Her cancer treatment hasn't been debilitating; all along it has been aimed at slowing the spread of the disease and maintaining her quality of life. A chemo assault on the cancer, aimed at eliminating it, might have shortened her life, and almost certainly would have had side effects severe enough to rob her of much of the energy she has invested in living the life she wanted these last three years.

But Mom's had a bad run for the last couple of months. She fell at home and hit her head once, suffered through spells of dizziness and nausea, and through periods of high blood pressure and high anxiety about what was happening to her. Thankfully, the last week was pretty good for her. I don't think that my presence had all that much to do with her gains in strength and appetite; my sisters Dale and Teri and brother Mark had already been on the spot during the more difficult time before I arrived.

Still, it is clear that Mom was still reeling and full of distress while I was there. Ordinarily, she's both a gregarious friend and an intensely private person. When she's feeling good, she's very clear about boundaries. The daytime is for chores and for socializing. The nighttime is private time, rest and recharge time. She likes to see her children, her grandchildren and her toddler great-grandchild, and she loves them all best when the visits are short. Most times when I come in from DC, she gives me a big hug when I arrive and, 48 hours later, begins wondering when I'm going to leave. But this visit I was still somewhat welcome a week after I got there; that's how bad she has been feeling.

There's no question aging is tough. So is being so sick that your life doesn't feel like your own anymore. Mom hates those feelings and hates being dependent, but she's luckier than most people her age and most people with her diagnosis. She's got her problems, but she's financially secure and she has first rate health insurance that doesn't cost her anything. As the widow of an Illinois state legislator who served in that role for 14 years, she has Cadillac healthcare coverage and a decent pension. Of course, she also has Social Security, Medicare (which pretty much guarantees that holes in her healthcare coverage are plugged), and what remains of an originally sizable payment from my dad's life insurance coverage. As a result, there are some things she simply doesn't have to worry about.

But most people her age have only Medicare coverage and, by itself, that has enormous holes. And many people with diagnoses as severe, or worse, live their lives with poor and inadequate healthcare. They may also live in substandard housing and have to scrape by making the choice to pay some bills and ignore others. Some are elderly, sick, homeless and hungry.

I suppose I could do a little research and come up with some estimate of how many millions of people are worse off, in many cases, much worse off than Mom, but I'm just going to say there are millions in that position. And in the best possible scenario, those millions of people are loved and cared for by millions more who undoubtedly are stretched financially, emotionally and physically in the process. These people, dependent on others for basics they cannot themselves provide, and their caregivers, live in communities and neighborhoods where still more millions are witnesses to their need and must themselves decide whether and how much to help.

The social ramifications of witnessing needs and being unable to respond adequately are huge. When such a story is repeated over and over again the social consequences of our collective helplessness in the face of injustice are almost too much to bear. I think those consequences include widespread alienation, shame and anger. We cannot bear to keep looking at what we cannot fix and so we look away. But though we may not acknowledge that we have looked away, we must do something.

One familiar option is blaming the victim. The social desperation around us is, for example, the fault of those who suffer. They were not prudent or wise or diligent or independent; they are or were lazy, unmotivated and otherwise undeserving. It is they who are bankrupting are healthcare system, creating trillion dollar deficits, weakening our country.

Never mind that our healthcare system is what it is, a disaster for some of us, a chronic problem for most of us, because it is a profit opportunity for a very few of us. U.S. healthcare is, currently, just another mechanism for concentrating wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of Americans. Our trillion dollar plus budget deficit is arguably as connected to rampant American militarism, to annual military spending that exceeds a trillion dollars (Pentagon spending plus spending by other departments plus off-budget spending plus interest on that portion of the debt attributable to past military spending), as it is to any other cause. Congressional leaders, most particularly Republicans, and tea party organizers alike, are better at finding ways to mask our shame and express our frustration at our helplessness than they are at addressing our fundamental problems. Democrats, who this past year have managed to squander every apparent political advantage, now appear ready to abandon healthcare reform altogether. This will not be a tragedy for my mom individually, who will address her own challenges with the relatively mighty set of tools at her disposal, but she will suffer her share of our collective failure, if we cannot pass even a sorry compromise of the separate bills that have already passed the House and Senate.

War As Profit Opportunity

Why we need a military draft, why we won't get one

On Monday, Fresh Air host Terry Gross introduced an interview (on-line here) about civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan by quoting a severely injured contractor who said, "It's almost like we are an invisible, discardable army."

This particular contractor got both legs blown off by a roadside bomb and subsequently discovered that he was not entitled to any sort of federal compensation for his loss or for his health care. He had to fight his private insurance company to get a shot at prosthetic legs. I didn't hear all of the interview with reporter T. Christian Miller, so I don't know if the conversation pursued the deeper point that while the US maintains both an all-volunteer army and a private mercenary army, war becomes a profit opportunity that is largely shielded from effective political opposition.

Here we are, involved in two of the longest wars in American history, at a cost to the federal government of over one trillion dollars and climbing, with minimal effective public and Congressional opposition to those wars. The Vietnam War, in its many phases--military advisers and trainers, CIA mercenary armies, the mobilization of a fighting force over 600,000 strong, and secret bombings and incursions in Cambodia and Laos--was longer and killed far more American soldiers than have been killed to date in Iraq and Afghanistan (more information here and here). The Vietnam War also killed more civilians than the current wars have killed so far, but the difference is not worth applauding.

But here's the thing: the Vietnam War was pursued by two presidents in the face of relentlessly increasing public opposition. Though that opposition did not end the war in a timely way, say, 1969 or '70, rather than 1975, active resistance and public disapproval forced both Presidents Johnson and Nixon to conduct portions of the war in secrecy and otherwise compromise war aims. Arguably, public and Congressional opposition is also forcing compromise on President Obama, but it seems more likely that weapons manufacturers and military contractors are currently forcing political compromises that will prolong those wars.

Indeed, the influence of the military-industrial complex might right now be at an all-time high, at least in proportion to the influence of the public and anti-war organizations. In each of the six complete election cycles since 1998, the contributions of corporations in the war business have climbed 10 to 20 percent, with the exception of the 2008 cycle when the increase was
more than 20 percent (go here to explore the ugly truth, note that the 2010 cycle promises to break all previous records). In a 1997 article, "Guns r' Us" in In These Times, a magazine I worked at for two years, writer Martha Honey recounts the many ways that weapons manufacturers seek to increase markets for their products. Ten+ years later, the situation is worse.

Of course, anti-war opposition has limited some of the options of those who would rather pursue the current wars more vigorously. But the practices of maintaining an all-volunteer army, and employing contractors to reduce the direct cost of war, have obvious roots in the lessons that political, military and corporate chiefs learned from the civil unrest and mass opposition that they confronted during the Vietnam War.

First, make sure that large numbers of people do not serve in the front-lines in a manner that is obviously against their will. This lesson was initially applied with the end of active conscription in December 1972. To ensure an adequate supply of volunteers, regular pay for members of the armed forces was increased significantly in 1971. By itself, the pay increase would not have been sufficient, but by the mid-'70s, the economy began to stagnate and the real value of workers pay began to drop; to drop far enough, in fact, that many women not in the workforce at the time, began to work in order to maintain household income. Thus began a cascade of economic changes (including relative reductions in unemployment compensation, financial aid for higher education, cuts in welfare payments and childcare) that has often made enlistment in the all-volunteer army an economically coerced decision. This state of affairs has made it much more difficult for many working people to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the use of private companies providing personnel for security and other non-military services (like transport, food prep and garbage services) has helped to reduce war visibility and exported some of the costs of the war onto the shoulders of those least able to afford it and powerless to do much about it. These are the individuals who work under contract with the Blackwaters and Brown & Roots who pull down tens of millions of dollars annually from the Pentagon. These individuals, like the man quoted at the beginning of Fresh Air, are among those coerced by economic conditions at home to serve in harm's way abroad. And they do so, largely at their own risk.

I started at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1965. The spring before I got to Ann Arbor, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the first teach-in against the war. At the time, there was still very little public opposition to the war, and little need for the military to resort to an active draft to maintain the then relatively low force levels in Vietnam. But Ann Arbor and the U of M were a center of anti-war fever and it didn't take very long for me to succumb to the virus. In point of fact, focused as I was on what could be learned outside of class, I quickly lost interest in maintaining my student status. I opposed the war and, soon after, began active opposition to the draft.

Even then it was obvious that some companies would profit from the war. President Eisenhower, soon to leave office, had given a speech in 1961 warning the country of the existence of a "military industrial complex" with interests separate from a broader national interest. And, as the Vietnam War heated up and middle-class students enrolled at colleges and universities escaped service, it also became obvious that the brunt of war fighting and dying was falling largely on minorities and the white working class. In that context, maintaining a student deferment became a moral conundrum that troubled many young men who had such deferments, and troubled many working people who saw family members fighting and dying in Vietnam while others went to college.

The obvious solution to those who would prefer to fight wars less encumbered by controversy would be to reduce the flash points, and nothing flashes quite like being forced to leave home to fight and die. That is why there will be no draft. And the absence of a draft is also one of the reasons why obvious elements of economic justice, like a reasonable minimum wage, an adequate supply of affordable housing, and universal health care are not a part of this democracy.

Economic Justice and Military Spending Cannot Coexist

The Fight We Must Win


Our next door neighbor's adult son has moved in with her. Two years ago, just before it was clear that the economic poop had well and truly hit the fan, he had moved out to a place of his own. Now, having lost his job, he's back. They're being careful with each other right now, as opposed to two years ago when we would hear them arguing almost nightly and it was clear that he had to move on and that they were out of patience with their shared living arrangements. I presume that it is only a matter of time before they begin finding the same old faults with each other.

Another friend has been having difficulties with his pre-teen son who suffers from a variety of emotional disorders and learning disabilities. He lives in a state that has never fully funded the service his son requires, but in the last year those services have been rationed more thoroughly than before and he finds that his family cannot get all the help that his son needs. He is considering moving to another state, but which one is flush with cash and fully funding the array of mental health, educational and social services he is seeking?

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), 26 states that had plugged deficits at the beginning of this fiscal year, have discovered that they haven't plugged enough. New gaps have opened up and new cuts must be made before the end of this fiscal year. Almost all those states and at least a dozen must make further budget cuts in the next fiscal year, as well. (See CBPP's report here).

Given that federal stimulus spending helped many states fill recent deficits, and that there is no new stimulus spending on the horizon, it seems pretty obvious that state spending for health care, education, highways, public transportation, housing and emergency services for the poor and the unemployed will drop, even as the demands increase.

The $787 billion stimulus package passed in February has saved or created 640,000 jobs, CNN reported in October. But the economy has lost 7.3 million jobs since December 2007 (read the Bloomberg.com report here). With $1 trillion+ federal budget deficits, steady right-wing criticism of the first stimulus (second, countin the even more feeble Bush stimulus package), and uncertainty over the cost of health care reform, it will take a great deal of political courage for Congress and the President to propose and pursue further stimulus spending large enough to help.

But there's the rub. At this point in time, in a country with significant unmet social needs that is also fighting two (long) wars, any effective political leadership will have to be courageous. So, assuming the existence of such a quality, I once again offer military spending as the pot of silver (if not gold) to be placed on the table and redistributed according to the real needs of Americans, rather than the needs of empire.

As frequently happens, I cite the ever reliable Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) for some of the facts that best support an argument for cutting military spending. "... the standard economic models that project job loss from efforts to stem global warming also project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to 2 million jobs in the long run," Baker wrote in a recent column that appeared on-line at truthout.org.

The calculations Baker references are based on projections covering a 20-year period, so the actual current job losses from the military spending increases since 2000 are certainly lower, in the area, say, of half to three-quarters of a million jobs. But if the US had been saving those jobs over the last seven years, rather than bleeding them away, it would have had the impact of another stimulus bill; and likely a timelier and more effective one.

Unfortunately, President Obama has recently signed a defense spending bill that increases the military budget by about five percent. Though it is the accumulating, down-the-road impact of such spending increases that do the most harm, even a one percent decrease annually in the next three military budgets would have a small, positive and growing impact by 2012 and beyond, providing new stimulus to the domestic economy in the amount of, perhaps, $90 billion (the estimated total of annual one percent cuts, plus three to five percent in avoided annual increases). But the longer-term political impact of such cuts matters more than the immediate social benefits.

Winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will involve serious political fights. Resistance will come from members of Congress with large military bases and large numbers of workers in military production living in their districts. Weapons manufacturers and military contractors already spend huge and corrupting amounts of cash on lobbying and political contributions. But as the costs of empire and war erode our domestic economy and our manufacturing base, there is nothing to be gained by avoiding political fights about the direction of spending and everything to win.

The federal budget picks winners and losers and has been picking the military-industrial complex and corporate interests to win since the 1950s. Beginning the fight to pick new winners now--American workers, the domestic economy, social justice, et al.--is a surer way to reelect Obama and progressive Democrats in 2010 and 2012. Small gains now in cutting military spending will set the stage for bigger fights, larger cuts and, ultimately, peace dividends and economic justice in the years beyond 2012.