So what did happen to the "peace dividend?"
Well, first of all I think we really have to define "peace dividend." Often times people say that a peace dividend is leftover money when you cancel a weapons system, or money that the military ends up not spending. We define peace dividend somewhat differently; our approach is that the peace dividend comes when you engage in a reprioritization of federal spending in total. It's not just leftover money, it is in fact a conscious decision to invest public resources into programs that directly benefit those who have been hit the hardest by the downturn in the economy and the shift in federal spending priorities.
So the peace dividend would be additional money to meet the needs in housing, health care, education, infrastructure repair, environmental protection - all those types of issues. It would be funded by taking a realistic look at what the US security needs are, and budgeting the Pentagon at a level that provided the needed funds to protect the coastal boundaries of the US.
How do we go about focusing the public's attention on such an effort; in otherwords, what have we on the left not done that we need to be doing?
One of the things that the movement hasn't done recently is to challenge the general assumption that the US should be able to fight two and a half wars at the same time. That's the theoretical underpinning of this current level of spending. Before the Gulf War, people in this country felt that we were spending too much money on the military; people called for major reductions in military spending because there was no enemy, nobody to fight. There was no justification for military expenditures that totalled more than the country spends on all of its domestic programs combined.
We have to get back to raising this issue. We have to clearly demonstrate to the American people that the real culprit behind the deficit, the real reason why the country is in a financial crisis, is not because money was given to "poor people on welfare" or spent on social programs, but because of the massive military buildup under the Reagan administration, and the continued high levels of military spending, especially in the face of the lack of real enemies. The country is still engaged in that buildup, which cranks up the deficit and continues to waste taxpayer resources.
I was going over the federal budget outlays the other day, and took note of the fact that the entitlement programs that the right targets as "welfare," such as AFDC and the food stamp program, amount to no more than 6% of the US budget. If you ask most people how much they think we spend, they usually say around 50%.
Right, and that's a carefully crafted deception that's been floated by those who are in favor of reducing domestic spending, in order to create the myth that the country's going broke spending money on programs that provide services for poor people. So people believe that, and that enables the right to direct their anger at the poor instead of where it should really be targeted, the corporations that are reaping monumental amounts of profits from their relationship from the federal government.
And you have 265 billion dollars that goes to the military, yet the families of military personnel are forced to go on food stamps to make ends meet. So even when the money goes to the military, it's not going to the people in the military, it's going to the military contractors who are simply using the military as a conduit for that money.
So if we had the opportunity, where would we start? People want to know what you will do tomorrow; what do we say to them when they ask us how we expect to start shifting this money around?
We can start with something simple; the US has an entire network of overseas military bases. The question is "are these bases still needed?" There is no need for the US to maintain this massive network of military bases in Europe any longer. The situation in Bosnia is a clear example of the fact that the network set up after WWII to deal with the "communist threat" from the East is at best ineffective, at worst useless in terms of dealing with the contemporary realities that confront the European continent at this point in time. So why are we spending billions of dollars to maintain this network? It can be and should be shut down. A similar situation applies to Korea, and the other bases around the world.
The Center for Defense Information recently did an analysis of the current military budget, and they came the conclusion that the US could be effectively defended for 100 million dollars instead of the 265 billion we now spend. The Brookings Institute said that defence could be cut by 50% in five years. Anybody who takes a realistic look at the justification for this continued high level of military spending sees that the money to actually provide coastal protection of the United States is nowhere near the amount that's being budgeted. The big money is put aside for the military contractors to do research and development on weapons systems that are no longer needed, such as the Seawolf sub or the B-2 bomber. They say they can't convert because it would put people of work. But you could pay people the same amount of money, they could go back to school, then cut out the amount that's being pocketed by the contractors, and you'd still save tons of money. Workers would be getting paid while they're being retrained, and it would cost the taxpayers less than it does now.
How do people of color fit into the conversion issue, and what should the left be doing in that regard?
The key thing is that the left has got to take its energy, its resources to grassroots struggles that are in existence, and to work as junior partners with people who are struggling on a day to day basis. Provide support, allow people to develop their own struggles, serve as a resource; that creates a sense of solidarity that's important to expanding the struggle. Too often the left simply looks at people of color to flock to the issues that they consider to be paramount; what people have to do is go to the places where day to day struggles around survival issues are taking place, and serve in apprenticeship to learn from those folks a different aspect of what it's like to struggle against the forces of capital.
Following that, once you have built alive citizen relationships, then you can go on to form coalitions. The work of those coalitions has to be inclusive so that it deals with the issues that directly impact on a majority of people, be they people of color, be they poor people of all colors. There are issues that cut across the board, and that's where attention needs to be focused.
Speaking of recent political issues, the Republicans have recently co-opted the word empowerment for their own use. Given the role of real empowerment, as well as democratic accountability, as a means to bring about an economic conversion which will serve the majority of Americans, how do react to their use of that word?
Their issue of empowerment really focuses on the idea that it's time that people stepped away from utilizing government funds of government programs. They have no problem.... they don't talk about empowerment when corporations cut deals that guarantee them profits, when companies move their operations from low paid work areas in the South to even lower paid areas in the Caribbean or in Asia, or when they get federal money to help them leave the country. This is a game that's being played by the Right; what they want to do is to create the mindset that people should run screaming from the government like a vampire from a crucifix, while at the same time they are enriching themselves at the public trough.
The whole push for privatization, the whole increase in military spending, all of that is linked to their ability to tap into public resources. So what they want to do is to encourage people to do things like the Points of Light Foundation, or anything that says that you don't have a right, and that you should run away from attempts to demand that the government provide services for people. These people are taxpayers, they've worked hard, and they have a right to demand certain things from their government. Now that doesn't mean that people shouldn't be creative or have initiative and do things on their own, but they should remember that they have a perfect right to say that the government should be providing certain services.
The Right will trumpet empowerment when somebody says, "Well, I'm going out and start a private school because the government's not doing what it should with the public schools." But the real issue is that the majority of children of working class people and poor people will be in the public schools, so what we should be fighting for is to make sure that what goes on in the public schools is on target, and is fulfilling the needs that these young people have, as opposed to being caught up in all of the hoopla about either vouchers or private or home schooling, because that's simply a way of moving money from the public treasury into private pockets.
They don't talk about real empowerment, which is when people struggle to cut military spending because they want more money spent on social programs in the midst of an economy that continues to take more and more victims; when people begin to demand that the government step in to provide jobs during this "jobless recovery." The Republicans don't talk about empowerment in those terms because that strikes at the very nature of the system that they want to establish.
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