Deficit spending for war is still deficit spending

When Russia made its fatal foreign policy blunder in 1979 by invading Afghanistan, soon followed by the Iranian hostage crises, President Jimmy Carter went down to defeat in one of the greatest incumbent electoral college massacres in American history as a result of his perceived impotence in the face of these “crises”.  One of the many destructive fallacies of the chest-thumping Reagan Era and beyond was the Washington “bi-partisan” consensus that wars and other military spending somehow transcend fiscal restraints and exist on their own astral plane.

Reagan got a Dixiecrat Congress to double military spending at a time when the U.S. was winding down the Cold War and not engaged in “war” anywhere. Meanwhile, Reagan got the Dixiecrat Congress to cut domestic spending - we just couldn't afford those costly social programs. Reagan pretended the two things were totally unrelated, and the Dixiecrat Congress merrily went along.

Maybe the Democrats are finally catching on. In June, Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois posted this stark news:

“This month, we mark the seventh anniversary of President Bush's declaration of ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq, yet five American soldiers have been killed there in May alone. Iraqis went to the polls nearly three months ago, but the political system remains so fractured that no party has been able to piece together a coalition. There are some indications that sectarian violence is again on the rise.”

The only clear winner of the Iraq war is Iran. Their mortal enemy, Saddam Hussein, was taken out, thanks to our state of the art military, and Iran’s fellow Shiites are in charge. Iran has therefore been emboldened to the point of threatening the stability of the region and the world with its growing nuclear capability.

And then there's Afghanistan, which, after nearly a decade of war, represents the longest continuous U.S. military engagement ever. Even the non-partisan Congressional Research Service recently declared the situation in Afghanistan as a "deteriorating security situation and no comprehensive political outcome yet in sight." The commanding general, Stanley McChrystal was ignominiously forced into early retirement.

Schakowsky noted that on June 20, 2010, we would pass the $1,000,000,000,000 mark on Bush's wars. That is 1 followed by 12 zeros, a trillion not a mere billion dollars.

Hundreds of thousands dead, former respected generals sacked and no good news in sight. President Obama is getting us out of Iraq. He is not getting us out of Afghanistan. Earlier this month, we also passed the grim milestone of 1000 dead Americans in Afghanistan. Now McChrystal is gone, Pettraeus is in! For what?

It would be easy and obvious to point to all the different productive ways we could have spent that $1,000,000,000,000. To fund state of the art health care for everyone or mass transit or research and development into clean, renewable energy sources, or simply to ensure that all Americans have adequate food and housing, and that all children are well-educated, are all sadly just “liberal” fantasies. We learned from the “healthcare” debate that taking even incremental steps on any of those human issues requires the political version of a bloodbath. But funding actual bloodbaths will get a rubber stamp and hardly requires any debate whatsoever.

Sadly, those have become our national political values..

$1,000,000,000,000. For what?

Ever since, the Democratic leadership and the big Democratic constituency groups have largely collaborated in maintaining the destructive fiction that we can shovel tax dollars to war and to its companion corporate welfare called "defense spending" without having any impact on our ability to provide quality education, health care, effective enforcement of environmental, civil rights, and worker safety laws, and other basic services to our citizens that are taken for granted by the citizens of every other industrialized country.

But maybe - maybe - that destructive connivance is coming to an end.

Weeks ago, House Appropriations Committee Chair David Obey told the White House that he was going to sit on the Administration's request for $33 billion more for pointless killing in Afghanistan until the White House acted on House Democratic demands to unlock federal money to aid the states in averting a wave of layoffs of teachers and other public employees.

Obey didn't just link the two issues rhetorically; he linked them with the threat of effective action.

At last, at long last. Unfortunately, the 33 billion allotment was passed anyway without any kind of debate about “adding to the deficit”.

But why did David Obey stand alone?

Perhaps, behind the scenes, the big Democratic constituency groups are pulling for Obey.

But you wouldn't know it from any public manifestation. Why? This should be a "teachable moment," an opportunity to mobilize the majority of America's working families to push to redirect resources from futile wars of empire and the corporate welfare of the "base military budget" to human needs at home and abroad. Where is the public mobilization of the Democratic constituency groups?

If we could shorten the Afghanistan war by a month, that would free up the $10 billion that Obey is asking for domestic spending. Rep. Jim McGovern's bill requiring a timetable for military redeployment from Afghanistan currently has 94 co-sponsors in the House. Five Ohio Congressman are among those 94 co-sponsors, including Dennis Kucinich, Marcia Fudge and Mary Jo Kilroy. If McGovern's bill became law, it would surely save the taxpayers at least $10 billion. Why aren't the big Democratic constituency groups aggressively backing the McGovern bill, demanding that it be attached to the war supplemental?

This isn't just a question of missing an opportunity. There is a freight train coming called "deficit reduction." If the big Democratic constituency groups continue to sit on their hands on the issue of military spending, then we can predict what the cargo of that freight train is likely to be: cut Social Security benefits, cut Medicare benefits, raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare, cut domestic spending for enforcing environmental regulations and civil rights and worker safety. Already these very list of items are on the Republican agenda for this fall.

Ending the war in Afghanistan with a timetable for withdrawal would likely save hundreds of billions of dollars. That's money that could be used to prevent cuts from jobs and services at home. After years of waffling, the influential Washington Post has recently called for a withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Ask any economist at any local university, Cleveland State, Case Western Reserve or Kent, and you will get nearly unanimous opinions that excessive military spending drains not adds to the economy. Yet, as recently as four weeks ago, the Editorial page of the Plain Dealer (Kevin O’Brian) claimed defense spending had no ill effect on the economy. Since when did the Plain Dealer editorial page become expert in American economic theory? Of course O'Brian cited no leading economist supporting his bold claim.

And we can cut the "base military budget" - the money we are purportedly spending to prepare for wars in the future, whether those wars have any measurable probability of occurring or not - without having any impact on our security.

The president's Deficit Reduction Commission will recommend a package of cuts to Congress in December for an up-or-down vote. Will the Deficit Reduction Commission recommend real cuts to military spending?