Third World America (5 page)
Read Third World America Online
Authors: Arianna Huffington
The needs of the past and the demands of the present exert a powerful pull on our attention, while the future doesn’t have many advocates—it’s always something we can get to later. There once was a time when we could get away with pushing our problems down the road, secure that our reserves would always bail us out. There was a strong safety net to catch those who fell through the cracks. Well, those reserves are gone now and the safety net is frayed and full of holes.
Another warning sign that we are on the way to becoming a Third World nation is the trillions of dollars we continue to spend fighting unnecessary wars and building ever more powerful weaponry while our people here at home do without.
You want Third World thinking? How about North Korea joining the nuclear club while its people starve? Since the fall of
the Roman Empire, one of the hallmarks of nations in decline has been increased military spending at the expense of other essential priorities. Think of the Soviets trying to match America, nuclear warhead for nuclear warhead.
Historian Arnold Toynbee believed that civilizations almost always die from suicide, not by murder.
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That is, our future is dependent on the choices we make and the things we decide to value.
Partisanship pop quiz time.
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See if you can identify the bleeding-heart liberal who said this: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Noam Chomsky? Michael Moore? Bernie Sanders?
No, it was that unrepentant lefty five-star general Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953, just a few months after taking office—a time when the economy was booming and unemployment was at 2.7 percent.
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Yet today, while America’s economy sputters down the road to recovery and the middle class struggles to make ends meet—with more than twenty-six million people unemployed or underemployed and record numbers of homes being lost to foreclosure—the “guns versus butter” argument isn’t even part of the national debate.
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Of course, today, the argument might be more accurately framed as “ICBM nukes, predator drones, and missile-defense shields versus jobs, affordable college, decent schools, foreclosure prevention, and fixing the gaping holes in our social safety net.”
We hear endless talk in Washington about belt tightening
and deficit reduction, but hardly a word about whether the $161 billion being spent in 2010 alone to fight wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq might be better spent helping embattled Americans here at home.
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Indeed, during his State of the Union speech in January 2010, President Obama proposed freezing all discretionary government spending for three years—but exempted military spending, even though the defense budget has ballooned over the last ten years.
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According to defense analyst Lawrence Korb, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, the baseline defense budget has increased by 50 percent since 2000.
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Over that same period, nondefense discretionary spending increased less than half that much.
In fact, as Katherine McIntire Peters reported on
GovernmentExecutive.com
, President Obama is “on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II.”
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In that time we’ve had Korea, Vietnam, the massive military buildup under Reagan, and Bush’s funded-by-tax-cuts invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the most trying economic times since the Great Depression, Obama’s outgunning them all.
This is not about ignoring the threats to our national security. And it’s certainly not about pacifism. To quote then Illinois state senator Barack Obama in 2002, “I don’t oppose all wars.…
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What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Iraq was never about making us safer. And the original rationale for going to war in Afghanistan—taking on al-Qaeda—has been accomplished, with fewer than one hundred members of the group still operating in the country.
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The irrationality of continuing to spend precious resources on wars we shouldn’t be fighting is
all the more galling when juxtaposed with our urgent and growing needs at home.
According to the
Los Angeles Times
, before the summer 2010 surge in Kandahar (cost: $33 billion)—a surge the military claimed was as important to Afghanistan as securing Baghdad was to Iraq—Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen told an Afghan leader that the goals of the surge, as well as defeating the Taliban, included, in the words of the
Times
, “reducing corruption, making local government work and, eventually, providing jobs.”
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Talk about “mission creep”!
Is that why we are still fighting a war there nine years later, spending American blood and treasure—to provide jobs for the people of Kandahar? It’s like a very bad joke: “The good news is, the Obama administration is ramping up a multibillion-dollar program that will create a host of new jobs. The bad news is, you have to move to Kandahar to apply.”
The Bush-era rationale for these overseas misadventures was always “We’ll fight ’em over there, so we don’t have to fight ’em over here.” Today, it seems, we’re fighting to create jobs for ’em over there, while we don’t have enough jobs for our people over here. At a time when so many middle-class families are reeling from the economic crisis—and our country is facing the harsh one-two punch of more people in need at the exact moment social services are being slashed to the bone—that seems like the most perverted of priorities.
Berkeley professor Ananya Roy defines the troubled state of America not so much as a fiscal crisis as “a crisis of priorities.”
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And Representative Barney Frank, who has been one of the few in Washington arguing for the need to cut military spending, says that our military overcommitments have “devastated
our ability to improve our quality of life through government programs.”
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Looking at the money we’ve spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, Frank says, “We would have had $1 trillion now to help fix the economy and do the things for our people that they deserve.”
The National Priorities Project (NPP) provides a useful online tool that brings this budget trade-off to life by showing—specifically—all the things that could have been done with the money spent on Afghanistan and Iraq. For example, according to the NPP, since 2003, more than $747 billion of taxpayer money has been spent in Iraq.
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That could have provided:
- 115 million people with low-income health care for a year;
- or 98 million places in a Head Start program;
- or funding for more than 11 million elementary school teachers;
- or 11 million police officers;
- or 13 million firefighters;
- or 94.7 million college scholarships.
While unaffordable college tuition prevents many qualified young people from achieving the American Dream, we are continuing to spend billions on outdated and redundant military defense programs, including pricey relics of the Cold War, such as the F-22 fighter, the Osprey transport helicopter, and America’s hugely expensive nuclear triad—bombers,
submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles—designed to annihilate a Soviet empire that no longer exists.
If we don’t come to our senses and get our deeply misguided priorities back in order, America could find itself a superpower turned Third World nation—dead from our own hand.
BRENDA CARTER
I was a manager of information systems at the same company for thirteen years. I thought my job was secure. All the purchasing approval and budget monitoring went through me. I attended weekly board meetings. I was well liked.
One day the chief operating officer gave me a high-priority project. I never suspected I would be laid off the next day. When I arrived and said my “good mornings,” my co-workers in finance and administration looked a little sad and they did not respond to my greeting in the normal fashion. I shrugged it off, went to my office, and put down my briefcase.
My phone rang. It was my boss. He told me to come to his office. He told me I was being laid off due to budget constraints. He said he was sorry but his hands were tied. He told me that since I was a longtime employee I would not be escorted immediately out of the building, and I could take as much time as I needed to remove my belongings.
Since I was at my office most hours of the day, I’d made it feel like home, with plants, pictures, and other personal items. As the manager of information systems, I was the one called to terminate employee user names and passwords. To allow me to clear my office knowing I had access to that information told me my boss trusted me and didn’t want me to be humiliated in front of my co-workers.
Imagine getting up every day for thirteen years to go to the same job and suddenly that part of your life just ceases. I cried and cried and cried. I just could not believe it. I did the jobs of
three people. How will they make it without me? Some days I did not get out of bed. I wondered why I wasn’t given the option of demotion. My seniority should have counted for something.
Now I spend my days searching for work. It’s hard to compete for jobs at my age. I hate putting my previous salary and age on applications. They are red flags. I developed a wall of rejection letters. I took it down because it started to depress me.
To broaden my opportunities and keep my mind fresh, I began taking technology courses in college. I also passed the real estate exam. I’m trying to make it by any means necessary, even selling my homemade candy door-to-door. The candy sold well, but it takes gas to travel. I have had only good feedback about the candy so I’ll continue to pursue this dream, moving my sales online.
I applied for unemployment, and am back in the role of housewife. My children are adults now. They think the world of me. They cannot believe I have been out of work for so long. In their minds I was the one who was going to be a millionaire. I sometimes feel that I let them down.
I have been out of work since 2007. After all the years I have worked and raised a family, I’m now dealing with threats to turn off my utilities and repossess my car.
What have I learned from being unemployed? That it’s frustrating and demoralizing. I have learned that I don’t want to be dependent on a Congress that obviously does not have America’s best interests at heart. I have learned to have more compassion for people who are in this situation.
I know there are many stories out there and mine is not the worst, but at times it feels like it is. It’s like waking up in the
same nightmare every day with no way out. There is a scripture I hold on to and say to myself when I open my eyes in the morning: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” My response is, “Lord, I am asking for Your help, knocking on the door, asking you to open it and find favor on my family this day.”
NIGHTMARE ON MAIN STREET
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merica has long been known as the land of opportunity. So what happens when that opportunity vanishes, when the jobs that served as the gateway to the American Dream disappear, never to return? What happens when educational opportunities and the historical underpinning of our vision of ourselves as a nation give way? What steps into the void?
In a word: fear.
The fear that America is in decline—that our greatest triumphs are behind us. The fear that the jobs we have lost are gone forever. The fear that the middle class is on an extended death march—and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become as outdated as an Edsel with an eight-track player.
