Tag: war

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The Dog Must be Walked; War Must be Paid For

Why oh why oh why did the Democrats not demand that the Republicans pay for their wars out of current tax revenues?

Would Americans have voted for a war that was going to cost each of them, man, woman, and child, $750 (over $2000 per household) so far? Or would they have demanded better proof, at least, of the actual existence of weapons of mass destruction?

The Republicans cut taxes while taking on the war and then borrowed to cover the deficit. Why did the Democrats allow the Republicans to bill the war to future generations? Did they not realize that once Bush had run up the deficit, the Republicans, having whipped the nation into a patriotic frenzy (with, among other things, those nauseating “God Bless America” interludes at ball games), could now use the deficit as an excuse to slash spending on programs that actually benefit most Americans?

Was this planned?

David Stockton appeared on “60 Minutes” last Sunday. The former Reagan budget director actually advocated higher taxes on the rich for the simple common sense reason that the country’s bills need to be paid.

One could be forgiven with coming away with the impression that there is indeed a class war going on in the U.S.: the rich are out to destroy the middle class.

Common sense: whether you were in favor or opposed to the Iraq War, it defies belief that the Republicans were able to get away with cutting taxes at a time when it was clear that the government needed additional revenues to defend itself against terrorism. Who benefits the most from the peace and security of the U.S.? The rich. So who pays the least to defend the peace and security of the U.S.? Proportionately, the rich.

By borrowing the money for his wars (and that is absolutely what he did), and then cutting taxes to the rich, George Bush stunningly shifted the burden of the cost of the wars to the middle-classes. The next step in the process is for the Republicans to scream bloody murder about the awful deficit they created and weep crocodile tears: “now we’ll have to cut Social Security and Medicare and other social programs! Alas!”

The Democrat’s biggest blunder? By allowing themselves to be cornered into supporting the war and terrified of being accused of raising taxes, the Democrats consented to screwing themselves. They should have demanded that Bush raise the revenue to pay for the war without borrowing! That would have been a Rove-like tactic that might have brilliantly positioned themselves as the more fiscally responsible party in 2010.

Instead, they are like the adults whose kids promised they would walk the dog every day, if they would only, please, please, please, get a dog. And now the Republicans sit on their fat asses watching “American Idol” on TV, ignoring the dog.

And now, well, the dog must be walked. And it’s raining, and it’s cold, and it’s dark. And the dog must be walked.

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Twelve-year-olds of America: Unite!

If I were an American 12-year-old right now, I would get on the web, set up a new site called something like www.boston_tea_party2008.com and start up an online petition. The petition will be to designate a representative to go to Washington and appear before Congress– with a phalanx of media, of course– to announce that the future taxpayers of America– today’s children and young people—do not agree to pay to bail out this generation from their own folly. They will not pay for the war. They will not pay for tax cuts to the rich. They will not pay for obscenely over-priced fighter planes.

Barack Obama does not have $750,000,000,000 and neither does George Bush. The U.S. government does not have this money either. The U.S. government has done something rather shocking. They borrowed the money from the 12-year-olds… without their consent. Yes, they are going to give the money to the big banks and the Detroit 3, and then they are going to pass the bill on to future taxpayers. They’re charging it all to our children.

No 12-year-old voted for Obama or Bush. They didn’t vote for Clinton either or anybody else who contributed to this mess. So why the hell should they pay for it? Why on earth should they simply accept that they are on the hook for this money? Since they didn’t vote for it, I think they have every right in the world to walk away from it.

I think this idea could really gather some momentum. It should start at a local school level with grade nine students meeting at lunch to elect a representative. All city and all county representatives would follow, and would meet at the state capital to elect national reps. They meet in Washington, with some cool adult chaperones, of course, like maybe Kristen Stewart and Bruce Springsteen, and then they march to the Capitol buildings and announce that the future tax-payers will not pay this bill.

The mechanism for doing this might be complicated. They could sell off a couple of aircraft carriers, and some national parks, and the statue of liberty. Might not be enough. They might have to simply garnishee it from social security. How do you like that?

While they’re at it, they should also announce they are not going to fight any more wars on behalf of old feeble rich white men anymore either. Any future war would have to have congressional support from more than half of all the black or Hispanic or female members. How ’bout that?

Added 2011-09:  Okay, I’m just saying. In essence, the government is borrowing money to buy a house for themselves but will also be available to the 12-year-olds to live in. When they are old enough, they will have to pay their share of the mortgage.

But it is also true that if you took away the insane massive tax cuts given to the wealthiest people in the country and the corporations, you could easily pay for all of the government programs and the wars and the weapons that are reasonably affordable.  What I object to is that while soldiers and middle-income earners make sacrifices for the war– big ones– the rich are actually making out like bandits with reductions to their tax burden.

That is obscene.

And the truth is, given a choice, the 12-year-olds will demand to live in the house that they don’t want to pay for. I’m just saying….

What would actually happen if the 12-year-olds of America could do this? Revoke their obligations to the present generation of borrowers? Who would loan the government money if it seemed the the next generations would simply revoke their obligations?

If only. The lenders would simply destroy the U.S. economy. Think it can’t be done? The Americans threatened to do it to the British and French over the Suez crisis in 1956. [Read the section under “Financial Pressures”.]

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The Real War

Number of Americans who died in 9/11: 3,000

Number of Americans who have died of AIDS: 500,000

[added 2011-07]

Amount we will spend trying to prevent another 9/11: hard to say how much when you add in all the new weapons systems, all the health care costs for veterans, replacement costs for weapons used, etc., etc., etc., etc.: — certainly over $2 trillion. Afghanistan alone is approaching $1 trillion dollars, for which we will have the gratifying experience of seeing it swirl down a sinkhole a few short years after we inevitably leave.

Amount spent to stop people dying of AIDS: $150 billion

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Some Numbers

Americans killed in the…

Civil War: 600,000

World War I: 114,000

World War II: 292,000

Viet Nam: 56,000

Germans killed, WWI: 2,000,000

French killed, WWI: 1,700,000

British casualties, battle of Passchendaele, July 1917: 70,000 dead, 170,000 wounded.

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Small is Beautiful and Other Momentary Lapses in Justice

Twenty-five years after E.F. Schumacher published “Small is Beautiful” the Ontario government still doesn’t get it.

It is about to close hundreds of small schools across Ontario because they are “inefficient”. The Ontario Public Schools Association predicts that 600 small schools will have to be closed to meet the demands of the Harris government. In Toronto alone, 128 schools are slated to be shutdown. In response to the public outcry, Harris tells the boards to cut their own “bloated bureaucracy”. He tells them, to give up some of their administrative space, though he must know that even if they gave up all of their administrative space, it would still be less than 20% of what is required.

The Toronto Board has already implemented the following:

  • School superintendents (making $100,000 a year) cut from 92 to 47.
  • Trustees cut from 74 to 22.
  • Trustees’ salaries cut from up to $50,000 to $5,000.
  • Administrative staff of 2,000 to be cut in half over three years.

Well, hey, we all hate bureaucracies, so way to go Toronto School Board! I’m too stupid to figure out what 2,000 administrative staff do in a city the size of Toronto, so let’s turf them.

Well, what do they do? The truth is, I have a feeling that a lot of what they do is administrative masturbation. You need a clerical worker to do the filing for an administrator who organizes training seminars for other administrators who run the human resources department which administers the pension plans and benefits packages for the secretaries and the administrators. Other administrators spend a lot of time doing “the vision thing”, going on retreats, and making strategic plans.

Anyway, speaking of Napoleon, I’ve had enough the Harris sniveling about “improving” education. He thinks we are stupid enough to believe that reducing the money spent on education will result in smarter, better students and teachers. Just as you know that if you reduce the amount of money you spend on a car, you will end up with a better car, right? And if you spend less on plumbing, you get better pipes, right? And if you hire the cheapest computer programmer, you get the best software, right? Riiiiight.

Now, obviously, spending more money does not guarantee a better educational system, just as it doesn’t guarantee better software. But you certainly can’t have a good educational system without spending the money necessary to do the job well, attracted good people, and provide adequate resources.

I attended small schools all my life. My children attend a large high school. The larger high school has some advantages, but the biggest difference between the two, by far, is that it is relatively easy to coast unnoticed through four years of education without learning anything in a big school. And it is hard for parents to get to know your kids’ teachers. You see them once for the one semester your child is in their class, and then you never meet the same teacher again. You never develop a strong enough relationship to feel that wonderful sense of accountability that teachers in small schools feel.

Small schools are often an important social and cultural force in the communities they are located in. They are where everyone goes for Halloween parties and the Christmas pageant and graduation. Parents volunteer to help in the classroom and to improve facilities. Everyone meets there at 3:15 to bring their children home. Everyone cares about their safety.

Harris wants to put them all on a bus, demolish or sell the schools, and convince the parents to place all their trust in an institution he has been slamming ever since he came into office.

Does Harris really care at all about education? It’s hard to believe that anybody could be so stupid as to not care. But all of the policies and directives and initiatives he has taken seem far more concerned with reducing costs than actually improving anything. The truth is, improvements do cost money. The truth is, even though we know schools and school boards waste a lot of money, they do still accomplish things. Students need good lab equipment, computers, books, field trips, art supplies, film, paint, desks, and so on. Having all those things doesn’t guarantee a good education, but you can’t have a good education without them.

* * *

The government has stacked a committee that was supposed to hold hearings, listen to varying viewpoints, think about the information gathered, then come to a rational and fair conclusion about how 46 million hectares of publicly owned land in Northern and Central Ontario should be used. This committee heard from loggers, industrialists, commercialists, environmentalists, cottage-owners, and the general public. They then adopted a very thoughtful expression and said, “hell, let’s turn everything over to the loggers.”

The Committee’s official conclusion is that 7.6% of public land should be set aside for preservation. “Hell, let’s give everything to the loggers.”

Now, this is a government that says no one gets a free ride. No more welfare bums. No more government handouts for people who don’t contribute. This government wants to charge user fees for fresh air. This is a government that wants schools of 10,000 students, taught by video camera from a windowless cell in Port Elgin. This is a government that wants MacDonald’s to operate our prison system. But then they turnaround and offer all the trees in Ontario to the logging companies for practically nothing.

If you’re poor. If you’re destitute, and living on the streets of the Toronto– this government says, tough luck, fella. I can’t help yah. But give that bum a chain saw, and the government says, hey, you want some trees? We don’t need them.

* * *

Hey, I’ve been saying this all along! You know those late penalties they charge you on your utilities bill (in Canada)? Like, about $20.00 if you’re one day late on a $200.00 bill? The real interest rate on those charges is, according to actuarial experts, about 5,000,000,000%. That’s right, five billion. In Canada, it is illegal to charge interest rates higher than 60% per annum (which is pretty ridiculous anyway). Well the Supreme Court just ruled that these interest rates, contrary to previous rulings, and with the complicity of the Minister of Energy for Ontario in the 1970’s (under Premier Comatose, Bill Davis), may well be subject to Federal law after all.

This was just another example of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. Now it looks like there’s a chance that the law might be applied equally once again.

The court case is based on a challenge of the penalty filed by Gordon Garland against Consumer’s Gas, on behalf of the 30% of customers who pay late.

* * *

The Blue Jays are demanding a “better deal” from the Skydome or, so they say, they will play at the “mistake on the lake”, Exhibition Place, next season.

Watch your pockets. A “better deal” means the Blue Jays want the taxpayers of Ontario to subsidize the cost of playing baseball in the Skydome so they can pay Jose Canseco $28 million over four years to bat .234.

Why don’t they just pay Jose Canseco less? Because the New York Mets just agreed to pay Mike Piazza $91 million over seven years to play catcher for them. How can they pay this guy so much money? Well, they can’t. Buy we can. You and I will gladly hand over our money for stadiums and police and road construction so Mike can have an extra limo, three or four extra houses, body guards, and a $25,000 stereo system.

If we don’t pay, undoubtedly, they will move the Blue Jays to Sarasota or someplace that has more suckers per capita than we do.
* * *

How many wars are there in the world this year? How many conflicts between two or more nations in which people are shooting or bombing or shelling each other?

None. Nada. Not a single one.

Yes, there are conflicts. But every conflict in the world this year, involving military action, is a civil conflict, between two factions within a single nation.

It’s true– you can check it out. Is humanity making progress? I think so. Eeyore says, “oh, there’s sure to be another war soon.” Pooh says that’s dumb.

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The Just War Theory

The Christian Reformed Church officially believes that there is such a thing as a “just” war. It’s there in our official church policy, right next to sensual abstinence and charitable materialism.

I liked the 1960’s. Sure there were a lot of crazy ideas in the air, and a lot of foolish ones. And sure, the hippies were naïve and idealistic. But you have to see it from the point of view of someone “coming of age”. You have to appreciate what it was like before t he 1960’s.

The 1950’s was Frank Sinatra, Leave it to Beaver, Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was Billy Graham and Richard Nixon and John Wayne. It was military bands and double-knit pants, pant-suits and Tupperware parties.  It was Bette Davis and Doris Day and Rock Hudson and, god help us, Barbara Stanwyck, who all, to me, had the sexual appeal of dried potatoes.

The 1960’s was the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jesus Christ Superstar, and blue jeans. It was Woodstock, Janis Joplin, J.D. Salinger.  It was Natalie Wood and Ali McGraw and Faye Dunaway.  It was t-shirts and sandals and free love–whatever that was– and John Kennedy.

It was no contest.

One of the things a lot of people in my generation believed in–don’t puke now–was the PEACE movement. I remember arguing with my teachers and parents and minister about it. They all believed that war was a regrettable necessity, but a necessity nevertheless. They argued that the world was full of violent, evil people, who were just itching to conquer and destroy us, just like the Nazis, and the Communists, and, of course, Cuba. In order to preserve our God-ordained lives as suburban consumers, it was necessary to threaten to destroy all life on the entire planet. There could never be peace as long as there was sin in the world, and there would always be sin in the world.

The more sophisticated among us argued back: they are warlike because we are warlike. They hit back, because we hit first. They threaten to destroy us because we threaten to destroy them.

Hopelessly naïve, so we were told.

The Christian Reformed Church produced a thoughtful document that supported the pro-war faction. But a careful reading of it reveals that the peaceniks were gaining the high ground. This document laid out very stringent conditions under which a war could be considered “just”. The one that was most interesting: the benefits of a particular war should outweigh the cost.

Well, I suppose you wouldn’t have a hard time finding militarists who really believed that the benefits of almost any war outweighed the costs. Benefit: lots of medals. Cost: hundreds of thousands of lives. After reading this document, I came to conclusion that some members of the committee which wrote it were playing a joke on us.

It is of more than passing interest that the current generation of leadership in the West, especially Tony Blair in England and Bill Clinton in the U.S., are baby-boomers, members of the “Give Peace a Chance” generation. And guess what: they are proving us right.

The biggest difference between Clinton and Blair and their predecessors, Thatcher and Reagan, is that Clinton and Blair really do believe that peace is a good thing. (One of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as president, way back in 1980, was to restore the funding for military brass bands which President Carter had cut. Thatcher, of course, charged off to Argentina to save the Falklands for England, tally ho.)

And so we finally have peace in South Africa. Peace has a tenuous grasp in the Middle East. And so you have Blair in Ireland and Israel, and Bill Clinton lending the full support of the U.S. But it is not those two men alone. Baby boomers now hold the reigns of power in industry, commerce, education, and government, and whatever other compromises they have made in their lives, they seem to agree that peace is better than war.

Of course, there are still conflicts and civil wars and other disturbances, in places like Nigeria and Kosovo, and the Middle East could still explode if negotiations don’t make some progress soon. But over-all, has the world ever been in better shape? No, it hasn’t. Last year, there were two significant conflicts in the entire world. In any given year during the 1960’s, there were at least 20.

*

Perhaps the difference in generations is most aptly summed up in a controversy that broke out several years ago between the Canadian Legion and some “peaceniks” in Chatham, Ontario. The Legion was outraged– outraged, I say– that a group of nuns and activists had decided to hold a peace rally in front of the local cenotaph. How dare they! In their protests, the Legion made transparent all their pretty rhetoric about heroism and sacrifice: the truth was, they didn’t go over “there” to die for their country. They went over there to kill for their country. And the monument was not a tribute to the peace they won; it was a tribute to the camaraderie of men who enjoyed dressing up and shooting guns off at each other, and then spending the next forty years boozing it up away from their wives and retelling the same boring stories about “Jack” and “Bill” and how splendidly they gave it to the wicked kraut.

They realized that peace activists devalued their most cherished accomplishments.

I had been brought up to respect these men for the grim work they did of defending liberty and freedom. After hanging around a Legion hall a few times, and after all we’ve heard in the last few years– about the Queen and admitting Sikhs to the Legion halls, and the flag and so on– I was left with the impression that most of these men had some skewed imperialistic notion of “liberty” that didn’t have much latitude in it for diversity or democracy. I don’t think many of these men cared much about the horrible injustices of the Nazi regime, except insofar as particular incidents could be used to paint the enemies as monsters.

More recently, the veterans complained bitterly when the National War Museum revealed plans to include a section on the Holocaust. How dare they? What’s that go to do with World War II? In the U.S., veterans complained so loudly and bitterly that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. was forced to withdraw an exhibit that merely documented– did not damn or praise, merely documented– the bombing of Hiroshima. In one sense, their actions are a glorious admission of shame. They want to pretend that Hiroshima never happened.

I mean that, absolutely, their actions were a monumental admission of shame.  If they really believed there was nothing morally wrong with Hiroshima they would not have been bothered one whit about featuring it in an exhibit on the war.

I have gone from believing that these men fought out of a sincere belief in democracy and freedom and justice to believing that most of these men still hold the same attitudes and political views that gave rise to many of the 20th century’s military conflicts in the first place, namely, that honor and national pride are worth killing for, and that material wealth must be guarded against interlopers, and that killing in the name of a nation or a flag is honorable and right.