THINKING FOR OURSELVES

Budgets and Nooses

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, Oct. 28-Nov. 3, 2007

The ink had barely dried on the presidential veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program when Bush announced he wanted an additional $46 billion to pay for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This manipulation to prevent a discussion of national priorities is an outrage to democracy and democratic practices.

Bush chose to sacrifice the health of children rather than have an honest discussion of the nation’s priorities. In fact, Bush has never allowed funding for this war to be included in budget discussions. This latest spending proposal brings the total current fiscal year request for war to $196.4 billion, the largest annual tally since Sept. 11, 2001. It would bring the total appropriated since then to more than $800 billion. At the current rate war appropriations could reach $1 trillion by the time Bush leaves office, a total that by some measures exceeds the cost of the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

A Congressional Research Service report in July estimated that the total cost over the next 10 years could reach $1.45 trillion, even assuming the number of U.S. troops in Iraq is cut in half by 2013. The war is costing about $10 billion a month.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) derided the warfunding bill as an example of "misplaced priorities.” "For the cost of less than 40 days in Iraq,” she said, “we could provide health-care coverage to 10 million children for an entire year.” Bush knows he can cower the Democrats by isolating the discussion to the old “support the troops” argument.

Most Americans oppose funding this war, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Just a quarter of those surveyed supported the president's full spending plan, and seven in 10 wanted it reduced. About 46 percent wanted it cut sharply or altogether. This juxtaposition of priorities embodied in vetoing a bill to protect the health of our children while planning on expanding the war brings to mind the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in opposing the war of his generation. “Any nation, ” he said, “ that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

In making this statement Dr. King was talking about something more than the question of moving money around. He was calling our attention to what happens to a people who devote themselves to programs of death rather than polices of life. Such misplaced priorities erode our humanity.

The House Judiciary Committee hearings on the Jena 6 convened by John Conyers vividly reflected this erosion. Conyers said he wanted to talk about the “stain on our history of race relations, namely racial violence and hate crimes.”

Yet Conyers focused only on the nooses that hang from the trees. He was unwilling to follow the rope back to its anchor. That would lead him where it led Dr. King, to see that racism is inextricably entwined with militarism and materialism. King said: “War is not the answer. We must not engage in a negative anti[terrorism], but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against[terrorism] is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of [terrorism] grows and develops.”

To follow the rope all the way back, Conyers would have to be willing to impeach the man who has made a mockery of our democracy. He would have to acknowledge that the noose in Jena is tied to a government that justifies any atrocity to protect its own power.

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