<font size="5"><center>Blacks Urged to be Vocal about
Excess Defense Funding</font size></center>
by Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – U. S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), the only member of Congress who voted against a bill that gave President Bush unfettered authority to wage war after Sept. 11, now says Black people must demand an end to what appears to be unfettered spending on war while domestic needs go unmet.
“The Black community has got to start organizing around this defense budget because we have huge tax cuts for the wealthy and huge economic, social, educational, health care and housing disparities in our country,” says Lee. “We need resources and these are our tax dollars. African-Americans have got to demand our fair share and demand that we began to have a rational defense budget… And our community needs to recognize the fact that it’s taking away $2 billion a month now that we could use here at home.”
The Bush administration has already spent $500 billion - $100 billion a year - on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 and is expected to spend at least $100 billion more this year.
But a “Common Sense Budget” bill that Lee co-sponsored and pushed unsuccessfully under Republican- control in the 109th Congress shows what could be done by making modest cuts in defense spending. She plans to re-introduce the bill in this session of Congress.
The original version states that “The DepartmeThe original version states that “The Department of Defense's increasingly large budget provides for total defense spending that is greater than military outlays of the other 192 countries in the world combined.”
According to the bill, the Defense spending continues while:
• “Federal spending on elementary and secondary education has fallen to less than 10 percent of the proposed 2007 outlay for the Department of Defense;
• Schools throughout the nation are eliminating programs in music, foreign language, and physical education;
• Sixty-one million individuals in the United States lack health insurance during some period of any given year, and half that number of individuals (more than 10 million of whom are children) lack such insurance for the entire year;
• and, the Government Accountability Office estimates that [a third] of the nation's public schools, serving 14 million children, need extensive repair or need to have their entire physical plants replaced. Eighty-five percent of the nation's public schools, 73,000 facilities serving 40 million children, need some repair work, costing more than $120 billion, repairs that could have been paid for nearly five times with the money America has spent on the war.
In addition, the Washington-D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the U. S. has a budget of $5.1 billion dollars for the Children's Health Insurance Program that covers less than half of the eligible children. Moreover, more than 100,000 children a year lose the coverage because the funding is frozen due to budgetary constraints.
If it were not for war spending at the rate of $100 billion a year, the U. S. could fully fund Child Health Insurance at least 10 times, according to CHI cost estimates by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, which estimates the cost of fully funding CHI at a total of $50 billion over the next five years.
“Everybody should worry about the depletion of our resources, about the rebuilding of Iraq and about the investments abroad when their children here at home are going lacking with educational supplies, when their family incomes are being lessoned because job losses are taking place in this country,” says House Majority Leader Clyde Clyburn.
But what will mobilize citizens to act?
Howard University Political Science Chair Lorenzo Morris says, “People will not be mobilized until someone says, ‘You can't pay for this very good idea’. And so, to some extent, issues like national health care or major innovations in educational need to be identified as policy options in order to really mobilize people,” says Morris. “The cost issue will help [the Democrats], but it may not be dramatic because the alternative expenditures are not always evident.”
Congresswoman Lee’s bill, H. R. 489, aims “To reallocate funds toward sensible priorities such as improved children's education, increased children's access to health care, expanded job training, and increased energy efficiency and conservation through a reduction of wasteful defense spending.”
The bill, which she expects to introduce late this month or early March, is just one response to what is being increasingly criticized as wasteful spending by the Bush Administration.
“The president is out of touch,” Congressional Black Caucus Chair Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) says in an interview. “It’s social justice that people want, it’s access to capital, it’s really the American way of life that all of us want and deserve. Americans have got to demand it and Congress has got to act.”
Kilpatrick, Lee and other Congressional Black Caucus members have joined Democratic leaders - and even some top Republicans - in opposing the president’s defense spending plan.
“We ought to really be concerned any time you have just ordinary, hard-working people finding it harder and harder to make a living and prepare for their family's future. And that's what this war is doing to us,” says House Majority Leader James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) in an interview. “It's sapping our resources, it's sapping our energy in this country. And I would hope that we get out of this thing before it begins to sap our aspirations as well.”
The economic impact of the war does not only affect the poor, but the economy of the nation as a whole, says Bill Spriggs, chair of the Howard University Economics Department.
“People have to guess about the future, so their attitudes about the future will affect their spending,” says Spriggs. “So, if people think that housing prices will moderate or fall and continue to think that their taxes down the road will have to go up based on war, then you can see people saying that, `When I get extra money, I'd better not spend it. I'd better reduce my debt. If consumption pulls back and the rate of increase slows because enough people get more pessimistic, then the rate of the economy slows.”
In addition to money, the war in Iraq has cost 3,000 American military lives since 2003
African-Americans, who live in areas with the poorest schools and whose unemployment rates are consistently double the national average, are being hit the hardest, says Lee.
She states, “African-Americans must march, call, email, have meetings with their members of Congress and tell them to stop supporting this huge military build-up.”
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