Science Talk

Thaddeus Stevens · Guest

Which Side Are We On?
By Sen. Bernie Sanders
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3063/which_side_are_we_on/

In early February, President Bush told a group of Wall Street executives that “income
inequality is real; it’s been rising for more than 25 years. … And the question is
whether we respond to the income inequality we see with policies that help lift people
up, or tear others down.”

It’s ironic that this president raised the issue of income inequality because his own
trickle-down economic policies have contributed to the growing gap between the very rich
and everyone else, a situation worse today than at any time since the ’20s.

Despite Bush’s professed concern, the budget he recently submitted to Congress will
exacerbate the enormous gap between the rich and the poor, squeeze the middle class,
reward war profiteers and hurt those most in need.

The president’s budget cuts the number of children receiving childcare assistance by
300,000 and terminates food stamps for 280,000 families. At a time when veterans
urgently need access to healthcare, the president’s budget imposes a new enrollment fee
for Veterans Administration healthcare as high as $750. And the list goes on and on.

Over the next decade, the Bush budget would cut Medicare by $252 billion and Medicaid by
$28 billion. In 2008 alone, education will be cut by $1.5 billion and the Environmental
Protection Agency will lose $509 million.

The administration claims we just don’t have the money to reduce childhood poverty or
provide universal healthcare. Meanwhile, millionaires would receive an average tax break
of $160,000 per year at a cost of $739 billion over the next decade. And, the
president’s 2008 defense budget — $608 billion — is more than at the height of the
Vietnam and Korean Wars.

Class warfare is being waged in America and the wrong side is winning. It is time for
the new Democratic majority in Congress to stand with the working families of our
country. It is time we offer a budget that reflects the needs of working people instead
of the wealthy.

And it is time for citizens across the nation to stand up and demand that their
representatives and senators, Democrats and Republicans, do so and thereby represent the
interests of all Americans, not a select few.

We must ask: Which side are we on? Are we for the rich and the powerful or the middle
class and working families?

As a member of the Senate Budget Committee, I see a pretty clear answer. I will not be
voting for more tax breaks for the outgoing CEO of Home Depot, who recently received a
$210 million golden parachute. Rather, I will be voting to substantially increase
financial aid for low and middle class families so that every American, regardless of
income, can receive a college education.

I will not support a tax cut for the former CEO of Pfizer, who received a $200 million
compensation package. Instead, I will vote to substantially increase funding for
childcare so that families can find affordable and quality care for their children.

The former CEO of ExxonMobil, who managed to get a $400 million retirement package, does
not need more tax relief. It is far more important that we keep our promises to the
veterans of this country who now find themselves on waiting lists to get the health care
they need.

If we as a nation are serious about creating a more egalitarian society, we need to
invest more federal resources in education, health care, housing, infrastructure,
environmental protection and sustainable energy. We also have to reduce our national
debt. Given that reality, Congress must develop the courage to stand up to the big money
interests and roll back the tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent, stop corporate
welfare, eliminate unneeded defense weaponry, and demand that the wealthy and powerful
rejoin American society.

We should do nothing less.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~______________________________~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TODAY as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with military
power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys—and is
bent on perpetuating—has become central to our national identity. More than America's
matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's
arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to
signify who we are and what we stand for.
When it comes to war, Americans have persuaded themselves that the United
States possesses a peculiar genius. Writing in the spring of 2003, the journalist
Gregg Easterbrook observed that "the extent of American military superiority has
become almost impossible to overstate." During Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. forces
had shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that they were "the strongest the world has
ever known,... stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the
height of Roman power." Other nations trailed "so far behind they have no chance of
catching up."1 The commentator Max Boot scoffed at comparisons with the German army
of World War II, hitherto "the gold standard of operational excellence." In Iraq,
American military performance had been such as to make "fabled generals such as Erwin
Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."2 Easterbrook
and Boot concurred on the central point: on the modern battlefield Americans had
located an arena of human endeavor m which their flair for organizing and deploying
technology offered an apparently decisive edge. As a consequence, the United States
had (as many Americans have come to believe) become masters of all things military.
Further, American political leaders have demonstrated their intention of tapping that
mastery to reshape the world in accordance with American interests and American
values. That the two are so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable is, of
course, a proposition to which the vast majority of Americans subscribe. Uniquely
among the great powers in all of world history, ours (we insist) is an inherently
values-based approach to policy.
Furthermore, we have it on good authority that the ideals we espouse represent
universal truths, valid for all times. American statesmen past and present have
regularly affirmed that judgment. In doing so, they validate it and render it all but
impervious to doubt. Whatever momentary setbacks the United States might encounter,
whether a generation ago in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq, this certainty that
American values are destined to prevail imbues U.S. policy with a distinctive
grandeur. The preferred language of American statecraft is bold, ambitious, and
confident.
Reflecting such convictions, policymakers in Washington nurse (and the majority of
citizens tacitly endorse) ever more grandiose expectations for how armed might can
facilitate the inevitable triumph of those values. In that regard, George W Bush's
vow that the United States will "rid the world of evil" both echoes and amplifies the
large claims of his predecessors going at least as far back as Woodrow Wilson.3
Coming from Bush the warrior-president, the promise to make an end to evil is a
promise to destroy, to demolish, and to obliterate it.
One result of this belief that the fulfillment of America's historic mission begins
with America's destruction of the old order has been to revive a phenomenon that C.
Wright Mills in the early days of the Cold War described as a "military
metaphysics"—a tendency to see international problems as military problems and to
discount the likelihood of finding a solution except through military means.4
To state the matter bluntly, Americans in our own time have fallen prey to
militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see
military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations
regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history,
Americans have come to define the nation's strength and well-being in terms of
military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for)
military ideals.5

_______________________________________

1. Gregg Easterbrook, "Out on the Edge: American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super,"
New York Times, April 27, 2003.
2. Max Boot, "The New American Way of War," Foreign Affairs 82 (July/August 2003), p. 44.
3. Bush remarks at the National Cathedral, September 14, 2001.
4. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956, rpt. 2000), p. 222.
5. The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 6, p. 438, provides the following four-part
definition of militarism: "The spirit and tendencies of the professional soldier; the
prevalence of military sentiments or ideals among a people; the political condition
characterized by the predominance of the military class in government or
administration; the tendency to regard military efficiency as the paramount interest
of the state." The new American militarism conforms to the latter three elements of
this definition, with the caveat that the present-day "military class** in Washington
is comprised chiefly of people who are not themselves serving soldiers. They are
instead politicians, civil servants, journalists, and hangers-on who are fully imbued
with a militaristic mindset and worldview. The definition offered by The New Oxford
Dictionary of English, p. 1173, "the belief or desire of a government or people that
a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it
aggressively to defend or promote national interests," also applies, but it fails to
consider the importance of military values, which also form an element of the new
American militarism.

~ from "The New American Militarism, How Americans are Seduced by War" by Andrew J.
Bacevich

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