Summer/Fall 2008 Featured Article Then, This Is the Year: Imagining Our Way to the Peace Economy By Frida Berrigan
Imagination is key to the work for social and political transformation. In the struggles against racism, sexism, and nationalism, imagination plays a critical role in inspiring and sustaining activists through tough times. This time is particularly ripe for imagination, as a country steeped in the bloody history of slavery and organized, state-sanctioned repression came together to elect an African-American president. Our forebearers imagined the end of slavery before they began to build it; they saw humanity after the Holocaust as they struggled against Nazism.Following in their footsteps, can we kindle our imagination in ways that will ignite change? Can we turn our imagination to the cut and dry world of paying for war? Can we imagine budgets being turned upside down, with money for education and jobs training, health care and social services, roads and other infrastructure programs dwarfing what is spent on the military? Once we imagine it – can we make it happen? Martin Espada’s evocative poem, “Angels of Bread,” ends with a tribute to the imagination:
As Espada writes in his poem – “this is the year.” The need is critical. We see it and feel it. People are losing their jobs and their homes, state and local budgets are frozen, and the price of just about everything is on the rise. We wish it was last year, or the year before that – in fact, we wish it was before this expensive and unnecessary war was launched. But, it did not happen then, so now, “this is the year.” What would the United States look like without a permanent war footing and the military spending to match it? This exercise in imagining enough money for bread begins with knowing how much is set aside for bombs. In October 2008, the Congressional Research Service estimated that lawmakers have appropriated $864 billion for the Iraq war and occupation, ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, and other activities associated with the global war on terror since 2001. The Pentagon says that it will need another $170 billion for fiscal 2009 (which begins in October 2008), which would push war spending since 2001 to $922 billion – close to one trillion dollars. To help the imagination absorb this inconceivable figure, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has a useful comparison: He begins with a stack of one-thousand dollar bills roughly six inches high. That six-inch stack is worth one million dollars. Then, a $1 billion stack would be as tall as the Washington Monument, and a $1 trillion stack would be 95 miles high. $922 billion over seven years is about $2.5 billion per week to fight war. And that is not the total amount of the money that we spend on the military. This $922 billion in war spending since 2001 is not part of the U.S. annual military budget. In fact, the spending comes in the form of emergency supplementals the Bush administration has been submitting to Congress a few times a year, and is on top of the Pentagon’s regular budget. For fiscal year 2009, military spending will total roughly $541 billion – including the Pentagon’s budget, plus work on nuclear warheads and naval-reactors at the Department of Energy. The Bush administration has presided over one of the largest military buildups in the history of the United States. In 2001, military spending totaled just over $300 billion. We need to know these numbers in order to imagine – and begin to enact the bright and peaceful futures that could be built instead. We have the resources to feed the hungry and house the homeless, to provide health care for all, to take care of the planet, build a 21st century national infrastructure, and chart a more sustainable course for meeting energy needs. Consider this: In More than 35 million Americans are hungry and cannot afford an adequate and balanced diet. According to a report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, requests for emergency food assistance increased in 74 percent of the cities surveyed in 2006. As the price of food rises, more and more are hungry every day. At the same time, budgets for federal programs that provide food to hungry people are woefully inadequate. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the costs of providing less than $100 worth of food stamps to 26 million hungry people each month totaled more than $33 billion in 2007. But food stamps – despite being the most comprehensive food assistance program – do not cover everyone in need and fails to adequately assist those covered. Representatives Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) are sponsoring a bill to increase spending on all nutrition programs by $20 billion over five years. But that is just the beginning of what is needed to fill empty stomachs in the world’s richest nation.
Forty-five million Americans do not have access to health insurance. According to the National Coalition on Health Care, the United States spends a greater portion of gross domestic product on health care than any other industrialized country in the world but is the only industrialized nation that does not have a unified national health care plan. Here is one place where we do not need to spend more money. Physicians for a National Heath Care Plan asserts that the United States could save enough on administrative costs (more than $350 billion annually) with a single-payer system to cover all of the uninsured. The American Society for Civil Engineers estimates that $1.6 trillion is needed to bring the nation's infrastructure up to a good condition. That is $320 billion a year for the next five years – and it is badly needed. Assessing aviation and water systems, roads and bridges, brown fields and dams throughout this country, the engineers gave the U.S. infrastructure a series of C and D grades. The Apollo Alliance – a broad coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community leaders – advocates an investment of $300 billion over the next ten years to catalyze a clean energy revolution in America that will reduce oil imports, cut the carbon emissions, and create new opportunities for businesses and workers. Turning to look at the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals it is staggering to consider their total cost – $760 billion. Halving extreme poverty, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS, reducing infant mortality, ensuring access to clean water, and providing universal primary education could all be achieved by 2015 for less than what the United States has spent in the disastrous and unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq. Hundreds of billions of dollars are daunting figures. This is the kind of investment needed to repair, restore, and rebuild this nation and this planet. And, obviously, imagination is not the only thing needed to change U.S. priorities. It will take an awful lot of hard work. But, we cannot begin that work until we can see where we are going. And it is so far off the horizon that our imagination must help take us there. The steps are clear – even as they are monumental. We have to dismantle the military-industrial complex and take the profit out of security, catalyze a transformation of thinking so that security means more than bombs and borders and bloodletting, and begin to turn the whole work of the government around so that it serves the needs of people rather than sating the appetites of corporations. President-elect Barack Obama will need a lot of pushing from all of us to take even the initial steps of this long journey. But the work begins with believing that we can do it. If the work of a peace economy begins with imagining justice and equality as means to security, then, this is the year!
Frida Berrigan is senior program associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Previously, she served as deputy director and senior research associate at the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York City. Ms. Berrigan is a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and a contributing editor to In These Times magazine. ©2008 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
