"Waiting for Superman" Dodges an Obvious Source of Funding

This past week, I finally got around to viewing Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim's searing documentary on the shortcomings of urban education in the United States. Like so many stylish, well-intentioned efforts tackling the standardized test performance gap between predominantly white, suburban students and inner city, students of color; Waiting for Superman is long on critical description and short on answers.

Of course,  an elephant in the room that  Guggenheim never addresses is how our bloated military budget sucks money away from our urban schools. For example, though Guggenheim briefly alludes to the benefits of tutors working with failing students, he never wrestles with how we might provide such tutors to all underperforming students.

Do we really have to spend as much as we are spending on Cruise Missiles? (Anywhere from $600,000 to $1,500,000, depending whose cost quote you believe.)  And how about all of those other weapons systems? Surely savings can be found in our defense budget, which grossly outpaces those of all the other nations in the world. Through prudent defense cuts we can finance an army of retirees to serve as excellent tutors for our students who are performing below standards.

Have You Heard About the 1.2 Trillion Dollar National Security Budget?

My son, Phil, sent me this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon the other day.

The kid has a point; especially when - against the backdrop of the nation-wide budget and deficit  haggling - you read Chris Hellman's TomDispatch.com article  ( http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175361/  ) projecting U.S. national security spending for this coming year.  Hellman has been tracking military allocations for decades, as a Congressional aide and as a military analyst.  (He is currently Communications Liaison for the National Priorities Project.) When he systematically lays out the real defense amount for 2011,  revealing that it is in the 1.2 trillion dollar range, you can trust his figures.

       1.2 trillion dollars is over one third of the total federal budget, and breaks down to  roughly $3,800 for every man, woman and child in the United States.  For my family of five, that means $19,000 in tax dollars.

       Marshall McLuhan said something to the effect that we go hurtling into the future, while looking through a rearview mirror. I would add that while doing so,  we in the U.S. keep spending like addicts  on  military budgets no longer (and perhaps never) rational.

       We have to back away from this, my friends. We all have to begin insisting that our $3,800  be invested more wisely.

      













 

Carve Out Some of the Defense Budget for the Creator of the Super Soaker

Lonnie Johnson (pictured below) is an American inventor in the Edison mold with approximately 100 patents to his name.  He's the man who invented the Super Soaker squirt gun,  and now he's come up with the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter, or JTEC (pronounced “jay-tek”) which may be able to turn solar heat into electricity, with twice the efficiency of a photovoltaic cell, by using temperature difference generated pressure gradients to force ions through a membrane.

This is the sort of technology that the United States needs to  invest in BIG TIME.  We can do so by cutting the excessive bloat out of the defense budget, but we have to develop the political will to do so. (Have you noticed how the current deficit reduction discussions so deftly avoid military cuts?)

To read more about Lonnie Johnson and the JTEC, click on the following link, which will take you to Logan Ward's November 2010 article in The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/shooting-for-the-sun/8268/

Shooting for the Sun

From his childhood in segregated Mobile, Alabama, to his run-ins with a nay-saying scientific establishment, the engineer Lonnie Johnson has never paid much heed to those who told him what he could and couldn’t accomplish. Best known for creating the state-of-the-art Super Soaker squirt gun, Johnson believes he now holds the key to affordable solar power.

By LOGAN WARD

IMAGE CREDIT: BEN BAKER/REDUX

Go to the Friends Committee on National Legislation Link Now to Urge Defense Cuts

We seek a world free of war and the threat of war

We seek a society with equity and justice for all

We seek a community where every person's potential may be fulfilled

We seek an earth restored.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation maintains a vigilant  watch of  Congressional activities and facilitates timely contact with legislators via email links.  By clicking on the link below, you can send a message to your representative demanding cuts in defense spending as part of the overall deficit reduction effort. It is important that you act now  in conjunction with defense cut resolution amendments being offered during the budget debates.


http://www.capwiz.com/fconl/issues/alert/?alertid=27099501&type=TA

Do We Have Any Hope of Shrinking the National Security State?

     I must confess that, at times, the goal of shrinking the U.S. national security state from its  current behemoth size to something more modest and reasonable seems like a hopelessly, quixotic pipe dream.  After all, the corporate and military interests dedicated to maintaining the status quo are enormously powerful, and they are ruthless in their commitment to self preservation.  Plus, when the nation remains, in one way or another,  perpetually at  war; it's seems impossible to obtain the broad-based  political support necessary to make dramatic cuts in the defense budget.

     Yet,  I remain convinced that substantial military spending decreases will occur in the near future for the simple reason that current expenditure levels are not sustainable.   The national deficit is just too large. Also, much of the U.S. perceived need to project military power around the globe is based on the economy's oil dependence.  Since it's now painfully apparent that we can't remain addicted to fossil fuels,  the U.S. will steadily  increase investing in alternative energy sources.   Then, as oil dependency decreases, the need for a world-wide military presence to maintain control of supply lines will diminish.

      The cycle away from our current high tide of militarism has already begun. It will play itself out over time.  However,  we can't become complacent.  Much hard work remains to rally the support to bring about desperately needed changes, sooner rather than later.

     Saddle up, Amigos.

Fifty Years After Ike's Farewell Address, The Military Industrial Complex Permeates Our Lives. We Must Reign It In.

         

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1/17/60             
                                                                                                            

January 18, 2011

     Yesterday was not only Martin Luther King Day, it was also the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's farewell address in which he warned against the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex.  Plaudits for Ike seemed to be breaking out everywhere I turned.

     NPR's Morning Edition and On Point  ran  stories on him ( You can access the first here  and the second here. The complete text of the speech is available here.)

     Quaker activist and commentator Chuck Fager sent around favorable comments about Eisenhower avoiding nuclear war during the height of Cold War tension.

     Andrew Bacevich's latest article in The Atlantic, The Tyrany of Defense Inc., (click here) extolled Ike's foresight and lambasted our costly national security state.

     And in my American Studies class, I was segueing into my annual pitch regarding Ike's prescient warning.

     Fifty years following the speech, with staggering, wasteful military expenditures dwarfing those of the world's other nations  (click here for international comparisons ), we have neither peace nor prosperity. Nor do we seem to have the critical mass of "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" that Eisenhower hoped would "compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."   


However, we really have no choice but to press the case against maintaining these ridiculous levels of military spending. By March 4, Congress needs to finalize the US budget for 2011. The current military authorization bill calls for $725,000,000,000 in new spending.  (Note: this does not include the continuing costs, such as veterans' medical care,  associated with prior wars.)  Please call or write your representative and senator  and ask for reductions in defense expenditures such as those described in the recent spate of proposals summarized by Laicie Olson of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (available here.)  Billions need to be cut from military spending and reinvested into productive new technologies and vitally needed social programs.


                                                * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  

For further insights from Eisenhower, consider the quotation below from a 1953 speech.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?" 

      –Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953/ (From: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001660)

Gen. Eisenhower speaks with soldiers of the 101st Airborne on the eve of D-Day.  If anyone knew the costs of war, it was Ike.

We Need More Than a "Clean-Energy" Moonshots:

In his thoughtful and provocative, October 28, 2010 Rolling Stone article, The Case for Obama,  Tim Dickinson argues that Obama is our first "green" president.  While acknowledging his failure to obtain a comprehensive climate bill,  Dickinson praises Obama for launching the equivalent of a "clean-energy moonshot" via targeting $94 billion of stimulus money for clean energy development,  enough to "double the nation's renewable-energy generating capacity by 2012 - bringing enough clean energy online to power New York around the clock...." while doubling "... the nation's manufacturing capacity for wind turbines and solar panels, bringing down the cost of  clean energy so it can compete with fossil fuels - even if Congress doesn't pass a carbon cap."  Dickinson goes on to laud the president for various steps to aggressively reduce pollution, including getting old cars off the roads through the Cash for Clunkers program, increasing CO2 restrictions  on new vehicles, and (most likely) having the EPA "...set limits on carbon emissions for large industrial polluters..."


This is all well and good, but far more is needed.  The "moonshot" analogy is fine for raising eyebrows, but the stakes far higher when  dealing with climate change than they ever were for the space race.  This is not just a matter of bolstering U.S. prestige, gaining further military advantage and generating future economic spin-offs; this is about the future of an energy devouring planet.





The Obama administration's current efforts have to be squared against the arguments laid out by James Fallows in this December 2010  The Atlantic article,  Dirty Coal, Clean Future,  in which Fallows presents indisputable evidence for the world's (and especially China's and the United States')  reliance on coal for decades yet to come. So, what's a nation to do, especially given the  projected poor results  for power plant scrubbing techniques that will never really yield clean coal?  The most promising  possibility presented by Fallows,  one where  the Chinese are once again far ahead of Americans,  is underground gasification of coal.  Of course there will be problems with perfecting this technology, but the prospect  of tapping the nation's massive coal reserves, while leaving the worst of the pollutants below the surface is compelling and deserving of far more federal investment. 


 


And where can the funds be found? It is ridiculous to pursue the reductions in social programs that the incoming  congressional Republicans are touting.  Too many people - young, old and in-between - are desperately hurting due to the weak economy.  The most logical source of funding is our bloated military budget. Once again, I suggest that you visit the National Priorities Project website to explore the facts regarding the federal budget. In particular view their  Cost of War  calculator and their Tradeoffs tool  in order to get a stronger notion of the possibilities.


(Note: Clicking on the items appearing in blue will link you to the mentioned sites.)