No one should be surprised to hear candidate after candidate promising to "change the ways of Washington" should he or she be elected--political campaigns depend upon such promises, and upon the forgetfulness of a populace that hears such never-to-be-fulfilled promises every two years. But very few of these candidates are willing to get all that specific about what they might or might not do once in office--if they did, there is the danger that they might be held accountable! It is much easier for them to define change in flowery, touchy-feely, inspirational language, because the vague desire for "change" is practically universal. But such campaigning is pure demagoguery--and pure Grade A Bullshit.
What are the ways of Washington that they say need changing? All these candidates are willing to go this far: "domination by special interests." But what special interests? Looked at objectively, there is one clear answer that stands out from the rest: military and defense contractors. The military officially consumes 40-odd percent of our national budget, but an additional 20% or so actually goes to the military indirectly through other defense contracts, bringing the total actual spending on military and defense to greater than 60% of our national budget--a total figure which is nearly equal to the military spending in the rest of the world combined. So it should be clear what the biggest "special interest" in Washington is.
So tell me this: have you heard a single candidate say anything about cutting the military budget? Many talk about spending more money on healthcare and education, many talk about eliminating our budget deficit and enormous national debt--but where could that money come from, if not from the military budget? Having a budget is about making choices and setting priorities--a fact that seems obvious to everyone outside our political system. And so we Americans have one simple, but very important, choice to make: Healthcare or War? Eliminating the budget deficit or pouring more money into the military's coffers? Funding programs that benefit the majority of American people, or funding those that benefit only a small, elite group--the military and defense contractors? We can't have it both ways--because money doesn't grow on trees, and we're already more than 8 trillion in debt.
Such an important, fundamental choice about how we spend our money should be in the hands of the people--you might assume. We live in a democracy, after all, and what kinds of choices are more important for us to make than fundamental budgetary ones? But search far and wide across our political landscape, and you won't find any indication of that choice. The only way that we the people can make choices about anything is through the officials we elect--that is, we only have the choices that are reflected in the differing positions of the various candidates running for office. Especially given the contentiousness of our political climate, but mostly because we are supposed to be a democracy, we might expect a wide variety of choices to be available to us, through those various candidates. There are maybe 10 or so candidates campaigning for the presidential election in 2008, so we should have 10 or so choices about which direction we want the country to head. Do we? Is there a single candidate offering us, by making it one of his or her chief issues, the choice to cut the military budget--if a majority of people felt they wanted to vote for that? No.
So, despite the appearance of diversity among those campaigning for president--an African-American, A Woman, a Mormon, etc.--in fact there is very little substantial political diversity among them. And none whatsoever on this one issue, which consumes 60% of our tax dollars. The personal diversity is a deception masking an underlying political sameness, despite the rhetoric you may hear from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, et. al. I doubt very much that American Policy would differ substantially under any of these candidates--whomever elected would merely serve as a figurehead for the military and corporate elites who have much greater influence over our country than the American people themselves.
It may appear that in this regard, politics has been much worse over the last 6 years--but as Howard Zinn points out in one of his chapters from "The People's History of the United States," there has been a "Bipartisan Consensus" since Carter and Before, that our Military Budget will not be touched. On this issue that has consumed the majority of our tax dollars for three or four decades, there has been no political diversity whatsoever. We can hardly single out George Bush for proposing an increase in the military budget, as he did last month, if every politician in both major political parties has gone along with that kind of policy for decades.
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Let me be clear about what I'm arguing for in this essay. I'm not arguing that we should cut the military budget and spend the money on social programs and reducing our national debt. What I'm arguing is that such a choice must be available to the American People to make, if we wish to consider ourselves a great democracy. I think that that is a conclusion that people of all political stripes ought to be able to agree on, even if the choices they would make or vote for would be radically different from each other.
My broader argument is that if we the people do not have budgetary choices, then we are not a democracy. It is our money that 535 legislators and 1 executive are spending, and if they give it all to their croneys and political supporters then America is not much different from an Absolute Monarchy or Military Dictatorship (with revolving personnel)--despite the appearance of minor political choice (which personality we prefer in office--not which policy we prefer), to appease and deceive the public. I believe that if we are ever going to really change Washington, we're going to have to change the ways that money is distributed and spent--from serious reforms of Lobbying and Campaign Finance, to some kind of public oversight over the national budget. If it is our tax dollars, we should have some right to decide how it is to be spent.
Here's a crazy Idea: a national budget referendum, in which people get to vote on the rough percentage allocations within our budget for which programs. Or an even crazier idea: on our tax returns we get to specify the percentage of our taxes that goes to each element of the budget. So if I want 50% of my tax dollars to go to paying off the national debt, and 50% toward social programs, I can specify that--and if someone wants to give 75% of his tax dollars to the military, then he can do so. Either way, the people have a hand in deciding the general shape of the budget, and congress's job is to allocate the money to specific programs within those already-publicly-determined broad constraints.
In the mean time, we can hope and dream that political candidates will eventually arise who have the courage to challenge the military establishment and its overblown budget--who have the democratic integrity to offer us that choice to vote upon, which should really be in our hands, not in the hands of "special interests." I don't see anyone yet--to my eyes, those campaigning for president in 2008 are cowards, all.
