by Frida Berrigan
from
Off Our Backs
Volume 38, Number 1, 2008
Women's Visions for Peace
http://www.offourbacks.org/CurCov.htm
Imagination is key to the work for social and political transformation. The power of women's imagination makes equality with men attainable even as many of its hallmarks- equal wages and representation, respect, freedom from fear and violence—are still a work in progress. In the struggles against racism, sexism, nationalism, imagination plays a critical role in inspiring and sustaining activists through tough times.
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 the 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:
If the abolition of slave-manacles began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
If the shutdown of extermination camps began as imagination of a land without barbed wire or the crematorium, then this is the year;
If every rebellion begins with the idea that conquerors on horseback are not many-legged gods, that they too drown if plunged in the river, then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth, teeth like desecrated headstones, fill with the angels of bread.
As Espada writes in his poem -- "this is the year."
The need is critical. We see it and feel it. Food riots rage throughout the world, and at home milk and gas are both going for a wallet-busting $4.00 a gallon. 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 February 2008, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that lawmakers have appropriated $752 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 of this year), which would push war spending since 2001 to 922 billion-- close to $1 trillion.
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 a 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.
Military spending dwarfs all other aspects of the U.S. federal budget. Military spending represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs (those that Congress gets to vote up or down on an annual basis). This means that military spending is more than the combined totals of spending on education, environmental protection, justice administration, veteran's benefits, housing assistance, transportation, job training, agriculture, energy, and economic development. The military budget is more than 30 times higher than all State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined and almost 110 times more than the roughly $5 billion per year the U.S. government spends on combating global warming.
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:
More than thirty-five 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 US 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 increased 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 national 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.
Knowing how to read and write are critical skills enabling women's participation in all areas of society. And yet, according to the United Nations Public Information Department, in the first decade of the 21st century, nearly one billion adults on the planet cannot read and two-thirds of them are women.
Educating these 600 million women is just a small part of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, but talk about imagination! What do we lose when a tenth of the world's population is illiterate?
And turning to look at the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals as a whole, 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.
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 for eight years 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. She has also worked as a researcher at The Nation magazine.
Ms. Berrigan is a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and a contributing editor of In These Times magazine. She is the author of reports on arms trade and human rights, U.S. nuclear weapons policy, and the domestic politics of U.S. missile defense and space weapons policies. She has been a featured expert on national and regional radio outlets, and regularly speaks on national security issues to citizen's organizations and at major conferences throughout the United States.
