Third World America - Arianna Huffington [14]
The Bush-era rationale for these overseas misadventures was always “We’ll fight ’em over there, so we don’t have to fight ’em over here.” Today, it seems, we’re fighting to create jobs for ’em over there, while we don’t have enough jobs for our people over here. At a time when so many middle-class families are reeling from the economic crisis—and our country is facing the harsh one-two punch of more people in need at the exact moment social services are being slashed to the bone—that seems like the most perverted of priorities.
Berkeley professor Ananya Roy defines the troubled state of America not so much as a fiscal crisis as “a crisis of priorities.”85 And Representative Barney Frank, who has been one of the few in Washington arguing for the need to cut military spending, says that our military overcommitments have “devastated our ability to improve our quality of life through government programs.”86 Looking at the money we’ve spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, Frank says, “We would have had $1 trillion now to help fix the economy and do the things for our people that they deserve.”
The National Priorities Project (NPP) provides a useful online tool that brings this budget trade-off to life by showing—specifically—all the things that could have been done with the money spent on Afghanistan and Iraq. For example, according to the NPP, since 2003, more than $747 billion of taxpayer money has been spent in Iraq.87 That could have provided:
115 million people with low-income health care for a year;
or 98 million places in a Head Start program;
or funding for more than 11 million elementary school teachers;
or 11 million police officers;
or 13 million firefighters;
or 94.7 million college scholarships.
While unaffordable college tuition prevents many qualified young people from achieving the American Dream, we are continuing to spend billions on outdated and redundant military defense programs, including pricey relics of the Cold War, such as the F-22 fighter, the Osprey transport helicopter, and America’s hugely expensive nuclear triad—bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles—designed to annihilate a Soviet empire that no longer exists.
If we don’t come to our senses and get our deeply misguided priorities back in order, America could find itself a superpower turned Third World nation—dead from our own hand.
BRENDA CARTER
I was a manager of information systems at the same company for thirteen years. I thought my job was secure. All the purchasing approval and budget monitoring went through me. I attended weekly board meetings. I was well liked.
One day the chief operating officer gave me a high-priority project. I never suspected I would be laid off the next day. When I arrived and said my “good mornings,” my co-workers in finance and administration looked a little sad and they did not respond to my greeting in the normal fashion. I shrugged it off, went to my office, and put down my briefcase.
My phone rang. It was my boss. He told me to come to his office. He told me I was being laid off due to budget constraints. He said he was sorry but his hands were tied. He told me that since I was a longtime employee I would not be escorted immediately out of the building, and I could take as much time as I needed to remove my belongings.
Since I was at my office most hours of the day, I’d made it feel like home, with plants, pictures, and other personal items. As the manager of information systems, I was the one called to terminate employee user names and passwords. To allow me to clear my office knowing I had access to that information told me my boss trusted me and didn’t want me to be humiliated in front of my co-workers.
Imagine getting up every day for thirteen years to go to the same job and suddenly that part of your life just ceases. I cried and cried and cried. I just could not believe it. I did the jobs of three people. How will they make it without me? Some days I did not get