Third World America - Arianna Huffington [70]
Targeting Defense Department waste is not the exclusive province of progressives like Frank.50 Senator Tom Coburn, a social conservative and fiscal hawk—and a Republican member of President Obama’s deficit commission—has called for a full audit of spending by the Pentagon. He sums up the need succinctly: “The Pentagon doesn’t know how it spends its money.” In a damning letter to the deficit commission’s chairmen, calling for an audit, Coburn said, “An ethic continues to predominate in the Pentagon that consistently paints an inaccurate picture—one that is biased in the same unrealistic and ultimately unaffordable direction. The errors are not random: actual costs always turn out to be much higher than, sometimes even multiples of, early estimates.” According to a Coburn aide, there hasn’t been a Pentagon audit in fifteen to twenty years because the department’s “books are so disorganized it would be impossible to do.” Not exactly the description you want to hear about a place receiving more than $700 billion in taxpayer money this year.51
Bottom line: We could trim the defense budget, change our national security priorities, and make the nation more secure. Even after cutting billions, defense spending would remain significantly higher, in real dollars, than it was at the height of the Reagan arms buildup.52
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it in a speech at the Eisenhower Library (fitting given Ike’s warnings about the military-industrial complex): America cannot survive as “a muscle-bound, garrison state—militarily strong, but economically stagnant and strategically insolvent.”53
SAVING OUR HOMES FROM FORECLOSURE
We cannot truly secure our homeland without also protecting America’s besieged middle class. The best place to start is finding a way to reduce foreclosures, allowing people to keep their homes.
The single most valuable thing the government could do to help people facing foreclosure is to pass a cramdown bill allowing homeowners in bankruptcy to renegotiate their mortgages under the guidance of a bankruptcy judge.
Cramdown legislation, facing intense opposition from mortgage-industry lobbyists, has been repeatedly voted down in Congress.54 But those senators and members of the House representing the interests of average Americans—as opposed to the special interests—need to keep trying. The banks’ resistance to the idea of judicial modification is showing signs of weakening. Some, including Bank of America and Citigroup, have already changed their tune and expressed support for it.55
We should also make it mandatory that homeowners and lenders engage in mediation prior to any final foreclosure.56 A pilot program along these lines, the Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion Program, started in Philadelphia in 2008, has proven very successful in preventing or delaying foreclosures in 75 to 80 percent of the cases that have made it to mediation. Currently, many homeowners don’t even talk to their lenders until they have been foreclosed on—partly because the lenders often make it next to impossible to reach them.57 Or, if your mortgage has been sliced up and sold to speculators, to even find them.
“I’ve been to the City Hall courtroom where the mediation hearings take place,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania told me, “and they are crammed with lenders and borrowers and counselors and lawyers, and they are remarkably effective.”58
Judge Annette Rizzo, who has been working hard to keep Philadelphians in their homes, told the Philadelphia Daily News: “There is hand-to-hand outreach to each client here.59 There is individual caretaking here. The lender lawyers get to know the homeowners as people here. We put a human face on this