Stop America's costliest war

    The sad thing is that bad things always come with "war."

    Sure, war is a bad thing unto itself. And when will we study something other than war when we measure ourselves and our leaders? Dylan songs aside, when?

    But the concern here is the term — war — which we toss around like we toss around "clearance sale" and "now with fluoride."

    Naming anything a "war," except the kind that summons a nation's every sinew, as in the mobilization of Dec. 7, 1941, is not only fallacious but ultimately self-defeating. 

    "War on poverty"? Bad choice, Mr. President. Can't defeat poverty. You can ameliorate it in many ways, and you did. But "war"?

     "War on terror"? Maybe the worst word choice in our nation's history. John Kerry was absolutely right in challenging the term. Ironically, the decorated war veteran committed the error of just not being brazenly militant enough for the moment.

     Terror is a condition. Terrorism is a means to that end. War involves rolling tanks, killing innocents (war's own means to its end), naming names — governmentwise, while unaffiliated shadow players do what terrorists do with primitive means.

     War involves suspending our own hard-fought rights and abdicating democracy to the executive branch.

     And in the case of the "war on terror," it appears to be all the above without end.

      But if "war on terror" has an open-endedness to it, what about "war on drugs"? It has become, literally, a life term. Afghanistan, now 10 years on? Vietnam? Cost and duration considered, no "war" we've known compares.

       The war on drugs is America's costliest, most futile endeavor to ever acquire the term "war," and looks to outlive anyone who ever conceived it or first nodded in assent. For what?

      Considering what we are doing, spending, and committing in terms of human capital, the recent report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy deserved banner front-page treatment — right alongside the latest Charlie Sheen update.

      The report, from a group that includes ex-heads of state and such diverse voices as former Secretary of State (under Ronald Reagan) George Shultz, former Fed chairman Paul Volker and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, called the war on drugs a total failure "with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world."

      Yes, it didn't just call the effort a dud, a fizzle, a fiasco. It called it destructive — "devastating."

       Say, how much have we been spending to achieve all that?

       State and federal, we're spending about $40 billion a year. Sure, that's chump change compared to occupying two countries militarily. But that's not the only cost of the drug war.

     This year some 1.6 million Americans will be arrested for drug possession or distribution. Like the military bases we set up overseas, we will then commit to housing, feeding and otherwise tending to the needs of each of them for an indeterminate time.

      The Global Commission said such repressive strategies cannot succeed. Only strategies that approach drug abuse as a medical or societal problem short of criminality will work. It pointed out that the most repressive countries about drugs — like Russia and Thailand — have the worst drug problems per capita. Countries on the polar, holistic, side of the equation like Switzerland and Australia have the fewest problems.

     The commission recommends an end to the militant approach to drugs, and the legalization of marijuana.

      The White House challenged the commission's findings, just like a war department would do. At least it acknowledged the fact that we cannot arrest and prosecute our way to a better day. We need a stronger and clear-eyed approach to treatment, it said. Agreed.

      With several states now having legalized medical marijuana, with police looking the other way when hundreds of thousands of young people openly light up joints each spring on "4-20," we are in many ways in the phase we saw in the last two to three years of Vietnam and today in Afghanistan — sensing that we can't achieve much more with war, but being unable to figure a way to end it.

     The answer is to get real about costs, about pyrrhic results, about the benefits of undercutting organized crime by treating pot differently. Start by finding another name for a fiasco.

     Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

     

That voodoo that they do

    One can't paint recent job figures as anything but dismal. However, anyone who says the economy is grim across the board isn't paying attention.

   "Board" is an apropos word. Boards — as in "chairmen of the" — have been doing spectacularly of late. In the last year, annualized corporate profits rose 42 percent. In the last quarter of 2010 they were a record $1.68 trillion.

    Yes, profits — the sweet elixir by which all boats are raised. Do you feel it?

    Except — hold your boat. If you didn't have a job a year ago, those profits have done absolutely nothing for you, or anyone else needing employment.

    Simply put, Nobel laureate Michael Spence tells Time magazine, "Companies are hoarding cash."  It bespeaks a "fundamental disconnect," in Time's phrasing, "between the fortunes of America's firms and those of its employees."

    Though this appears to present the matter as something new or astounding about how the American system works. That's the way things have always worked.

    In the political context, this is "Fool me once. Fool me twice. Fool me as many times as you wish." The Republican Party gets the message, and will fool you as soon as authorized to again.

     It was true fool's gold for the economy when George W. Bush managed to cut taxes for all, and particularly America's wealthiest, back in 2001. And it was the same brand of pyrite a few months ago when the newly empowered Republicans in Washington said, "Deficit be damned; keep those tax cuts for America's wealthiest in place."

      Then they railed against the deficit.

      Maybe if those tax cuts really were the way we could mend a broken economy we could justify the $700 billion they cost to continue them. However, we now have 10 years to guide us as to the efficacy of the Bush tax cuts. To call them a costly failure is something you can only dispute unless you drip with wealth and are that much wealthier because of them.

      Where do we start? The National Priorities Project points out that the government has spent more than $400 billion over the last decade in higher interest payments to finance the debt deepened by the Bush tax cuts.

      Meanwhile, economics writer David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times, asserts "overwhelming evidence" that the Bush tax cuts "did not spur investment." He points out that job growth in the George W. Bush years was one-seventh that of the Clinton years. Wages also fell.

      Interesting: Republicans have seized on the new job figures to say that President Obama's policies have failed. Actually, Obama's much-reviled stimulus package is the only thing we can point to that, in fact, worked.

       A bipartisan panel of economists in December pointed out the stimulus legislation had created 2.7 million jobs and saved millions more. The analysis literally credited the stimulus package for averting a second Great Depression.

      If you recall, the stimulus bill also contained tax breaks. But they were a different kind, a targeted kind that achieved a lot more than the Bush kind. Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, who advised John McCain's presidential campaign, estimated that the Bush tax cuts generated only 35 cents in economic activity for every dollar committed. The targeted cuts in the stimulus bill stimulated three times as much. Why? Because they went to people who needed the help.

     How long, how long, will Americans swallow the trickle-down fiction that rewarding the wealthy will make us all better off? Or that cutting taxes, regardless of our deficit situation, is good for us? That last time the economy was doing swimmingly it was on the heels of the Clinton tax increases, a move Republicans said would be disastrous.

    George H.W. Bush was the one who coined "voodoo economics" for what the tax-cut, deficit-by-design party has been doing for three decades. Somewhere along the line we should have learned something. We know America's moneyed class has.

      Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Living in a tea party fantasy

     So, the space race took off, and the United States stayed behind. John Kennedy had great ambitions for it and for us, but as 50-year-old tapes now reveal, he was concerned that budget hardliners would shoot it down.

     And so they did, and the Soviets draped the heavens in red.

     It was the same with Richard Nixon and the Environmental Protection Agency — opposed by spending hardliners and states-rights devotees. So, when time can to declare Lake Erie dead, they just mixed its ambient solids with asphalt and paved it.

     It's all as the anti-government crusaders of a future century would have it.

     The Centers for Disease Control? Never happened. The Public Health Service, the umbrella organization under which the CDC was established, didn't happen,  because anti-spending forces said that disease control was best left up to Doc Jones down the road.

      So, when diphtheria and malaria swept the country, Americans attributed it to God's vengeance for the outbreak of rock 'n roll.

      The interstate highway system didn't happen, either. Too costly and federal. Roads would be left up to each state and berg. If they connected, they connected. And they didn't. States like Texas that didn't want to be a part of the whole weren't, literally.

      Dwight Eisenhower called the interstates essential not just for commerce but for military readiness. But of course, they weren't. They were just more big government from Washington.

      Airports? No need for federal involvement. Local governments could take care of that — if they wanted to face the wrath of taxpayers. And most city council members and county commissioners didn't run to do that.

      All of these things the federal government didn't have to do, according to the Constitution: fly to the moon; build highways and airports; protect the air, water and soil; guard against epidemics.

      In a tea party fantasy world, it wouldn't have happened.

      This musing surged the other day to read that House Republicans seek to zero out two key programs that affect many lives: the Transportation Enhancement component of the Surface Transportation Act, and the Safe Routes to Schools program. Both assist communities in meeting pedestrian needs and building pedestrian-bicycle infrastructure.

    Transportation for America, an advocacy group that promotes such needs, points out that 47,700 Americans died from 2000 to 2009 when struck and killed walking. To often those deaths are due to the lack of safe places for their feet to be.

      The Safe Routes to Schools program targets blighted inner-city areas where children walk to school. I walked one such area in Texas — before and after. Before: Children walked in the streets or in fields demarcated by broken bottles. After: Well, let's just say most U.S. taxpayers would be proud of what they did there with a very modest investment.  

     Those who would shut these functions down would say we don't have the roughly $1 billion annual outlay the two programs represent. Sure we don't. Not when we'll spend $708 billion on the military this fiscal year alone, maybe building walkways in Kabul.

    The tea partiers will say sidewalks and bike lanes are a local matter, and federal aid to cities should cease, anyway. Then again, when many of them — they who have fled the multicolored nature of the city — take their wealth to their suburban neverlands, it's hard for cities to meet many needs at all. Oh, and these people still come back to dine, and work or sell their wares to those people they flee.

       What a dream: to just run from it all, the whole the American experience, the shared communal responsibility that has defined this land. Welcome to the fantasy.

       Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.