A Manifesto

Consider it a given that our enormous military outlays do not buy security. Most of it is waste and fraud fed into the military-industrial-congressional complex. But not only is the spending not providing the benefits it claims, that's where the real money is to be found for normal social programs. Unless we take back those funds we can't afford other priorities.

There's another equally or perhaps even more compelling reason for reducing military spending: Giving the military primacy profoundly corrupts our culture. We have become, in effect, a culture of death. Clearly, there's a better way.

To get into the details, those, for example, who want to end the war in Iraq might — through some miracle — achieve their goal, but if military spending continues apace we are guaranteed to have another war somewhere else soon enough, an unending series of wars, until the military destroys us by finally losing a war or thoroughly bankrupts America. Similarly, those who want to reduce or perhaps eliminate nuclear weapons might achieve limited success with one or another arms control agreement, but so long as money is plentiful then more powerful and more dangerous nuclear weapons inevitably will continue to be developed. Conversely, if we were to cut the military budget drastically enough there wouldn't be money left to pay for 'wars of choice' or an out of control nuclear arms race.

Energy should be obvious. The establishment, however, doesn't want to change the way it does business and refuses to acknowledge either that we're running out of petroleum or that we're breathtakingly close to creating a tipping point for the planet's ecosystem, a change that, for all we know, might mean that human beings go extinct. A near term economic collapse from lack of energy supplies (some argue this is exactly what happened to the Roman empire) makes solving the larger long-term problem even more difficult because, unless we've developed alternatives, coal becomes the default cheap fuel.

Investing in renewables means decentralizing energy production, another anathema to the establishment, but this gives our economy much greater resilience, a safety zone, for when planetary limits begin to bite. And, besides, renewables technology is a good business to be in. It would be a great pity if America misses this next stage in industrial development.

It's possible that even with a will we won't be able to devise technology fixes fast enough to avoid the energy shortages that lead to an economic collapse. It's certain, however, that if we don't try we'll be hungry and shivering in the dark. How much would it cost? The answer should be, whatever it takes.

Taxes are, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., put it, "what we pay for civilized society." But when the top 1% of taxpayers in the U.S. collect 20% of all personal income, things are badly out of whack. Establishment blandishments aside, obscene levels of executive pay amount to theft from the public by a corporate system that makes up its own rules. And these wealthy scavengers leave a trail of monumental destruction behind them, whether it's the mortgage and banking crisis, the off-shoring of good American jobs, or the insidious propaganda of media monopolies.

If we accept a philosophy that people should be free to accumulate as much money as they can, without government restraint, then the wealthy will always outwit the rest of us. But playing catch-up, these days, effectively puts a large part of the population into indentured servitude, including an uncomfortable descent by many formerly in the middle class. Unrelieved greed — modern economic doctrine to the contrary notwithstanding — does not a healthy society make.

When people wring their hands about the deleterious effects of money in politics they're not really talking about money per se; what they mean, whether they know it or not, is that wealthy individuals have too much political power. Wealthy individuals have tame members of Congress write laws custom made for their business interests. Wealthy individuals block progressive social reforms because they prefer a dependent, weak underclass. Wealthy individuals pursue all manner of harmful de-regulation. Wealthy individuals, as a group, try to steal everything in society that isn't nailed down.

A society that turns itself over to the tender mercies of the very, very rich does not deserve to be called a democracy. Indeed, its very essence is feudal, in our case with an intellectual lineage harkening back to the early American slavocracy's objections to taxes on the grounds that a powerful central government might contemplate manumission. And the fact that today the U.S. government appears unable to tax the rich suggests just how weak the government actually is.

If we reintroduce thoughts of politics we can see how far from anything proposed by either the Democrats or the Republicans these policy priorities are, and it would be reasonable to ask what structural political reforms might make better policy alternatives politically possible. That question, however, leads to another essay.