From Perceval Press today: “To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.”
—Noam Chomsky
Barack Obama is a centrist. His skill is in bringing two opposing views to a middle ground. If he is to succeed in finding a middle ground in this economic crisis that benefits the citizenry as much or more than it benefits the banks, then we, the people, must speak, must act.
Do you know how much the various items in the National Budget cost your community? Not how much is in the budget for your community: we all know, first hand, how long it takes for Federal money to show up on our doorsteps. How much are, say, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq costing your community? Using The National Priorities Project’s calculator for the two wars’ cost to my county, Sonoma, California, I find that the 1.7 Billion spent by my county since 2001 could have provided 715,801 People with health care for one year. 24,568 music and arts teachers for one year. We’re in those wars to protect oil; we’re in those wars to prevent people we don’t agree with from acquiring nuclear weapons, either of their own, or “left over” from the Soviet Union. We’re in those wars because we’re in them: because now Americans are (and British and other “coalition country” troops have been) on the ground, trying to finish projects or embroiled in fighting, and we can’t.just.leave.them.there.
As the National Priorities Project puts it:
American taxpayers expect the federal government to provide national security. Achieving that security is a constant and complicated challenge that cannot be met by military might alone. A sound national security policy involves three broad strategies:
- preventive measures such as securing nuclear materials abroad and participating in multi-lateral diplomatic and peacekeeping operations;
- homeland security such as providing port security and coordinating emergency first responders; and
- the military
According to their figures, in fiscal 2009 US federal spending on national security broke down like this: 89% to the military, 7% to homeland security, 4% toward preventative measures.
We can see how well this is working.
Mr. Obama has said over and over, “I need to hear from you.” Let him use his experience as a community organizer, someone who spends his time listening to what the community says it needs, then organizing the community to achieve what it must. As President, his community is not the banks, not the corporations, not the Senate or the Congress. His community is US.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Learn the law of the land. Your Senators and Congresspeople are paid to represent their communities, not their contributors. Let’s remind them of that, and help them help Mr. Obama find the middle ground that’s as close to home as possible.
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.” – Thomas Jefferson @ Trust: Representative Democracy in America
For a free pocket copy of The Constitution, leave me a comment and I will snail-mail you one. To order your own or for a group, go to the National Center for Constitutional Studies.
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