Support the Grunts, Not Greed
Sometimes I wonder if our so-called “leaders” in Washington get up every morning and drink a great big glass of hypocrisy just to get them prepared for their day’s work.
How else can you explain the fact that, while Bush and the congressional leaders of both parties are always speechifying about how much they honor the men and women on the frontlines of America’s war machine, they cynically shortchange these very troops at budget time? Military spending is now nearly $400 billion a year — yet only a pittance of that goes to outfit the grunts who do the dirty and deadly work of, for example, rooting out terrorist forces.
The infantry, on whom the White House must depend to pursue its war adventures, has been left “cash poor and ill equipped,” according to senior army officers, who are disgusted that the politicians and top brass stiff our ground troops. Army investigators report that the underfunding is so bad that GIs in Afghanistan had to buy their own gloves, cushioned socks, cargo belts, flashlights, and other basic equipment!
Where are the billions for defense going? To huge corporate contractors that make hig tech, razzle-dazzle weaponry — and that make fat campaign contributions to Bush and the other politicians. While the grunts — who don’t make campaign donations — have to buy their own socks in Bush’s war against terrorism, the corporate contractors routinely overcharge and defraud us taxpayers for techno-weapons that are absurdly expensive and often don’t work or aren’t even needed.
The New York Times reports that just this year’s $690 million cost overrun on the problem-plagued and unnecessary F-22 jet would pay for brand-new boots, fatigues, helmets, weapons, ammo, flak vests, and other necessary needs of 87,000 ground troops. But, said the Army’s chief of infantry sarcastically, “We’ve chosen to do other things.”
We shouldn’t pay a dime in cost overruns to the military profiteers until our soldiers are fully outfitted.
There’s Congress, Then There’s Reality
Sherwood Boehlert is a member of Congress and, despite that, not a bad guy.
He’s a New York Republican who’s been in the house for more than 20 years now, and he loves the place. Fine — it’s said that some people who muck manure for a living come to love the smell, so everyone to their own taste. But I thought Sherwood had been sniffing the congressional perfumes a bit too deeply when he recently declared that the house is “the one institution in the whole wide world that’s the personification of this great democracy of ours.”
Democracy? The great majority of Americans are factory workers, clerks, cab drivers, dirt farmers, teachers, main-street merchants, programmers, waitresses, health care workers, and the like. How many of them serve in Congress, or are even marginally represented by those who serve there? About 70% of Americans make less than $50,000 a year — how many of our Congress critters go to Washington from such an income perspective?
Indeed, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group reports that nearly half of the newly elected members of Congress are millionaires — which 99.5% of Americans are not. And if the house is so representative of our people, why didn’t we get a pay raise four of the last five years, as they gave themselves? Why don’t we have topflight health coverage paid for by taxpayers, as they do? Why don’t we get golden, no-worry pensions, as they do?
Phil Gramm is one example of congressional separation from the rest of America. The Texas senator, who just retired, opposed any government program to help regular folks, while he slavishly served the corporate powers that financed his campaigns. He became a millionaire while in office. And now that he’s out, We the People will send him a retirement check of $78,534 every year. He’ll get more doing nothing than 80% of us will make working day in and day out.
That’s the personification of plutocracy, not democracy.
This article appears in January 24 • 2003.