Posted By Ariel & Dave Lindorff June 30, 2008
Laid-off American workers will be getting temporary extended
benefits as the nation sinks into recession, thanks to
Congressional Democrats, who cleverly tacked a funding provision
onto a bill giving the president all the money he asked for (and
then some) to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on out through
next June. Veterans of the Iraq War will also be getting tuition
benefits equal to the full cost of in-state public college
tuition plus $1000 a year for books and supplies.
When workers pick up those unemployment checks from their
state Department of Labor offices, though, they should see them
as dripping blood. Those checks have been bought with the blood
of American men and women in uniform who have been sent over and
over into harm’s way in those two countries in misbegotten and
criminal adventures that have nothing to do with defending
America and everything to do with boosting the profits of oil
companies and defense contractors, and with getting Bush
re-elected and Republicans elected.
Iraq Vets, too, should not overlook the blood on their VA
education benefits checks, because their tuition will be paid by
the blood of active-duty comrades still left stranded in battle
zones overseas.
It didn’t have to be like this.
For generations, Congress has voted supplemental funding for
unemployment benefits to be extended during economic
downturns—not always willingly, but always eventually, following
enough pressure from workers and the labor movement.
For generations, too, Congress has voted for education
benefits for veterans.
This being an election year, passage of a freestanding
supplemental benefits bill for unemployment insurance and a
restoration of decent education benefits for Iraq and
Afghanistan War veterans would have been a sure thing. Even
Republicans facing the prospect of re-election campaigns would
have signed on to both measures by Labor Day and the votes would
have been there to override any Bush veto. Neither measure—both
important in themselves and badly needed—had to be tied to a
war-funding bill.
But Democrats in the House and Senate leadership weren’t
really thinking about the plight of the unemployed or the needs
of returning veterans in this case. They were, rather, thinking
of a way of putting some “progressive” window-dressing on a
war-funding bill that they wanted to pass without having to take
responsibility for it. Their objective was to push the whole
issue of funding the wars out past Election Day, in hopes of not
having to discuss it in the coming campaign.
Funding Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq especially has, after
all, become a more and more unpopular and difficult affair for
Democrats. In this last go-round, fully 141 House Democrats
voted against further funding of the war—nearly the same number
as voted for it (149). At first, back in mid-May, the measure
didn’t even pass, because Republicans cleverly joined with the
anti-war Democrats in blocking the measure, forcing Democratic
leaders to scramble to round up the votes to pass a bill the
second time around.
Americans clearly don’t want the war to continue, and
Democrats don’t want to have to face the voters, as every member
of the House and a third of the Senate have to do this November,
being labeled as war backers. That’s why they come up with these
pathetic excuses like, “I’m opposed to the war but we have to
support the troops.”
Any sentient being in the country by now knows that most of
the long-suffering and abused troops, as polls have shown, think
that the best way to support them is to bring them home
immediately. A Zogby poll of active-duty troops in Iraq taken in
2006 found that 72% wanted the US out within a year, while one
in four wanted all US troops out immediately. Only one in five
supported staying “as long as necessary.” (With many of those
troops on yet another rotation, in some cases their fifth, those
numbers are probably even more in favor of immediate withdrawal
today.) Military experts have also written about how all the
troops in Iraq could be pulled out safely in as little as two
weeks’ time. All the Pentagon would need to do is start running
a constant convoy of trucks south to Kuwait, carrying troops and
weapons systems. They could leave the porta-potties, the
McDonalds stands, the bowling alleys, the gyms and the barracks
to the Iraqis and then blow up whatever they didn’t want falling
into the wrong hands. It would be easy and fast. There’s no need
for Obama’s proposed 16-month staged withdrawal, which would
just mean more unnecessary deaths and killings.
Democrats in Congress know all this, but congenitally
spineless and devoid of principle, they’re afraid if they don’t
fund the war they could be accused by Republicans of being
“soft” on defense—as though the Iraq War had anything at all to
do with protecting America.
And so they have come up with this shameless ruse of
attaching a $95-billion domestic spending package, including
unemployment funding measure and a veterans’ education benefits
measure, to a $162-billion atrocity—a measure that assures more
death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more dead and
maimed American military personnel. They’re pretending that they
“pulled one over” on Bush by forcing him to sign an unemployment
extension bill and a veterans’ bill, when they know Republicans
would have forced him to sign those anyway, later in the summer.
The real joke is on the American people, and on those very
workers and veterans who will be receiving the unemployment
checks and tuition reimbursements funded as a result of this
duplicitous tactic.
The $162 billion that Congress has voted for the continuation
of the two pointless and disastrous wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, together with the money already allocated for the
so-called “War on Terror,” is all borrowed, and is a major
contributor to the collapse of the dollar and to the resulting
soaring of the price of oil, electricity and imported goods. It
is thus a major contributor to the credit crisis and the
collapse in the housing market that has pushed the nation into
what may be the worst economic collapse since the Great
Depression.
Furthermore, the blood-money unemployment and tuition checks
bought through his gutless subterfuge by House and Senate
Democrats will be pissed away in no time on higher gas prices
spent by workers on desperate job searches, or on long commutes
to distant jobs or commutes if they are lucky enough to find
them. It will be pissed away too for veteran/students on their
commutes to college, and on higher heating bills for their
families at home.
Equally important, the $162 billion wasted in Iraq, along
with the half trillion dollars being wasted every year on
military spending for a military colossus that encircles the
globe for no good purpose other than intimidation of other
nations, assures that those Democrats who control Congress can
do nothing of consequence to shore up retirement funds, to
develop a national health program, to improve our dismal school
system, to repair our crumbling infrastructure, or to develop
alternative, non-polluting energy sources that could combat
global warming.
The Democratic Congress has shown itself to be worse than
useless. It is part of the problem. That includes Sen. Barack
Obama, who like Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain,
signed onto this contemptible funding bill. |