Author: TarheelDem

John.  Yes, you John Boehner.  Can we talk?  About the spending cuts for which you seem not to have details?  Here is a modest proposal that cuts $813.551 billion from  the budget in cuts to discretionary and mandatory spending.  True to your campaign promise, it does not affect elders’ Social Security or Medicare.  And it does not make significant cuts in national defense.  Could you maybe offer this as the Republican plan for spending cuts?  Just a modest proposal.

Total Spending Cuts – $813.551 billion

US Department of Agriculture

Eliminate the US Department of Agriculture
   Move National Forest Service to Department of Interior, make purpose wilderness preservation, and cut budget from $5.377 billion to $3 billion – net $2.377 billion
   Eliminate commodities and internation functions – net $4.099 billion
   Move soil and water conservation to EPA, and cut budget from $0.964 billion to $0.950 billion – net $0.014 billion
   Eliminate rural development funding – net $2.646 billion
   Move Food and Nutrition Service to US Department of Health and increase funding to $12.000 billion – net – $3.868 billion
   Eliminate agricultural Research – net $2.723 billion
   Eliminate Marketing from Marketing and regulation, move regulation to US Department of Health, and cut budget from $2.057 billion to $1.000 billion – net $1.057 billion
   Eliminated adminstrative cost $0.663 billion
Total discretionary savings: $9.048 billion

   Move mandatory Food and Nutrition (Food Stamps) to US Department of Health and increase by $4.000 billion – net -$4.000 billion
   Eliminate Commodity Credit Corporation – $12.664 billion
   Eliminate Crop Insurance – net $7.555 billion
   Eliminate Natural Resources Conservation Service – net $2.772 billion
   Eliminate Agricultural Marketing Service – net $1.270 billion
   Move National Forest Service to Department of Interior and eliminate mandatory funding – $0.757 billion
Total mandatory expenditures savings – $18.226 billion
TOTAL – Department of Agriculture –  $27.274 billion

US Department of Commerce

Eliminate the US Department of Commerce
   Eliminated administrative cost – $0.069 billion
   Eliminate Economic Development Administration – $0.286
   Move the Bureau of the Census to Congressional budget – no change
   Move Economics and Statistics Administration to the Department of Labor and combine with the Bureau of Labor Statistics – no change
   Eliminate the International Trade Administration – $0.534 billion
   Eliminate teh Bureau of Industry and Security – $0.113
   Move National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the US Department of the Interior – no change
   Move Patent and Trademark Office to Library of Congress – no change
   Eliminate the National Institute of Standards and Technology – $0.922 billion
   Eliminate the National Telecommunications and Information Administration – $0.046 billion
Total discretionary exenditure savings – $1.857 billion

Eliminate the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Fund – $0.125 billion
Eliminate the grants to manufacturers of worsted wool fabrics – zeroed out in FY2011
Eliminate other unspecified mandatory outlays – $0.176 billion
Total mandatory expenditures savings – $0.301 billion

Eliminate Fisheries Finance Direct Loans – $0.023 billion
TOTAL – US Department of Commerce – $2.181 billion

US Department of Defense

   Military personnel – no change
   Operation and maintenance – no change
   Reduce military procurement 25% – $28.218 billion
   Moratorium on Research, Development, Testing – $76.131 billion
   Eliminate Discretionary Overseas Contingency – $159.336 billion
Total discretionary expenditure savings – $263.695 billion

   Eliminate mandatory outlays – $4.367 billion
   Eliminate direct loan disbursements – $0.200 billion
TOTAL – US Department of Defense – $268.532 billion

National Intelligence Programs

Reduce National Intelligence Programs to $0.500 billion – net is unknown
TOTAL National Intelligence Programs – $0.500 billion

US Department of Education

Eliminate US Department of Education
   Eliminate College and Career Ready Students Program – $14.492 billion billion
   Eliminate School Turnaround Grants – $0.900 billion
   Eliminate Race to the Top Program – $1.350 billion
   Eliminate English Learner Education – $0.800 billion
   Eliminate Effective Teaching and Learning for a Complete Education Program – $1.015 billion
   Eliminate College Pathways and Accelerated Learning Program – $0.100 billion
   Eliminate Excellent Instructional Teams Program – $3.855 billion
   Eliminate Expanding Educational Options Program – $0.490 billion
   Eliminate Supporting Student Sucesses Program – $1.786 billion
   Eliminate Special Education State Grants – $12.569 billion
   Eliminate Career and Technical Education Programs – $1.272 billion
   Eliminate Adult Education State Grants – $0.612 billion
   Eliminate Workforce Innovation Fund – $0.060 billion
   Eliminate Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants – $0.757 billion
   Eliminate Federal Work Study Program – $0.980
   Eliminate Higher Education – Minority Serving Institutions Program – $0.642 billion
   Eliminate Higher Education – TRIO Programs – $0.853 billion
   Eliminate Student Aid Administration – $0.749 billion
   Eliminate Institute of Education Sciences – $0.739 billion
   Eliminate all billion other discretionary US Department of Education programs (what are these?) – $4.432 billion
Total discretionary expenditure savings – $49.697 billion

Eliminate Higher Education mandatory – Minority Serving Institutions Program – 0.278 billion
Eliminate Higher Education mandatory – TRIO Programs – $0.057 billion
Eliminate Federal Pell Grants – $28.928 billion
Eliminate Academic Competitive/SMART Grants – $0.824 billion
Eliminate Vocational Rehabilitation State Grants – $3.080 billion
Eliminate all other mandatory expenditures – $1.993 billion
Total mandatory expenditure savings – $35.160 billion

Direct loans to Historically Black Colleges and Universities for Capital Financing – $0.186 billion
Federal Direct Student Loans – $132.427 billion
TEACH Grants – $0.065 billion
Temporary Student Loan Purchase Authority – $0.972 billion
Federal Perkins Loans – $1.355 billion
Total direct loans disbursements – $135.005

Guaranteed Federal Family Education Loans – zeroed out in FY2011

TOTAL – US Department of Education – $219.862 billion

US Department of Energy

Eliminate the US Department of Energy
   Eliminate National Nuclear Security Administration – $11.215 billion
   Eliminate other DOE defense activities – $0.878 billion
   Eliminate Energy Resources programs – $5.065 billion
   Eliminate Science Programs – $5.121 billion
   Eliminate Environmental Management Programs – $6.000 billion
   Eliminate Radioactive Waste Management Programs – zeroed out in FY2011
   Eliminate Corporate Management Programs – $0.212 billion
   Eliminate Power Marketing Administration – $0.095 billion
Total discretionary expenditure savings – $28.124 billion

   Eliminate Innovative Technology Direct Loans – $18.114 billion
   Eliminate Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Direct Loans – $11.352 billion
Total direct loan savings – $29.466 billion

   Eliminate Innovative Technology Guaranteed Loans – $9.016 billion
Total guaranteed loan savings – $9.016 billion

TOTAL – US Department of Energy – $66.606 billion

US Department of Health

Eliminate Welfare Functions from US Department of Health and Human Services, renaming it the US Department of Health
   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – no change
   Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration – no change
   Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality – no change
   Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services – no change
   Combine Discretionary Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control with Inspector General – no change
   Eliminate Administration for Children and Families – $17.480 billion
   Eliminate Administration on Aging – $1.625 billion
   General Department Management – no change
   Office of Civil Rights – combine with Inspector General – $0.044 billion
   Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology – no change
   Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals – no change
   Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund – $0.735
Total discretionary expenditures savings – $19.884 billion

   Medicare – no change
   Medicaid – no change
   Other mandatory programs – $35.915 billion
Total mandatory expenditures savings – $35.915 billion
TOTAL – US Department of Health – $55.799 billion

US Department of Homeland Security

Eliminate US Department of Homeland Security
   Department Management and Operations – $1.618 billion
   Office of Inspector General – $0.130 billion
   Transfer US Citizenship and Immigration Service to Department of State – no change
   Transfer US Secret Service to Executive Office of the President – no change
   Eliminate Transportation Security Administration – $5.724 billion
   Eliminate Federal Law Enforcement Training Center – $0.278 billion
   Transfer Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Department of Justice – no change
   Transfer Customs and Border Protection to Department of State – no change
   Transfer US Coast Guard to US Department of Defense as co-equal branch – no change
   Eliminate the National Protection and Programs Directorate – $1.460 billion
   Transfer the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Department of Housing and Urban Development – no change
   Eliminate Science and Technology Programs – $1.018 billion
   Transfer the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office to the Department of Justice – no change
Total discretionary expenditure savings – $10.288 billion

   Transfer US Citizenship and Immigration Services to Department of State – $0.568
   Transfer Federal Emergency Management Agency to US Department of Housing and Urban Development – no change
   Transfer Customs and Border Protection to Department of State – $0.373  billion
   Transfer US Coast Guard to US Department of Defense – no change
   Eliminate Transportation Security Administration – $0.407 billion
Total mandatory expenditure savings – $1.348 billion

   Disaster Assistance Loans – no change
TOTAL US Department of Homeland Security – $11.636 billion

US Department of Housing and Urban Development

   Eliminate Community Development Fund – $4.380 billion
   Eliminate HOME Investment Partnerships Program – $1.650 billion
   Homeless Assistance Grants – no change
   Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS – no change
   Tenant-Based Rental Assistance – $19,551 billion
   Project-Based Rental Assistance – $9.376 billion
   Public Housing Operating Fund – $4.829 billion
   Public Housing Capital Fund – $2.044 billion
   Transforming Rental Assistance – $0.350 billion
   Choice Neighborhoods/HOPE IV – $0.250 billion
   Native American Housing Block Grant – no change
   Housing for the Elderly – $0.274 billion
   Housing for Persons with Disabilities – no change
   Salaries and Expenses – $0.379 billion
   All other – $0.761 billion
Total discretionary expenditures savings – $43.844 billion

   FHA Mandatory – $1.016 billion
   Eliminate Community Planning and Development – $1.128 billion
Total mandatory expenditures savings – $1.412 billion
TOTAL – US Department of Housing and Urban Development – $45.256 billion

US Department of the Interior

   Eliminate the Bureau of Land Mangement – $1.151 billion
   Transfer Minerals Management Service to EPA – no change
   Transfer Office of Surface Mining to EPA – no change
   Eliminate Bureau of Reclamation/CUPCA – $1.108 billion
   US Geological Survey – no change
   Fish and Wildlife Service – no change
   National Park Service – no change
   Bureau of Indian Affairs – no change
   Office of the Special Trustee – $0.160 billion
   All other programs – $1.250 billion
Total discretionary expenditure savings – $3.669 billion
TOTAL US Department of the Interior – $3.669 billion

US Department of Justice

   Eliminate the Federal Bureau of Investigation – $8.165 billion
   Eliminate the Drug Enforcement Administration – $2.139 billion
   Reduce Federal Prison System by 50% – $3.804 billion
   US Marshals Service – no change
   Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – no change
   Detention Trustee – $1.534 billion
   US Attorneys – no change
   General Legal Activities – $0.976 billion
   National Security Division – $0.100 billion
   Office of Justice Programs, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Office on Violence against Women – no change
   Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force – $0.579 billion
Total discretionary expenditures savings – $16.818 billion

Total mandatory outlays (unidentified) – $5.232 billion
TOTAL US Department of Justice – $22.050 billion

US Department of Labor

Strengthen US Department of Labor
   Eliminate Training and Employment Service – $3.925 billion
   Cut Unemployment Insurance Administration by 50% –  $1.740 billion
   Eliminate Employment Service/One-Stop Career Centers – $0.788 billion
   Increase Office of Job Corps – -$14.000 billion
   Eliminate Community Service for Older Americans Program – $0.600 billion
   Bureau of Labor Statistics – no change
   Increase Occupational Safety and Health Administration – -$1.000 billion
   Combine Mine Safety and Health Administration with OSHA – no change
   Increase Wage and Hour Division – -$1.000 billion
   Increase Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs – -$0.300 billion
   Office of Labor-Management Standards – no change
   Office of Workers Compensation Programs – no change
   Employee Benefits Security Administration – no change
   Increase Veterans Employment and Training – -$1.500 billion
   Departmental Mangement – no change
   Increase Foreign Labor Certification – -$0.044 billion
   Increase Office of Disability Employment Policy – -$0.011 billion
   Eliminate State Paid Leave Fund – $0.050 billion
Total discretionary expenditure savings – -$9.246 billion

   Increase mandatory Unemployment Insurance Benefits by 75% – -$61.789 billion
   Reorient Trade Adjustment Assistance – -$2.000 billion
   Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation – no change
   Black Lung Benefits Program – no change
   Federal Employees Compensation Act – no change
   Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program – no change
Total mandatory expenditure savings – -$63.789 billion
TOTAL US Department of Labor – $73.035  billion increase

US Department of State

   Administration of Foreign Affairs – no change
   Increase International Organizations and Peacekeeping – -$15.000 billion
   Economic Support Fund – no change
   Global Health and Child Survival – no change
   International Narcotics and Law Enforcement – no change
   Migration and Refugee Assistance – no change
   Increase Non-Proliferation, Anti-Terrorism, and Demining programs – -$1.000 billion
   Eliminate Foreign Military Financing – $5.473 billion
   Eliminate Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund – $1.200 billion
   Eliminate Assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia – $0.716 billion
   Eliminate Development Assistance – $2.946 billion
   Eliminate Broadcasting Board of Governors – $0.769
   Millennium Challenge Corporation – no change
   Eliminate Export Import Bank – no net change
   Eliminate the Overseas Private Investment Corporation – no net change
   Eliminate the Peace Corps – $0.446 billion
   Eliminate Multilateral Development Banks – $2.957 billion
   Eliminate other State and International Programs – $2.726 billion
Total discretionary expenditures savings – $1.261 billion
TOTAL US Department of State – $1.261 billion

US Department of Transportation

   Eliminate Federal Aviation Administration – $12.953 billion
   Eliminate Federal Highway Administration – $41.363 billion
   Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Obligation Limitation – no change
   National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – no change
   Federal Railroad Administration – -$12.000 billion
   Federal Transit Administration – -$10.000 billion
   Eliminate Federal Maritime Administration – $0.352 billion
   St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation – no change
   Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration – no change
   Research and Innovative Technology Administration – $0.017 billion
   National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund – $4.000 billion
   Office of the Secretary – no change
   All other – $0.014 billion
Total discretionary expenditure savings – $36.699 billion

  Mandatory Federal Highway Administration – $0.900 billion
  Mandatory Federal Railroad Administration – -$1.000 billion
  Mandatory Federal Maritime Administration – $0.176 billion
  Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration – no change
  Office of the Secretary – no change
Total mandatory expenditure savings – $0.076 billion
TOTAL US Department of Transportation – $36.775 billion

US Department of the Treasury

   Reduce Internal Revenue Service – $2.633 billion
   Reduce Financial Management Service – $0.235 billion
   Reduce Departmental Offices – $0.173 billion
   Department-wide Systems and Capital Investments Program – no change
   Bureau of the Public Debt – no change
   Inspectors General – no change
   Special Inspector for TARP – no change
   Alchohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau – zeroed out FY2011
   Increase Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – -$1.000 billion
   Community Development Financial Institutions Fund – $0.250
Total discretionary  expenditures savings – $2.291 billion
TOTAL US Department of the Treasury – $2.291 billion

US Department of Veterans Affairs

Increase Department of Veterans Affairs
   Increase Medical Care – -$52.000 billion
   Double Medical Care and Prosthetics Research – -$1.080 billion
   Information Technology – no change
   Construction – no change
   Veterans Benefits Administration – no change
   General Administration – no change
   Dramatically increase Housing and Other Credit – -$1.000 billion
   Increase National Cemetery Administration – -$0.100 billion
   Office of Inspector General – no change
Total discretionary expenditure savings – -$54.180 billion

   Increase Disability Compensation and Pensions – -$43.000 billion
   Increase Educational Benefits – -$10.000
   Increase Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment – -$1.000 billion
   Housing (credit) – no change
   Insurance – no change
   All other – no change
Total mandatory expenditure savings – -$64.000 billion
TOTAL US Department of Veterans Affairs increase – $118.180 billion

Corps of Engineers – Civil Works

Transfer Corps of Engineers – Civil Works to US Department of Interior
   Construction – no change
   Operation and Maintenance – no change
   Mississippi River and Tributaries – no change
   Flood Control and Coastal Emergencies – no change
   Investigations – no change
   Regulatory Program – no change
   Eliminate Expense Item – $0.185 billion
   Eliminate Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army – $0.006 billion
   Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program – no change
Total discretionary expenditures savings – $0.191 billion
TOTAL Corps of Engineers – $0.191 billion

US Environmental Protection Agency

   Operating Budget – no change
   Eliminate State and Tribal Assistance Grants – $1.276 billion
   Eliminate Clean Water State Revolving Fund expenditures – $2.000 billion
   Eliminate Drinking Water State Revolving Fund expenditures – $1.287 billion
   Brownfields Assessment and Cleanup – no change
   Eliminate Clean Diesel Grants – $0.060 billion
   Eliminate Targeted Water Infrastructure – $0.020 billion
   Superfund – no change
   Leaking Underground Storage Tanks – no change
Total discretionary expenditure savings – $4.643 billion
TOTAL – US Environmental Protection Administration – $4.643 billion

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Eliminate the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – $17.680 billion
TOTAL – National Aeronautics and Space Administration – $17.680 billion

National Science Foundation

Eliminate the National Science Foundation – $6.788 billion
TOTAL – National Science Foundation – $6.788 billion

Small Business Adminstration

Eliminate the Small Busines Adminstration – $1.228 billion
TOTAL – Small Business Adminstration – $1.228 billion

Social Security Administration

Social Security Administration – no change
TOTAL Social Security Administration – $0.000 billion

Corporation for National and Community Service

Eliminate the Corporation for National and Community Service – $0.967 billion
TOTAL Corporation for National and Community Service – $0.967 billion

Independent Agencies

Eliminate Access Board – $0.007 billion
Eliminate the Administrative Conferenced of the United States – $0.004 billion
Eliminate the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation – $0.008 billion
Eliminate the Affordable Housing Program – $0.152 billion
Eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission – $0.081 billion
Eliminate the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation – $0.005 billion
Eliminate the Broadcasting Board of Governors – $0.915 billion
Eliminate the Central Intelligence Agency – $0.345 billion
Eliminate the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board and move functions to a Department – $0.012 billion
Eliminate the Commission of Fine Arts – $0.007 billion
Eliminate the Commission on Civil Rights and delgate its functions to the Department of Justice – $0.010 billion
Eliminate the Committee for Purchase from People who are Blind or Severely Disabled – $0.007 billion
Eliminate the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – $0.236 billion
Transfer the Consumer Products Safety Commission to the US Department of Health – no change
Eliminate the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity ad Efficiency – $0.006 billion
Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency for the District of Columbia – no change
Eliminate the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board – $0.031 billion
Eliminate the Delta Regional Authority – $0.014 billion
Eliminate the Denali Commission – $0.017 billion
District of Columbia – no change
Eliminate the Election Assistance Commission – $0.015 billion
Eliminate the Electric Reliabiity Organization – $0.100 billion
Eliminate the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and delegate its functions to the Department of Labor – $0.419 billion
Eliminate the Export-Import Bank of the US – $0.315 billion
Eliminate the Farm Credit Administration – $0.070 billion
Eliminate the Farm Credit System Insurance Corporation – $0.500 billion
Eliminate the Federal Communications Commission and eliminate the assignment of frequencies – $10.421 billion
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – no change
Eliminate Federal Drug Control Programs – $0.404 billion
Federal Election Commission – no change
Eliminate the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council – $0.023 billion
Eliminate the Federal Housing Finance Agency – $0.194 billion
Eliminate the Federal Labor Relations Authority and move its functions into the Department of Labor – $0.028  billion
Eliminate the Federal Maritime Commission – $0.026 billion
Eliminate the Federal Mediation and Conciliatory Service – $0.053 billion
Eliminate the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission and move its functions to the Department of Labor – $0.014 billion
Eliminate the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board and move its functions to OMB – $0.146 billion
Eliminate the Federal Trade Commission and move its functions into the Department of Justice – $0.192 billion
Eliminate the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation – $0.003 billion
Eliminate the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development – $0.010 billion
Eliminate the Intelligence Community Management Account – $0.704 billion
Eliminate the International Trade Commission – $0.104 billion
Eliminate the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation – $0.002 billion
Eliminate the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and transfer its functions to the State Department – $0.002 billion
Transfer the Legal Services Corporation and its funding to the Department of Justice – no change
Eliminate the Marine Mammals Commission and transfer its functions to the US Department of the Interior – $0.004 billion
Merit Systems Protection Board – no change
Eliminate the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation – $0.006 billion
Increase the National Archives and Records Administration – -$0.500 billion
Eliminate the National Capital Planning Commission and transfer its functions to the US Department of the Interior – $0.010 billion
Eliminate the National Council of Disability and transfer its functions to the Department of Justice – $0.003 billion
National Credit Union Administration – no change
Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts – $0.173 billion
Eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities – $0.173 billion
Eliminate the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences – $0.285 billion
Eliminate the National Labor Relations Board and transfer its functions to the Department of Labor – $0.313 billion
Eliminate the National Mediation Board – $0.016 billion
Transfer the National Transportation Safety Board to the US Department of Transportation – no change
Eliminate the Neighborhood Investment Corporation – $0.274 billion
Eliminate the Northern Border Regional Commission – $0.002  billion
Eliminate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and transfer its functions to the US Environmental Protection Agency – $0.143 billion
Eliminate the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board – $0.002 billion
Eliminate the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission – $0.013 billion
Eliminate the Office of Government Ethics and transfer its functions to the Executive Office of the President – $0.015 billion
Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation – no change
Office of Special Counsel – no change
Eliminate the Office of the Coordinator for Alaska Natural Gas Projects – $0.004
Postal Service – no change
Eliminate the Presidio Trust – $0.014 billion
Eliminate the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board – $0.002 billion
Transfer the functions of the Railroad Retirement Board to the US Department of Labor – no change
Eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission – $0.432 billion
Eliminate the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board – $0.258 billion
Standard Setting Body – no change
Eliminate the Securities Investor Protection Corporation – $0.042 billion
Smithsonian Institution – no change
Eliminate the State Justice Institute – $0.005 billion
Eliminate the Telecommunications Development Fund – $0.001 billion
Eliminate the authority of the Tennessee Valley Authority to borrow – $1.147 billion
Transfer the United Mine Workers of America Benefit Funds to the US Department of Labor – no change
Transfer the US Court of Appeals for Veteran Claims to the Judiciary – no change
Eliminate the US Enrichment Corporation Fund – zero it out
Transfer the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the Department of the Interior – no change
Eliminate the US Institute for Peace – $0.056 billion
Transfer the functions of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development – no change
Eliminate the Vietnam Education Fund – $0.005 billion
TOTAL Independent Agencies – $19.329 billion

The New Normal of chronic unemployment and declining opportunities has become a persistent theme of the national media, especially the business press.  The coverage documents a trend and also the intent of the Masters of the Universe to accept and prolong that trend.

What is progressive action in response, given the certain inevitability of some of the predictions?

Before we can get to that, we need to shake off a little denial.  We are not going to have a rerun of the New Deal.  Most likely, we are not going to see a rebellion against corporations and politicians who are delaying economic recovery.  And the November election bodes ill for changing that.
Item 1

Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce report Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education through 2018

America is slowly coming out of the Recession of 2007–only to find itself on a collision course with the future: not enough Americans are completing college.1 The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce shows that by 2018, we will need 22 million new college degrees–but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million postsecondary degrees, Associate’s or better. In addition, we will need at least 4.7 million new workers with postsecondary certificates. At a time when every job is precious, this shortfall will mean lost economic opportunity for millions of American workers.

As the economy evolved, postsecondary education gradually became the threshold requirement for access to middle class status and earnings. In the 37-year time frame …, the share of people in the middle class with some college education and no degree or less, declined dramatically….

Given the transformation of workers by economic class, postsecondary education and training is no longer just the preferred pathway to middle and upper income classes–it is, increasingly, the only pathway.

The emphasis on postsecondary preparation for new hires means that workers will tend to be attached more to the occupations they will be filling than to the specialized industries in which they work.

The blog Inside Higher Ed in an interview with the author of the Georgtown study, Anthony P. Carnevale (A Jobs Mismatch) presents this:

The colleges that most students attend “need to streamline their programs, so they emphasize employability,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown center.

Carnevale acknowledged that such a shift would accept “a dual system” in which a select few receive an “academic” college education and most students receive a college education that is career preparation. “We are all offended by tracking,” he said. But the reality, Carnevale said, is that the current system doesn’t do a good job with the career-oriented track, in part by letting many of the colleges on that track “aspire to be Harvard.” He said that educators have a choice: “to be loyal to the purity of your ideas and refuse to build a selective dual system, or make people better off…

And that does mean a clear priority at most colleges for career-oriented programs over all others, Carnevale said. He said that, without major changes in education policy, there is no way the country can meet President Obama’s goal of having the United States lead the world by 2020 in the proportion of adults who are college graduates. And that requires honesty, he said, about the fact that the current system is not working

He also said that a serious focus on these issues should lead to a shift in resources — one he said he wasn’t sure would take place — from the universities that educate the best prepared to those who educate most of America. That would mean less money for flagships and more for the community colleges and other public institutions. Carnevale said that the institutions that need more are also those that educate larger proportions of minority and low-income students, and that such patterns have led to many a court case when they involve elementary and secondary schools.

Not surprisingly, there is criticism of the conclusions of this study.  Inside Higher Ed also reports:

But the new analysis from Carnevale’s research center may also receive criticism from the left. Amy E. Slaton, associate professor of history and politics at Drexel University, is a scholar of the history of education politics, and she argues that the push for a career orientation to higher education limits the potential for many students. “This approach accepts the notion that you need a tiered education system,” she said, “and that seems like a good way of making sure that the least number of people are given a chance to develop their potential to be innovators, to learn creative skill sets.”

Short version.  Higher education is shifting from providing a common academic educatiion plus career education to exclusively providing career education — unless you attend a flagship university.  Most of you will see this as a present reality, not a future trend.

Item 2

Andrew Gelman writes in Is it 1930? that Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute says:

Goldman Sachs’ latest forecast (and they’ve been pretty accurate so far) is that unemployment will rise to 9.9% by early 2011 and trend down to 9.7% for the last quarter of 2011. Obviously, this is a simply awful scenario but it seems one that is being accepted. That is, we seem to be in the process of accepting the unacceptable. Note that this scenario probably assumes the passage of the limited efforts now being considered in Congress.

Gelman concludes:

I can see the future debates already: was Obama a Hoover who dithered while the economy burned, too little and too late (the Krugman version) or a Hoover who hindered the ability of the economy to recover on his own by pushing every button he could find on the national console (the Chicago-school version)?

In either storyline, it’s 1930, not 1932: rather than being three years into a depression, we’re still just getting started and we’re still in the Hoover-era position of seeing things fall apart but not quite being ready to take the next step.

Some unpleasant realities

1. Those with money are unwilling to pay taxes to see that the economy gets going again.
2. Business interests are more interested in ending the New Deal than restarting the economy.
3. The infrastructure, including education and even healthcare will continue to deteriorate and become barriers to competitiveness with more social democratic countries.
4. Those seeking to regain the status of the US as a superpower see paying down the debt to China as an important strategy.
5. Having bargained away the interests of the US in the pursuit of “free trade”, the US does not have the diplomatic clout to arrange a more level global playing field, nor are US-headquartered transnational corporations interested in doing this.  Cross-border arbitrage is a profit-booster.
6. Barring a huge (and unlikely) progressive victory in the 2010 elections, there will be no repeat of anything like the New Deal.  Indeed, it will be a battle just to hold onto Social Security and Medicare.
7. Sustained unemployment at high levels in the cash economy is going to persist because of the lack of political will (even among the unemployed) to do anything about it.
8. Immigration and H1-B visas will keep US wages and salaries low until wages and salaries in other nations reach parity (going upward) with the US (going downward).
9. Pressure for change will be diverted into a more intense nativism, creating political disorder.   And this will reduce the attractiveness of investment even further.
10. Structural unemployment is the reason that the unemployment rate will remain high, but the structures in question will not just be the industrial distribution of labor but the geographical distribution of labor across the global economy.
11. The environment will be one of deflation, not inflation, except where contracts (such as mortgages) resist deflationary pressure; this will result in more broken contracts, foreclosures, and bankruptcies, both personal and commercial.
12. The Great Recession is heading into its second dip.  State and local layoff will kick it over the edge.
13. Most importantly, if the economic situation has not affected you yet, it is likely to, and it will be chronic rather than just a brief down.

It is Congress, not Obama, that is dithering.  And mostly because Republicans are still fighting the Cold War against “godless communism”.  However else they may frame it to look relevant.

The question is what can progressives do individually and socially to cope with the serious hardships that will persist.

Principle 1: The cash economy is not the only economy capable of delivering goods, services, and information.

The Bush Ownership Society was satirized as the You’re on Your On Society and rightly so.  Well here we are.  Bush was a transformational President.  Through government paralysis, most of us are on our own in dealing with the consequences of other people’s folly.

The Household Economy:  Economies originated in the management of households.  Households still raise vegetable gardens, have small orchards, raise chickens or rabbits for their own use.  The old pattern was to raise for the household and sell the surplus to the cash economy.  Today the cash economy often takes production first and any surplus is left for the household.  In a time of unemployment and uncertainty, household production compares well (even in an return-on-investment sense) to wasting time trying to participate in the cash economy.   People who make the decisions for households need to start considering the household economy explicitly.  Households with extended families combine fixed costs of operating a household, for example.  As do co-housing situations.  The household politics becomes more complicated, and sometimes time-consuming, but no more so than office or factory politics.

The Local Economy:  The financial industry has chosen to continue to “invest” in paper instruments instead of communities.  Some communities have improved their local economy through issuing local bartering script, the equivalent of a local currency pegged to US dollars but available for transactions only within the community.   This allows for barter to have a system of third- and multi-party exchanges and some of the characteristics of saving.  It separates some transactions from the effects of the national economy, restricts circulation of exchage to the local community, tends to circulate exchanges faster, and provides a buffer to national disruptions.  It is only as good as the production of goods and services available locally, but stimulates the creation of additional goods and services.

The Volunteer Economy:  Rural communities still have volunteer fire departments and volunteer rescue squads.  Their dependence on the cash economy is driven by the cost and availability of their tools.  Most support their acquistion of equipment and building through fundraising, often in the form of barbecues.  State cuts in education, social services, and healthcare make necessary the susbstition of paid staff by volunteer staff.  Volunteer work might not show out in the national accounts of gross domestic product, but it is a real economy contribution to gross national product.  And it mitigates the failures of the cash economy.  But  there are other volunteer opportunities that contribute to the economy.  The Open Source movement in the information technology industry is a good example.  Most open source projects (Firefox, WordPress, Ubuntu, and so on) are free to individuals and charge commercial applications of the technology for support and training.  No one is really clear which economic ventures can be done as open source projects and which can’t.  Most have some sort of symbiotic relationship with a corporation that has provided back-level source code to seed the open source project.  OpenOffice, for example, starting with the source code of an old version of Sun’s WordStar software.  Creative Commons and Gnu Public License agreements are ways of protecting open source and creative projects from commercial highjacking.  Can these methods be applied to alternative energy do-it-yourself tools and equipment?  Someone  is probably working on the idea.

The Non-Governmental Organization Economy: The non-governmental organization economy is made up of large established non-governmental organizations, social entrepreneurs like Mohammed Yunus of Grameen Bank, and venture philanthropists seeking social impact instead of financial return on investment.  This economy partially lies within the cash economy and partially lies within other economies, such as the volunteer economy or local economy.  Social Edge and Change.org provide two good gateways for folks interested in social entrepreneurship.  Most foundations are re-jiggering themselves as venture philanthropists in response.

The Public Economy:  At the moment this is a failing sector of the cash economy.  The public economy has the power to command cash through taxation and to make large investments in social and economic infrastructure.

The Market Economy This sector of the cash economy has run off the rails in terms of social purpose.   It’s collapse and the descent of its major actors into a “war of all against all” mode is the core issue in the global economy and the one that has produced, justified,  and touted the New Normal.

Principle 2. A fundamental restructuring of education is necessary to coping with the New Normal

The Georgetown Study of higher education points out the economic fact that established university curriculums are neither delivering academically educated (in the sense of wide understanding of the world, issues, questions of values, and critical thinking)  nor career-trained individuals (those who will garner wages and salaries associated with the middle class).  And recommends exclusivity in admission to academic education and reorienting all other university curricula to career preparation based on the needs of employers.  Following these recommendations will make the tyranny of the economic over the cultural complete.  Only the high-performing (in economic terms) lucky duckies will get what was once intended to be a liberal (freeing the mind) and common (providing a consensus viewpoint) eduction.  Guess whose consensus will matter now?

At the elementary and secondary school level, public education has been broken by politics.  But this obscures a fundamental problem with public education processes today; while we still live in an information plantation economy organized on a factory basis, that means of organization and the factory-organized school system that staffs it are increasing out of step  with what people are actually having to do — even in the factories that remain.

What politics has created is an increasing fragmentation of Horace Mann’s common school.  Mann’s six principals were:

(1) the public should no longer remain ignorant;
(2) that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public;
(3) that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds;
(4) that this education must be non-sectarian ;
(5) that this education must be taught by the spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society; and
(6) that education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers.

Mann sought to educate all children, of all classes together, providing a common learning experience.  The early labor movement saw common schools as providing an opportunity to the folks not “born on third base” to have upward social mobility. Mann’s stated purpose was to “equalize the conditions of men”.  These need to continue to be the progressive principles for education in America because in this case American tradition is progressive.  The question is what form public education takes in an environment of constrained resources.  And how to restore the “spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society” to the currently fragmented system.

Public schools are no longer performing because outside of the college-bound there is no reason for students to be there and a significant number of students tune in to that attitude and leave either physically or mentally.  They are not performing because the traditional structures of instruction – one hour periods, six-hour days, summer vacations, and intense and high-stakes testing – are not adapted to the way folks actually learn or work today.  Essentially they have devolved into teaching one fundamental lesson – do what you are told, remember the paperwork, the test is all that matters in the long term.

Some parents today rightly or wrongly are apathetic about a schooling that did nothing for their own opportunities an ill-equipped them to help their kids in school.  They are surviving, so it must not matter.

Some parents are actively fighting Horace Mann’s principles for sectarian or bigoted reasons, or both.  And there is an entire entrepreneurial industry capitalizing on this mood — sectarian schools, homeschooling, private schools, tailored textbooks and teach materials, and standardized tests.  No to mention a barrage of propaganda/marketing.

Some parents are genuinely concerned enought to try homeschooling, a private or public charter school, a private school or even a sectarian school.

States and school districts have contracted private charter school companies with so-called proven methodologies.  Or they have authorized public charter schools to use alternative teaching methods. At massive cost, school districts have sought to keep schools having a variety of backgrounds through pupil assignment, busing, and magnet schools.  The backlash against these approaches that depart from neighborhood schools has been building. Public school buildings are expensive to build and maintain.  Changing population densities are constantly causing some schools to close and others to be built.  And yet, most schools are second to churches in underutilization of facilities.  School districts must better organize how they use their buildings.

There is a lot about this that has been known for a generation but not addressed through policy or  action.   There is a lot that is the result of the distribution of housing into economically exclusive communities. At a minimum public school systems, if they are to survive are going to have to provide technical and instructional support  to homeschooling parents, provide some common services for public charter schools that otherwise could not afford them, and deal with residential segregation by ethnicity and class that makes a common education difficult. Education is a fundamental infrastructure of economic, political, and cultural life.  In the pursuit of employability, political and cultural life are being impoverished by the direction that public education and higher education are taking.

The New Normal is that public education will have fewer resources, dramatically fewer resources, to do their job.  Households, local efforts, volunteers, and social entrepreneurs will have an increasing role in education.  Whether sought or not.

In 1996, Bill Clinton and Al Gore ran on the slogan of “Building the Bridge to the 21st Century”.  Fourteen years later we wonder if we will ever get off that bridge and get into the 21st century.  Not chronologically, for the rhetoric of new centuries is not about the rolling over of a clock.  But the promise of transformation.  For Clinton and Gore, building that bridge meant the internet, more money for education, and personal responsibility for grabbing opportunities and acting as citizens.  Kinda pathetic for a millennial bridge, isn’t it?  More and more the public mood is, well where is it?  Where are my opportunities?  Where is it that my taking responsibility as a citizen actually does anything?

This is a reflection of where we are and what we might do.  But we have to examine how century transitions became so important in our culture.  Or millennial transitions.  When the Christian era date of 1000 occurred, there was no notice, no fireworks to speak of (had they been invented yet), no public countdowns to the new year, barely a notice of the new year at all outside of certain communities whose life was devoted to time, such as observatories and monasteries.  Seasons cycled through the same old-same old.  Empires fell and feudal systems arose and court scribes wrote chronicles but there was no popular consciousness of change or narratives of sweeping changes in civilization.
When that changed is not important for this diary.

But the 20th century was greeted, at least in the West, with great expectation.  The 19th century era of heroic materialism had created more concentrated industries and institutions that gathered knowledge and self conscioiusly applied it to doing what had not been done before — building transcontinental railroads; having synchronous messaging over great distances; creating more goods at cheaper prices available and affordable for more people; mechanizing agriculture, logging, shipping, fishing, and, of course, fighting wars.  The US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War had spawned a small peace movement, shocked at the inhumanity of mechanized warfare.  The end of the slave trade and the elimination of legal slavery, even in the US plantation South, spawned movements for the liberation of women and ethnic minorities.  The industrial management of Dickensian England filled with Scrooges holding millions in poverty spawned new community movements, Christian charities for the poor, Karl Marx’s bitter analysis of a system he named “capitalism”, socialist philosophies of common living for the common good, and a labor union movement.  Depending on who you asked, the 20th century was going to be the era of prosperity through technology, the growth of commerce enriching us all, or the promised completed revolution of 1848.  In the wildest imaginations, people would live undersea, go to the moon, climb the tallest mountain, find the last end of the earth, and bring Christianity to all the world.  Meanwhile, most people lived as they always had.  my grandfather plowed rented land using a metal plow and a mule and raised cotton with his own labor and the help of his neighbors;  the community went to its one church; folks sought to get a school and a doctor in the community; my grandfather got a mortgage on his crop each year in order to buy seeds and supplies and have a little set aside to live on; at the end of the year, he paid off his mortgage if he was lucky, the weather agreeable, and the market prices high enough.

The 20th century did not start until 1914.  The consequences of that most brutal of wars brought legitimacy to the peace movement, the illusion of the promised revolution, the beginning of a hundred year (if we are fortunate) global war that still continues, and the seeds of todays most pressing issues — advertising, finance, healthcare, insurance, corporate triumphalism, entrepreneurial religion, fundamentalism, defenses of various privilege, aerospace technology, electronics, telephony, exclusive use of fossil fuel energy in developed areas, urban growth, unwinding colonialism, marketing, technological surveillance, and more.  My grandfather would understand Julius Caesar’s world than he would understand the world that I live in.  Production might be an individual problem, but not a social one; finance and distribution of produce became the critical social problems.  Production was a matter of political will, either in a corporation board or a government.  “Can we produce it?” became secondary to “Can we afford to produce it?”  So much for the great inventor-spawned industries of “can-do” mythology.  The world was so transformed that by mid-century a US president (Eisenhower) created a commission to explore new goals for Americans.

So, where is my new millennium?

We are all futurists now as well as historians, able to create alternative narratives about the past and project alternative narratives into the future.  We sense that most of the issues on our plate are holdovers from the 20th century.  World leaders should have come to an agreement to end war as a political tactic by now.  The poverty within the world of plenty that became such a prod to conscience in the 1960s should have ended by now, both within the US and through development aid from the “First World” to the “Third World”  (does that shorthand even make sense anymore with tent cities in Sacramento?).  The economic use of the environment should have been transformed in the late 1970s.   Renewable sources of energy should have been available massively by the mid-1980s.  The trend toward global climate change should have been fixed by 1990.  And on and on, one missed opportunity after another.  When will the Second Hundred Years War, that started in colonial scramble, spawned revolution, genocide, a Cold War, and a conflict between private armies of terror–when will that war end?  When will (in Carl Oglesby’s phrase) the “war without end” be shut down?

What 21st challenges and opportunities might there be to deal with?  How does that affect our vision of politics?  What practically can we do starting now to, you know, progress?

Here are the major themes I see for the 21st century:

A democratic global order: No not the one US presidents keep referring to, right before asserting US exceptionalism or “responsibility”.  Shall I state that from the negative side?  Avoiding neo-feudalism, in which private contracts between protectors and protected become permanent obligations allowing no exit.

Devaluation of privilege:  Devaluation in the culture, in the geography, in public policy,  in economic transactions.  What is privilege?  Orwell sums it up best.  All are equal but some are more equal than others.  Exclusive neighborhoods, entitlements by ethnic identity or gender or sexual orientation or educational achievement or social role or political power or economic wealth or celebrity or “social contribution” or the happenstance of family lineage or geographical location or presence in the blogosphere.  Does any of that pinch yet?

Environmental disaster response:  Assuming we can successfully rid ourselves of the unsustainable baggage of the 20th century  or even if we can’t, we are going to have some significant environmentally caused dislocations and disasters.  How prepared we are to deal with them can mean the saving of thousands or millions of lives, avoid potential conflict in the scramble for resources, lay the foundation for remediation, and provide the constituency for change in the way we account for our use of the environment.

Empowering civil society  No not NGOs, not some Third Way institutions.  Empowering local informal networks of individuals engaged in political, economic, and cultural activities and projects on behalf of local communities, empowering regional networks that support civil society so as to empower a global civil society.  This goes beyond institutions and movements and all that folderol.  A hint of this is in the constatly shifting networks in the blogosphere (and not just the political blogosphere).  This activity is primarily volutary and unincorporated and might use the facilities of institutions (library meeting rooms, blog diaries  and comments on name blogs, goods and services from businesses) and might  be involved in movement alliances, but essentially is informal and fluid.

Deinstituionalizing the economy:  We have only an inkling of an outline of what this is.  The allocation of resources, production, and distribution of goods and services occurs in an economy broader than the institutional (or firm/government) model of conventional economics.  There is the household part of the economy, gift transactions in the economy, black markets and other informal economic transactions through networks of people outside stable, slow-changing, legitimized, legally defined institutions.

Regulating institutional secrecy:  This is really about a dramatic reversal of the current situation regardling individual privacy and institutional transparency.  And is the first step to institutional accountability, whether the institution be government, corporations, or cultural and social instutions (universities, for example).  The Catch-22 here is that regulation requires an institution, and who regulates the regulators to ensure that they decisions are transparent.  Dealing with that Catch-22 is the major theme here.

Global mutual security framework:  About $2 trillion of the $60 trillion global production of goods and services are devoted to direct military expenditures.  No one has estimated the total expenditures globally for past, present, and future wars that ripple backward claiming resources and labor and constituting a sizeable economic sector.  One thirtieth of global GDP is certainly better than the one-twelfth of global GDP that existed during the Cold War.   The way to dramatically lower these costs is through a build-down (cutting production and destruction of existing weapons)  that can only occur if people and national governments feel secure in disarming.  And that security is best provided through a mutual security framework that permits the resoluton of issues and the deterrence of aggressive behavior on the part of nations.  NATO and SCO are two pieces of this emerging framework.  Creating the institutions that link these with each other and with the UN Security Council will be a century-long project.

Comprehensive and seamless social infrastructure:  Yeah, infrastructure is a lousy term.  It’s an abstraction for the common resources available to ensure economic productivity, political influence, cultural participation, and individual excellence.  Transportation of  water, food, all other goods and services.  Disposal of garbage and sewage.  Energy avaliabilty.  Education. Health care. Protection from crime and epidemic and environmental disaster.  Recovery after crime, epidemic, or environmental disaster. Recording of contracts and signficant personal and real property.  Resolution of disputes.  Order. Justice. Welfare.  A mixture of private, public, voluntary, and local resources.  But it must be comprehensive in scope, universal in availability, and seamless in interaction with individuals.  Comprehensive. Universal. Seamless.  Those are the themes.

Organizational model for lifelong education:  Lifelong education is a concept given much lip service and little action.  One reason is the failure to figure out what organizations are responsible for what pieces.  Consider what is now organized as K-12 education.  We now have industrial-age public school buildings and curriculum, charter schools of varying degrees of innovation, and home schooling.  Outside a few school systems, the public school system only has responsibility for supporting education that occurs within its buildings; the other organizational forms are viewed a threatening scarce (and they are) resources.  Or consider what passes for adult education and training, limited by the time available to the students and their willingness to study.  And yet post-college continuing education is going to determine how flexibly society can respond to continuing changes.

Devolution of political power:  Global political institutions enable the devolution of power a much as the concentration of power.  Global institutions provide the opportunities for regions to become autonomous even as nations combine into regional institutions.  Just as the centralization of US government in the 20th century created a regional framework that devolved federal power by mid-century and forced states to devolve power into multi-county regions and urban councils of government, the growth of global institutions means that these institutions and national institutions check and balance one another.  This also places incentives on more international regional structures.  There is an implicit consensus on the geographic pieces that make up this, if not the exact boundaries and functional relationships: Europe, Russiia, China, Southeast Asia, Pacific, Asian Subcontinent, Central Asia, North Africa, Middle East, Subsharan Africa, North America, Carribbean, Central America, South America, Antarctica, Near Earth Outer Space, Earth’s Moon.

Biological and neurobiological technology ethics:  How far do we go in modifying our “natural world”, ourselves and our mental processes?  What are the restrictions?  This is the bioengineering counterpart of the environmental movement spawned by the industrialization of chemical technology, especially organic chemical technology.  How do we recover from the effects of misguided decisions? On the other side of the issue, exactly how far to we want to preserve, recover, or reconstruct the “wild” (in Gary Snyder’s sense)?

What we know about how to change things

The first half of the 20th century saw change, well of some kind, as inevitable.  It was the 20th century, the Modern World, fundamentals were being questioned and driven back as far as the intellect could go about art, music, sexuality, social organization, economic organization, politics, communications, language.  The second half of the 20th century became focused on making (or resisting) change.  “Change” became a political slogan.  To the point that both candidates in the hangover of the 20th century mood into the 21st century used that theme:  “Change you can believe in” (McCain–Do you remember that?), “You are the change you have been waiting for.”  (Obama’s field campaign).

But what do we know about how society, the economy, and politics get changed.

Think global, act local:  All politics is local.  Local is where you are.  You can affect small contexts without being overwhelmed (OK, maybe not with one two-year old in a family).  Personal networks are local.  Even national political campaigns and global movements have local “field organizers” or “community organizers”.  Anyone, anywhere can gather a dozen or so committed people and change the world (Haven’t you actually seen this happen?  Think about it before exercising your knee-jerk cynicism.  What happened to the Cold War? Who gave it the shove over the cliff?)  The temptation of all reform movements is to jump to national or global scale because the issue is so pressing.  If you just have a dozen or so people, where are going to get your million-person march on Washington?  Except through networking with other folks who have a dozen or so people or with established institutions who can mobilize a dozen or so committed volunteers who in turn can mobilize 50% of the institution (the secret to why the GOP loves churches).

Change happens through actions not drama:  Speeches, posturing, protests, demonstrations don’t change a thing.  Haven’t you noticed that?  Nor do phone calls, blog posts, letters to the editor, mass media campaigns, marketing.  A little heretical, isn’t it? People change things, and all of this drama is intended to persuade or pressure people who are not yet involved in changing things to change them in the way that we want them changed.  Dramas carry one of three types of narrative: greed, fear, accomplishment (success). Dramas intend to divert people from what they are currently doing and get them doing something else.  Whether there is anything wrong in that depends on what the something else is.  Drama also seeks to solidify the identity of an in-group.  Whether there is anything wrong in that depends on the actions that the group does as a disciplined unit; again, the actions are key.

Action has dramatic effects:  Walk into a diner and sit at the counter.  That is an action.  A normal ordinary action.  Unless you are black.  Unless you are in Greensboro, NC.  Unless it is 1960.  Action doesn’t seek to persuade; it forces a decision.  Do we or do we not have equal protection under the law?  If we do, the lunch counter clerk does not have to think; it’s just like any other customer.  If we don’t, the police and courts need to tell us that, not the clerk.  Not dramatic in intent.  Dramatic in outcome.

People resist external power but not internal empowerment:  “Make me do it.” is only effective if it is a means of exerting leadership for folks who do intend to provide support.  If it an excuse or a manipulation of followers, nothing happens.  External power corners.  Internal empowerment releases restrictions.  This applies to folks in “positions of authority” as well.  Leaders need followers to follow.  You change a wise leader’s direction by not following.  You destroy a foolish leader by not following.  That is the inherent power of so-called “passive resistance”.  So when looking at leaders, you need to ask “Who does the leader lead?”  When you know who the followers are, you know the leader’s priorities.  Revolutions don’t happen when barricades are thrown into streets; they happen when the followers stop following.  And do so on a massive scale.  And even the enforcers stop following.  And do so on a massive scale.

Acting like the change has already happened makes it happen:  This is a variation on forgiveness is easier to get than permission.  Consider a very difficult issue.  Letting women have equal protection under the law to the privacy of their bodies and decisions about their bodies.  The abortion issue is not about abortions; they still happen.  The abortion issue is not about choice; women still can choose to ignore the law, risk sepsis, and so on.  The abortion issue is a fundamental issue of economic class.  Do all women have the same right of access to abortion services that are legal and safe that wealthy women do?  The abortion clinic movement of the 1970s began before Roe v. Wade and sought to provide safe and legal abortion (indeed a broad spectrum of female reproductive medical services) to women of all economic classes.  Organizers found willing doctors, clinic space if necessary.  They conducted information, referral, outreach, and education services in their communities and raised funds for the clinics.  To duplicate that today would require ponying up for expensive security and personal protection services for doctors, staff, and patients.  If there is the will in a local community, it can be done again.  And there are still existing clinics that can be supported financially and with volunteer participation.  The widespread presence of abortion services makes their presence less controversial.  But in the current culture, one must also deal with teenage pregnancy, spouse abuse, and family financial difficulties like the revolution has already occurred.  Exactly what those service are is open to the creativity of local community female reproductive clinics and their supporters.  In the area of climate change and independence from fossil fuels, local community efforts to massively install residential photovoltaic systems even if they do not allow taking the house off the grid–even if they are not highly efficient because of shade or prevailing weather–creates energy network effects that move power companies in the direction of lowering CO2 emissions.

Change is not without cost:  The easiest changes are those that have the most widespread support and have generally recognizeable individual benefits.  The more difficult changes have narrow support and signficant individual costs to finances, careers, privacy, security, or freedom.  If one is acting as if the change has already happened, how does one act if the change in question is that the military-industrial-media complex has already been shrunk to a human scale?  How does one act if the change in question is that global labor and environmental standards exist for all products and services?  How does one act with respect to national security knowing that the cost of acting if change has come is much higher in other locations around the world and that the constraints you might be able to have here might make those costs higher for someone else.  War has a high cost; peace does as well.  The cost show up in different places.

Beauty changes hearts and minds; economics solidifies the change:  Want to transform a distressed neighborhood?  Clean up, paint up, fix up, encourage others to do the same. Start having beautiful cultural events that get people out enjoying themselves.  And make sure that the time that you buy with those tactics is used to set up real economic opportunities, even if it is only neighbors paying each other for doing their laundry (to use a hackneyed example).  Decrease the money going out of the neighborhood; increase the money coming into the neighborhood, have enough diversity of enterprises to circulate the money coming in multiple times before it goes back out.  Have enough immediate necessity products and services to circulate the money rapidly through the community.  Have a way of directing savings in the community into investments that create paid work. (Grameen Bank has a great way of doing this.)  Make sure there are means of protecting these changes from disruption; some folks outside the community will not be happy with its development.  Does this work?  Every time it spontaneously has been tried it works.

Legislatures and Congress ratify changes after they have already occurred:  This is what you saw in the Civil Rights Movement.  This is what you are seeing with the movement for marriage equality.  Enough said.  Don’t hold your breath.  Make the changes and watch them follow.  Do Congresscritters not all have Blackberries?

This is where I am supposed to pivot to my hope for the new decade and the actual beginning of the new millennium.  I don’t know that we’re there yet.  I feel like we are still on the bridge to the 21st century and hoping that it is not a bridge to nowhere.

Also in orange.

President Bush has given Congress a conundrum: how to exert oversight on a President who has publicly declared that he does not have to listen to Congress on matters of national security.   Congress can cut off funding he says, but he as the “unitary executive” can reprogram funds from other places because it his responsibility and he knows best how to protect the American people — and Congress doesn’t.  So what does the power of the purse actually mean?  Does not the President control the Department of the Treasury, and cannot he instruct them to keep on writing checks for whatever he wants them to as long as it falls under the banner of national security?  The other side of this dilemma is the fact that cutting funds for troops already deployed into a war zone puts the lives of those  troops in danger, and the President will use that fact to argue that the Congress is not only against the troops but is actually harming the people they are trying to protect from his insanity.

So what is to be done?

My proposal: De-fund the deciders, not the troops.  But how?
The Congress, has under the Constitution, the power of the purse for all expenditures.  Presumably, that means that Congress can revoke, rescind, or suspend funding already authorized.  In addition, the state of the 2007 budget (the one that authorized spending beginning October 1, 2006) has not completely passed the Congress.  But the Defense budget did pass, jammed through by the Republican Congress.

In the interim, there was an election whose outcome primarily turned on national security policy.  By all logic, that Defense authorization should be revisited.  But Bush’s DC is a land of mirrors, devoid of all logic.  Besides, the people carrying out the actions under this bill are not the ones making the decisions.

Congress can, however, revoke the funds for the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President.  Congress can revoke funding of offices that are political appointees of the President.  These people don’t have to stop work; they can work for free like a lot of ordinary Americans already do.

Here is the scenario:

Congress revokes the Iraq War Resolution and cuts funding after 180 days.  Should be able to get the troops out in the same time it took to get them positioned before the war, shouldn’t.  The Congress authorizes and instructs the President to withdraw the troops to Turkey and Kuwait.  The Congress revokes funding for 4/5 of the naval operations in the Persian Gulf unless those operations are to transport troops and equipment out of the Middle East.  The Congress revokes authorization for funding of National Guard stationed outside of the US and instructs the President to bring them home immediately.  The Congress revokes authorization for expenditures for private security contractors operating in Iraq and forbids reprogramming of funds to keep them there.  The Congress forbids expenditures for the construction permanent military bases and for the new embassy in Iraq.  The Congress authorizes expenditures in Iraq for only one purpose–to bring the troops home in 180 days.

Of course, Bush will dodge this.  So the Congress, after 10 days of inaction or after Bush publicly or privately refuses to carry out their instructions,  revokes the authority of the President to expend funds (including salary, benefits, travel, office operations) for Presidential appointees (including advisers) at the White House and in the Vice President’s office who advise on foreign policy and national security issues.  The Congress instructs the President to give any civil service employees displaced by this move paid leave until further notice.  And the reassignment to other duty without loss of pay or benefits of any uniformed military personnel assigned to these offices.  Of course, Bush just moves these functions to State and Defense.

So after a second 10 days of inaction, moves of Presidential appointees to other departments, or Bush publicly or privately refusing to carry out their instructions,  the Congress revokes all expenditures at the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, with the same hold harmless provisions for the civil service employees and uniformed military assigned there.  And the Congress revokes authorization of expenditures to the Office of the Secretary of State, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, with the same hold harmles provisions for civil services employees and the uniformed military assigned there.  And Bush just hides these functions somewhere else.

If after 45 days, Bush still is recalcitrant, the Congress revokes the authorization to spend funds for salary, benefits, travel, or expenses of any appointee of the President, appointed after February 1, 2001.  And authorizes the senior civil service executive or uniformed military officer in the organization to act as an interim replacement for these appointees.  The Congress immunizes whistleblowers who report to the GAO proven instances of when this instruction of the Congress is not being carried out and forbids under the law of fraud any Presidential appointee instructing any civil service employee or uniformed military personnel to expend funds on activities forbidden by the Congress.  And Congress immediately passes bills of impeachment of the President, Vice President, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the National Security Agency.  And the Senate immediately considers convictions under those impeachment procedings.

Should the Supreme Court intervene to prevent the Congress from exerting its Constitutional authority to control the expenditures of the United States Government, the Congress prepares and debates bills of impeachment for the three remaining justices who ruled for Bush in Bush v. Gore, bringing forward evidence that the case was wrongly and politically decided because a full count was known to have shown Al Gore the winner.  The Senate considers conviction and removal from office.  The vacancies are not replaced until the next President takes office.

Should the Supreme Court continue to intervene to prevent the Congress from exerting its Constitutional authority to control expenditures, the two Supreme Court appointees shall be examined as illegitimate appointees of an unelected President as result of fraudulently conducted elections in Ohio in 2004.  And this opens the investigation of the 2004 election.

There is now a Constitutional crisis.  The question is whether the Constitution provides an adequate means of dealing with it.  This diary argues that it does.

(Cross-posted at Booman Tribute and Daily Kos)

Robert Scheer at Liberal Oasis says about the increasing calls for impeachment:

At this point, calls for impeachment do little more than show the difference between Democrats and Republicans.  But to do that without being seen as merely partisan, there must be an authentic difference.  Yes, Bush led us into war on false pretenses.  Yes, the war in Iraq is in the toilet.  Yes, troops know both of these things and want not to go back for another tour.  Yes, parents are keeping their kids from enlisting.  But Bush is seen by many as the only leader we have, the only one with a plan.  That more than anything else will, as Scheer says, prevent calls for impeachment being taken seriously.  Who is the leadership who will replace Bush?  Why should impeachment be the issue of the 2006 campaign if removing Bush brings someone worse (hello, Dick, David)?

If Democrats are going to have a unified view, we are going to have to talk in more than slogans and soundbites – “get out now”, “an exit strategy”, “a timetable for withdrawal”.  And we are going to have to speak the hard, unpleasant truth.

And here it is:

0. The population of Iraq (2005) is 26 million.  Population of Germany (1939) 90 million.  On V-E Day, Eisenhower had sixty-one US divisions (1,622,000 troops) and a total force in Europe of 3 million troops.  Mark Helprin of the Wall Street Journal Online has it right thanks to Yucatan Man:

We aren’t getting World War II results because the Bush administration, for all its talk of World War II, did not make a World War II-level commitment.

1. A military victory in the sense of World War II’s unconditional surrender is not possible and never was in Iraq, regardless of how much ordnance we drop on Iraq and how many Iraqis we kill.  Only governments can surrender, and Saddam Hussein fled rather than surrender.  There is no closure through this route.
2. We have too few troops in Iraq to stay without growing casualties and too few to leave without a short-term intense increase in casualties.
3. There will be no real turnover of security responsibilities  to Iraqis as long as we have troops in Iraq.
4. We are an occupation army that has failed the first responsibility of occupation, bringing order to the streets of every city in Iraq.  We failed because we never saw ourselves as an occupation army.  Early in the war, our soldiers complained in interviews in the media, “I wasn’t trained to do law enforcement.  I was trained to fight the enemy.”
5. If we are serious about staying the course, we need to deploy the same concentration of troops that occupied Germany in World War II.  That would mean about 3 million trained troops.  But we know that Republicans and other supporters of the war are not willing to volunteer themselves, their children, or their grandchildren to be these troops.  As Donald Rumsfeld said, “We fight with the army we have.”
6. If we are serious about staying the course, we need to finance the war honestly.  We now have spent approximately $300 billion in over two years on the war.  We don’t know exactly because it has been off budget, lacking the oversight of the Congress and the people, fudged figures and unreal estimates.  And financing the war honestly means repealing the Bush tax breaks and increasing taxes to actually cover repaying the cost of the war within three years after its end.  We will never have Rumsfeld’s 12 year war because it will bankrupt us.
7. The war is not and never was about the war on terror.  In fact the words “war on terror” are code for war without end.  As long as we frame our actions as a war on terror, we will be in war without end.  There are three distinct activities going on –  a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq, and an international secret action that has seemingly lost its way.  We must stop confusing these three.  We must deal with each individually.
8. The consequences of our action in Iraq is civil war.  The only thing policy might do is lessen its intensity, shorten its duration, and contain its effects.  But none of those will happens as long as we have troops in Iraq.
9. The US will not control the oil of Iraq.  Ever.
10. The US will not establish 14 permanent bases in Iraq.  Nor has there been a justification of why the US needs to.
11. The future of Iraq depends on the actions of the states that border Iraq, the “frontline nations”.  Their active consensus about Iraq’s future will determine the length and intensity of the civil war in Iraq.  The more meddling, the more catastrophe.
12. The US will not get the support of the rest of the world in anything it does in Iraq without a specific, detailed, honest, and formal apology to the United Nations for our fraudulent use of the Security Council in going to war.  
13. The US will not regain the trust of the rest of the world regarding our foreign policy until we reaffirm our commitment to strictly enforce the Geneva Accords in our own institutions and until we ratify participation in the International Criminal Court.
14. The US owes the world the prosecution of the people who embezzled the Oil for Food money that was turned over to the Coalition Provisional Authority.  The US owes the Iraqi people the restoration of those funds.
15. Leaving abruptly will neither help US troops nor the Iraqi people unless there is a political context that minimizes the danger to US troops and guarantees the good faith intervention of frontline states in reducing the conflicts leading to civil war.
16. An exit strategy is not the same thing as a timetable.  It is possible to develop an exit strategy.  It is not possible to  develop a timetable without considering contingencies.
17. The troops that the US sent to Iraq have been horribly abused by the administration of the US government.  They deserve our honor, our thanks, our apology, and whatever support required to put their lives back together.
18. Osama bin Laden and other al Quaeda leaders are still on the loose.  Being able to capture them requires the good offices of both the Pakistani, Afghani, and Iranian governments.  The diplomacy to get that support is going to be very difficult for a lot of historical reasons.
19. The situation in Afghanistan has suffered the same neglect since the beginning of the Iraq war that it did after the departure of the Soviet army.  The US has abandoned them twice.  And the government in Kabul is losing more and more power to the provincial governors, who have returned to being war lords.
20. Terrorist organizations like al Quaeda and other jihadis are organized crime organizations.  Governments deal best with organized crime organizations through the use of international law enforcement and intelligence.  These activities are often more macho, more hardnosed, and more difficult than the use of the military.  And we have not given the people who do these investigations the respect that they deserve.
21. Diminishing our own civil liberties might be expedient but it will not restore our respect in the world.  The world respects America for its rule of law, its acknowledgement of human rights, and its continued striving to make it lofty words real within its own borders.
22. Anti-muslim bigotry is a threat to US national security.
23. The current administration has lied about or caricatured every one of these realities in an effort not to be held accountable for its policies.

The Strategy

1. De-couple the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the actions against terrorist organizations and individuals.
2. Let the American people decide our policy for Iraq based on describing the pro’s, con’s of several policy options and the commitment required of them.  Let’s start treating voters as grownups.

Option 1:  Finishing the job in Iraq
Pro’s:

• A stable, democratic Iraq with a government that is sort of like the government of Turkey would be a success story.
• What has become a nest of jihadis and terrorist will be cleaned up.
• Saddam Hussein will be held accountable through the rule of law.

Con’s:

• We really don’t know what “finishing the job means” because no one, not even the Iraqis, not even the insurgents knows what is going on in Iraq.
• We would be hard pressed to do this from our fortification in the Green Zone.
• A substantial increase in the number of troops in Iraq would be required, maybe as many as three million troops.
• Even pro-war conservatives are not willing to go there themselves.
• The financial cost would be enormous, approaching $1 trillion, and would require a massive tax increase in order to just service the debt.

Commitments:

• Sending America’s sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfather to join those already in Iraq.  This includes undergoing intensive training and possibly learning a foreign language.  Roughly 30 people from each and every <u>precinct</u&gt in America.
• Repealing the Bush tax cuts; increasing taxes on individuals and especially on corporations; closing lots and lots of tax loopholes; imposing windfall taxes on defense industry corporations.
• To our children and grandchildren; this debt will be paid off in 10 years.
• To the world; no permanent US bases in Iraq; end to extrajudicial detentions and torture; restoration of funds embezzled from the Iraqi people.
• Recovering funds for fraudulent claims by defense contractors, such as Halliburton.
• Reconstruction of what we have destroyed in Iraq; the counterpart to the Marshall Plan for Europe.

Option 2:  Immediate withdrawal of troops
Pro’s:

• We are no longer the excuse for an insurgency.
• Our troops can rejoin their families.
• We have removed ourselves for an immoral and illegal war.
• Iraqis have their country back.
• The federal budget is no longer bleeding massive deficits.
• We can think of ourselves as a peaceful country again.

Con’s:

• The logistics of withdrawing troops before the end of the insurgency are high.
• Our withdrawal immediately starts the jockeying, conflict, and even civil war among ethnic groups and political factions.
• The disposition of Saddam Hussein himself is unclear.  He might be murdered, but he might also regain power.
• The possibility of a widening war in the region as Iran protects the Shi’ites, Saudi Arabia protect the Wahabi Sunnis, and Turkey attacks the Kurds.

Commitments:

• Sending in sufficient troops to minimize the number of US casualties.
• Understanding in advance that there will be a jump in casualties.
• Constructing the story by which reversing course because of a mistake is not a defeat.
• Convening an honest-to-goodness truth commission to examine responsibility for the decision to go to war.
• Encouraging the European Union, the UN, and the Arab League to use their influence with the frontlines states to prevent meddling in Iraqi politics and to contain the conflict within Iraq.
• Obtaining authorization from the UN to convene a war crimes trial for Saddam Hussein.
• Ensuring that Saddam Hussein is transported to the Hague.
• Repealing the Bush tax cuts; increasing taxes on individuals and especially on corporations; closing lots and lots of tax loopholes; imposing windfall taxes on defense industry corporations.
• To our children and grandchildren; this debt will be paid off in 10 years.
• Recovering funds from fraudulent claims by defense contractors, such as Halliburton.
• Reconstruction of what we have destroyed in Iraq; the counterpart to the Marshall Plan for Europe.

Option 3:  A timetable for withdrawal
Pro’s:

• Some of the insurgents will be interested in a political place in the postwar government.
• There is a date certain when there are no longer US troops in Iraq.
• The families of our troops have something to look forward to–the return of their loved ones.
• There is time to put together some of the more difficult negotiations that might prevent a civil war or a regional war.
• The disposition of Saddam Hussein can be arranged so that he has no possibility of returning to power.  He could be delivered over for trail.
• It doesn’t look like cutting and running.
• It is possible to have neutral troops separate the combatants-the US, the insurgents, the Kurdish peshmurga, the jihadis, the Shi’ite militants (such as Sadr), the Sunni militants, and the ex-Baathists.

Con’s:

• Having a timetable might not encourage the insurgents to move to a political footing but intensify their attacks.
• The approaching date of withdrawal starts the jockeying, conflict, and even civil war among ethnic groups and political factions.
• The possibility of a widening war in the region remains.
• The likelihood of a “Fall of Siagon” photo op is increased.
• What do you tell the last person to die from a mistake.

Commitments

• Sending in sufficient troops to minimize the number of US casualties.
• Understanding in advance that there will be a jump in casualties.
• No permanent bases in Iraq.
• Reconstruction of Iraq
• Obtaining authorization from the UN to convene a war crimes trial for Saddam Hussein.
• Ensuring that Saddam Hussein is transported to the Hague.
• Repealing the Bush tax cuts; increasing taxes on individuals and especially on corporations; closing lots and lots of tax loopholes; imposing windfall taxes on defense industry corporations.
• To our children and grandchildren; this debt will be paid off in 10 years.
• Recovering funds from fraudulent claims by defense contractors, such as Halliburton.
• Reconstruction of what we have destroyed in Iraq; the counterpart to the Marshall Plan for Europe.

There are probably options that mix these three, but what is striking is what has to be done no matter which option is chosen.  The other striking thing is the choice is something like this.  You can come up with another 3 million troops to finish the job or you can come up with an additional 150,000 troops to help get our troops out of there.  The people who support the need to end their delusion that reality is just a matter of saying so.  The people who argue for immediate withdrawal need to think through this carefully; what would you have to do to avoid disaster during withdrawal and still move the troops out; otherwise, you are advocating endangering the troops (and Iraqis) more than they already are.  The people who support a timetable need to understand that a timetable does not make it any easier and in the process you are losing more troops (and Iraqis) by a war of attrition.

So how do we start to build an unified view that is an alternative to the Republican dreamland?