[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 132 (Thursday, September 8, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1562-E1563]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RECOMMENDING A THOUGHTFUL ARTICLE BY FORMER SENATOR GEORGE McGOVERN
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HON. JAMES P. McGOVERN
of massachusetts
in the house of representatives
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring the attention of my
colleagues to a recent article by my friend, former Senator George
McGovern, in the September, 2011 issue of Harper's magazine.
In the article, Senator McGovern offers a series of recommendations
to improve our Nation, including bringing our troops home from
Afghanistan, investing in the jobs of the future, and reducing defense
spending.
Senator McGovern continues to bring an important, thoughtful
perspective to the issues of the day. I urge my colleagues to read his
article and to give serious consideration to the proposals he outlines.
Easy Chair--A Letter to Barack Obama
(By George McGovern)
When President Franklin Roosevelt came into office in the
depth of the Great Depression, he sought to stabilize and
empower American society by introducing bold new initiatives:
Social Security, the Public Works Administration, the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Rural Electrification
Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian
Conservation Corps, and the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration, among many others. These measures were
sufficiently successful, as was his leadership during World
War II, that he secured four terms in the White House. There
was some congressional resistance but not enough to block the
support of both political parties.
Like Roosevelt, President Barack Obama has inherited a
serious economic crisis, but in his first two years in office
he has been met with an even worse problem: the rigid
opposition of the rival party leaders to national health care
and nearly every other proposal he has made. The Republican
House Appropriations Committee has even voted to terminate
public funding for NPR and PBS. Neither during my four years
in the House of Representatives, when Dwight D. Eisenhower
was in the White House, nor through eighteen years in the
U.S. Senate, under John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard
Nixon, have I witnessed any president thwarted by the kind of
narrow partisanship that has beset Obama. He has tried to
avoid such divisions by publicly explaining his willingness
to compromise, but these gestures have been spurned. Some of
his political critics have gone so far as to express the hope
that the Obama Administration will fail, even avowing their
determination to hasten that failure. What has happened, one
is compelled to ask, to the love of nation?
I have learned that it is not easy to succeed either as a
senator or as a president if you are pushing for fundamental
change. We tend, as lawmakers and as citizens, to drift along
with the familiar ways of thinking: If it is good enough for
Grandma and Grandpa, it is good enough for us. If it is good
enough for the flag-wavers and the boasters, it is good
enough for us. Such resistance to change often is
strengthened by powerful interests--nowhere more forcefully
than in the National Defense bill that Congress considers and
passes each year.
When I entered the U.S. Senate in 1963, the defense budget
was $51 billion. This was at a time when our military experts
felt it necessary to have the means to win a war against the
combined powers of Russia and China. Today we have a military
budget of over $700 billion, and yet neither Russia nor China
threatens us, if indeed they ever did. Nor does any other
nation. Furthermore, the terrorist threat we face is not a
military matter. The World Trade Center was brought down not
by artillery or bombers or battleships but by nineteen young
Arabs equipped only with box cutters. The Department of
Homeland Security created by the Bush Administration after
this attack is a better instrument against terrorism than our
military, even though our armed forces are the best in the
world.
In my career both in the House and in the Senate, inspired
by the words of Eisenhower, my supreme commander in Europe
during World War II, I tried hard to curb the powers of what
Eisenhower, in his farewell address as president, referred to
as the ``military-industrial complex.'' Needless to say, all
my efforts to reduce military spending were defeated. With
the renaming of the War Department as the Defense Department
in 1947, the military part of the government became sacred,
virtually untouchable. How could anyone vote to cut defense
unless he or she is willing to face political defeat?
We need a new definition of ``defense'' that takes into
account the quality of our education, the health of our
people, the preservation of the environment, the strength of
our transportation, the development of alternative fuels, the
vigor of our democracy. These were the concerns expressed by
the people who stood in Cairo's Tahrir Square holding up
their signs for more than two weeks this winter. Without
guns, knives, or the use of their fists, they brought down
the dictator who had exploited them for nearly thirty
years.
All Americans want their country to have an adequate
military defense. But under pressure from corporate lobbyists
and legislators seeking military contracts or bases for their
states, we are spending to excess while other sources of
national defense, such as health care and education, are
shortchanged and the national debt grows ever larger.
Many patriotic Americans have opposed the two wars our
gallant young troops have been asked to fight in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
has estimated that the direct and indirect costs of the Iraq
war will amount to $3 trillion. This represents nearly a
quarter of our national debt. I suspect that the war in
Afghanistan will eventually cost another $3 trillion and we
still will not have achieved our aim. General David Petraeus,
the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, advises
[[Page E1563]]
that we cannot think of withdrawing our troops before 2014.
If we stay on that schedule, our soldiers will have been
fighting, bleeding, and dying there for thirteen years--more
than three times the length of U.S. involvement in World War
II.
I recently conferred with President Obama in his White
House office, urging him to withdraw from Afghanistan. I'm
pleased that he has since announced the withdrawal of 10,000
troops in 2011 and 23,000 in 2012. I would have been even
more pleased if all our 100,000 troops now in Afghanistan, as
well as those in Iraq, were on the way home.
The president may he reluctant to follow the advice of a
presidential candidate who in 1972 lost forty-nine states to
Richard Nixon. I can appreciate that concern. On the other
hand, shortly after the 1972 election, two bipartisan
investigations--one by the House and one by the Senate--
forced the incumbent who beat me to resign his office in
disgrace. A question from the New Testament comes to mind:
What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world or wins
a big election and loses his own soul? The late Sargent
Shriver, my running mate in 1972, came to me the day after
the election and said, ``George, we may have lost forty-nine
states but we never lost our souls.''
With this sentiment in mind, I would like to suggest a few
bold steps President Obama might consider for the good of his
soul and that of the nation.
1. We should bring our troops home from Afghanistan this
year. No previous foreign power that has tried to work its
will in Afghanistan has succeeded--not Alexander the Great,
not the Mongols, not the British, and not the Russians, who,
after nine years of fighting, had sent some 25,000 of their
soldiers home in coffins. The Soviet treasury was emptied and
the Soviet Union collapsed. Even if it were desirable for us
to stay a decade more, we simply cannot afford to do so.
2. We should close all U.S. military bases in the Arab
world. American troops in the Middle East incite rather than
prevent terrorist attacks against us. We would do well to
remember that when Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia
after fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, he found a large
American army in his home country, positioned there to halt a
possible Iraqi invasion--a presence that so offended him he
denounced the king and his own family for quartering the
American ``infidels'' within the shadow of the holy cities of
Mecca and Medina. He then returned to Afghanistan to organize
Al Qaeda and, later, launch the World Trade Center and
Pentagon attacks.
3. We should evaluate whether it is necessary to continue
other American troop consignments to Europe, South Korea, and
elsewhere. When the U.S. Army was sent to Korea in 1950 the
deployment was described as a brief police action, but sixty
years later our troops are still there. South Korea is now a
wealthier, more populous, and more industrialized nation than
North Korea, and is fully capable of defending itself.
Similarly, U.S. troops in Europe, now numbering 80,000, have
been there for half a century. They should be withdrawn, as
were the Soviet forces from Eastern Europe under Mikhail
Gorbachev.
4. President Obama should call on the Pentagon to reduce
the current military budget of $700 billion--a figure that
accounts for almost half of the world's military
expenditures--to $500 billion next year, and then, over the
next five years, to $200 billion. In a careful and persuasive
study, Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress and an assistant secretary of defense under
Ronald Reagan, identifies unneeded and costly programs that
could be cut from the Pentagon budget without weakening our
security, including the elimination of sophisticated
warplanes--all of which, added up, could save a trillion
dollars over the next ten years.
5. The Bush tax cuts for those with higher incomes should
be not only repealed but reversed; with an increase in taxes
for this bracket, the increased revenues could be used to
reduce the national debt. There would, of course, be strong
resistance to ending the tax favoritism now enjoyed by the
rich, but this bonanza for the few at the top must end.
6. Savings in military spending could be used to launch
valuable public investments, thereby creating jobs and
stimulating the entire economy. The administration has
expressed support for creating a European-style high-speed
rail system in the United States, and indeed we ought to
build the fastest, cleanest, and safest passenger- and
freight-train system in the world.
The president should also revive the full provisions of the
World War II--era G.I. bill, which enabled 7.8 million
soldiers to secure a college education at government expense
while also receiving a cost-of-living stipend. Having been a
bomber pilot during World War II, flying missions over Nazi
Germany, I was one of the beneficiaries of the bill,
eventually earning a Ph.D. in history at Northwestern
University. This program was costly, but the government
certainly made its money back, because educated citizens earn
more and so pay increased taxes. Now, as we experience a
crisis in higher education caused by soaring tuition costs
that exclude many working- and middle-class young people, why
not offer government-paid higher education and vocational
training for all qualified students--both civilian and
military?
Another wise public investment would be the expansion of
Medicare to all Americans. Some of the recently proposed
health-care legislation has been so lengthy and complicated
that I am not sure what is contained in it, but we all know
what Medicare is. We could reduce the impenetrable
legislation to a simple sentence: ``Congress hereby extends
Medicare to all Americans.'' I am at a loss as to why an old
codger like me benefits from Medicare while my children and
grandchildren do not. To soften the impact of this expansion
on the budget, I propose that the program be implemented in
steps every two years: the first step including children up
to the age of eight; the second, those from nine to eighteen;
the third, those from nineteen through thirty; and finally,
those from thirty-one through sixty-five. Programs such as
Medicare have been in place for years in many advanced
countries. My Canadian relatives tell me that any government
that tried to do away with their comprehensive medical and
hospital care would be promptly expelled from office.
None of this is intended as a criticism of Barack Obama,
who had my support when he was a candidate for the United
States presidency and who has my support today. I hope that
some of the ideas here might help him on the road to
greatness. I wish him well on the journey ahead.
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