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Rep. Lynn Woolsey | A Budget Built on Common Sense    [

    Rice and Rumsfeld Press for $65 Billion for War
    The Associated Press

    Thursday 09 March 2006

    Washington - Top members of the Bush administration urged Congress Thursday to quickly pass a $91 billion spending bill that includes money to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that despite a surge in sectarian violence in Iraq, the process of creating a stable government is proceeding satisfactorily.

    Rumsfeld was pressed to explain the US military's plan to respond in the event that Iraq's sectarian violence grows into a full-fledged civil war.

    "The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the - from a security standpoint - have the Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to," Rumsfeld said.

    Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., repeatedly pressed Rumsfeld to say what US troops would do if civil war broke out, noting that in his own view the country "only narrowly missed descending into all-out civil war" in recent days.

    Rumsfeld said the key to avoiding civil war is for Iraq's political leaders to form a government of national unity. He also said that it would be counterproductive to set a timetable for withdrawing US forces, stressing that he's confident the Iraqis realize the enormity of the stakes at this stage of the process.

    "They have everything to lose," he said. "If they are not able to put together a government in a relatively short period of time they are facing a very difficult situation for all of the people involved in governance in that country."

    Also responding to Byrd's question, Gen. John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command, suggested that Iraq has been moving in the direction of civil war.

    "There's no doubt that the sectarian tensions are higher than we've seen, and it is of great concern to all of us," Abizaid said, adding that he was pleased with the professionalism that Iraq's own security forces have demonstrated in responding to the strife.

    Abizaid also described the situation in Iraq as "changing in its nature from insurgency toward sectarian violence."

    Both Rumsfeld and Rice acknowledged the recent growth in sectarian violence.

    "There is a high level of tension in the country, sectarian tension and conflict," Rumsfeld said. But it has not yet become a civil war "by most experts' calculation," he added.

    Both Abizaid and Rumsfeld cited progress in the training of Iraqi security forces. Abizaid said more than 100 Iraqi battalions are now conducting counter-insurgency operations, compared with only five in 2004. He did not mention that the number of Iraqi battalions rated as capable of operating without US military assistance had recently dropped from one to zero.

    In her opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee, Rice said most Iraqis are convinced that their hopes for a stable and secure nation will succeed despite the persistent insurgency.

    "They still face a very determined enemy, an enemy that would like to see that political process halted so that Iraq might devolve into chaos and conflict," she said.

    Rice also criticized "a terrible human rights record" in Iran, urging the Congress to approve a proposed $75 million plan to increase US cultural outreach to Iranian citizens. "We do not have a problem with the Iranian people," she said, adding that the problem is with the Iranian government and its nuclear ambitions.

    Rumsfeld told the panel he was disappointed that the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday trimmed by $1 billion the Pentagon's request for $5.9 billion to continue training Iraqi and Afghan security forces.

    "In my view that is clearly an enormously important thing for our country to be doing," he said.

    Rumsfeld said such training is at the heart of a broader Pentagon strategy to build reliable security partners globally.

    "When other nations and partners can shoulder greater security burdens around the globe it is far less likely that US troops will be called on at what is always considerably greater cost in both blood and treasure," he said.

    Abizaid told the committee that the $5.9 billion is vital to successfully completing the development of Iraqi and Afghan police and military forces.

    "In both Afghanistan and Iraq, local security forces take on the brunt of the fighting and the brunt of the casualties," he said.

    Rice's opening statement to the committee was interrupted by a man in the audience who stood and shouted, "How many of you have children in this illegal and immoral war? The blood is on your hands and you cannot wash it away." As he was escorted from the room by security officers the man also shouted, "Fire Rumsfeld."

    The future of the $91 billion spending bill has been threatened by a move in the House to block a Dubai-owned company from taking control of some US port operations. President Bush has said he would veto the bill if such a proposal was included.

    Also appearing at the hearing was Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace. It was the first time those four leaders have appeared together in front of Congress since Rice joined the Cabinet in January 2005.

    The emergency spending bill includes about $65 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as about $20 billion for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts. Additional money would go to the State Department and intelligence agencies for international operations and classified activities.

    The Senate is not expected to vote on the bill until sometime in

    April. The House could vote next week.

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    Go to Original

    A Budget Built on Common Sense
    By Rep. Lynn Woolsey
    Alternet.org

    Thursday 09 March 2006

    A decade after coming to power on the promise that they, and they alone, could put us back on the path to fiscal righteousness, Republicans have run the nation's finances into the ground.

    With Congress' blessing, President Bush has turned out to be a shameless profligate, throwing fiscal caution to the wind and splattering the nation with red ink. His policies have turned a projected $5.6 trillion surplus (over 10 years) into a projected deficit of $3.3 trillion. That's a staggering $8.9 trillion fiscal reversal. With every second - every single tick of the clock - that this administration is in office, it is responsible for adding roughly $680 to the federal deficit. An American child born today will inherit a promissory note - which might as well be a tax increase - of more than $27,000.

    And yet, for all of President Bush's drunken-sailor spending, precious little of it has been invested in empowering people who desperately need a hand-up from their government to rebuild their lives. Instead, the president has fattened up the Pentagon, ladled out tax breaks for wealthy individuals and pried open the treasury for the oil, insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

    It's time to rearrange our federal budget priorities, which have become completely distorted on the Republicans' watch. It's nothing short of scandalous that a nation spending trillions of dollars a year would tolerate a threadbare social safety net. Take it from a former welfare mother like me - programs like Medicaid and school nutrition are a lifesaving last resort for millions of American families.

    It's time to question the hallowed, untouchable status of some of our bigger budget items. For example, it's been an open secret for years that the Pentagon is rife with waste - remember the $600 toilet seats of 1980s lore? Fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy is still fighting the Cold War, still procuring weapons systems that have nothing to do with the security threats we face today.

    So today, I'm joining my fellow Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Barbara Lee in introducing the Common Sense Budget Act (CSBA), which would divert $60 billion of unnecessary Pentagon spending to under funded domestic priorities. Among the cuts: $7 billion from the National Missile Defense Program and $13 billion to reduce the American nuclear arsenal to 1,000 warheads.

    These obsolete Pentagon expenditures have been identified by a team of military experts led by defense scholar Lawrence Korb, whose knows a thing or two about what and how the Pentagon spends - he was President Reagan's assistant secretary of defense for Manpower, Installation and Logistics.

    The $60 billion would be reallocated as follows:

Children's Health Care: $10 billion annually to provide health care coverage for the millions of uninsured American children.

School Reconstruction: $10 billion over 12 years to rebuild and modernize every public K-12 school in the country.

Job Training: $5 billion per year to retrain 250,000 Americans who have lost their jobs because of foreign trade.

Energy Independence: $10 billion each year to kick the imported oil habit by investing in efficient, renewable energy sources.

Homeland Security: $5 billion a year to make up for funding shortfalls in emergency preparedness, infrastructure upgrades and grants for first responders.

Medical Research: $2 billion a year to restore recent cuts to the National Institutes of Health budget.

Global Hunger: $13 billion a year in humanitarian assistance that allows poor nations to feed 6 million children who are at risk of dying from starvation every year.

Deficit Reduction: $5 billion devoted to putting a dent, however small, in the $8.2 trillion national debt.

    We can do all that, without a single tax increase or one additional dime in federal spending. And the right wing can save the demagoguery about patriotism and supporting the troops - this legislation doesn't touch outlays for the war in Iraq or the so-called war on terrorism. Those are funded separately through a supplemental appropriations process. We're simply talking about diverting that fraction of our overall defense spending that is doing nothing to defend us.

    In addition to Mr. Korb and the military advisers, we have developed this legislation in collaboration with Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities (BLSP), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization of 650 top corporate executives from companies like Goldman Sachs, Hasbro and Phillips-Van Heusen. BLSP is behind this bill not just because they have a moral compass, but because they are businesspeople who understand that these investments in human capital will create jobs, improve the business climate and create economic opportunity.

    Even when Republicans catch a case of buyer's remorse, they still manage to get it wrong, by reining in exactly the kind of spending we need most urgently.

    Case in point: the debate over budget reconciliation last fall. Post-Katrina, when the government pledged billions to help rebuild the Gulf Coast, a group of Republicans pressured their leaders into debating (and eventually adopting) budget cuts to offset the Katrina spending.

    Can you guess which programs ended up on the chopping block? Of course, the ones that our most vulnerable citizens depend on - Medicaid, Food Stamps, public housing, foster care, student loans, child support enforcement, etc. As part of the relief effort for people who've lost everything, we took from people who have virtually nothing.

    We left untouched the slice of the federal pie reserved for the defense contractors and corporate welfare queens, while telling poor children who need immunizations that they really need to tighten their belts.

    But why the imperative for Katrina offsets in the first place? When did the people who abandoned pay-as-you-go budgeting suddenly become interested in balancing both sides of the ledger? Where were the offsets for the billions upon billions in spending that put us in this hole in the first place?

    Republicans pick the most curious moments to exercise fiscal restraint. Tax windfalls for heirs to inherited wealth? Throw down the national credit card. An unnecessary war, involving the invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation, at a cost of a cool quarter of a trillion dollars? Just send the bill to my grandchildren.

    But a national emergency in which a major American city drowns? Whoa, that sounds expensive. A natural disaster that leaves hundreds of thousands of our own people homeless? In that case, don't stop pinching pennies until every last grant is paid off in full! And whatever you do, don't touch the Pentagon budget. Because what that destitute Louisiana family needs above all is a space-based shield to intercept the imminent Russian missile attack.

    This is no way to run a country, no way to manage a nation's finances. A new fiscal approach is long overdue.

    The Pentagon, which already consumes roughly half of all discretionary spending, can make do with 15 percent less. Cutting $60 billion would actually bolster the national defense, because weeding out the waste would allow the military to focus on the weapons, training and tactics that truly keep the nation safe. What better serves the cause of national security? Investment in first responders, energy independence and global nutrition ... or billions that we're still pouring into the F/A-22 Raptor, which was designed to outpace Soviet fighter jets?

    The Common Sense Budget Act represents a dramatic shift in our fiscal priorities, an almost revolutionary rededication to investing in our people. The money is there, if we choose to find it, if we choose to take on the sacred cows and the entrenched interests that perpetuate them.

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    Lynn Woolsey represents California's Sixth Congressional District and is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.