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Yes, Mr. Bush, This War / Recession Is Hard

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

It must have been a day for getting things off the chest. No sooner had the government finally admitted that we were in a recession than the President was confessing he'd never realized the war would be so hard.

Perhaps he thought the whole thing would be fun: get on a pile of rubble, put on a hardhat, pretend to be a fireman; fly into a carrier, parachute a few feet with a messianic banner -- 'Mission Accomplished'; or, play with big Tinker Toys in the desert and dream huge scary dreams about End-Time.

Well, Mr. Bush, it did turn out hard for the thousands of dead, mostly poor American soldiers and civilians and for the hundred thousand and more poor Iraqis and Afghans burned to death or shot. Too bad. I didn't know it was hard for you.

Your recession though is also hard. You said February 18 on the "Today Show" that you didn't think the war caused the economics problems: "I think actually the spending in the war might help with jobs... because we're buying equipment and people are working."

But a lot of your people (6-7 percent) aren't working now. A lot of them aren't buying houses. A lot of them are going hungry (more than 1 in 8 people). And a lot of them face the end of their dream of a decent life or a decent education.

As I get older, I tend to reminisce. I recently looked at pictures that reflect my own memories of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, especially South Dakota in the '30s -- the Farm Security Administration pictures of poor and starving rural people, the pictures from my father's parishes of farm buildings and machinery covered with dust, a dust cloud at least a thousand feet high moving in on Gregory, South Dakota.

The relief work, the beggars, the staring, straggly cattle wandering through the countryside, the grasshoppers eating the up the grasslands and crops, even the fence posts. No one could pay Dad. We couldn't even raise a garden. Finally we moved to Wisconsin's Lake Superior area -- rain and no dust but farming in brick clay and glacial rocks. It was hard.

After we came back to Nebraska in 1944, I fished with a neighbor in Wahoo, August Albert. He taught me to paint houses, to mix the paint just right, to use an angle brush for fine work, and to scrape and prime the siding so that the work lasted forever. He taught me my first job skills. After work we would go bullheadfishing, he on the other side of the fishhole with his hang-down pipe glowing in the dark. There would be silence, then crickets, a frog croak, and occasional crackles in the bushes from passing animals. After a while August would start to recall things. He had no work or money at times during the Depression. He had fished to keep his family going (his wife was gone). He had picked up coal along railroad tracks and clinkers in dumps for heating. He had rummaged in the dumps for food and clothes.

Roosevelt was a good man.

The government had saved him and his family during those hard times when, in 1933, it decided to do something and launched the New Deal.

(For a sense of how good the New Deal could be, read Suzanne Williams' Nebraska and the CCC, obtainable from the Denton Community Historical Society.)

Now the government has decided to do something again. This time though, it's not the CCC or the WPA or the Federal Writer's Project. Now it will give $700 billion dollars to the biggest banks, rescue AIG (too big to fail!), rescue the 'Big Three' automakers, and spill mega-money on mega-corporations everywhere to make their deserts bloom. But no blooms come yet from this strategy of first rescue the upper crust.

In my view, no blooms will come until ordinary folks have work, mortgages that they can pay, food to feed their kids, and money to spend. One cannot run a mass production economy without money for the masses. Paul Krugman, the newly tapped Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote in 2006 that Bush's tax cuts saved those with incomes of over $200,000 a year more than $44,000 annually, and gave half the tax-cut money to them. Those receiving less than $75,000 annually received barely a quarter of the cuts: "For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth." Two years later with economic collapse and the same policies in place, most Americans lose ground at a radical pace.

Ironically, we cannot now spend our way out of a depression through New Deals and wars as we did in the Great Depression. Then, we had little national debt and strong basic industries. Now we have a three trillion-dollar war to enrich Big Oil's part of the "small wealthy minority" (a figure that does not count the off-the-books 'privatized' costs Annual Peace Conference speaker Michele Chwastiak detailed in the Nov./Dec. 2008 Nebraska Report).

• We have about 11 trillion dollars in national debt -- about 12 percent of that debt held by China and Japan and another 12 percent by the rest of the world.

• Our dollar is increasingly less the normative standard for international currencies.

• Our spending on infrastructure, education and job creation has gone up in smoke. As our jobless numbers grow, military spending creates only a fraction of the jobs per million of dollars spent that civilian spending creates.

Our Big Business war has placed large sections of the economy in a 'socialist' sector where the market does not operate, where usable goods are not created, and where food for the hungry is not produced. In coming months, billions of dollars will be directed to this same unproductive sector bailing out the very, very rich.

Yes, Mr. Bush, this war has been hard for everyone but the wealthy. Perhaps the next administration will find a way to put resources and hope into the hands of the August Alberts of our country. Let us hope.