How You Can Stop the Iraq War and Improve Traffic and Life Here: Take the No-Money Pledg

[marmar]

from HuffPost:


Edge Pusher
How You Can Stop the Iraq War and Improve Traffic and Life Here All at Once: Take and Trumpet the No-Money Pledge
Posted August 14, 2007 | 07:30 PM (EST)



Let's start with essentials. There is nothing bad happening in the U.S. that a lot of federal money now going to Iraq wouldn't make infinitely better. This includes the traffic nightmare. The lack of affordable housing. The miserable, under-funded schools in neighborhoods dominated by Latinos and African Americans. The paucity of resources for inner city kids. The fact that millions of Americans are "food insecure." The legions without health insurance. And the leaching of decent working and middle class jobs out of the country because of a scarcity of economic development and infrastructure funding.

Throw chunks of the Iraq-bound trillion at these problems and sit back and watch the difference it will make as compared to Iraq, where it has gone to secure a fundamentalist Shiite clergy takeover of most the country a la Iran and to enrich several of the sleaziest companies in America, all major contributors to the Republican Party, and their corrupt counterparts in Iraq.

This is our local reason for ending the criminally misbegotten Iraq event, which its perpetrators have used as an excuse to cut federal funding for the country's needs over the past five years. The very long list of non-local reasons doesn't need repeating here.

What desperately needs stating -- and then repeating -- is how to shut the nightmare down.

Which leads inevitably to the matter of money in politics, meaning the dollars that finance political campaigns. Accordingly, let us now all entertain the superb idea of defunding the Democratic Party as the fastest way to stop the Iraq war. Since Congressional Dems don't have the collective courage simply to stop funding the war, let's stop funding the Dems until they do. (Last month Senate Dems resorted to an "all night session" stunt they knew in advance they could not win -- a vain effort to insert a troop withdrawal amendment in a bill that will finance the war anyway, an amendment which would take 60 votes to overturn the Republican filibuster as compared to the simple majority needed in either the Senate or House to stop the money flow altogether. The Dems' idea is to bring pressure on Republicans to justify their blocking actions to their constituencies and give the Dems cover for an election that is a year and a half away while Iraq is happening now.)

Stopping Dem funding is an idea that has come about without any prejudice to the similarly fine notion of defunding the Republican Party, an act unfortunately less likely to have mass appeal among its campaign donors. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edge-pusher/how-you-can-stop-the-iraq_b_60468.html