By Johan Galtung
MANASSAS, Virginia, U.S. , Oct 28 2013 (Columnist Service)

Political terrorism failed. The House Republicans used voting in one chamber to put the livelihoods of millions of people inside and outside the U.S. at risk, for their own political goals. And made the mistake of most terrorists, non-state or state: when people suffer they will join us, against our enemy; to find out that people turn against the terrorists instead.

And they were not a small group of Tea Party extremists but a clear majority of the House Republicans: 144 voted No in the end, only 87 Yes.

President Barack Obama has himself to thank for the general House Republican majority; having betrayed most groups voting for him in 2008 he was punished in the 2010 mid-term elections. Like the Republicans will be in 2014 for their political terrorism.

Johan Galtung

The budget deal postponed the government shutdown to Jan. 15 and the U.S. default to Feb. 7, solving nothing.

Worse, there was much reporting but few ideas floating in the media. Worse still, there was no massive million “Stop this Nonsense” March on Congress, but widespread apathy. Worst: the most clearly outspoken group was veterans and reserve officers (1.1 million strong) – indicative of a major threat should their Nov. 1 paychecks not arrive.

The two blocs hardly talk, but treat each other like they treat the Taliban. Terrorists are punished by not being listened to – a bad thing when the Republicans have arguments. The Health Care Act may not be affordable, there may be a coverage gap, etc.; work remains to be done.

There are solutions for a country as resourceful as the U.S. The government shutdown is about the federal budget deficit. Do as households do: decrease the expenditure, increase the income.

Three major parts of the federal budget are loan interest, the military, and Social Security-Medicare-Medicaid – all enormous.

The three giants are in a NATO vs Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) arms race; joint military terrorism putting humanity at risk. How about the U.S. making a deal with the Chinese and the Russians? Chinese forgiveness of 50 percent of the U.S. debt against a 50 percent U.S. reduction of the most offensive military components – the 800 bases around the world – over 5-10 years?

Accompanied by a similar multilateral and balanced reduction in offensive arms in all three, building on the Russian chemical arms momentum?

Social Security: let everybody at an older age who wants to work do so. More tax revenue, less expenditure.

Medicare-Medicaid: create a more healthy population. The decrease in smoking, mainly thanks to the U.S., was a great step forward. Next in line: sodas. Selling and serving sodas should become as illegitimate as smoking in public; much more to gain than from outlawing marijuana.

The debt ceiling is a deeper problem, affecting an economy that does not produce a surplus sufficient to run a modern society with an acceptable livelihood for all of its citizens. A sixth or even a fifth of the population lives in misery.

A source of much new income, at the individual, family, local community, state and federal levels. Politically difficult, but economically simple: lift the bottom up. Identify the poorest local communities, give short-term credit to cooperatives for growing and selling cheap, organic food, build affordable housing, and provide simple polyclinics for the common diseases.

Employing the neediest. Make people fend for themselves rather than depend on taxation. Like any small business, they need some initial credit; unlike small businesses they need the protection of cooperative production and consumption.

Learn from positive experiences in Spain; Mondragon, Marinaleda: a small investment in people marginalised by the mainstream economy, and they (re-)enter and become consumers and producers.

Reduce suffering, decrease inequality, and make the real economy grow; three huge flies with one huge stroke. Is the U.S. up to it?

The U.S. economy is strong on goods – with decreasing unit costs due to high resource-labour-capital-technical-administration efficiency – but weak on services, with skyrocketing costs in education, health and old age care.

Credits are needed, but not from money banks: from time banks with people exchanging services on a one hour = one hour basis.

The U.S. real economy is weak today relative to the Wall Street finance economy – and Washington bail-out rather than stimulus – using money to make more money, directly, not via cumbersome investments; in seconds, not in years, at tremendous risk; with more 2008’s lining up. Stop it.

Remedy No. 1: The five or six financial behemoths are too big to use. To stop feeding them money is like stopping to serve alcohol to an alcoholic. Let thousands of local saving banks grow for people to put their savings in, not risking that they will be used for betting, but for local investment.

Remedy No. 2: A much overdue one percent sales tax on the stock exchange.

Remedy No. 3: Outlaw money trafficking, like trafficking in drugs and women.

No such items on the table by January-February, only small-scale budget bickering and the Chinese approach comes up: de-Americanise the world economy. A “world reserve currency” – the dollar – from just one country is madness anyhow; from a country with cyclical shutdowns and ceilings – like the U.S.- it is insanity.

Strong leadership has to emerge from the White House and Congress, but especially from people – the local level, local banks and businesses. The future is above all in their hands.
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Excerpt:

The federal budget for fiscal year 2013 proposed by President Barack Obama severely cuts aid for working families by targeting at least two programmes, the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) and Project-Based Rental Assistance (PBRA), that aid the nation’s most vulnerable working families.

First, Obama has proposed a 50-percent cut to the CSBG programme that funds an array of services – which differ in each county – including emergency rental and utliity assistance, dental clinics, Head Start (pre-kindergarden education), home weatherisation, job training, GED (high school diploma equivalency) classes, and entrepreneurship training.

In 2012, Congress funded CSBG at 677 million dollars. For 2013, President Obama has proposed funding the programme at only 350 million dollars, a cut of nearly one half.

Obama has also proposed additional cuts to the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

“This is the second year that the administration has made these recommendations,” David Bradley, executive director of the National Community Action Foundation, told IPS regarding CSBG.

“Congress in 2012 rejected them for a number of reasons. Number one, economic recovery, particularly in low-income communities, has not happened yet. Eleven hundred community action authorities in 98 percent of U.S. counties are still at record levels of people coming for services, and record levels for new individuals and families. People who have fallen into economic hardship, who previously may have been middle class, the demand is still there,” Bradley said.

“Particularly in rural areas, there’s no one else who can pick this up,” Bradley said.

Bradley said the cuts would be devastating to millions of U.S. families.

If Congress enacts the cuts to CSBG as proposed by Obama, “Over five million individuals and families would not have access to these services. In a 3.7-trillion-dollar budget, this is an example of penny-wise and pound-foolish,” Bradley said.

These cuts are tiny in proportion to the federal budget, and yet right-wing organisations and the Tea Party still blast Obama for failing to cut the federal budget to their satisfaction, meaning that there is little political benefit to the president – only harm to the people who have largely supported him electorally.

“Obama has some good words about restraining the budget and reducing the rate of deficit, but little of long-term substance in his 2013 budget proposal,” Joe Cobb, policy advisor in economics at the right- wing Heartland Institute, said in a press release. Cobb said Obama’s budget proposed is “dead on arrival”.

“The vision of an America that enjoys economic growth is not going to come from the European welfare-state ideals of President Obama and his social Democrats in the Congress, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). They believe in that great fiction that everyone might live at the expense of everyone else, if we only transfer wealth from successful to unsuccessful people,” Cobb said.

So what does Obama have to gain from these cuts if the right-wing Republicans are still unhappy?

“It’s symbolically, (Obama is saying) we’re not going to defend all poverty programmes, here’s a programme we like, but were going to cut it, as he said in the (2011) State of the Union. If he’s calling on Republicans in Congress to make sacrifices on tax extenders or tax breaks he’s showing he’s willing to make tough choices too, this is a choice he’s willing to make. Find another one, Mr. President,” Bradley said.

Meanwhile, Obama has also proposed a complete elimination of the PBRA programme, which means that hundreds of thousands of low-income renters in the U.S. – many of whom were displaced from demolished public housing projects with the promise of affordable housing opportunities elsewhere – will now lose their rental subsidies.

Currently, nearly 1.2 million households benefit from PBRA, where the amount of rent they pay is based on a portion of their income, while the rest is paid by the federal government, through local housing authorities, to property owners.

Unlike the voucher programme, where the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides monthly checks to property owners on behalf of tenants who select where they want to live, under PBRA, the low-income apartment building or complex itself is subsidised.

“HUD proposes renewing just a third of project-based Section 8 contracts for a full year, and turning the rest into short-term contracts,” Amy Clark, spokesperson for the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), told IPS.

“We are very concerned that this would cause investors to question the stability of the programme, putting tenants’ housing at risk,” Clark said.

“HUD has tried this budget gimmick before,” Sheila Crowley, president of the NLIHC, said in a press release. “And it wrecked havoc in the lives of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people.”

Obama also wants to raise the minimum rents paid by the very poorest HUD-assisted households. Raising the minimum rents from 25 or 50 dollars per month to at least 75 dollars per month would create a savings of 150 million dollars, or only .003 percent of the total HUD budget.

“The federal government is reduced to picking the pockets of the poorest of the poor. It is Scrooge-like,” Crowley said.

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