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coalition of individuals and |
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Coalition for Peace with Justice
Letter to Chatham Record [to CPWJ Letters page] [ to CPWJ home page] February 18, 2003"Evil Empire" re-runs rob Chatham County People in Chatham County have even more at stake in the current debate over attacking Iraq than we did years ago during the "Evil Empire" campaign that supported wild spending on weapons systems for confronting the Soviet Union. Many people discussing the current campaign to attack the already destroyed country of Iraq may be too young to remember, but we've been through this before. Here's what happened in the 80's, when relative prosperity reigned and the gap between rich and poor was significantly less than it is today: While the intelligence community already knew that the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Cold War investment in distrust was too tempting to set aside. President Reagan's speech writers constructed a threat that he delivered convincingly, and the biggest deficit in history was created through vast amounts of arms production, and reductions in spending on domestic needs. Reagan's cronies grew rich from the game, while many veterans and many poor families ended up homeless in our streets. Today we face a more serious situation. The people who profited from Evil Empire scare tactics have learned how to divide and rule in a way that treats the states like colonies in an empire. They've captured many at the top of both parties. We send our hard-earned money to Washington on April 15th, but little of it returns. If you've followed the struggles over money for local needs, you may recognize a pattern. There's a shell game that starves local needs so local politicians are forced to raise the taxes that have been wasted in Washington, so that we will fight each other over the crumbs, and "anti-tax" forces can win elections. It's calculated to make us meaner than we are, and keep us divided. The scare tactics -- Evil Empire, etc -- worked to our disadvantage in the 80's. So have we learned anything? Our economy relies on exporting our nation's goods to the world. Many countries are already angered by trade policies that force them to accept hormone-contaminated meats, etc. Many of those countries would be flooded with refugees from a war profitable to powerful interests in the US. Do we really want to anger them further by forcing on them the costs of a war that they consider unnecessary? Who will buy our goods? If our politicians in Washington don't defend our needs, but instead follow a President off a cliff, it's time to replace them with ones that will take care of our communities. And throughout all this, we need to work together to construct a sense of community that will resist tactics of division. Jerry Markatos |
