Progressive Caucus

Floor Speech

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Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, as co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it is my honor to be here again tonight with Congressman Ellison and other members of the Progressive Caucus who will come down to talk about the Federal budget and our progressive priorities.

When we talk about the budget, it's easy for people to have their eyes just glaze over because they automatically think we're going to be talking about a bunch of numbers on a page. But, you know, this budget and every budget is so much more than that. While you will hear a bunch of numbers being thrown around here for the next hour, the important thing that must be remembered is that all of these figures represent what we believe. They represent what we, as a Nation, have as our priorities, what that says to every citizen of this country and every nation around the world.

The funding decisions that are included in the budget are the choices that every Member of Congress must make on what our priorities as a country should be for the next--not 1 year, but 10 years. These are choices that affect the lives of every single American. It is choices like whether or not we ensure that everyone will receive adequate health care, or whether or not we build yet another weapons system that we don't need. And these choices speak as loudly as anything on who we are as a Nation. That's why it's so important to talk about this and to understand what the numbers in the budget mean for our constituents, and to let them know that all this isn't set in stone, but that there are real choices to be made.

For the past 2 years, and again this year, the Progressive Caucus will be offering a full budget alternative, an alternative that will bring defense spending under control, that will balance our tax code to ensure that everyone is paying their fair share, and invests in renewable energy, in education, transportation, housing, veterans benefits, and health care for all.

These are our priorities; they're priorities that we, as progressives, have laid out. And I look forward to discussing all this with my progressive colleague, Mr. Ellison, and others who are here tonight

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Ms. WOOLSEY. Probably because I am a peacenik, I just am, have been, I think I was born that way.

But, you know, before we talk about the savings, I think we should, first of all, know that this is the third Progressive Caucus alternative budget in the last three budget cycles that we have introduced, and all of our budgets have been around what our President said in his speech, reforming our defense budget so that we are not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems that we don't use. You said that, I am going to emphasize that.

Now we are working with Congressman Barney Frank. This budget is going to be wrapped around cutting 25 percent of the defense budget so that our colleagues will have an option. They will have an alternative. They will be able to vote their conscience if they want to cut the defense budget. I am not saying they won't vote for the base budget, but they will have a chance to vote for a budget that cuts defense and invests in our national priorities.

But here is why we know we can do this. The United States doesn't just lead the world in defense spending, we almost outspend the rest of the entire world combined.

Mr. ELLISON. Wait a minute, do you mean to tell me that if you take every country in the world from Palau to Brazil, Russia to Israel, from Argentina to Brunei, you add them all up, you mean we still spend more?

Ms. WOOLSEY. That's right, and a full 43 percent of the world defense spending comes from the United States alone. When we add NATO allies into it, it's over 50 percent.

So our annual defense budget dwarfs that of all our biggest rivals, and we spend four times as much as China and eight times as much as Russia. Why? That's what I ask you, we don't need to do that.

And if you want to put this in perspective, every single person spent, when we add up our Pentagon budget, that's 40 percent of the taxes that every single person pays, 40 percent of their taxes go to the Pentagon. Why, I ask you? It does not make it safer and, in the end, you are less safe.

So what kinds of weapons are we cutting? You have got your chart up there, we are saving $15 billion a year by reducing the number of nuclear warheads that we have in our arsenal. We are going from 10,000 to a thousand. We don't think we need 10,000 warheads. We need 1,000 to keep us safe, even with the rest of the world. Over time, we should be working to have a nonnuclear world because it's nuclear weapons that can actually do all of humanity in, and shame on us for not knowing enough to stop that.

So we also, in this budget, get rid of the F-22 Raptor. We save $4 billion because this fighter jet was designed to fight, as I said, the next generation of Soviet planes, which were never even built.

It makes sense to build a plane that fights ghosts? I ask you, no, it doesn't.

There is the Virginia Class Submarine that, like the F-22, was built to fight the Soviets. It's more expensive than the submarines we currently have, and it doesn't have any new capacity or capability.

So there is so much about this that makes no sense.

And the other thing that we have to know is an investment in defense spending on weapons does not nearly enough for our economy. If you want to invest in the economy, invest in jobs and infrastructure and education.

Mr. ELLISON. Early childhood, health care.

Ms. WOOLSEY. Right. Health care. Invest in what gives back to the people of this country.

Mr. ELLISON. Mr. McDermott, a great American whose birthday we celebrate every January 15, actually on April 4, 1967, said these words: ``A Nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.'' Those words were spoken by Martin Luther King.

What do you think about that quote?

Mr. McDERMOTT. Well, I think it's obvious that one of the things that President Obama faces is the fact that this country has used its military might all over the world for the last 7 years and lost its moral authority by issues like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and a variety of other things. And it is clear, and it was Hubert Humphrey, from your home State and actually was mayor of your city, who said that a country will be judged by how it deals with those in the twilight of life and those at the dawn of life, the children and the old people.

Mr. ELLISON. In the shadows of life.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Right. You know the quote.

Mr. ELLISON. Yes, I do.

Mr. McDERMOTT. A guy from Minnesota should know it.

Mr. ELLISON. Absolutely.

Mr. McDERMOTT. But the fact is that that is the essence of what the government is about. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are basic documents that say it is our responsibility to protect the life and liberty of the American people and allow them to develop themselves to the fullest extent possible. And there is a point at which when we don't educate our children and when we don't take care of their health care, when we're the only industrialized country on the face of the Earth that doesn't have universal access to health care, you have to ask yourself how many guns do we need? How many bombers? I mean I would like to take a few of those off there and use them as financing for extending the health care system to everybody in this country. It wouldn't take very much out of this budget. But it would, in fact, make us a safer country and make us a morally responsible government to deal with the problems of our people.

For us not to do that, for us not to do in energy what needs to be done, in the long run it doesn't make any difference how many nuclear weapons we have. If global warming causes the oceans to rise and all these other things begin to happen, nuclear weapons aren't any good to shoot at polar bears or at whatever. I don't know. We'll have this stockpile of weapons, and some day people will come along a thousand years from now and say, I wonder what they were planning to do with all those weapons? They built them and they sat here and rotted. And that's really what's happening.

I really think that making a sensible and reasonable defense system is important. But we have gone way over the top, as has been suggested by some of these weapons systems that people were imagining something. I mean this whole business of Star Wars, it started with Reagan. I mean he said, well, you know, suppose they get up there in the sky and they start shooting rockets down on us. We've got to have this missile defense. And we are spending money even today on that stuff, and it makes no sense whatsoever.

If you look around the world and ask yourself are we really threatened by the Iranians? Are we really threatened by the Pakistanis? Are we really threatened by the Chinese? The Chinese have got so many problems of their own. But we continue to build weapons as though they were sitting over there just about to launch off into attacking us, and it could be nothing further from the truth. Chinese families want food and housing and an education for their kids and a health care system and a government that makes peace and makes a decent life for the people. They're not looking to attack us. But yet we continue to build weapons systems.

In fact, I think in some cases the military industrial complex was sad when the Berlin Wall fell because they had nothing to justify this stuff. And they've been scrambling around to justify it ever since, trying to find somebody to be afraid of. When, in fact, what we ought to be doing is building a peaceful world and dealing with our own problems at home and the problems of AIDS and hunger and disease around the rest of the world. If we would spend our money on those things, we would have much more peace than we will have building these weapons that are on the chart next to you. There's no security in that kind of continued----

Ms. WOOLSEY. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. ELLISON. I was going to ask you to react to the quote, if you would, ma'am. Would you react to the Martin Luther King quote, or should I read it again?

Ms. WOOLSEY. Read it again. That would be beautiful.

Mr. ELLISON. ``A Nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.''

How do you react to that? And then add on what other thoughts you may have.

Ms. WOOLSEY. Well, I believe it with all my heart. That's why I have introduced every year for the last 5 years SMART Security, which has war as the very last option when countries aren't getting along, if we even need that option, and it cuts military spending and invests in soft power and in diplomacy and international relations.

I want to read something out of an article that Barney Frank has in The Nation.

Mr. ELLISON. Please do.

Ms. WOOLSEY. The March 2 edition of The Nation. And I would like to enter this article into the Record. It's a great article, and it supports his and our 25 percent cut in defense spending in our budget. And he says, in the middle of this article, ``Spending on military hardware does produce some jobs, but it is one of the most inefficient ways to deploy public funds to stimulate the economy.''

Then he went on to talk about when he was talking with Alan Greenspan. He said, ``When I asked'' Alan Greenspan ``what he thought about military spending as stimulus, to his credit, he said that from an economic standpoint military spending was like insurance: If necessary to meet its primary need, it had to be done, but it was not good for the economy, and to the extent that it could be reduced, the economy would benefit.''

There is no question. President Eisenhower, before he left office, said beware of the military industrial complex, Americans, because it's got us going in the wrong direction. And we have a chance now to turn it around. We have a new President who does believe in diplomacy. We have a majority in the House and the Senate and we have our President in the White House, and now it is time for us to stand up and put together plans that will meet Martin Luther King's promise to us, and that's that we would have a world of peace as the world we want to live in.
[From the Nation, Mar. 2, 2009]

Mr. ELLISON. Congressman, you've been reflecting quite a bit on issues of military reductions and focusing on our country's security, not sacrificing that, but on how we might save more money. But what do you think about this idea of military expenditures not being a good economic investment, not stimulating a lot of jobs? Any thoughts occur to you about that?

Mr. McDERMOTT. If you spend a dollar in a school educating a kid who then does better in the world and gets a job and makes money and pays taxes and contributes to the society, you've created something. When you build a nuclear weapon and put it on a shelf somewhere, you have developed nothing. It just sits there. Or you build a tank or you build a Humvee.

Ms. WOOLSEY. And it kills somebody.

Mr. McDERMOTT. You have to ask yourself why do we keep building more and more and more? And, in fact, there's a curious thing about Iraq. Having been over there, it reminds me, we have 150,000 soldiers over there and we also have 150,000 contractors. Now, if a soldier is paid $50,000 and a contractor is paid $100,000, why isn't it more sensible to hire another soldier than to hire a contractor for twice the money? And that's going on all over Iraq, in fact, all over the world. We are contracting things out that ought to be done by our own soldiers and would be done in a much more reasonable and cost-efficient way. So if you look at this budget, there are a million places where you can find places to save money if you care about that.

Mr. ELLISON. Talking about soldiers as opposed to contractors, I will never forget the hearing in which General Petraeus was asked how much he makes, and I think he makes about $170,000 a year for managing a whole lot of people and a whole lot of equipment. And then somebody asked Erik Prince, who is the head of Blackwater, how much he makes, and he makes quite a bit more than that, definitely millions. And I mean he runs an operation quite a bit smaller than the United States military and a comparable force. So even when it comes to the leadership in the military arena, we're contracting military leadership and we are paying them a whole lot more than we are those soldiers who are at the head of our military and who are really doing the real hard work and can't just walk away, and it's not just about a dollar and cents for them. When you made your observation about contractor versus soldier pay, that was another image that stuck in my mind.

I yield back to you.

Mr. McDERMOTT. I think that is the whole thing that we have not seriously looked at for the last 7 years. We have been spending, spending, spending. We've had budget after budget, supplemental budgets. They come in and say we need another $30 billion. We need another $70 billion. We're going to use $50 billion for reconstruction. We're going to use this. But no oversight. They've been putting that money out there, but nobody has been actually looking. And that's why you get control towers, as I said, built out in the desert for $14 million and nobody says to themselves, gee, what's that about? Who did that? Well, it was a contractor. You know, I don't know if it was KBR or which one of the contractors, but we let a contract to somebody to build a very sophisticated control tower. And we talk about the ``bridge to nowhere'' in our infrastructure. We complain if somebody puts a piece in the budget for a bridge somewhere. We put military things out like that and we don't even ask a question.

Mr. ELLISON. You've hit on something. Why has it been somewhat taboo to discuss the military budget? What is in operation that would make someone shy about asking tough questions about military expenditure?

Does the gentlewoman from California have any views on this?

Ms. WOOLSEY. Well, first of all, there's a big fear of looking like you're not patriotic around here. The second thing is it's very embarrassing when you ask the question and nobody has the answer and you're talking about billions of dollars. And that's why Barbara Lee and I have been working with the GAO to have the DOD implement the over 2,000 recommendations that the GAO has made to the DOD to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. So they now know they have to do it, and we are counting on those cuts of those 2,000 wasteful expenditures in our Progressive Caucus budget.

Mr. ELLISON. Congresswoman, we have just been joined by Congressman Sam Farr, who is a member of the Progressive Caucus.

Congressman Farr, tonight we have been talking about the Progressive budget and how examining the defense budget in a tough way will allow us to save a whole lot of money which we can use for human need. And I just want to know do you have any comments on that, any reflections?

Mr. FARR. Well, without a doubt the way we have been spending and putting the war efforts into just an emergency supplemental doesn't make any sense, because there has never been an accounting for it. The new administration has said they are bringing us in their budget the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan, so there is going to be some fiscal responsibility, and everyone knows there will be a day when we will not be spending that much money, which is a lot of money, and therefore those costs can be cut.

I think that there is no way that we cannot. As we try to balance this budget or get it into sense in the outyears, the largest increase over the years has been the Defense Department, and therefore they are going to be the one that is the most dramatically reduced. I think all of us feel that the plan is to have a smaller military, but without a doubt it has to be a smarter military, and the investment in smartness is not the kinds of things you see on that board.

I am very excited about upgrading the skills of American military, particularly because my background in the Peace Corps is that you find in Afghanistan and Iraq what is missing now is what we call soft power, which is that we have learned to kick down the doors anywhere in the world at any time, but we have not learned to win the hearts and minds of people. If indeed we are going to have peace and stability, we have got to do a lot more work on the soft power side, which is less expensive and probably more effective. So, obviously there is room for reductions. As we argue the cost of health care, we have to also argue the cost of defense.

Mr. ELLISON. Congressman Farr, one of the things that Barney Frank says is that on September 10th, 2001, we had no idea how we were going to deal with the expenditures associated with an Iraq war. Somehow over the course of time we figured out how to come up with $10 billion a month to fight the Iraq war. Yet people tell you and they tell me we can't afford universal health care. That is just too expensive. The prior President even told us that and vetoed the State Children's Health Insurance Program because it cost too much money.

But what does that mean to you when we think about reexamining our defense budget for waste, fraud and abuse, and dealing with some of these Cold War era weapons systems? In your view, what do we really need a ballistic missile defense for in this age and day? Do you have any thoughts on that topic?

Mr. FARR. You have the expert on health care here with Dr. McDermott and the American leader on single payer plans, and certainly he can give a lot of that.

But I think what I see missing in the dialogue here is that a lot of people, conservatives who would not agree with us would argue that government ought to run itself more like a business. You don't hear businesses talking about costs and expenditures. When they spend money, they talk about investments.

Indeed, if America is going to grow and strengthen itself, then it has got to talk about these things as investments. And if you really analyze the investment in education, the investment in health care, not costs in, but investments in, obviously you want to run them well, and if you really look at the military and talk about an investment in peace operations and stability, which is what it is all about, I think you come up with different numbers than just costs. You come up with different priorities.

Mr. ELLISON. Congresswoman Woolsey, do you want to reflect on this?

Ms. WOOLSEY. I just want to say you also should put the cost of not doing those things, the cost of not having a healthy community, not having an educated constituency, not having people ready for jobs for the 21st century. Those costs, we never look at that when we are doing our budgeting.

I have a question, if I may, to just throw out to the three of you. Sam, before you came down here we were talking about 150,000 contractors in Iraq and why our military, which is one-third of the cost, each one of our troops, why we just didn't have them doing it all.

My question is, wouldn't we have to have a draft in order to have that many troops available? I don't think we have volunteers that would be able to double the size of the troops in the units over in Iraq and Afghanistan, because I don't think people are that excited about going over there for $50,000 a year, for one thing.

Mr. FARR. Well, the difficulty you have is, again back to that investment, if indeed the contracting purpose is to build infrastructure, it is nuts to think that a company from the United States has a vested interest in the outcome and survivability of that project. We learned that with the ``ugly American,'' where we would go and build things in other countries and leave and they would fall apart, because in the process we never got the host country nationals involved in building it, in owning it, in wanting to run it and keep it up and learn how to, as we saw with generators in Iraq that we installed and nobody put oil in them and they all burned out, because they said it doesn't matter, they will wait until they come back and replace them.

So I think this dialogue is really important, because the first line of our national security is investment in a well-informed electorate or well-informed public. So the first line of our national security is investment in education. That is our biggest defense system, security system, and we have to make that investment equal to or greater than obviously it has been historically if we want to build a stronger America.

Mr. McDERMOTT. One of the interesting things, I am standing here listening to this, and, I don't know, as people are sitting at home listening to this and wondering about all this, this is a sacred cow that we are never supposed to look at. That is why we don't discuss the defense budget, because people are afraid if you talk about it and talk about reducing it at all, you are not a patriot. That is the accusation that is made immediately.

But what happens in the Defense Department is they say, well, you know, we would like to build a submarine, so this year we will put $1 million into the budget and sign a contract to build a submarine in the next 2 years. So the next budget comes along and here is a contract already signed, and the next $10 billion goes into the budget, and the next year it is ten more. And that kind of sort of sneaking it in under the door without people actually seeing what is being committed to, that is how this missile defense stuff and all that is done, incrementally. Nobody ever sees the long-term cost of what we are doing and what it is going to mean in terms of what isn't available for the things that this society needs.

The minute anybody raises it and says, why are we doing this, somebody says, well, you don't care about the safety of this country. That couldn't be further from the truth for any one of the four of us. But in fact people will say it and they will think that somehow if you cut one dime out of the defense budget, the whole country suddenly is going to be cowering in the corner and the world is going to be threatening us. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Mr. ELLISON. Well, Congressman, the fact is that in all this exorbitant, precipitous expansion of the defense budget, you really haven't seen the average soldier getting a whole lot more money. We have had to increase the budget for the VA. When you talk about the human element in the military, this almost seems like the forgotten element.

When you think about a weapon like this ballistic missile defense over in Europe, agitating the Russians, the Iranians aren't threatening to bomb America. I haven't heard that one yet. The fact is that this thing in the Bush budget was $10 billion. The fact is you have got this $21 billion for nuclear weapons. We live in a time of asymmetrical warfare. What do we need $21 billion for? Why do we need that?

The fact is that is one of the things that is so appalling. One of the things we are doing tonight is saying it is not unpatriotic to examine the military budget. It is not a sign that you are a coward and you don't want to face the enemy if you want to cut the military budget. It doesn't mean that you don't care about the troops. Of course, we desperately care about the troops. Part of what we are arguing for is for the sake of the troops.

So the thing is that it is so important to be having this dialogue tonight, so critical that we do not shrink from this critical dialogue about cutting this budget. I am so happy that President Obama came right in this

Chamber a little more than a week ago to say ``we will eliminate the no-bid contract that have wasted billions in Iraq and reform our defense budget so that we are not paying for Cold War era weapons systems we don't use. Let it begin now.''

Mr. FARR. You know what is interesting about your comment? I sit on the Military Construction Appropriations Committee. That is the military quality of life. We interview the soldiers, have them come in and ask them to prioritize what they want. Never in my 15 years have I ever heard them ask for a weapons system. What they ask for, their number one issue is quality of housing. The number two issue is childcare. Childcare. That is what the soldiers want. It is quality of life, because they are raising their families in the military. They are getting deployed and they are coming back.

The weapons system, those are all Fortune 500 companies that make those. That is Wall Street. So you have a different lobbying effort between the personnel, the human factor in the military, and the weapons systems or the procurement side of the military, and that is what is incredibly remarkable. And I am really pleased that you are pointing out if we are going to make proper adjustment, we have got to really scrutinize these expenditures to really make them essential to a new global world order.

We are not fighting conventional wars. We are fighting asymmetrical wars, and I don't know what a ballistic missile system is going to do in an asymmetrical war in fighting people that are using the Internet and public transportation to move their weapons and ideas around.

Thank you for your time tonight. I really appreciate it.

Mr. ELLISON. Congressman Farr, let me thank you for being here. Let me also thank Congressman Woolsey, Congressman McDermott, and also Congressman Polis was with us for a moment.

This is the progressive message, the progressive message tonight that we came with, to talk about just the defense aspect of the progressive message. We believe that if we follow the program that has been offered by the Center For American Progress that Congressman Frank has been working on, we can save a lot of money for the American people without any reduction in safety for the American people.

It is not unpatriotic to question the military budget. It is not unpatriotic to talk about waste, fraud and abuse in the military. It is to enhance the quality of life for the soldier and security for the American people.

My name is Keith Ellison. I have been happy to be here tonight for the Progressive message. It has been great, another fantastic hour. We will be back, week in, week out, projecting a progressive message to the American people.

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