If the populace of the nation, which spends on its military industrial estate more than all the other nations combined, were more directly involved in experiencing and doing public policy, would the Global Village be safer and healthier?
People's Lobby's citizen-initiate American World Service Corps Congressional Proposals will give us the opportunity life safer and healthier for all.
Without an American World Service Corps, we will continue stumbling into dumb, uninvolved, costly public policies
Dwayne Hunn
Too often, when Americans get comfortable, they get complacent. Then, too often, they let dumb things happen.
In the 1920’s, the flappers gave the impression that all of America was having a good time. They hid the fact that too many of our institutions were decaying and people suffering.
When enough Americans suffered enough to wake enough others up, they pushed a rich boy president, whose wheel chair struggles had imbued him with enough character and backbone, to put Americans to work rebuilding not only bridges, roads, and parks, but our character, vision, and sense of community as well. FDR grew into a giant among our great presidents, because he involved Americans in confronting the needs, ignorances, and evils of those times.
If FDR did not have Hitler’s corporate-tied government to defeat, he would have defeated our depression even more quickly. He built a peaceful, productive CCC and WPA army, who effectively recycled good works and money into our infrastructure and revived our can-do spirit.
Americans serving and working together weaved a stronger, more aware American community. When all shades and dialects of Americans served around the country, they learned directly and personally how similar their goals and those of their previously unknown and untrusted neighbors were.
In depression service, Americans were no longer flapping along buying into the "just dance and have a good time" philosophy parlayed upon them by the advertised lifestyle of America’s opulent.
By putting Americans into service, FDR laid the groundwork for building the burgeoning middle class of the 50’s and 60’, where laborers and truck drivers could buy homes and send their kids to college without amassing mountains of debt. America’s surface roads as well as foundational ideals were solid and the future looked bright for the world’s economic and moral giant.
The 60’s even gave us another rich boy president, whose war experiences gave him an expansive vision of the changing and shrinking world. He had fought against corporate Fascism. He recognized that an energized America would not lose a guns and butter race to a shaky Communist economic system.
JFK was visionary enough to see that America’s ability to respond to challenges depended on continuing to build a growing and aware middle class, stepping up our science and technology, and winning hearts and minds worldwide. He invested in, grew, and increased middle class awareness, while doing the same for America’s science and technology.
With America increasingly and rightfully portrayed as Ugly Americans, primarily concerned about materialism, and a Nation of Sheep, who had lost their rugged character that willingly challenged New Frontiers, Kennedy built a peaceful, productive army of involved Americans to win the battle for the world’s hearts and minds.
In 1961 President Kennedy launched the Peace Corps because, as Sarge Shriver said:
If the Pentagon’s map is more urgent, the Peace Corp’s is, perhaps, in the long run the most important... What happens in India, Africa, and South America -- whether the nations where the Peace Corps works succeed or not -- may well determine the balance of peace.
Kennedy wanted the Peace Corps to hit, within a decade, a million volunteers for, as he told former Senator Harris Wofford, "Then, it would be significant."
Unfortunately, the loss of a visionary JFK coupled with our still limited understanding of the world, led us into a Vietnamese quagmire. Our ignorance of the world lost us 50,000+ American lives, around $500 billion investable dollars, and killed millions of little brown peasants.
Imagine if we had been involved enough in the understanding worldly needs that we had instead sent the cost equivalent of 23.2 million Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) into the world. Those PCVs could have made America and the world smarter, healthier, and more efficient. Not only would our and the world’s economies bloomed with good health, but America’s moral standing in the world would have been unrivaled in the annals of history.
Instead, America today has only about 180,000 PCVs who have trained and/or served. Thirty-seven years after starting a corps of do-gooders and heart-winners, less than 180,000 have tasted the world’s needs, learned languages, understood cultures, and networked friends around the world.
Kennedy wanted tens of millions to have served, worked, and learned in the world by now. Instead, a dearth of visionary leadership has cost us and the world dearly in blood and dollars.
What has that loss of vision allowed?
It has allowed America at the turn of the 21st century to again be dumbed down. This time we have been dumbed into an unnecessary trillion dollars plus undeclared war. The wasteful Iraq occupation is moving America back to a depression era infrastructure, a crippled middle class, decaying standards in our institutions, and an Ugly America image that dwarfs that of the 60’s.
A new president’s words will not repair America’s crumbling economy and disastrous worldwide perception. New leadership must do what past visionary leaders did. Smart leadership must build and involve an army of peaceful, productive Americans to confront today’s myopic hatreds, poverty, climate change, etc.
If we are smart enough to blaze this challenging path, Americans will become more aware. In the process, America will help implement the effective public policies that make life healthier for Middle America and for the Global Villages’ children.
People’s Lobby’s citizen-initiated American World Service Corps (AWSC) Congressional Proposals produces the robust corps we need to blaze that path. To have hectic, financially overburdened Americans understand and support smart policies that strengthen and smarten America and the world, we need more than 11 minutes of network nightly news from well-endowed General Electric, Times Warner. We need less un-researched radio bombast and trite clichés from screeching radio personalities.
Who knows more about the reality of post Katrina? Americans who learn about it from TV while it is hot but wet news? Or Habitat volunteers who over the last five years pound away at rebuilding homes for New Orleans?
Who knows more about the poverty of Appalachia? Followers of Brittany Spears? Or those few AmeriCorps volunteers who work in those valleys of need day in and day out?
Who knows why Nigerian tribes are taking money from Al Queda to fight the uranium companies who want the grasslands on which they feed their herds? Those television masses Lost in front of Survivor? Or the few Peace Corps volunteers working with Nigerian millet farmers?
Global challenges are moving faster than ever, and a once strong America has not learned fast enough and grown smart enough about the policies needed to address global, as well as domestic needs.
Why does America need to mount a robust American World Service Corps (AWSC) to confront these problems?
Discussing, debating, and reading are merely primary steps toward solving problems. Too often, the same small choir group will listen to and applaud the wise solutions proposed but not have enough clout and know how to implement the policies. Too often, such cerebral stuff just wastes precious time. Wise grownups know that true knowledge and lasting solutions come from adjusting to hidden dilemmas that work on the problems, not just talk and reading about them, produces.
The world and America is filled with pressing needs. Many of these we have inflicted on the world and ourselves because too many Americans have been unaware of the smart public policies that would have alleviated the afflictions.
Involving twenty-one million Americans over the next twenty-seven years to address poverty, climate change, ignorance, hatreds, etc., will work those needs and, consequently, raise our public policy IQ.
Having moved from the world’s strongest economic power, with a large and growing middle class, to the most debt ridden nation, with a growing ultra rich catered to by a tottering middle and growing lower class, some may ask, "How do we pay for the AWSC?"
The proposed AWSC legislation lists ten funding streams, which will not negatively impact Middle America. Two of the most innovative funding streams would only voluntarily impact a minuscule percentage of Americans and corporations and be overwhelmingly supported by Americans. These unorthodox but timely and doable two revenue streams are:
- The Forbes 400 2% Solution. The wealth of the Forbes 400 Richest Americans continues spiraling upward each year, totaling $1.54 trillion in 2007. Most of the Forbes elite has set aside less than 10% of their wealth to charitable contributions. People’s Lobby expects that listing the wealth and charitable contributions of the Forbes 400 at an AWSC web site, to which millions of eyes will visit while contemplating healthy national service, will encourage many of the Forbes 400 to donate voluntarily to underwrite the cost of the AWSC. If the Forbes elite annually set aside merely 1.65% of their wealth, the cost of having twenty-one million Americans serve productively and peaceable for twenty-seven years would be covered – with no need to consider the other 8 proposed revenue streams.
- Non-tax paying corporations. Many large corporations, like Enron and El Paso Energy, reap profits in the hundreds of millions yet pay little, zero, or negative income taxes. Listing a spreadsheet of these corporations and adding a column listing what they donate, without tax deductibility, to underwrite the cost of the AWSC should encourage many of them to add to what the Forbes 400 raise to make life better and safer today and tomorrow. http://www.worldservicecorps.us/... for financing details.
Middle Americans sense the uber-rich and mega-corporations do not sweat as much as they do to make ends meet and pay taxes. People’s Lobby’s AWSC Congressional Proposals addresses, voluntarily and gently, this large and growing economic discrepancy. Implementing the AWSC also cost effectively addresses war and peace by cost effectively involving millions of Americans in insuring that peace, rather than war, fills more of our and the world’s future.
How will:
• Liberals and progressives,
• Compassionate conservatives, and
• Supporters of volunteerism
oppose this without Middle America branding opponents as hypocrites?
America has been complacent, dumbed down, and uninvolved long enough. It has cost the world and us dearly in lives, limbs, and economic growth. It is time to smarten and strengthen America by learning about critical problems by working on them.
I paraphrase a very wealthy lender and philanthropist who once advised his son, "Never lend to a farmer unless he has dirt under his fingernails."
A similar commandment should apply in politics. "Never lend to our elected officials our public policies unless they, and enough Americans, have dirt under their fingernails from working those policies."
Implementing People’s Lobby citizen-initiated American World Service Corps Congressional Proposals lodges good experiences into the minds and clean dirt under the fingernails of Americans, so that America will produce healthy, rather than disastrous, public policies.