More than one candidate has promised to remove the money-power from politics this election cycle.
Money corrupts more than one area of our democratic republic, but it also connected to decisions of life and death. Several members of Congress are stockholders in companies that make weapons for the Department of Defense.
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) holds approximately $100,000 of stock in Lockheed Martin. Of course, Blunt is in good company, as Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) holds approximately $130,000 of stock in Honeywell, Raytheon, and Boeing; Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) holds approximately $348,000 in Honeywell, United Technologies, Boeing and Raytheon; and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D–Calif.) owns approximately $650,000 of stock in Boeing. In fact, 51 members of Congress and their spouses own between $2.3 and $5.8 million worth of stock in companies that are among the top defense contractors in the world. In the Senate, nearly one-third of the Senate Defense Subcommittee for the Defense Appropriations Committee own stock in top defense contractors.
After the Jan. 3 attack on Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, congresspeople who held stocks in defense-related companies watched their stock portfolios become more valuable because war became more probable. Putting money in the hands of stockholders, sometimes politically connected, is a poor way to increase the security of Americans. The power in our country needs to be moved away from those who have the resources to purchase defense stocks and defense contractors who have the power to move tax dollars into their hands. Our country must embrace real security. We can’t forget we live in a country where retail and fast food employees struggle to survive without government assistance and millions are homeless!
The first step in solving the problems is to sever the connection between money and weapons appropriation and our Congress. Members of Congress should be required to divest all stock related to their congressional responsibilities. This would avoid potential conflicts of interest.
In 2017, over 500,000 people were homeless. While some of the homeless have substance abuse problems or are mentally ill, 75% of the homeless simply can’t afford a place to live.
Our country spends more than the next 10 nations combined on military spending. President Donald Trump has proposed over $700 billion in defense spending for 2020. The Pentagon’s budgetary waste has been addressed time and again and the details are beyond the scope of this story. However, a case in point is the contract Lockheed Martin received to design and test the aircraft that went into mass production and has a long history of flaws and malfunction.
Millions of workers in the low-paid service sector (the retail, restaurant, healthcare, and hotel/motel industries) make something close to the federal minimum wage — $7.25 an hour. While wage growth has barely budged for the last 20 years, the rent on a home or apartment has doubled in the same time period.
Landlords are like the owners of defense stocks (and other stocks) and defense contractors (Lockheed Martin and others) in a way. They make money through control of assets or connection to politicians and not an evolving group of customers. Let’s take some of the waste in the Pentagon’s budget and solve the affordable housing crises.
Writer Michael Lind gives us some valuable advice in his story “Why this Man was Prescient (Hint: It Has to do with Your Rent).” He repeats the often-given advice that renters shouldn’t spend more than 30% of their income on rent and turns this advice into public policy. Lind recommends a universal housing tax credit that could be used to pay a rent or mortgage. The tax credit’s universal nature means it would benefit both low-income people and the middle-class and this would make it hard to abolish. The new housing tax credit would be refundable like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, meaning that people too poor to pay federal income taxes could receive checks from the Internal Revenue Service. A law keeping landlords and home sellers from raising prices the size of the subsidy would be necessary.
We could also spend public money building housing cooperatives. This is a form of housing ownership – it can take the form of single-family houses or apartments – where those who make the monthly housing payment own the housing the live in, similar in concept to a credit union. Housing co-ops make housing cheaper in any given market.
The low-income workers who toil in the service sector don’t have the money that defense contractors do or those who own lots of defense stock. However, they are starting to acquire some power in the Fight for 15 movement, which works to unionize fast food and retail workers, and in the tenants unions that are being organized in coastal cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles and in heartland cities like Kansas City. These two movements need to come together to fight the wage and housing war!
Cicero, the great defender of the Roman Republic and an opponent of empire, said republics are a collection of people brought together to respect justice and the common good. Let’s remember the will of the people and fight the power of money!
Jason Sibert worked for the Suburban Journals in the St. Louis area for over a decade and is currently executive director of the Peace Economy Project in St. Louis, Mo. Email jasonsibert@hotmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2020
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