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U! S! A! We’re Number …. 15?

Ever heard of the Human Development Index (HDI)? No? You mean US Disneylanders don’t have any?

Never mind. At least US Disneylanders can learn by experience – if not cognitive – and that’s why they’re having their crash course in reality experience right now.

Reality check: David Vine, “Too Many Overseas Bases” (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 25, 2009)

“In the midst of an economic crisis that’s getting scarier by the day, it’s time to ask whether the nation can really afford some 1,000 military bases overseas. For those unfamiliar with the issue, you read that number correctly. One thousand. One thousand U.S. military bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC, representing the largest collection of bases in world history.

Officially the Pentagon counts 865 base sites, but this notoriously unreliable number omits all our bases in Iraq (likely over 100) and Afghanistan (80 and counting), among many other well-known and secretive bases. More than half a century after World War II and the Korean War, we still have 268 bases in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. Others are scattered around the globe in places like Aruba and Australia, Bulgaria and Bahrain, Colombia and Greece, Djibouti, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, and of course, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — just to name a few. Among the installations considered critical to our national security are a ski center in the Bavarian Alps, resorts in Seoul and Tokyo, and 234 golf courses the Pentagon runs worldwide.

Unlike domestic bases, which set off local alarms when threatened by closure, our collection of overseas bases is particularly galling because almost all our taxpayer money leaves the United States (much goes to enriching private base contractors like corruption-plagued former Halliburton subsidiary KBR). One part of the massive Ramstein airbase near Landstuhl, Germany, has an estimated value of $3.3 billion. Just think how local communities could use that kind of money to make investments in schools, hospitals, jobs, and infrastructure.

Even the Bush administration saw the wastefulness of our overseas basing network. In 2004, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas installations, moving 70,000 troops and 100,000 family members and civilians back to the United States. National Security Adviser Jim Jones, then commander of U.S. forces in Europe, called for closing 20% of our bases in Europe. According to Rumsfeld’s estimates, we could save at least $12 billion by closing 200 to 300 bases alone. While the closures were derailed by claims that closing bases could cost us in the short term, even if this is true, it’s no reason to continue our profligate ways in the longer term.

Costs Far Exceeding Dollars and Cents

Unfortunately, the financial costs of our overseas bases are only part of the problem. Other costs to people at home and abroad are just as devastating. Military families suffer painful dislocations as troops stationed overseas separate from loved ones or uproot their families through frequent moves around the world. While some foreign governments like U.S. bases for their perceived economic benefits, many locals living near the bases suffer environmental and health damage from military toxins and pollution, disrupted economic, social, and cultural systems, military accidents, and increased prostitution and crime.

In undemocratic nations like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Saudi Arabia, our bases support governments responsible for repression and human rights abuses. In too many recurring cases, soldiers have raped, assaulted, or killed locals, most prominently of late in South Korea, Okinawa, and Italy. The forced expulsion of the entire Chagossian people to create our secretive base on British Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is another extreme but not so aberrant example.

Bases abroad have become a major and unacknowledged “face” of the United States, frequently damaging the nation’s reputation, engendering grievances and anger, and generally creating antagonistic rather than cooperative relationships between the United States and others. Most dangerously, as we have seen in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign bases create breeding grounds for radicalism, anti-Americanism, and attacks on the United States, reducing, rather than improving, our national security.

Proponents of maintaining the overseas base status quo will argue, however, that our foreign bases are critical to national and global security. A closer examination shows that overseas bases have often heightened military tensions and discouraged diplomatic solutions to international conflicts. Rather than stabilizing dangerous regions, our overseas bases have often increased global militarization, enlarging security threats faced by other nations who respond by boosting military spending (and in cases like China and Russia, foreign base acquisition) in an escalating spiral. Overseas bases actually make war more likely, not less.

The Benefits of Fewer Bases

This isn’t a call for isolationism or a protectionism that would prevent us from spending money overseas. As the Obama administration and others have recognized, we must recommit to cooperative forms of engagement with the rest of the world that rely on diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties rather than military means. In addition to freeing money to meet critical human needs at home and abroad, fewer overseas bases would help rebuild our military into a less overstretched, defensive force committed to defending the nation’s territory from attack.

In these difficult economic times, the Obama administration and Congress should initiate a major reassessment of our 1,000 overseas bases. Now is the time to ask if, as a nation and a world, we can really afford the 1,000 bases that are pushing the nation deeper into debt and making the United States and the planet less secure? With so many needs facing our nation, it’s unconscionable to have 1,000 overseas bases. It’s time to begin closing them.”

It’s evident, the warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and so it couldn’t disappear when the last lunatic in the Oval Office moved on.

But back to the HDI – which is new to the US:

“There are US Americans who are a full fifty years behind others in terms of their level of development.”

Tendency: rising.

Such degrees of inequality – whether high or rising, whatever – in the US (closer to Turkey on such measures than to France) are reflected in the HDI scores.

A new report shows that in terms of aggregate health, education, purchasing power, security and general well-being, the U.S. has been in decline – not really new to the world.

Origin:
The Nation, March 4, 2009.
By Dalton Conley.

The president’s proposed budget will do much to bring progressivity back to the tax code. Upper-income households–which have gained the most over the past three decades–will contribute around 80 percent of federal revenues, and more modest incomes will finally catch some real tax relief. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans have applauded the administration’s move to impose limits on executive compensation by attaching strings to bailout money. The reason is one of basic fairness, of course. But it turns out that limiting the windfalls of the few may actually be good for us all. That’s because there appears to be a relationship in the United States between inequality–which is largely driven by an explosive rise in incomes at the top–and overall levels of human development.

In the ticker tape of economic bad news, there is perhaps one dire statistic that has not gotten as much attention as it deserves: the American Human Development Index (HDI), released for the first time last year. The American HDI is especially troubling because it puts all this economic gloom and doom in stark human terms. And the results are somewhat surprising: in good times as well as bad, in terms of aggregate health, education, purchasing power, security and general well-being, we have been in decline.

The HDI has long been used by experts and officials concerned with advancement in poor countries. In 1990 Mahbub ul Haq–a former World Bank official who had also served as Pakistani finance minister–created the indicator to capture the actual experiences of people in a given country or region in a way that GDP and other indicators of economically measurable output could not.

With some slight adjustments, the index was retrofitted to work for rich countries. The score consists of three dimensions: health, as measured by life expectancy at birth; access to knowledge, captured by educational enrollment and attainment; and income, as reflected by median earnings for the working-age population. And now the results are finally in.

The first bit of bad news is that America was slipping well before our most recent downturn. Whereas during the 1980s we were consistently No. 2 in the world (Switzerland occupied the top slot in 1980, while Canada did from 1985 to 1990), by the mid-1990s we had slipped to six. And by 2006 (the most recent year available), we had even fallen out of the Top 10 (to slot 15). Income clearly doesn’t capture every dimension, since the United States still holds the No. 2 position in terms of income per capita. Rather, other aspects of American society make it less “developed” than it should be, given the resources available here.

This decline proceeded apace through the Reagan and first Bush administrations, during the go-go Clinton ’90s, and through the regime of George W. Bush. We have slipped in periods of budget deficits and during the largest surplus in US history. So something deeper about the structure of American society is probably responsible.

Of course, there are some pretty good suspects. There is, for example, the issue of nearly 50 million people who don’t have health insurance. There is the fact that college completion rates have been flat since the ’70s despite an increasingly technological economy. And there is the wage stagnation for the bottom half, a problem that has dogged us since the oil shock of 1973. But there is one larger force underlying these trends that has been gaining steam over the past three decades, and that’s income inequality.

Income inequality has been rising since the late ’60s and is greater in the United States than in any other developed (i.e., rich) country. Income inequality can matter for general health, knowledge and our shared standard of living, for several reasons. First, the more that Americans have vastly different economic means at their disposal, the harder it is to generate political support for investments that would raise all boats. For instance, inequality often leads well-to-do people to abandon the public school system — or to move to particularly well-funded districts, where house prices are highest. Some scholars even posit that high inequality harms our health, as a result of the stress from relative deprivation and increased efforts to keep up with the Joneses (or, as the case may be, the Gateses). While this claim remains highly controversial among health economists, the observation that more-unequal countries generally display worse health than more-equal ones is not in dispute. Such high (and rising) degrees of inequality in the United States (we are closer to Turkey on such measures than we are to France) are reflected in the HDI scores. Some Americans are a full fifty years behind others in terms of their level of development.

Yet the relationship between inequality and overall HDI scores is not straightforward. For example, state-level inequality is not a reliable predictor. The District of Columbia, New York and Connecticut all have high levels of inequality — and are among the richest regions — yet perform at the top in their American HDI scores. On the other hand, another rich state, California, boasts three out of the top five Congressional districts in terms of HDI (including Silicon Valley, West Los Angeles and West Orange County) while also bearing the shame of the worst district in the United States (Kings County in the Central Valley, which includes Fresno). Kings County is further behind in human development terms than any district in rural Mississippi; it is equivalent to the US average during the 1970s, and it isn’t comparable to the scores of any of the rich countries we like to think of as our peers.

These differences — even among rich states — probably reflect distinct policy choices about how to invest in children and families. For instance, California — held hostage by Proposition 13, which has limited property taxes over the last three decades — is among the bottom half of spenders on K-12 education, despite having a diverse population with great needs in terms of English as a Second Language and related services. Meanwhile, New York spends more per pupil than any other state, and the District of Columbia and Connecticut are not far behind. In other words, educational investment might act as a bulwark against inequality’s pernicious effects on human development.

Putting inequality in human development terms captures the cost to our collective future better than GDP, income or other abstract measures can, even — or especially — in perilous economic times such as these. And such a framework makes clear that if we want America to be “number one,” it is more a matter of pulling up the bottom than of continuing to concentrate gains at the top. Until we deal with the rising tide of inequality we will not lift all boats — recovery or no recovery.