Uncle Sam and world needs the World Service Corps

Uncle Sam and world needs the World Service Corps

Dwayne Hunn

The global village is diverse, yet its people generally simple and caring. However, when misunderstood, it becomes complicated and dangerous.

Most backpackers know the world better than corporate media moguls and the couch potatoes to whom they cater. The global village needs a lot more backpackers, who unpack and work in America and the world’s pockets of need. From those pockets, seeds of anger, ignorance, and poverty make the world dangerous.

What’s needed? Bold, visionary policies, which treat the world’s increasingly dangerous conditions seriously with America’s best medicine and resources. We need millions “serving as if you and your kids’ lives depended on it.”

And what is America’s best resource and medicine?

Some of our best resources are the same Americans who on command carry out precise warring assignments, which too often makes the world sicker by multiplying our enemies.

They just need a law that:
• Sets them to marching to the beat of a different drummer.
• Orders them to carry out a different assignment, a mission without missiles.
• Posts a smiling Uncle Sam to encouraging, not bribing or drafting, Americans to join the proposed World Service Corps.

WHAT ARE THE CITIZEN-INITIATED WORLD SERVICE CORPS (WSC) CONGRESSIONAL PROPOSALS?

If citizens across America move Congress to introduce and pass the WSC proposals this year, this would happen. Each year for the next six years, 100,000+ American would voluntarily choose to serve in their choice of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Head Start, Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross, International Rescue Committee, OxFam, and other similar organizations. Six years from now ONE MILLION Americans would be walking the walk around which our admired image is built.

Upon completion of service, WSC members would receive two years of community plus two years of state college tuition (approximately $15,000), equivalent educational loan payoff, or equivalent investment in Medical or IRA Accounts, which would be transferable to family relatives. This updated mini GI Educational Bill of Rights would give governmental and non-governmental organizations the mix of enthusiastic, experienced, can-do Americans, aged 18 – 60+, who would make the world safer and better.

WHAT WOULD WSC DO?

Sending a million American a year doing good would do more than just send the right message. It would:
• Reduce poverty, misunderstandings, ignorance, hatreds, future misdirected policies, and terrorist recruitment in a world where Ugly Americanism is spreading.
• Raise America and the world’s political and policymaking IQs.
• Inspire Americans, and other nations, to send their human resources into domestic and international fields of needs.
• Respond quickly to hurricane, famine, and refugee needs.

HOW WAS IT INSPIRED?

Edwin and Joyce Koupal were old fashioned, fabled Americans. They worked hard and were not political. Their religion churched them to help the downtrodden. They, like our admired fore fathers, only turned to politics when they became disgusted with the powerful abusing those less connected, in their case with connected homeowners taking advantage of the common homeowners in their suburban development. Soon, they founded People's Lobby as a grassroots initiative factory/school of political reform, and drilled into its workers heads these words:

“This country runs on laws. If you want to change the country, write its laws.”

Ed taught us to question the expenditure of time and energy in demonstrations, arguments, debates, etc. Put that energy into solving the problems, not grousing about then. And to Ed, proposing, educating, and writing law proved a better cure of problems than most of what he saw frustrated citizens doing. http://www.peopleslobby.us

For the WSC proposals to become law and implement an earth changing WSC program, a national grassroots movement requires:
• Tens of thousands of on-line Petition signers. http://www.worldservicecorps.us
• Thousands of activists across the nation calling, writing, and educating their elected reps on the need to send a million Americans a year on missions without missiles.
• Virtual PLI offices across the nation pushing WSC and its ensuing, education and smart policies into the nation’s consciousness.

START LOCALLY WIN NATIONALLY

The Marin County Board of Supervisors is considering a citizen submitted draft resolution to endorse the WSC http://www.dwaynehunn.biz/draft%20marin%20county%20resolution%20for%20WSC.htm . Marin, one of the nation’s richest counties, has sent $289 million of its federal tax revenues to support the Iraq War. Had a robust WSC existed for years or decades, rather than engaging in an expensive preemptive war, our knowledge and the state of the world would have saved us from even having to consider such a policy.

If you live in Marin, call, write, and encourage the Supervisors to introduce and endorse the WSC Support Resolution. If you live in other counties, copy the draft resolution from the web site and use it to gain local support for the WSC. With enough counties and cities endorsing a smarter, more cost efficient national service policy, Congressional representative will pass the WSC law.

WHY THE WSC NEEDS PASSAGE THIS YEAR

Almost six years into this administration, a majority of American have reservations about our world policies, Iraq War, concentrated media, economy, education, ability to compete in the future, etc. The nation is looking deeper than the rosy reports on which so many politicians and media pundits dwell.

Implementing the WSC this year insures that six years from now at least one million Americans will better understand our global village. By learning and working in the classrooms of needs, these Americans will be the informed reporters, builders, and Special Forces who will spread their knowledge among multitudes of Americans.

THIS SISSYPHIAN PATH IS A TOUGH CLIMB

Citizens respond positively when they hear the WSC proposals, but too few are hearing the proposals. Too many of those who rave about them do little to build political support thereafter. All efforts that mix doing good with politics need funds, and that applies to this PLI effort.

Implementing the non-partisan WSC would make a quantum improvement in the human condition, yet many can’t envision the benefits enough to help it happen. Others are too busy trying to stay ahead of their day-to-day needs. From war to peace, hurricanes to bucolic tranquility, shacks to decent housing, ignorance to education, implementing the WSC makes a huge difference, but it needs a crusading army to popularize and pass the proposals.

“OH, BUT WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY!”

In 2005, $8.8 billion was lost in the Iraq-Bremer-Halliburton pipeline. That amount would pay the financial incentives of the first 440,000 WSC serving in America and the world. Don’t they give America a better $8.8 billion bang for the buck?

The present 2006 Defense Budget allocates a soaring $442 billion to cover the costs of our 1.4 million military personnel. Add supplemental cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan war, nuclear program costs, hidden and shifted costs of carrying for the vets who return in need, and the annual costs of maintaining each of our military personnel hits the $500,000+ range. Now add our soldiers’ generations spanning post-traumatic distress disorder costs and our taxpayer subsidized, through tax write-offs, use of mercenaries by large corporations.

Head Start, with a budget under $7 billion, reaches a mere half of all eligible children. The Early Head Start program is budgeted so low that it serves only five percent of those eligible. Yet, Head Start is where we prepare tomorrow’s citizens – and soldiers -- to compete and protect us.

A 2005 Rand Study states that for the Army to have soldiers spend no more than one in three years overseas, it will need SEVEN more heavy brigades, representing 24,500 - 28,000. The start-up cost for 26,000 soldiers is $10 billion. Operating seven extra brigades would cost an extra $2.5 billion. That per soldier combined cost equals $480,769.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

President Eisenhower

“In order to defeat terrorists, in order to defeat their ideology of hate, in the long run we must spread freedom and hope.”

President Bush


The WSC http://www.worldservicecorps.us proposed legislation addresses those presidential concerns better than any legislation in recent decades. Sign the Petition and help build the grassroots movement http://www.worldservicecorps.us/ that prods Congress into enacting the WSC program.


Dwayne Hunn is Executive Director of People's Lobby Inc. (PLI). Trained by Ed and Joyce Koupal, he learned the value of initiative and law writing by working on such PLI campaigns as California’s Clean Environment Initiative, Political Reform Act, Western Bloc Nuclear Safeguards Initiatives, and PLI’s Congressional National Initiative Hearings. For the WSC legislation to pass, People’s Lobby needs virtual offices across the nation.