Yes, AWSC Can:
Executive Summary of the American World Service Corps Proposals for a Robust 21st Century Volunteer Corps
Why build these cities beautiful
If man unbuilded goes,
In vain, we build the world–
Unless builder also grows. Edwin Markham
12-24-08
For years America’s relevance, good will, and influence abroad has shrunk. At home, a long period of growing ignorance and indifference has crippled our economy. We have the opportunity to erase this trend while building a safer, saner “Global Village,” through the People’s Lobby’s American World Service Corps (AWSC) Congressional Proposals, which Congresswoman Woolsey has offered to introduce in the 111th Congress. We hope you will join her as an original sponsor and be one of many outspoken leaders this proposed legislation needs.
The Obama-Biden team calls for adding 2.5 million jobs in two years, providing universal preschool, fielding corps of Green, Elderly, Classroom workers, doubling the Peace Corps, tripling AmeriCorps, and undertaking some aspects of the WPA. The People’s Lobby organization proposes to scale up this admirable proposal with the AWSC Proposals, which would involve 21 million Americans in voluntary public service over the next 27 years. This program would incorporate existing volunteer teams, empowering them to cost effectively address all the needs identified in the Obama proposal, and many more.
The Obama-Biden tax proposals propose that the very rich pay a fairer share of the communal benefits that good governance can provide America and the world. Many of the richest Americans and corporations pay little or nothing in taxes. Our AWSC proposal incorporates web mechanisms to encourage the Forbes 400 and non-taxpaying corporations to make an annual 2% donation into an escrowed, locked box account. This AWSC account would be solely dedicated to funding AWSC team members. This revenue could erase the need to use taxes to field this annual army of one million peaceful, productive volunteers for a generation. And it grows healthy business opportunities for the very rich by moving more people toward healthier, productive lives.
This AWSC report is designed to provide details on the motivation and mechanisms for the AWSC proposals. (More information is at www.WorldServiceCorps.us) It includes the following sections:
I . Introduction: “Yes, AWSC can”
Address the myriad of crises facing us, especially in depressing economic times.
II. A Solution to Current Problems: A Volunteer Army to Prove “We Still Can.“
Twenty-one million serving Americans can help right the ship.
III. Why Build the AWSC?
By serving we learn. By learning we grow smartly at home and abroad.
IV. Investing in a Peaceful Future
Offering the mega rich and non-tax paying corporations the opportunity to help.
V. Education for the Long Run
Raising our public policy IQ for generations to come.
- “I Need Your Help…,” says President-elect Obama
AWSC provides America’s best service organizations the opportunity to perform.
VII. Incentive to Participate: Internet-based Education and Public Relations
Graphically depict how America’s ultra rich are pitching in.
VIII. Timing is Everything. We have Wasted Too Much Time. The Time is Now.
Learning while embedded with costly Human Terrain Teams is too late.
“America is defined by the enduring powerof ourideals.”
-Barrack Obama
We can recharge these “ideals” by reinforcing the many good
teamsunder the AWSC umbrella with millions of serving Americans and contribute
immediately to economic recovery.
I
“Yes, the AWSC can”
…Robustly address the myriad of crises facing us, especially in depressing economic times
When written in Chinese the word “crisis” is composed of two characters –
one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
John F. Kennedy, 12 April 1959
Yes, we can do much better than we have done over the last couple of generations – and especially over the last eight years. But we won’t if high percentages of Americans continue to rely on slogans, bumper stickers, and raving pundits whose real-life experiences avoid the actions, passions, and struggles of most hard-working humans.
- In the 21 nations that make up the Middle East, South and East Africa, and Indonesia, about 910 million mostly Muslims reside. Poverty, cultural tensions, anger, and antipathy toward America have spread in much of these lands. Terrorists convert heart and minds there. In the meantime, annually we have had about 50 Peace Corps volunteers serving among those 910 million.
- As 2008 draws to a close, the lives and homes of those devastated by Katrina in 2005 are still broken. As the American belief that successive American generations would have a better life than those preceding it dwindles, our laws aim to provide corporate bailouts to those whose comforts, greed, and power contributed to our economic tailspin. Too many large corporations and very rich households have contributed too little to strengthening America’s future families.
- As wealth and income disparity grows wider and wider in America, about half of those poor families whose children qualify for Head Start have no programs in their communities, because we not have enough Head Start teachers or volunteers to provide them race-evening early opportunities.
- While Al Gore gathers 10,000 PowerPoint Presenters to begin educating the comfortably unaware about the catastrophes of rapidly advancing global climate change, we have too few Americans working on energy retrofits, spreading appropriate technologies, and building recycling programs for energy reuse.
- As health care costs skyrocket and nurses are increasingly asked to do more and more for less, where are the candy stripers, the reinforcements of previous generations who would help nurses and patients?
- While we have about 170 military bases around the world and deploy 1.4 million active military personnel, we have less than 8000 Peace Corps volunteers in the field in about 60 countries. In an age of terrifying weapons of mass destruction, peace, security, and development will not be done by the biggest, baddest guns but by those who fielded teams that win hearts and minds.
- As a surge of our post-911 Afghan and Iraqi-stationed soldiers begins returning from their four-year military contracts, we have not provided the tools or living facilities that can effectively reduce the tsunami of post-traumatic stress disorders our soldiers are bringing home.
- Fewer and fewer American schools teach civics, involve their students in community service, provide one-on-one assistance to troubled students, or inspire students to make their lives productive for themselves as well as the world. There is so much to learn that even well-paid teachers could use full time volunteers in their classrooms to help their students grow and learn.
- Those who see no benefit in educating Americans to depressing world needs increasingly control our major media. Consequently, our public policies too often exacerbate the world’s needs. Al Jazeera News shows our public policy mistakes and raises their viewers’ ire. Our major news outlets dwell on the private policy problems of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and leads Americans to forget life’s important essentials.
The key AWSC proposed bills correct these bullet pointed problems. The key proposal can be read at
“As Jack (Kennedy) liked to say, he’d rather send in the Peace Corps than the Marine Corps, and Sarge (Shriver) was his Peace Corps commandant who always got the job done, establishing new beachheads of hope and opportunity in lands that had never known them before. LBJ respected Sarge so much that he gave him a second hat to wear, and Sarge was equally brilliant in launching the Office of Economic Opportunity as the heart of our War on Poverty.”
KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS, “A
TRIBUTE TO SARGENT SHRIVER” 12/12/05
II.
A Volunteer Army to Prove “We Still Can.“
Twenty-one million serving Americans can help right the ship.
Greatness is not found in possessions, power, or prestige. It is discovered in goodness, humility, service, and character.
Implementing People’s Lobby’s American World Service Corps Congressional Proposals addresses those highlighted problems and other needs better than any proposal now being considered in Congress. By fielding 21 million American volunteers over the ensuing 27 years in their choice of such governmental and non-governmental organizations as the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Head Start, Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross, International Rescue Committee, Oxfam, Mercy Corps, and State Conservation Corps… we involve enough Americans to help build the foundation that will lift us from the economic and public policy depression into which recent policies have dumped us. We are seeking original cosponsors to join Congresswoman Woolsey in sponsoring the AWSC Proposals in the 111th Congress.
America’s ignorance of the real world allowed us to be led into a $3 trillion war that is the primary contributor to the breaking of our economy. Our continued failure to implement a smart, long-term strategy will destroy the economics, common sense, and moral ethic that made America special.
In our Revolutionary War, whether we knew it or not, we followed the tenets of an earlier foreign warrior, Sun Tzu:
- All war is based on deception.
- The supreme excellence is to subdue the armies of your enemy without fighting a battle.
- He wins who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
The terrorists have done a better job of following those winning tenants than we have. The terrorists also seem to better understand that their goal is to destroy public support for once respected America, while winning enough hearts and minds to do violence against the increasingly repugnant America.
Deceptions lead us into war. In war, we are deceived as to who the enemy is. Too often and too easily in today’s guerrilla warfare, a uniform disguises the allegiance of warriors’ hearts and minds. Lulls in warfare deceive us into believing we have won, while hidden and growing armies of terror decide when and where to strike next. Those abiding by Sun Tzu’s strategies will come closer to determining winners of 21st century wars than will nuclear powered aircraft carriers, uranium tipped bullets, and night goggle driven Hummers.
| Until a sane and healthy world is created, one may never totally win this kind of war. In the interim, terrorism must be contained, squeezed out, and then expunged. Filling the world with a million missiles, lasers, and Vader-like storm troopers is not a viable 21st century containment policy. Filling the world with a million public health workers, builders, energy designers, etc., is a winning containment policy. The AWSC provides those teams who can set the foundation for a Global Marshall Plan that relies on peaceful interaction, education, and hard work. |
In those 21 nations where 910 million mostly Muslims reside, we need many more Americans, like Greg Mortensen, drinking Three Cups of Tea and building schools, bridges, and businesses — not drones raining laser guided missiles on some bad and many innocent people.
In December 2000, the Saudi publication Ain-Al-Yaqeen reported that one of the four major Wahhabi proselytizing organizations, the Al Haramin Foundation, had built “1,100 mosques, schools, and Islamic centers,” in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and employed three thousand paid proselytizers in the previous years.
The most active of the four groups, Ain-Al-Yaqeen reported The International Islamic Relief Organization, which the 9/11 Commission would later accuse of directly supporting the Taliban and and Al Qaeda, completed the construction of thirty-eight hundred mosques, spent $45 million on “Islamic Education,” and employed six thousand teachers, many of them in Pakistan, throughout the same…
By offering free room and board and building schools in areas where none existed, madrassas provided millions of Pakistan’s parents with their only opportunity to educate their children. “I don’t want to give the impression that all Wahbabi are bad,” Mortenson says. “Many of their schools and mosques are doing good work to help Pakistan’s poor. But some of them seem to exist only to teach militant jihad.”…
“Apo calling Wahbabi madrassas beehives is exactly right. They’re churning out generation after generation of brainwashed students and thinking twenty, forty, even sixty years ahead to a time when their armies of extremism will have the numbers to swarm over Pakistan and the rest of the Islamic world.”
Three Cups of Tea, pages 243-245
We have blown $3 trillions on unnecessary warfare. Had we followed John Kennedy’s visionary proposal today’s global village of 7 billion people would be more peaceful, healthy, and smart. John Kennedy wanted the Peace Corps to quickly field 100,000 volunteers per year. When it hit 1 million, he believed the Peace Corps would make a significant impact on the world. Almost 38 years later, only about 180,000 have trained and served, and our public policy IQ reflects that too few have served and learned.
When Kennedy proposed and Sargent Shriver created the Peace Corps in March of 1961, only some of the world considered us Ugly Americans, as portrayed in a best selling book of that time . Those opposed to us propagated the image of rich, swaggering, soft Americans luxuriously cruising the world. But most of the world had the belief that Americans were special and longed to know Americans and America. When we lost Kennedy, we lost the grand vision that would have given us a much more peaceful world today. The largest annual number of Peace Corps volunteers fielded was about 14,000 in 1968. Almost without exception, those small contingents of PCVs were admired worldwide. Those relatively few serving Americans erased the then growing Ugly American image.
Failing to field tens of millions of PCVs over the last two generations has caused us to become illogically fearful of little brown people who grew rice in Vietnam. It has caused us to buy into the false premise that economic development is best delivered by major corporations and economic hit men. It has allowed poverty, climate disasters, and ignorance to spread because we didn’t move enough Americans off of their couches and into the frontiers of service at home or abroad. It allowed comfortable Americans to allow ignorance to spread at home and fundamentalists in Africa and the Middle East to plant hatred in the minds of those who struggle on a couple dollars a day, as well as with those receiving higher educations. It allowed those Americans unconcerned about the plight of the masses to instill fear in the minds of those Americans who had not received the opportunity to serve and learn in the world. It allowed too many Americans to buy into myopic talk radio’s too prevalent hate banter leading to conclusions that bombing was better than building. It allowed too few comfortably cocooned Americans to learn through hard and honest work how to develop logic and common sense.
Unfortunately, if you are ensconced in a comfortable cocoon where peaceful and productive service and learning is not part of your nation’s life, then you ignorantly conclude that costly bombing is the winning path. From there, your nation’s character and economy can only go downhill.
“Never forget that the purpose for which a man lives is the improvement of the man himself, so that he may go out of this world having, in his great sphere or his small one, done some little good for his fellow creatures and labored a little to diminish the sin and sorrow that are in the world.”
William F. Gladstone
III.
Why Build the AWSC?
By serving we learn, by learning we grow smartly at home and abroad.
“We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage, and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is man’s duty to understand his world rather than to simply fight for it.”
Ernest Hemingway, 1946
There are political reasons why the Obama-Biden administration should help introduce and implement People’s Lobby‘s American World Service Corps Congressional Proposals.
- Big problems exist in the world. Our uninformed public policies have contributed too many of those problems. Big problems need big solutions. The AWSC Congressional Proposals create a bigger army to address those problems than any other related congressional proposals now being considered.
- The AWSC gradually builds over a seven-year period to its 1 million person corps. Staying at that 1 million number for 20 years, the AWSC will:
- Field
21 million AWSC do-gooders over 27
years.
- Release our military of some nation building chores it is increasingly asked to do.
- Win hearts and minds, reduce poverty, and eliminate ignorance that too often forces our 1.4 million active military into fields of blood and gore.
- Raise our public policy IQ as to how to address domestic and international needs so as to refrain from future costly policy blunders.
- Involve rich and poor, young and older (18-70+), the U.S. and other nations in serving, learning, doing, and building a sane Global Community.
- Avoid the political bickering and legislative roadblocks that arise around calls for mandatory national service by using the voluntary AWSC’s size to produce the desired impacts of mandatory service.
- Provide choices and unmatched training to many of those struggling in today’s economy.
- Avoid the cost, time consumption, and political opposition that come from trying to create new do-good government programs by instead relying on existing governmental programs and non-governmental organizations (NGO).
- Help pay the “rent” we owe for the space and resources we use in the world.
It is not the I.Q. but the I WILL that is important in the education of individuals as well as in the education of a nation.
IV.
Investing in a peaceful future
Offering the mega rich and non-tax paying corporations the opportunity to help.
“ The problem in defense spending is to figure out how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
When budgeted, off-line, and hidden costs are compiled, our recent terror-induced war policies have cost us about $760,000 per active military personnel in 2007. http://www.worldservicecorps.us/revsAWSCcosts.xls At about $35,000 per volunteer, the AWSC is a bargain, and its service-learning-doing components will keep us from future trillion dollar wars.
People’s Lobby’ AWSC Congressional Proposals have six traditional and six non-traditional funding mechanisms, which can be reviewed at http://www.worldservicecorps.us/financing_AWSC.htm.
In 2007 the accumulated wealth of the Forbes 400 Richest Americans was over $1.54 trillion. According to Forbes Magazine’s Charitable Giving documentation for the Forbes 400, stunning numbers of them contribute 0-5% of their wealth in charitable contributions. If the Forbes 400 annually donated 1.7% of their wealth to the locked box escrowed AWSC account, $706.86 billion would be raised. This would more than fund the financial rewards given to the 21 million AWSC workers serving over 27 years, as well as cover the program costs of those serving in governmental programs.
If those Corporations Who Pay No Taxes also donated less than 2% of what they were supposed to pay in taxes, an additional locked-box AWSC fund would be available to cover the nominal living stipend that non-governmental, governmental agencies, and domestic states and foreign nations would be contributing to cover the program maintenance of AWSC team members.
With visionary leadership, just these two innovative funding streams would cover the estimated $700 billion twenty-seven year cost. http://www.worldservicecorps.us/revsAWSCcosts.xls
Just motivating the Forbes 400 to donate 2% of their wealth into the AWSC locked box investment account would allow 21 million Americans to serve, learn, and grow a peaceful world over the next 27 years. This AWSC account would involve the mega rich and character rich Americans in producing a safer, more profitable world, without hedging on derivatives. These non-traditional funding mechanisms would dramatically reduce or eliminate the need to rely on traditional taxing mechanisms during these taxing economic times. Using these creative financing mechanisms would allow everyone – rich, middle class, and poor to profit handsomely.
Most of the world’s mega rich and large corporations are aware enough to realize that peace provides them more opportunities to continue building wealth. Many of them have an instinctive reaction against any kind of taxation. With the People’s Lobby AWSC Congressional Proposals, we offer a donation mechanism that allows them to participate voluntarily in building a sane and profitable world, while involved Americans take note as they visit the AWSC web site.
In a letter emailed to Obama and Biden in September 20008, People’s Lobby proposed that if elected they host a White House White Castle luncheon for the Forbes 400 at which these untraditional funding mechanisms be suggested. (Candidates McCain & Palin received a similar letter.) It is our belief that several Forbes 400 members would be open to being part of the 2% Solution, which would sit well with struggling Americans and influence the reticent rich potential donors to become part of the solution.
The “How about a Joe Sixpack lunch for the Forbes 400?” letter is at
“Ring out the feud of rich and poor.
Ring in redress of all mankind.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
In Memoriam, Part
CVI, stanza 3
V.
Education for the long run
Raising our public policy IQ for generations to come
Gen. Eisenhower addressed the graduating class at an illustrious university saying,
“Your business is to put me out of business.”
A powerful segment of America strives and too often succeeds in using fear to drive America’s citizenry and public policies into the cesspools of history. When too many Americans remain comfortably unaware of its neighbors needs seething at home and in the world, we can be led into disastrous policies that destroy our character, reputation, troops, and economy. Had organizations such as the Peace Corps had tens of millions of Returned PCVs rather than less than 180,000 who actually served since its 1961 inception, America would have been too smart to be led into the disastrously costly policies of recent years.
We can’t afford to waste another generation that fails to have a significant part of our citizenry smartly serve, learn, and grow in a crowded resource strapped Global Village.
| The Obama Biden National Service Plan called for doubling the size of the Peace Corps and tripling AmeriCorps. The world and America needs more than that. |
America needs to provide incentives and leadership that fills the ranks of effective and good-doing but understaffed existing teams. The small umbrella AWSC agency would provide the incentives to build those teams, so their numbers would come close to the size of our active military. The AWSC management team would also promote and help build the organized participation of other nations with AWSC volunteers, so that our service, learning, and growth connect from the interpersonal through international levels.
| The Obama Biden National Service Plan has the right objectives, but they have been forced to limit the financial and human resources their NSP proposes to achieve limited do-good goals, which they would gladly like to exceed. Their proposed Green, Elderly, Class Room School, etc., Corps are all needed. However, if these are proposed as new programs, gaining legislative approval, building staffs, fielding, and training crews will take more time than implementing the AWSC umbrella that empowers existing effective programs. |
The already proven teams under the AWSC Congressional Proposals, and the others that can be added, are not burdened with as many congressional approval, start-up, personnel, training, implementation, etc. problems. For example:
- AmeriCorps, Habitat, State Conservation Corps, City Build, and other respected existing non-profit organizations could immediately expand their weatherization of homes, environmental clean-ups, and appropriate technology projects with an influx of full time AWSC volunteers.
- Hospitals and convalescent homes could request a major rejuvenation of Candy Stripers to serve as full time volunteer aides to overburdened nurses, physical and vocational therapists, social workers, etc.
- AmeriCorps’ Jump Start program that provides classroom aides to teachers could be dramatically expanded with AWSC volunteers to insure that more individual attention and higher quality teaching spreads across the nation, while young and older AWSC volunteers improve today’s teaching and provide for tomorrow’s teachers.
- Headstart, which for lack of personnel, fails to provide teaching to our most needy young could expand to reach the estimated 50% of eligible preschoolers it now misses. AWSC members could provide the human resources that provide the universal preschool Obama has desired.
- Local do-good non-profits who may be able to cover the daily living expenses of their volunteers will find additional full-time helpers who after two years will have enough for a college education, or have a medical savings or retirement account, or home down payment funds. For example, Glide Memorial in the Bay Area provides food, shelter, and training to numerous individuals through its volunteers, who in many cases were themselves once needy or troubled. Under the AWSC umbrella, Glide would now have more volunteers, and those volunteers would be building future stability through the AWSC rewards program.
- State Conservation Corps would grow and be better able to address increased fire fighting and flooding needs as well as better prepare states for inevitable natural and man-made disasters, which seem to be driven by climate changes and ignorance. For states like California, where Governor Schwarzenegger recently stated, “Fire season is now all year round,” expanding the California Conservation Corps would be a Godsend. Hurricane-prone states would also welcome the development of their own Conservation Corps. The AWSC federal program would help states help themselves by having state citizens working to build stronger, smarter communities.
“There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusions certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience. ”
Roger Bacon: Opus Majus, 1928
VI.
“I need your help…,” says President-elect Obama
Americans love playing on good teams. The AWSC provides America’s best service organizations the opportunity to perform.
“Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need–not as a call to battle, though embattled we are–but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle year in and year out ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’–the struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address January 20, 1961
Inspiring the robust expansion of serving-learning-doing under the AWSC umbrella answers the Obama-Biden call that, “We can’t fix these problems alone. We need your help…”
The Obama-Biden team wants to add 2.5 million new jobs over the next two years. As proposed, the AWSC productively engages 280,000 Americans within two years with full time work that will both address fundamental needs and build better jobs for the AWSC members and those with whom they work. The AWSC will simultaneously build our physical and human resource infrastructure, which will create a multiplier effect of new smarter jobs and policies for the future.
The Obama-Biden national service plan calls for rewarding 100 hours of volunteerism with $4,000 tuition grants. Although laudable, that may raise a debate with a political segment deeming themselves as fiscal conservatives and with the MANY Americans earning less than $40.00 per hour. Serving one’s nation should also engrain one with indelible learning experiences that stick with one for life. In these tight economic times, some will:
- Find a way to do 100 hours of community service over a few weeks.
- Abuse the program by quickly doing what can be portrayed as simplified community service.
- Attack such simplified community service as wastefulness, in the vein that portrayed welfare recipients as driving Cadillacs.
- Argue that such limited service does not leave the indelible learning and skill building imprint that the country needs.
- Question paying $40.00 per hour pay when many households earn much less.
In these hard economic times, the more demanding AWSC full time program leaves little doubt that AWSC workers have more than “earned” their service rewards. Few argue against the Peace Corps. Few will be able to argue against using the AWSC proposals to strengthen such learning experiences when the AWSC builds the teams that can help implement a Global Marshal Plan at home and abroad. In being much more demanding, the AWSC teams develop the real characters formed on actual daily service that America needs.
“There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well.”
Walter Reuther
VII.
Incentive to Participate: Internet-based Education and Public Relations
Graphically depict how America’s ultra rich are pitching in.
“The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.”
Andrew Carnegie: The Gospel of Wealth, 1889
Thanks to a bushwhacked economy, the Obama-Biden team will be strapped for money to do all that needs doing. While staring at a looming depression, most Joes have becomecognizant of how disproportionately they have lost wealth, power, and independence to the mega rich. The simple, voluntary, non-traditional funding mechanisms in the AWSC Congressional Proposals will further the economics education of our middle class, while pressing the mega rich to voluntarily contribute to the health of the American and world community.
Integral to successfully funding a robust AWSC — is using the proposed AWSC web sites to help educate Americans and pressure the mega rich to participate in patriotically rebuilding a crumbling America. Consider how just two of the AWSC non-traditional funding mechanism would both educate Americans and provide the locked-box funding to reward those AWSC members serving country and world. Financing AWSC http://www.worldservicecorps.us/financing_AWSC.htm
Listing the Forbes 400 Richest Americans and their charitable contributions in spreadsheet format at the publically accessible AWSC web site educates Americans. Listing how little some mega corporations pay in taxes will move Middle Americans to support the innovative AWSC financing mechanisms proposed here. Listing in spreadsheet format what the mega rich and non-tax paying corporations voluntarily contribute to fund the rewards given to AWSC workers will generate contributions that will dramatically reduce or eliminate taxing to fund the AWSC.
Charitable giving and the Forbes 400 http://www.forbes.com/2004/09/23/cz_dw_0923philan_rl04.html
Corporations paying no income tax in 2003 http://www.worldservicecorps.us/corps%20paid%20no%20taxes.xls
Forbes 1.7% AWSC cost solution http://www.worldser vicecorps.us/revsforbesdonations.xls
Forbes solution to a well-armed Live Earth 7-11-07
Corporate income taxes as percentage of GDP – 1942 – 2003 http://www.ctj.org/html/corp0302.htm
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much… it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
VIII.
Timing is Everything. The Time is Now.
Learning while embedded with costly Human Terrain Teams
is too late.
“There is no such thing as inevitable war. If war comes it will be from the failure of human wisdom.”
Bonar Law, British Prime Minister
In the last year, we have been training armed experts (sociologists, political scientists, etc.) to embed with our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their mission, in simplified terms, is to find out why they don’t like us, how we can get them to like us, how our policies can work better, etc. These experts are trained at our military camps, seemingly under corporate contracts, and receive about $9,000 for each month of training. After assignment to Afghanistan or Iraq, they receive additional hazard pay. For the total three-month training cost of each human terrain expert, we could field a Peace Corps volunteer for a one or probably two years. Almost every PCV provides services abroad that endear America to those with whom they work. Those PCVs return home to help America create smarter public policies. It is so much cheaper to follow this peaceful service route than it is to allow our ignorance of foreign and domestic needs to trip us into wars.
A tsunami of post-traumatic stress disordered (PTSDed) veterans is about to wash back upon our shores. (Veterans Tsunami is coming… DailyKos, August 14, 2008 http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/8/14/2812/39260 ) Back home our veterans will be fighting different battles. They deserve what they have not had before — a village where they can peacefully work, learn, and build something together for themselves and the nation. We should be taking over unused or little-used campuses, closed military bases, etc., and allow veterans to develop them. Our veterans, who need more than a bag of pills to cure their PTSD should be clearing out their troubles by taking government surplus land, like dilapidated Skaggs Island Naval Reserve in Sonoma, California, and have veterans turn such places into energy farms.
The envisioned AWSC could play a role in this by providing volunteers to help them build such campuses and energy farms and by having the vets themselves serve as AWSC core members and receive the financial rewards implicit in the program. Implementing the AWSC Congressional Proposals protects future vets from stumbling into unnecessary wars, provides more human resources to today’s vets, and allows today’s vets to work together with their own team members, whom they know so well, to build the communities that can help to erase PTSD. Www.Veteransvillages.org www.WorldServiceCorps.us
“War is a racket… War, like any other racket, pays high dividends to the very few. But what does it profit the masses?… The cost of operations is always transferred to people who do not profit.”
General Smedley Butler, 1934
To Live and Make a Difference
“To
live and make a difference”
That’s what I’m longing for.
To help all the people,
Where no one’s gone before.
“To live and make a difference”
In someone’s life today.
To find out all their needs and wants,
And take each one away.
“To live and make a difference”
That’s what I want to see.
I have just one question,
Will you join me?
by Irisheyes95 www.Compassion.com
The AWSC addresses America’s desire to serve…. at a size that makes a difference,
“I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The actions and passions of today and yesterdays times lie in the field of sane human and sensible resource development. A Implementing the robust AWSC will provide the strong teams that can get those jobs done at home and abroad.
“Change does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up…That’s how we’re going to bring about change.”
Barach Obama, January 21, 2008
The AWSC involves an army of peaceful Americans working from the bottom up and helping bring the bottom up. It involves Ordinary People Doing the Extraordinary. When enough Americans do the extraordinary, the nation becomes extraordinary.
Will you help us move the AWSC proposed legislation forward? We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks.