Good Ways to Wage Good Fight
by Pete Hamill
New York Daily News 10-01-2001

The city is much calmer now, but the war is not over. The President and his cabinet members have warned that it has only begun, that it will be long and nasty and dangerous.

Almost surely, the true believers will strike again. Probably not tomorrow, or next week, but soon. Perhaps even before the rubble has been removed from Ground Zero. The men who planned this slaughter surely had second, third, fourth options. True believers are patient. They think in terms of eternity.

But the Americans who will manage the ongoing crisis must also sustain our national unity. That is, we have to know that the costs of the war on terrorism will be borne by all citizens. The Social Security surplus, for example, was already gone before Sept. 11, because the Bush administration demanded increased spending while cutting taxes. Now, after the murderous assault on the World Trade Center, spending has spiraled beyond any earlier estimates.

President Bush can't follow the example of Lyndon Johnson, who tried to fight a war in Vietnam and a war on poverty without raising taxes. Inflation hammered the economy for a generation. Both wars were lost.

Here are a few suggestions, offered for discussion, to be debated in good faith by intelligent men and women:

* Postpone the tax cut for 18 months. Tax cuts are part of conservative dogma, and everybody would prefer keeping a little more of their own money. But most citizens would give up their $300 or $600 checks to pay for increased security at airports, bridges, tunnels, reservoirs — and the escalating costs of military retaliation.


* Pass the increase in the minimum wage. This would get money into the hands of people who desperately need it, and who would surely spend it. Think of all those busboys, delivery people and messengers who perished in the World Trade Center. Better to pay such people more money than to give tax breaks to citizens who don't need them to survive.


* Scrap, or postpone, the missile defense system. This system could never have protected us against the hijackers who turned domestic airliners into guided missiles. Each test costs $100 million, and many scientists believe that the system can never work. The eventual cost would be in the billions. Better to spend this money on true Civil Defense, and the expansion of human intelligence-gathering throughout the world. The system was defined before Sept. 11 as a system that doesn't work against an enemy that does not exist. Sept. 11 only underlined that point.


* Put hard limits on executive salaries and bonuses paid to those who will receive government bailout money.



The most obvious case is the airline industry. The families of New York firefighters, police officers and emergency workers should not be told that their tax money will ensure that CEOs continue to gather obscene salaries and bonuses (as high as $7 million a year).


* Every airline executive — and all other business executives whose companies benefit from taxpayer money — should be required as part of the bailout to reduce his or her pay to $120,000 a year for the next two years. That was the salary that Fire Chief of Department Peter Ganci was being paid when he died at the World Trade Center.


* Have the President and all cabinet members forgo their salaries for the duration. This would be a great symbolic act, showing the willingness of American leaders to share in the general demand for personal sacrifice. It could be limited to all those cabinet members who have more than $1 million in the bank. That probably includes all of them. Certainly, not one of them is working in the government for the money. The act of turning salaries back to the general fund would have a major effect on maintaining the sense of national purpose.


* Have actors, directors and professional athletes voluntarily reduce their salaries for the duration. This would allow movie companies and distributors (along with team owners) to reduce ticket prices, thus allowing more citizens to go to theaters and ballparks. One symbolic act: For one day, reduce the prices at all such venues — all over the country — to the prices charged on V-J Day in 1945.


* Create local and national laws against price gouging. In New York, for example, any landlord trying to cash in on the shortage of office space should be subject to criminal charges. Commercial rents should be frozen at the prices in effect on Sept. 10. The same should apply to all other vendors, from those selling food and gasoline to those peddling gas masks.


* Create an excess profits tax on all defense-related spending. We must assume that the people who manufacture arms, uniforms, gas masks, vaccines, etc., are patriots. In this national emergency, they should not cash in. They should be willing to accept modest profits — say 6% — for the duration of the crisis. The surest way to erode unity would be the prospect of war profiteering.


* Scrap all plans to use taxpayer money to fund private entertainment enterprises. Locally, this means Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium. Three years from now, if the terror networks have been "ripped up," this subject can be revisited. To try to do it now — with some spurious waving of the flag — would be an outrage.


* Get rid of the faith-based initiative. This heavy-handed attempt to bridge the separation of church and state was a terrible idea from the beginning. After Sept. 11, it's even worse. We are now seeing all over the world the dreadful results of welding church with state. It led directly to the World Trade Center. Islamic fundamentalists, from the Taliban to the bloody killers in Algeria, Egypt, the Bekaa Valley and elsewhere, are part of a faith-based movement. We should not spend one more dime on this plan. Get rid of the staff, cut off the money.


* Speed up the integration of all so-called "aliens" into American society. If the United States is hit again, the Pat Buchanan right will be demanding mass deportations — not simply of Muslims, but of Mexicans and Central Americans and Dominicans and Chinese. The old nonsense about dual loyalties — to which the Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans and Japanese were subjected — will flower.



To head this off, the first step the Bush administration can take is to allow swift naturalization of all those immigrants who have American children. These children, from birth, are as American as George W. Bush. They should never face the threat of being separated from their parents by the fevers of the moment.