Speech concerning Ronald Reagan, 1982

-11Pell grants for needy college students will be cut by $1 billion, knocking 1 million students off the rolls. Title 1 aid for low-income students will be reduced by one-third. Funds for education of the handicapped will be slashed $200 million. Last year's tax cuts gave greatest savings to families earning more than $35,000 a year. Only 6 percent of black America has an income at that level. Three-fifths of black America earn $15,000 a year. They gain $75 a year in tax savings under the president's plan. Eight million Americans last year used food stamps to pay their bills at the super-market check-out line, only 7 of every 100 white families used food stamps, but 36 of every 100 black families needed uncle Sam's help to keep groceries on their table. Five-sixths of all food stamp households will lose their benefits under the president's new proposals. Twelve percent of all food stamp families -- 3 million people -- will lose their benefits entirely. Twenty-two million Americans needed medicaid to pay their doctor bills. Ten million of them are black. Blacks are half of the recipients of aid to families with dependent children. In fiscal 1982 and now for fiscal 1983, the president cut through these programs like a hot knife through warm butter. The fact that one-third of all American damilies will be negatively affected by the Reagan cuts is a clear reminder of the necessity for a continuing struggle to end economic discrimination in the United States; that disproportionate numbers of these families are black

-12or brown is an unnecessary reminder that white supremacy remains an essential feature of the culture of mainstream America and may be permanently rooted in the American character.

The president's budget policies, in sum, are anti-family and anti-black.

The promise that each American would bear an equal burden is as empty as the pockets of our ten million unemployed.

Now the president proposes more drastic cuts in these life-sustaining programs, and again a disproportionate number of the victims will be black.

The administration has increased unemployment to fight inflation, and is balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.

There are more people out of work in America today that at any time since the great depression.

Black young men have an unemployment rate that approaches 50 percent; they are social sticks of dynamite, and the explosion they may create can destroy us all.

As the destruction of the social safety net has moved forward, and as the human infrastructure of America begins to collapse under a deliberate design of calculated neglect, the greedy appetite of the military machine grows more voracious every day.

The administration is beating our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears.

The choice they put before us is greater than guns versus butter, it is soup kitchens and surplus cheese versus expensive airplanes and malfunctioning tanks.

-13The $15.6 million dollars it costs to build one navy F-14 would build 1,000 2-bedroom homes. The 4.3 million it would have cost to create 860 miles of tunnels for the M-X missile would pay the nation's mass transit bill for one year. The $60 million it takes to build one C-5A airplane would feed 12,000 four-person families for one year. And, contrary to popular theory, military spending creates fewer, not more jobs for American workers. It is capital, not labor-intensive. For every billion dollars spent on the MX missile, 17,000 people would be employed. That same billion would hire 48,000 hospital workers or 65,000 people in the building trades. Those billion dollars would pay for 72,000 teachers, or police officers, or firefighters. It is wasteful spending as well. In 1980, the army's patriot missile exceeded its cost -- over the inflation rate -- by 53 percent. That was the equivalent of $285 million, dollar for dollar almost precisely the amount cut from women's, infant's, and children's programs. The result -- 70,000 fewer pregnant women and fewer children will be assured of proper nutrition. The M1 tank's cost overrun in 1980, again above inflation rates, was $747 million. That's equal the amount cut by congress and the president from the enefgy conservation program.

-14The F-18 fighter plane cost overruns were $607 million, nearly equal to the cuts made in aid to dependent children. That 43 percent increase in the cost of this plane equals evaporated assistance to 400,000 families. Even without comparisons to much needed spending for human needs, the wasteful nature of military spending is astounding. Six years ago, general dynamics proposed building a new, shoulder-fired attack rocket launcher for the army. The cost would be $78 each. Today, the cost has risen to $1,000 each. Two years ago the patriot air defense system would have cost $5.5 billion. Today the cost is $7.8 billion for fiscal 1982. The cost of one apache helicopter has risen $6 million each since 1980. Since last June, the price for pershing missiles has doubled. Two years ago, 110,000 copperhead artillery shells cost $1.2 billion. Today, less than half as many of these shells cost almost exactly as much. But the aggresive militarism we face and the callous cut-backs in human programs is not the first time political capital has been earned at the expense of the people living on the economic edge. What is happening to us now has happened more than once before. As in the reconstruction period, 100 years ago, the collusion between a hostile administration and a seemingly unfeeling majority seemed to doom the hope of the American underclass. Then and now, a president, desperate for power, entered into an illicit arrangement -- not just with the unreconstructed South -- but with the national unreconstructed mentality that believed then

-15as it believes now -- that private profit and public arrogance could be pursued at the expense of the people living on the American margin.

As in that earlier period, the aspirations of and movement by black people began to be curtailed. Not just by organized violemce and barbarity, but by a series of legal and extra - legal maneuvers designed to make us less than political and economic equals. The frenetic activity of the 60s had created a political counter-revolution characterized by selfishness and fear. A constituency of the comfortable, the callous and the smug was recruited to form solid ranks against the forgotten. This massive manipulation of the american mind made the mundane magnificent, and placed government in the hands of men who believe in privilege for the powerful and neglect of the powerless. In the past 20 years the american economy has changed.

The "new economists" of the 1960s believed that judicious manipulation of fiscal and monetary policy would automatically dissolve racism, sexism, and poverty. But these planners did not -- could not -- or would not -- foresee the increased corporate control of the american economy. By 1978, the top 100 companies controlled more of our total assets than the top 200 did in 1948. American capital controlled, rather than obeyed, the laws of supply and demand. In the 30s, for example, when one-fourth of the work force was idle in the streets, business lowered its prices to maintain volume in a time of falling consumption.