Rights Group Wants Urban Marshall Plan

The National Urban League, declaring the end of the Cold War means defense spending can be slashed by half, today proposed creation of a $50-billion urban Marshall Plan to aid blacks and minorities in entering the work force.

“America will become a second-rate power unless we undertake policies to ensure that our neglected minority population gets the education, housing, health care and job skills they need to help America compete successfully in a global economy,” League President John Jacob told a news conference unveiling the rights group’s annual report, “The State of Black America.”

Jacob said, “We spent $2 trillion in the past 10 years on defense because we locked into a wartime mentality that now has no basis in fact.

“World leadership in the 1990s depends on economic strength, not on stockpiling weapons you can’t use without committing suicide,” Jacob added. “And economic strength in this post-industrial world depends on developing our human resources.”

The Bush Administration, reacting to various claims on the so-called peace dividend, has said there is no such thing, that any savings from lower defense spending will be used to reduce the federal deficit.

But Jacob said current estimates suggest the defense budget could be sharply reduced to create a $150-billion peace dividend and that one-third of that should be used to “fund an urban Marshall Plan that develops our economic infrastructure, renews our cities, and moves people out of poverty” with the remaining $100 billion used to bring the budget deficit down to minimal levels.

The Marshall Plan, named after then-Secretary of State George C. Marshall, was a program under which the United States provided more than $12 billion in economic aid to Western European nations between 1947 and 1952 to help them rebuild after World War II.

Jacob noted that as long ago as 1963, the Urban League had called for a domestic version of the Marshall Plan.

“Had that been implemented, we would not have the devastation in our inner cities today,” he said. “Despair would have long ago been replaced by hope and opportunity.”

But he said the nation has a new opportunity now to act on the domestic front.

“The peace dividend is real,” Jacob said. “It exists. Our leaders must resist those who want to continue to throw America’s scarce resources down the pit of tax breaks for the wealthy or down the bottomless well of a defense establishment that knows no limits.”