Agran Getting Back on Track With a ‘Peace Dividend’

Larry Agran, whose 12-year tenure as Irvine mayor ends next month, is thinking globally, again.

Now that he’s going to have more time on his hands, he’s starting a movement.

(Think back. You remember what that means. Picture the civil rights movement. No? OK, how about the women’s movement? Uh, all right, what about the anti-war movement? You know, Vietnam ? They’ve made some movies about that. . . .)

Anyway, Agran’s movement doesn’t have a name as yet, but he says the words “peace dividend” will probably figure prominently.

I know, I didn’t get it right away either. But since it sounded rather au courant --like the kind of thing where you wouldn’t want to wait for the video--I pressed on.

What Agran has in mind is a grass-roots movement, a common sense movement, a throw-the-bums-out-of-office-if-they-don’t-get-with-the-pro-gram kind of movement.

Or at least, that’s the plan as of right now.

Agran says he should know within the next eight to 10 weeks if this thing is going to fly, i.e., if he can get some money.

There have been meetings, including two last week in L.A., with as-yet-to-be-identified movers and shakers, the kind who have been known to think big thoughts and then lay their hands on big checks.

Right. About this “peace dividend” business. . . .

Here’s Larry:

“We won the Cold War. Where are the benefits? My argument is to bring the boys and bring the billions back home.”

Or in other words, take the money no longer needed for the arms race and spend it domestically. On restoring the environment. Transportation. Child care. Health care. Affordable housing.

The Good Things.

Larry again: “I want to raise expectations about these peace dividends. It’s time not only to declare that peace dividends be paid, but to pay them. . . . It’s not a few million dollars we are talking about, but billions. . . . There is no rationale left for spending $150 billion on the defense of Western Europe.”

OK, sounds good, I tell him. And it really does. But not to be too blunt about this, I remind the mayor that as of next month he will be a politician without an office.

His nemesis, Sally Anne Sheridan, who beat him by 3% of the votes in the June 5 election, takes over next.

I mention things like cynicism, apathy, exhaustion, the right wing, Don Quixote.

Larry: “This is not just pie in the sky. If I’ve done anything at all while I was mayor, I’ve shown the ability to take ideas and reduce them to tangible programs. . . .

“There are going to be people who dismiss this as idealistic, unrealistic or beyond the purview of government, but they don’t really count. This is what a democracy is all about. If I have to be the President of the United States to articulate ideas, then this country is in deep, deep trouble.”

Let me state for the record that Larry Agran has no immediate plans to become President of the United States. (“Although, if they called me in to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development, I’d take it.” Big smile.)

What Agran says he hopes to do is organize people nationwide to demand that government be responsive to their spending priorities, not merely to those of the generals who have a hankering for a new bomber fleet.

“If you deprecate government in a democracy, then you are basically trashing the people,” he says.

The movement would not be a mere lobbying group, Agran adds. Nor would it be a faction within the Democratic Party--”a bombed-out shell”--or, needless to say, that other party.

Larry again: “It’s time to insist that politicians pay the peace dividend. That is what most people in this country want. . . . How did we win civil rights? It wasn’t the Congress or the President of the United States. They proved to be an enabling solution . . . I think it is going to be the same with the peace dividend. It is not going to be paid to us by the Congress or the President of the United States without a struggle.”

Agran figures it will take between $500,000 and $1 million to get his movement started. He says he has zip so far. And he adds that the organizers, including himself, should be paid.

The mayor also says he has no immediate plans to leave Irvine, where his wife, Phyllis, is a pediatrician. Their son, 19, is a student at Dartmouth.

Anyway, back to the movement. What happens if it doesn’t move?

Agran, an attorney, reminds me that he is still executive director of the Center for Innovative Democracy. Or he says he might want to consider offers that he has received to join the staff of an environmental group.

He’s not keen on helping Dianne Feinstein become governor of California, he says.

“They’d have to pay me a lot of money for that. As I’m sure you can understand, I’m less than enthusiastic about jumping into another political campaign.”

So Agran and I keep talking, about where it went wrong at home--”What really did me in was the labeling. I didn’t pretend to be something other than a liberal Democrat”--and where it might go right elsewhere.

Which, of course, seems inevitably to lead Agran back to the “peace dividend.”

“It might come along more quickly than people think,” he says.

And Larry Agran wants to be there when, or if, it does.