If we can spend $1 trillion on the Iraq war, then we can afford $1 trillion for a new American Dream.

Guest edited by Jim Finefrock

Because I am complicit, along with each and every one of my fellow US citizens, in spending what may be the worst trillion dollars in history on a petro-fundamentalism-driven military folly only a warrior deity – that Great Jingoist in the Sky – could love, I am hereby calling on the candidates in the 2008 presidential race to develop a plan for spending The Next Trillion – a good trillion, and, yes, maybe even the best trillion dollars we’ve ever spent.

Economists project that, when all is said and done, the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $1 trillion. The magnitude of this expenditure is one thing, but even more glaring is how it was accomplished: Most of the war funding was approved outside regular channels, with limited congressional oversight, through the Emergency Supplemental Appropriation process.

And so I say: Let’s do it again!

Let’s do it with the same sense of moral urgency, the same sense of manifest destiny that has made America great at so many critical junctures in its history.

But this time let’s do it for the cause of life, rather than for the cause of death. Let’s do it for the good of all humanity (and all the other species, too), not just for the good of one nation at the expense of another or the good of one ideology at the expense of another.

Let’s see to it that the war in Iraq becomes useful in an unexpected way: Let it mark the beginning of the end of the Age of Petrodollars. Let it mark the beginning of the Age of Sustainability and Prosperity.

Now that’s something worth spending $1 trillion on.

We must do something of sufficient scale and impact to reestablish American leadership in the world and begin to face the social and environmental challenges of our time.

There’s an emergency out there that needs the next trillion dollars of government attention. It’s called climate change. It’s what happens when a world economy makes a thousand billionaires and a billion thousandaires. It’s what happens when an economy depends upon frenzied economic growth in China, which is adding 65 gigawatts (equivalent to California’s annual energy consumption) to its grid each year, most of it produced by highly polluting coal-fired power plants. And it’s what happens when each of us – each US citizen – uses more energy, puts more carbon into the atmosphere and generates more waste than any citizen in history – and by a shameful margin.

In response, we need more than business as usual. And more than a misguided military adventure.

We need The Next Trillion. Here’s how we should spend it: