Military downsizing and Rio - 12 June 1992

Before we get down to a matter not much talked about and that's affecting millions of Americans, Europeans most of all the citizens of the former Soviet Union, a note was sounded on Monday in the lofty halls of the United States Supreme Court that I'm surprised to see has made no headlines, no ominous baritone noises from the men on the tube, but on the face of it anyway it strikes me as more than a little scary.

Simply the court by the unusually substantial majority of six to three ruled that the states have a constitutional right to prohibit writing votes in elections, let's say at once that very many people, millions have made it clear already that if Mr Ross Perot doesn't manage to raise the required number of petitions to put him in the ballot in their state, they will none the less write in his name.

In most of the primary elections we've just come through, there were impressive totals of writing votes for candidates not on the primary ballots. Mr Tsongas for one, remember – he withdrew from the race early on for the stark reason that he'd run out of money and was already a couple of million dollars, I think it was, in debt.

It's one of the never-solved puzzles to foreigners that in this great democracy, in order to run for any elected office, most conspicuously for the House or the Senate, worse for the presidency, you have to go around cap in hand to rich groups who will cough up vast sums not because they love the colour of your eyes or your charming voice, but because they represent a special interest – businesses, labour unions, farmers, tinkers, tailors, sailors, soldiers, transport, whatever –interests which are bound to come up as a new law and on which they expect your vote their way. This is called raising a campaign fund and by no twist of meaning as catering to special interests.

Well, the court and its ban on writing votes – it met to review a case brought last year before a United States Court of Appeals for the federal circuit that is adjudicated in San Francisco. How the case came about is interesting, it shows on the part of the man who started it, certainly no sinister defence of writing votes, he was a Republican living in New Jersey who moved out into the Pacific and settled in Hawaii. When the first election came up, he discovered that Hawaii is a rock ribbed Democrat state so strong that once the Democrats put their candidates name on the ballot, often the opposition party, the Republicans for instance don't find it worthwhile to put up an opponent. The Democrat will be voted in unopposed.

Well, Mr Burdick, this greatly surprised Republican, challenged the Hawaiian law, which said that writing votes were illegal, he argued that under the first amendment the right of free speech he should be able to vote for the man or woman he chose and never mind if the name was not on the ballot. Well, the majority of the court turned him down, Justice White saying that "the right to vote in any manner and the right to associate for political purposes through the ballot are not absolute".

I must say the majority had a strong case in Hawaii because its law requires a petition to carry no more than 25 signatures to put a name on the ballot. In some of the big states that Mr Perot hopes to contest, a petition containing at least 50,000, some states I believe 75,000 are necessary before he can printed on the ballot.

At first glance, it looks as if Mr Perot supporters had been dealt a blow by the Supreme Court. I believe on the contrary, it will spur on his supporters rallying the more sluggish to rush in there with a ballpoint pen and a flourishing signature. In truth, there are only three other states that don't allow writing votes and presumably would be legally justified in destroying them – they are Nevada, Oklahoma and Indiana, not among the most populous states. Still, I'll bet that by this weekend, the Perot recruiting officers will be busy in those four states warning them that if they don't sign in old Ross's name on a petition it will do them no good to write it in in November.

Now in the past couple of years to lean back no further, we've had two or three lamentable examples of the constant conflict between idealism and earning a living, the most dramatic, the most lurid and unsolved of these conflicts is surely that between this government's genuine urge to wipe out the Colombian drug cartel and yet to rescue from hunger and poverty the half million or more Peruvian peasants who live by cultivating the cocoa plant. The obvious and much publicised solution is alternative profitable crops. I'm afraid not too much has been done or will be until somebody finds a crop that produces one tenth say the revenue of cocaine.

This week at the very start of the Rio environmental conference, at which the United States was cast from the beginning as the villain, suddenly the United States proposed a noble plan and was thwarted once again by the poor people who'd be the first to suffer from the carrying out of that plan. I'm referring of course to Mr Bush's appeal to the assembled nations to double their spending on conserving the world's forests. Some industrial nations have been quick to agree, but the opposition is massive from the countries that would forego stripping, logging, manufacturing from timber resources, from, that is, the poor underdeveloped countries that we must now call developing whether they are developing or not.

The latest and the most widespread assault on the jobs both of the unskilled and the very skilled, the jobs of millions of workers in Europe and Euro, Asia and America is the simple huge project of liquidating the military or cutting it down in so many countries cutting it down to size. "Oh," moaned a friend of mine, a strong liberal and an unlikely moaner of such a line, "Oh for the bliss of the Cold War." I doubt that anybody listening to me now sighed or shook a head when the Soviet Union collapsed and not very long afterwards the United States and the collection of republics that still can't think up a name got together to cut their arms production, their stockpiles and manufacture of nuclear weapons and the mass of their armies and navies. What a splendid day it was we thought and nobody said so more resoundingly than the Democratic Party in this country, which for more than a decade ever since the coronation of Ronald Reagan has deplored and groaned and bellyached about the size of the defence budget, about the crime of Ronald Reagan increasing that budget from Carter's 22% to 28%.

Very odd, by the way, that when John Kennedy lifted the cost of defence to 50% of the national budget, nobody called him a warmonger. Well, the crooning and whooping of the Democrats didn't last more than a year or so, by which time several committees of Congress that have to do with the armed services found themselves going through a long list of army camps, factories, forts and bases, naval shipyards so on and having to decide which ones to close down. At that point, every congressman of either party who had a shipyard or a camp or a defence factory in his constituency pleaded with much eloquence and cogency before those committees that of all the bases and plants that ought to go, it was a curious fact that his own was the one that should be spared.

The hurtful irony is that since the Democrats are a majority of the House, the chairman of all committees are Democrats and the majority on the committees is Democratic. Nevertheless, the Armed Services Committee was brutal and many a congressman contemplating the sudden addition of 50-60,000 unemployed in his district simply decided not to run again in November.

The United States, like I suppose Britain and the NATO countries, is only now beginning to feel the blow of the cutting down process. And of course when I tot up unemployed, I'm thinking not only of soldiers let go but much more of the workers in defence plants.

Well, if we think we have trouble, this week we heard from a committee of Congress the Job-like sufferings being inflicted on the people's of the former Soviet Union. The committee that heard this sad and later on for us alarming tale has a jaw-breaking title, but it's a joint House and Senate sub-committee on the economics of national security. It heard this week from intelligence experts in the CIA and the Defense Department. I thought back to the old days to the many long years when such experts testified with grim diligence about the menacing strength of the latest Soviet weapons and appropriations, they testified then in secret and were, by the way, usually right. Their testimony the other day had swivelled 180º: they deplored the huge drop in the number of formerly Soviet defence plants, the near bankruptcy of many of them, the collapse of sales of weapons and the trouble the different Rrepublics are having in paying their workers. The Russian military are bearing down on Mr Yeltsin pointing to the hundreds of thousands of dismissed soldiers, officers with no jobs, no homes begging him not to go on and halve the military, which he'd promised from about three million to a million and a half. This year about two million defence workers will be laid off. The result of all this is exports down 30%, imports down 40%, inflation beginning to roar.

What I suggested was the alarming note for us was the common concern of these officials about the great numbers of surface to air missiles and sophisticated aircraft and weapons that are lying about and which are under an agreement between Mr Yeltsin and the heads of three other republics in the defence business are forbidden to sell these things abroad without permission, but who could humanly expect these legions of skilled men unemployed to resist the solicitations of arms dealers of every sort from every country of the Third World under what the government witnesses describe as dire economic conditions.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.