A recent trip to my local farmers' market illustrates one way I see economic justice playing out in the 2008 elections. A young farmer in a Che Guevara t-shirt was discussing third-party politics with a baby boomer wearing a Green Party button. "There's no difference between the capitalist parties," he said. "Just look at the Iraq war." On the other hand, he hasn't had health insurance for two years and believes there may be differences between mainstream party candidates on that issue. He doesn't know how he'll vote. Ultimately, he hopes that people will realize it's all connected: funding for the Iraq war, and lack of funding for meeting human needs at home.

In a nation that is spending $720 million a day on the Iraq war while one in eight people lives in poverty and 47 million lack health insurance for some part of the year, the issue of how elected officials vote to spend our tax dollars is the key economic justice issue to mobilize around in 2008. While candidates may not use an explicit frame of "budget priorities," progressives should use that frame to link the issues candidates are likely to highlight: how to achieve health care for all, and whether and how to defund the Iraq war.

Being Realistic

As anyone knows who has ever organized a "penny poll" asking people to vote for their budget priorities, support for "schools, not bombs" is widespread. Yet Pentagon budgets soar while the funding needed to provide good schools, universal health care, and other social goods essential to human security is slashed to the bone. There are many reasons for this paradox. These include the influence of campaign donations by military contractors; families' and communities' reliance on the living-wage jobs provided by such contractors in a globalized economy that offers fewer and fewer local alternatives; and the lack of educational opportunities and alternatives to militarism available to many low-income and minority youth.

These are multilayered challenges that one unpopular war and one election cycle won't solve. Yet in this election year, I believe we can achieve much by emphasizing those "budget priorities" in all our work. The American Friends Service Committee is bringing to many events a large, colorful display of "cost of war" banners comparing the daily US expenditure on the war in Iraq with a range of more positive uses to which the same amount of money could be put. (Visit www.afsc.org/cost [7] for materials you can order or download). The converging public qualms about the price tag of the Iraq war and widening economic insecurity offer fertile ground for this message. How would you rather have Congress spend your tax dollars: $500,000 a minute on the Iraq war, or expanding S-CHIP (the federal program to provide health insurance coverage to low-and moderate-income children) to four million more children?

Making the Connections

Economic justice is not a stepping stone to the "real" goal, peace, but a fire-in-the-belly issue in its own right. As Institute of Medicine statistics show, uninsured adults have a higher risk of dying before age 65 than do insured adults, resulting in roughly 18,000 excess deaths annually. People with no roof over their head risk death or illness from exposure to the cold, and are also vulnerable to hate crimes directed against people who are homeless. Going to a school that is starved for resources can limit children's opportunities for their whole lives. These national insecurities are every bit as real as those dangers claimed abroad.

In addition to working for economic alternatives to the jobs provided by the armed forces and military contractors, "peace" and "justice" activists have not yet succeeded in bridging the race and class gaps that divide us, despite a sincere desire to do so. The challenge for those of us who are white is not only to overcome the inevitable turf and ego issues of coalition politics, but to listen and learn how to be allies in the struggle for economic justice in the United States in a serious way.

One of the challenges in the current moment of economic justice organizing is the lack of a unified grassroots movement working to halt the slash in services and build economic justice in the US. Hundreds of community groups are successfully organizing on schools, health care, jobs, and other local issues around the country, and a number of effective state and national networks of human needs advocates exist. Our efforts, however, remain fragmented and have not coalesced along the lines of the labor movement of the 1920s, the welfare rights movement of the 1960s, or the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s. Those movements contain within them important core principles that we need to replicate and lift up today - people's right to be heard, to decide, and to have basic needs met.

We must also keep alert to new opportunities arising "from the ground up," such as the recent grassroots mobilizations by African American activists around the Jena 6 case in Louisiana and last year's major immigrant rights mobilizations. The overarching issue that unites the calls for ending racism in the criminal justice system and discrimination against immigrants is the call for human rights, including economic rights.

It is hard to know how that grassroots energy will play out in the 2008 elections. It is clear that recent innovations for people to express themselves and mobilize through YouTube, Facebook, text mes-saging, blogs, and talk radio offer new opportunities for all of our movements - and for this baby boomer - to keep learning, as we work to build a society in which economic justice and peace truly intertwine.