Obama Sacrifices The Domestic Common Good On The Altar of Increased, No Cuts Military Spending
While DINO President Obama washes his hands of the jobless crisis in
the US by shunting it to the do nothing Senate, he plays the
Republicans' game with the deficit: cut domestic spending but do not
touch military spending.
Bloated military spending should be on the chopping block but isn't. That increased Pentagon spending (at the expense of domestic programs for the common good) has become blatantly obscene.
Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch puts the ever expanding, gargantuan military budget into context as sets the scene with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reportedly watching the movie, "Seven Days in May",a 1965 film about an attempted military coup in the United states, on his return flight from Pakistan where "he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip
"... Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out.”
"....every week in Washington is now the twenty-first century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.
"Think of the week after the Secretary of Defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.
"After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark. He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.
"Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest “budget outlook” indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn’t even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).
"Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count. Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.
"To put just the president’s domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes. The president’s team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years. On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion. (And keep in mind that that figure doesn’t include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.) That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending. American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.” That’s what seven days in January really means."
President Obama apparently is terrified of the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex. He seems contented to make regular Americans struggle even more as he calls for domestic spending cuts while genuflecting at the altar of increased military spending
Like his terrible choices of Geithner and Summers, etc., why did Obama keep integrity challenged Bushite Secretary of Defense Gates?
Where is the change the American electorate voted for?
Bloated military spending should be on the chopping block but isn't. That increased Pentagon spending (at the expense of domestic programs for the common good) has become blatantly obscene.
Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch puts the ever expanding, gargantuan military budget into context as sets the scene with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reportedly watching the movie, "Seven Days in May",a 1965 film about an attempted military coup in the United states, on his return flight from Pakistan where "he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip
"... Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out.”
"....every week in Washington is now the twenty-first century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.
"Think of the week after the Secretary of Defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.
"After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark. He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.
"Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest “budget outlook” indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn’t even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).
"Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count. Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.
"To put just the president’s domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes. The president’s team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years. On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion. (And keep in mind that that figure doesn’t include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.) That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending. American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.” That’s what seven days in January really means."
President Obama apparently is terrified of the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex. He seems contented to make regular Americans struggle even more as he calls for domestic spending cuts while genuflecting at the altar of increased military spending
Like his terrible choices of Geithner and Summers, etc., why did Obama keep integrity challenged Bushite Secretary of Defense Gates?
Where is the change the American electorate voted for?
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