Hard times indeed. Republicans tell us that we must face up to the coming realities of austerity and shared sacrifice. Every social service, every government program from financial and environmental regulation, child care, education, social security, medicare, medicaid, you name it, is being considered for the budget knife, alll in the interest of saving the ailing American economy patient.
All except one. The biggest, lardiest porkbelly barrel of them all. The Defense Budget(or the TDMICDS for Trillion Dollar Military Industrial Complex Direct Subsidy) proved once again bulletproof in the current fiscal discipline firestorm. To which I say WTF, or "war's the future".
On Friday, our Republican controlled House overwhelmingly approved a 649,000,000,000 dollar spending bill that boosts the budget of the Defense Department by 17,000,000,000 dollars.
And they say we have to cut Social Security. The Dept. of Education. Public transit funding. Food safety. Pollution Control. Child Care. Because a weapons program, like the C-17 which the Pentagon did not even request but happens to be on Boeing's punchlist, is a higher priority. Because spending more on our military than the next eight nations combined is somehow not enough.
I'd like to point out the example of the reddest state in the country. Here's how Utah's congressional reps voted:
Yes -- Rep. Jim Matheson (D) (I would only grudgingly admit he's a D)
Yes -- Rep. Rob Bishop (R) (Former defense lobbyist, no suprise here)
No -- Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) (Wait a second, isn't this the Tea Party candidate who unseated the 'too-liberal' Chris Cannon? )
"(There are) those who want to keep the military as strong as possible, so do I, but that doesn't mean you can't have an exceptionally strong military and cut the budget a little bit"
Rep. Jason Chaffetz R-Utah
We're taking bread out of the mouths of our poor to fatten defense contractors and the only Utah congressman who thinks something's wrong with this is the Tea Partier? Yet again, a break in the Republican ranks providing another missed opportunity for Dems, who not only played along with increasing defense spending but rallied for it, mostly under the misrepresentation of defense spending as 'jobs stimulus'. This is a violation of a basic notions of social justice. You can stimulate an economy with jobs to restore public infrastructure like roads and mass transit, improve parks, provide services like health care and aid for the poor and elderly. You cannot stimulate an economy by diverting labor and resources into producing stuff that either:
A. Blows Up
B. Blows Up Other Stuff
C. (the best case scenario) Sits Somewhere Rusting Until It's Obsolete
In anticipation of Dem defense hawks who will bring up the tired canard that proposing cuts in defense spending is electoral suicide, I would like to point out that large pluralities of Americans believe that defense spending should be cut.
Even if Defense Spending has somehow morphed into an even higher voltage third rail than Social Security or Medicare, that says more about the pervasive power of MIC lobbying and campaign contribution than the 'will of the people'. Right now we're witnessing a historic confluence of money and media on the corporate side and a prevailing angst and fear that America is 'falling behind' in our popular culture. Once again, our corporate masters know something most of us don't. If you accept the proposition that the American standard of living is, as Dick Cheney bluntly put it, "non-negotiable" and if you recognize a world of dwindling resources it becomes inevitable policy to take what your society 'requires' from weaker nations by force.
If this is the case, then history will treat us as unkindly as it did the Romans.
It bears noting that the most eloquent and prescient quote on this issue was made by a Republican president.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross.”
Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower “The Chance for Peace” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.