Finally! Reasonable proposals to cut the defense budget!

It is truly outrageous, what we spend on the military in this country -- and how so many of those expenditures are treated as being "off the table" when it comes to budget-cutting. I've never understood why.

When I was in the Peace Corps, the program director -- a Reagan appointee! -- was fond of pointing out that the program she oversaw, which at that time sponsored something like 12,000 volunteers working in 50+ countries around the globe, operated on a budget that was less than what the U.S. spent annually on its military bands.

Military bands!

We, as a nation, have our priorities seriously f***ed-up.

Seems the money we spend on our military is what is undermining our security!

Agree we need spending cuts and agree we should start with military spending cuts but few in Washingon are listening.

Now let's go back to December. Not two months after Obama signs a tax reduction package (with a token amount for unemployment benefits) that will cost the US $850 billion, Obama now is looking to cut $1 trillion from government spending because he says the US can't run such high budget deficits. If he simply didn't pass the tax cut, we'd be near break even right now. He is simply using the Republican "starve the beast" budgt tactic.

Sorry people but playing nice with the Pentagon won't cut it. When we can give major cuts to non-military related programs that hurt us, there's no reason to not give major cuts to military related bs. Here are some reasons I have in mind.

1. Jobs. How long are we gonna allow more employment to be tied to the Military Industrial Complex? The metal being wasted on bombs and guns could be used for expanding railroads.

2. Environment. Aren't we forgetting all too often that the military has been made to be the biggest energy hog thanks to bloating its budgets since WWII ?

3. Austerity itself. It has been brought up that the real meaning of austerity is being sabotaged by creating double standards on spending cuts. There's no reason to create one set of rules for non-military related social programs and another for military spending.

4. Defense itself. We need to get back to the real meaning of defense such as health care and safety from violent outbursts that are 90% rightwing here in the country itself. The majority will never figure this out until war spending is drastically reduced. It's disingenuous to call war spending "defense" spending. The true meaning of defense is about caring and not invading and occupying. The nature of occupying another nation is like a man controlling a woman physically or mentally and this brings me to my next point.

5. Helping men respect women and even women respecting women. I'm still unable to shake away from what a brave feminist recently told me about feminism being dead in America while shining high in Europe. She proved that feminism has been making inroads even throughout Asia and Africa where male oriented dominance used to define past traditions and cultures. Her biggest sorrow was women fighting each other and I told her that I too felt bad about this. I don't blame her for her anger and sadness. There's no doubt that serious reductions in military spending would go a long ways towards more men embracing feminism that could help them confront internal weaknesses and more women not shying away from it either.

By the way, I don't think feminism is dead but the MIC has become too much of a monster that we're in a Catch-22 where we either fight fire with fire and risk losing compassion or we play nice and risk losing to tyranny. It's no different than the war between practical and ideal.

Reasonable proposals! Also why do we need 725 military bases around the world?

Taking away winter heating oil from the poor while cutting taxes for billionaires is obscene.

Washington DC is the centre and main propagator of collective psychosis on the planet today. Not only are the politicians of the US psychotic, they are criminally insane! They spread their psychic virus through the main stream media, which is a culture for morphing the primary virus into countless variations of insanity. Most of the US citizenry exposes themselves to this psychic warfare (psy-ops) daily and have succumbed to the viral psychic toxins exuding from the cable and satellite networks!

You get what you pay for.
And if you pay for military, you will get war.
It's not rocket science.

I'd have to take umbrage with the author's statement: "While some of the money would come from closing tax loopholes and increasing the burden on individuals earning more than $250,000 per year"

When has Obama done this?

he may have spoken those words but Obama has proven to be a lying schmuck - he extended the tax breaks for the richest -

If he would have allowed them to expire he would have had more savings than his cuts provide -

Obama is a lying hypocrite, corporate, fascist loving, reptilian, warmongering neo-con -

I'm sick of these "If Obama just did these things" BS articles - Obama is NEVER going to do any of these things - just as bush would never had done them -

I have a better chance waking up as Kobe Bryant and playing basketball for the Lakers than Obama turning into a progressive!

Missed the mark here William. What we need ARE radical proposals and radical actions. The zealots in the MIC are the true extremists who threaten our everyday lives with their colossal theft of our labor and resources as manifest in the expenditures of the US War Machine.

Additionally, Hartung at the end of his piece, slyly slips in the propagnda noise about "terrorists" thusly legitimizing the very notion that was manufactured by the forces he is ostensibly, though mildly, speaking against.

If this is the reasonable voice that is held up as the opening position in attempting to negotiate with these Wall St./MIC psycopaths we are in trouble.

We ARE in trouble.

What can we expect when we have gone from being recognized as citizen's of this country to consumers who have nothing to say except keep buying stuff.

"Sustainable Defense Task Force" , another new excellent Orwellian term. They want to make sure the "perpetual war for perpetual peace" is sustainable---a word they must have co-opted from Al Gore. Why are the things people really need, like heated houses in the winter, considered "discretionary", while lasers(Reagan's ray-guns?) in space are "essential to national security?

Since all of our politicians have all their money invested in the stocks of the military industrial complex companys. It is a pipedream to think they are going to loose money by cutting the pentagon budget. As their portfolio fatten, they are looking for more military projects, like maybe let'snuke Iran. We are on the Neo cons path of continuous war. Thiskeeps their wallets fat at the expense ofthe country and its Children. I remember the huge outcries from musicians and movie start during the Vietnam war. Where are the protests over a war in a county, that never threatened us. Our Children are dying for the sole purpose of fattening the bank accounts of our elected officials. Boy is our country getting ducked yo.QQ

The Majority of What Americans pay in Taxes are used for Military Budgets and paying off the Debt of Paper money to the federal reserve.
(Military Murder and Paying DEBT on Our own Money - Insane)

Maybe we should all just stop paying taxes, then there would be no money for the Military Empire which is the united WAR states government.

Sometime we need to take extreme measures to get things done, look at Egypt for an example of that!

or we can go on sitting behind our computers whining about how unfair life is.

The Military has become the biggest employer in the 21st century. Im amazed when I travel America and especially the Midwest, Prairie States that seemed to be everyother person in the neighborhoods serves in the Military or Reserve units. Reserve Units have become secondary "Cash Cow" Employment for people. Some make more money on Deployment in Iraq then they do at the regular Jobs. Plus after 20 years Reserve time they get a pension when there 62, Military Care, VA. other types of assistance. 20 year Active military have become the 1st career to jump to a Govt. job waiting when they retire. I hate to attack the Members of the Armed Services and I m a Veteran and eligable to retire from my State Job. The conservatives attack public employees and our Unions and they won't say a word about the Military employees/Service Members.

The Pentagon's 553 billion $ annual budget and the U.S. support of over 700 military bases on foreign soil...that is the real terrorism that needs to be exposed for what it is!

Beside weapons and pot, what else do we have to sell?

The single most outrageous aspect of Obomber's budget proposal is his INCREASE in military spending when we already annually spend well over two and a half times what we spent on peak Cold War Pentagon budgets when we faced the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. We have NOTHING to show for ten years of our oil/terror wars but the global and domestic proliferation of terrorists, terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks. We have not rebuilt the infrastructure or the economies or democratized the governing institutions of Afganistan or Iraq (where there is spreading civil unrest and ongoing horrific IED bombings on a weekly basis). Our gutless "mainstream" corporatist press and sold-out politicians don't have the courage or integrity to question our failing strategy and tactics in the "global war on terror." Now our dictatorial allies in the oil sheikdoms face the spreading threat of civil insurrections copying those in Tunisia and Egypt and the U.S. is on the wrong side of history siding with those dictators, failing to conserve energy inside the U.S., becoming MORE dependent on oil imported from unstable regions, and further infuriating average Muslim citizens in the oil sheikdoms.

Sec. Def. Gates and Obomber are proposing $78 Billion dollars in Pentagon "cuts" spread out over 5 years that do not take into account the actual yearly costs of these quagmire wars but only the Pentagon's basic operations budget. A realistic cut would be $140 Billion EVERY year for three to four years, commensurate with a domestic Green New Deal to employ returning veterans and unemployed civilians. Veterans returning from these botched occuvasions already have a higher unemployment rate than the domestic civilian "official" unemployment rate and their rates of home foreclosures are soaring.

Our domestic and foreign policy priorities are ass-backwards, purely corporate-serving, and intensely stupid and short-sighted on all fronts. We are governed by the reigning oligarchs and their political puppets as if we are planning for the 19th century and not the 21st.

Obama speaks softly, the good cop to Bush's bad cop, but still recklessly fights on in the middle east. These efforts include our general to general talks with Egypt, which further empower the military takeover.

Ron Paul calls for taking our troops of out Iraq and Afghanistan--saving us billions. Bravo Ron Paul.

As for social security--I'm waiting for the President as well as the media to note that social security takes in more then it gives out-- and, believe it or not, runs a surplus. I wish the politicians and media would admit that they've taken money out of this fund and used it for other purposes. (Under Reagan, Greenspan arranged an increase in the SS tax rate so as to keep it funded over the years-- but then they took the money from the fund and used it elsewhere--in other words, it was a sneaky Reagan tax increase. What a country!

The politicians who advocate the privatizing of Social Security do not seem to understand that this will making war more difficult.

The military will be scaled back when our country goes broke and we aren't able to afford our empire anymore, not before. Don't expect any traction in this arena / ain't gonna happen .....

Let's be clear, we don't avoid cuts for the sake of national defense. We avoid them because they are propping up our economy. If we cut the military it would devastate our economy. It's how the right can actually stay Keynesian without admitting it. Republicans will actually (and have) make the argument that closing bases and reducing spending will result in losses of jobs. The left needs to understand it because it has to propose a way to convert military bases to some other way of providing jobs. Veterans need other ways of receiving an income and so forth. The city of San Diego would be crushed if the navy were significantly cut. It's a sad and ironic fact that the republicans are closet Keynsians but watch out, in a couple of years there will be a left-right alliance based on this principle. Let's start now with conversion proposals so that we don't get our economic policies hijacked by soldiers looking for the status quo. You will wake up one day and Fox News will explicitely say governments need to spend money to prop up demand. Instead of them making the argument that we need to spend on military lets switch to infrastructure. The army core of engineers could build high speed rail networks for example. Lockheed-Martin could design maglev trains, etc. Yes, this is state-run capitalism but this is the model Asia uses and it works for them. And we use it too, for bombs though and not bullet trains.

I am sorry to say this, no offense, but it seems to me that most people here are ignoring the huge elephant in the room: the war scam! This president like most of them, are all in on this. They do not represent the people. Surely, they do represent some of the people of this country but not you and me. Well, definitely not me! It is clear, crystal clear, that they represent the monster created by an enormous corporate greed. Here are some of the top names of this pyramid scheme: Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, GE, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America among many others. On the corrupted side you have Congress, The Pentagon, The Supreme Court and the Office of the President of the US. Those corporations are completely out of anyone's control, and are the number one obstacle for any chance of a balanced budget and a better, friendly, peaceful, hard working country most of us could be proud of instead of totally disgusted of.

The government we have do not represent us, period! They represent arrogance, greed, irresponsibility, unaccountability, dishonesty. We, The People have been shut out from any decisions. We have become slaves that pay our masters. On the very top of this incredible Pyramid Scheme built over several WARS are the big Banks financing it all, completely in secret via the Federal Reserve and Treasury through Goldman Sachs and others.

The sooner we recognize this the sooner we can look for possible solutions to our dilemma.

Like who needs help paying the bills, with a glut of mercenary and weapons manufacturing, freeway expansion, and continued building boom "jobz" despite the crash? In my area, there's been absolutely no slowdown of the kapitalist's frantic pace of plunder and CON(de)struction.

THIS is what the US Military is up to.

http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/us-air-force-c17-transport-caught-smuggling-arms-and-drugs-into-argentina/

A manifest provided by the US did not list war materiel and drugs which were seized by Argentine authorities.

>>Among the confiscated materiel were communications interception equipment , encrypted communications equipment, sophisticated GPS devices, high power rifles, a machine gun and narcotics as well as a full trunk of expired pharmaceuticals including stimulants. All boxes had the stamp of the 7th Army Airborne Brigade based in North Carolina.

So why would the US Military be smuggling drugs and arms into Argentina?

Are they planning another "insurgency"?

The US Military is the ENFORCEMENT arm of the Fascist Corporate State. They are not "defending" anything.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a nation that cannot educate its young, cannot care for its ill, cannot feed its poor yet has endless funds for war and prisons.

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