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Cutting $100 Billion?... Easy: If Only Washington Had a Brain
Here’s the latest news from Congress, in case you’ve been in Afghanistan for the last couple of weeks. A debate about slashing the federal budget is now upon us, while fears of a possible government shutdown as spring approaches are on the rise. The Republican leadership of the House of Representatives originally picked $40 billion as its target figure for cuts to the as-yet-not-enacted 2011 budget. That was the gauntlet it threw down to the Obama administration, only to find its own proposal slashed to bits by the freshman class of that body's conservative majority.
They insisted on adhering to a Republican Pledge to America vow to cut $100 billion from the budget. With that figure back on the table, Democrats are gasping, while pundits are predicting widespread pain in the land, including the possible loss of at least 70,000 jobs “as government aid to cops, teachers, and research is slashed.”
In the meantime, the Obama administration has hustled its own entry in the cut-and-burn sweepstakes into place, leaving Democrats again gasping. Its plan calls for ending or trimming more than 200 federal programs next year. It also reportedly offers cuts adding up to $1.1 trillion over a decade and puts in place a “five-year freeze on domestic programs [that] would reduce spending in that category to the lowest level, measured against the economy, since President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961.”
It all sounds daunting, and the muttering is only beginning about “entitlement” programs -- Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- that have yet to be touched.
Which reminds me: Didn’t I mention Afghanistan?
If so, how fortunate, because there’s a perfectly obvious path toward that Republican goal of $100 billion. If we were to embark on it, there would be even more cuts to follow and -- believe it or not -- they wouldn't be all that painful, provided we did one small thing: change our thinking about making war.
After all, according to the Pentagon, the cost of the Afghan War in 2012 will be almost $300 million a day or, for all 365 of them, $107.3 billion. Like anything having to do with American war-fighting, however, such figures regularly turn out to be undercounts. Other estimates for our yearly war costs there go as high as $120-$160 billion.
And let’s face it, it's a war worth ending fast. Almost a decade after the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. military is still fruitlessly engaged in possibly the stupidest frontier war in our history, thousands of miles from home in the backlands of the planet. It's just the sort of dumb conflict that has, historically, tended to drive declining imperial powers around the bend, just the sort -- in the very same country -- that helped do in the Soviet Union. And though news from that war remains remarkably grim, were we by some miracle to win, for hundreds of billions of dollars we would have gained tenuous control over the fifth poorest, second most corrupt, and premier narco-state on the planet. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, would undoubtedly still be happily ensconced in the Pakistani tribal border areas with a range of superbly failed states available elsewhere for exploitation.
There’s genuine money to be slashed simply by bringing the troops home, but okay, I hear you. You live in Washington and you can’t bear to give up that war, lock, stock, and barrel.
I understand. Really, I do. So let’s just pretend that we’re part of that “moderate” and beleaguered House leadership and really only want to go after $40 billion in the 2011 federal budget.
In that case, here’s an idea! We’ve been training the Afghan military and police forces for almost a decade now, dumping an estimated $29-billion-plus into the endeavor, only to find that, unlike the Taliban, our Afghans generally prefer not to fight and love to desert. What if the Obama administration were simply to stop the training program? What if we weren’t to spend the $11.6 billion slated for this year, or the up-to-$12.8 billion being discussed for next year, or the $6 billion or more annually thereafter to create a security force of nearly 400,000 Afghans that we’ll have to pay for into eternity, since the Afghan government is essentially broke?
What if, instead, we went cold turkey on our obsession with training Afghans? For one thing, you’d promptly wipe out more than a quarter of that $40 billion the House leadership wants cut and many more billions for years to come. (And that doesn’t even take into account all the saveable American dollars going down the tubes in Afghanistan -- a recent report from the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction suggested it adds up to $12 billion for the Afghan Army alone -- in graft, corruption, and pure incompetence.)
Think about it this way: Are we actually safer if we get rid of police, firefighters, and teachers here in the U.S., while essentially hiring hordes of police and military personnel to secure Afghanistan? I suspect you know how most Americans would answer that question.
Dumb Intelligence Runs Rampant
Here’s another way to approach both those $40 billion and $100 billion targets. Start with the budget for the labyrinthine U.S. Intelligence Community which is officially $80.1 billion. That, of course, is sure to prove an undercount. So, just for the heck of it, let’s take a wild guess and assume that the real figure probably edges closer to... $100 billion.
I know, I know, the Republican House majority will never agree to get rid of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, and neither will the Democrats. They’ll claim that Washington would be blinded by such an act -- although it’s no less reasonable to argue that, without the blinders of what we call “intelligence,” which is largely a morass of dead thinking about our world, our leaders might finally be able to see again. Nonetheless, in the spirit of compromise with a crew that hates the “federal bureaucracy” (until the words “national security” come up), how about cutting back from 17 intelligence outfits to maybe three? Let’s say, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.
I’ll bet you’re talking an easy $40 to $50 billion dollars in savings right there -- and the cost of the job-retraining programs for the out-of-work intelligence analysts and operatives would be minimal by comparison.
According to a Washington Post series, “Top Secret America,” here are just a few of the things that you, the taxpayer, have helped our intelligence bureaucracy do: Produce 50,000 intelligence reports annually; create the sheer redundancy of “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, [to] track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks”; and, in the category of the monumental (as well as monumentally useless), construct “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work... since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space.”
Take just one example: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency which has 16,000 employees and a “black budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year.” Until now, you may not have known that such a crew was protecting your security, but you’re paying through the nose for its construction spree anyway. Believe it or not, as Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out, it now has a gleaming new, nearly Pentagon-sized headquarters complex rising in Virginia at the cost of $1.8 billion -- almost as expensive, that is, as the Freedom Tower now going up at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
Or let’s check out some smaller, distinctly choppable potatoes. Officially, America’s Iraq War is ending (even if in a Shiite-dominated state allied with Iran). All American military personnel are, at least theoretically, to leave the country by year’s end. Whether that happens or not, the Obama administration evidently remains convinced that it’s in our interest to prolong our effort to control that country. As a result, the planned “civilian” presence left behind to staff the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar citadel of an “embassy” the U.S. built in downtown Baghdad and various consular outposts will look uncomfortably like a mini-army.
As Wired.com's Danger Room website put it recently, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq "will become a de facto general of a huge, for-hire army." We’re talking about 5,500 mercenaries paid to guard the 17,000 “civilians,” representing various U.S. government agencies and the State Department there. To guard the Baghdad embassy alone -- really a regional command headquarters -- there will be 3,650 hired guns under contract for almost $1 billion. The full complement of heavily armed mercenaries will operate out of “15 different sites... including 3 air hubs, 3 police training centers... and 5 Office of Security Cooperation sites.”
In 2010, USA Today estimated that the cost of operating just the monstrous Baghdad embassy was more than $1.5 billion a year. God knows what it is now.
What if the cost-cutters in Washington were to conclude that it was a fruitless task to try to manage the unmanageable (i.e., Iraq) and that, instead of militarizing the State Department, the U.S. should return to the business of diplomacy with a modest embassy and a consulate or two to negotiate deals, discuss matters of common interest, and hand out the odd visa. That would represent a cost-cutting extravaganza on a small scale. (And the same could be said for the near billion-dollar “embassy” being built in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the $790 million going into another such embassy and consulates in Afghanistan.)
Deep in the Big Muddy
It's important to note that none of the potential cost-cutting measures I've mentioned touch the big palooka. I’m talking about the Pentagon budget, a very distinctive “entitlement” program on the American landscape. Given the news reports on “Pentagon cuts” lately, you might think that the Obama administration is taking a hatchet to the Defense Department's funds, but think again. As defense analyst Miriam Pemberton wrote recently, “The Pentagon is following the familiar tradition of planning ambitious increases, paring them back, and calling this a cut.” In fact, at $553 billion, the proposed Pentagon budget for 2012 actually represents a 5% increase over the already stunningly bloated 2011 version of the same.
Keep in mind that U.S. military spending equals that of the next 15 countries combined (most of them allies) and represents 47% of total global military spending. If Washington's mindset were different, it wouldn’t be hard to find that $100 billion the Republican House freshmen are looking for in the Pentagon budget alone -- quite aside from cuts in supplemental war-fighting funds -- and still be the most heavily armed nation on the planet.
And here’s my question to you: Don’t you find it odd that cuts of this potential size are so obviously available and yet, with all the raging and groaning about deficits and budget-cutting, no one who matters seems to focus on such possibilities at all? To head down this path, Washington would need to make only the smallest of changes: it would have to begin thinking outside the war box for about a minute and 30 seconds.
Our leaders would have to conclude the obvious: that, in these last years, war hasn’t proven the best way to advance American interests. We would have to decide that real security does not involve fighting permanently in distant lands, pursuing a “war on terror” in 75 countries, or growing the Pentagon (and the weapons-makers that go with it) year after year.
Americans would have to begin to think anew. That’s all. The minute we did, our financial situation would look different and for all we know, something like not-war, if not peace, might begin to break out.
Forty years ago, Americans regularly spoke about a war 7,500 miles away in Vietnam as a “quagmire.” We were, as one protest song of that era went, "waist deep in the Big Muddy.” Today, Afghanistan, too, looks like a quagmire, but don’t be fooled. The real quagmire isn't there; it's right here in Washington D.C., that capital mythically built on a swamp.
There's no way that thinking so old and stale, so out-of-date, can begin to take in or react adventurously to a fast-changing world. Look at Egypt, or China, or Brazil, or India, or Turkey. There, new thinking and new developments are blooming, but you wouldn’t know it in Washington.
Neither $553 billion nor $80.1 billion can buy Washington a brain. Right now, by all evidence, our leaders are still convinced that it's their job to run the world and fight distant wars until hell freezes over. They can't bear to think a new thought, or take a chance, or experiment on anything, or look at our planet in a new way. At the moment, the evidence indicates that they have the brainpower of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz without that character's urge for self-improvement, and it’s taking us down.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. His other most recent book is The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books). Previous books include: The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
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52 Comments so far
Show AllSpeaking of 'entitelments', isn't Congress entiteled to health care, pier diems and other perks that we poor peasents are not? My entitelment of social security was paid into all my life.
Let's start cutting the perks the whores in Congress get first. How much money would that save? If only the teabaggers would wake up and see how they are being used and screwed and join forces with us, they might be a real movement in this country to save ourselves. However, the elites would just unleash their military goons on us and throw us into the FEMA camps.
Hell, yes! Let them buy their own insurance--that's what they're asking me to do and they have a WHOLE lot more disposal income.
Amen, Tom. It's time to castrate the MIC and its supporters. Alas, only a few members of Congress have the cojones to do so.
Why do Americans attack Unions but very few will even touch this subject ?
Are Americans just stupid ?
Do they just not care ?
Do they like being lied too ?
Do they enjoy living in "fear "?
Are they allergic to books ?
Why is real thinking considered ELITIST
Why is the choice TV over learning ?
Why no free thinking
Are they zombies ?
Why don't Americans ….
...and why do our dirtpoor millions ardently support tax cuts for billionaires?
Simple answer, our culture tells them to.
And why did Egyptians build huge stone monuments in honor of their God-Kings? It's human nature to want to be awe-struck, and without pharoahs, emperors or popes, we're happy to worship entertainers and billionaires.
Most do not. It is our (mis)representatives that do.
I have yet to talk to a single family member, neighbor, train rider or casual acquaintance who supports the endless Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
Every single person I have spoken with on this subject when I point out that the
military represents over 50% of Federal income taxes supports major cuts.
The only time I get opposition is when I ask why we need a military whatsoever.
As a pacifist I do not need see how armed conflict has ever accomplished more in the long term than non-violence which has now been shown to be successful in yet another instance in Egypt. Most people want some sort of military just to defend the US.
They do not support 1,000 military bases, 234 golf courses, arming all sides in every
conflict (such as $50 Billion for Israel with $54 Billion for Saudi Arabia the same time)
Once it is brought to people's attention the aburdity of our armed madness is clear...
But there are a whole lotta people like my younger brother-in-law who ardently believes that the federal government spends more money on foreign aid than military. Of course, he indoctrinates his children to believe the same. He seldom works, therefore seldom pays any income tax, while my sister supports the family.
During Christmas, he was telling me how much he admires the Tea Party. I asked him if he knew who financially supports the Tea Party. He had never heard of the Koch brothers.
There are a lot of ignorant, lazy Americans and our elected officials prove it!
Our nation's capitol suffers from a terminal case of calcified cranial tissue. There isn''t one who has the ability to engage in original thinking. Even more astonishing is to look at their constituency. Teabaggers with tea bags hanging from the brims of their hats, screamig incoherently about issues based on pure emotion and lacking any connection to the facts. Then there is Glenn Beck, Fox News and their multitudes of functional idiots. They must surely have an aversion to knowledge in any form. Emotional fervor and lies are the stuff of their minds.
Meanwhile our politicians, Wall Street, the oligarchs, the Supreme Court and the MIC sit back in their easy chairs and smile ................
Isn't there an established law of physics that goes something like, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?" Go Madison, Go!
Fifty years ago, Eisenhower, in his farewell speech, stated that the conversion of the country's economy to a permanently mobilized war footing in 1945, consolidated in 1948 with Truman's policy of communist containment, was "something new in the American experience", that it posed serious dangers to civil society and its political institutions, and even to its collective spiritual values. Fifty years on, this economy has so entrenched itself that, in my opinion, nothing short of national bankruptcy, or its very immanent threat, can really force a meaningful reduction in its scope and power.
In 1967, "The Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace" was published, and it concluded that a conversion to a peace economy was too risky politically, economically and socially, and that it might require, among several other new initiatives, the reintroduction of "euphemistically" rationalized forms of slavery, ritual blood sports, and artificial threats to the nation. Whether or not this report was actually a hoax intended to satirize the prevailing Cold War think tanks of the day is still disputed, but even if it was a hoax, good satire parodies something that is basically quite real. Although mass involuntary conscription is no longer considered necessary (it almost tore the country apart in the sixties and now serves as the only way up and out for the poorest and most desperate among us), the permanent war footing economy continues - it has a direct or indirect economic presence in every congressional district in the country. American genius manifests itself to the world through a degree of weapons sophistication almost beyond science fiction.
When the crunch comes, after a long (or maybe not so long) imperial contraction, can it so without doing major damage to what remains the country's original constitutional and legal commitments to a civilian controlled democracy, or will we become a gigantic banana republic, complete with permanent suspension of civil liberties and due process, or fall into some form of corporate fascism in the American grain, featuring, euphemistically, a smile, baseball, and stock car racing? (FDR was threatened by a cabal of military men, industrialists, and politicians early in his administration who wanted his removal by extra-constitutional force.)
The interests behind the war economy are too powerful to go quietly or easily, even if, to paraphrase Solzhenitzyn on Russia without its Soviet empire, a substantial reduction of the military budget burden would allow our country to "stand up straighter." And have decent public transportation, well paid teachers, and more medical advances. There may be enough political will to trim the edges a little, re. the base closure program after the end of the Cold War, but the likelihood of real reductions by Congress seems very low. Meanwhile, ordinary people, small and medium business, etc., will foot the bill, not Exxon-Mobile, which profits.
The spiritual costs of war fever cryptically mentioned by Eisenhower had already been fully clarified by Orwell, but we also have a powerful 19th Century American voice on this issue, see Samuel Clemens' "War Prayer."
I've observed that "politics makes strange bedfellows". I don't agree with much of what the Tea Partiers stand for however I do find common ground with them on the issue of cutting the military budget. Strange indeed...
As well as angry opposition to the bailouts. When left and right begin to agree, it's a good sign that the center is in trouble and that the social contract is under some real stress.
Fascist amerika will not stop its Imperialistic slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But the good news is the amerikan empire IS collapsing- fast; it will bring dowm the fascist military ! AND the People will rise up against the oppressors in washington ! Strange that the Mid East, that amerika has been trying to both destroy and control is setting the stage for non-violent revolution !
And in spite of their billions and billions; inspite of their psy-ops, brainwashing and other mind-control techniques; in spite of their "we create reality" world view; when the cards come tumbling down, the American soldier and sailor will stand by the American people, just as the Egyptian military stood by its.
Grammarians, I was taught that the personal pronoun "its" does not exist, and yet I can't help but feel I've used it correctly. Am I wrong?
You have used "its" correctly.
Actual people get "their" — Egypt's soldiers stood by their people.
Assemblies, organizations, companies get the singular "its" — Egypt's military stood by its people.
... Except in the U.S. of course, where companies ARE people.
The Tea Partiers insist on cutting the budget outlays by significant amounts. This will impact the mostly urban poor. Why isn't anyone insisting that the Tea Partiers make cuts where they live: in the mostly rural Red-states? Everyone knows these states are net beneficiaries of the federal government, and get their roads, bridges, electric lines, and other infrastructure heavily subsidized by the same urban people they now want to hurt. As long as the Tea Partiers are allowed to cut Federal outlays that don't affect them, they will be perfectly happy to do so. And as long as Blue State America allows them to hurt Blue State America, this will continue.
See this for what it is: one half of America has been given carte-blanche to stick a knife into the other half of America, and has been trained by Faux News that this is what it should be doing. Blue State America better wake up and smell the coffee. This is war. Its class war, in which the upper classes have recruited a segment of rural America to be its storm troopers. Its time to fight back, on the Tea Partiers turf.
How many countless times in history has some self-serving demagogue riled up the information-starved farmers against a trumped up enemy? Works just about every time is why its so popular.
Down town: This time the proper usage is "it's," for the contraction: it is.
lhhj: Excellent post.
Downtown's usage is correct, SR.
"It's" is the contraction for "it is."
"Its" is the proper possessive pronoun.
Too much common sense here! It hurts, it hurts ......
Yes, I find it odd - no, make that bizarre/ astonishing - that "cuts of this potential size are so obviously available and yet... no one who matters seems to focus on such possibilities at all." I find it just as astonishing the those of us who don't "matter" don't seem to think about it either. Why are we so complacent about letting our schools, highways and cities go down the tubes rather than getting out of Afghanistan? What would it take to mobilize a new anti-war movement?
A great rundown. I wonder how many progressives would agree to let the people decide what to cut by fair, direct democratic referendums? Are we afraid of democracy in a FOX mind controlled world?
"At the moment, the evidence indicates that they have the brainpower of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz without that character's urge for self-improvement, and it’s taking us down."
If only this statement were true, however, they know exactly what they are doing.
Careful there. There were something like 24 of those Wizard of Oz books, and at least a dozen were written by Baum . And Scarecrow (capitalized, coz that was his name) with nothing but feathers in his head, was definitely the smart one.
This will never happen. The politicians know where their money is coming from--defense contractors-- and all they have to do is periodically mention a terror plot to scare the sheeple back under their rocks where they can hide from true facts. One group is too greedy and the other is too stupid.
I'm afraid the only solution is a total collapse of the empire but unfortunately all of us will go down together.
If Congress shuts down, who will protect their corporate predators from the people?
Gail just what I and other poor people are waiting for. The handle that flushes their toilets are gold. Lots of usable stuff in their houses. Don't worry you or I might not have insurance but they do. Does not cost them a dime.
Tick tick tick
External wars equals fascist state suppression
Powered by military industrial complexion.
Hiliary Clinton and her brutal goons,
Laws made by Congress loons.
Presidential power appeaser.
Sweet talk people teaser.
Require new direction
from insurrection,
from people,
believable.
Cool!
The US should first of all rename the so called Defense dept. back to it's orginal name "The War dept." While their at it in DC they should also change the Nat'l motto from "In God we Trust" to what it really is WARS ARE US.
Actually that should be, "Profits are us." I'm afraid war is just one of the means to the end.
You have such a nice kind face. If only we could see those lines of kindness in the D.C. group, but nada, no where to be seen. No kind faces, but plenty of s--t for brains.
“'The Pentagon is following the familiar tradition of planning ambitious increases, paring them back, and calling this a cut.'”
I am a Viet Nam era submariner-vet. We would go out on a two-week op. We would be extending six weeks. Depression and sadness. Then the glorious announcement: We're coming back early!! So instead of two weeks, we're out six, and everyone's happy we're coming back early, except me. I bitch, I try to explain the logic, all to no avail, no one wants a wet blanket pointing out the obvious. Let us rejoice and celebrate. Worked EVERY TIME, TIME AFTER TIME. The numbers were different, but the pattern was the same. And I met not one shipmate who saw it my way.
Wanna save even more than $100 billion?
Fund the Defense (sic) Dept. and Dept. of Fatherland Security at their Sept. 10, 2001 levels.
"...the brainpower of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz "
I just realized who John Boehner reminds me of...
Engelhardt is very persuasive. I hope a lot of Tea Partiers read the article.
Like lhhj, I keep going back to Eisenhower's farewell address. Those words need to be repeated by everyone about as often as the pledge of allegiance. I really think most Americans have no idea how their country has turned into a slave to arms and war makers.
Another point that should be stressed, but isn't mentioned by Engelhardt, is that the "war on terror" is a ginned-up law enforcement problem used by the beneficiaries of the wars and the war economy to prevent the MSM from even discussing the obvious (e.g., what Engelhardt states in his article).
Virtual money is entered on the Federal Reserve's balance sheets out of thin air. It's distributed to the IMF & other international banks. These organizations then lend it out, w/ interest, to various governments to be bourne as indebtedness by the public.
How is this debt not also "virtual"? It is backed by nothing. Our miltary is used as cannon-fodder for same zio-nazi vampires to maintain international control of this evil system.
We are OWNED. Either to be drained dry of all assets - or as "collateral damage".
Before they banned it, there was a movie called "Wild in the Streets" where hippies poured acid in the drinking water supply and blew the minds of old conservative bastards.
At first, that seems like a good idea, but then on second thought, can you imagine the likes of Dick Cheney on acid?
Sorry I've repeated same comments on a couple of different CD articles. Originally typed into "Youtube" comment box of very pertinent video - but Not Allowed to Post. Realize I'm preaching to the choir here. Censorship is very frustrating, and it also isn't encouraging to have Saxby Chambliss for a senator. He responds to my requests for discontinuation of wars with enthusiastic form letters about our need for strong military presence in ME, especially to support our staunch ally, Israel.
... pardon me while I puke.... (at Saxby Chambliss)
The global trillion dollar a year , or more, expansion of empire in two wars , and many military covert missions, is going to turn America into a Fascist country run by the " War on Terror " communists.
You heard me. Martial law is close at hand. 37 billion for scope and grope scanners by the Obama Administration is huge. At 250000 dollars a scanner, thats 2450 scanners per state. Break it out by population and you will have 10000 scanners each for Florida, Texas, New York, California .That still leaves 1770 scanner for each of the other 48 states.
Mobile scan units called viper units will be everywhere. They will say there is a threat, and ask people to walk through the scanners before going in to a store, football, music event, on our highways, etc, anytime anyplace.
Deceleration quote
"He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."
Look for the budget not to pass, and martial law be invoked if protests come to Washington.
Cut out tax exemptions for religious organizations. That will reduce the deficit and help to de-fund the politicians who are interested in perpetual wars of agression and the movement to control women's health and reproductive choices.
How many times has it been asked here when or if any assembly of the American populace might start pushing back? What the neocon and Rovian America-haters have done so well is be prepared to exploit each new development to further their agenda.
Will we really take no lessons or inspiration from what is happening in the ME? Maybe we will - Madison and Columbus. The corporate/political element of our society is going to force this fight now, this year, on this country. Using the simple math and logic of what Englehardt has laid out here perhaps we really can have massive peace protests by insisting that the congress does indeed cut the deficit by ending the wars and cutting the military.
The march for sanity and honesty. Heal the budget - end the wars.
Keeep it simple and focused, and expose the false choice the old regime forces on us. Start the rallies, never waver from the message, don't let them continue to form the narrative, and demand the end to our insane spending on war, death, and destruction so that we don't financially implode.
It really is a simple message. If we can't use this glaring hypocrisy to force a change in our government, on ground of their own choosing, then we never will. They have picked this fight, but we can win it.
Fuck Horace and all his stunted reasonings. I just love all the free marketers, free enterprisers, claiming the high ground in the name of innovation and progress. Horseshit. What we experience today is extortion and blackmail for jobs in a purposely wounded economy in order to maintain the status quo of profits by the overlords.
The situation is ripe: a worsening economy, few jobs, low paying and void of benefits; spiking gasoline and food prices; growing contemp by the ruling political class for the plurality of our society, of us; bankrupt state and local governments. And after ten years of war, an entire region is throwing off the cast of puppets this huge military, intelligence, and foreign influence spending was meant to hold in place.
The fight is coming. Here, as in Cairo, the young have a chance to at least imagine another future.
This and the Iraq war will bumble happily along until we institute a temporary gas tax to fund it or we re-start the draft.
Until then, our financial woes will be the fault of slackers, illegals, liberals, or whoever happens to be the RNC attack-radio brown shirts' pick of the week.
Tom Englehardt's article is perfect--I couldn't find anything that needed changing. I think a copy of this article should be put on every desk in the Capitol and every desk in the White House, including the one in the oval office. I've been saying all along that the Pentagon could be reduced to a triangle with zero effect on national security or preparedness. There are so many sacred cows in that place they could start a ranch.