The Untouchable Budget Defense Department, Inc.

[Joanne98]

By SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES

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 are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life…. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

--Dwight Eisenhower, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

President Obama called his $3.8-trillion budget a big step in restoring America’s economic health. Last year he promoted TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program to bail out the financial sector at a mere $700 billion. Anyone – even billionaire bankers -- can make mistakes that wreak ruin on the rest of us!

Obama also declared as “untouchable” the Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion (including hidden costs in other government branches), which dwarfs the rescue package for the financial oligarchs. Both payouts, however, used the same logic: Congress taking from the have-nots and giving it to the have-mores. Indeed, the economic, political and military potentates depend on the federal budget to transfer taxpayer resources to them.

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau03052010.html

[Warpy]

1. I'm glad that other people who, like actually get published

are finally starting to write about this. The Pentagon is a horrible burden on the backs of working people, on the country on the whole, and on the world. Empire is a rich man's game and the rich have shoved the burden of enforcing it off their shoulders and onto ours.

It has to stop. Our very survival depends on it.

Unfortunately, the country will have to bankrupt before those frightened old maids in pants we call Congress will do anything about it.

[ixion]

2. This is the trillion ton Gorilla that needs to go

The DoD and the MIC are millstones around the neck of the US taxpayer.

And I wholly-fully-utterly loathe and despise the idea of my tax dollars being used to kill people. As a pacifist, that really doesn't sit well with me.

[patrice]

3. Infinitudes of Potentiality LOST to our One True God's manifest Trinity: Power, Property, & War.

[classysassy]

4. "Its a mad,mad,mad world"

The arms dealers own the american congress,the white house,the courts,the newspapers,television,hate radio and most of the brain dead citizens.

[FlyByNight]

5. Chalmers Johnson's books regarding the American Empire...

...are devastating and a depressing.

The "defense" budget isn't defense at all. The obscene amount of money spent is about force projection and, in essence, very narrowly targeted economic stimulus.

This perpetual war posture is unsustainable and profoundly immoral.

Dismantle the empire.

:grr:

[bertman]

6. The last American President who decided to stand up to these "defense" monsters was JFK.

We all know what happened to him. If you think President Obama is going to take them on, you are delusional.

[Cartoonist]

7. The last Candidate

to take them on was McGovern. He won one state. American voters haven't changed.