The unwritten and unspoken story of the budget showdown in Washington is the tale of both parties deliberately working to once again exempt the ever-growing Pentagon from America's larger budget/deficit discussion.
This is the thrust of the new Republican plan to pass a one-week continuing resolution for non-defense spending and at the same time pass a full year's status-quo Pentagon budget. Even though military spending is the single largest discretionary spending item in the budget, and even though there are blatant examples of Pentagon waste fraud and abuse, the GOP's proposal nonetheless insists that the Pentagon must be sacrosanct.
Meanwhile, whether deliberately or inadvertently, President Obama's tactic of citing soldier pay as the main reason to avoid a government shutdown reinforces the same embedded militarist ideology as the GOP budget proposal. It goes without saying, of course, that, delaying troop pay would be regrettable. But citing the military as the primary reason to avoid a government shutdown furthers the notion that somehow the largest discretionary budget item is the only budget item that should be considered Holy and therefore untouchable. (This is a message, by the way, that congressional Democrats have already embraced in recently offering to take yet more money from social programs and pour it into the Pentagon.)
In pursuing this course, the president is adding credence to the logic behind the GOP's "everything but the Pentagon" proposal. If troop pay is the major reason he opposes a government shutdown, then it stands to reason he would support the GOP's initiative to pass the status-quo bloated Pentagon budget for the rest of the year, while keeping everything else (read: social programs) on the chopping block.
The tragedy is that if the GOP's proposal passes, an even larger and more disproportionate amount of budget cuts will be focused almost exclusively on the relatively small portion of the discretionary budget that funds social programs. This is an outcome polls show polls show most Americans strongly oppose. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found "a majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the federal deficit rather than taking money" from social programs.
That's why this move to defy the public will and exempt the Pentagon from the national deficit discussion is being done under the veneer of a larger budget showdown. Both parties know they can't come out and overtly advocate the Pentagon exemption, so they are working to legislate it under the cover of continuing resolutions and threats of a government shutdown. Their goal is first and foremost protecting the Pentagon's budget - a long-term goal of a bipartisan Washington establishment now wholly owned and operated by military contractors.
As I show in my new book Back to Our Future, it has been the goal since the 1980s rehabilitated hypermilitarism as a winning political frame, and sadly, it looks like both parties may have finally engineered a budget showdown that delivers the results the military-industrial complex has been waiting for.
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The TRUTH is IF (and that's a big 'IF) the Republicans truly cared about the troops AT ALL, they had a perfect opportunity to make sure that they would be paid. And here's a good example of this fact:
"– House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD), first by unanimous consent and then by amendment, offered an alternative budget measure that would provide a 1-week extension of the current budget agreement until April 15. The “clean” continuing resolution alternative includes funding for the military but omits the irrelevant policy riders the GOP attached to H.R. 1363. Republicans unanimously voted against consideration of the alternative."
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/07/house-gop-troop-funding-cut/
bottom line fact is the GOP are flat out L1aRS!!!!!!!!
The President was absolute correct.
They never intended to "finish" any of them ----they are illegal wars based on lies --everyone of them since Viet Nam ---- the idea is to keep the wars going non-stop from now on, Bush/Cheney engineered the perfect enemy ---faceless, nameless, countryless, shifting from one desert wasteland to another ----this is not a "war on terror" aimed at "keeping America safe" -----this is a war on Americans to funnel every nickel into the coffers of the MIC ......
read up on it ----the govt is duping all American oout of their money, if we don't stop them they'll have our SS and everything else.....bleeding us out until the country is totally third world ----the terrorists out there aren't anywhere as near a huge a threat to out way of life as this out of countrol government....
I don't think the troops are gonna quit and go home if the pay check is a little late.
the troops should all quit and go home.....and so should all the tens of thousands of mercanaries that are on the federal payroll ---all being paid 10s what the enlisted men make....
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."–Dwight Eisenhower, 1960.
http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm
Both parties are controlled by corporate campaign cash.
If anyone dare take on this corporate welfare, they will be accused of being "soft of defense".