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          Obama is trying to position himself exactly between the Republicans
     in the House and the Democrats in the Senate.  


                       http://portlandobserver.com/?tag=economy

         Neither party represents the poor or the unemployed.  Both parties cater
     to the rich and the military industrial complex in order to get campaign
     contributions and get favorable treatment from the corporate media,
     like General Electric and NBC.  As a result, only a few members of Congress dare
     to heed Eisenhower's warning about the American military industrial complex.
     Republican (Ron Paul) and Democrats (Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders)
     are the major exceptions.



            One in seven Americans is poor.  One in four children is in a family in
      poverty.  Nearly 50 million Americans have no health insurance, something
      which every other industrialized country in the world guarantees all its citizens. 
      The top 1% of Americans in wealth own more than 50% of the country's
      wealth.  The super rich care more about their stock portfolios.  As a result,
      the stocks representing the leading defense contractors (NOC, BA, ROK, GD,
      UTX, RTN and LMT) have turned up recently, the realization now being that
      there would be no big hits to their military contracts.   See their individual
      TigerSoft charts at the bottom of this page.
          

          It is very clear that the very rich do not seem to care much about Main Steet
      America.  They are supported by Washington, which they can now control.
      It is clear that they run America.  If they cared, things would be different. 
      Instead, the rich are busy exporting jobs, bribing Congressmen and
      maintaining the American Empire by making military spending a sacred
      elephant whose wild rampage cannot be challenged or seriously touched
      by budget cuts.

                    

        In this Washington context, Obama's priorities seem utterly perverted and
     lacking in compassion when viewed outside of Washington.   Though, one in
     seven Americans are desperately poor.  Obama prefers to cut heating subsidies
     for the disabled and the elderly and axe the Pell education grants for
     needy students, rather than control the wild elephant of military and empire
     spending.  He seems oblivious that the American middle class is disappearing.
     Taxes are onerous, unfair and destructive of employment.   They penalize
     real wages and reward exportation of jobs. Income from investments are taxed
     at a rate far below that imposed on a secretary, a school teacher, a farm
     worker ot a lathe operator.  The tax rates on the super rich that Obama promised
     to raise, he left alone in December; this alone will cost $300 billion over the next
     ten years.

       

      Meanwhile, the Pentagon has almost 1000 bases overseas to guard
      against what?  The Pentagon's budget equals the military budgets
      of the rest of the world combined.  Our trillion dollar war in Iraq was based
      on lies.  Our war in Afghanistan and covertly in Pakistan is counter-
      productive.  It is allienating the very people we say we want to defend.

      This is obvious.  Most Americans would sharply cut military spending
      and end the war in Afhanistan-Pakistan.  But popular opinion is ignored.
      The Republicans and Democrats have agreed overwhelmingly to maintain
      the present military and imperial budget.

       While I can understand Obama's heartless political cynicism, I consider
       his betrayal of his political base to be utterly despicable and heartless. 

       What is harder to undertand is the failure of so-called Progressive
       Democrats to condemn his failure to cut back military spending dramatically. 
       This spending on far flung bases, military golf courses and weapons
       that perpetuate an arms race is much worse than a tragic, colossal waste.
       It is counter-productive.  It guarantees that Americans will be hated
       and we will be attacked again and again.  War and torture are so cruel.
       Yet we hurtle down this road to self-destruction.   Meanwhile, just
       paying for the imperial military is bankrupting us.   Yet, Obama and
       almost all Washington politicians are silent.   Why can't they see
       the consequences of their perverted priorities?   It hurts average
       Americans so much to pay for this wild elephant. $750 billion a year,
       more than $2500 for each man, woman child in America.

           

        These were the thoughts that ran through my mind when I got an
        email today from David Swanson, a long-time opponent of this wild elephant,
        unchecked military spending and cruel war-making a half a world
        away.   I am quoting it in its entirety below.

David Swanson is the author of  War Is A Lie | Let's Try Democracy and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org

    How Many Progressive Budget Analysts Does It Take to Notice the Military?
By David Swanson
http://warisacrime.org/node/56702

Whether or not one recklessly and misleadingly includes Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid in discussions of the federal discretionary budget, the fact remains that over half of the discretionary budget (of everything other than Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid) is military. The primary talking point coming out of the White House is the need to freeze all non-military discretionary spending. And yet it is difficult to find a progressive analysis of the budget President Obama proposed on Monday that even mentions the existence of the military.

Here's Robert Reich arguing for taxing and spending. I agree with everything he says. I would tax the rich if all it accomplished was taxing the rich. I would spend on the poor if the money had to be borrowed. But there has to be some reason why Reich does not mention the option of funding everything he dreams of and more by cutting the military back to merely three times the size of anyone else's. He must believe the United States benefits from and can survive an ever-larger military budget. Or he must be afraid to say otherwise.

You can find similar, military-free analysis at the Campaign for America's Future, although CAF does squeeze mention of the military in here, and at the Nation. At Huffington Post the main story doesn't mention the military, and it's followed by a blurb misleadingly suggesting that the "defense" budget is being cut, while in reality it is going up. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities includes one half sentence misleadingly suggesting "defense" is being cut.

Ezra Klein, not your most progressive blogger, was, to his credit, among those bucking the trend. He called the United States government An insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army and pointed out that The Defense Department won the future, or at least the budget.

You can listen to the audio recording of a phone call the White House held on Monday with progressive bloggers here. Congressional Budget Office spokesman Ken Baer briefly mentions the White House's misleading claim to be cutting $78 billion from "defense" without stressing that those are theoretical cuts in future years and cuts from a dream list but actually increases above this year's budget. White House adviser David Plouffe did not mention the military at all in his initial comments when he joined the call late.

Progressive bloggers asked why the budget was so hard on poor people and so easy on the rich, why funding for poor people's heat was being slashed, how cuts could possibly be good for the economy, et cetera. They wanted spending, not cuts. They dragged in Social Security. But the call was almost over before a single one of them brought up the existence of the U.S. military, despite the fact that over half of discretionary spending goes there, and despite the consensus among economists that the same spending elsewhere would produce many more jobs and jobs with better pay.

Christina O'Connell with FireDogLake, always the best blog that manages to maintain access to these calls, asked about the pretended cuts in military spending and about the ongoing war spending and whether there would be additional off-the-books supplemental bills. Plouffe replied by bashing Bush's practice of using supplementals despite Obama having broken a promise and used them for the past two years, but did not promise not to go on using them for a third year. At the same time Plouffe meaninglessly bragged about a decrease in war spending in the 2012 budget. He did not reply at all to the first half of O'Connell's question, regarding the pretense that overall military spending is being cut while in reality it is going up. He did not explain that the theoretical future cuts are only proposed as cuts to wish lists while still allowing the budget to increase year by year.

Why the lack of interest among the other bloggers in the majority of the budget they are reporting on?

Do progressive bloggers consider it their duty to talk (albeit in a better way) about the topics those in power want to talk about? Would it be rude to raise a new topic no matter how relevant?

Or do progressives who are loyal to the Democratic Party and therefore invited on White House phone calls share Barack Obama's desire to increase the military every year and use it against a growing number of countries each year?

These are serious questions, even deadly serious questions.
  

THE BIGGEST DEFENSE CONTRACTORS

                                                               Another pie chart of US Budget

                                                HOW THESE FIGURES WERE DETERMINED

urrent military” includes Dept. of Defense ($653 billion), the military portion from other departments ($150 billion), and an additional $162 billion to supplement the Budget’s misleading and vast underestimate of only $38 billion for the “war on terror.” “Past military” represents veterans’ benefits plus 80% of the interest on the debt.*