Obama & Folks have issued their 2012 budget proposal, and while it does not have an iceberg's chance in this century of passing Congress as written, the proposed spending levels indicate where his morality is. The Pentagon actually gets a 3% increase in spending over the 2011 fiscal year. Defense spending is now about half of the federal discretionary budget. No surprise there, because the defense budget is the biggest sacred cow grazing on Capitol Hill. Obama apparently does not care if the Great Lakes get cleaned up because he wants to slash the funding for that environmental program by twenty-five percent to $350 million. Environmentalists say the impact on local improvement projects will be hard. The Lakes face an array of environmental problems from invasive species and native wildlife restoration to toxic pollution and bad water quality. The northern poor will have to do without home heat because Obama wants to cut by half federal grants to low income energy assistance programs. But there is plenty of taxpayer money to subsidize the nuclear power industry. He proposes tripling the nuclear loan program adding $36 billion to the loan fund, and spending $500 million to develop "small modular reactors". The loan program proposal is the same as the one last year, but thanks to public opposition to more corporate welfare, no funding was approved. Heart in the right place? Maybe not. US Person's advice to cut the deficit by $118 billion: Mr. Obama, shut down these foreign wars!
What makes these cuts of needed social programs so galling is the fact that Goldman Sachs made a $2.9 billion profiton proprietary trades using free government money it received during the global capitalist bailout of 2008. The New York Federal Reserve Bank, handmaiden to Wall Street, did almost nothing to prevent banks from getting such windfalls. The report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee said Goldman made $1.9 billion of the total windfall after the government rescue of insurance giant AIG began. The new kamikaze financial strategy of "pay me or we'll blow it all up" seems to have worked very well against the spineless in charge of the federal government. Perhaps Obamacon should give Jamie Diamond a Medal of Freedom for making the fundamental corruption of our government so unmistakably obvious.