[credit: R.J Matson, St. Louis Post Dispatch]
US Person recalls the the Advent calendar in the misanthropic movie "Bad Santa": the gullible fat boy expectantly opens one of his advent calendar windows to get a chocolate treat only to find the drunken "Santa" deadbeat has consumed all of them in one go. The budget negotiations in Washington remind him of that scene. Average Joe Weed is jonesing for a tax break but the political Grinches seem to take perverse delight in disappointing their constituents. The truth is the whole "fiscal cliff" imbroglio is a con.US is in the hardball negotiating camp. It would almost be worth some domestic fiscal pain to begin cutting the Pentagon down to an appropriate and affordable size. The Senate just passed a $631 billion defense budget(98-0) while considering making seniors wait until they reach 67 to be eligible for Medicare. Only in the corrupt military-industrial conspiracy culture of Washington DC could those thoughts be held simultaneously without your head exploding. The military brass, and there are a mighty few of those, are in-fighting desperately to avoid $500 billion in cuts over the next 10 years if we go over the falls in our canoe of state. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says "we are shooting ourselves in the head" if we just go back to the 2007 level of spending! To see how delusional such language is consider that only one fighter jet development, the F-35 "Lightning II" consumes 38% of the entire Defense Department procurement budget. What do the generals get for their lavish expenditure: a jet that is slower with less range and 50% smaller payload than the F-16 it is intended to replace. A credible estimate of the overall lifetime cost of the high-tech boondoggle is $1.5 trillion, or more than the gross domestic product of Spain. Need to shoot the stealthy F-35 down? Rosoboronexport, the Russian arms export agency, will sell you a mobile, low-frequency, stealth-defeating radar set for $10 million each. Over the last decade the Pentagon has spent $46 billion on equipment programs eventually canceled. Inability to discern reality is a hallmark of schizophrenia or pathological greed.
The military is lionized by conservatives as the only branch of government that works. In reality the Pentagon gets big lip service because it is a cornucopia of lucrative contracting for the corporate arms industry. It takes a lot of cash to support the livestyles of CEOs, beribboned flag officers, and elite Washington bureaucrats, as we know. The reality is Americans achieve very little bang for their bucks, and precious little appreciation from people whose countries we destroy in our own alleged security interests. Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, told an interviewer that Americans are responsible for higher levels of terrorism in his country even after a decade of war costing 2,000 American lives. A report released Tuesday shows the total number of global terror attacks has dramatically increased during the post-9/11 era. In Libya, a country we supposedly set on the road to democracy by deposing its inconvenient dictator, our ambassador/CIA agent is killed by the very terrorists we were told we had defeated elsewhere. Despite these decidedly mixed military results, our leaders are yet again considering intervening in another foreign conflict, Syria*. So, US Person's advice to El Obamados in the budget negotiations is to stay the course for some real reform. Make the rich pay a fair share of taxes. Cut the Defense Department and end the profligate militarization of our foreign policy. Rebuild our social safety net while revitalizing America's crumbling economy with investments in a sustainable future. Damn the torpedos of the plutocracy and full speed ahead!
*Observers think the Assad regime is becoming desperate as rebels improve their ability to resist security forces with better weapons and more experienced fighters. Rebels control the eastern half of the country including several oil fields, but have yet to completely overtake a major city. Allegedly, Assad has taken chemical weapons out of stockpile and put them in deployment positions, prompting a warning from the United States about "consequences".