Republicans are hurriedly searching for ways to avoid any cuts to the defense budget after the super-committee’s failure to propose overall cuts locked in automatic across the board cuts to defense in 2013.
The approximately $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts – called sequestration – that lawmakers mandated as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling would translate to about $450 billion in cuts to the Pentagon over ten years. This amounts to a slight decrease in the rate of growth in defense budgets over that time.
But Republicans have been adamant about scuttling those mandates, with Buck McKeon (R-CA), the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, vowing to introduce legislation to kill the military cuts, along with Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham working on a bill to avoid at least some of them.
President Obama has vowed to veto any attempts to undo the sequestration mandate. But Congress is stuck, essentially refusing to cut the military for the sake of contractors’ heavy pockets and refusing to cut domestic programs for the sake of votes.
Meanwhile, the Senate is expected to finalize a vote on the $662 billion defense bill that would authorize funds for military personnel, weapons systems, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and national security programs in the Energy Department. The appropriations would be tens of billions of dollars less than those of the current fiscal year, and tens of billions less than what President Obama requested.
The US Congress has become so corrupted by Monopoly Capitalist / Military Industrial Complex that the Federal budget has become sacrosanct regarding perpetual war and the domestic police state.
There was no 'Peace Dividend' at the end of World War 2, thanks to the contrived Cold War promulgated by the CIA. The 'War OF Terror' came just in time to rescue the MIC from the collapse of the Soviet Union & the Cold War. As so well explained in Orwell's '1984', perpetual war is of tremendous advantage to maintaining a hierarchical society that favors the Monopoly Capitalist Kleptocracy — investment in bullets & bombs removes excess capital & economic capacity from bringing progress to the majority of the misgoverned. Perpetual war also is a fiscal godsend to the private for-profit international banksters that, like vampires, feed off of the national imperative to never lose a military conflict, which drives government debt.
Without the imperative of perpetual war, the USA could slash military spending by 80%, homeland security by 100%, and the intelligence infrastructure by at least 50%. The current MIC could be tasked with 'beating swords into plowshares', with only a slightly less profitable bottom line. Investment in the weapons of war is antithetical to investment in infrastructure. The crumbling of domestic infrastructure is a more immediate danger to the existence of the USA as a viable constitutional republic than defeating 'freedom fighters' 8.000 miles away, or government contrived domestic 'terror' incidents designed to justify the continued existence of the domestic Police State.
The problem is that our government is not controlled by We The People but by the Wall Street Mobsters and the Monopoly Capitalists, kleptocrats all.
Congress: Yes of course we said it, but that doesn't mean we actually meant it!
This is execrable, The root of most of our problems,, both fiscal and moral,are these wars which do not give any advantage to the American people and even increase the danger of retaliatory terrorism. Where are our lawmakers? Have they completely lost their capability to reason and have they completely forgotten which nation they inhabit and legislate for? May that peculiar "God" they invoke have mercy on their crooked souls.