It’s been said (by me!) that the big spending cuts set to hit the federal budget next year—so-called “sequestration”—are not created equal, at least in the eyes of the corporate media.
The cuts, as designed, hit the military budget and non-military spending in roughly equal measure. The political calculation was that Republicans would object to the military cuts while Democrats would object to cuts in social spending.
But in the corporate media, those non-military cuts hardly ever get any attention—perhaps because there are not powerful lobbyists and Cabinet officials complaining loudly about how the safety of the country is at risk based on returning the military budget back to 2007 levels (back when the country was, apparently, virtually defenseless).
So it was heartening to see Jennifer Steinhauer‘s piece in the New York Times (6/22/12), “Pentagon Gets Attention, but Planned Spending Cuts Range Far and Wide.” She writes:
It is no secret here that come January, barring Congressional action, huge spending cuts will hit the Pentagon. Congressional Republicans, President Obama’s secretary of defense and military contractors have taken pains to denounce the planned reductions, which were scheduled as part of the resolution to the debt-ceiling crisis of last year.
But other government programs are facing equally large cuts, though they have received a scintilla of the attention and outrage that the planned Pentagon cuts have attracted.
And she tells readers that there are people trying to draw awareness to this issue:
“There is political pain and substantive pain” in the cuts to nonmilitary spending, said Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning research group, who noted that roughly a quarter of those cuts would affect Americans at or below the poverty line.
So good for the New York Times for bringing this to light.
Turn to the Washington Post (6/21/12), though, and you’ll see a more typical story:
Study Says Pentagon Budget Cuts Would Destroy 1 Million Jobs
Reporter Lori Montgomery writes up a new study from the National Association of Manufacturers, which she says is the latest in “a growing heap of studies” that warn of the catastrophe that awaits if the Pentagon cuts go through as expected.
The pain will hit “not just big defense contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin,” Montgomery explains, who goes on to note: “Increasingly panicky industry representatives are lobbying Congress to block the cuts.”
But a more critical analysis might point out, among other things, that military spending is not an especially efficient job creator. That was part of the lesson of a recent study by Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the University of Massachusetts. As they wrote in the Nation (5/28/12):
Members of today’s military-industrial complex—the constellation of forces, including Democratic and Republican politicians, weapons manufacturers, lobbyists and the Pentagon leadership, whose influence President Eisenhower warned against in 1961—claim that significant reductions in the military budget would decimate U.S. defenses and inflict major damage to the economy. In fact, these claims are demonstrably false.
As the chart accompanying the piece shows, there are far more efficient ways for the government to spend money to create jobs:
If you want to read that kind of journalism, you pick up the Nation. The Washington Post, which is the hometown paper for an array of military contractors, lobbyists and their politician friends, is telling a far different story.
Yes! Pick up the Nation Magazine! There you will find the good news, the bad news, and the reasoning that we need to think about.
Agreed! The Nation is a better source of news than any major newspaper I can think of.
It’s also worth noting what our wonderful military budget is buying for us.
The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, continues to insist that we are winning two “wars,” one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. America’s current military foes, however, do not actually run the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, so they are not likely to stand on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise in top hats and tails and hand over their swords, as the major media expect them to do any day now.
They are not going to surrender for the simple reason that they are not fighting a war. They are part of a world-wide revolution against the very sort of domination that the Department of Defense is attempting to impose, and Penetta’s drone air strikes on unarmed civilians in those two countries constitute the greatest incitement to revolution the world has ever known.
Does anybody think that, come January, particularly if Romney gets elected we will see those military cuts? Even with those cuts, we will still spend more money on the military than many countries combined. Besides, we haven’t taken care of Iran.
Paul Ryan’s budget which I believe every House Republican voted for, has vicious cuts in store for virtually every program that helps middle class/poor Americans while increasing the military budget.
As for war, as Michael Ledeen said (ex-Pentagon official): “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show we mean business.” This is our destiny–fighting wars.
The military – *industrial* – prison – media complex does its masters’ bidding, too. Provoking just the right level of strife in the Middle East helps keep oil prices high, so the spending cited is just the *military* side of things. That expensive commute to work because you have to buy more expensive oil/gas… that’s part of the cost too.
In addition to spending more than the rest of the world combined on the U.S. military (six times more than our nearest military rival, China), the U.S. dominates and suppresses its own population too. U.S. prisons incarcerate 756 people per 100,000 of population. Canada, with similar demographics and insignificantly different crime statistics only incarcerates 111 per 100,000. (world average: 150 per 100,000)
That incarcerated population is largely people of color snagged by the fruitless drug war, which enriches the military / surveillance industry and the drug lords. Don’t white people use and sell drugs in the same proportion as non-whites? Yes, if studies are any guide (things like emergency room visits, arrests confirm this), but non-whites are convicted more often, and given harsher sentences.
And sure, its illegal to discriminate based on color, but not based on imprisonment. The criminalizing of entire swaths of population is the subject of Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow.” She suggests a movement as prominent as the Civil Rights movement will be required to undo this disenfranchisement in our “democracy.”
…So…where exactly is that axis of evil again? And *who* is that evil empire, really?
Does anybody think that, come January, particularly if Romney gets elected we will see those military cuts? Even with those cuts, we will still spend more money on the military than many countries combined. Besides, we haven’t taken care of Iran.
Does anyone think that, come January, if Obama is re-elected, we will see those military cuts?
If so, why hasn’t he already done this? Why does will it have taken Obama more than 4 years at that point to do so?
Yes, continue attacking the Republicans since they are oh so much worse than the Democrats. Why aren’t people on the left attacking the Democrats, who you claim supposedly have values closer to our own? Wouldn’t that do more good? (Please do not include PDA, who continue to support the DP agenda no matter how cruel and inhumane it may be.)