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From Senator John McCain’s website: (slight changes marked)
Washington, D.C.–U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) today announced the launch of their “Preserving America’s Strength” series of town hall-style meetings in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and New Hampshire highlighting the devastating impacts of the looming defense clean energy and infrastructure cuts now scheduled to take place under budget sequestration next year.
The three senators, all members of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Atmosphere Preservation Committee, will discuss how the cuts will weaken American national security, put one two million jobs at risk, and break faith with the men and women of our Armed Forces Clean Energy and Infrastructure Crew and their families. The Department of Defense Earth Protection has already agreed to reduce defense spending by nearly $500 billion over ten years. The additional military spending cuts called for under sequestration would add another $500 billion on top of that figure.
“President Obama’s own Secretary of Defense Earth Protection called the looming defense clean energy and infrastructure cuts under budget sequestration ‘devastating,’ likening them to ‘shooting ourselves in the head,’ and yet to date, Congress and the Obama Administration have done nothing to stop them from going into effect,” said Senators McCain, Graham and Ayotte. “We look forward to visiting communities in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and New Hampshire to sound the alarm about the profound negative consequences of these cuts to our national security and economy. These communities – which provide our troops workers the equipment and support they need to defend our country – will bear the brunt of the defense sequestration cuts. Their voices must be heard in Washington.”
Now, such an announcement, which has been printed almost word-for-word in the nation’s newspapers is, for better or worse, socialistic. Big Guvmint is taxing us in order to spend money to create jobs. Should it stop doing so, the economy and the people who live and work in it will be devastated. All of that is, in fact, true. But it is heresy in the ranks of rightwing reactionism. It is only permissible because the jobs, in the unaltered announcement, are for the war machine. The jobs are for killing human beings. That carves out a big fat exception for them. As soon as we alter the announcment to make the jobs serve a useful purpose they are transformed into foolish socialism.
The reality, of course, is that the military is so wasteful and destructive that this is not only the one type of government spending that is deemed acceptable, but it is also the one type of government spending that does not help. Were the spending to go to something useful, as in the altered announcement, then it actually would provide the economic benefits that these war-profiteering prostitutes are claiming to defend.
3 Comments
Misleaderership.
Thank you, David, for making that excellent point.
Paul Krugman and his fellow Keynesians point out that it was a massive public-works program that caused our economy to finally recover from the Great Depression, namely WWII. Lots and lots of spending to no good economic purpose except that it put people to work. It would have had the same economic effect, if we had dumped all those weapons into the ocean.
There are some who continue to argue that capitalism was on the mend, pre-carnage. But neither that nor ‘dumping weapons into the sea’ would have gotten capitalism’s golden age. The reconstruction, demolition of uncompetitive capital, the escapism to consumerism, the cold war, the destruction of the labor movement, and the centralized domination of former European colonies into which wartime technological and operational advances could be spread were essential to its flourishing for a brief generation.
And the carnage goes on.