Don't Call It a "Defense" Budget

Foreclosing the future of our country should not be confused with defending it.

"Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors," The New York Times reported February 2.

It isn't defense to preclude new domestic initiatives for a country that desperately needs them: for health care, jobs, green technologies, carbon reduction, housing, education, nutrition, mass transit ...

"When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer," Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out. "We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don't even get good oleo. These are facts of life."

At least Lyndon Johnson had a "war on poverty." For a while anyway, till his war on Vietnam destroyed it.

Since then, waving the white flag at widespread poverty - usually by leaving it unmentioned - has been a political fact of life in Washington.

Oratory can be nice, but budget numbers tell us where an administration is headed. In 2010, this one is marching up a steep military escalator, under the banner of "defense."

Legitimate defense would cost a mere fraction of this budget.

By autumn, the Pentagon is scheduled to have a total of 100,000 uniformed US troops - and a comparable number of private contract employees - in Afghanistan, where the main beneficiaries are the recruiters for Afghan insurgent forces and the profiteers growing even richer under the wing of Karzai-government corruption.