All the Crab Legs in the World Don't Add Up to $8.3 Trillion

Everyone receiving food stamps, cash assistance, housing vouchers and every kind of public help could actually be doing everything the repugs accuse them of - buying crab legs and Cadillacs and Caribbean vacations all the time  - and the total spent would still not come close to the $8.3 trillion-with-a-t the budget-buster queens have managed to lose.

 

Crooks and Liars:

Yahoo Money' The Daily Ticker  is reporting that is has discovered a Reuters investigation that reveals $8.5 trillion – that's trillion with a "T" – in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for.

You read that right. While Republican politicians  rush to slash food stamps for the 47 million Americans living in poverty – the highest amount in nearly two decades –  Republican U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has the audacity to complain that $20 billion dollars in automatic sequester cuts to the massive and secretive $565.8 billion Defense Department budget are " too steep, too deep, and too abrupt," all while the Pentagon and the Defense Department are overseeing massive fraud, waste, and abuse.

Meanwhile, according to the USDA, in 2014 U.S. taxpayers invested $70 billion on food stamps, averaging $125 per person per month.  DoD lost $425 billion per year - six times that much.  Not spent six times as much keeping us safe to prehistoric morons in a desert 5,000 miles away.  LOST six times as much - completely unaccounted for.

There's an old line you can use to make any teacher cry: Some day schools will get more money than they need and the defense department will have to hold bake sales.

Some day.

Will Anyone Ask Hagel About This?

Tomorrow the Senate will hold its confirmation hearing on Chuck Hagel's nomination to be Secretary of Defense.

I'm sure someone will ask him how he would deal with the end of the military ban on women in combat.


But will anyone ask him what he would do about this?

The trailer up top is for Kirby Dick's documentary The Invisible War, about the military rapes McKeon is covering up and which has been nominated for an Academy Award this year. The film features one of Congress' most outspoken proponents of the rights of the victims of this tragedy, Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree. Unlike McKeon's shady hearings next week, the documentary includes interviews with numerous survivors of sexual assault. A member of McKeon's Armed Services Committee and an effective thorn in his side, Pingree has urged her colleagues-- and her constituents-- to watch the film. "This nomination," she said, "is an honor to the people who made the movie, and that includes the incredible brave veterans who told their stories on camera. It's only because people like them have had the courage to talk about what happened to them that the scandal of sexual assault in the military has been brought to light." McKeon, however, is still trying to shut them up.

All due respect to Hagel's experience as an enlisted man in combat, the issues facing today's military are simply beyond the ken of white straight men of his generation.

Obama missed a huge opportunity by not nominating Michele Flournoy for Secretary of Defense.

If Obama's Going to Emulate Reagan, He Should Go All Out

Jim White at Firedoglake:

As recently as last January, Barack Obama reiterated his love of the Reagan zombie, when Time described a dinner Obama shared with a group of presidential historians: “And yet Obama was clearly impressed by the way Reagan had transformed Americans’ attitude about government.” If Obama really wants to emulate Reagan, I have a suggestion for how he could copy Reagan’s pioneering moves when Reagan appointed individuals with attitudes diametrically opposed to the mission of their agency and in line with Reagan’s radically conservative agenda. With Robert Gates’ impending departure there is soon to be an opening for Secretary of Defense. With some bandying Leon Panetta’s name for SecDef, that leaves a potential opening for DCI. I have Reaganesque suggestions for Obama: appoint Dennis Kucinich,who has been a big advocate for a Department of Peace, as Secretary of Defense and Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, as Director of Central Intelligence.

Perhaps the best-remembered of Reagan’s appointees who were put into positions where they could do significant harm to programs Reagan hated was James G. Watt, Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior. In an article written near the end of Watt’s rocky tenure, Time noted that Watt was an early advocate for drilling in the Gulf and other near-shore areas:

SNIP

Why not take that Reagan spirit that Obama so longs to capture and put it to good work for a liberal cause? If Obama really shares “virtually no priorities” with Reagan as the January Time article claims, he could honor Reagan by appointing a Secretary of Defense whose chief desire would be to transform the former “War Department” into a Department of Peace.

SNIP

If James Watt was able transform the Department of the Interior from a conservation operation into one that openly auctions off resources, shouldn’t Obama bring balance to the world by nominating Dennis Kucinich to introduce the concept of nonviolent conflict resolution to the Defense Department?

In a similar vein, why not nominate Daniel Ellsberg, who famously released the Pentagon Papers which are widely credited with helping to turn sentiment against the war in Vietnam, to run the Central Intelligence Agency? Even now, only about a week away from turning 80, Ellsberg’s work on behalf of Bradley Manning continues his advocacy for release of classified information when it serves to document war crimes or other atrocities.

Of course, Obama would never make these nominations. The chief reason that he wouldn’t do so is that Time has it entirely wrong when they state that Obama shares “virtually no priorities” with Reagan. As far as I can see, Obama’s priorities are identical to Reagan’s with the blatant racism stripped away. You can bet that Obama will appoint a SecDef who shares Obama’s love of war and any new DCI will share Obama’s radical position on prosecution of whistle-blowers, two positions indistinguishable from those of Reagan.

Oooh, I've got one! Michael Moore for Secretary of the Treasury. Or head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Then we'd see some Wall Street heads roll.

Dirty Fucking Hippie Commie Tree-huggers Take Over Pentagon

Blue Texan at Firedoglake:

Among wingnuts, it’s an article of faith that efforts to develop energy sources that don’t burn fossil fuels are part of some kind of secret Marxist plot.

A socialist world would place an enormous priority on alternative energy sources. This is what ecologically-minded socialists have been exploring for quite some time now.

And it’s not just the crazies at Conservapedia who believe this, it’s Very Serious People like Charles Krauthammer.

So what are they going to think about this?

With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.

Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.

But…but…solar energy is just a left-wing fantasy — we’re decades away from it replacing our God-given pollutants.

Because the military has moved into renewable energy so rapidly, much of the technology currently being used is commercially available or has been adapted for the battlefield from readily available civilian models.

Also, Al Gore is fat.

Are even the holy Pentagon and precious National Security enough to make the oil-soaked repugs support renewable energy? You don't have to be as cynical as me to seriously doubt it.

The Waste-Bloated Elephant in the Deficit Discussion Room

Blue Girl wrote yesterday that war funding is deficit spending and if the deficit hawks weren't scum-sucking liars, they'd start their austerity crusade at the Pentagon.

Now one of our favorite members of Congress is doing just that.

John Nichols at The Nation:

Well, if Obama and (Rep. Barney) Franks' other fans really want to celebrate the congressman’s contribution to the economic discourse, perhaps they should start listening to what he is saying about how to balance the federal budget.

Frank wants to cut $1 trillion in unnecessary—let’s be blunt: wasteful—spending over the next decade.

How so? By hacking away at excessive Pentagon spending.

A crazy notion?

Republican Ron Paul doesn’t think so.

The libertarian-conservative congressman from Texas is Frank’s partner in this project.

This unlikely pairing has led the fight to get the federal deficit reduction commission to, in Frank’s words, focus on the fact that “unless there is a substantial reduction in American military expenditures over a ten-year period close to if not slightly over a trillion dollars over what’s proposed—that is at $100 billion a year—you simply cannot deal with deficit reduction in a way that is economically and socially responsible.”

Frank—working with Paul, North Carolina Republican Congressman Walter Jones and Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden—put together a remarkable left-right coalition of budget and defense-policy analysts in a “Sustainable Defense Task Force” that included everyone from the Center for American Progress’s Larry Korb, Peace Action’s Paul Martin and the Institute for Policy Studies’s Miriam Pemberton to Laura Peterson of Taxpayers for Common Sense and Christopher Preble, the director of foreign policy studies for the libertarian Cato Institute.

Based on the task force’s recommendations, Frank and Paul are making the rounds of the blogosphere, cable television and talk radio to propose Pentagon cutbacks. As such, they have become the most recognizable, and politically potent, proponents of a serious approach to deficit reduction.

Here is the argument that Frank and Paul are now making on behalf of what should be the next big fiscal project not just of the congressman from Massachusetts but of the president who heaped so much praise on him Wednesday:

SNIP

Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates refers to Pentagon spending as “the gusher” and dismissed the notion that it is difficult to find waste, fraud and abuse in a budget that “adds up to about what the entire rest of the world combined spends on defense.”
"Only in the parallel universe that is Washington, DC, would that be considered 'gutting' defense," says Gates, who has done a great service by opening the space for honest debate about defense spending.

Barney Frank—with a crucial assist from Republicans such as Ron Paul—is filling that space. As Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib notes, “Reps. Paul and Frank are doing more than writing a blog post.… These two odd-fellow members of Congress are harbingers of things to come. Annual defense spending has more than doubled over the last decade, largely because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now the deficit is high, the debt is growing, and those wars are winding down, one way or another. So the parallel move to wind down Pentagon spending is coming. The only questions are how big the urge to curb will be, and what form it will take.”

If Obama was serious about his praise for Frank, the president should now embrace the congressman’s call for a realistic approach to deficit reduction that begins by making necessary cuts to a bloated-beyond-belief Pentagon budget.

American Citizens Under Threat of Destruction

Idyllic Pacific island paradise sacrificed to the questionable needs of the U.S. Military is nothing new - ask the former residents of Bikini Atoll.

Department of Defense squandering tens of billions of dollars on a dubious project is also nothing new.

Even American citizens getting bulldozed by uncaring bureaucrats is, tragically, still not new.

But hitting all three in one giant boondoggle? Now that's a hat trick.

Koohan Paik in The Nation explains:

The centerpiece of the Guam Buildup is the transfer of about 8,600 marines from Okinawa. When you add their families and construction teams, including entire low-wage crews from the Philippines and Micronesia--there goes the "jobs bonanza" locals were promised--the expected influx will be 80,000 more people on Guam. The island, about half the size of Cape Cod, has a population of about 178,000. The people of Guam, whose largest ethnic group are Chamorro (37 percent of the population), followed by Filipino (25 percent) and then statesiders (10 percent), doubt their island has the carrying capacity to absorb a 50 percent population surge.

In November the Defense Department released a mandatory Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) assessing the buildup's effects. It elicited the most blistering responses ever to come from the Environmental Protection Agency, newly resuscitated after the Bush years. The EPA gave the DEIS its lowest possible ranking for proposing entirely ineffective mitigation actions. The agency further enumerated a litany of ecological catastrophes. Hundreds of acres of jungle and wetlands habitat will be covered with concrete and tract developments in order to house tens of thousands of newcomers. There will be massive raw-sewage spills and a shortage of drinking water. The Navy's plans include the destruction of seventy-one acres of an exquisitely healthy coral reef, home to at least 110 unique coral species, in order to build a berth for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which transports eighty-five fighter jets and 5,600 people.

Meanwhile, the Army wants to turn a pristine limestone forest that stretches from the hills to the sea--site of a prehistoric village that is listed with the National Registry of Historic Places--into a shooting range. In addition, it wants to build ammunition storage bunkers in wetlands areas. The Air Force hopes to build a missile defense shield, as well as hangars, airstrips and helicopter pads, turning Guam into the planet's premier parking lot for billion-dollar fighter jets, helicopters and drones.

The DEIS provided no adequate alternative actions to any of these problems. Nor did it mention that dredging the reef will dislodge radioactive sediment that accumulated during the 1960s and '70s when ships traveling from atomic test sites in the Marshall Islands came to Guam to be washed down at Apra Harbor.

SNIP

Carmen Artero Kasperbauer, a Chamorro elder whose family's land is now part of an air base, told the military daily Stars and Stripes, "We hate being possessions to the federal government. That's why people are angry." But Kasperbauer, like most Chamorros, doesn't direct her anger at the troops. "I'm not talking about the uniformed military. We love the uniformed military. Our son...helped liberate the Kuwaitis. But he can't help liberate me."

Increasingly, Guam residents are discussing the urgency of political self-determination. "We're being moved back and forth across a chessboard by two countries: one that once occupied us [Japan] and one that currently does," pointed out university instructor Desiree Ventura, author of the popular blog The Drowning Mermaid. Clearly, the need for sovereignty is more dire than ever, exposing the real question at hand: is President Obama ready to release Guam's people from their colonized status?

Read the whole thing.

Then call or write your members of Congress and tell them to stop the destruction of Guam.