Robert Scheer: Bush Budget Delivers the Bacon (Truthdig)

[marmar]

Bush Budget Delivers the Bacon

Posted on Feb 6, 2007

By Robert Scheer

President Bush’s outrageous military budget has nothing do with fighting terrorism but everything to do with pumping up the profits of the administration’s generous political donors in the defense industry. So, the question is: Will the Democrats have the guts to stop this betrayal of the public trust?

Ever since some lunatics, mostly citizens of our longtime ally Saudi Arabia, used $3 knives to hijack four planes on the same morning, President Bush has exploited our nation’s trauma as an opportunity to throw trillions of dollars at the military-industrial complex to build weaponry for a Cold War that no longer exists.

That is the subtext of the more than $700-billion defense appropriation requested by Bush in his budget, released Monday. Sure, it includes $141.7 billion explicitly dedicated to fighting “the global war on terror”—but that much-abused phrase falsely encompasses the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or the perpetrator, al-Qaida. In fact, that amount rises to $235.1 billion when the additional supplemental funds to cover Iraq for the remainder of this budget year are added in.

At least in Iraq, we created enemies we can now fight. The bulk of the rest of the military portion of the federal budget, $481.4 billion for the Defense Department and an additional $22.5 billion for other departments’ defense programs, is intended to fight an enemy of advanced military power that is nowhere to be found—not even among the dreaded “Axis of Evil” nations.

For example, this budget allocates billions to continue building stealth aircraft designed to evade Soviet defenses the ex-superpower never managed to create. .....(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070206_bush_budget_delivers_the_bacon/

[acmavm]

1. Friggin' people in this country need to wake up to the fact that

defrauding the American people is just another form of treason. And for the basest reason, the almighty buck.