defending ourselves to death

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/defending-ourselves-death-1335281978

The OWS movement is right to focus on Wall Street and the financial services industry as the proximate cause of our current discontents. Wall Street is at once the symbol of greed and the instrument of the big commercial banks, venture capitalists, and "wealth managers" that feed on greed, and (more to the point) are fed by it. As everyone knows, the nation's leading financial institutions engaged in extremely risky behavior with our money, plunging the country into a deep and prolonged recession, causing great pain across the length and breadth of middle-class America, while reaping fabulous rewards, some virtually tax-free, in the form of multi-million-dollar bonuses, perks, deferred compensation, stock options, and "golden parachutes".

The economic conundrum we face at present is rooted in the past, including a tax system that redistributes wealth upward from the middle class to the wealthy and, consequently, the relentless growth in both public and private debt. Private debt exacerbates the problems arising from a shrinking labor market; burgeoning public debt places severe limits on what government can do to stimulate growth and often renders efforts to do so (for example, the Obama stimulus) ineffectual largely in large part because the very banks that receive the bulk of the bailouts pull back and refuse to lend. The irony is delicious; unfortunately, the nouveaupauvre can't eat it.

But there's another big piece of the puzzle that deserves closer public scrutiny, namely the obese US defense budget. The Plutocrats who control Wall Street and bankroll the Wingnuts in Congress who kill all attempts at tax reform and oppose everything that has anything to do with social justice would have us believe that the big problem with the federal budget is entitlements – Social Security and Medicare. Pure rubbish. There are two much bigger problems, one on the revenue side, namely the skewed federal tax laws that let corporations and the super-rich pay way too little, and one on the spending side. The mother of all expenditure-related debt problems is the defense budget.

At least 95 percent of the national debt is war-related. The Defense Department absorbs 25-30 percent of the federal budget, depending on what's being counted and who's counting. Two-thirds (68 percent) of all federal government civil and military employees are involved in national security and war related activities. If you add the $100 billion or more for the two wars we are still fighting, the $80 billion for the intelligence budget, and various other defense-related expenditures, that figure is actually much higher – roughly one-half the entire federal budget for the period 2002-2008.