Congress must stand up to Gates and say: ENOUGH! We cannot afford your murderous weapons!

[kpete]

Defense Budget Wrecks Middle Class Economy. Permanent War Threatens Our National Security and Well Being.
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Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 07/12/2010 - 5:51pm.

* Guest Commentary

JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH

We are told by Congressional leaders that we must sacrifice. Republicans want to end Social Security. Schools haven’t the funding to stay open for five days in most states. Seven hundred or more national parks have been shut down because of lack of Federal funding. Most states are broke. Millions of children are starving in our countryPerhaps Mr. Gates would like to strip the elderly from their Social Security funds for that $33 billion, and then kick them out on the streets so that the defense contractors can continue to live the extravagant life they’ve grown accustomed to?

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I question President Obama’s motives for hiring the same politicians from the oil, weapon and Wall St. corporate elite to work in the White House with him. Change you can believe in? It’s become an embarrassing joke for this President. We all scratched our heads when he kept Bush’s Robert Gates on to serve as Secretary of Defense, but when he hired Ken Salazar, well known for his oil and natural gas drilling deals, to be Secretary of the Interior, the idea of changing things became a fading campaign echo.

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The Military Defense broke our middle class economy with their inflated war budget, compliments of a corrupt and cowardly Congress, but even during this current Depression, the Pentagon and Military contractors will make absolutely no sacrifices, their hands greedily stealing all our tax dollars from the Federal budget while Americans are losing their jobs and homes and millions of children are going hungry in this country. The few jobs that they create are not worth the massive damage they’re causing to the rest of the economy. In other words, 95% of the country has to sacrifice so that 5% in the Defense Weapon industry can live high on the hog.

There are no words to describe the damage they’re doing. There is nothing patriotic about making a great country poor as dirt. It’s evil to the core. Congress must stand up to Gates and say: ENOUGH! We cannot afford your murderous weapons! Feed the starving children and rebuild the infrastructure. That’s how you defend and secure a country.

more:
http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/3344

[jaxx]

1. Republicans also want to keep every obsolete plane

and fight to do so...money for their states. Congress has the checkbook, not the President.

[zipplewrath]

2. Gates is probably sympathetic to your position

He's started to openly question things like the 11 carriers we have, and was cooperative in the winding down of the F-22 contract. He also was instrumental in the shutting down of the FCS army program, as well as things like the Boeing ABL effort and the multiple kill vehicle effort.

The reality has always been that the primary problem in the MIC is the congress. These programs become jobs programs and are hard to end. Same way with base closings. It is politically hard to close a base. Strangely, the DoD has BECOME politicized by the process of acquiring weapons. The sad reality is that the sheparding of major weapons programs through congress is a basis for promotion. It is long past the time that a central authority for the development of weapon systems is established, outside of the DoD.

To use a sport analogy, coaches who are also general managers often do quite poorly. You need one guy who gets the talent, and another guy that coaches the talent.