Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → robbing the public and spending irresponsibly → bloated military budget → Democrats aren’t helping

I gave in to temptation and brought up the U.S. presidential election campaign here at The Picket Line. My position, in a nutshell: If you think Kerry’s the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.

A friend emailed me, saying he’d probably be voting for Kerry even though he isn’t too excited about it, and asking who I’d be voting for.

So I tried to give it a little more thought. My working theory is that paying attention to political campaigns helps the pests to thrive and lowers the general quality of discussion and debate as well as having a bad influence on public intelligence and behavior. But I suppose that I have no evidence that occasional indulgence is terribly harmful, so long as I take care not to make a habit of it.

I think I understand people who will be voting for Kerry and I can sympathize with them. Bush is a dangerous lunatic and people will have good reason to sleep better at night with him and his crew out of (as much) power. But I’m hoping to discourage people from thinking of this crisis we’re in as being something that might be over come , or that voting for or working for Kerry is the solution.

Only part of this is because Kerry is campaigning so hawkishly. He’s backing away from his most courageous stands during the Vietnam Era, running to Bush’s right on Israel, promising to send more troops to Iraq, and hoping to strengthen the Patriot Act. So be it. Still, there’s little I can imagine Kerry doing that I can’t imagine Bush doing worse.

Bush is a dangerous lunatic, but it’s not like this is a hidden secret that’s being suppressed or censored — it’s right out in the open. The liberal blog world keeps hoping that they’ll finally get The Big Scoop: the evidence on the scandal that proves for once and for all what they already know is going on. The big problem is that a majority of Americans don’t seem to mind the awful truth, or in fact to be willing to entertain its possibility — even if they had the evidence in black-and-white, they’d figure out some way to work around it (like the majority of Americans who continue to believe that the WMD-in-Iraq or Saddam-helping-bomb-the-WTC stories are either true or about as likely as not).

A case in point is the frequent assertion that “we do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties.” It’s a Fact with a capital F. Hawks can assert it confidently as the lead-in to something else, with the same tone they’d use to recite one of the laws of thermodynamics or a cliche about life (“there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” “nothing is certain but death and taxes,” “Rome wasn’t built in a day”). Nobody ever says of this assertion “are we really?” or “how exactly have we changed our policies to enforce this new standard?” or “how do we know how well we’re doing?”

The facts don’t agree well with this Official Motto, but the facts aren’t at issue! “We do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties” sounds like an assertion of fact but it doesn’t seem to ever be interpreted that way — it’s more like a creed or an assertion of pride or something.

I sometimes imagine that when these people are talking about America they’re really referring to a mythical place like Camelot that by definition does what is good and right. If U.S. troops recklessly bombed a civilian area and took out some children, that wasn’t really America but some faulty mortal incarnation of the Platonic ideal of America — of course we regret the loss of life but, let’s be reasonable, we’re America and America does everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, even if actual American troops don’t and actual American policy doesn’t bother to enforce or even monitor this.

Some people agree with what Dubya does (or they like his bad boy pose), some are more skeptical (or think his bad boy pose is too much like the bully who beat ’em up in school), but almost none have the appropriate sense of panic that our government with all of its power and its brutality (both potential and actual, since in Iraq we’re just cracking our knuckles compared to the real beating we could give out if we’re in the mood) is in the hands of a bunch of psychopaths.

The Dubya Squad seem to be particularly nutty in this regard, but Clinton and Gore and Kerry are just quantitatively less severely messed up, not qualitatively different. The problem is that we don’t choose honest and honorable people to run our state (which would be dangerous enough) but instead we choose them through these election spectacles which as far as I can see have evolved to select some of the worst examples of humanity we’ve got. Madness. I’m convinced that if we selected our congress like we select our juries we’d be better off than with the way we do it now.

The fact that people put up with this, and even celebrate it, means that the problem is bigger than who’s in the oval office. I don’t see any sense in wishing for a coup d’êtat by some handful of enlightened people who think like I do (fat chance anyway). My instincts are more democratic than that. I want to see the U.S. government dissolved or fundamentally reformed because we the people demand it — and not so much because of the change in government this would bring about, but because of the change in we the people this would signal.

The only happy ending I can see will be if suddenly, like a crack spreading across the ice, people snap and say to themselves “this is a buch of crap — why are we putting up with this?” No more mufflers in the form of ironic detachment, penetrating media analyses, above-the-fray commentary, or political expediency blinders. No illusions about term limits or campaign finance reform solving anything. Just a big “no more.”

Some people think real revolutionaries should vote for Bush because under the Dubya Squad things are most likely to get so dreadfully awful that folks will revolt. Myself, I’m less prepared to grit my teeth and hope things finally get so intolerable that people snap, and more eager to see people raise their standards so they realize that it’s already intolerable. After all, what are we likely to end up with after a revolution made by people with such low standards?

But this is also a reason why I’m not likely to get enthusiastic about Kerry, since he’s clearly an Anyone-But-Bush, a compromise, allegedly “electable,” a “moderate.” In other words this is more practice in lowering our standards and putting up with things we should practice not putting up with any more.

The United States has the largest, most expensive, most internationally-dispersed military the world has ever seen. The United States spends about as much on what it still teasingly calls “defense” as the rest of the world combined. But you knew that. What you didn’t know is that it isn’t big enough!

“[T]he American military is too small, not simply for the challenges we face today, but also as an appropriate hedge against future dangers” say 21 members of the U.S. Senate, who have sent a letter to President Bush urging him “to include funding for an expanded active duty Army and Marine Corps in your budget request.”

Among those 21 Democrats signing the letter are John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Hilary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Joseph Biden, and Joseph Lieberman.

Remember that budget that came out a few days ago? You know, the one that was the largest one ever, with a gigantic deficit, that the press kept trying to describe as “spare” and “full of deep cuts” to “rein in spending”?

Well, you probably heard that it included a record-breaking military warchest (and “In another sign of the times, financing for the apprehension of Army deserters would double”). And maybe you heard that a lot of things you might think of as belonging to the military — like, say, nuclear weapons development — aren’t even part of the Defense Department allotment but are snuck into other parts of the budget (the Department of Energy gets the A-bomb funding, for instance).

But even that wasn’t good enough. , the Dubya Squad asked Congress for an additional $82 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the greater glory of American foreign policy (you know, like payoffs for foreign governments that backed the Iraq War fiasco).

It is one of the largest emergency requests in recent U.S. history, coming on top of $25 billion already allocated for the war in . The sum exceeds the president’s combined funding request for the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Housing and Urban Development, and it is nearly five times the savings Bush is seeking in cuts to discretionary spending.

Why didn’t they include this money in the budget they just released? Well, you know, these wars are big, unpredictable, exceptional things. Huge asterices that get in the way of reasonable budgeting. Besides, the rules on these supplemental warbucks packages are faster and looser and the bills get much less Congressional scrutiny… which means, of course, that they’ll try to sneak in as much as they can.

There’s not much in the way of specifics in any part of this document — no breakdown, beyond a billion or so, of that $17.3 billion for Army operations and maintenance, or of $5.6 billion for Air Force operations and maintenance, or of $990 million for Army military construction in Iraq. The list could go on and on.

This is one reason the administration is loading so much military spending in a supplemental instead of the regular budget. The budget is scrutinized; supplementals aren’t.… ¶ [T]his supplemental includes quite a lot of money for items that have nothing to do with the costs of war in Iraq.…

Finally, there is the slush fund for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. When that $87 billion supplemental came out in , I noted provisions giving Rumsfeld the authority to move around $9.3 billion — 11 percent of the total amount — from one account to another at his discretion. This time, I’ve spotted between $7.5 billion and $11 billion (10 percent to 14 percent), depending on how it’s counted.

I wonder what would have happened if John Kerry had won in  — would he stop this military gluttony?

Sen. John Kerry called for tens of thousands of new U.S. troops on and said the country should adopt a series of initiatives to support military families.

Kerry said he plans to file legislation to increase the size of the military by 40,000 — 30,000 in the Army and 10,000 in the Marines — to help support the country’s efforts in Iraq and the larger war on terrorism.…

“The war in Iraq proved that a lightning-fast, high-tech force can smash an opposing army and drive to Baghdad in three weeks. But there is no substitute for a well-trained and equipped infantry to win the peace,” Kerry said in remarks delivered at an annual ceremony sponsored by the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester.

Don’t look now, anti-war Democrats, but your party is hard at work:

A team of Senate and House Democrats are planning to introduce legislation today aimed at significantly increasing the size of the U.S. Army.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services (SASC) airland subcommittee, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), a SASC member, and Reps. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), both members of the House Armed Services committee, are pressing for the passage of the United States Army Relief Act.

So the news has been full of the hawkish, decorated, ex-Marine, Vietnam Vet, Democratic House Member John Murtha calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. (Followed quickly by San Francisco’s representative, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, saying “Mr. Murtha speaks for himself.”)

Murtha introduced (as the sole sponsor) a House Resolution to support his call, which (after all of the usual throat-clearing “whereas”es) reads:

Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.

Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region.

Section 3 The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

He apparently didn’t care to sign on to House Concurrent Resolution 35, which has a mere 34 co-sponsors so far, and which puts it this way (after the usual throat-clearing “whereas”es):

[I]t is the sense of Congress that the President should—

(1) develop and implement a plan to begin the immediate withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq;

(2) develop and implement a plan for reconstructing Iraq’s civil and economic infrastructure;

(3) convene an emergency meeting of Iraq’s leadership, Iraq’s neighbors, the United Nations, and the Arab League to create an international peacekeeping force in Iraq and to replace United States Armed Forces in Iraq with Iraqi police and Iraqi National Guard forces to ensure Iraq’s security; and

(4) take all steps necessary to provide the Iraqi people with the opportunity to completely control their internal affairs.

…or H.R. 4232, the “End the War in Iraq Act,” which has even fewer cosponsors, and puts things sans whereases:

(a) Prohibition– Except as provided in subsection (b), funds appropriated or otherwise made available under any provision of law may not be obligated or expended to deploy or continue to deploy the Armed Forces to the Republic of Iraq.

(b) Exception– Subsection (a) shall not apply to the use of funds to—

(1) provide for the safe and orderly withdrawal of the Armed Forces from Iraq; or

(2) ensure the security of Iraq and the transition to democratic rule by—

(A) carrying out consultations with the Government of Iraq, other foreign governments, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United Nations, and other international organizations; or

(B) providing financial assistance or equipment to Iraqi security forces and international forces in Iraq.

(c) Rule of Construction– Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit or otherwise restrict the use of funds available to any department or agency of the Government of the United States (other than the Department of Defense) to carry out social and economic reconstruction activities in Iraq.

(d) Definition– In this section, the term ‘Armed Forces’ has the meaning given the term in section 101(a)(4) of title 10, United States Code.

While war-ending resolutions like these have attracted few sponsors, many Democratic members of the House have been trying to compete rhetorically for the love and votes of the increasingly anti-war, withdrawal-happy public. So the Republicans decided to call their bluff today by introducing and rushing to the floor their own resolution which reads:

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

Couldn’t be simpler, right? (Well, except that “Sense of the House is legislative language which offers the opinion of the House, but does not make law” which kind of makes the whole exercise even stupider — what could it mean for a legislative body to go on the record as being officially in favor of a course of action that it is simultaneously failing to legislate?)

The roll call vote should create a helpful list for The Nation to refer to when deciding which candidates to endorse . For as they said in their recent editorial:

We will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq a major issue of his or her campaign. We urge all voters to join us in adopting this position…

Courageously standing up to this stern threat from The Nation, Rep. Pelosi urged Democrats in the House to vote against the resolution, and 93% of them did (the total vote in the House was a lopsided 403 to 3).

Many Democrats have hit on a nuanced position that rejects the rash, cut-and-run language of the Republican-introduced measure, (which establishes that the opinion of the House is that “the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately”) in favor of the far more reasonable language in Murtha’s resolution (which says that “The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated”). Oh yes, if only they would allow us to bring up the Murtha resolution for a vote… but this sham Republican amendment is far too reckless to consider!

Update: According to the Associated Press, on Pelosi stopped distancing herself from Murtha’s position. “We should follow the lead of Congressman John Murtha, who has put forth a plan to make American safer, to make our military stronger and to make Iraq more stable,” she said.

A garden of miscellany:

  • Christina Cowger of “North Carolina Stop Torture Now” talks about the various ways her group is fighting at the grass-roots level to expose and fight the domestic enablers of the “extraordinary rendition” program — from Air America-like front companies like “Aero Contractors” to subsidiaries of Boeing.
  • Reuters reports that the Democrats in the House of Representatives plan to see Dubya’s $93 billion supplemental request for war funding, and then raise him $5 billion in additional military spending. And then, they’ll get to put frosting on top.
  • Speaking of pork… where do you think all that “Homeland Security” spending has been going?
  • Thanks to MetaFilter: Some links on “Possum Living”: “How To Live Well Without a Job… building a $100 Log Cabin… a geodesic dome out of cardboard… handbook for cob building… cheap solar power system… stocking up on food…” and more.
  • A “white powdery substance” in an envelope shut down the IRS mail room in Fresno . And a Connecticut tax collector was run over by a vehicle he was trying to impound.
  • The Coalition to Get the Stop Funding the War Coalition to Stop Funding the War put out a press release: “We have had enough of waiting around for politicians to take action. If those of us in the peace movement use our own power instead of begging officials to use theirs, we might actually stop this war and prevent the next one too. It’s way past time for those of us who say we stand for peace to put our money where our mouths are. Don’t pretend you can oppose the war with your rhetoric while you’re paying for it with every paycheck. The power of the purse begins with us — let’s cut the war funding at the source.”
  • And, surprise, surprise, many of the people who don’t pay their taxes in the United States are the same people who get their paychecks from the federal government. “Nearly half a million current and former U.S. federal employees have not filed tax returns. Collectively, they owe almost $3 billion.”
  • The New York Times has seen the new BBC America series Robin Hood and declares it Tax Policy Decreed by Merry Men in Tights.

Apologies for my recent span of postlessness. My excuses include attending a wedding out of town, starting up again at my day job, and reading a dense and interesting book — Evil and Human Agency — which I’ll review here when I finish it, if I can wait until then.

For news, I have two bits of disillusionment for those of you who still cling to the Democratic and Republican parties (I know you’re out there, because I keep running in to you).

First: for those of you Republicans who know you have much to be ashamed of but think you can at least be proud of the beast-starving, tax-cutting part of your party — think again. The Beast Ain’t Starving:

Federal revenue collections hit an all-time high in , contributing to a further improvement in the budget deficit for .… , tax revenues total $1.505 trillion, an increase of 11.2% over . That figure includes $383.6 billion collected in , the largest monthly tax collection on record. Tax collections swell in April every year as individuals file their tax returns by the deadline. For , revenue collections and government spending are at all-time highs.

And secondly, for those of you who still can’t seem to help but be Democrats, please note: the military budget is as bloated as ever now that the donkey party holds the purse strings:

[I]f anyone thought the Democrats might reassess the nation’s defense needs or the Pentagon’s way of doing business, think again. The Cold War may be long over, but America’s Cold War military machine is intact and well-oiled.

This $504 billion—measured in real terms (i.e., adjusting for inflation) — falls only a few billion short of the largest military budget in U.S. history, back in , when America was embarking on its Cold War rearmament campaign and fighting a war in Korea.

One difference: The budget included the cost of fighting in Korea. The budget does not include the cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.…

A half-trillion dollars exceeds the military budgets of all the world’s other nations combined.

A few miscellaneous things that caught my eye recently:

Was it that we were promised that if we supported a surge of Democrats in to Congress, things would change? The supporters of the surge got all they asked for — majorities in both the House and Senate.

But while surge supporters point to some successes — new Congressional committee leadership, a new method for inserting earmarks into bills, and the like — this appears to have more-or-less completely failed to effect any appreciable change in the dismal national political situation.

In particular, the Iraq war is hotter than ever. There are more U.S. troops in Iraq today than at any time during the war, and the slaughter goes on with no end in sight.

And yet the proponents of the surge continue to ask for patience, and, indeed, suggest that only a bigger surge of Democrats can end the war.

But, thank goodness, some people are finally giving up on the surge.

Our local war tax resistance group is still trying to come up with a game plan for . We may try to come up with an action of our own and then invite some other local groups in the anti-war/militarism milieu to join us. Or we may try to piggyback on some other group’s tax day protest.

I suggested that maybe we could try joining up with the local incarnation of the Tax Day “Tea Party” protest. Those protests are happening nationwide this year, and are being egged on by the usual megaphone-wielding suspects in the American right-wing. The protests are meant to be a way for citizens like you and me to express our outrage at the government’s waste of our money in the bailout boondoggle (and in general), and at the tax increases that are bound to follow.

Here’s how our local group is putting it:

Together with Tea Parties taking place in hundreds of cities across the country, concerned taxpayers will gather on in Civic Center Park in San Francisco to send the following message to President Obama and the Congress:

  • No You Can’t! spend taxpayers’ hard-earned money on reckless stimulus packages loaded with pork.
  • No You Can’t! implement a pork-laden budget that can only lead to increased taxes and further debt.
  • No You Can’t! put a stranglehold on our economy.
  • No You Can’t! take our money and limit our freedoms.

The consequences of such profligate spending are far-reaching and will affect the economic well-being of future generations while thwarting the basic liberties entrusted to the people by our Constitution.

When, in , the colonists were not heard or respected, the Boston Tea Party was born and the Sons of Liberty dumped tons of tea into the Harbor as a protest against the British government. Tax Day Tea Party protesters are gathering across this great nation in the spirit of those patriots, demanding to be heard.

The winds of change are blowing but this isn’t change any of us can believe in. The irresponsible behavior of Washington’s politicians has prompted taxpayers to action. Hard-working Americans throughout the country and across the economic and political spectra are joining forces to send a message to their politicians: America is going to party like it’s !

While protesting shoulder-to-shoulder with folks who get their news from Fox would be a big step out of the traditional comfort zone for our local war tax resistance group, I think it might be productive. We’d be introducing conscientious tax resistance to a group of people who may never have encountered it before. And we could point out that most of the pork and waste in Washington is pentagonal in shape — a message the dittoheads may not have yet been exposed to.

My proposal has gotten a lukewarm reception so far. One person emailed me saying that she wasn’t sure she wanted to join a protest against the government’s spending priorities since she’d just gotten an email from the American Friends Service Committee declaring its enthusiastic support for the budget!

Sad to say, it’s true. Read it and weep. The email message was even worse than what you find on the web site. Dozens of liberal groups, including the American Friends Service Committee, signed on to support “President Obama’s budget priorities” and urge passage of his budget, claiming:

His budget commits major investments in health care reform, education, and clean energy, while restoring fairness to our tax system and reducing military expenditures over time in a responsible manner. [Emphasis mine — ♇]

This is an incredible distortion. Over the last decade, in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, U.S. military spending has just about doubled. Is Obama reversing this cancerous growth? Hardly. Obama’s budget allocates more to military spending than any of the Dubya Squad’s budgets did. And the American Friends Service Committee and the Friends Committee on National Legislation are doing their part to make sure it passes.

Don’t look now, but…

Influential US lawmakers on Thursday called for levying a new income tax to pay for the war in Afghanistan, warning its costs pose a mortal threat to efforts like a sweeping health care overhaul.

“Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for,” the lawmakers, all prominent Democratic allies of President Barack Obama, said in a joint statement.

The group included House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey; Representative John Murtha, who chairs that panel’s defense subcommittee; and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank.

Some bits and pieces from here and there: