The Routine Giveaways

Everyone furrowing their brows over $700 billion dollars to the rich and greedy should be advised that the Congress did that last week.

WASHINGTON - Automakers gained $25 billion in taxpayer-subsidized loans and oil companies won elimination of a long-standing ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as the Senate passed a sprawling spending bill Saturday.

The 78-12 vote sent the $634 billion measure to President Bush, who was expected to sign it even though it spends more money and contains more pet projects than he would have liked [...]

The Pentagon is in line for a record budget. In addition to $70 billion approved this summer for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department would receive $488 billion, a 6 percent increase. The spending bill also offers aid to victims of flooding in the Midwest and recent hurricanes across the Gulf Coast.

Such a huge bill usually would dominate the end-of-session agenda on Capitol Hill. But it went below the radar screen because attention focused on the congressional bailout of Wall Street.

$700 billion on the investor class and to keep banks lending, non! $560 dollars on the most wasteful and bloated weapons systems in the world and the continued slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan, si! And actually, it's more than that, as Robert Borosage notes.

Most Americans have no sense of the cost and scope of America’s role as globocop. We sustain what Chalmers Johnson calls an “empire of bases” across the globe – over 700 active bases in more than 30 countries. Our navy polices the world’s oceans. We task our military to maintain “dominance” not only in our own hemisphere, but in Europe, the Persian Gulf and Asia. Our intelligence “plumbing in place” engages in covert activities throughout the globe. We are the only nation with the capacity to airlift expeditionary forces rapidly and in large numbers across the globe. We are now devoting some $12 billion a month to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Bush has declared a “Global War on Terror,” a so-called “long war,” without limits or exits. Our Defense Secretary complains that the military is displacing the desiccated State Department as America’s representatives across the world.

The cost of sustaining this commitment is staggering. The Pentagon’s budget itself represents more than half of all discretionary spending—everything the government does, outside of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and interest on the national debt. At $700 billion, it is about equal to that spent by the rest of the world combined on the military. But the actual cost of our military is strewn throughout the budget. Add in the cost of our veterans, the arms aid in the State Department budget, Homeland Security, and more—and actual spending climbs over $1 trillion a year.

Puts that bailout in a little perspective, eh? Especially when 21st-century challenges in protecting America from extremism has no military solution whatsoever.

The problem, folks, is that the largest sector of the private economy is financial services, in other words people pushing paper to other people, while manufacturing is at its lowest level in decades (and much of that is guns, warplanes and missiles). That is historically unsustainable and impossible, and invites crises like this, and no amount of figuring out a creative accounting fix and some kind of bailout on the cheap is going to change that. Only by creating a new energy economy, allowing for 5 million new green-collar jobs, and building a manufacturing base again to match the knowledge economy will we ever have an economic system in any kind of balance. Yet only the Senate bribery bill even brooches that subject.

Looks like a big rondelet of failure from where I'm standing.