By
Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted July 19, 2008.

https://www.alternet.org/workplace/91927/?page=3

.....



We have a government that is spending two and a half billion dollars
a day in Iraq, essentially subsidizing new swimming pools for the
contracting class in northern Virginia, at a time when heating oil and
personal transportation are about to join health insurance on the list
of middle-class luxuries. Home heating and car ownership are slipping
away from the middle class thanks to exploding energy prices -- the
hidden cost of the national borrowing policy we call dependency on
foreign oil, "foreign" representing those nations, Arab and Chinese,
that lend us the money to pay for our wars.
And while we've all
heard stories about how much waste and inefficiency there is in our
military spending, this is always portrayed as either "corruption" or
simple inefficiency, and not what it really is -- a profound expression
of our national priorities, a means of taking money from ordinary,
struggling people and redistributing it not downward but upward, to
connected insiders, who turn your tax money into pure profit.
You
want an example? Sanders has a great one for you. The Senator claims
that he has been trying for years to increase funding for the Federally
Qualified Health Care (FQHC) program, which finances community health
centers across the country that give primary health care access to
about 16 million Americans a year. He's seeking an additional $798
million for the program this year, which would bring the total
appropriation to $2.9 billion, or about what we spend every two days in
Iraq.
"But for five billion a year," Sanders insists, "we could
provide basic primary health care for every American. That?s how much
it would cost, five billion."
As it is, though, Sanders has
struggled to get any additional funding. He managed to get $250 million
added to the program in last year's Labor, Health and Human Services
bill, but Bush vetoed the legislation, "and we ended up getting a lot
less."
Okay, now, hold that thought. While we're unable to find
$5 billion for this simple program, and Sanders had to fight and claw
to get even $250 million that was eventually slashed, here's something
else that's going on. According to a recent report by the GAO, the
Department of Defense has already "marked for disposal" hundreds of
millions of dollars worth of spare parts -- and not old spare parts,
but new ones that are still on order! In fact, the GAO report claims
that over half of the spare parts currently on order
for the Air Force -- some $235 million worth, or about the same
amount Sanders unsuccessfully tried to get for the community health
care program last year -- are already marked for disposal! Our
government is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Defense
Department crap just to throw it away!
"They're planning on throwing this stuff away and it hasn?t even come in yet," says Sanders.
According
to the report, we're spending over $30 million a year, and employing
over 1,400 people, just to warehouse all the defense equipment we don't
need. For instance -- we already have thousands of unneeded aircraft
blades, but 7,460 on the way, at a cost of $2 million, which will join those already earmarked for the waste pile.


This is why you need to pay careful attention when you hear about
John McCain claiming that he's going to "look at entitlement program"
waste as a means of solving the budget crisis, or when you tune into
the debate about the "death tax." We are in the midst of a political
movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while
at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public
expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian
analysis... well, shit, what can I say? That's what's happening.
Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010
would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting
"entitlement" programs for cuts while continually funneling an
ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the
befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North
Virginia McMansions -- this is all part of a conversation we should be
having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we're not
going to have that conversation, because we're going to spend this fall
mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about
whether or not Michelle Obama's voice is too annoying, about flag lapel
pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.
Bernie
Sanders is one of the few politicians out there smart enough and secure
enough to understand that the future of American politics is
necessarily going to involve some pretty frank and contentious
confrontations. The phony blue-red divide, which has been buoyed for
years by some largely incidental geographical disagreements over
religion and other social issues, is going to give way eventually to a
real debate grounded in a brutal economic reality increasingly common
to all states, red and blue.
Our economic reality is as brutal as
it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the
midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly
ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the
Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political
unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished
dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the
sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of
American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our
manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy
that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our
government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The
Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these
changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society
would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up
enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers -- that party
panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued
relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between
the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an
argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits
of American middle-class existence -- immediately, if you ask the
Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the
Democrats.

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