It's a wonderful day - A beautiful Friday here in NYC leading into a Holiday weekend. Only one thing could make it better - some good news coming over the wire. And guess what? There is some good news. The headline reads, Obama Signs Bill To Cut Wasteful Defense Spending. You ask, "What's the big deal, seems like a pretty mundane headline to me?" Well let me explain....
We'd never see this headline in a Republican administration. NEVER. According to wingers, you can never spend enough on defense. NEVER EVER. Even if it’s a totally useless or outdated program like the latter day "star wars" now the "Strategic Defense Initiative," it must be funded. Pour valuable tax dollars into a technology that has never been proven to work in the most simplified test environments. Even if it unnecessarily strains relations between Russia and the US, we still must spread this idiotic and expensive technology to our allies. Unfortunately, we're not cutting this program but hopefully it's not far off from finally dying a quiet and unassuming death.
Growing up during the 80s, my parents were active in the disarmament movement. There were posters in my house that read, "It'll be a Great Day When Schools Have Get the Money They Need, and the Air Force Needs to Hold a Bake Sale to Buy a Bomber." My father was the head of a group that advocated nuclear disarmament and one of the many prongs of his argument against the massive military build-up of the eighties was the tremendous cost of building weapons systems. More importantly, he often spoke about the toll on our society that resulted from spending so much on our military. Our schools, our inner cities, our elderly, our poor, all getting the short end of the stick so we could spend billions on warheads we’d never use.
As long as we spend billions and billions on weapons and war there’s going to be little left to spend on Health Care, Schools, Alternative Energy, and all that other good stuff. Obama is making a great start, by beginning the process of cutting our military budget down to a sane size. For today, it appears some pockets of the media are with him.
Now, we need to take the next step and ratchet up the pressure to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and cut programs like The Strategic Defense Initiative. It’s going to be a difficult task for Obama to get us out of Iraq. I don't know why we're escalating the war in Afghanistan - we need to send him a message on this. Missile Defense - when it comes time to pay for everything Barack wants to do, it's going to look mighty appetizing to kill that program. He needs our help.
But for today, the sun is shinning and Obama is moving things in the right direction.