Political Firestorm Flares As Looming Budget Cuts Include Defense Reductions 3AUG12

THE military-industrial complex propaganda war is really heating up with sequestration approaching. Fear is going to be their main tool, and they will use it to turn the American middle class into factions against each other, the poor, and government agencies like the Dept of Education, the EPA, the Labor Dept, and against the social safety net programs like Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, FEMA, and Obamacare. Their primary goal is not the defense of the Republic, it is the defense of their profit margins. Unfortunately too many will be duped and deceived into believing all the fear mongering and so will push Congress (many of whom have already been bought out buy the defense industry) into cutting non-defense spending and even allocating defense funding not to provide for the essentials for our troops but to increase the profits of military contractors and weapons manufacturers. Profits above all else, because if there is one thing true in America, it is that war is business. One can't be faulted for hoping sequestration would take place because maybe, just maybe, the defense spending cuts would force our government to think twice before becoming involved in another conflict we shouldn't be in and force the US military to revert to the self supporting organization it used to be. To look at just what our out of control defense spending is costing our nation check out http://www.costofwar.com from the National Priorities Project. This from the PBS NewsHour....

SUMMARY

Should Congress fail to pass a deficit reduction plan by the end of the year, the 2011 Budget Control Act will trigger budget cuts of $1.2 trillion, evenly split between defense and non-defense spending. The result has been a political brawl on the campaign trail and between the political parties. Margaret Warner reports.

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Transcript

JUDY WOODRUFF: There's a familiar ring to this next story. Congress still has not agreed on how to balance the federal budget, and there's a deadline approaching.
Margaret Warner explains the latest skirmish.

MAJORITY LEADER SEN. HARRY REID (D-Nev.): I want to also say a word or two about sequester.
MAN: Those who would be affected by the sequester.
MARGARET WARNER: Sequester, it's been the bipartisan buzzword of choice lately.
The term refers to across-the-board budget cuts that take effect January 2, if lawmakers can't produce a comprehensive deficit reduction package before then. The measure was part of the Budget Control Act passed by both houses of Congress and signed by President Obama a year ago.
The sequestration axe would slice $54 billion from defense and an equal amount from domestic programs from Head Start to the Border Patrol next year, with more to follow. Though the troops themselves are exempt, the looming defense cuts have kicked up a political firestorm, on full display Wednesday at a House Armed Services Committee hearing.
The Office of Management and Budget's acting director, Jeffrey Zients, sparred with Republican Congressman Randy Forbes of Virginia.
REP. RANDY FORBES (R-Va.): Mr. Zients, I'm just asking if you can tell me if there's any proposal you can put forward today, any proposal that the president has put forward to stop sequestration that has gotten a single vote?
JEFFREY ZIENTS, Office of Management and Budget: The root cause problem here is the Republicans' refusal to ask the top 10 percent to pay their fair share...
REP. RANDY FORBES: Mr. Zients, I understand your partisanship. I'm just asking you if you can tell me if that proposal -- can you point to such a proposal?
JEFFREY ZIENTS: There is...
REP. RANDY FORBES: Then your answer is no.
MARGARET WARNER: The verbal spat came after a weeks-long Republican campaign to sound the alarm to the public. Arizona Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have taken the message to states with lots of defense- related jobs.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-Ariz.): No uniformed military leader who we trust agrees that these cuts would do anything but devastate our national security.
MARGARET WARNER: House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon took aim at President Obama at a Mitt Romney presidential campaign event Tuesday in Arlington, Va.
REP. HOWARD "BUCK" MCKEON (R-Calif.): Has anybody here heard the word sequestration? Do you get sick and tired of hearing that we need to cut more out of defense?
MARGARET WARNER: And on the presidential campaign trail, President Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, have traded accusations about who's to blame.
MITT ROMNEY (R): Today, we are just months away from an arbitrary across-the-board budget reduction that would saddle the military with a trillion dollars in cuts, severely shrink our force structure, and impair our ability to meet and deter threats.
Don't bother, by the way, trying to find a serious military rationale behind any of that. If I am president of the United States, I will not let that happen.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There are a number of Republicans in Congress who don't want you to know that most of them voted for these cuts. Now they're trying to wriggle out of what they agreed to do. Instead of making tough choices to reduce the deficit, they'd rather protect tax cuts for some of the wealthiest Americans, even if it risks big cuts in our military.
GORDON ADAMS, American University: This is theater.
MARGARET WARNER: Former top OMB defense budget official Gordon Adams, now teaching at American University's School of International Service, sees a lot of posturing at play.
GORDON ADAMS: So this is a highly staged and scripted drama where every player is playing his or her part, everybody is jumping up and down, rending garments, tearing hair, gnashing teeth and making it look like horrible things like Armageddon are going to happen.
The reality is, I don't expect it to happen, but, even if it did, it's a slow-roll process when it does. But it's a great thing to fight about in an election year.
MARGARET WARNER: Some defense contractors, like giant Lockheed Martin, have tried to stoke the fight by warning that, under a federal 60-day notice law, they may have to issue conditional layoff alerts to their workers before the November 6 election.
On Monday, the Department of Labor issued guidance that layoff announcements were not required and unwise while cutbacks were still speculative and unforeseeable.
Armed Services chairman McKeon dismissed that guidance as politically motivated.
REP. HOWARD "BUCK" MCKEON: They have no legal authority to do what they did. So, if I'm a CEO of a company and I go to my attorneys for guidance, they would just laugh at that, because if they do lay off their employees and don't send the notice, then they are liable to be sued.
MARGARET WARNER: Fears of immediate hits to defense production lines in January are overblown, maintains defense budget expert Adams.
GORDON ADAMS: They will not feel the effect on January 1, in fact, because defense contractors today are working on contracts that were funded by dollars appropriated three years ago, two years ago, last year. And none of those dollars are going to be affected by a decision to do across-the-board cuts on January 2.
MARGARET WARNER: Yet, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter made clear at Wednesday's hearing that the administration is deeply worried about the impact.
ASHTON CARTER, deputy secretary of defense: Sequestration would introduce senseless chaos into the management of every single one of more than 2,500 defense investment programs, inefficiency into the defense industry that supports us, and would cause lasting disruptions, even if it only extended for one year.
MARGARET WARNER: And after the hearing, Carter told the "NewsHour" the dilemma faced by contractors is well-founded.
ASHTON CARTER: Each and every contractor who works for the Department of Defense has to take heed, because, remember, this is across the board. It is indiscriminate. So each and every -- you named a bunch of aircraft and investment programs. Every piece of our operations and maintenance, all of our personnel accounts, every single thing gets hit with this.
MARGARET WARNER: So it's not a political gimmick?
ASHTON CARTER: I have spoken to a number of our defense contractors. They take it as a serious matter. We have the same issue in the government, which is, we are trying to balance being ready if some -- this really terrible thing happens to us, and not causing some of its bad effects before we even have a chance to solve it.
MARGARET WARNER: But as long as this remains a hot-button campaign issue for both parties, no one expects a deal to solve it before the November election.


 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec12/sequestration_08-03.html

WHY ALL AMERICANS SHOULD THANK SEN SHELBY from NPR 8FEB10

Why All Americans Should Thank Sen. Shelby
12:31 pm

Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Shelby, and 99 other U.S. senators should be furious at him.

Late last week, the senior Republican from Alabama placed a blanket hold on 70 nominations pending before the Senate. He was not objecting to their qualifications or personal profiles, or even discussing them.

His problem had to do with a couple of government contracts he wants to see benefit his home state. The contracts have not been resolved in the direction the senator prefers, and he felt he was getting stiffed.

Of course, once he had made a few headlines with his shotgun-hold tactic, he was willing to let most of his hostages loose. Now he's just holding a handful of appointments he sees as relevant to his home-state focus.

But the damage just may have been done.

People who watch the Senate regularly know that holds are as common as colds. Senators use them to pressure the administration on any number of matters, from nuclear policy to petty personnel squabbles.

Most of the time, only hardcore Hill mavens notice. But with his one act of singular senatorial arrogance, Shelby overstepped the usual bounds of caution. This time, the shenanigans went viral, and more than a few people were alarmed.

That's why the rest of the Senate should be short of breath over this. Because if Shelby gets noticed with this extreme version of business as usual, other senators conducting similar hijackings on a smaller scale may get noticed, too.

What is this mysterious power to place a hold on appointments and bills? How is it that one senator could delay or even cancel the filling of these jobs?

The hold is simply a senator's way of notifying the majority leader that he or she intends to use the right to extended debate against that name or bill. It is an implicit threat to filibuster, in a time when such threats are as effective as filibusters themselves ever were.

The holding senator may have an issue pertaining to the nominee or the bill at hand. Or there may be something else on the senator's mind.

In this case, Shelby's communications director said, the issue was the coddling of terrorists. He then explained that the Obama administration had yet to resolve a certain contract for the building of tanker planes to refuel U.S. warplanes in midflight, a years-long battle between two defense consortia on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

And the Obama administration has not yet let a contract for a lab that will analyze forensic evidence from bomb-making materials found in Iraq and Afghanistan. The communication from the senator's office suggested this shows a lack of commitment to anti-terrorism.

It neglected to mention that both these contracts involve, or might involve, large business interests in the state of Alabama.

This is what some call constituent service. Others call it earmarking, the practice of steering specific outlays in spending bills to benefit preselected parties. Still others call this plain and simple pork barrel politics, the pursuit of government largess benefiting one's friends and constituents and campaign supporters.

Shelby was exercising his right to shut the appointment process down because he did not get what he wanted in the most recent round of appropriations for the Department of Defense.

So why should Americans be grateful?

They should be grateful to the senator for being so bold as to be blatant, so outspoken as to be outrageous. Most of his colleagues would be more subtle about manipulating Senate rules, so as to keep this ability down below the radar of the media and the voting public.

A blanket hold on 70 nominees ought to be embarrassing to senators such as John McCain, senior Republican from Arizona, who ran for president twice emphasizing his detestation of earmarks. How can McCain, and others like him, defend the Shelby-style brandishing of the hold-filibuster to protect earmarking?

That's a debate the Republican minority ought to be having in its conference meetings, where it contemplates how to use its filibuster power now that it has 41 votes to make it stick.

But Democrats need to look in the mirror. One big reason the majority party has not been able to act like one in the Senate is its unwillingness to tackle the customs and traditions that make every senator a king or queen. Every senator has an interest in preserving that kind of individual power.

But what about the public interest, or the national interest? Do these privileges serve the rest of us?

If one senator can hold sway over so much of the nation's business simply by declaring himself willing to be unreasonable, then reasonable people have cause to re-examine the institution of the Senate itself.

SEN SHELBY (R-AL) HOLDS SENATE HOSTAGE FOR ALABAMA PORK, CREDO ACTION 5 FEB 10

This is a message from Credo, my mobile phone company. If you want to sign the petition to Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid click the header.

An Alabama Republican is holding Democrats hostage.
Enough is enough.
Your message to Harry Reid:

Enough is enough. Do not honor Sen. Shelby's shameful hold on all 70 of Pres. Obama's appointees. Stand up, fight back and make the Republicans filibuster these nominees and suffer the consequences in the court of public opinion.
A Republican Senator from Alabama has put what is by all accounts an extraordinary "blanket hold" on almost every single nomination that President Obama has sent to the Senate.
This is what happens when the Democratic leadership plays nice with bullies. The country loses. And if Sen. Richard Shelby is successful, this kind of extortion will only get worse.
At least 70 nominees to important positions at the White House, the federal judiciary, and crucial cabinet agencies — including those charged with keeping us safe from terrorism — cannot move forward until this hold is ignored or lifted. Make the Republicans filibuster. What's worse, this is not just the typical Republican obstructionism, but a brazen brand of political extortion. According to reports, Sen. Shelby will lift his hold on the President's executive appointees if the Senate agrees to pour billions of dollars into Alabama via two federal programs:
— A $40 billion contract for Northrop/Airbus to build air-to-air refueling tankers in Mobile, Ala.
— The construction of a $45 million FBI lab outside Huntsville, Ala.
It's time for Democratic leadership to stand up to Republicans, starting with Sen. Shelby. Senate Majority Leader Reid should refuse to honor Shelby's "blanket hold" on more than 70 nominees. If Republicans want to block every single Obama appointee, they must filibuster them one-by-one and deal with the very public consequences of their obstructionism. Sen. Shelby should be ashamed — but he is not.
Harry Reid has refused to honor holds in the past — including when Sen. Chris Dodd tried to block retroactive telecom immunity for big telecom companies who helped the Bush White House spy on Americans.
Imagine the gall of blocking every single one of the President's appointees, just to bring home pork to the state of Alabama.
If ever there was a time for Sen. Reid to say enough is enough, it's now. We can't let Senate Democrats simply stand by while a Republican Senator brazenly takes advantage of their spinelessness to extort billions of taxpayer dollars for boondoggle projects in his home state.
Becky Bond, Political Director
CREDO Action from Working Assets