Orwell for Congress! (Never mind, he's already there...) [View all]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Orwell-for-Congress--Nev-by-Thomas-Magstadt-Budget_Congress_Congress_Debt-131102-851.html

Oceania was a Soviet-style dictatorship ruled by "Big Brother". Stalin is dead and the Soviet Union is history, but Orwell's insights are still relevant.

Orwell for Congress! (Never mind, he's already there...)
OpEdNews Op Eds 11/2/2013 at 07:36:13
By Thomas Magstadt

Critics in this country have long railed against profligate military spending. They point out correctly that US taxpayers are saddled with a greater defense burden than is true in any other advanced society in the world. Taxpayers are curiously oblivious to this argument, so it's hardly surprising that calls for deep defense cuts fall on deaf ears in Congress.

However, Republicans who fought to defund "Obamacare" and who oppose raising the debt ceiling, the very ones who clamor the loudest against the evils of big government and budget deficits but have no problem with outlandish expenditures on war and weapons, are shameless about demanding deep cuts in social spending . Thus, for example, i n the spring of 2011:

"the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives [was] intent on taking out fuel subsidies for the poor, federal funding for Planned Parenthood, money for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, and the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that "supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs," among many other programs, but not (as New York Times columnist Gail Collins pointed out recently) the millions of dollars the U.S. Army sinks into its "relationship" with NASCAR.

To repeat: these are the same politicians who never question the size or contents of a bloated defense budget and are not in the least troubled by the Pentagon's well-documented failure to account for untold billions of dollars that simply disappear without a trace every year. The US Defense Department hemorrhages taxpayer dollars and yet Congress continues to pretend that military and war-related waste and mismanagement aren't a problem. (Never mind, for example, that most of the $73 billion in AID money poured into Afghanistan apparently vanished into thin air .)