A Real Change We Need: Some Good News for B. O.

Not all doom & gloom on the horizon for the prez-elect. Sure, we're all about to be walking around in barrels (Where the fug would one even get a wooden keg like that these days?) & fighting each other for the wealthy elite's Mickey D leftovers & grease soaked wrappers, but on the foreign policy front it could be worse, according to Fred Kaplan in Slate. We give you the most hopeful part, hopeful because breaking the military-industrial complex is something Americans can accomplish by themselves, w/o relying on untrustworthy, erratic, confused foreigners.

Military spending. According to a story by Bryan Bender in the Boston Globe, the Defense Business Board, a senior advisory group appointed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, recommended huge cuts in the military budget, noting that the current level of spending on weapons is "unsustainable." Several private and congressional defense analysts have been making this point for a few years now; the U.S. Government Accountability Office recently calculated that the Pentagon's 95 largest weapons systems have accumulated cost overruns amounting to $300 billion (that's just the overruns, not the total cost, which amounts to many hundreds of billions more). It's also clear, from the Pentagon's own budget analyses, that well over half of the $700 billion-plus budget has little if anything to do with the threats the United States faces now or in the foreseeable future. The past seven years have been a free-for-all for the nation's military contractors and service chiefs; the number of canceled weapons projects can be counted on one hand; they've otherwise received nearly all the money for everything they've asked for. Even many of the beneficiaries realize that the binge is coming to an end; the nation simply can't afford it. Obama's fortune is that he can order the cuts, invoking not his own preferences but the sober-minded urgings of a business advisory group in the Bush administration.

'Bout time someone made the most important part of the gummint work.