Trick-or-Treating the Zombies of the Military Industrial Complex

Paul Krugman's column today is a treatise on the "Weaponized Keynesians" -- those Republican ideologues who insist that government should not be in the business of creating jobs -- unless, of course, it's the jobs created through military spending.

These fiscal conservatives love to call tax hikes on the rich and any cuts to defense spending  "Job Killers".  But as Krugman quotes Barney Frank as saying, pumping money into Defense miraculously creates a whole slew of jobs. Stimulus is so stimulating when it involves death and destruction!

So, how do we get our own pet liberal stimulus bills past the war-happy Austerians?  I think we have to start getting sneaky and creative. Just go along with the "War is So Bipartisan" theme.  Make speeches celebrating sadism, torture, death and destruction, and then call Congress and tell them to Pass This Bill Right Now!

 We could rename the endangered Head Start Program the "Douglas MacArthur Early Childhood Education Program for Future Old Soldiers Who Fade Away."  Medicaid payments to local community health centers being slashed? No problem! Introduce a bill funding Defense Against Disease centers. Millions of people will be freezing this winter due to the defunding of home heating assistance.  Put that money under appropriations for heat-seeking missiles. Mortgage relief and rental subsidies and clean, safe homeless shelters can go under Homeland Security. And when we nationalize all the too-big-to-exist banks, we can call them the "In God We Trust Companies" to make the right- wing fundamentalists go all rapturous.


Congress has a nine percent approval rating. They've been starved of oxygen under that suffocating dome. How hard can it be to get the better of them? The possibilities are endless. Let's entangle them in the spider web of their own deceit.