Priorities

So, as you may have heard, President Obama has announced a two-year pay freeze for federal workers as a partial solution to the exploding deficit—and the very first paragraph of this New York Times piece underlines two pretty ginormous problems with the policy:

President Obama announced a two-year pay freeze for civilian federal workers on Monday as he sought to address concerns over sky-high deficit spending and appeal to Republican leaders to find a common approach to restoring the nation's economic and fiscal health.

Problem #1: The Republican leaders to whom he's trying to appeal are the same jackasses who got us into this mess, so their stamp of approval on any solution ought to be a red flag that it's garbage.

Problem #2: That little adjective—civilian. It means uniformed military employees are exempt, because, if they weren't, all the people who didn't give a fuck when George W. Bush zeroed out funding for soldiers with traumatic brain injury, as but one of nine gazillion examples, would start screaming about how Barack H. Obama doesn't sufficiently support the troops.

Which is not an argument in favor of freezing troops' salaries, by the way.

But it does highlight the fundamental indecency of this administration's unwillingness to even entertain the idea of cutting the defense budget—by which I mean the exorbitant funding of large-scale weaponry and mechanical beasts designed for wars we'll never fight—before it freezes the salaries of workers who are tasked primarily with keeping the country running.

Including the administration of social services currently being strained to their breaking points by desperate people who are losing their jobs and healthcare and homes and ability to be self-sufficient, because our priorities include continuing to fight two three wars of choice, and line the pockets of the war profiteers and mercenaries we politely call subcontractors, and build multitudinous killing machines, instead of holding financial institutions accountable and fixing bridges and creating a new green economy, or anything else that might resemble progressive leadership.