Left Calls for Huge Defense Cuts – Just as Predicted by Former Terrorist Mark Rudd

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

The “respectable” US left is calling for huge defense cuts – something predicted in late 2008 by former Weather Underground terrorist leader Mark Rudd.

In 2006/2007, Mark Rudd worked closely with his old comrades Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, in a new organization Movement for a Democratic Society. Ayers and Dohrn, of course, were both close friends of Barack Obama, who they met through their participation in the Chicago far left. In 2008, Movement for a Democratic Society begat Progressives for Obama, which Mark Rudd endorsed.

Mark Rudd posted an article on the Movement for a Democratic Society aligned The Rag Blog, November 27 2008, just after the election, when many “progressives” were alarmed at some of Obama’s “moderate” appointments.

Rudd’s purpose was to calm his wavering radical friends. To assure them that Obama was on their side, but must work tactically to achieve his radical goals.

He also specifically urged his comrades to watch the George Soros funded leftist Washington DC “think tank” Center for American Progress.

If you’re anything like me, your inbox fills up daily with the cries and complaints of lefties. Just the mere mention of the names Hillary Clinton and Lawrence Summers alone conjure up a litany of horrendous right-wingers appointed to top level positions.

Betrayal is the name of the game. But wait a second. Let’s talk about a few things:

Obama is a very strategic thinker. He knew precisely what it would take to get elected and didn’t blow it… But he also knew that what he said had to basically play to the center to not be run over by the press, the Republicans, scare centrist and cross-over voters away. He made it.

So he has a narrow mandate for change, without any direction specified. What he’s doing now is moving on the most popular issues — the environment, health care, and the economy. He’ll be progressive on the environment because that has broad popular support; health care will be extended to children, then made universal, but the medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance corporations will stay in place… the economic agenda will stress stimulation from the bottom sometimes and handouts to the top at other times. It will be pragmatic… On foreign policy and the wars and the use of the military there will be no change at all. That’s what keeping Gates at the Pentagon and Clinton at State and not prosecuting the torturers is saying.

And never, never threaten the military budget. That will unite a huge majority of congress against him.

And I agree with this strategy. Anything else will court sure defeat. Move on the stuff you can to a small but significant extent, gain support and confidence. Leave the military alone because they’re way too powerful. For now, until enough momentum is raised. By the second or third year of this recession, when stimulus is needed at the bottom, people may begin to discuss cutting the military budget if security is being increased through diplomacy and application of nascent international law. Obama plays basketball. I’m not much of an athlete, barely know the game, but one thing I do know is that you have to be able to look like you’re doing one thing but do another. That’s why all these conservative appointments are important: the strategy is feint to the right, move left. Any other strategy invites sure defeat. It would be stupid to do otherwise in this environment.

Look to the second level appointments. There’s a whole govt. in waiting that Podesta has at the Center for American Progress. They’re mostly progressives, I’m told (except in military and foreign policy).

How prescient was Mark Rudd? Was he psychic, or did he simply have insight into a plan long mapped out by America’s enemies?

Three years into a recession, far leftist budget expert Leon Panetta is appointed Secretary of Defense.

John Podesta’s Center for American Progress is calling for one trillion dollars worth of defense cuts. C.A.P’s Lawrence Korb has prepared a long shopping list of defense items he wants to go on the chopping block.

Barney Frank, the Massachusetts congressman whose far left ties earned the attention of the FBI, has echoed the call.

From the Washington Times:

The political left is pressing the White House and Congress to inflict a wave of Pentagon budget cuts not seen since the post-Cold War 1990s.

Liberals are citing the debt crisis and troop drawdowns from Iraq and Afghanistan to argue that now is the time for the Defense Department to shed people, missions and weapons after a decade of doubling arms spending after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The proposals, including one from the Center for America Progress, go well beyond President Obama’s call in April for $400 billion in defense cuts over 12 years. The center — run by John Podesta, who served as chief of staff to President Clinton — wants that much in reductions over the next three years and $1 trillion from what had been projected increases over the next decade.

Some House Democrats, led by Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, also have called for $1 trillion in cuts.

“I think this is the time because of a combination of the deficit and the changing way in which we’re going to deal with threats from groups like al Qaeda,” said American Progress’ Lawrence Korb, a longtime defense analyst in Washington.

Mr. Korb said the Obama administration has dumped President George W. Bush’s overall war strategy of preemptive attacks against terrorist states, and he cited just-retired Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’ warning against any future land wars in the Middle East.

The bottom line is that the center wants projected increases ended and the overall arms budget reduced to $500 billion by 2016, which would be $111 billion below the Pentagon’s already pared-down projection…

The Center for American Progress also proposes a list of weapons terminations and troop cutbacks.

The number of V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft would be stopped at about 150. The next-generation workhorse jet fighter, the F-35 — which is mired in big cost overruns — would be bought only for the Air Force, not the Navy or Marine Corps.

The Navy’s 11 carriers — a key way America projects immediate air power overseas — would be trimmed to nine, and with it other surface ships. A full third of 150,000 troops in Europe and Asia would be ordered home.

“You may not be able to keep as many carriers forward-deployed,” said Mr. Korb. “You would have to surge them, but I don’t see any missions you could not do.”

However, reducing the number of active carriers to nine means only three typically would be deployed at one time, possibly leaving the Pacific without a surface ship strike force.

“If the Chinese are going to threaten Taiwan, they’re going to do it with short-legged stuff, short-range ballistic missiles, right from shore,” Mr. Korb said. “We can’t do it that way. If the threat were Mexico, not to worry. We build diesel submarines and short-range fighters, and we’d call it a day…”

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who proved a hawkish director of the CIA, vowed to Congress that he would not let the military go hollow as it did in the late 1970s.

On July 8, he urged the White House and Congress to base cuts on a strategy. He expressed his concern about negotiators who would “just pick a number and throw it at the Defense Department without really looking at policy, without looking at what makes sense.”

America’s many enemies, from the United Nations, to Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, have long wanted to gut America’s military capabilities.

They may now be on the verge of success.

If they do succeed, American 5th columnists in the US Congress and organizations like Center for American Progress, can rightly take a big share of the credit.

Mark Rudd has warned us of the plan.

Should we not listen?

Read more at Emerging Corruption