Today, the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee included a $25 billion preemptive bailout of the nuclear industry, in the form of loan guarantees for new reactors, in the Energy and Water Appropriations bill.

President Obama wants to dramatically increase spending on nuclear weapons. Tell the president to cut - not increase - the nuclear weapons budget.

President Barack Obama will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned - a request that could be an especially hard sell to some of the administration's Democratic allies.

Out of control militarism is bankrupting America, morally and financially. Tell Congress to invest in human needs, not endless wars.

With President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats considering a massive spending package aimed at pulling the nation out of recession, the national debt is projected to jump by as much as $2 trillion this year, an unprecedented increase that could test the world's appetite for financing U.S. government spending.

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So, one might ask, where is there room to cut spending? The Pentagon budget, for starters. With total expenditures at over $700 billion and counting — including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the United States is spending more for military purposes than at any time since World War II.

The current financial crisis presents an opportunity to scrap the failed policies of neoliberal economics and make America's economic policy both stronger and fairer. By rejecting band-aid solutions, taking decisive action to stop the bleeding, holding the culprits accountable, and reforming our financial system to address the root causes of the crisis, we would do future generations a great service.

"In our councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex..."

With the focus on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, appropriators quietly executed an end run around challenges to the thousands of earmarks slipped in the must-pass, year-end spending bill.

Proposals from Washington to fix the financial crisis fall far short of addressing the fundamental problems that led to the crisis. Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of "Globalization and Its Discontents" Joseph Stiglitz outlines an alternative bailout that would benefit the American people instead of the big corporations that made this mess.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States continued spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined. Andrew Bacevich, author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism", questions whether the runaway spending actually makes America safer, and why candidates from both the Democratic and Republican parties are swearing allegiance to the global "war on terror".

The Democratic presidential candidate has adopted a key component of Bush's fiscal policy: A novel bookkeeping method that guarantees that the $9.5 trillion national debt will get much bigger.

More than a year after Congress pledged to curb pork barrel funding known as earmarks, lawmakers are gearing up for another spending binge, directing billions toward organizations and companies in their home districts.

The U.S. has been on a madcap spending spree on wars and weapons having little, if anything, to do with combating terrorism, nothing to do with the imaginary threat from China and everything to do with sustaining an enormously bloated defense industry.

The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can't spend $3 trillion -- yes, $3 trillion -- on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.

Many Americans, including numerous seniors and people with chronic conditions, obtain prescription drugs from international sources not because they're scratching some itch for faraway places. The shameful reality is that they're looking abroad simply because they can't afford U.S. drug prices.

Prescription-drug ads prompt nearly one-third of Americans to ask their doctors about an advertised medicine, and 82% of those who ask say their physicians recommended a prescription.

The $3.1-trillion fiscal 2009 budget proposal represents Bush's last chance to establish his legacy. Unfortunately, it will be one of massive deficit spending that will be paid for by generations to come.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have treated the military budget as sacrosanct with their Senate votes and their campaign rhetoric. Clinton is particularly clear on the record as favoring spending more, not less, on the military.

And the worst of it is that the Democrats, who should have been in a strong position -- does this administration have any credibility left on economic policy? -- appear to have caved in almost completely.

The new earmark disclosure rules put into effect by Congress confirm the pre-eminence of Representative John Murtha at procuring eye-popping chunks of pork for contractors he helped put in business in Johnstown, Pa.

Democrats took control of Congress last January promising a "new direction." A year later, the image that haunts them most is one symbolizing no direction at all: gridlock.