President Obama does not want our defense contractors to give layoff notices to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. He is willing to illegally pay those workers with citizen tax dollars until after the election, along with any incurred fines for not complying with the act.

Major defense contractors include Lockheed Martin, BAE systems, EADS North America, etc. Hundreds are due to be laid off, and they are legally required to be notified months in advance.

Mainstream media are doing all they can to shore up Obama’s jobs image, like reporting unemployment as under 8 percent, when in reality, the workers who have given up looking are no longer counted. Fox reports actual unemployment is over 11 percent.

The loss of defense jobs would likely cause a huge jump in those numbers as well. Don’t listen to what Obama says, watch what he does.

Digesting Samuelson’s weekly morsels requires much attrition; they constitute a biopsy of the neo-con soul for us to inspect.

His backdrop is sound; $2.1 trillion in budgetary reductions for 2012-2021 were passed in debt-ceiling negotiations. Of those reductions, $1.2 trillion were considered “painful” and renegotiable by congressional “super-committee” until a 2013 “sequestration mechanism.”

But Samuelson cannot resist the tried-and-true propaganda of fear-mongering, blaming our president for “devastating cuts” which “dangle over the throat of defense.”

Defense spending consumes roughly $700 billion of our annual budget – nearly half of global military spending.

“As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan … we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces,” President Obama said.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta concurred: “The U.S. joint force will be smaller and leaner, but its great strength will be that it is more agile, flexible, ready to deploy, innovative and technologically advanced,” adding that “The plan is aligned to strategic priorities we have identified to keep America safe and maintain the strongest military in the world.”

These statements are corroborated by foreign policy successes in Pakistan against Osama bin Laden; in Libya against Moammar Gadhafi; and by exercising discretion in Egypt.

While Obama achieves historic nuclear treaties with both Russia and North Korea, Samuelson cries foul that the budget unfairly hurts Republicans. He warns of “dreadful consequences” of “chaos” and “confusion.”

In reality, Obama plays chess, while the GOP plays checkers.

Federal Transfer Funds (FTF) – monies entering the state to pay for federal commitments – represent a good portion of the economy of Washington state due to its several military installations and large military retiree population.

In the 2010 fiscal year, $3.737 billion was paid to fulfill commitments to 70,983 military retirees, their dependents and 8,373 retiree widows in this state. More than $1 billion of this is retiree retention pay. With most of this spent in the state boosting businesses, creating new jobs and reducing unemployment, it has a major impact on the state’s economic well-being.

The state will suffer a huge decrease in FTF with the proposed cutbacks in the defense budget. The proposed revamping of the military retirement system to an IRA-type retirement over time would negatively affect the state’s economy by billions of dollars plus military retiree retention pay now entering the state each year. Every facet of the state’s economy will be negatively affected.

This “penny wise, pound foolish” proposal will cost the Defense Department more in recruiting/training costs as it must continually recruit and train new troops to replace the trained career troops who will leave the service in droves as they refuse to put their lives on the line without the added incentives of the present retirement system.

The politicians are forgetting that the preamble to the Constitution requires the government to provide for the common defense of the United States. It can’t be done by shorting our career military.