It’s come to this. Preserving tax breaks for the wealthy has become essential to our national security, at the expense of some 2 million Americans who stand to have their unemployment benefits cut-off for Christmas. Recently, Senator John Kyle (R-AZ) the Republican’s point man on nuclear weapons, indicated that the New START Treaty reducing U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons won’t stand a chance of ratification this year if the Senate allows the Bush era tax cuts for the rich to expire.

At the same time, a stiff dose of “Dikensian” economics is being doled out by Senate Republicans, led by Scott Brown, as they threaten to cut off unemployment funds for two-million before Christmas. New jobless claims last month still remain above 400,000.

The $700 billion in tax breaks for the wealthy must be preserved, even though there are some 15 million Americans out of work. At the same time, the U.S. will have to borrow huge sums from China to maintain a grossly oversized nuclear arsenal and to refurbish its nuclear weapons complex to make more.