By Mike Prokosch

On Monday a thousand Boston teachers got we-might-lay-you-off notices. Next month the Little House Health Center will close.

The cuts are piling up. We need about $2 billion to close the gap between what's coming into the state treasury and what we need to maintain health care for kids, rent aid that keeps families in their homes and off the streets. Two billion happens to be roughly Massachusetts taxpayers' share of the war in Iraq.

So how about stopping the war right now &emdash; before our troops and Iraqi civilians get chewed up in a Baghdad street battle - and using the money to stop this war at home?

Let's just say that's not at the top of George W. Bush's list.

At the top is an enormous tax cut for the rich.

Last week in Washington, Bush's people jammed next year's budget through the House of Representatives. It gives multi-millionaires $30,000 each. The richest one percent of US taxpayers get about a third of the whole tax cut. The top five percent get almost half. There's no money to bail out the states.

To pay for that handout, Bush slashed Medicaid, school lunches, cash assistance for the elderly, student loans and &emdash; get this &emdash; medical benefits for disabled veterans.

How did he get away with it? Well, have you noticed the lead story on every night's news? The war is a weapon of mass distraction that lets Bush quietly throw money at the people who contributed to his campaign.

And who run his cabinet. Dick Cheney, before assuming the Vice Presidency, ran an oil equipment company named Halliburton. Now a Halliburton subsidiary named Kellogg Brown & Root is building camps for our forces in Iraq and wherever else US forces go in the next ten years. The contract is better than the Big Dig. There's no ceiling on costs and KBR gets 1 percent on top of whatever they spend. Plus bonuses the Pentagon can give them if they like KBR's work. One contract expert described it as "Come up with creative ways to spend my money, and the more you spend, the happier I'll be."

Cheney and Bush aparently see nothing wrong with enriching their friends while others do the fighting. And nothing wrong with slapping union members in the face. Bush and his appointees have decided that several groups of federal employees can't form unions because then they might put the union before their country. On January 8, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay - the guy who pushed the tax cut through &emdash; called America's labor movement "a clear and present danger to the security of the United States at home and the safety of our armed forces overseas." He also accused unions &emdash; especially the Firefighters - of exploiting Sept. 11, 2001, for a "shameful post-9/11 power grab."

That's what you get for supporting the President after 9-11. Or maybe just for not being wealthy.

In previous wars, presidents have raised taxes on the rich and built bridges with labor so the country goes to war together.

Not this time. This one is a war on us.