Tired of NOT seeing very much in the main stream media about the three quarters of a trillion-dollar defense budget Congress is getting ready to pass? A budget that is $25 billion MORE than what the war machine (oops, I meant the Pentagon) requested. Apparently, it’s not a story worthy of anything but a passing reference.
First, let’s get something straight – this is NOT a defense budget. It’s a WAR budget. In the late 1940’s as part of the optics during the build-up for the Cold War, the name of the War Department was changed to the Defense Department. What didn’t change was its mission – to make the world safe for US (and its Western European allies) businesses and to prevent revolutionary movements, in what was then called the Third World and is now known as the Global South, from resisting continued exploitation by the old colonial powers or by their proxy, the US.
When I think of defense, I conjure up an image of a protector, don’t you? Thus, if the Congress was interested in spending this money on defending us, they could take a small part of that $750,000,000,000 (and it would take a very small part) to fund a universal, worldwide COVID vaccine program. COVID has already killed 250 times more Americans than the 9/11 attacks and the failure to vaccinate the world’s population guarantees that new variants will continue to kill Americans in large numbers.
They could take another small part of that $750,000,000,000 to eliminate world hunger and an even tinier part to resettle refugees fleeing both natural and manmade disasters (read GLOBAL WARMING) and conflict (read WARS). A much saner solution to the refugee crises than building a wall.
Now that I’m divvying up the WAR budget, I’m excited to take an even larger chunk for a “pet” project of mine (and many millions of folks a lot younger than I) namely saving the world from global warming. Taking money from the WAR machine is a win-win proposition. The military is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, so cutting their budget will reduce that, as well as greatly increase the funds available for a Green New Deal.
The US is now on track to spend more on its war machine than the next 11 or 12 countries in the world combined (up from 7 or 8 only 20 years ago), and most of them are supposedly our allies. Really, now, what are we afraid of? An invasion? (Side bar – the last real invasion of the United States was in 1812, although there was a rumor a couple of years ago that the Nicaraguans were planning to invade, a sort of Bay of Pigs in reverse).
In a recent interview with a Democratic candidate for Congress in our area, I asked him to explain why we should be spending this outrageous sum, and his flippant response was “because we are the largest economy in the world, we need to spend more on our military”. (Sidebar - there is a grain of truth here, even if he had no idea what it was.) He followed it up with a comment to the effect that we need to provide this outlay for the pay and benefits of our soldiers. Obviously, he hasn’t taken a course in elementary logic, nor has he done his homework on the military budget. Only about 23% of the $750,000,000,000 goes to military personal in terms of pay and benefits. You can probably guess where most of the rest goes.
And what do we get for that $$$? A series of failed wars, coups that destabilize countries and whole regions for decades, and wars and bombing campaigns that have killed millions of people. This bloated WAR budget does not make us any safer, but it does result in chronic underfunding of infrastructure and social services at home. I would call that a lose-lose situation.
So how do the WAR machine and the merchants of death (i.e.,
the Military-Industrial Complex) get away with this? More on this in future
posts (but here is a hint – reread the first sentence of the post.)
