by TED RALL
Military spending is the biggest waste of federal tax dollars ever. Both political parties are equally complicit.
The militarism scam is the best-kept secret in American politics.
When you think about it — but no one in the halls of Congress ever does — it’s hard to think of a country that has less to fear than the United States. Two vast oceans eliminate our vulnerability to attack, except by countries with sophisticated long-range ballistic missiles (5out of 206 nations). We share long borders with two nations that we count as close allies and trading partners.
Historically, the U.S. has only faced an invasion once, by the British during the War of 1812. (There have been other minor incursions, by Mexico during the 19th century and the Japanese occupation of two remote islands in the Aleutian chain during World War II. The Pearl Harbor attack was a raid, not an invasion.)
Objectively, we have little to worry about beside terrorism — and that’s a job for domestic police and intelligence agencies, not the military. Yet a whopping 54% of discretionary federal spending goes to the Pentagon. The Bush Administration put the Afghanistan and Iraq wars “off the books” of the Pentagon budget. And that’s not counting interest on debt or benefits paid out for old wars. We’re still paying $5 billion a year for World War II. We’re still paying off beneficiaries for the Civil and Spanish-American Wars!
The U.S. accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population. We account for 37% of military spending worldside, equal to the next seven countries (China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, Japan) combined. (And the U.S. sells a lot of hardware to most of those countries.)
Russia spends roughly a tenth as much on defense as the U.S. And they have a lot more (and twice as much territory) to defend against: NATO/American missiles to their west in Europe, a southern border full of radical Islamists in unstable countries like Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Afghanistan a stone’s throw away, historical regional superpower rival China next door. Despite its relatively small defense budget, Russia somehow manages to soldier on.
No matter how you look at it, America’s military budget is due for a haircut. If it were up to me, I’d scale quickly down to the Russian level, pro rata for square mileage — lob 95% of this bloated $600 billion a year monstrosity right off the top. But even a less radical budget cutter could do some good. A 10% cut — $60 billion a year — would buy universal pre-school or allow half of America’s four-year college and university students to have free tuition.
Insanely, we’re going the opposite direction.
President Trump wants to increase military spending by $54 billion — roughly 10% — per year.
Republican hypocrisy is brazen and obvious. Most are channeling Dick Cheney’s “deficits don’t matter” to justify huge tax cuts to rich individuals and big business. “I’m not the first to observe that a Republican Congress only cares about the deficit when a Democrat is in the White House,” the economist Alan Krueger says. But even the most strident deficit hawks, though uncomfortable with the tax cuts, have no problem whatsoever with Trump’s proposed hike in military spending.
“Any time we spend more money — even if it’s for something that we need — we need to cut spending in a corresponding aspect to the budget,” says Rand Paul. Slashing other, more needed programs — which is pretty much anything other than the military — is what passes for sanity in the Republican Party.
No one is proposing zero increase, much less a cut.
If anything, the Democrats are even worse. Democrats have promised a fierce Resistance to Trump and his works. But their oft-stated resolve is noticeably absent when it comes to He-Who-Must-Be-Impeached’s lust to jack up a crazy-ass defense budget that doesn’t have much of a justification to exist at all.
“This budget shifts the burden off of the wealthy and special interests and puts it squarely on the backs of the middle class and those struggling to get there … Democrats in Congress will emphatically oppose these cuts and urge our Republican colleagues to reject them as well,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
Notice what’s missing? Like other Democratic leaders, Schumer’s beef is with Trump’s proposed cuts to the arts, EPA and other domestic spending, and the tax cuts. He doesn’t say boo about the defense increase.
As usual, Bernie Sanders was better than other Democrats. But even he didn’t explicitly reject the idea of a military increase on its face.
As we move past Memorial Day — the holiday when we remember the war dead, the vast majority who died not to defend America but to oppress people in other countries who never posed a threat to the United States — we should reconsider the assumption that all military spending is good spending.
Notice what’s missing? Like other Democratic leaders, Schumer’s beef is with Trump’s proposed cuts to the arts, EPA and other domestic spending, and the tax cuts. He doesn’t say boo about the defense increase. As usual, Bernie Sanders was better than other Democrats. But even he didn’t explicitly reject the idea of a military increase on its face.
We must stop perpetual war. We must end the War on Terror. We must end the military waste. We must stop demonizing Iran. We must stop demonizing Syria. We must stop demonizing China. We must stop demonizing Russia. We must stop the war crimes and plunder. We must halt wanton death and destruction. We must stop creating terrorists and refugees. We must end America’s bombs away diplomacy. We must end the military madness of empire building. We must put an end to regime change and nation building. We must stop pretending to be the policeman of the planet. We must… Read more »
Think about this: Would middle class America rather spend $1 for desperately needed poverty relief or $100 to maintain war? Our budgets, as well as the general public discussion, provide the answer.
The US is a war nation. War is what we do. Today, we can no longer afford to do much else, except prisons. The US has remained engaged in wars more often than not, almost always by choice, for over a century. The international community has increasingly grown to see this nuclear-armed country as the greatest potential threat to all life.
Here is an article on the Peace Dividend project by one of my all-time favorite writers, John T. Hall.
The Peace Dividend: A Time To Take Dead Aim and Attack . . . https://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/04/28/the-peace-dividend-a-time-to-take-dead-aim-and-attack/
Every time tax payers money is allocated to the Pentagon, named ‘defence spending’, this orwellian double-speak distorts all perception of our (governments) true war-mongering agenda. Terrorism is basically (dictionary definition) ‘violence against civilians for political gain’…. and this; once seen through the hogwash, is what the Pentagon is all about. By naming the miltarys mass toll of civilian victims ‘collateral damage’ the public is once again distracted from the obscene amount of suffering; death and indeed destruction that they indeed pay for with their tax dollars… and what is the greatest general excuse for this state sponsored bomb-dropping terrorism? Well… Read more »
I remember back when the democrats held their presidential convention in San Francisco.
Perhaps I’ll write it into a story someday but here I say we pounded on the sides of a skyscraper in the financial district and there were so many of us that vertical slat siding was sending clacking waves clear to the top and the building was evacuated.
I’ll never forget handing out leaflets listing the democrat’s wars to fleeing bankers business men. They were amazed that peace workers opposed democrats because they are such callous war mongers.