War Spending Is Bankrupting America
By John W. Whitehead
Information Clearing House
Thursday, March 14, 2019
War spending is bankrupting America.
Our nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex
that is propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and
foreign governments.
America has so much to offer—creativity, ingenuity, vast natural
resources, a rich heritage, a beautifully diverse populace,
a freedom foundation unrivaled anywhere in the world, and
opportunities galore—and yet our birthright is being sold
out from under us so that power-hungry politicians, greedy
military contractors, and bloodthirsty war hawks can make
a hefty profit at our expense.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars
are being used for national security and urgent military needs.
It’s all a ruse.
You know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the
end of the government’s fiscal year?
Government agencies—including the Department of Defense
—go on a “use it or lose it” spending spree so they can justify
asking for money in the next fiscal year.
We’re not talking chump change, either.
We’re talking $97 billion worth of wasteful spending.
According to an investigative report by Open the Government,
among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal
year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these
“use it or lose it” funds:
Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004),
alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment
including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail
and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and
workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).
So much for draining the swamp.
Anyone who suggests that the military needs more money is either
criminally clueless or equally corrupt, because the military isn’t
suffering from lack of funding—it’s suffering from lack of proper
oversight.
Where President Trump fits into that scenario, you decide.
Trump may turn out to be, as policy analyst Stan Collender warned,
“the biggest deficit- and debt-increasing president of all time.”
Rest assured, however, that if Trump gets his way—to the tune of a
$4.7 trillion budget that digs the nation deeper in debt to foreign
creditors, adds $750 billion for the military budget, and doubles the
debt growth that Trump once promised to erase—the war profiteers
(and foreign banks who “own” our debt) will be raking in a fortune
while America goes belly up.
This is basic math, and the numbers just don’t add up.
As it now stands, the U.S. government is operating in the negative
on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and
takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily
(from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the
government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad.
Certainly, nothing about the way the government budgets its funds
puts America’s needs first.
The nation’s educational system is pathetic (young people are
learning nothing about their freedoms or their government).
The infrastructure is antiquated and growing more outdated by
the day.
The health system is overpriced and inaccessible to those who need
it most.
The supposedly robust economy is belied by the daily reports
of businesses shuttering storefronts and declaring bankruptcy.
And our so-called representative government is a sham.
If this is a formula for making America great again, it’s not working.
The White House wants taxpayers to accept that the only way to
reduce the nation’s ballooning deficit is by cutting “entitlement”
programs such as Social Security and Medicare, yet the glaring
economic truth is that at the end of the day, it’s the military
industrial complex—and not the sick, the elderly or the poor—that
is pushing America towards bankruptcy.
We have become a debtor nation, and the government is sinking us
deeper into debt with every passing day that it allows the military
industrial complex to call the shots.
Simply put, the government cannot afford to maintain its
over-extended military empire.
“Money is the new 800-pound gorilla,” remarked a senior
administration official involved in Afghanistan.
“It shifts the debate from ‘Is the strategy working?’ to ‘Can
we afford this?’ And when you view it that way, the scope of
the mission that we have now is far, far less defensible.”
Or as one commentator noted, “Foreclosing the future of our
country should not be confused with defending it.”
To be clear, the U.S government’s defense spending is about
one thing and one thing only: establishing and maintaining
a global military empire.
Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population,
America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure,
spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending
nations combined.
In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states
combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire
unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to
conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion
waging its endless wars.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt
politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s
expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate
of more than $32 million per hour.
In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five
seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.
Then there’s the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus
U.S. military bases spread around the world and policing the globe
with 1.3 million U.S. troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70%
of the countries worldwide).
Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are
expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a
military empire it can’t afford.
As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than
15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with
a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the
form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities
like pension funds and state and local governments, and by
countries like China and Japan.”
War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you
factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors.
As The Nation reports:
For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been
perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud,
deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and
drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military
necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its
annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions
of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions
—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading
reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD
the following year.
For example, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the
Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions
of dollars’ worth of spending.”
Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending
that can be tracked.
A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been
massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in
tens of millions of dollars in overspending.
As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:
$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a
small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a
5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part,
also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD
for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin
metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands,
for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption
within the American military empire is a sad statement on how
little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.
Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior.
It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.
The U.S. government is not making the world any safer.
It’s making the world more dangerous.
It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere
in the world every 12 minutes.
Since 9/11, the United States government has directly
contributed to the deaths of around 500,000.
Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.
The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing
American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term
referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s
international activities.
Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that
America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy
would result in devastating blowback.
Those who call the shots in the government—those who push the
military industrial complex’s agenda—those who make a killing by
embroiling the U.S. in foreign wars—have not heeded Johnson’s
warning.
The U.S. government is not making American citizens any safer.
The repercussions of America’s military empire have been deadly,
not only for those innocent men, women, and children killed by
drone strikes abroad but also those here in the United States.
The 9/11 attacks were blowback.
The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback.
The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback.
The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.
The transformation of America into a battlefield is blowback.
All of this carnage is being carried out with the full support of the
American people, or at least with the proxy that is our taxpayer
dollars.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the
national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources,
and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless
wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized, under a military empire, war
and its profiteering will always take precedence over the people’s
basic human needs.
Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower warned us not to let the
profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic
processes.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world
in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school
in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants each serving
a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single
fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a
single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than
8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on
the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all,
in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is
humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way
the world may live?”
We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.
The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government
that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps
the greatest threat to the nation today.
It’s not sustainable, of course.
Eventually, inevitably, military empires fall and fail by spreading
themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.
It happened in Rome. It’s happening again.
The America empire is already breaking down.
We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually
every front, and the government is ready.
For years now, the government has worked with the military to
prepare for widespread civil unrest brought about by “economic
collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful
domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health
emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
For years now, the government has been warning against the
dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems
to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems
to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as
extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate
anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.
We’re approaching critical mass.
As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to
wage its costly, meaningless, endless wars abroad, the American
homeland will continue to suffer: our roads will crumble, our
bridges will fail, our schools will fall into disrepair, our drinking
water will become undrinkable, our communities will destabilize,
our economy will tank, crime will rise, and our freedoms will
suffer.
So who will save us?
As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on
the American People, we’d better start saving ourselves: one
by one, neighbor to neighbor, through grassroots endeavors,
by pushing back against the police state where it most counts
—in our communities first and foremost, and by holding fast
to what binds us together and not allowing politics and other
manufactured non-realities to tear us apart.
Start today. Start now. Do your part.
Literally and figuratively, the buck starts and stops with “we the
people.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51270.htm
