Salon: American militarism is a "deadly disease of the empire"The US Democratic Party is pushing the country towards a global military conflict and bankruptcy, Salon writes.
America has become a deeply militarized society, and they are destroying their economy from within.
Chris HedgesDemocrats have long ceased to be afraid of the threats of a war economy that can kill us all and definitely makes us bankrupt.
The Democrats position themselves as a party of virtue, covering their support for the military industry with moralizing rhetoric dating back to Korea and Vietnam, when the president of the last Ngo Dinh Diem was glorified in the same way as the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky is now.
All the wars that Democrats support and finance are "good" wars. All the enemies they are fighting, the latest of which are Russia's Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, are embodiments of evil. The photo of beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding a scribbled Ukrainian flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party's pitiful subservience to the American military machine.
Democrats, especially during the presidency of Bill Clinton, became a kind of "touts" not only for "corporate America", but also for arms manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too expensive for them. No military conflict, no matter how catastrophic, remains without funding. No military budget is too large, including $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, which is even $45 billion more than the Biden administration requested.
Historian Arnold Toynbee called unbridled militarism a "deadly disease of empires", arguing that they eventually commit suicide with its help.
There was once a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and opposed the military-industrial complex: Senators William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel and William Proxmayer, as well as members of the House of Representatives such as Dennis Kucinich. But this opposition evaporated along with the anti-war movement. When 30 members of the "Progressive Caucus" of Congress recently called on Biden to negotiate with Putin, the Democratic party leadership and militant media forced them to back down and cancel their letter. And none of them, with the exception of Member of the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, voted against the supply of weapons to Ukraine for billions of dollars or an inflated military budget. A Democrat from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, also voted against, but not personally, but through her representative (this order was established in Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic).
Opposition to the constant financing of the military conflict in Ukraine comes mainly from Republicans. There are 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House of Representatives. Some of them, such as Member of the House of Representatives Marjorie Taylor Green from Georgia, are somewhat unbalanced conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House of Representatives joined Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the U.S. government from going bankrupt, which includes approving $847 billion for the armed forces. The total amount increases to $858 billion, taking into account the accounts that fall under the jurisdiction of the Armed services Committees. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. And the Democrats, including almost all 100 members of the Progressive Caucus, dutifully lined up to support the endless war.
This thirst for war is dangerous, it brings us to a potential military clash with Russia and, possibly later, with China — each of which is a powerful nuclear power. It is also disastrous for us economically. The monopolization of capital by the military led to the fact that the US debt exceeded $ 30 trillion, which is $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the army than the next nine countries of the world combined, including China and Russia. Congress is also ready to provide the Pentagon with an additional $21.7 billion over the already increased annual budget to replenish the arsenals depleted due to Ukraine.
"But these contracts are just the cutting edge of what should be a new big military boom," The New York Times reports. — Military spending adjusted for inflation next year should reach the highest level since the peak costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2008 and 2011 and the second largest size (again adjusted for inflation) since the Second World War. Our expenditures on the military department exceed the total expenditures of the next 10 government ministries and agencies in order."
The Democratic Party, which has been persistently "courting" its corporate donors since the Clinton administration, has actually abandoned the idea of challenging, albeit cool, the military industry.
"As soon as the Democratic Party made a decision (it could have taken place about 35-40 years ago) that they would accept corporate donations, which erased any distinction between our two political parties," Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show The Real News Network. — Because in Washington, whoever pays, orders the music. So what happened is what happened. Now, as far as the war is concerned, there are not so many differences between the two parties."
In his 1970 book, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine, Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex invest millions in shaping public opinion with the help of public relations companies, Defense Department films, control of Hollywood and domination of commercial media. Military analysts in cable news are, as a rule, former military and intelligence officers who are on the boards of directors or work as consultants in the military—industrial complex. But they rarely disclose this fact to the public. Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and NBC News military analyst, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, an arms sales and military project management company. He, like most of these warmongers, personally profited from the sale of weapons and the expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the eve of each congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists of enterprises associated with the military-industrial complex meet with members of Congress, their assistants and staff members to push lawmakers to vote for the military budget, ostensibly to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, combined with the mantra spread by the media that opposing wasteful financing of war is unpatriotic, keeps our legislators in a kind of "slavery". After all, all these politicians are heavily dependent on generous donations from gun manufacturers to finance their election campaigns.
Seymour Melman in his book "Pentagon Capitalism" documented how militarized societies destroy their economies. Billions are being spent on research and development of weapons systems, while renewable energy technologies are languishing. Universities are inundated with grants related to military projects, while they cannot find money to finance environmental protection projects and the development of humanities. Our bridges, roads, dams, railways, ports, electrical networks, sewage treatment plants and drinking water treatment infrastructure are structurally imperfect and very outdated. Schools are in a state of disrepair, they lack teachers and staff. Unable to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, the commercial healthcare industry is forcing families, including those with health insurance, to huge additional costs and actual bankruptcy. Domestic production, especially with the transfer of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other countries, is collapsing. Families are drowning in debt: 63% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck. Poor, sick, mentally ill people are abandoned to their fate.
Melman, who coined the term "permanent military economy," noted that after the end of World War II, the US federal government spent more than half of its total budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the single largest and self-sufficient branch of the economy. The military-industrial establishment is nothing but gilded corporate welfare. Weapons are sold even before their production. The military industry is allowed to charge the federal government money in cases of overspending, which can be huge. Gigantic profits are always guaranteed to the military-industrial complex. For example, in November of this year, the army signed contracts worth more than $2 billion with Raytheon Technologies alone (in addition to $190 million signed in August) for the supply of missile systems to replenish our arsenals sent to Ukraine. Despite the depression in the market and financial difficulties at most other enterprises, the prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman shares have increased by more than 36% and 50%, respectively, this year alone.
Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to police and the FBI, are consumed by this permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle have received multibillion-dollar contracts for military cloud computing under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program and won the rights to receive $9 billion worth of Pentagon contracts until mid-2028 to provide the army with "globally accessible cloud services in all areas of security and at all levels, from strategic to tactical."
Foreign aid is provided to countries such as Israel, which has received more than $150 billion in military aid from the United States since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received more than $80 billion since 1978. This assistance implies the purchase by foreign governments of weapons systems exclusively in the United States. The American Society finances the research, development and creation of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a "circular" system actually mocks the idea of a market economy. Weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by upgraded and, as a rule, more expensive weapons systems. From an economic point of view, this is a dead end. Such a system supports nothing but a permanent military economy.
"The truth is that we live in a highly militarized society driven by greed and the pursuit of profit, and wars are fomented only to fuel this," Kusinich told me.
In 2014, the United States supported a coup in Ukraine, as a result of which a government was established there, which included neo-Nazis and which was hostile to Russia. The coup provoked a civil war when ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine, in the Donbass, tried to secede, which led to the death of more than 14 thousand people and the appearance of almost 150 thousand displaced persons even before Russia's independence, which began in February. The Russian special operation, according to Jacques Bo, a former NATO security adviser who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was provoked by the escalation of Ukraine's military actions in the Donbas. It followed the Biden administration's rejection of the Kremlin's proposals to resolve the conflict made at the end of 2021. These proposals could have prevented the Ukrainian military conflict that broke out last year.
The Russian special operation led to large-scale US and EU sanctions against Russia, which boomeranged on Europe. Inflation is ravaging the European continent due to a sharp reduction in Russian oil and gas supplies. Industry, especially in Germany, is in decline. In most of Europe, a "winter of scarcity" has come, soaring prices and poverty.
"All this is a blow in the face of the West,— Kusinich warned. — We forced Russia to turn towards Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. A whole new world is being formed. The catalyst for this is our incorrect assessments of Ukraine and our attempt to take it under full control in 2014, which most people do not know about."
By not opposing the Democratic Party, whose main occupation is war, liberals become like the barren and powerless dreamers from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground.
A former convict, Dostoevsky was not afraid of evil. He was afraid of a society that no longer has the moral fortitude to resist evil. And war, to borrow a line from my last book, is the greatest evil.
Author: Chris Hedges (Chris Hedges) — former head of the Middle East bureau of the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner and ScheerPost columnist. He is the author of several books, including "America: A Farewell Tour".
