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Why
the Deafening Silence on Cutting the Military Budget?
By
Harvey Wasserman, David Swanson, Bob Fitrakis
Bernie Sanders’ common sense proposals for dealing with universal health care,
college tuition, restoring the infrastructure, confronting poverty and more
have encountered predictable scorn from “fiscally responsible” corporatists.
They
all scream about the “deficit spending” and tax hikes that might be required to
pay for these vital programs. From predictable right-wing corporatists to
Hillary Clinton (“free stuff! free stuff!” she mocks) to fictional
“left-leaning economists” invented by the New York Times, numerous voices scorn
Bernie’s agenda because his proposals “cost too much.”
But nowhere do we find anyone willing to take on the biggest imperial welfare
program of them all, the most obvious source of revenue for the programs needed
to heal our nation: the military budget. If Sanders were willing to cut the
military budget he’d encounter no criticism for raising taxes, because he’d
have no need to raise taxes. We hope that he’ll no longer pass up this
opportunity to tell us how he would cut into a military budget that exceeds
nearly all the rest of the world’s combined, and that largely has nothing to do
with fighting terrorism (and so often makes it worse).
It’s not that Bernie doesn’t have a good answer for how he would pay for
everything. He does, and it’s plenty clear and simple for an intelligent fourth
grader, and possibly even Donald Trump, to grasp. But just try squeezing the
following into a sound byte television response to “You want to raise my
taxes!”
Even
this lengthy list does not seem to straightforwardly explain that Medicare for
All could raise your taxes, but would give you net savings as you dropped your
health insurance payments.
For
those who can get past sound bytes, Sanders’ proposals are good, and the taxes
all needed for the sake of equitable sharing of wealth and power. But cutting
the oceans of cash going to the armed forces is also needed for the purpose of
slowing down the military industrial complex and its penchant for creating
wars.
And
there are projects that the United States and the world desperately need that
aren’t listed above. Rather than more wars and occupations, the United States
has a moral responsibility to begin a massive investment in actual humanitarian
aid to the world, a world beginning to suffer from climate change driven more
by the United States than any other nation, with the possible exception of the
much, much larger nation of China.
The
United States is currently extremely stingy in foreign aid by global standards,
and a Marshall-Plan scale investment could work wonders in transforming world
opinion about the U.S. government. A similar investment, much more than $100
billion per year, is needed in the United States for green energy. The
possibility of creating a Solartopia is slipping away from us, while the cost
of the Iraq war alone would have been enough to halt climate change.
Here
are some simple, obvious ways to pay for all those programs Bernie advocates,
and much much more:
1.
There are various plans afoot to “upgrade” the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal,
with price tags in the range of $1,000,000,000,000 and more. Why don’t we just
get rid of all of them and use the money to pay for much of the above?
2.
There is talk of a replacement fleet of a dozen “Ohio Class” nuclear submarines
at a (currently estimated) cost of up to $8,000,000,000 each (which is bound to
soar), with construction to begin in 2021. These are perfectly designed to
protect us from the Soviet Union, which no longer exists, and will do nothing
except bankrupt us, making us more vulnerable to the likes of ISIS, which was
created by our intervention in Iraq.
3.
The United States currently maintains at least 900 bases outside its borders,
with troops stationed in 175 foreign nations and waging or threating war in
some of the handful of nations that do not have U.S. troops (Syria, Iran). The
financial cost is over $100 billion a year. The bases, in many cases, generate
an enormous amount of popular resentment and hatred, serving as motivations for
attacks on the bases themselves or elsewhere — famously including the attacks
of September 11, 2001. Why continue to pay for this?
4.
The military spends millions every year advertising itself as a career
opportunity, with fly-overs at football games, saturation TV spots, marching
bands (the military is the nation’s leading employer of musicians) and more. In
fact, it has an entrenched interest in keeping college tuitions high, as a key
incentive for young people to enlist is to be able to afford tuition. Yet while
the armed forces are heavily over-staffed, and recruitment ads for the National
Guard depict the bringing of aid to natural disasters, the reality is that a
major effort to aid those at home and abroad impacted by climate change or
disasters like the methane gas leak at Port Ranch, California, doesn’t exist
and would be a prime step toward guaranteeing a true global peace.
If the military were scaled back even a little, in the direction of a purely
defensive operation, we could create such a modern civilian conservation corps
and, among other things, put solar panels on the rooftops of every building on earth.
There
is, of course, much more that could be done to cut the military budget and pay
for what we really need. The vast bulk of military expenditures today have
nothing to do with fighting terrorism. In many cases, the clumsy bludgeonings
of our over-stuffed military actually promote it.
Yet this kind of discussion has not yet made it into the mainstream. We look
forward to either journalists or brave nonviolent event disruptors inserting
this topic into the endless election coverage.
David
Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of
WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org.
Bob
Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of the upcoming THE STRIP &
FLIP SELECTION OF 2016 FIVE JIM CROWS & ELECTRONIC ELECTION THEFT.
--
David
Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of
WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's
books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org.
.
War
Is A Lie: Second Edition, published by Just World Books on April 5, 2016.
Please buy it online that day. I'll come anywhere in the world to speak about
it. Invite me!
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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