Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Covid and the
Military
H
Patricia Hynes
June
17, 2020
Submitted
to Portside by the Author
On May 18, the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) launched a Salvation Army-like charity
drive asking the public for donations of money, food and mobile
phones to help an estimated 40,000 homeless veterans during the
pandemic. More than one-half of all homeless veterans are African
American and Hispanic, while they account for only 15% of U.S. veterans,
another punishing consequence of pervasive racism.
How is it that a
country that spends nearly $1 trillion each year on the military, national
security, cybersecurity and weapons manufacture, a country that touts itself as
the military superpower of the world, with soldiers and weapons on every
continent except Antarctica, needs charity for its veterans?
The final end for
World War II veterans at the Holyoke Soldiers Home in Massachusetts
tragically mirrored their wartime experiences. Feted when first built in 1952,
the Soldiers Home has suffered serious shortages of protective gear during Covid
and has been chronically underfunded and understaffed, such that the
administrator combined wards of uninfected and infected men. Of the 210
veterans living there, 89 had died by late May – among
the highest death tolls of any end-of-life facility in the country.
In late March,
Captain Brett Crozier sent an e-mail up his chain of command regarding the
hazardous conditions for the 4,800-crew members aboard the tightly- quartered
aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, on which cases of coronavirus were growing.
“We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die,” he wrote. “If we do not act
now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset
— our Sailors.” When his message was leaked to the San Francisco
Chronicle, the captain was removed from his post. “We all have one mission
and that’s to defend the nation,” said then Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modley
who removed Crozier, suggesting the sailors at risk were dispensable. As
of June 10, 1200 of the 4,800-crew members aboard the aircraft carrier USS
Theodore Roosevelt had contracted the coronavirus.
If soldiers and
veterans are so disposable, what does matter to the deepest pocket of our tax
dollars, the Department of Defense [sic]?
Since the
inception of the pandemic, the Washington consensus assured that major weapons
makers, such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon would receive payment in advance
of work. The chief pandemic profiteer Lockheed Martin received
an estimated $450 million to keep its supply chain for weapons
funded. So generous is the advance funding that the company is advertising
thousands of new jobs. This while millions of unemployed waited desperately for
their belated $1200 aid and relief payment from the federal government.
Elsewhere, tucked
away in the House Heroes Act is a provision to reimburse defense contractors,
not only for unemployed workers but also for executives’ salaries and
business costs of marketing and sales.
Why the preference
for the industry of war and death, over its vets and soldiers? For one, the
Pentagon is driven to remain the macho military superpower of the world, given
China’s economic prowess. Marshall Billingslea, the US arms control negotiator,
has sets his sights on spending Russia and China “into oblivion” in an arms
race. Secretary of Defense [sic] Mark Esper worries that the $3 trillion
infusion into the economy for, among others, the now 16% unemployed, those who
can’t pay for rent or food or medications, “may throw us off course of
increasing the DOD [sic] budget 3 to 5%.”
Every “good” in
our federal discretionary budget – education, housing, health, renewable
energy, diplomacy, and more is cut in Trump’s proposed 2021 budget, while
weapons of mass destruction, fossil fuels, anti-immigration staffing and
resources are increased. Worse, the DOD [sic] has insulated the weapons
manufacturers from the economic crash of Covid in order to assure our military
dominance in the world.
With a new
administration, we have a chance to cut the defense [sic] budget. However, as
one analyst writes “even the most liberal legislators are likely to
rush to the defense of plants [and jobs] in their own district.” But, an
aggressive Green New Deal here, like Germany’s economic recovery
plan, could replace lost defense [sic] jobs with solar and wind technology
jobs.
We need to
redefine our militarized national security embodied in weapons and global top
cop mentality as urgently as cities and states need to rethink community
security embodied in militarized police. We need to replace the “necessary”
arms industry with a more necessary Green New Deal that can
revive our economy, slow the climate crisis upon us and forge a path to peace
in our world.
Pat Hynes, retired
Professor of Environmental Health, directs the Traprock Center for Peace and
Justice. https://traprock.org
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.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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