As another $690 BILLION defense spending bill wends its way through congress, you can lay 100000 to 1 Vegas odds that it will get passed with few problems or rider amendments. There are too many key Senators as well as Reps who now depend for their political livelihood on military spending. Translated: They depend on ordinary American taxpayers to keep pushing military pork to their communities while thousands of other communities endure continued infrastructure decay. This is a damned disgrace, and what's more, in a parlous financial environment in which we'll soon need to raise the national debt ceiling, it is unconscionable! We need to get our miserable asses out of Afghanistan, and we need to do it this summer, not by 2014! We don't have the freaking money - even borrowed from the Chinese- to continue with that bullshit.
Now, out of the mouths of 'babes' one find similar sentiments expressed, as in a letter published in yesterday's Denver Post from high school student Abigail L. Cooke. Just when you thought 99% of young people only had their eyes and brains tethered to the social media like Facebook, along comes a surprise and it is a heartening one. Abigail wrote:
"Fifteen trillion dollars in debt and counting. Every year our government spends billions on defense, leaving insufficient funds for important things like education. This year, almost $30 million will be cut from my school district’s education budget. That means fewer teachers, and even less arts programs for students like myself.
But why? Where will all of this money go? Probably to help further fund our involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq — invasions costing more than $1 trillion when combined. Imagine if just one billion of those dollars were applied to our school districts here in Colorado. That would mean more after-school programs, more teachers, smaller classes, instruments, music and instructors for music programs that our nation’s students are desperate for.
It’s time we start putting our money where we truly need it. It’s time for America to start raising scholars, not soldiers
This is an excellent letter! It shows this teen's priorities are on much more solid ground than superficial personal concerns. Indeed, her vision and insight would put nearly all politicos to shame. The only small error she committed in her letter was underestimating the disgraceful costs of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan which will come to more like $3.3 trillion when all is said and done, and all the returned vets' hospital treatments and therapies must be paid for by the taxpayers. But otherwise, she's nailed it. She's shown (and she knows) we have priorities all screwed up in this country. Our whole domestic tapestry is unravelling as we continue to stubbornly involve ourselves in nations which have no more respect for us - irrespective of the gazillion bytes of PR churned out each day.
Even current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has admitted defense spending cuts must be made, though he seems to take issue with President Obama's conservative $400 billion proposed cuts over 12 years. In fact, this is ridiculous. The cuts ought to be more like $400 billion per YEAR! (Especially given the DoD budget was effectively doubled since 2000.) Just pulling our asses out of both Iraq and Afghanistan and leaving the idiotic nation-building behind would more than achieve that in the next three years. Cutting most of the dumb, money squandering armaments (including 'cloaked' helicopters which, while cool, aren't essential unless you're always into violating other nations' sovereignty via pre-meditated raids etc.) and you get even bigger savings.
I also totally disagree with Gates' assessment that "Americans would face tough choices" in a number of decisions, such as which weapons systems to eliminate, and the size of fighting units. Look, this is a no brainer! We already are overstretched across the freaking globe in nearly 44 countries. DO we have to be cop of the world? I don't think so! Nor can we afford that role in our debt environment. As for fighting units, do we really need to continue to maintain bases in Japan, Germany and S. Korea? Last time I checked all those nations had formidable forces that could more than take care of themselves.
Gates also whined in his last address:
"A smaller military, no matter how superb, will be able to go fewer places and do fewer things"
SO WHAT? As I said, we don't need to be scattered in 44 nations across the globe! (See Chapter Five: The State of the American Empire: How the U.S. Shapes the World). We need to be taking care of our own mammoth country and its PEOPLE, left ignored the past decade, and especially the crumbling infrastructure: roads, sewers, water mains, bridges....which is a much bigger threat to our security than some phantom bad guys some place. We have to get it into our fat heads we can't police and patrol the planet. This is foolishness.
Gates did also say that however vast the defense spending (the Pentagon approved the largest ever defense budget in February) it "was not the major cause of the nation's fiscal problems". However, he also added in the same breath that it was "nearly impossible to get accurate answers to where the money has been spent and how much?" Good god, man! If you 'can't get accurate answers' there's no telling how much they're pissing away! And let's not forget that we still haven't turned up $1.1 TRILLION that the Pentagon "misplaced" around 1999-2000. This, of course, was well documented by former defense analyst Chuck Spinney in a memorable PBS interview with Bill Moyers in August, 2002. Spinney also pointed out that if money is given via legislation but never accounted for, as to the GAO, then the Pentagon itself becomes an unaccountable and unelected agent that undermines democracy. Spinney is also known for a September 2000, Defense Weekly commentary, in which he called the move to increase the military budget from 2.9% to 4% of the GDP as " tantamount to a declaration of total war on Social Security and Medicare in the following decade." Well, he wasn't off on that one!
It is time our politicians and representatives get that into their heads, and begin now with massive cuts to tame the country's over-inflated military empire. Let's not forget it wasn't so much 'barbarians at the gate' that brought Rome to ruin, but military overstretch which all its taxes and property seizures could no longer pay for. They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Let's hope it's not to late to learn!
John F. Kennedy, had he lived, would likely have ready a torrent of “I told you so’s”, in terms of the parlous and vexing state this nation finds itself in, from too many entanglements of only marginal value to our actual national security. He’d also have expressed anger that for all the warnings he’d delivered about “enforcing peace with American weapons of war” (his famous Pax Americana speech at American University, Washington, in June, 1963, see photo) nothing sank in, and President after President never heeded his advice, each preferring to remain hostage to the Military-Industrial complex.
Though JFK wasn’t so prescient in a specific context, his American University speech did generically prefigure the horrific consequences if the U.S. insisted on being the policeman of the world, enforcing American terms of peace (via the noxious document NSC-68) with American weapons of war. This speech probably set the foundation for Kennedy’s later plan (under National Security Action Memorandum-263) to pull out of Vietnam (after the 1964 elections when political blowback would be minimal). He could likely see that if, indeed, the U.S. remained in Vietnam - the perils of a much wider war, along with consolidation of the military-industrial-oil complex – would be unavoidable. Alas, JFK was assassinated, and LBJ invoked NSAM-273 to repeal JFK's NSAM-263 and with the phony firing on the Maddox and Turner Joy by N. Vietnamese, we were in for a penny, in for a pound: 58,000 killed, and $269 billion in costs. One would have thought we'd have learned from 'Nam, but the phony Iraq intervention showed we forgot it all.
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