“We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct,” writes Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times on Sunday. “It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo.”
He adds: “The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.”
The full article is here.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Bring troops hone, for starters.
Cut military by 1/2 and cost savings redirected to deficit and social stuff, like schools, roads, Heath care.
New Rule 50-50 cuts to deficit and social programs.
Tell truth about Social Security: it is not running out of money. Leave trust fund alone.
Wow Curtis…agreed.
I’m in. We have a carried a bloated, over extended, nation building military since the fall of the Soviet Union, and a good deal of time before that. We may graduate the cuts, but we should cut the military by $300 billion per year, and eliminate the bulk of the ‘special expenditures’ for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cutting the Military addresses but half of the problem.
The Military Industrial Complex is a dragon with a lot of heads.
Our consumption and waste make us all complicit in helping it to survive.
We need to make some profound and innovative adjustments to our way of thinking and living and consuming, in order to sustain our own survival and that of our progeny.
I could not agree with Judith more.
Think about this as a society that possesses economic. social and natural capital. Economic is pretty clear; social is the people and institutions; and natural is the environment. Wealth is created when we simultaneously build all three forms of capital. If we build one without the others we are just shifting wealth from one area to another.
The real issue is that we incentivize the wrong things.
We are incentivizing the building of economic capital through consumptive behavior and stealing capital from the social and natural sides of the equation. By using our precious and limited financial resources on the things that only build one form of capital we starve the things that would build real wealth.
Military Industrial Complex
Over 800 military bases in 140 countries
Bloated Budget
Pork
National Deficit and Debt
These all are one problem, make our elections publicly financed and many of these problems become manageable.
Instead of favors being returned to big business in the form of government contracts we need to have this money invested in human capital. Infrastructure updating/ maintenance and higher education for those who qualify to mention a couple.
We are going down the same path as many superpowers have done in the past, military imperialism for strategic resources to keep the expansion going. This is truly cancer socially and biologically. Growth for the sake of growth.
Paraphrased from a Dec. 19 post of mine on another blog:
Perhaps you’d read recently in the New Yorker magazine that in a boathouse near Hackensack, Minnesota were discovered long-missing “drafts, memos, and research materials” from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address that he delivered on January 17, 1961.
Eisenhower’s address has long been regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most prescient speeches (http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm). One thing that hasn’t been clear was whether his speech was merely a political afterthought, or the unexpected and suddenly public embodiment of his until then closely-held and intense alarm at the growth not just of a military industrial complex, but the entire corporate industrial complex as well.
Well, we finally have an answer to that question, it turns out that it was the latter. President Eisenhower’s harbinger against ALL corporations nurtured by federal largess is present through every one of the 29 drafts of his speech. I suggest that you read the entire speech, but here is a particularly cogent section:
“Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research – these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”
In reading the 29 drafts, it becomes clear that he actually toned down the final draft. From the New Yorker:
“One core idea dominates every [draft] version: the first draft described ‘the conjunction of a large and permanent military establishment and a large and permanent arms industry.’ Policing it would require ‘all the organizing genius we possess’ to insure ‘that liberty and security are both well served.’ It added, ‘We must be especially careful to avoid measures which would enable any segment of this vast military-industrial complex to sharpen the focus of its power.’ Through scores of revisions, that idea persisted. As delivered, the speech memorably read, ‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.’ ”
And so, regrettably, it appears that we did not heed Eisenhower’s warning and are now standing at the bottom of the pit.
The very system of representative gov’t that we depend on to protect us from the Corruption Complex is now hopelessly entwined and corrupted by that same complex. The options are few and we have run out of time.
Michael,
Chance for Peace
Eisenhower 1953
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. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.
Humbling and chilling words out of the mouth of a warrior and statesman. That is the genuine love of country and his fellows…we need to hear it again and often…Kate Hancock
Thanks, Ben, for this excerpt from Eisenhower’s historic speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the historic Statler Hotel (now the Capitol Hilton) in Washington D.C.
Where are today’s Eisenhower and Goldwater Republicans? Not on TV, that’s for sure. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham seem to be to the right of Atilla the Hun in comparison.
Check out Thomas Friedman’s column from the New York Times from yesterday. It’s time for the “pay-as-you-go-progressives” to take over, and they are going to come in Republican, Democratic, and Independent flavors. We must strive to judge by the policy, not by the party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26friedman.html?_r=1&hp
Michael,
I use many of the Eisenhower policies to show how far to the right our country has gone. At least as it comes to tax structure and social policies. The more power and wealth we give the top 1% and corporations the worse off everyday Americans become and the need for government assistance grows. Republicans cut taxes and increase military (Big Government in other nations) increasing our National Debt at home, it is called starving the beast and the two santa claus theories.Nixon would be considered a screaming liberal by today’s political standards. ObamaCare is pretty much Nixon’s health care reform.
Starve the Beast explanation
http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/06/tax-cuts-republicans-starve-the-beast-columnists-bruce-bartlett_print.html
Two Santa Claus explanation
http://www.commondreams.org/print/37172
Think about the other ways that Eisenhower left a legacy as President (separate from his military service). He appointed Warren Burger to the US Supreme Court, along with William Brennan (who received an almost unanimous confirmation vote in the US Senate with only Joe McCarthy voting against him).
Where would this country be without the Warren Court?
Wasn’t it Earl Warren Eisenhower appointed to the Supreme Court?
Tony you are absolutely right—I meant to say Earl Warren and then typed Warren Burger (who I am considerably less enamored with)–thanks for the correction.
Obvious solution, outsource our military to China, like we’ve done with everything else. They have a much larger number of soldiers, and obviously pay them far less.
Imagine my surprise, other voices agree that we are spending our treasure on the wrong things. I agree with Tom Friedma, it is not just about austerity, it is about stopping our spending on stupid things, and diverting some of that spending to smart things.
As commented on on another thread, imagine telling that to the ‘good old boy’s’ network. they are invited in the old, not the new.
What we need is a stronger Progressive voice advocating smart austerity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26friedman.html?src=me&ref=general
I am learning to hate the intuitive spelling function on my I-pad. I meant to say Tom Friedman and “They are invested in the old…”.
Thanks Jeff,
Thanks for shedding some light on a topic that is way overdue for being seriously considered and discussed – it’s so ingrained that our military is our diplomacy that it seems as if few question the propensity for aggression as attempted solution.
(Speaking of China – I’d recommend The Jaws of the Dragon; America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony by Eamonn Fingleton.)
Michael,
I use many of the Eisenhower policies to show how far to the right our country has gone. At least as it comes to tax structure and social policies. The more power and wealth we give the top 1% and corporations the worse off everyday Americans become and the need for government assistance grows. Republicans cut taxes and increase military (Big Government in other nations) increasing our National Debt at home, it is called starving the beast and the two santa claus theories.Nixon would be considered a screaming liberal by today’s political standards. ObamaCare is pretty much Nixon’s health care reform.
Starve the Beast explanation
http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/06/tax-cuts-republicans-starve-the-beast-columnists-bruce-bartlett_print.html
Two Santa Claus explanation
http://www.commondreams.org/print/37172
Good stuff Ben.
Where to go from here?
I do not fault people like Boehner and Beck. They are psychologically damaged people, abused as children and in need of serious professional help. Absent that help, they project their tortured souls upon us, extending the abuse to their constituents.
So we’ve identified the problem. Now what?
While pondering that question, let’s let the Raging Grannies have their say:
Well Ben, I suggest states like Texass “starve their OWN beasts” and secede. States like this are the biggest recipients of federal and blue state large$$e and then whine and bleat about it. They’re sourpuss losers with guns. I’d like to just see those states and their stupidity all seceded, no benefits and out of the closet where we can keep an eye on the wing nuts and whack jobs. Oh, and good luck to the old, heavy laboring poor and sick in their new redneck utopia. Kate Hancock
Good comments, all. I will add that Eisenhower, as a Presidential candidate, was courted by both the Republicans and Democrats of that time. Of course, his status as a hero of the then recent victory of the Allies in WW II was a factor, but this might shed light in several ways on the politics and thinking of that time. First, the parties were much closer in thinking, constutuency, and leadership then than now, Eisenhower’s thinking and actions were representative of that of most Americans of the time, and Eisenhower and his supporters (generally all of the American people) had learned some hard lessons from the years of the Great Depression and WW II. We could say, as Tom Brokaw pointed out, they were truly “The Greatest Generation,” and we should listen to what they have to tell us.
There has been much discussion as to why we undertook the wars in the Middle East, but one thing few would dispute is that they are basically oil wars. Those favoring the wars would point out that if the U S loses control of the world’s oil supply, which we presently mainly have, it would mean loss of control of worldwide military dominance by the U S, which they see as essential to U S world dominance. Now I am playing Devil’s Advocate, since I went by bus with many others from Nevada County to San Francisco to protest the day before the invasion of Iraq, but I must admit the opposition has a valid argument, though it represents a viewpoint with which I totally disagree, not thinking the dominance now held in the world, supported by our military-industrial complex, is at all essential to the health and welfare of myself, family and country men and women. I want to see us beat our swords into plowshares, bring the troops home and put them to work repairing our rotting infrastructure, taking care of the sick, teaching our children, raising healthy and nutritious food, all that other good stuff, and living happily ever after. But then my lifestyle goal does not require a mini-mansion to live in, a $60,000 auto to drive and maintain, skiing at Tahoe, trips to Reno and Vegas, a Porterhouse for dinner, or other things many Americans feel they must have to be happy. I ask myself, and others, would we be willing to pay $2.00 for a pound of bananas in order to provide more social justice to farmers in Central America? Guess one’s answer would depend on how important U S world dominance and the military-industrial complex needed to maintain it is for what that buys us.