Anti War: Thread

[grarpamp]

Guns For Hire: America’s Crisis State Goes Global

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/americas_crisis_state_goes_global
https://www.loc.gov/collections/theodore-roosevelt-films/articles-and-essays/sound-recordings-of-theodore-roosevelts-voice/
https://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-delivers-remarks-israel-hamas-war-white-house-rcna119647
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-military-drops-a-bomb-every-12-minutes-and-no-one-is-talking-about-it/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/obama-as-wartime-president-has-wrestled-with-protecting-nation-and-troops.html
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/03/26/body-count-report-reveals-least-13-million-lives-lost-us-led-war-terror
https://medium.com/traveling-through-history/only-15-years-of-peace-in-the-history-of-the-united-states-of-america-c479193df79f
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/11/costssummary
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/taxday/average/2022/us/receipt/
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/whats-new/2023/4/17/pay-taxes-you-gave-1087-pentagon-contractors/
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/04/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-10-countries-combined
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/09/cost-wars-iraq-afghanistan/499007/
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03sun3.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/05/pentagon-logistics-agency-review-funds-322860
https://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/contractor-waste-iraq-KBR
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/only-the-pentagon-could-spend-640-on-a-toilet-seat/
https://www.pogo.org/investigations/leaked-audit-boeing-overcharged-army-up-to-177000-percent-on-helicopter-spare-parts
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/boeing-overcharges-taxpayers-by-up-to-177-000-percent-for-army-helicopter-parts-3d7b351232/
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03sun3.html
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0607-lopez-fallingapart-20150606-column.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eisenhower-farewell/
https://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-America-War-American-People/dp/1590795229/
https://www.amazon.com/Erik-Blair-Diaries-Battlefield-Dead/dp/1954968027/
https://archive.li/Ts2SF

    “Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to
execute the will of the people. From these great staffs, both of the
old parties have ganged aside. Instead of instruments to promote the
general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests which
use them in martialling [sic] to serve their selfish purposes. Behind
the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing
no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the
people.”—Theodore Roosevelt

>From being a nation in a permanent state of emergency, America’s
crisis state has gone global.

The military industrial complex, which has established itself as the
“solution” to all of our worldly problems (at taxpayer expense, of
course), has mired the nation in endless wars abroad waged by U.S.
military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns
for hire.

Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has
been bought—lock, stock and barrel—and made to dance to the tune of
the police state, a.k.a. the Deep State, a.k.a. the military
industrial complex, a.k.a. the surveillance state complex.

Even Dwight D. Eisenhower, the retired five-star Army
general-turned-president who warned against the disastrous rise of
misplaced power by the military industrial complex was complicit in
contributing to the build-up of the military’s role in dictating
national and international policy.

The Biden Administration’s response to the latest carnage in the
ongoing Israel-Hamas war merely plays into the hands of a salivating
military industrial complex for whom war is merely a means to a larger
profit margin.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast
military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of
international defense contractors, is one of its best buyers and
sellers.

Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. military dropped a bomb
every 12 minutes.

President Obama, the antiwar candidate and Nobel Peace Prize winner,
waged war longer than any American president. His administration’s
targeted-drone killings resulted in at least 1.3 million lives lost to
the U.S.-led war on terror.

America has long had a penchant for endless wars that empty our
national coffers while fattening those of the military industrial
complex.

The United States has been at war for all but 15 years in its 247-year history.

Since 9/11, we’ve spent more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad,
including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and
interest on the national debt.

The average American pays over $2300 a year in taxes to support the
military, half of which goes to military contractors.

Even with America’s military might spread thin, the war drums continue
to sound as the Pentagon polices the rest of the world with
counterterror activities in 85 countries.

The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military
servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire:
outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to
police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

Aided and abetted by the U.S government, the American
military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in
history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting
perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Although the U.S. constitutes barely 5% of the world's population,
America boasts almost 40% of the world's total military expenditure,
spending more on the military than the next 10 biggest spending
nations combined.

Unfortunately, this level of war-mongering doesn’t come cheap to the
taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt
politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding
military empire is bleeding the country dry. In fact, the U.S.
government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it
can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15
years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit
card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of
purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension
funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and
Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor
in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors.

For example, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the
Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of
dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can
be tracked.

Consider that the government lost more than $160 billion to waste and
fraud by military and defense contractors. With paid contractors often
outnumbering enlisted combat troops, the American war effort dubbed as
the “coalition of the willing” has quickly evolved into the “coalition
of the billing,” with American taxpayers forced to cough up billions
of dollars for cash bribes, luxury bases, a highway to nowhere, faulty
equipment, salaries for so-called “ghost soldiers,” and overpriced
anything and everything associated with the war effort, including a
$640 toilet seat and a $7600 coffee pot.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing had been
massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens
of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the
American taxpayer paid:

    $71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a
small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a
5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also
smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71:
a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that
DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an
increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within
the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control
“we the people” have over our runaway government.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are
among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially
the Department of Defense and its contractors.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been
transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons
better suited to a war zone. Biden, no different from his
predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad
and domestically, calling on Congress to approve billions that pander
to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security)
that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright
immoral behavior.

Essentially, in order to fund this burgeoning military empire that
polices the globe, the U.S. government is prepared to bankrupt the
nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of
terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much
closer to eventual collapse.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon
that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 60
years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the
nation’s fragile infrastructure today.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national
infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning
taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes
and mounting death tolls.

This is exactly the scenario Eisenhower warned against when he
cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine
endanger our liberties or democratic processes:

    “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.”

We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair
Diaries, the growth of and reliance on militarism as the solution for
our problems both domestically and abroad bodes ill for the
constitutional principles which form the basis of the American
experiment in freedom.

As James Madison warned, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is,
perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the
germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed
debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the
domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the
midst of continual warfare.”

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not
stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged
periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its
demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict
is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome
attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to
remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally
or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon
the course of non-democratic empire.

WC: 1659
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and
president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the
best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the
award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police
State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries.
Whitehead can be contacted at staff at rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is
the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about
The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org