Fiscal Insanity: The Government Borrows $6 Billion a Day, and We’re Stuck with the Bill

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By John & Nisha Whitehead

We’re not living the American dream.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

The U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.

The government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.

As the Editorial Board for the Washington Post warns:

“The nation has reached a hazardous moment where what it owes, as a percentage of the total size of the economy, is the highest since World War II. If nothing changes, the United States will soon be in an uncharted scenario that weakens its national security, imperils its ability to invest in the future, unfairly burdens generations to come, and will require cuts to critical programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It is not a future anyone wants.”

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $31 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033. That translates to roughly $246,000 per taxpayer or $94,000 for every single person in the country.

The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in.

The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

Interest payments on the national debt are estimated to top $395 billion this year, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

In ten years, those interest payments will exceed our entire military budget.

This is financial tyranny.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.

None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”

Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.

On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.

It’s all gone downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are 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.”

Of course, we’re the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Mind you, that’s only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.

The United States also spends more on foreign aid than any other nation, with nearly $300 billion disbursed over a five-year period. More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That price tag keeps growing, too.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Most recently, the U.S. has allocated nearly $115 billion in emergency military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine since the start of the Russia invasion.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have any rights at all.

There Are No Permanent Allies, Only Permanent Power

Posted on February 17, 2023 by Reid Mukai

If we do not build left-right coalitions on issues such as militarism, health care, a living wage and union organizing, we will be impotent in the face of corporate power and the war machine.

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

On Sunday, February 19, I will be at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington at noon to speak at the anti-war rally, Rage Against the War Machine. There, I will be joined by Jimmy Dore, Dennis Kucinich, Ann Wright, Jill Stein, Max Blumenthal, Cynthia McKinney, Anya Parampil, David Swanson and other left-wing, anti-war activists I have shared platforms with for many years. I will also be joined by Ron Paul, Scott Horton and right-libertarian, anti-war figures whose political and cultural opinions I often disagree with. The inclusion of the right-wing has seen anti-war groups I respect, such as Veterans for Peace (VFP), refuse to join the rally. VFP issued a statement sent to me on Friday saying that “to endorse this event would have caused a huge disruption in VFP and had little effect on the outcome of the demonstration.” The board of Code Pink asked its co-founder, Medea Benjamin, one of the nation’s most important and effective left-wing and anti-war activists, to cancel her scheduled talk at the rally.

“The left has become largely irrelevant in the U.S. because it is incapable of working with the right,” said Nick Brana, chair of The People’s Party, which organized the rally with libertarians. “It clings to identity politics over jobs, health care, wages and war, and condemns half the country as deplorables.”

We will not topple corporate power and the war machine alone. There has to be a left-right coalition, which will include people whose opinions are not only unpalatable but even repugnant, or we will remain marginalized and ineffectual. This is a fact of political life. Alliances are built around particular issues, in this case permanent war, which often fall apart when confronting other concerns. If I had organized the rally, there are some speakers I would not have invited. But I didn’t. This does not mean that there are no red lines: I would not join a protest that included neo-Nazi groups such as Aryan Nations or militias such as The Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.

My father, a Presbyterian minister who was an army sergeant in North Africa during World War II, was a member of Concerned Clergy and Laity About Vietnam, an anti-war group that included the radical Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan. He took me with other clergy, almost all veterans, to anti-war rallies. There was much in the anti-war movement that he and other members of the religious group opposed, from the Yippies — who put forward a 145-pound pig named Pigasus the Immortal as a presidential candidate in 1968 — to groups such as the Weather Underground that embraced violence. He and the other clergy disliked the widespread drug use and propensity of some protestors to insult and bait the police. They had little in common with the Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists and Trotskyites within the movement. Daniel Berrigan, one of the most important anti-war activists in American history who was constantly in and out of jail and spent two years in federal prison, opposed abortion — a stance that today would probably see him deplatformed by many on the left. These clergy understood that the masters of war were their real enemies. They understood that the success of the anti-war movement meant forming alliances with people whose ideologies and beliefs were far removed from their pacifism, abstemious lifestyles and Christian faith. When I was about 12, my father told me that if the war was still going on when I turned 18 and I was drafted, he would go to prison with me. The jolt of that promise has remained with me my entire life.

The demands of the Rage Against the War Machine rally are ones I share. They include Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine; Negotiate Peace; Stop the War Inflation; Disband NATO; Global Nuclear De-Escalation; Slash the Pentagon Budget; Abolish the CIA and Military Industrial Deep State; Abolish War and Empire; Restore Civil Liberties; and Free Julian Assange.

I know war. I spent two decades reporting on conflicts all over the globe, including many months in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, containing two million people including over a million children. I saw thousands of lives destroyed by United States military adventurism in Central America, Africa and the Middle East. Dozens of people I knew and worked with, including Kurt Schork, a Reuters reporter, and the Spanish cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, died violent deaths.

We must halt the decades of rampant and futile industrial killing. This includes ending the proxy war in Ukraine. It includes drastic cuts to the funding of the U.S. war machine, a state within a state. It includes disbanding NATO, which was established to prevent Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, not wage war around the globe. If Western promises to Moscow not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany had been kept, I expect the Ukrainian war would have never happened.

To those who suffer directly from U.S. aggression, these demands are not academic and theoretical issues. The victims of this militarism do not have the luxury of virtue-signaling. They want the rule of law to be reinstated and the slaughter stopped. So do I. They welcome any ally who opposes endless war. For them, it is a matter of life or death. If some of those on the right are anti-war, if they also want to free Julian Assange, it makes no sense to ignore them. These are urgent existential issues that, if we do not mobilize soon, could see us slip into a direct confrontation with Russia, and perhaps China, which could lead to nuclear war.

The Democratic Party, along with most of the Republican Party, is captive to the militarists. Each year, Congress increases the budget for the war industry, including for fiscal year 2023. It approved $847 billion for the military — a total that is boosted to $858 billion when accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction are included. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Republicans slavishly hand the Pentagon everything it demands.

The rally on February 19 is not about eliminating Social Security and Medicare or abolishing the minimum wage, which many libertarians propose. It is not a rally to denounce the rights of the LGBTQ community, which have been attacked by at least one of the speakers. It is a rally to end permanent war. Should these right-wing participants organize around those other issues, I will be on the other side of the barricades.

“I supported the Rage Against the War Machine Rally from the time of its conception and I support it today, even though I will not be one of the speakers because the organization I have been associated with for 20 years, CODEPINK, urged me not to speak,” Medea Benjamin told me in an email. “The CODEPINK staff felt that my participation would hurt the group’s standing with other coalitions committed to gay rights, women’s rights and anti-racism. They felt that Jackson Hinkle has taken stands that are anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-feminist and Islamophobic, and they were concerned about the sponsorship of the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has ties to white nationalists.”

“So why do I support the rally?” she asked. “Because I am heartbroken by a war that is causing such death and destruction in Ukraine. Because I have real fears that this war could lead us into World War III or a nuclear confrontation. Because both political parties are complicit in giving over $100 billion to Ukraine to keep this war going. Because the Biden administration is pushing this war to weaken Russia instead of promoting solutions. Because we urgently need as many voices as possible, from a broad variety of perspectives, to speak out so we can be much more effective at pressuring Congress and the White House to move this conflict from the bloody battlefield to the negotiating table. The future of our world stands in the balance.”

Benjamin said although she will not speak, she will be at the rally “cheering on the speakers” and is planning a lobby day two days later, on February 21, for those who want to take their anti-war message directly to the offices of Congress. You can register for the lobby day here.

Ralph Nader, who has just founded the Capitol Hill Citizen, a newspaper focused on Congress, has long advocated a left-right coalition as the only effective mechanism to push back against corporate power. He argues that those on the left who refuse to join left-right alliances are engaging in “self-immolation.” This refusal, he says, fosters political paralysis, not unlike the paralysis in the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts in the 1950s against supposed Communists. Although many loathed McCarthy, the Republican establishment refused to join forces with the liberals and Democrats to end the smearing, blacklisting and imprisonment of dissidents. The left-right coalition is especially important if we are to rebuild labor unions, Nader points out, the only mechanism capable of crippling the ruling oligarchy. If we cannot reach across ideological divides, we will slit our own throats.

“A left-right alliance on issue after issue, whether it’s on a living wage, ending endless wars of aggression by the United States; whether it’s striking down hard on corporate crime, fraud and abuse; whether it’s universal health insurance is an unbeatable movement,” Nader told me when I reached him by phone. “Just think of a senator receiving ten constituents from back home and five are liberals and five are conservatives. How is a senator going to game them? How is a senator going to sugarcoat them? It’s very difficult. Any time there is a left-right alliance, as in the enactment over 30 years ago of the Federal False Claims Act to go after corporate fraud in government programs and contracts, it’s an unbeatable combination.”

Sponsored by leading Republicans and Democrats, the False Claims Act amendments of 1986 have been used by the federal government to recover more than $62 billion of fraud and mismanagement funds stolen by corporations with government contracts.

“If you want to prevail on Congress to fulfill its duties under the Constitution and never engage in wars or become co-belligerents without a declaration of war by Congress — the last war that was declared by Congress was World War II, and we’ve engaged in many wars since then and are continuing to do so — you must have a left-right coalition,” Nader said. “Because there is no coalition in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats are war parties. They support a Pentagon budget that gives the generals more than they ask for. They have done this for almost eight years, most recently giving the Pentagon $48 billion more than the generals and President Biden requested, instead of giving that money for public health to prevent pandemics, death, injury and disease.”

Those who will pay the steepest price for this paralysis are those killed, wounded and displaced by the war machine, including the over 900,000 civilians killed directly, and millions more indirectly, as a result in the post-9/11 U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Pakistan. But the left, mesmerized by a self-defeating boutique activism, also pays a price. As the empire unravels, the woke left, demanding moral absolutism, marginalizes and discredits itself at a moment of crisis. This myopia is a gift to the oligarchs, militarists and Christian fascists we must defeat.

The West Is Incentivizing Russia To Hit Back

Posted on February 7, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Well the omnicidal war sluts won the debate over sending tanks to Ukraine, so now it’s time to start arguing for sending F-16s.

In an article titled “Ukraine sets sights on fighter jets after securing tank supplies,” Reuters reports the following:

“Ukraine will now push for Western fourth generation fighter jets such as the U.S. F-16 after securing supplies of main battle tanks, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister said on Wednesday.

Ukraine won a huge boost for its troops as Germany announced plans to provide heavy tanks for Kyiv on Wednesday, ending weeks of diplomatic deadlock on the issue. The United States is poised to make a similar announcement.

Just in time for the good news, Lockheed Martin has announced that the arms manufacturing giant happens to be all set to ramp up production of F-16s should they be needed for shipment to Ukraine.

“Lockheed Martin has said that it’s ready to meet demands for F-16 fighter jets if the US and its allies choose to ship them to Ukraine,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp reports. “So far, the US and its allies have been hesitant to send fighter jets to Ukraine due to concerns that they could be used to target Russian territory. But the Western powers seem less and less concerned about escalation as the US and Germany have now pledged to send their main battle tanks.”

Lockheed Says It’s Ready With F-16s If US and Allies Choose to Send Them to Ukraine
The arms maker says it's ramping up production of the fighter jet
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #F16forUkraine #F16 #LockheedMartin #Ukraine #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #NATO https://t.co/I4YHxOqM6F pic.twitter.com/y4HOs3Y3lA
— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) January 25, 2023

The New York Times has a new article out titled “How Biden Reluctantly Agreed to Send Tanks to Ukraine,” subtitled “The decision unlocked a flow of heavy arms from Europe and inched the United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with Russia.” It’s authors David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper write:

President Biden’s announcement Wednesday that he would send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine came after weeks of tense back-channel negotiations with the chancellor of Germany and other European leaders, who insisted that the only way to unlock a flow of heavy European arms was for the United States to send tanks of its own.

His decision, however reluctant, now paves the way for German-made Leopard 2 tanks to be delivered to Ukraine in two or three months, provided by several European nations. While it is unclear whether it will make a decisive difference in the spring offensive that President Volodymyr Zelensky is now planning to take back territory seized by Russia, it is the latest in a series of gradual escalations that has inched the United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with Russia.

When even the myopic empire simps at The New York Times are acknowledging that western powers are escalating aggressions in a very dangerous direction, you should probably sit up and pay attention.

In a recent article for Responsible Statecraft titled “Mission Creep? How the US role in Ukraine has slowly escalated,” Branko Marcetic outlines the ways the US empire has “serially blown past their own self-imposed lines over arms transfers,” over and over again relenting to war hawks and requests from Ukrainian officials to supply weapons which it had previously refrained from supplying for fear that they would be too escalatory and lead to hot warfare between nuclear superpowers. Marcetic notes the way previously unthinkable aggressions like NATO spy agencies conducting sabotage operations on Russian infrastructure are now accepted, with more escalations being called for as soon as the previous one was made.

"…NATO arms transfers have now escalated well beyond what governments had worried just months ago could draw the alliance into direct war with Russia…" https://t.co/NKbMdVuxnY
— Responsible Statecraft (@RStatecraft) January 25, 2023

Toward the end of his article, Marcetic drives home a very important point which needs more attention: that the western alliance has established a policy of continually escalating every time Russia doesn’t react forcefully to a previous western escalation, which necessarily means Russia is being actively incentivized to react forcefully to those escalations.

“By escalating their support for Ukraine’s military, the U.S. and NATO have created an incentive structure for Moscow to take a drastic, aggressive step to show the seriousness of its own red lines,” Marcetic writes. “This would be dangerous at the best of times, but particularly so when Russian officials are making clear they increasingly view the war as one against NATO as a whole, not merely Ukraine, while threatening nuclear response to the alliance’s escalation in weapons deliveries.”

“Moscow keeps saying escalatory arms transfers are unacceptable and could mean wider war; US officials say since Moscow hasn’t acted on those threats, they can freely escalate. Russia is effectively told it has to escalate to show it’s serious about lines,” Marcetic added on Twitter.

A good recent example of this dynamic is the recent New York Times report that the Biden administration is considering backing a Ukrainian offensive on Crimea, which many experts agree is one of the most likely ways this conflict could lead to nuclear warfare. The article reports that the Biden administration has assessed that Russia is unlikely to reciprocate an escalatory aggression, but the basis for that assessment apparently comes from nothing other than the fact that Russia hasn’t done so yet.

“Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin,” the Times quotes a RAND Corporation think tanker as saying in explanation for the Biden administration’s belief that it can get away with backing a Crimea offensive. But as Dave DeCamp explained at the time, that’s not even true; Russia did significantly escalate its aggressions in response to strikes on Crimea, beginning to target critical Ukrainian infrastructure in ways it previously had not.

In this article about how the US is “warming” to the idea of helping Ukraine strike Crimea, RAND lady says Russia didn’t massively escalate in response to other attacks on Crimea. But the major strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure didn’t start until after the Kerch bridge bombing! pic.twitter.com/p4pHxs6xFB
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) January 18, 2023

So Russia has in fact been escalating its aggressions in response to attacks on Crimea; it just hasn’t been escalating them against NATO powers. As long as Russia is only escalating in ways that hurt Ukrainians, the US-centralized power structure does not regard them as real escalations. The take-home message to Moscow being that they’re going to get squeezed harder and harder until they attack NATO itself.

And of course that won’t de-escalate things either; it will be seized on and spun as evidence that Putin is a reckless madman who is attacking the free world completely unprovoked and must be stopped at all cost, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon. Russia would of course be aware of this obvious reality, so the only way it takes the bait is if the pain of not reacting gets to a point where it is perceived as outweighing the pain of reacting. But judging by its actions the empire seems determined to push them to that point.

It really is spooky how much de-escalation and detente have been disappeared from public discourse about Russia. People genuinely don’t seem to know it’s an option. They really do think the only option is continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship, and that anything else is obsequious appeasement. They think that because that’s the message they are being fed by the imperial propaganda machine, and they’re being fed that message because that is the empire’s actual position.

I’ve been warning about the increasing risk of nuclear armageddon for as long as I’ve been publicly engaged in political commentary, and people have been calling me a hysterical idiot and a Putin puppet the entire time even as we’ve moved closer and closer to the exact point I’ve been screaming about at the top of my lungs all these years. Now there’s not a whole lot closer it can get without being directly upon us. I deeply, deeply hope we turn this thing around before it’s too late.

The Democrats Are Now the War Party

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Reid Mukai

The Democratic Party has become the party of permanent war, fueling massive military spending which is hollowing out the country from the inside and flirting with nuclear war.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested.

The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimately commit suicide.

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present.

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with Russia and, perhaps later, with China — each a nuclear power. It is also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. Congress is also on track to provide an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon — above the already expanded annual budget — to resupply Ukraine.

“But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup,” The New York Times reported. “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.”

The Democratic Party, which, under the Clinton administration aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry.

“As soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two parties,” Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show for The Real News Network. “Because in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the tune. That’s what’s happened. There isn’t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”

In his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine,” Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards or work as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most of these shills for war, personally profited from the sales of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

Seymour Melman, in his book “Pentagon Capitalism,” documented the way militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are spent on the research and development of weapons systems while renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with military-related grants while they struggle to find money for environmental studies and the humanities. Bridges, roads, levees, rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated. Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff. Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned.

Melman, who coined the term “permanent war economy,” noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare. Military systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are guaranteed. For example, this November, the Army awarded Raytheon Technologies alone more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine. Despite a depressed market for most other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than 36 and 50 percent this year.

Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in Pentagon contracts to provide the military with “globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Israel, with more than $150 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received over $80 billion since 1978 — aid that requires foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a circular system mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

“The truth of the matter is that we’re in a heavily militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created just to keep fueling that,” Kucinich told me.

In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced, before Russia invaded in February. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Baud, a former NATO security advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass. It also followed the Biden administration’s rejection of proposals sent by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia’s invasion the following year.

This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia, which have boomeranged onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry, especially in Germany, is crippled. In most of Europe, it is a winter of shortages, spiraling prices and misery.

“This whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,” Kucinich warned. “We forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole new world being formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most people aren’t aware of.”

By not opposing a Democratic Party whose primary business is war, liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.”

A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to steal a line from my latest book, is the greatest evil.

The US-Nazi Connection since World War II: From Inspiring the Third Reich to Supporting the Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

Posted on November 3, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

The mafia in Washington, London, Brussels and Tel Aviv would do anything to keep their “Unipolar World Order” project in place, in fact, there are getting desperate to hold on to whatever remaining powers they have left even if it means collaborating with its worst enemies. There is a well-known ancient proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” that rings true today especially since Washington, the CIA, the Military-Industrial Complex, along with Mossad and NATO have supported well-known terrorists including the Islamic State (ISIS), Al Qaeda, and other groups to overthrow governments they don’t approve of especially in the Middle East. However, their support of terrorists who were their enemies at one time or another did not start with their regime change wars against Syria or Libya, the idea of supporting its enemies began during and after World War II when the US government recruited Ukrainian Nazis to counter their new enemy, the Soviet Union. What a strange turn of events knowing that the Soviets who fought the Nazis with their American and European allies during the war were seen as a new threat. Washington and the rest of their mafia cohorts used the Nazis back then as they are now using jihadi terrorists today in their war for world domination no matter what the costs are in the long-term.

So who were the Nazis and why was Washington interested in recruiting them in the first place? For starters, the Nazis had members involved in several scientific and technological disciplines that the US government was interested in and would later utilize them to produce all sorts of weapons of war and psychological operations for its future military operations, but we will get into further details shortly. However, the Nazis did follow a far-right fascist ideology that was authoritarian that coincided with ultranationalist principals that rejected anarchy, communism, democracy, republicanism, socialism and other forms of government that was seen as a threat to their rising power. And as insane as this sounds, the Nazis also used scientific racism, or what we can call eugenics to manipulate human gene pools by separating certain groups of people between those who are considered inferior to advancing those who were deemed superior. Then there is the element of antisemitism that was prevalent within the Third Reich. Nazism has led to genocide, torture, forced sterilizations, imprisonment of its opposition, deportations and other atrocities among those who did not fit the profile of being an ultra-nationalist especially if you did not have the racial qualities that they demanded for their movement.

If we look back into the history of fascism, its roots were based in Europe as historians have claimed that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte ‘aka’ Napoleon III who ruled France with an iron fist from 1848 to 1852 had the elements of a fascist/Nazi state.

America’s Extermination of Red Savages was Adolf Hitler’s Inspiration

Adolf Hitler, Germany’s new chancellor took the lead in imposing fascist policies in his country when he came to power. Hitler’s allies also known as the Axis Alliance, Benito Mussolini of Italy and Hirohito of Imperial Japan had similar policies.

So, what inspired this sort of ideology? Where did the Nazis get their inspiration from? It’s a known fact that Adolf Hitler admired America’s ways of dealing with certain groups in their short history from the Jim Crow laws against African Americans to the indigenous populations who were sent to prison camps during the American Indian wars. John Toland’s ‘Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography’ states that “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” and that “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.” So, when did the idea of a ‘concentration camp’ came into effect? It was under US President and Democrat, Andrew Jackson who introduced “emigration depots” as part of his Indian Removal Act of 1830 where tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples who were forced into what was called ‘prison camps’ and they included the Seminoles, Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, and other tribal nations mainly in the Southern part of the United States and that included Alabama and Tennessee.

One other element of how the US model of governance that influenced Nazi Germany was the Jim Crow Laws. James Q. Whitman, a legal scholar and author of ‘Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law’ wrote an introduction on how the Nazis viewed American race laws:

In the opening minutes, Justice Minister Gurtner presented a memo on American race law, which had been carefully prepared by officials of the ministry for purposes of the gathering; and the participants returned repeatedly to the American models of racist legislation in the course of their discussions. It is particularly startling to discover that the most radical Nazis present were the most ardent champions of the lessons that American approaches held for Germany. Not, as we shall see, in this transcript the only record of Nazi engagement with American race law. In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s many Nazis, not least Hitler himself, took a serious in the racist legislation of the United States. Indeed in Mein Kampf Hitler praised America as nothing less than “the one state” that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish.

My purpose is to chronicle this neglected history of Nazi efforts to mine American race law for inspiration during the making of the Nuremberg Laws, and to ask what it tells us about Nazi Germany, about the modern history of racism, and especially about America

The Nazis saw US race laws as a suitable policy that they can implement on various groups such as the Jews who were a wealthy and powerful class of people which many Germans despised at the time, became non-citizens. Native Americans, Filipinos, African Americans, and others were also considered non-citizens even if they lived in the US or its colonized territories. But there was one aspect of US race laws that interested the Nazis and that was the anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriages in about 30 US states where those who broke the law in the US received a severe criminal punishment. US-inspired race laws were imposed on German society with the establishment of the Nuremberg laws that was passed on September 15^th, 1935.

Operation Paperclip: Why the US Government Recruited Nazis After WWII

The rumor of a nuclear war is more prevalent today more than ever before since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has taken place. Ukraine’s actor, oh, excuse me, I meant President, Volodymyr Zelensky has called for “preventive strikes” to deter Russia from using nuclear weapons although he backtracked the claims shortly after, but he did call for for the West to hit Russia with nuclear weapons for preventative measures which was extremely dangerous rhetoric coming out of his mouth. Speaking of nuclear weapons, do you know who originally proposed the idea of placing nuclear bombs on ballistic missiles in the first place? It was an idea that was derived from Nazi rocket scientists who was hired by the US government during World War II. The original program was called Uranprojekt or the “Uranium Project” for the purpose of developing nuclear technology to build weapons and reactors.

In the last years of World War II, US intelligence agencies and the Military-Industrial Complex secretly transferred more than 1,600 Nazi scientists and their families from Germany who were experts in various fields that included rocket science, aerodynamics, chemical weapons, and medicine in what was called Operation Paperclip. There were Nazis working for the US military who also prepared intelligence briefs creating fear and panic that the Soviets were going to take over the world which was over-exaggerated. But what the US government feared most was that the Soviet Union under Operation Osoaviakhim with more than 2,500 former Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (SBZ) and the Soviet sector of Berlin would be one step ahead of the US government in weapons development and other areas.

One important historical fact about America’s Nazi Scientists was the recruitment of Wernher von Braun or known by his full name as Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun who was a member of the Nazi Party and the Allgemeine SS or the “General SS” which was a major branch of Nazi Germany’s paramilitary forces. Wernher von Braun was also the head of developing rocket technology who is considered the pioneer of rocket and space technology in the US. He was also the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that allegedly helped launch the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.

Nazi scientists also helped the US government and the CIA develop chemical and biological weapons programs that included the use of sarin gas and other dangerous weapons of war including VX (nerve agent) and of course, the most used biological weapon during the Vietnam war, Agent Orange. So, in other words, the US government hired Nazi scientists for their knowledge of creating weapons of mass destruction that has inflicted damage on various populations around the world since then. During the Vietnam war, the US military unleashed Agent Orange on the Vietnamese population causing more than 3 million people to develop birth defects and other health related problems to this day. The Nazi scientists were indeed evil geniuses when it came to developing advanced weapons of war and that was something that the US military and the intelligence community were solely interested in and that was and still is a scary thought.

America’s Frankenstein: The Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

As we know from the valuable lessons of history that the US government and the CIA had supported and trained Ukrainian Nazis since 1946. The CIA had organized “Stay Behind” operations with the OUN-B (neo-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) in Eastern Europe and other areas to assist Ukrainian nationalist who were sent to destabilize Soviet Ukraine with covert operations such as using commandos to assassinate Soviet officials, to sabotage infrastructure and to commit acts of terrorism.

The history of the US government and its CIA operatives shows that it supported Ukrainian war criminal Stephan Bandera to advance the Ukrainian underground movement to destabilize Soviet Ukraine, so the CIA and their Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and the Office of Special Operations (OSO) planned covert operations with the OUN-B and provided support to the anti-Soviet Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA) for psychological warfare within the Soviet sphere of influence. The CIA declassified their historical account of their association with Ukrainian Nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis during the Cold War in ‘Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists’ by Kevin C Ruffner detailed how the “CIA reestablished and expanded its contacts with the Ukrainians and others for covert action against the Communists and as wartime assets to be used behind Red Army lines as guerrillas, saboteurs, and resistance leaders.” The historical account went further and stated that “The sometimes brutal war record of many emigre groups became blurred as they became more critical to the CIA.”

Fast forward to November 2013 were there were large-scale protests which was known as the Euromaidan against the policies of President Victor Yanukovych who made the decision to have closer ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union instead of proceeding with the idea of having a political and economic relationship with the European Union by rejecting their free-trade agreement. Then in February 2014, what is known as the Maidan Revolution took place that ended up in violent clashes between the protesters and the government’s security forces in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv which led to a coup against the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Soon after, the Russo-Ukrainian war began and the birth of the Neo-Nazi inspired Azov Battalion was established as they became the resistance against basically, anything Russian.

On January 22^nd of this year, Yahoo News who is part of the mainstream media published an article titled ‘CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades’ basically admitted that the CIA was secretly training Ukrainian forces since 2015:

While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government

According to Yahoo News, an unnamed former senior intelligence official said that “If the Russians invade, those [graduates of the CIA programs] are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders,” and that “we’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact.” One must wonder how many were actually radicalized neo-Nazis.

In 2018, Reuters published a commentary by Josh Cohen ‘Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem’ that explains Ukraine’s problem with the Nazis filling the ranks of its National Militia. Cohen said that in “a January 28 demonstration, in Kiev, by 600 members of the so-called “National Militia,” a newly-formed ultranationalist group that vows “to use force to establish order,” illustrates this threat.” Cohen added that the National Militia has recruited members from the Nazi-affiliated Azov Battalion:

Many of the National Militia’s members come from the Azov movement, one of the 30-odd privately-funded “volunteer battalions” that, in the early days of the war, helped the regular army to defend Ukrainian territory against Russia’s separatist proxies. Although Azov uses Nazi-era symbolism and recruits neo-Nazis into its ranks, a recent article in Foreign Affairs downplayed any risks the group might pose, pointing out that, like other volunteer militias, Azov has been “reined in” through its integration into Ukraine’s armed forces. While it’s true that private militias no longer rule the battlefront, it’s the home front that Kiev needs to worry about now

Cohen obviously is following the mainstream media narrative when he said that Putin seized Crimea which in fact, it was the Russian-speaking Crimean people who voted in a referendum to reunite with the Russian federation. But to his credit, Cohen does mention the fact that the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector are held in high-regards since they fought Russian-backed separatists. Cohen also mentioned the Azov battalion’s children’s training camps:

When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea four years ago first exposed the decrepit condition of Ukraine’s armed forces, right-wing militias such as Azov and Right Sector stepped into the breach, fending off the Russian-backed separatists while Ukraine’s regular military regrouped. Though, as a result, many Ukrainians continue to regard the militias with gratitude and admiration, the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology that will endanger Ukraine in the long term. Since the Crimean crisis, the militias have been formally integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces, but some have resisted full integration: Azov, for example, runs its own children’s training camp, and the careers section instructs recruits who wish to transfer to Azov from a regular military unit

Although Cohen’s claims expose Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis, he also follows the Western establishment and the mainstream media’s narrative that “the Kremlin’s claims that Ukraine is a hornets’ nest of fascists are false: far-right parties performed poorly in Ukraine’s last parliamentary elections, and Ukrainians reacted with alarm to the National Militia’s demonstration in Kiev” which are all lies. Cohen’s statement is false, in fact, it’s a contradiction when he wrote at the beginning of his article that the “National Militia’s members were recruited from the Azov movement” but not to worry because “Azov has been “reined in” through its integration into Ukraine’s armed forces” at least according to Cohen who sourced his misinformation from Foreign Affairs magazine which is a publication owned by the Council of Foreign Relations, a favorite of of the US political establishment.

So, does the US government, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the CIA support Ukrainian Neo-Nazis in their ongoing war efforts against Russia today? Well, the answer to that question should be obvious by now.

“World War III is Closer than Ever”: US War Machine to Increase Lethal Military Aid by Sending “Suicide Drones” to Ukraine

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Despite the US economic decline, the Biden regime is sending another $33 billion to support Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia. Biden called on the US congress with the majority who are in the pockets of the Military-Industrial Complex to provide Ukraine with the necessary assistance to defeat Russia. A CBS news report titled ‘Biden asks Congress for $33 billion in Ukraine aid to ramp up pressure on Russia’ on Biden’s recent comments on the proposed bill, he said, “That’s why today, in order to sustain Ukraine as it continues to fight, I’m sending Congress a supplemental budget request,” he said. “It’s going to keep weapons and ammunitions flowing without interruption to the brave Ukrainian fighters and continue delivering economic and humanitarian assistance to the Ukrainian people.” The majority of the $33 billion, around $20 billion of the US taxpayer-funded war will be used for “artillery, armored vehicles and anti-armor and anti-air capabilities, according to the White House.”

Washington and the Military-Industrial Complex will continue to instigate war with Russia by continuing to send the Ukrainian military and their Nazi battalions more suicide drones. In a report by Military.com ‘The Phoenix Ghost, a Secretive ‘Suicide Drone’ Developed in California, Is Headed to Ukraine’ said that “the Ukrainian military will soon begin tracking and attacking Russian forces with a secret new “suicide drone” produced by Aevex Aerospace, a little-known Solana Beach company that has considerable experience with unmanned aerial systems.” The Biden regime is supposed to send more than 121 of the Phoenix Ghost drones to the Ukraine:

Defense analysts say it appears the Phoenix Ghost will loiter in the sky, quietly looking for targets. Once it finds one, the drone goes into a dive and rams the object, setting off its explosive warhead. Analysts speculate that it is a comparatively small weapon that could be hard to see against the cloud cover that shrouds much of Ukraine in late April and in May

The Pentagon has been developing the Phoenix Ghost drones since last February, “We can’t talk about details,” said Brian Raduenz, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who serves as chief executive officer of Aevex Aerospace. “I have to refer you to the remarks that John Kirby made about this.” John Kirby, a Pentagon press secretary and then a spokesman for the State Department under Barack Obama recently had a press conference briefing and mentioned the Phoenix Ghost drone and said that it has “been in development before the invasion, clearly. The Air Force was working this. And in discussions with the Ukrainians, again, about their requirements, we believed that this particular system would very nicely suit their needs, particularly in eastern Ukraine” and later concluded that “This unmanned aerial system is designed for tactical operations. In other words, largely, but not exclusively, to attack targets. … It can also be used to give you a site picture of what it is seeing, of course. But it’s principal focus is attack…its purpose is akin to that of the Switchblade, which we have been talking about in the past, which is basically a one-way drone and attack drone. And that’s essentially what this is designed to do.”

The switch blade is described as a “quiet, lightweight, all-electric drone made by AeroVironment.” AeroVironment also produces another drone which is a “5.5-pound 300 version of Switchblade can be carried in a soldier’s backpack and quickly launched — making it highly useful for Ukrainian soldiers who are trying to maneuver around Russian troop and vehicles. The larger 600 version of Switchblade is being used to destroy Russian tanks and armored vehicles, many which litter roads in the Donbas region of Ukraine.” Militay.com said that the Biden regime has sent over 1,000 switchblades to the Ukraine so far, a move that surely angered Moscow.

Russia has warned the US and its NATO allies that they were “adding fuel” to the conflict and that there can be “unpredictable consequences.” Washington and its NATO allies are not listening, they should know that Russia is not bluffing. What will happen if this continues?

I believe World War III is closer than ever before, so why does Washington want this war in the first place? Well since the US economy is collapsing with tensions increasing between liberals and conservatives and an increase of violent crime that is sweeping across the nation followed by an influx of illegal immigration on its southern borders, Washington has failed on every level. This leads to what Gerald Celente of the Trends Journal has famously said “when all else fails, they take you to war!” Given the rapid decline of the US empire, Celente’s quote should not be taken lightly during these dangerous times. War is coming soon; times will be very different so prepare for the worst.

Biden Wanted $33B More For Ukraine. Congress Quickly Raised it to $40B. Who Benefits?

Posted on May 16, 2022 by Reid Mukai

US President Joe Biden speaks about the conflict in Ukraine during a visit to the Lockheed Martins Pike County Operations facility on May 3, 2022 (Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

Tens of billions, soon to be much more, are flying out of U.S. coffers to Ukraine as Americans suffer, showing who runs the U.S. Government, and for whose benefit.

By Glenn Greenwald

Source: Substack

From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Biden White House has repeatedly announced large and seemingly random amounts of money that it intends to send to fuel the war in Ukraine. The latest such dispatch, pursuant to an initial $3.5 billion fund authorized by Congress early on, was announced on Friday; “Biden says U.S. will send $1.3 billion in additional military and economic support to Ukraine,” read the CNBC headline. This was preceded by a series of new lavish spending packages for the war, unveiled every two to three weeks, starting on the third day of the war:

Feb. 26: “Biden approves $350 million in military aid for Ukraine”: Reuters;
Mar. 16: “Biden announces $800 million in military aid for Ukraine”: The New York Times;
Mar. 30: “Ukraine to receive additional $500 million in aid from U.S., Biden announces”: NBC News;
Apr. 12: “U.S. to announce $750 million more in weapons for Ukraine, officials say”: Reuters;
May 6: “Biden announces new $150 million weapons package for Ukraine”: Reuters.

Those amounts by themselves are in excess of $3 billion; by the end of April, the total U.S. expenditure on the war in Ukraine was close to $14 billion, drawn from the additional $13.5 billion Congress authorized in mid-March. While some of that is earmarked for economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, most of it will go into the coffers of the weapons industry — including Raytheon, on whose Board of Directors the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, sat immediately before being chosen by Biden to run the Pentagon. As CNN put it: “about $6.5 billion, roughly half of the aid package, will go to the US Department of Defense so it can deploy troops to the region and send defense equipment to Ukraine.”

As enormous as those sums already are, they were dwarfed by the Biden administration’s announcement on April 28 that it “is asking Congress for $33 billion in funding to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than double the $14 billion in support authorized so far.” The White House itself acknowledges that the vast majority of that new spending package will go to the purchase of weaponry and other military assets: “$20.4 billion in additional security and military assistance for Ukraine and for U.S. efforts to strengthen European security in cooperation with our NATO allies and other partners in the region.”

It is difficult to put into context how enormous these expenditures are — particularly since the war is only ten weeks old, and U.S. officials predict/hope that this war will last not months but years. That ensures that the ultimate amounts will be significantly higher still.

The amounts allocated thus far — the new Biden request of $33 billion combined with the $14 billion already spent — already exceed the average annual amount the U.S. spent for its own war in Afghanistan ($46 billion). In the twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan which ended just eight months ago, there was at least some pretense of a self-defense rationale given the claim that the Taliban had harbored Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 attack. Now the U.S. will spend more than that annual average after just ten weeks of a war in Ukraine that nobody claims has any remote connection to American self-defense.

Even more amazingly, the total amount spent by the U.S. on the Russia/Ukraine war in less than three months is close to Russia’s total military budget for the entire year ($65.9 billion). While Washington depicts Russia as some sort of grave and existential menace to the U.S., the reality is that the U.S. spends more than ten times on its military what Russia spends on its military each year; indeed, the U.S. spends three times more than the second-highest military spender, China, and more than the next twelve countries combined.

But as gargantuan as Biden’s already-spent and newly requested sums are — for a ten-week war in which the U.S. claims not to be a belligerent — it was apparently woefully inadequate in the eyes of the bipartisan establishment in Congress, who is ostensibly elected to serve the needs and interests of American citizens, not Ukrainians. Leaders of both parties instantly decreed that Biden’s $33 billion request was not enough. They thus raised it to $40 billion — a more than 20% increase over the White House’s request — and are now working together to create an accelerated procedure to ensure immediate passage and disbursement of these weapons and funds to the war zone in Ukraine. “Time is of the essence – and we cannot afford to wait,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter to House members, adding: “This package, which builds on the robust support already secured by Congress, will be pivotal in helping Ukraine defend not only its nation but democracy for the world.” (See update below).

We have long ago left the realm of debating why it is in the interest of American citizens to pour our country’s resources into this war, to say nothing of risking a direct war and possibly catastrophic nuclear escalation with Russia, the country with the largest nuclear stockpile, with the US close behind. Indeed, one could argue that the U.S. government entered this war and rapidly escalated its involvement without this critical question — which should be fundamental to any policy decision of the U.S. government — being asked at all.

This omission — a failure to address how the interests of ordinary Americans are served by the U.S. government’s escalating role in this conflict — is particularly glaring given the steadfast and oft-stated view of former President Barack Obama that Ukraine is and always will be of vital interest to Russia, but is not of vital interest to the U.S. For that reason, Obama repeatedly resisted bipartisan demands that he send lethal arms to Ukraine, a step he was deeply reluctant to take due to his belief that the U.S. should not provoke Moscow over an interest as remote as Ukraine (ironically, Trump — who was accused by the U.S. media for years of being a Kremlin asset, controlled by Putin through blackmail — did send lethal arms to Ukraine despite how provocative doing so was to Russia).

While it is extremely difficult to isolate any benefit to ordinary American citizens from all of this, it requires no effort to see that there is a tiny group of Americans who do benefit greatly from this massive expenditure of funds. That is the industry of weapons manufacturers. So fortunate are they that the White House has met with them on several occasions to urge them to expand their capacity to produce sophisticated weapons so that the U.S. government can buy them in massive quantities:

Top U.S. defense officials will meet with the chief executives of the eight largest U.S. defense contractors to discuss industry’s capacity to meet Ukraine’s weapons needs if the war with Russia continues for years.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told reporters Tuesday she plans to participate in a classified roundtable with defense CEOs on Wednesday to discuss “what can we do to help them, what do they need to generate supply”….
“We will discuss industry proposals to accelerate production of existing systems and develop new, modernized capabilities critical to the Department’s ongoing security assistance to Ukraine and long-term readiness of U.S. and ally/partner forces,” the official added.

On May 3, Biden visited a Lockheed Martin facility (see lead photo) and “praised the… plant that manufactures Javelin anti-tank missiles, saying their work was critical to the Ukrainian war effort and to the defense of democracy itself.”

Indeed, by transferring so much military equipment to Ukraine, the U.S. has depleted its own stockpiles, necessitating their replenishment with mass government purchases. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to marvel at the great fortune of this industry, having lost their primary weapons market just eight months ago when the U.S. war in Afghanistan finally ended, only to now be gifted with an even greater and more lucrative opportunity to sell their weapons by virtue of the protracted and always-escalating U.S. role in Ukraine. Raytheon, the primary manufacturer of Javelins along with Lockheed, has been particularly fortunate that its large stockpile, no longer needed for Afghanistan, is now being ordered in larger-than-ever quantities by its former Board member, now running the Pentagon, for shipment to Ukraine. Their stock prices have bulged nicely since the start of the war:

But how does any of this benefit the vast majority of Americans? Does that even matter? As of 2020, almost 30 million Americans are without any health insurance. Over the weekend, USA Today warned of “the ongoing infant formula shortage,” in which “nearly 40% of popular baby formula brands were sold out at retailers across the U.S. during the week starting April 24.” So many Americans are unable to afford college for their children that close to a majority are delaying plans or eliminating them all together. Meanwhile, “monthly poverty remained elevated in February 2022, with a 14.4 percent poverty rate for the total US population….Overall, 6 million more individuals were in poverty in February relative to December.” The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau found that “approximately 42.5 million Americans [are] living below the poverty line.” Americans with diabetes often struggle to buy life-saving insulin. And on and on and on.

Now, if the U.S. were invaded or otherwise attacked by another country, or its vital interests were directly threatened, one would of course expect the U.S. government to expend large sums in order to protect and defend the national security of the country and its citizens. But can anyone advance a cogent argument, let alone a persuasive one, that Americans are somehow endangered by the war in Ukraine? Clearly, they are far more endangered by the U.S. response to the war in Ukraine than the war itself; after all, a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Russia has long been ranked by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as one of the two greatest threats facing humanity.

One would usually expect the American left, or whatever passes it for these days, to be indignant about the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars for weapons while ordinary Americans suffer. But the American left, such that it exists, is barely visible when it comes to debates over the war in Ukraine, while American liberals stand in virtual unity with the establishment wing of the Republican Party behind the Biden administration in support for the escalating U.S. role in the war in Ukraine. A few stray voices (such as Noam Chomsky) have joined large parts of the international left in urging a diplomatic solution in lieu of war and criticizing Biden for insufficient efforts to forge one, but the U.S. left and American liberals are almost entirely silent if not supportive.

That has left the traditionally left-wing argument about war opposition to the populist right. “You can’t find baby formula in the United States right now but Congress is voting today to send $40 billion to Ukraine,” said Donald Trump, Jr. on Tuesday, echoing what one would expect to hear from the 2016 version of Bernie Sanders or the pre-victory AOC. “In the America LAST $40 BILLION Ukraine FIRST bill that we are voting on tonight, there is authorization for funds to be given to the CIA for who knows what and who knows how much? But NO BABY FORMULA for American mothers!” explained Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Christian Walker, the conservative influencer and son of GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia, today observed: “Biden should go apply to be the President of Ukraine since he clearly cares more about them than the U.S.” Chomsky himself caused controversy last week when he said that there is only one statesman of any stature in the West urging a diplomatic solution “and his name is Donald J. Trump.”

Noam Chomsky, in an interview this week, says "fortunately" there is "one Western statesman of stature" who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it.

"His name is Donald J. Trump," Chomsky says.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/z3Cug8kFHS
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2022

Chomsky says he regards Trump as a deeply dangerous figure, yet he is "the one statesman in the West who has said it, and it's the right way out."

"Let's tell the truth," Chomsky says.

Full interview here:https://t.co/UXdbAd2FfT
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2022

Meanwhile, the only place where dissent is heard over the Biden administration’s war policy is on the 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. programs on Fox News, hosted, respectively, by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who routinely demand to know how ordinary Americans are benefiting from this increasing U.S. involvement. On CNN, NBC, and in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, there is virtually lockstep unity in favor of the U.S. role in this war; the only question that is permitted, as usual, is whether the U.S. is doing enough or whether it should do more.

That the U.S. has no legitimate role to play in this war, or that its escalating involvement comes at the expense of American citizens, the people they are supposed to be serving, provokes immediate accusations that one is spreading Russian propaganda and is a Kremlin agent. That is therefore an anti-war view that is all but prohibited in those corporate liberal media venues. Meanwhile, mainstream Democratic House members, such as Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), are now openly talking about the war in Ukraine as if it is the U.S.’s own:

Whatever else is true, the claim with which we are bombarded by the corporate press — the two parties agree on nothing; they are constantly at each other’s throats; they have radically different views of the world — is patently untrue, at least when it comes time for the U.S. to join in new wars. Typically, what we see in such situations is what we are seeing now: the establishment wings of both parties are in complete lockstep unity, always breathlessly supporting the new proposed U.S. role in any new war, eager to empty the coffers of the U.S. Treasury and transfer it to the weapons industry while their constituents suffer.

One can believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is profoundly unjust and has produced horrific outcomes while still questioning what legitimate interests the U.S. has in participating in this war to this extent. Even if one fervently believes that helping Ukrainians fight Russia is a moral good, surely the U.S. government should be prioritizing the ability of its own citizens to live above the poverty line, have health insurance, send their kids to college, and buy insulin and baby formula.

There are always horrific wars raging, typically with a clear aggressor, but that does not mean that the U.S. can or should assume responsibility for the war absent its own vital interests and the interests of its citizens being directly at stake. In what conceivable sense are American citizens benefiting from this enormous expenditure of their resources and the increasing energy and attention being devoted by their leaders to Ukraine rather than to their lives and the multi-pronged deprivations that define them?

CORRECTION (May 10, 2022, 20:47 pm ET): This article was edited shortly after publication to reflect that Russia’s total annual military budget is $65.9 billion, not $65.9 million.

UPDATE (May 10, 2022, 22:39 pm ET): Shortly after publication of this article, the $40 billion package for the war in Ukraine passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 368-57. According to CNN: “All 57 votes in opposition were from Republicans.”

Perpetual Tyranny: Endless Wars Are the Enemy of Freedom

Posted on March 3, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“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.” — James Madison

War is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that 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, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

It’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

This latest crisis—America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine—has conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises, manufactured or otherwise, which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.

And so it continues in its Orwellian fashion.

Two years after COVID-19 shifted the world into a state of global authoritarianism, just as the people’s tolerance for heavy-handed mandates seems to have finally worn thin, we are being prepped for the next distraction and the next drain on our economy.

Yet policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad isn’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, it’s certainly not making America great again, and it’s undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

Indeed, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

What most Americans—brainwashed into believing that patriotism means supporting the war machine—fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

Consider: We are a military culture engaged in continuous warfare. We have been a nation at war for most of our existence. We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.

We are also being fed a steady diet of violence through our entertainment, news and politics.

All of the military equipment featured in blockbuster movies is provided—at taxpayer expense—in exchange for carefully placed promotional spots.

Back when I was a boy growing up in the 1950s, almost every classic sci fi movie ended with the heroic American military saving the day, whether it was battle tanks in Invaders from Mars (1953) or military roadblocks in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

What I didn’t know then as a schoolboy was the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to be cast as America’s savior. By the time my own kids were growing up, it was Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster film Top Gun—created with Pentagon assistance and equipment—that boosted civic pride in the military.

Now it’s my grandkids’ turn to be awed and overwhelmed by child-focused military propaganda. Don’t even get me started on the war propaganda churned out by the toymakers. Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig, with the Pentagon’s entertainment office helping to sell war to the American public.

It’s estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.

And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.

This is how you acclimate a population to war.

This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.

This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you teach a nation to “stop worrying and love the bomb.”

As journalist David Sirota writes for Salon, “[C]ollusion between the military and Hollywood – including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts—is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs….major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.”

Why is the Pentagon (and the CIA and the government at large) so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine?

To those who profit from war, it is—as Sirota recognizes—“a ‘product’ to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers….At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction — and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal.”

The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly.

This is what professor Roger Stahl refers to as the representation of a “clean war”: a war “without victims, without bodies, and without suffering”:

“‘Dehumanize destruction’ by extracting all human imagery from target areas … The language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are ‘air strikes.’ A future bombsite is a ‘target of opportunity.’ Unarmed areas are ‘soft targets.’ Civilians are ‘collateral damage.’ Destruction is always ‘surgical.’ By and large, the clean war wiped the humanity of civilians from the screen … Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitized and even aesthetically beautiful. Minimize any sense of death: of soldiers or civilians.”

This is how you sell war to a populace that may have grown weary of endless wars: sanitize the war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting (present a clean war), gloss over the actual numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human cost), cast the business of killing humans in a more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a hunt), demonize one’s opponents, and make the weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.

“This obsession with weapons of war has a name: technofetishism,” explains Stahl. “Weapons appear to take on a magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship.”

“Apart from gazing at the majesty of these bombs, we were also invited to step inside these high-tech machines and take them for a spin,” said Stahl. “Or if we have the means, we can purchase one of the military vehicles on the consumer market. Not only are we invited to fantasize about being in the driver’s seat, we are routinely invited to peer through the crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging war cultivate new modes of perception, new relationships to the tools of state violence. In other words, we become accustomed to ‘seeing’ through the machines of war.”

In order to sell war, you have to feed the public’s appetite for entertainment.

Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon has also turned to sports to further advance its agenda, “tying the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”

The military has been firmly entrenched in the nation’s sports spectacles ever since, having co-opted football, basketball, even NASCAR.

This is how you sustain the nation’s appetite for war.

No wonder entertainment violence is the hottest selling ticket at the box office. As professor Henry Giroux points out, “Popular culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, but also it delivers violence to a society addicted to a pleasure principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and torture.”

No wonder the government continues to whet the nation’s appetite for violence and war through paid propaganda programs (seeded throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood blockbusters and video games)—what Stahl refers to as “militainment“—that glorify the military and serve as recruiting tools for America’s expanding military empire.

No wonder Americans from a very young age are being groomed to enlist as foot soldiers—even virtual ones—in America’s Army (coincidentally, that’s also the name of a first person shooter video game produced by the military). Explorer Scouts, for example, are one of the most popular recruiting tools for the military and its civilian counterparts (law enforcement, Border Patrol, and the FBI).

No wonder the United States is the number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of violence and violent weapons in the world. Seriously, America spends more money on war than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil. America polices the globe, with 800 military bases and troops stationed in 160 countries. Moreover, the war hawks have turned the American homeland into a quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces have become roving extensions of the military—a standing army.

We are dealing with a sophisticated, far-reaching war machine that has woven itself into the very fabric of this nation.

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

Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.

It happened in Rome: 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.

It’s happening again.

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.

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 President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:

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 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter 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, I repeat, is 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.

The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.

What we have is a confluence of factors and influences that go beyond mere comparisons to Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government—i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers—and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

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 author Aldous Huxley warned: “Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

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After the Crash

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Tag Archives: military-industrial complex

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