Biden Expands Trump's Bloated Military Budget
Biden Expands Trump's Bloated Military Budget
There are many good reasons to condemn both ruling parties. Militarism is one of them.
NOTE: I grew up in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and I’ve witnessed the devastation and carnage of military conflict. I selected the image above to illustrate what war actually looks like. It is a photo of an Iraqi girl in agony after her parents were killed by U.S. Soldiers in Tal Afar, Iraq in 2005.
Against the backdrop of the drumbeat of war in Ukraine, Reuters reports:
President Joe Biden is expected to ask Congress for a U.S. defense budget exceeding $770 billion for the next fiscal year as the Pentagon seeks to modernize the military, according to three sources familiar with the negotiations, eclipsing the record budget requests by former President Donald Trump. The budget would benefit the biggest U.S. defense contractors including Lockheed, Northrop Grumman Corp and General Dynamics Corp.
To put this budget in context, Biden’s infrastructure bill and Build Back Better Act amount to less than a third the military spending he’s requesting. And of course, Republicans will welcome it, and ask for more. If anything is ‘bipartisan’ in Washington, it’s war.
A common (and worthwhile) exercise among establishment critics is to list the things that the U.S. government won’t provide to its citizens while having seemingly unlimited money for the military:
The list of policies where Biden has out-Trumped Donald Trump grows by the day. It includes border abuses, oil drilling, coronavirus deaths, and military spending. Chris Hedges writes:
When all else fails, when you are clueless about how to halt a 7.5% inflation rate, when your Build Back Better bill is gutted, when you renege on your promise to raise the minimum wage or forgive student debt, when you can’t halt the Republican suppression of voting rights, when you have no idea how to handle the pandemic which has claimed 900,000 lives – 16% of the world’s total deaths although we are less than 5% of the world’s population … when you watch passively as the ecocide gathers momentum, then you must make the public afraid of enemies, foreign and domestic. You must manufacture an existential threat.
Democrats and liberals will assail leftists as “fascist enablers” for speaking the truth. And they will go back to voting harder for the ‘blue team,’ as though that changes anything.
As I noted recently, large majorities of Americans favor ending the two-party monopoly:
Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults say the "parties do such a poor job representing the American people that a third party is needed," an increase from 57% in September. Meanwhile, 33% of Americans believe the two major political parties are doing an adequate job representing the public, the smallest percentage expressing this view apart from the 26% reading in October 2013.
Considering that political leaders of both ruling parties think making war is more important than ending poverty, hunger, and homelessness, is it any wonder people want a change?
It is unquestionably true, even if discomforting, that meaningful change benefitting the average American is less and less likely going to happen at the ballot box.