In the warfare state, national security spending more sacred than social security
The $1.5 billion national security budget could be slashed by 90 percent and still leave the United States with invincible self-defense.
The only thing more politically sacred in Washington, D.C. than social security is the multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex. From time to time, Presidents appoint commissions to study social security and to consider reforms to keep it financially solvent. But the warfare state is off limits. No debates about its soaring costs, for example, the $1.7 trillion alone projected for the F-35 or the $10 billion annually on Star Wars missile defenses which defy the laws of physics, or the 800 military bases abroad, or the more than $300 million per day for 20 successive years squandered in Afghanistan to bring back a second and more barbaric edition of Taliban. Republicans and Democrats alike are drum majors for the warfare state.
As the nation races towards a debt ceiling crisis, House Republicans are clamoring for spending reductions on everything but the warfare state like food stamps. Think of what war hero and President Dwight D. Eisenhower said about military spending 75 years ago when the Pentagon was but a shadow of what it has become in his Chance for Peace speech:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is 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.”
What is wrong with this country that deifies the armored knight and derides the thinker? What is wrong with this country whose glory has been transformed from liberty and the march of the mind to permanent war and targeted drone killings? What is wrong with this country which honors the Sermon on the Mount in the breach rather than in the observance?
We are sleepwalking off a cliff and into oblivion.