US, biggest warmonger in the world
Newch91
Posts: 17,560
Interesting article. Anyone have any thoughts on this? The author of the article makes good points, especially incorporating Ike's quote at the end. Ike told use to beware of the military industrial complex. Sadly, we haven't.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/09/23 ... the-world/
US, biggest warmonger in the world
By Dave Lindorff
There is a massive deception campaign in the US and in its global propaganda, which seeks to portray the United States as a poor set-upon nation that would like world peace, but just has to keep a military stationed around the globe to “police” all the world’s “trouble spots.”
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
That truth is that the US is the biggest warmonger the world has ever known.
Let’s start with its budget. The US, in fiscal year 2012, budgeted a total of $673 billion for the military, plus another $166 billion for military activities of other government departments, such as the nuclear weapons program, much of which is handled by the Department of Energy or of the Veterans Program, which pays for the care and benefits of former military personnel. There’s also another roughly $440 billion in interest paid on the debt from prior wars and military expenditures. All together, that comes to $1.3 trillion, which represents close to 50% of the general budget of the United States -- the highest percentage of a government budget devoted to the military of any modern nation in the world -- and perhaps of any government of any nation in the world.
That spending represents also the world’s biggest percentage of national gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to the military (GDP is a measure of all economic activity in a nation). Looking at the other countries with big militaries -- China, Russia, Britain and France, not only does not one come even close in terms of the percent of GDP spent on its military, but taken together, all of their expenditures on their military combined total less than half what the US spends by itself.
Since the late 1960s, the US government has engaged in a sleight-of-hand to hide the scale of its military spending from the American people. It has done this by adding to the federal budget the amount of money spent on Social Security, the nation's retirement program, and Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. This is not a correct accounting however, because both of those programs are actually funded by a separate payroll tax paid by employees and employers and the resulting trust funds are actually dedicated to the citizens who receive or will receive benefits from the programs. Using that fraud, the government and the politicians are able to claim that the US “only” spends 24% of the budget on military. Even that would be far above what is spent by any other nation in the world, but it is actually only half of what the US really spends as a share of its general budget.
One reason the US military budget is so huge is that the US operates some 900 bases abroad, in what amounts to a program of global empire. It is estimated that the cost of keeping those bases operating is about $250 billion. Empire costs a lot more than that though. There’s also the cost of operating a global fleet of ships, including incredibly costly aircraft carrier battle groups. That cost, surely in excess of $100 billion when the cost of the ships is factored in, doesn’t get broken out by the Pentagon.
Then, there is another way the US is the world’s biggest warmonger. This is in its role as the world’s biggest arms merchant. In 2011, the US sold more than $66 billion in arms to the rest of the world, often, as in the case of India and Pakistan, or India and China, or Israel and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, selling weapons to countries that are mutually hostile to each other or even, as in the case of India and Pakistan, in a state of active conflict along their border. That $66 billion -- an all-time record for the US -- was an astonishing and depressing 78% of the global arms market for the year. Russia was the second biggest arms dealer, selling only a paltry $4.8 billion in weapons to the rest of the world.
None of these weapons the US is selling makes either the US or the world any safer.
Indeed, two of the biggest recipients of US military “aid” and weapons sales are Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Saudi regime last year purchased $30 billion in arms from the US. Meanwhile the US has been providing Israel with $3 billion in outright military aid each year for years. Israel also buys billions of dollars in weapons from the US each year. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship and a promoter of instability within Syria, while it also props up dictatorships in countries like Yemen and Bahrain. In other countries, like Israel or Colombia, US aid encourages military actions which could lead to conflicts that would inevitably draw the US in as a participant.
The truth is that none of America’s military spending makes the US safer.
One doesn’t see fanatics traveling to Brazil or China or New Zealand to blow things up. One reason is almost certainly that those countries aren’t stationing their troops within other countries’ borders, and aren’t selling weapons to countries that threaten their neighbors.
The US government tells Americans that all that money they are spending on the military is designed to “protect” them from harm. In fact, the evidence over the years is that it is making Americans more vulnerable and less safe. Not only that, but the wars that the US has started over the years -- in Indochina, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere -- have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of young Americans (and of course to the deaths of millions of people in those countries, most of them civilians).
The truth is that a country that spends half of every tax dollar collected from its citizens on its military cannot hope to prosper. As President Dwight Eisenhower, a former top general in the US military who led US forces in World War II, once famously stated in a 1953 address to a group of newspaper editors:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Most of the rest of the world isn’t fooled by American government accounting tricks. Being at the barrel end of the gun, people of other countries know how US military spending is a primary cause of war and terror in the world. But we Americans ourselves need to wake up to the massive damage that our military-obsessed political system is doing to our country, lest it ultimately destroys us. There is a clear reason that social programs in the US are threatened, that the economy is in a prolonged depression, that our education system is collapsing, and that our standing in the world has plummeted. It is our militarism, and the incredible amount of the national wealth that is being spent on it.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/09/23 ... the-world/
US, biggest warmonger in the world
By Dave Lindorff
There is a massive deception campaign in the US and in its global propaganda, which seeks to portray the United States as a poor set-upon nation that would like world peace, but just has to keep a military stationed around the globe to “police” all the world’s “trouble spots.”
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
That truth is that the US is the biggest warmonger the world has ever known.
Let’s start with its budget. The US, in fiscal year 2012, budgeted a total of $673 billion for the military, plus another $166 billion for military activities of other government departments, such as the nuclear weapons program, much of which is handled by the Department of Energy or of the Veterans Program, which pays for the care and benefits of former military personnel. There’s also another roughly $440 billion in interest paid on the debt from prior wars and military expenditures. All together, that comes to $1.3 trillion, which represents close to 50% of the general budget of the United States -- the highest percentage of a government budget devoted to the military of any modern nation in the world -- and perhaps of any government of any nation in the world.
That spending represents also the world’s biggest percentage of national gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to the military (GDP is a measure of all economic activity in a nation). Looking at the other countries with big militaries -- China, Russia, Britain and France, not only does not one come even close in terms of the percent of GDP spent on its military, but taken together, all of their expenditures on their military combined total less than half what the US spends by itself.
Since the late 1960s, the US government has engaged in a sleight-of-hand to hide the scale of its military spending from the American people. It has done this by adding to the federal budget the amount of money spent on Social Security, the nation's retirement program, and Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. This is not a correct accounting however, because both of those programs are actually funded by a separate payroll tax paid by employees and employers and the resulting trust funds are actually dedicated to the citizens who receive or will receive benefits from the programs. Using that fraud, the government and the politicians are able to claim that the US “only” spends 24% of the budget on military. Even that would be far above what is spent by any other nation in the world, but it is actually only half of what the US really spends as a share of its general budget.
One reason the US military budget is so huge is that the US operates some 900 bases abroad, in what amounts to a program of global empire. It is estimated that the cost of keeping those bases operating is about $250 billion. Empire costs a lot more than that though. There’s also the cost of operating a global fleet of ships, including incredibly costly aircraft carrier battle groups. That cost, surely in excess of $100 billion when the cost of the ships is factored in, doesn’t get broken out by the Pentagon.
Then, there is another way the US is the world’s biggest warmonger. This is in its role as the world’s biggest arms merchant. In 2011, the US sold more than $66 billion in arms to the rest of the world, often, as in the case of India and Pakistan, or India and China, or Israel and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, selling weapons to countries that are mutually hostile to each other or even, as in the case of India and Pakistan, in a state of active conflict along their border. That $66 billion -- an all-time record for the US -- was an astonishing and depressing 78% of the global arms market for the year. Russia was the second biggest arms dealer, selling only a paltry $4.8 billion in weapons to the rest of the world.
None of these weapons the US is selling makes either the US or the world any safer.
Indeed, two of the biggest recipients of US military “aid” and weapons sales are Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Saudi regime last year purchased $30 billion in arms from the US. Meanwhile the US has been providing Israel with $3 billion in outright military aid each year for years. Israel also buys billions of dollars in weapons from the US each year. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship and a promoter of instability within Syria, while it also props up dictatorships in countries like Yemen and Bahrain. In other countries, like Israel or Colombia, US aid encourages military actions which could lead to conflicts that would inevitably draw the US in as a participant.
The truth is that none of America’s military spending makes the US safer.
One doesn’t see fanatics traveling to Brazil or China or New Zealand to blow things up. One reason is almost certainly that those countries aren’t stationing their troops within other countries’ borders, and aren’t selling weapons to countries that threaten their neighbors.
The US government tells Americans that all that money they are spending on the military is designed to “protect” them from harm. In fact, the evidence over the years is that it is making Americans more vulnerable and less safe. Not only that, but the wars that the US has started over the years -- in Indochina, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere -- have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of young Americans (and of course to the deaths of millions of people in those countries, most of them civilians).
The truth is that a country that spends half of every tax dollar collected from its citizens on its military cannot hope to prosper. As President Dwight Eisenhower, a former top general in the US military who led US forces in World War II, once famously stated in a 1953 address to a group of newspaper editors:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Most of the rest of the world isn’t fooled by American government accounting tricks. Being at the barrel end of the gun, people of other countries know how US military spending is a primary cause of war and terror in the world. But we Americans ourselves need to wake up to the massive damage that our military-obsessed political system is doing to our country, lest it ultimately destroys us. There is a clear reason that social programs in the US are threatened, that the economy is in a prolonged depression, that our education system is collapsing, and that our standing in the world has plummeted. It is our militarism, and the incredible amount of the national wealth that is being spent on it.
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
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take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Unfortuantely it is propoganda and soaked into kids dna from birth. America is great, support the troops, fighting for our freedom etc.
It is just tools to make it easier for our elected officials to go to war. You are unAmerican to oppose it.
My thoughts exactly. Just think of all the good we could do for the people here if we reduced out military spending by shutting down every base around the world. Why do we need a standing army? That was one of the biggest fears of our founding fathers and it seems to be one of the "fears" that most Americans forget about or know nothing about.
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
(based on 2011 federal budget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_federal_budget)
It's still a butt load of money, but nowhere close to the 50% that the article claims.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
I'm looking into my magic 8-ball ... I see the Senate gathering on January 1st ... I see ... a vote ... for ... postponement of military cuts!
The magic 8-ball now grows foggy ...
The deficit was $1.56B in 2011. If you completely cut the entire military budget and the interest payments ($1.11B) and we are still $447,000,000 in the hole for 2011 alone!
And yet our elected and campaigning leaders can look at us with a straight face and claim they have a plan to balance the budget ... in ten years ... somehow.
:fp:
2. regardless of the actual % - the critical issue here is that the purpose of these military expenditures is not altruistic. it is based on greed, exploitation and economic imperialism. this is the fact most americans will never get to.
That's because it is un-American and unpatriotic to criticize our country and how we became the lone superpower in the world, as of right now anyhow.
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
Godfather.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 1011405394
5 Myths about defense spending
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Defense spending is a massive part of our federal budget - and a cause of equally massive debate, whether in wartime or in peace. With fiscal pressures rising, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has detailed a reprioritization of Pentagon resources and a $78 billion reduction in planned defense spending over the next five years. But he has also argued that "when it comes to the deficit, the Department of Defense is not the problem." Still, the $720 billion defense budget is a very large share of federal discretionary spending - more than half in 2010. We can no longer separate national security from fiscal imperatives. Unfortunately, several myths keep us from a more disciplined defense budget.
Defense spending is dictated by the threats we face.
1 The challenges posed by terrorism, cyber-threats and military buildups by potential adversaries clearly play a role in shaping our national security strategy and defense budget. But so do competing government priorities in the face of limited resources, political and bureaucratic interests, and the influence of the defense industry. At times, these issues overwhelm security concerns.
As a result, budgeting decisions can appear off-course. Should we invest in our military's capacity to rebuild post-conflict societies, even if we are unlikely to engage soon in another war of regime change? Or should we spend as if we will soon confront China at sea and in the air, even if we are unlikely to do so? The White House, the Pentagon and Congress have enormous discretion in these decisions.
Sometimes funding also meets purely parochial or industrial needs. In August, for example, Gates announced his decision to close the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, which costs $240 million annually to operate. But after heavy criticism from state officials, Gates decided that half of the command's activities should continue, to be carried out by other Defense Department organizations in Virginia's Tidewater region. Local politics trumped efficiency.
The larger the Pentagon's budget, the safer we are.
2 Excessive defense spending can make us less secure, not more. Countries feel threatened when rivals ramp up their defenses; this was true in the Cold War, and now it may happen with China. It's how arms races are born. We spend more, inspiring competitors to do the same - thus inflating defense budgets without making anyone safer.
For example, Gates observed in May that no other country has a single ship comparable to our 11 aircraft carriers. Based on the perceived threat that this fleet poses, the Chinese are pursuing an anti-ship ballistic missile program. U.S. military officials have decried this "carrier-killer" effort, and in response we are diversifying our capabilities to strike China, including a new long-range bomber program, and modernizing our carrier fleet at a cost of about $10 billion per ship.
This country has remained secure in eras of declining defense budgets, such as the postwar period of the Eisenhower presidency and the early post-Cold War years. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced active-duty forces by 700,000, Pentagon civilians by 300,000, defense procurement dollars by 53 percent and overall national defense spending by 28 percent - and we were still able to carry out one of the Pentagon's top planning scenarios: occupying Iraq in 2003. (The wisdom of that decision is a different matter.)
Republicans like defense spending; Democrats don't.
3 Since 1945, defense spending has risen in wartime and fallen as conflicts end. Dwight Eisenhower reduced national defense outlays by 28 percent from their 1953 Korean War peak. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford went even further, cutting 37 percent from the defense budget after the Vietnam-era high in 1968. And President George H.W. Bush had cut 14 percent compared with the 1989 Cold War budget by the time he left office.
All these presidents were Republicans. Meanwhile, after adjusting for inflation, the most expensive defense budget in more than 60 years belongs to President Obama, a Democrat.
Of course, Democrats have also found savings at the Pentagon. Clinton extended the post-Cold War drawdown through his 1998 budget, and Obama will probably start post-Iraq and Afghanistan defense cuts soon - potentially with support from new Republican House leaders such as Eric Cantor (Va.) and Paul Ryan (Wis.), who have said that defense will not be exempt from the fiscal axe.
Today's levels of military pay and benefits are necessary.
4 Just as in any other labor market, the supply of and demand for workers determines the pay needed to maintain a professional military. But military pay and benefits are affected by other factors: Congress has learned that boosting military compensation is the easiest way to show that you're supporting the troops.
Gates expressed frustration in May with Congress's practice in recent years of adding half a percent to the military pay raises the Pentagon requested. While it does not sound like much, that increase is enormous - as much as $450 million a year - because it applies to all active-duty troops rather than targeting key specializations that the military needs.
Benefit costs for the military have also been increasing. Health care has been a particular problem, with Pentagon health-care budgets rising from $19 billion in 2001 to more than $50 billion today. This increase has been driven largely by the growth in the cost of health care generally and the expansion of the beneficiary pool to include more retirees and reservists. Congress has also resisted the Pentagon's recent annual requests to increase enrollment fees for working-age retirees, even though these have not changed in 15 years.
Gates's cuts are enough.
5 They're a small step in the right direction, but the proposed cuts would still leave the level of defense spending far above what we need. The United States spent more on national defense last year, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than in any year during the Cold War, even though we no longer face an existential Soviet-style threat.
Our security situation permits us to spend in a more disciplined way, and our fiscal circumstances require it. Publicly held federal debt takes up a greater share of the U.S. economy - roughly 64 percent, according to the Office of Management and Budget - than any time since 1951. Failing to control this debt means that interest payments will consume future budgets and limit our spending, even for defense.
As we detail in an essay in the latest Foreign Affairs, the national defense budget proposals could be lower by an aggregate of roughly $1 trillion through 2020, still leaving us to spend $6.3 trillion on defense over that period. This can be done while retaining our military dominance and building a more effective and efficient force.
Gordon Adams is a professor of international relations at American University and a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, a global security think tank. Matthew Leatherman is a research associate at the Stimson Center.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
your magic 8 ball seems to be spot on.. their is a fear that if military spending is cut that America will be weaken..
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hence the need for global political instability ... see libya and egypt ... see iran ... as long as the "threat" exists ... expenditures on defense will never be compromised ...
Now the US is behind them?
:fp:
A new report on the secret U.S. drone war in Pakistan says the attacks have killed far more civilians than acknowledged, traumatized a nation and undermined international law. In "Living Under Drones," researchers conclude the drone strikes "terrorize men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities." The study concludes that most of the militants killed in the strikes have been low-level targets whose deaths have failed to make the United States any safer. Just 2 percent of drone attack victims are said to be top militant leaders. We’re joined by report authors James Cavallaro, director of the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford University, and Sarah Knuckey, professor at New York University School of Law and former adviser to the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. [includes rush transcript]
did i say they were behind them? ... all i'm saying is that you can't continue to spend money on missles and planes and drones if there is world peace ...
That was the second part of what you said. The first part was an attempt to blame the lack of said world peace on the US intentionally fomenting unrest in Iran, Egypt, and Libya in order to have an excuse for a big military.
haha ... for someone who couldn't decipher what was obvious in a post about the catholic church and mary magdalene - you all of a sudden have derived an ability to now understand context?
well ... i'm here to clarify that you are wrong ...
do i think the US has been guilty of creating political instability for economic imperialistic goals ... definitely
do i believe the arab spring rising was orchestrated by the US? ... no
do i think the US is responsible for these latest protests supposedly related to an anti-muslim film? ... no ...
do i think that global insecurity is good for defense contractors? ... yes
do i think that there needs to be threats to security to ensure continued spending on weapons? ... definitely
Anyway, getting away from your ad hominem issues and back to the topic...the only real disconnect here is the unrest you said the US caused and the application of that to arab spring by Jason P. I of course don't read every post on AMT, so I don't know what you were or were not "cheering on". In this thread, initially you very clearly implied that the US was involved in fomenting instability in Iran, Egypt, and Libya (note I didn't say anything about the arab spring here or previously, since you didn't either) and that the purpose was as an excuse to maintain a large military, which is what I said in my earlier post. Now you're saying that the US does promote instability to justify a large military, but without mentioning any specific countries.
If the interpretation that you were disagreeing with before was the claim that you thought the US was behind (or "orchestrated") the Arab Spring, then fine, but that's never what I was claiming you said. When I said that it was an "implicit statement" in your post, I was talking about the instability being intentionally caused to justify a large military, not the Arab Spring specifically.
ahh yes and how amusing it is to watch as your governemnt spends money it doesnt even have. i hope whoever is holding the chit doesnt call it in... cause thatd make things reeeaaally interesting.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I don't even like talking to my mom about it... gets old. No wonder I get along with my dad better :roll: After 22 years in the Air Force and going through Desert Storm, he realizes how ridiculous and deadly the war machine is.
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
(crickets)
no governments that i can think of, but i do know that certain elements of the population of iraq, saudi arabia, pakistan, and australia want our bases off of their land.
do you remember one of the main reasons why 9/11 happened? because we would not get our bases out of saudi arabia.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
your point in the other thread was that there could be multiple interpretations - we didn't see it that way and i can confirm that i've received correspondence to confirm our interpretation ... you chose to give inlet the benefit of the doubt in that thread but here - you are making conclusions that are both false and presumptive ... i get it tho - you represent a different ideological viewpoint so you're gonna play the party line ...