US global source of poverty and war

Official figures show that there are nearly 47 million Americans suffering from extreme poverty.

US global source of poverty and war
17 December, 2013 – By Finian Cunningham – PressTV

The latest bilateral deal between House Republicans and Democrats on the US federal budget is a shocking reminder of the monstrous priorities for the American ruling class.

Poverty, hunger, sickness and homelessness for millions more ordinary Americans; while unbridled US militarism stalks the globe like a demented Leviathan, casting a shadow of war and destruction into every corner.

American-dominated capitalism is a global scourge of poverty and war. It is much less American dream and much more humankind’s nightmare.

The disclosure this week that Russia is to deploy Iskander ballistic missiles in the Baltic region, and the double think, inverted accusations ensuing from Washington that Moscow is destabilizing global security, is part of this monstrous American-induced global dysfunction – more on that later.

US Republicans and Democrats – two sides of the same oligarchic coin – congratulated themselves on the recent federal budget package, which amounts to nearly $1 trillion in US government spending for each of the next two years.

But of that annual $1 trillion, the money allocated for military spending amounts to some $633 billion. That is, nearly two-thirds – more than 63 percent – of the total US government’s budget is consumed by the means of war and killing.

To give this some perspective, the US spends ten times more on weapons and the means of destroying and killing other human beings than it does on educating its entire nation.

What kind of economy, or more to the point, society, is that? A cynic might say that’s just what the American ruling class wants. Keep the majority uneducated and misinformed, while the military-industrial oligarchs and their political minions keep devouring the nation’s wealth.

This US war machine entails the maintenance of over 1,000 military bases around the world, patrolling of Chinese seas with nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, expansion of missile systems across the Eurasian steppes encircling Russia, and the never-ending assassination drones that end up killing more civilians than “terrorists” in remote, barren countries.

Meanwhile, the budget “deal” signed off by Republicans and Democrats is gunning for massive cuts in US social security and public services. Some $100 billion in public spending cuts are locked in each year for the next decade. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon hailed the Pentagon’s lion’s share of the budget as “good value to taxpayers”.

As a result of this warped “good value”, over the following year millions of unemployed Americans will see their income support terminated as the new federal budget mandates $25 billion in cuts. Millions more Americans will go hungry as $4 billion in food stamps is axed. Millions of Americans will succumb to disease and illness as $30 billion is slashed from federal health care.

Already, official figures show that there are nearly 47 million Americans suffering from extreme poverty in the US. Some estimates put total US poverty at 150 million – nearly half the population – amplified by six years of economic depression since the US-bank-induced global financial crash of 2008. These same Wall Street banks, which are an integral part of the military-industrial cancer, receive $85 billion a month in bailout cash footed by the US taxpayer.

Of course, this ludicrous imbalance of US military spending as a share of the nation’s wealth is nothing new. Former US President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the spawning military-industrial complex almost half a century ago.

But what is revealing about today’s situation is that US military spending just keeps on growing regardless of rational or moral norms. It is estimated that between 1962 and presently, the annual American so-called defense budget has more than doubled.

William D Hartung at the US-based Center for International Policy reckons that the American military now consumes $100 billion per year more than the average during the Cold War years, when the US and the Soviet Union were bound up in a gargantuan arms race.

Note that this extra $100 billion figure arrogated by the Pentagon and its corporate nexus is equivalent to all the US cuts being sought in unemployment security, health care and elsewhere in public services.

The Cold War ended – or was supposed to have ended – over two decades ago. The subsequent so-called War on Terror, even if naively taken at face value, is a flea-sized contingency by comparison to the Cold War.

Yet today the American economy is more subsumed in growing and perpetuating the means of war than ever before. And this is while the human and social needs of ordinary Americans are crying out for relief more than ever. That glaring contradiction is a symptom of the rotten heart of American capitalism.

What this hideous misallocation of national resources shows is that war and poverty are endemic to American capitalism. The system is sustained – but not sustainable – only by the massive and relentless subvention of tax dollars into obscene militarism.

That perverse priority is not only at the root of American’s social meltdown. It also drives the rest of the world into a similar destructive and dangerous dynamic towards nihilistic militarism. …more