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by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-04-26
© 2010 Peter Belmont
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No apparent advantage accrues to the USA (as opposed, for instance, to the G8, G20, whatever) from the USA’s maintaining and sometimes using its bloated military at enormous expense.
One idea as to why we do it is to make the world “safe” for American-style “democracy”, that is, to allow corporations to run all the world the same way they run the USA. On this view, the USA’s militarism is a result of corporate pressure, and not merely from the manufacturers of arms.
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The USA maintains army, navy, and air force bases throughout the world, at enormous cost. The cost becomes even greater if the costs of all the surveillance we do including a sky full of satellites (called “intelligence gathering”) and the cost of military and intelligence contract workers (mercenaries) and the cost of debt repayment and debt servicing on past-years military and “intelligence” and mercenary borrowing are factored in. A good survey of USA militarism may be found in Andrew J. Bacevich’s “The New American Militarism”,
Sometimes we actually fight real wars, and always learn how expensive and generally unuseful they are. Vietnam was such a war, extraordinarily destructive not merely of the Vietnamese people and countryside but also of the lives, bodies, minds, and morals of American soldiers—and of USA treasure. Iraq is another.
Why do we do it? Is it as is sometimes said to reform other governments, to make “democracies” of places which were totalitarian? Is it to control resources such as oil—or to capture the sources of such resources? Are we in Iraq to steal its oil? To force Iraq to sell its oil at market prices rather than withhold its oil from market? (Did we really think Saddam Hussein was going to go broke? Had he ever done that?) To secure for USA corporations lucrative contracts running or servicing Iraqi oilfields?
”What’s in it for us?” I asked until I realized my mistake, I had made the really unforgivable mistake of forgetting to ask who “us” is. (As a speaker said at a political rally recently, whenever you hear a politician explaining his positions by saying “we”, you know it’s time to head for the hills.)
The USA acts, largely, at the direction of large corporations, presumably “American corporations” if that seemingly narrowing designation means anything any more, but corporations (and other coagulators of great wealth), certainly. Corporations pour money into political campaigns so that, truly, we have “the best Congress that money can buy.” Presidents cannot long ignore Congress if they want to “get anything done” legislatively (it having been long forgotten that, Constitutionally at least, presidents are our chief administrators, not a part of the legislative process). If the BIGs (Big Banks, Big Insurance, Big Armaments, Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, Big Autos, Big-Israel (AIPAC), etc., etc., etc.) want something done, it is very likely to get done.
And the BIGs like it that way and would like it to be that way everywhere. They’d like to make the world uniform in the image of American corporation-run “democracy”—for the benefit of the BIGs. The BIGs run America for their own benefit and would like to run the whole world that way.
And the BIGs don’t pay very much in the way of taxes to the USA, so none of this militarism costs them much. One use of the power of the BIGs is that they have reduced corporate taxation (through lowered tax rates, but also through special-interest tax deductions) and have also, very thoughtfully, caused taxes to be cut away to next to nothing for wealthy individuals, possibly taking note that wealthy individuals are the owners and operators of the BIGs.
So who does pay for USA’s militarism, which costs about as much in each year as the militarism-budgets of the rest of the world combined?
Good question. Not wishing to have these costs looked at very closely, the BIGs (acting, of course, through Congress) have caused the militarism budget to be split up and scattered in the national budget so that it is not easily added up. And, of course, they have exempted the militarism budget from being subject to the rule—which they apply to all other budget items—which requires increase in spending to be matched by increase in taxes or decreases in other spending.
Money for militarism is not accounted. And taxes do not pay for it. (It is borrowed.) And “conservatives”, often watchdogs as to expenditure, ignore it, indeed, insist on increasing it, seemingly without limit.
But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the BIGs are not the driving force behind USA militarism. Maybe it is only BIG Armaments and BIG-Israel and not all the other BIGs.
In that case, is it really possible that these Gargantua have so little regard for USA’s wellfare that they do not object to this so-excessive expenditure? If that is the case, and taking note again that the BIGs are, today, the only citizens of this republic (as the Supreme Court so exquisitely re-emphasized recently), then our only citizens are not watching the store. No-one in that case is watching the store. Is this a way to run a railroad?
Whether or not it be supposed that I’ve answered the question of “why does the USA maintain its enormous militarist enterprise?” the question remains, “who pays for it?”.
Seems that China pays for it, avidly (so far) collecting more and more of the USA’s increasingly worthless dollars. Why they do this beats me. Maybe I’ve been entirely wrong. Maybe we maintain our bloated militarist enterprise at China’s behest. Maybe China owns us or thinks it does. Or maybe China merely pays the costs in order to maintain an orderly world, a world safe for capitalism, since China is now a major capitalist player. The USA a rent-an-army?
Does anything else make sense?
Funny world we live in.
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