Pierre Tristam: Armed to the Teeth, America Marches Toward Military State

[marmar]

from the News-Journal, via CommonDreams:


Published on Tuesday, February 6, 2007 by the News-Journal (Florida)
Armed to the Teeth, America Marches Toward Military State
by Pierre Tristam

President Bush's 2008 budget includes a $625 billion request for the military, up from $295 billion the year Bush was elected -- a 112 percent increase. Its about $100 billion more than all other military budgets in the world, combined. Plenty of attention is being paid the exhausted military fighting Bush's various wars. There's no denying it. It's overstretched and undermanned. It makes you think the Pentagon needs more money, not less.

But little attention is paid the flip-side of that story -- the squandering of money on defense contractors' swindles, whether it's the superfluous $66 billion F-22 fighter jet program -- one of three jet fighters in development -- or the $9 billion-a-year missile shield, which, one test aside, hasn't gotten much past its middle school science project concept since Ronald Reagan fancied it a quarter century and $160 billion ago.

The military is strapped by its own doing. Lawmakers are complicit. Job-producing military contracts are seeded throughout the land's congressional districts like above-board bribes.

But lawmakers couldn't get away with it if the military weren't the subject of a misplaced, ill-informed and dangerous public infatuation that's been changing American society for the worse since the early 1980s -- the period when Reagan built up the military into the creepy colossus it's been since. As Andrew Bacevich, author of "The New American Militarism," wrote, "The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles."

Misuse of the military abroad and its escalating burdens on taxpayers are well documented. The consequences of the infatuation on civilian society are documented less well, because the effects are more subtle than convoys of tanks down Main Street. The consequences are more diffuse, more pernicious. There is, for example, the increasing role the military is playing in domestic life, secretly and not-so secretly, crumbling almost a century and a half old prohibition against military meddling in civilian business. ......(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0206-25.htm

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. fascism at it's finest . . . .

K&R

[Briar]

2. Any country that worships the military

is in danger of giving it too much civil power. I can see this happening in the US.

[bobthedrummer]

3. "BUSH ADMIN Allocating $43 Billion To Create An Illegal Biological Weapons Program"

thread started by kpete 2-5-07

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