Post Tagged with: "Military Industrial Complex"

Will the Pentagon Budget Ever Shrink?

Will the Pentagon Budget Ever Shrink?

What Would It Take for Military Spending in America to Go Down? A Thought Experiment on the Military-Industrial Complex I have a question for you: What would it take in today’s world for America’s military spending to go down?  Here’s one admittedly farfetched scenario: Vladimir Putin loses his grip on power and Russia retrenches militarily while reaching out to normalize[Read More…]

by — 06/04/2022 — Comments are Disabled — Imperialism
All Of Us Remain Hostages to the Military-Industrial Complex

All Of Us Remain Hostages to the Military-Industrial Complex

Do our “Defense Departments” really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud. For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. Civilians like us are just hostages. We are expendable. We are[Read More…]

by — 27/01/2022 — Comments are Disabled — World
US Congress approves massive $770 billion war budget

US Congress approves massive $770 billion war budget

By an overwhelming bipartisan margin of 88-11, the US Senate voted Wednesday to approve the largest military budget in history, nearly $770 billion, some $25 billion more than the Biden administration had requested. The legislation passed the House of Representatives last week by a similar bipartisan margin, 363-70, and it now goes to the White House for President Joe Biden’s[Read More…]

by — 16/12/2021 — Comments are Disabled — World
Why It’s Time to Make Deep Cuts at the Pentagon

Why It’s Time to Make Deep Cuts at the Pentagon

Where are you going to get the money?  That question haunts congressional proposals to help the poor, the unhoused, and those struggling to pay the mortgage or rent or medical bills, among so many other critical domestic matters.  And yet — big surprise! — there’s always plenty of money for the Pentagon. In fiscal year 2022, in fact, Congress is being especially[Read More…]

by — 13/12/2021 — Comments are Disabled — World
How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J. S. Davies Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the United States Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion’s share – over 65% – of federal discretionary spending to[Read More…]

by — 07/12/2021 — 1 comment — World
The Costs of War (to You) – Where So Much of Our Money Really Went

The Costs of War (to You) – Where So Much of Our Money Really Went

As a Navy spouse of 10 years and counting, my life offers an up-close view of our country’s priorities when it comes to infrastructure and government spending. Recently, my husband, a naval officer currently serving with the Department of Energy, spent a week with colleagues touring a former nuclear testing site about 65 miles north of Las Vegas. Between 1951 and 1957, the U.S.[Read More…]

by — 22/11/2021 — Comments are Disabled — World
Reining in the Pentagon

Reining in the Pentagon

by Mandy Smithberger and William D. Hartung Even as Congress moves to increase the Pentagon budget well beyond the astronomical levels proposed by the Biden administration, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has outlined three different ways to cut $1 trillion in Department of Defense spending over the next decade.  A rational defense policy could yield far more in[Read More…]

by — 09/11/2021 — Comments are Disabled — World
60 Years Later, The Farewell  Speech of President Eisenhower  Appears Even More Relevant Now

60 Years Later, The Farewell  Speech of President Eisenhower  Appears Even More Relevant Now

 Dwight D. Eisenhower had the special distinction of being a very highly decorated and senior five-star military general in-charge of some of the most crucial battles of the second world war who went on to become two-term President of the USA in the important post war phase ( 1953 -1961). When his maximum allowed 8 years of two terms were[Read More…]

by — 17/10/2021 — Comments are Disabled — World
      Baz Ratner/Reuters US troops in Afghanistan, June 2011

How Corporations Won the War on Terror

The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented — a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University’s Costs of War project. The question of who has benefited most from such an orgy of military spending has, unfortunately, received far less attention. Corporations large and small have left the[Read More…]

by — 21/09/2021 — Comments are Disabled — Imperialism
 National (In)Security and the Pentagon Budget

 National (In)Security and the Pentagon Budget

A Post-Coronavirus Economy Can No Longer Afford to Put the Pentagon First The inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a national security crisis. More than 190,000 Americans are dead, approximately half of them people of color. Yelp data show that more than 132,000[Read More…]

by — 14/09/2020 — Comments are Disabled — Imperialism
Robot Generals: Will They Make Better Decisions Than Humans — Or Worse?

Robot Generals: Will They Make Better Decisions Than Humans — Or Worse?

With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields.[Read More…]

by — 26/08/2020 — Comments are Disabled — World
 Killing Democracy in America: The Military-Industrial Complex as a Cytokine Storm

 Killing Democracy in America: The Military-Industrial Complex as a Cytokine Storm

The phrase “thinking about the unthinkable” has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I’ve been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish (at least for a democracy) as a thermonuclear Armageddon, but one that’s been rolling out in far slower motion: that America’s war on terror never ends because it’s[Read More…]

by — 27/07/2020 — Comments are Disabled — World
How The Military Controls America

How The Military Controls America

Unlike corporations that sell to consumers, Lockheed Martin and the other top contractors to the U.S. Government are highly if not totally dependent upon sales to governments, for their profits, especially sales to their own government, which they control — they control their home market, which is the U.S. Government, and they use it to sell to its allied governments,[Read More…]

by — 26/03/2018 — Comments are Disabled — Imperialism
How Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Became The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex’s Chief Propagandist

How Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Became The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex’s Chief Propagandist

  It used to be that the New York Times and the Washington Post competed against each other to be the chief propagandist for the hundred or so top firms who sell to the U.S. federal government — the 100 top “federal contractors,” almost all of which are Pentagon contractors — mainly these are weapons-manufacturing firms, such as the biggest,[Read More…]

by — 10/01/2018 — 3 comments — Imperialism