America’s Priorities Are Plain To See

by | Aug 5, 2018

Military spending in the United States eats up more than half of our nation’s “discretionary spending,” or the portion of the budget that the president requests and Congress appropriates every year.

Yet, you don’t hear cries for change when it comes to military spending. We can’t deprive the American military its right to might. That would be unpatriotic.

Fact: Our Taxes Prop Up The Empire

Can we talk about putting a peaceful end to the American Empire? When you weigh the damage we do, it’s clearly the merciful and sustainable thing to do.

Did you know that U.S. military bases, both domestic and foreign, consistently rank among some of the most polluted places in the world, as perchlorate and other components of jet and rocket fuel contaminate sources of drinking water, aquifers and soil?

Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad. For emphasis, please allow me to scream in type: 800 OVERSEAS BASES!

Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have 30 foreign bases combined.

From private prison profiteers to arms dealers and oilmen, the white men who run the Empire have a lot at stake. A lot to lose, you might say. Can you see why they’re so afraid? They believe in their own supremacy at all costs, literally at all costs.

We’re Nowhere Near The Change We Need

We can hope for change, hope that we get money out of politics, hope that we restore the illusion of democracy, and we can do our part while maintaining hope. We can also start to admit the things that so few of us want to admit. We are a nation built on genocide and slavery, and today we continue the bloodbath we started here on a global stage.

With the help of 139 Democrats, the House of Representatives easily passed the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act last month.

Just how aligned are Rs and Ds when it comes to preservation of the Empire (which we, the People, clearly can’t afford)? The vote was 359-54 in the House for the authorization. The Senate voted 87-10. In other words, we’re a long distance from the kind of systemic change this country needs.

According to NPR, the bill sped through both houses of Congress as the nation’s military continues waging war in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Niger, Libya, Somalia and an untold number of other global hot spots.

Congress matched dollar-for-dollar what the Pentagon asked for. The $716 billion in spending authorized by the bill is $16 billion more than what Congress approved for the fiscal year 2018.

Don Don now has a $717 billion war chest. The bill specifically authorizes $616.9 billion for the base Pentagon budget, $21.9 billion for nuclear weapons programs under the Energy Department, and another $69 billion in war spending from the special Overseas Contingency Operations account.

How does that make you feel?