{"id":226543,"date":"2023-01-02T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=226543"},"modified":"2023-01-01T07:24:17","modified_gmt":"2023-01-01T07:24:17","slug":"the-democrats-are-now-the-war-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/01\/the-democrats-are-now-the-war-party\/","title":{"rendered":"The Democrats Are Now the War Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Democratic Party has become the party of permanent war, fueling massive military spending which is hollowing out the country from the inside and flirting with nuclear war.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Democratic Dark Side – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

25 Dec 2022 – <\/em>The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem<\/a> was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are \u201cgood\u201d wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin and China\u2019s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding<\/a> up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed<\/a> Congress was another example of the Democratic Party\u2019s abject subservience to the war machine.<\/p>\n

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase<\/a> of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested.<\/p>\n

The historian Arnold Toynbee<\/a> cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimatley commit<\/a> suicide.<\/p>\n

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party\u2019s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind<\/a> their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception<\/a> of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted<\/a> present.<\/p>\n

The opposition<\/a> to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as<\/a> Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined<\/a> the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military \u2014 the total is boosted<\/a> to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don\u2019t fall under the Armed Services committees\u2019 jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed<\/a> the spending bill. The Democrats, including<\/a> nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.<\/p>\n

This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential<\/a> war with Russia and, perhaps<\/a> later, with China \u2014 each a nuclear power. It is also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S. debt to over<\/a> $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. Congress is also on track to provide<\/a> an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon \u2014 above the already expanded annual budget \u2014 to resupply Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup,\u201d The New York Times reported<\/a>. \u201cMilitary spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II \u2014 a level that is more<\/a> than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party, which, under the Clinton administration aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two parties,\u201d Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed<\/a> him on my show for The Real News Network<\/a>. \u201cBecause in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the tune. That\u2019s what\u2019s happened. There isn\u2019t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his 1970 book \u201cThe Pentagon Propaganda Machine,\u201d Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards<\/a> or work as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most<\/a> of these shills for war, personally profited<\/a> from the sales of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.<\/p>\n

Seymour Melman, in his book \u201cPentagon Capitalism,\u201d documented the way militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are spent on the research and development of weapons systems while renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with military-related grants while they struggle to find money for environmental studies and the humanities. Bridges, roads, levees, rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient<\/a> and antiquated. Schools are in disrepair and lack<\/a> sufficient teachers and staff. Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy<\/a>. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living<\/a> paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned.<\/p>\n

Melman, who coined the term \u201cpermanent war economy,\u201d noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare. Military systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are guaranteed. For example, this November, the Army awarded<\/a> Raytheon Technologies alone more than $2 billion in contracts<\/a>, on top of over $190 million awarded<\/a> in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine. Despite a depressed market for most<\/a> other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed<\/a> and Northrop Grumman<\/a> have risen by more than 36 and 50 percent this year.<\/p>\n

Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in Pentagon contracts to provide<\/a> the military with \u201cglobally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,\u201d through mid-2028.<\/p>\n

Foreign aid is given to countries such as<\/a> Israel, with more than<\/a> $150 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received over<\/a> $80 billion since 1978 \u2014 aid that requires foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a\u00a0circular system mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains<\/a> nothing but the permanent war economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth of the matter is that we\u2019re in a heavily militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created just to keep fueling that,\u201d Kucinich told me.<\/p>\n

In 2014, the U.S. backed<\/a> a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included<\/a> neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over<\/a> 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced<\/a>, before Russia invaded in February. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according<\/a> to Jacques Baud, a former NATO security advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine\u2019s war on the Donbass. It also followed the Biden administration\u2019s rejection of proposals sent<\/a> by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia\u2019s invasion the following year.<\/p>\n

This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and E.U. sanctions<\/a> on Russia, which have boomeranged<\/a> onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment<\/a> of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry, especially<\/a> in Germany, is crippled.\u00a0 In most of Europe, it is a winter of shortages, spiraling prices and misery.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,\u201d Kucinich warned. \u201cWe forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There\u2019s a whole new world being formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most people aren\u2019t aware of.\u201d<\/p>\n

By not opposing<\/a> a Democratic Party whose primary business is war, liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky\u2019s \u201cNotes from the Underground.\u201d<\/p>\n

A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to steal a line from my latest book<\/a>, is the greatest evil.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Copyright 2022 Chris Hedges<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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