Date: Sunday, 21 April 2024
https://theduran.com/how-americas-military-industrial-complex-wins
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/publish/post/143814672
How America’s Military-Industrial Complex Wins All of Its Wars Against America’s Taxpayers
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
As has been documented by such authorities on U.S. military spending as Winslow T. Wheeler, Robert Higgs, and others, America spends each year around $1.5 trillion for its military but hides at least around $800 billion of it (so as for the U.S. not to be publicly recognized as spending half of this entire planet’s military expenses) by spending it from other federal Departments than the Defense Department; or, “The US National Security Budget for 2023/24 is approximately $1.5 Trillion”, as Wheeler headlined a year ago, on 1 May 2023. He detailed there how approximately $800 billion of that $1.5T was budgeted as being from the Veterans Affairs Department ($320.8 billion, all of that for the military), Homeland Security Department ($103.2B for the military), Treasury Department ($78.2B+$13.1B=$88.3B for the military), State Department ($46.4B for the military), Energy Department ($35.7B for the military), Justice Department & others ($12,1B for the military), plus $146.0B national security share of interest on the federal debt. All of that non-‘Defense’ Department U.S. Government military spending totaled to $752.5B. He also mentioned “Supplementals” as then being “To come”; and, now, as-of the 19 April 2024 House passage (“Roll Call 142 | Bill Number: H. Res. 1160”) of the procedural motion “On agreeing to the resolution Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 316 - 94 (Roll no. 142)” so innocuously titled as to hide the dirty deed that they had just done, it added $26.38B to support Israel’s annihilation and/or expulsion of the 2.3 million Gazans, plus $60.84B to extend Ukraine’s war at least until President Biden becomes re-elected, plus $8.12 billion to encourage and support the leaders of Taiwan to declare Taiwan’s independence from China (of which it currently is a Province) so that the U.S. Government will have won Taiwan and would then need to invade China in order to defend from China that new U.S. colony (‘ally’). The “Supplemental” this year (Ukraine+Gaza+Taiwan) totals to $95.3B, which causes the original $886B ‘Defense’ (or Aggression) budget for this fiscal year to be: $886B+752.5B+95.3B=$1,733,800 billion, or $1.734T. However, even that is incomplete, because the entire U.S. intelligence community, CIA, DIA, and the many others, is classified, its budgets are secret, hidden from the public, and, of course, these are also important parts of the U.S. military; so, perhaps annual U.S. military spending is now around $2T. On 12 March 2024, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence headlined “DNI RELEASES FY 2025 BUDGET REQUEST FIGURE FOR THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM” and publicly revealed (in accord with a 2007 law) “the aggregate amount of $73.4 billion in requested appropriations for the Fiscal Year 2025 National Intelligence Program (NIP),” and on 20 April 2024 I shall request from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community the IC’s latest Audit Report in order to determine how complete that $73.4B figure is. I start with the assumption that it is the bare minimum of what the complete number is, and that what the maximum might be, and what the reality is, have remained top secret in this dictatorship. A number of leading investigative historians have documented that ever since the first CIA coup, which was against Thailand in 1948 and which started the CIA’s heavy financial dependence upon skimming from the international narcotics cartels via protection money laundered into funding CIA operations, not all of at least that Agency’s funding is on the books. However, in any case: if current annual U.S. military spending isn’t above $2T, it is at least near $2T. And virtually all of it is wasted because America has no border disputes with either of its two bordering nations and is protected by over 3,000 miles of ocean from both Europe to its east and Japan to its west and has won both Japan and Europe as its colonies, and so for this country to have annual military expenses of over $100 billion is obscenely to be controlled by its armaments manufacturers (i.e., by the billionaires who control those), which it so obviously is (and which leaves virtually nothing except Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid to actually serve the non-billionaire U.S. public). And, of course, America’s hundreds of invasions and 900 foreign military bases, and perhaps around a hundred coups, ever since the end of WW2, have destroyed many countries; so, this military is a terror and a curse to virtually the entire world and needs to be enormously reduced.
Maybe not only for non-Americans but also for the American people ourselves, the sooner that this Government defaults on its $35T federal debt, the better, because that would definitely be lots better than WW3, toward which the current U.S. Government is now inexorably heading, unless the now-inevitable default will happen before it does.
Any American who wishes to send this article to one’s members of the U.S. Senate and House is welcomed to do so, and I shall be happy to publicly distribute a copy of any letter from any of those responding officials so that perhaps others than yourself will have an opportunity to see and consider it. Even if that response is an excuse, it would be good for the public to know what that is.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
