Originally appeared at TomDispatch.
It’s strange when you think about it. Today, TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan offers a look at the staggering number of taxpayer dollars that go to just one major arms manufacturer in one city in America, New London, Connecticut, where she lives. It’s a company that’s focused there on creating world-ending naval vessels — nuclear submarines, to be exact. (Just what this world of ours doesn’t need, of course!) But the money that’s channeled into being a military power beyond compare (but never, it seems, beyond defeat) is hard even to take in. Consider just what it costs to support the 750 or so military bases that the U.S. still maintains across more than 80 countries, colonies, or territories on every continent except Antarctica. Best guess: approaching $100 billion annually.
And that’s your money, your tax dollars. That means you, like the rest of us in this country, are in some strange fashion — to steal an apt phrase from Berrigan — “military dependent.” Or put another way, believe it or not, the global military stance of the United States, which hasn’t won a war of significance since World War II, is distinctly dependent on you and me. Given all the money that’s gone into that military and the wars it hasn’t won from Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s to the “forever wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond of this century, if we were “investing” in anything else with similar results, there would be serious calls for us to stop.
Continue reading “Militarism Abuse Disorder: A Very American Malaise”