Military Spending Grows
But Are We Really More Secure?
John Darling
No one would wish an attack on America, but if it had to happen, the benefits for what Ike called the “Military-Industrial Complex” are just plain swell.
Bush, in his new budget, makes Reagan’s military buildup look cheap. The military part is a record $379 billion or $48 billion higher than now and the reason is the War on Terrorism and a doubled homeland defense. The total budget is a record $2.13 trillion, which is a lot of zeroes. Geez, just when we’d achieved balanced budgets for five years under Clinton. How to pay for this, especially when all surpluses have been wiped out by the recession, the big Bush tax cut for the rich, and the $43 billion stimulus package, also largely for the rich?
It’s simple. You cut a lot of those “big government” programs, such as highway projects, job training, environmental initiatives and, with a lot of patriotic hoohaw, dip into previously sacrosanct Social Security and Medicare funds. Youth Job Training (jobs for out of school, inner city youth) was whacked from $225 million to $45 million, triggering a protest from the Conference of Mayors. Now Bush is considering cutting an additional $620 million in grants to states for similar training and education programs.
Highways took a $9 billion cut. The Army Corps of Engineers suffers a 15 percent cut and a freeze on all new projects, making Congress howl, as this is a major source of pork for the folks in the district. EPA got cut back from $7.9 billion to $7.6 billion. It was just pork, the EPA said. Bush also froze their hiring in the enforcement division, with apologies to polluters if we don’t come see you as often. This comes after the Senate last year stopped him from cutting 270 enforcers. But that was before the war.
Now, Bush writes a budget $80 billion in the red. For a president opposed to big government, this allows the federal machine to grow by nine percent, more than twice the present four percent a year. If you take away the military and stimulus, the growth is below inflation, about two percent. But it’s war, folks, and Bush lets us know that while big government is bad, big military is a different thing—and with his war-begotten prestige and political capital, he believes it’s something he has a right to.
Said the puffed-up Bush on his spending plan, “I expect the United States Congress to not only pass the budget as I submitted it, I expect them to make it the first order of business. Now is not the time to play politics with the budget.” In other words, it’s my way or the unpatriotic way. But in a democracy, chief executives don’t get their budget passed without changes by Congress, also known as advise and consent or separation of powers, and for some Democrats in Congress, Bush’s imperial tone is wearing thin. Veteran Sen. Robert Byrd and others want to review the military outlay. Dubious about military spending on the home soil, they also tried to call the new czar of Homeland Security before Congress, but Bush said no, Tom Ridge, with an agency budget of $38 billion, is Bush’s man and answers only to Bush.
Bush is ratcheting up the game for long term military empire-building. “We’re entering the second stage of what I think will be a long war,” Bush said. “It’s a sustained campaign, a tireless, relentless campaign, to deny sanctuary to terrorists. We need to send that clear message that not only are we in this for the long haul, but the elected representatives of the United States people understand it as well.” It reminds one of his utterances last September that you are with us or with the terrorists—even if you’re a member of the most powerful deliberative body in the West.
Bush promised only last year to keep Social Security inviolate and pay off $2 trillion of the national debt during his expected two terms, but now Congressional, lobby and even White House analysts are saying there’s no way to carry off the military buildup without forgetting about debt reduction and dipping heavily into boomer retirement checks. His new budget calls for using over $200 billion in Social Security income to help counter the red ink. His budget also ends the strategy of using Medicare surplus to chew down the deficit and pump some green energy into Medicare itself.
To soften the blow of his budget, Bush in weeks before its release took a card from Clinton’s playbook, tossing a few tens of millions on small acts of kindness that warm hearts of various subgroups, make him look caring and diverse and don’t rock the real equation of power. Like food stamps for poor immigrants who managed to hang on here a year. Or $12 mil for black colleges, announced on MLK Day. He’s also gonna spend money to improve National Park roads, which sort of sounds like environ-mentalism, but ain’t.
But back to the red meat—military spending. It’s apparent that, in terms of material wartime loss, Osama is having his biggest impact, not in trashing planes and buildings, but in giving the Military-Investor-Corporate-Republican Complex the green light for spending public money on themselves. One estimate said he caused $1 billion in direct damage. Our response is costing 50 or 100 times that. Did Osama and those fundamentalist nuts have any idea they would be responsible for an upward redistribution of wealth in America?
Is this horrendous gushing of money necessary? Well, you can’t attack it right now. No Democrat is. But the political battle now is: how much of a money gush is enough and where, if anywhere, does it end? For the first time in history, we’re not at war with a sovereign power who can surrender and stop attacking us so we can declare peace and an end to the justification for excessive military spending. Why? Because, friend, there will always be terrorists. There will always be Islamic extremists who hate America or diehard Communists in Cuba or North Korea or drug lords in Columbia or something and if you’re a good, peace-loving American, you hate this, but if you’re also part of the Military-Investor-Corporate-Republican Complex, then you kind of love doing your patriotic duty and benefiting from your wise stock-holdings or role as an unconscionably well-paid CEO who also cycles in and out of key government posts.
But it works. It’s easy. Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld & Co. only have to utter a few patriotic phrases and do something with a flag and we’re there. We’ve become terrorist-imprinted, terrorist-phobic and terrorist-hostile. We’re now wired to fight terrorism and, though it hasn’t been spoken yet, we’ve pretty much accepted that the War on Terror, like the War on Drugs, is and will be perpetual. We understand that no president will ever say: “We won! It’s over!”These terrorists have made them-selves the New Commies. We thought Commies would go on forever and provide the justification for patriotic political posturing and perpetual military expansion. But you may recall that when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disbanded all in one breath-taking year, a reporter asked President Bush the Elder, hey, does this mean the Cold War is over? It was obvious the answer was yes, but he could only stand there equivocating—well, we can’t be sure, there’s still Castro and North Korea and the world is still a dangerous place, even though I can’t think of a big enemy right this second. While millions danced, the Military-Industrial Complex boys were bereft. No one wants an enemy, but, sorry to say, the Complex needs one to function.
Instead of asking Americans to pay for this military expansion with increased taxes, Bush proposes another round of tax cuts—a rousing $117 billion over ten years. “The president keeps digging the hole deeper and deeper,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat. “Every dime of the president’s new tax cuts would be paid for using Social Security trust fund money.” When Republicans cut taxes, they cut them for the rich, saying the money will trickle down because, duh, the rich spend their money. Nice theory, but, it doesn’t happen in reality. The rich (shareholders, boards, corpor-ations) simply become richer. But it has those magic words, “tax cut,” which is another way of saying: pleez give me a Republican Congress this November!
But even House Republicans are getting edgy at Bush’s high-spending, tax-cutting ways, rejecting his plea to up the federal debt ceiling by March 31 or else drain off billions from federal civil service retirement accounts to pay bondholders on national debt. Democrats oppose the debt limit hike unless Bush gets in a 12-step program for paying down the federal red ink, while Republicans have now begun writing their own budget.
What’s a president to do? Scale back on tax cut mania? Put the Pentagon on a sensible diet? Or keep whacking political opponents with the patriotism thing, hoping Congress won’t use its purse-string power to stop him?
The bigger picture: why is this man strutting the world stage, invoking Old Testament imagery—“axis of evil”—and suggesting he has the right to “take care of” Iraq next, then Iran and North Korea, because they’re terrorist nations or support terrorism. Who determines that? Bush? Using what data? Or do these nations become supporters of terrorism because they’re not “with us”?
This is scary new territory and a frightening assumption of world power, not yet counterweighted by Congress or American public opinion.
John Darling is an Ashland writer and counselor. A regular contributor to the Medford Mail Tribune, he also writes historical documentaries for Southern Oregon Public Television and has been a political reporter and legislative staff in the Oregon legislature, journalist with the U. S. Marine Corps, UPI, The Oregonian, Ashland Daily Tidings and KOBI-TV News in Medford. His book, “A Gathering of Voices” is available for $20 at jdarling@jeffnet.org.
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