W.J. Astore
So the “liberal” New York Times says
Four days ago, I got a story in my New York Times email feed on “A Turning Point in Military Spending.” The article celebrated the greater willingness of NATO members as well as countries like Japan to spend more on military weaponry, which, according to the “liberal” NYT, will help to preserve democracy. Interestingly, even as NATO members have started to spend more, the Pentagon is still demanding yet higher budgets, abetted by Congress. I thought if NATO spent more, the USA could finally spend less?
No matter. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the hyping of what used to be called the “Yellow Peril,” today read “China,” is ensuring record military spending in the USA as yearly Pentagon budgets approach $900 billion. That figure does not include the roughly $120 billion or more in aid already provided to Ukraine in its war with Russia. And since the Biden administration’s commitment to Ukraine remains open-ended, you can add scores of billion more to that sum if the war persists into the fall and winter.
Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times piece that I found especially humorous in a grim way:
[Admittedly,] The additional money that countries spend on defense is money they cannot spend on roads, child care, cancer research, refugee resettlement, public parks or clean energy, my colleague Patricia points out. One reason Macron has insisted on raising France’s retirement age despite widespread protests, analysts believe, is a need to leave more money for the military.
But the situation [in Europe of spending more on butter than guns] over the past few decades feels unsustainable. Some of the world’s richest countries were able to spend so much on social programs partly because another country — the U.S. — was paying for their defense. Those other countries, sensing a more threatening world, are now once again promising to pull their weight. They still need to demonstrate that they’ll follow through this time.
Yes, Europe could continue to invest in better roads, cleaner energy, and the like, but now it’s time to buckle down and build more weapons. Stop freeloading, Europe! Dammit, “pull your weight”! You’ve had better and cheaper health care than Americans, stellar educational systems, child care benefits galore, all sorts of social programs we Americans can only dream of, but that’s because we’ve been paying for it! Captain America’s shield has been protecting you on the cheap! Time to pay up, you Germans, you French, you Italians, and especially you cheap Spaniards.
As the NYT article says: NATO allies need to “follow through this time” on strengthening their militaries. Because strong militaries produce democracy. And European “investments” in arms will ensure more equitable burden sharing in funding stronger cages and higher barriers to deter a rampaging Russian bear.
Again, you Americans out there, that doesn’t mean we can spend less on “defense.” What it means is that the U.S. can “pivot to Asia” and spend more on weaponry to “deter” China. Because as many neocons say, the real threat is Xi, not Putin.
We have met the enemy, and he is us. That’s an old saying you won’t see in the “liberal” NYT.
Bracing Views 
Concerning the discussion topic, “Higher Military Spending Will Save Democracy,” everything depends on what one means by the trick words “Military” and “Democracy.” Research economist Michael Hudson elaborates in a recent interview, Why the U.S. Economy cannot Re-Industrialize (July 10, 2023).
[begin excerpt]
[00:13:29] Interviewer: “The US is losing its grip on its empire, yet has the largest military ever amassed in the history of the world. What about that military maintains hegemony?”
[00:14:32] Michael Hudson: Well, you’re using a trick word: ‘military.’ Military, for the United States, is different from what the word ‘military’ meant in every other society from the beginning of time. When you say military, you think of an army fighting. You cannot conquer a country without invading it, and to invade it, you obviously need an army, you need troops. But the Americans can’t mount an army, of enough size, to occupy anybody except Grenada, or Panama, because the Vietnam War stopped the military draft. What America does have, what it calls military, is what you quite rightly linked it to: the military industrial complex. It makes arms. And weapons.
But again, these are a funny kind of weapons. Suppose you had a winery that made wine that was so good, that really wasn’t for drinking. It was for wealthy people to buy, and to trade. And as the years go by, the wine would turn to vinegar. It’s not wine for drinking. It’s wine for making a profit, a capital gain.
Well, you can say the same thing about America’s military arms, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now — or as President Biden calls it, Iraq. The arms, basically, are there to create a huge profit for Raytheon, and the other companies in the military industrial complex. They’re for buying, and they’re for giving to the Ukrainians, to let Russia blow them up.
But they’re not for fighting. They’re not for winning a war. They’re for being used up, so you have to replace them now, with yet new buying. And so the United States State Department has asked Germany and other European countries, well, you’d promised to pay 2% of your GDP on military arms to enrich our military industrial complex.
But now that we’ve given all these tanks and missiles away – Russia just blew up 12% of all the tanks in just one week – so we only have a few weeks left to go before they’re all wiped out. Because they really don’t work on the battlefield. They’re not for fighting, they’re for being blown up. Now we want you to actually increase your spending to 4%, to replenish all of the stocks, you’ve just depleted, 10 years, maybe 20 years, of your arms stocks. And you have to now replenish them very rapidly, in order to meet the NATO targets, that we and the State Department, have set. So military today isn’t really how you control other countries. America’s found it much easier to do this by financial mechanisms.
You conquer a country financially, you conquer a country by getting it to submit to austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund, again, to impose austerity, to keep its local wages down. So you use finance as a means of imposing post-industrialization and depression, in order to prevent democracy from developing.
So any country that is seeking to promote a democracy by public spending on basic infrastructure, or banking, like China is doing, is called an autocracy. And every autocracy that has imposed a client oligarchy, to fight against labor, and to prevent these policies that would help enrich and industrialize the economy, is called a democracy, not an autocracy.
So we’re back in the Orwellian logic to describe a situation, that probably even the cynical George Orwell, would not have thought could go quite this far.
[end excerpt]
To recapitulate: Everything depends (1) not only on what one means by the trick words “Military” and “Democracy” but (2) who uses these trick words and (3) what they hope to accomplish by misusing them in this duplicitous manner.
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Or, the same concept expressed in a somewhat different manner five years ago:
Ordnance Expenditure Expeditions
Ordnance Expenditure Expeditions,
Use up and then order more munitions.
Make sure to run down the inventory.
Start wars for profits: the same old story.
“Give us the money or we’ll huff and puff.
Buy from us all of these weapons and stuff.
No-bid, cost-plus guarantees we demand.
And if we don’t get them, no jobs for this land.”
How? First a false flag: a made-up “good reason”
Summer, Spring, Winter, or Fall: any season.
“Gas” attacks “on his own people” will do it.
“Brutal dictator must go.” Then see to it.
Second: “advisers” deploy for a tour,
Helping make countries with little more poor,
Calling in airstrikes to wipe out the towns
Whenever local folks fight back with frowns.
Third: the “straight-legs” force us all to include them.
Regular Army. No way to exclude them.
They’ve got their generals, too; they demand it:
Their chance to play the Big Cheese (meaning, bandit).
Fourth: then the Air Force and Navy want in,
Bringing Marines as their “infantry” kin.
Some to pin medals and stars on their shirts.
Some to catch bullets and shrapnel, which hurts.
Generals, admirals, colonels, commanders:
Aimless amphibians, swamp salamanders,
Punching their tickets while lost in a land which
Doesn’t need them fucking up a soup sandwich.
Still, screwing pooches can make a career.
Just learn to lie with a lisp and a leer.
No one will know, if your jargon’s opaque,
How to distinguish the real from the fake.
Just babble bullshit and throw in some numbers,
Then keep it up until everyone slumbers.
You’ll have succeeded when their eyes start crossing.
Soon they won’t know a toothbrush from a flossing.
Fifth: let the dogs-of-war piss on the fire:
“Contractors” who’ll kill their mothers for hire,
Shooting at anything moving on roads.
Selling some “Safety” to rich loathsome toads.
Last: the camp-following big corporations
Feeding the troops on their overpriced rations.
Petrol at four-hundred bucks to a gallon.
Taxpayers sliced with a razor-sharp talon.
No thought to budgets that balance the books.
Just like Dick Nixon, these people are crooks:
Buying Republicans who’ll chant “God bless!”
Renting the Democrats who’ll lose for less.
Dining at Davos in Switzerland’s mountains,
Oligarchs drink to wealth spurting in fountains.
Then with The Donald they swap salutations,
Making our country a plague among nations.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2018
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It’s a great point about the IMF and financial dominance. And that leads into dominance of resources, such as oil, lithium, and the like.
Too many people, myself included, focus on the military, or we broaden our focus to the MICC or MICIMATT. Yes, it’s vast. Yes, it becomes an end in and of itself. But the ultimate end isn’t winning wars (which the US hasn’t done since WW2), it’s about economic and financial dominance. And part of that, as Caitlin Johnstone argues, is dominating the narrative, focusing people’s attention on the supposed wonders and necessity of U.S. military might, so much so that not only do we not question it, we celebrate it.
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Thanks, Bill, for taking on the NYT’s and its nonsense. What a worthless rag it has become.
Cautiously optimistic here that the prioritizing of guns at the expense of butter has brought many an empire down.
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*NYT and its nonsense
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Speaking of nonsense from the New York Times (relevant to the US ‘military’ looting the national treasury for generations) , Mark Sleboda has done an audio interview (July 17, 2023) with the Faultlines podcast Kiev Drone Attack Again Damages Crimean Bridge, Black Sea Grain Deal is RIP. Finally…. His interlocutor begins by saying to him:
[begin quote]
“The New York Times is reporting that 20% of the armaments sent to Ukraine have basically been destroyed or damaged. And they’re saying that ‘the startling rate of loss has dropped 10% in the ensuing weeks,’ officials said, preserving more of the troops and machines needed for the major offensive push that Ukraine is saying is still to come. And they’re basically saying they’ve changed their tactics.”
[01:33] “My thing is, Victoria Nuland basically said – there is a video of her saying this – they worked with Ukrainians for months on this particular offensive. The reality of it is that the New York Times is NOT reporting that they haven’t even gotten to the lines yet, that what they’re being killed in is this ‘gray zone,’ that all of this stuff is being done in a ‘crumple zone’ that hasn’t even reached the fortified lines. Give me your take on this. I mean, this is an interesting admission from the standpoint of the Western media. So give me your take on this analysis that’s basically saying: ‘We’ve changed our tactics.’ What did they change their tactics to?”
[02:08] Mark Sleboda: “OK. So in general they are correct about the failure of the Kiev regime’s attacks, their planned initial blitzkreig style attack through Russia’s screening zone. A lot of it has fallen afoul of the minefields that Russia placed there as well as the mobile defense squads – even according to the Kiev regime’s top general Zaluzhny — Russia’s 10:1 artillery advantage, and their complete air superiority. And they have changed their tactics, but this is where they get it wrong. The tactics they have changed, is instead of using the Western-supplied armored vehicles to protect troops as they try to fight through this screening zone to reach the first of five Russian echelon defense lines, they are using troops to protect the Western armored vehicles. And that’s where the New York Times gets it wrong. Because while their tactics have meant that fewer – not none — Western tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and APCs have been destroyed, the manpower losses have been even greater, as they are essentially using human wave attacks.
“That’s what they’re doing now. And at this time the assessments are that the Kiev regime has lost close to 30,000 troops over the course of its offensive – a total in terms of casualties. They’re moving forward in generally small groups, squad and platoon-sized groups that are trying to use forest lines as cover. They’re being dropped off, usually close to the contact line in the screening zone by pickup trucks, like ISIS riding around Iraq, or the Taliban using pickup trucks to drop off the infantry. The tactic can be called ‘Mosquito Attacks,’ perhaps more correctly than human waves, because it is a huge amount of troops but sent in small groups over a broad area. And the idea is that, of this infantry, enough of them will survive to dig in closer to where the Russian troops are defending from. And then they will attempt to entrench themselves and hold out, and then they’ll radio back for the actual mechanized vehicles to move forward to support them and exploit that. They haven’t had any greater success with this tactical change. So far, it hasn’t resulted in any significant gains anywhere in the south. . . . Russian reinforcements just keep throwing them back again, and again, and again, ad nauseum, now into the sixth week.”
[end quote]
So much for Victoria Nuland’s months of planning with the Kiev regime’s “top general.” The Pentagram really ought to take more care in selecting those Russophobic politicians, State Department minions, and corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs who do their strategic, operational, and tactical planning for them. And the New York Times ought to find sources more reliable in reporting the ugly truths about Imperial “war” as simply a venal exercise in money laundering on a vast scale.
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From the comment section of Larry Johnson’s blog in regard to his latest published observation (July 17, 2023), What is the Russian Military doing?
“Krainer Analytics Founder Alex Krainer, a Europe-based financial analyst, said while the war may have filled the US defense industry’s pockets, it also undermined many perceptions of its strengths and American’s military prowess.
“Outside this event, war in Ukraine has also taken the glitter off of western weapons and the military industrial complex. For a very high price, it produces inadequate quantities of shoddy goods,” Krainer said.
“The whole thing has been outed as a con and a paper tiger.”
Not just a paper tiger, but one made from recycled toilet tissue sold to Taiwan decades ago and now repurchased for shipment to the “we’ll take anything” Kiev regime. And lest anyone suspect that I jest, please consult “Ukrainian vs. Russian Artillery
+ US Buying Taiwan’s Hawk Missiles for Ukrainian Air Defense”, by Brian Berletic,
The New Atlas (July 16, 2023). Retired “Hawk” air defense systems from the 60’s-80s and retired 70-year-old engineers rehired to help younger US engineers build old Stinger missiles the old-fashioned way for supply to a “country” that hasn’t existed since we overthrew its elected government in 2014, replacing it with the Interim Nazi Regime in Kiev that most likely won’t — because it shouldn’t — exist by the time these promised “Wonder Weapons” arrive (if they ever do).
How humiliating for The Leader of the Fleeced World.
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