Sunday, June 13, 2004

Chalmers Johnson: Our First Victory Was Zapatero

"Today, we have a professional, permanent standing army that costs around three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year - that is, about $750 billion. This amount includes the annual Defense Department appropriation for weapons and salaries of $427 billion, another $75 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, $20 billion for nuclear weapons funded by the Department of Energy, and at least $200 billion in pensions and disability payments for our veterans. We are not paying for these expenses but putting them on the tab. Since we are today running the largest governmental and trade deficits in modern economic history, our militarism threatens us with bankruptcy.
The two most famous warnings about militarism in our history came from two prominent generals who became presidents. The first was by George Washington in his Farewell Address of September 1796. He wrote, "Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." The key phrase here is republican liberty (with a lower case 'r'). Washington was referring to the division of labor in our government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches and the establishment of checks and balances among them. The intent was to prevent the concentration of power in any one institution or person such that it or he could exercise dictatorial power. Washington was warning us that standing armies concentrate power in the executive branch. They lead to an expansion of taxes and the growth of a national bureaucracy that can lead to an imperial presidency, such as we have today. The division of labor in our form of government is the main bulwark defending our freedoms; if the enlargement of standing armies leads to a breakdown in the balance of power, the Bill of Rights becomes nothing more than a piece of paper.
No less important than Washington's Farewell Address was that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. He warned us against the vested interests that stand behind our huge military establishment. He wrote: "Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry.... But now 3.5 million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.... In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted."
Unfortunately, we Americans did not heed this warning and today the Department of Defense and its supporting military-industrial complex dominate our government. Of the money we spend on foreign affairs, 93% is controlled by the Pentagon, only 7% by the State Department. The biggest of all our weapons companies is the Lockheed Martin Corporation. In the year prior to the outbreak of the Iraq war, Lockheed Martin's profits rose by some 36%. When war becomes this profitable, we can expect more of it.
In The Sorrows of Empire I devote the final chapter to the likely consequences of our imperialism and militarism: perpetual war, the end of the Republic, official lying and disinformation, and bankruptcy. I document how advanced these are in our society. I hope you will read my analysis. My intent is to mobilize inattentive citizens to information that I know they don't have - because our government does everything in its power to see that they don't - but that they need if they are not to lose our Republic and the civil liberties it defends."

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