A recent report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute you won't see in the papers of record finds that the United States of America leads the planet in military spending, followed by our Communist friend and nemesis, People's Republic of China (PRC), old Europe's France falls in third, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain (UK), our loyal lieutenant, fourth.
You won't find this reported in your papers of record because it might beg the obvious question: what recession?
As unemployment in the tarnished state of California climbs near 12%, as homeless encampments are being formed and torn up - even in some of our state parks I just visited, as the safety net to the poor, sick, disabled, public school students K-12, talks of furloughs and lay-offs abound, the diversion of trillions of Western tax dollars into the Ultimate Killing Machine should make a single-parent struggling to make ends meet ponder.
Pres Dwight Eisenhower called it the "military-industrial complex" and warned against its growing power in his farewell address. Some scholars Eisenhower was well placed to make such a criticism: while an agent of the imperial dominion of the US specifically and the Western world generally, as a high-ranking military man and war hero, he also had a pragmatism when it came to military matters that he saw spin out of executive control during his two terms.
But why have a Killing Machine?
My late grandfather, Lowell B Denny, I, said many, many times that the US never emerged from the Great Depression; that it was intensive military spending that artificially swelled our economy, and now - the crack addicts that we are - we cannot put down the pipe (the crack flourish is mine, not my grandfather's).
The US became an imperial power with the close of the US frontier, 1890. The economy began to dip, so what better than to wage a war with Spain and take the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and remotely Cuba.
Empires and markets are the other reason to have a Killing Machine: foreign nationals - men and women with moderate intellect - won't willingly give up their rich natural resources cheaply [oil, diamonds, gold, rubber, spices, et al]. So the West imposes military regimes and fortifies a client class of super rich to keep the masses tortured. Essentially, this is why the US is in Iraq and why Obama is so slow to pull us out.
To those of us with better sense and a bit of morality of the bonds of humanity, the suppression of our brothers and sisters is an abomination. Our populism is nothing if it does not seriously and fundamentally revolutionize our high-flying way of life. It's not only bad for the planet; its bad for our peers around the world.
But a different, albeit simpler, way of life is exactly what out papers of record cannot broadcast: their funders, the advertisers, have made big business out of shaping Western appetites to be the pigs we are.
But now I am demeaning pigs. They don't gang up and fight territorial wars.
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