World military spending surged during , reaching $956 billion US, nearly half of it by the United States as it paid for missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror, a prominent European think tank said Wednesday…
The $956 billion spent on defence costs worldwide corresponded to 2.7 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product, according to the annual report…
The United States led the world in defence spending, accounting for 47 per cent of the total, followed by Japan with five per cent and Britain, France and China, with four per cent each.
Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → threat to world peace → fueling global arms races
Another collection of links and such:
- “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees” — “Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.” These quotes from a memo “sent by the intelligence staff of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, to all concerned military intelligence personnel in Iraq.”
- “A pork-hungry Congress has long been with us, of course, but , with our armed forces engaged on two major fronts, Congress has pushed the pork in the defense budget to an all-time high, totaling $8.9 billion.”
- Rusting museum of our attempted suicide survives in the desert — Jon Else revisits the nuclear weapons test site at Frenchman Flat: “An enormous Mosler bank vault sits abandoned and forgotten on the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat, Nev. It is ugly and rusting, a big cookie jar from hell — yet it now exists as one of America’s greatest monuments to clear thinking. ¶ That giant safe is a relic of an Atomic Energy Commission experiment in (“Response of Protective Vaults to Blast Loading”). Filled with stocks and bonds, cash and insurance policies, it confirmed that our official valuables, contracts and financial instruments could survive nuclear war.… ¶ Today, as we sweat over whether North Korea has four bombs or six, or whether Iran has any at all, remember that in , only 12 years after the Trinity test — the first nuclear explosion in history took place at Alamogordo, N.M., on — the United States was manufacturing 10 nuclear bombs per day, 3,000 fission and fusion bombs every year. The largest deployable weapon in our arsenal was the 5-megaton Mark 21, powerful enough to flatten 400 Hiroshimas (or Fallujahs or Oaklands) at a pop. ¶ Filling that Mosler vault with stocks and bonds in now seems a surreal gesture of hope. Imagine the bomb’s survivors — a hairless, sterilized post-nuclear Adam and Eve, dry heaving (like the radioactive feral dogs that roamed the deserted streets of Chernobyl) — crawling toward the bank vault in their bloody rags, trying to remember the combination, praying for their Chrysler stock, or Grandpa’s gold watch, or their Prudential personal liability policies.”
- Perhaps you’ve heard that some libertarian-minded sorts are hoping to gather the faithful and make their Gulch in New Hampshire. They may be joined by the town of Killington, which wants to secede from their current state and become a little island of New Hampshire deep inside Vermont. What’s triggering the revolt? Taxes, of course.
- The Christian Science Monitor profiles four Americans who dug themselves huge pits with their credit cards and then dug themselves back out. A companion article gives some advice on how to get out of debt. If you need to get out of the red before you can get below the tax line, you might want to give these articles a look.
Link-o-rama Saturday:
- After declining in the post-cold war era of , global military spending is on the rise again — threatening to break the one trillion dollar barrier , according to a group of U.N.-appointed military experts… ¶ “The United States now accounts for about half of world military spending, meaning that it is spending nearly as much as the rest of the world combined,” says Natalie J Goldring, executive director of the programme on global security and disarmament at the University of Maryland.
- Karen Button sums up the war tax resistance argument in her essay Against Hegemony: When Bush Comes to Shove, Resist, Don’t Pay for People’s Death. “I didn’t know what to do. One thing became clear though: No matter how much I might protest the war, my money was being used to finance it. I was paying for people’s death. At that moment I decided I would not give the US government any more of my consent.”
- I’m fairly certain nothing good can come of this: US wants to build network of friendly militias to combat terrorism. The visual that comes to mind when I read this headline are a bunch of troops running about wearing bright yellow smiley-face helmets — “look! it’s the Friendly Militia! we’re saved!” But I’d imagine the reality will be something like contras, mujahideen or janjaweed — some hybrid of insurgents and mercenaries who occasionally take orders and supplies from Americans in mirrored sunglasses and who can do our dirtiest work for us without making us take responsibility.
- I haven’t had much good to say about John Kerry on this blog, but I will say that when I read his smart, bold and sincere testimony (which right-wing blogs insist is show-stoppingly treasonous) I think to myself “why won’t this John Kerry run for president?” The latest phase in the attack on Kerry’s Vietnam record is shifting towards an attack on this anti-war activist phase, and I’m curious to see whether Kerry will be defending or backing away from these statements and actions.
As you might expect, not only does the United States spend as much money on its war machine as the rest of the world combined does on theirs, but when the rest of the world goes shopping for armaments they come to the United States (says ’s New York Times).
The Washington Post signals that perhaps the time has come for even the Washington Post to start taking the U.S. torture policy seriously. Their editorial yesterday is titled War Crimes and reads in part—
Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration’s whitewashers — led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in , that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false.…
[T]he appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.
While the United States spends the lion’s share of the $1 trillion in world military spending, at least they do so foolishly and inefficiently.
I’m freshly home from the holidays and am getting back to my email and my feed reader and the rest of that big ol’ interweb after some good family time.
So, today: a few bits and pieces that accumulated during my absence:
- First up: among the things that happened while I was away was that I got roped into Facebook by some pals who like to play word games long-distance. Those of you who have also given in to temptation may be interested to know that there’s a NWTRCC Facebook group as well as a more generic tax resistance group on Facebook.
- Frida Berrigan notes that the United States remains the world’s leading arms exporter, fueling wars and arms races worldwide.
- Don Bacon comments on the coming increase in the size of the U.S. military and how the military plans to go about boosting its headcount.
- A number of commentators gleefully point out that the brand of shoes recently flung at Dubya during a press conference in Iraq by Muntazer al-Zaidi are flying off the shelves.
- A fascinating new look at the role of the Watergate scandal’s “Deep Throat” by George Friedman sees the destruction of Richard Nixon as a behind-the-scenes power play by J. Edgar Hoover’s rogue secret police against political control of the out-of-control agency — and sees the Washington Post’s reporting of Deep Throat’s revelations not as the act of a paper courageously fighting the powers-that-be and bringing truth to light, but as hiding the real truth in order to take sides in a back stage coup.
- Charles Hugh Smith gives us some more of his insights into the coming expansion of the informal economy. According to Smith, in the still-coming economic downturn “very few can operate a formal business profitably, and so they close their doors and scrape up a living in the informal cash economy. Local government will see its revenues wither and eventually insolvency will force a radical re-thinking of government revenues, expenses and services. Until then, watch for the informal economy to grow and the formal economy to wither.”
- Jesse Walker at Hit & Run looks at alternative currencies and shares some details I hadn’t heard before — for instance this bit about Argentina: “At the depth of the country’s last economic crisis, about half the nation’s provinces issued their own money rather than rely on the central bank. I knew about the barter-based currency that emerged in Buenos Aires at the time, but I didn’t realize the search for homegrown monetary alternatives had been so widespread.”
- ntodd at Pax Americana shares the developmental stages toward Active Peace
One interesting aspect of the five-stages theory seems to be that the next one only becomes visible or understandable to you once you have attained the one before. In this way, each stage represents a “perspective”, both individual and social, and social “organisms” can be said to progress through the stages as well as individual ones.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- Ruth Benn of NWTRCC was the guest on David Swanson’s “Talk Nation Radio” to discuss war tax resistance :
- In Palmer Park, Maryland, locals have been vandalizing and destroying the speed and red-light cameras that the government has set up to extract money from drivers by means of automatically-generated traffic tickets.
This has led to the amusing spectacle of the police there setting up surveillance cameras to keep an eye on their cameras.
One man literally pulled out a pistol and used the camera for target practice. Police found another speed camera flipped over—leading police to believe a gang of people committed the crime, considering the weight of the camera. Then there was the camera set up on a stand, near FedEx Field. A man walked up to it, cut off one of the legs, and walked away. … [O]ne of the cameras incinerated.
- In
another case, a man recently paid his $137 traffic ticket by folding 137 dollar bills into origami pigs, carefully arranging them in Dunkin’ Donuts boxes, and taking them to the police cashier. - U.K. Council Tax resister June Farrow has been threatened with prison by the powers-that-be.
- The
Greek “won’t pay” movement has launched a new phase of its constructive program — reacting to the closure of hospitals and other austerity-prompted decay of the public health system by creating its own
“Social Solidarity Clinic.” The clinic launched with a blood drive. - Tax resistance is on the agenda in Indonesia, though not in a language I know how to parse…
- Not only does the United States itself possess the world’s most threatening and fearful arsenal of weapons by a significant margin, but it also is by far the largest dealer of weapons worldwide.
[T]he U.S. [sold] $66.3 billion in weapons abroad [in ], a record itself, but also by far the largest single year increase ever, over the $21.4 billion in 2010.
The sales amounted to about 78 percent of all foreign arms sales on the entire planet. The second place arms dealer nation is Russia, which sold less than $5 billion themselves.
