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military budget
Our Unequal Economy Means the US Can't Quit War
The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a group of oligarchs pushes the United States toward a military economy.
Dec 29, 2025
The United States is drawn to war on every front, like a moth to a candle. It does not matter that Americans are sick of foreign wars stretching back 25 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Venezuela, wars that have bankrupted the nation. It has no effect that the United States lacks the economic, technological, and manufacturing capacity necessary to sustain a conventional war. Nor would the United States likely win an unconventional war employing nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information warfare.
The critics allowed to appear on TV like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs attribute this warmongering to the foolishness and the ignorance of political leaders like President Donald Trump, or to the incompetence of bureaucrats. They intentionally avoid any analysis of the economic structure of the United States, or the role of multinational banks and corporations in the formulation of policy. Their only explanation for the drive for war is the foolish actions of a “few bad apples.”
No one wants war, including the rich and powerful on all sides, in Beijing and Washington, in Berlin and Moscow, in Tehran and Tel Aviv. Yet the beating of the drums of war continues, and it grows louder. The appetite for war spreads like a vermillion fungus across the entire nation, with a military culture pushed through newspapers, movies, and television broadcasts. Preparation for war is a means of controlling the “little people” in a totalitarian manner.
The US government is pressuring every ally to rapidly increase defense spending, up to 5%, and to do so far more rapidly than can possibly be done in such a short time without massive corruption and waste. The military buildup is but a transfer of wealth, not an increase in security.
So, Why War?
The United States is collapsing as an economy, as a society, and as a civilization, weighed down by a massive debt, burdened by collapsing infrastructure and dying educational and research institutions, and strangled by a culture of pornography and narcissism. Above all, the extreme concentration of wealth over the last 20 years, since government was captured completely by the super rich, has meant that a handful of conceited frauds can determine the policy for the entire nation, and decide the fate of everyone. The basic interests of the vast majority of citizens are entirely ignored. The republic, and all traces of participatory democracy, have been consigned to the trash bin of history.
The international trade system and the embrace of “free trade” ideology played a major role in pushing the United States toward war around the world. Supply chains link together factories in loops that encircle the globe. Manufactured goods and agricultural products are brought into the United States from over the world, not because doing so is good for Americans, but because the multinational banks that control the economy seek out the cheapest labor and cheapest goods. Virtually all consumer goods in the United States go through logistics and distribution systems controlled by multinational corporations. Unlike the situation in 1945, a large part of the money that citizens (rebranded as “consumers”) spend at Walmart, Best Buy, or Amazon goes to the stockholders of those corporations and offers little or no benefit for the local economy.
The increase in military spending is a policy choice; it is the only way to avoid economic collapse.
Until the 1950s, most of what Americans ate came from local, family-owned farms. Clothes and furniture were also produced locally. Now that production and distribution have been spread all over the globe, events far away directly impact the US economy, and sometimes politicians feel pressure to use military threats, or responses, to protect American corporate interests (repackaged as “national security”).
So, too, US dependency on petroleum did not exist in the 1920s or dependency on rare earth metals in the 1980s. These are problems created by the decisions of corporations to introduce technologies that offered some conveniences, but at the price of extreme dependency of citizens on technology, which has generated large corporate profits.
The relocation of American manufacturing overseas also means that the only employment available in many regions, especially rural areas, is as police officers, guards at prisons, soldiers, or other positions in the military, police, or surveillance system. These days, security and the military are the only parts of the government budget that are growing.
The last decade has seen employment in defense surge by 40%, reaching 1.4% of the total employment base. In 2022-2023 alone the workforce expanded by 4.8% in contrast to an average of 1.7%.
No politician can oppose the increase in the military budget because, although constant foreign wars do great damage to the economy as a whole, the military has become the only part of government that increases opportunities for employment locally.
The US economy is increasingly controlled by a small number of rich families. The wages of American workers have been reduced, and the costs of living greatly increased for the profit of the few. The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a group of oligarchs has changed everything. This restructuring of society may not seem to be military in nature, but it pushes the United States toward a military economy.
The End of the Welfare State
The disposable income of workers increased beginning in the 1940s because of the redistribution of wealth forced by the reforms of the New Deal. These reforms also allowed for corporations to make enormous profits after the 1950s by selling consumer products to working people who had the disposable income to purchase them. From the 1960s on, consumption, growth, and the stock market became the primary tools for assessing the health of the economy.
Particularly from the 1970s on, this system effectively funneled wealth from working people to the wealthiest. But today consumption by workers, the middle class, and even the upper-middle class is no longer sufficient to generate profits for corporations because the people cannot spend any more. Banks have been forced to look for some other source of profit to pay off their debts. One direction they looked has been the military. Military spending creates steady demand that is not tied to market conditions, or economic booms and busts. It is funded by the people through taxes, or through the inflation created by the deficit spending that funds military expenditures.
The increase in military spending is a policy choice; it is the only way to avoid economic collapse. It must be justified by threats from China, Russia, and Iran, or terrorism. Intelligence agencies responding to the demands of banks to do everything they can to create trouble with those countries.
The true three branches of government are the politicians, the bankers, and the generals.
Companies like Oracle, Palantir, Google, and Amazon not only grow fat like ticks feeding on the military and intelligence budgets, they are merging with banks and using their control of the IT systems that power banks as a means to seize control of money itself through digitalization of the dollar, or the introduction of cryptocurrencies.
One of the most powerful billionaires, Larry Ellison, has launched a campaign to dominate media through the control of social media, entertainment, and news broadcasting. The Trump administration forced TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to turn over its operations in the United States to a consortium headed by Ellison’s company Oracle in December 2025. Oracle grew to global influence as a major contractor for the CIA, and Ellison is a strong Trump supporter.
Since Ellison’s son David was installed as CEO in August 2025 of the new entertainment conglomerate Paramount Skydance—the merger of Paramount Global, Skydance Media, and National Amusements—father and son have been raising enormous funds for a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers that would give them unprecedented control over entertainment and journalism in the United States. Already CBS, under Ellison rule, has cancelled at the last minute a "60 Minutes" report on the notorious El Salvadorian prison CECOT.
These IT firms made those billions by taking out massive loans that they then used to buy back their own stock. They have nothing but debt and money in digital form. War, the threat of war, the buildup for war, is what keeps them going.
Impact on Governance
The United States government is a republic consisting of three branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The three branches complement each other, and they also regulate and balance out each other. This system ensures that power is not concentrated in any one place.
That was a long time ago. How does politics really work today?
There are three real branches of government today, and they are quite different than those described in the Constitution. The true three branches of government are the politicians, the bankers, and the generals. They are the ultimate powers behind the government, and they balance each other out because they operate at different levels and have different strengths.
The concentration of wealth has almost eliminated the impact of citizens on policy.
The politicians are able to form temporary alliances among interest groups in business, finance, and government and negotiate among them to determine policy. The bankers control money and have the power of financial manipulation to shut down the entire economy, or the activities of opponents. The generals possess a chain of command that cannot be easily broken by exterior forces, even by money, and they have the ability to use force directly, without relying on a third party, to achieve their goals.
In a healthy society, where citizens actually play a role in politics, the politicians rise to the top because their primary mission is serving the needs of their clients, whether they are bankers, businessmen, generals, or other interest groups in the general population. Politicians can play the central role because they reflect the needs of citizens. As long as politicians can effectively meet the needs of the bankers, the generals, and the citizens, and keep the money flowing to them, the system remains stable.
If wealth is too concentrated, however, to the degree that the bankers can pay off everyone and gain complete control of the economy, then they rise to the top because bankers need only service a small number of the super rich to obtain absolute power. The politicians become their puppets, and the generals are paid off by the bankers. That is what the political system in the United States has become today.
A political system run by bankers, however, will encounter enormous problems over time because everything will be decided on the basis of short-term profits, and no one will do anything for the sake of others, or follow an ideal greater than personal interest. As a result, the foundations of government, and of society, will crumble. Eventually the government will collapse into anarchy, or it will drift into war as a means of generating profits and enforcing the bankers’ iron-fisted rule over the people.
At that historical moment, the generals rise to the top because they have a viable chain of command that continues to function even as the government fails, and because they speak the language of force and violence, which will become the only language that has authority once the legitimacy of politicians and bankers has been destroyed.
The concentration of wealth has almost eliminated the impact of citizens on policy. The finance-driven speculative economy has brought trust in government and business to a new low. As a result, the only politicians in the Democratic Party who are able to take on the Trump administration are all former military and intelligence, and the election of a former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger as governor of Virginia suggests that the “CIA Democrats” have become the driving force in an ideologically bankrupt Democratic Party.
The financial kings, the bankers and billionaires, need make only one little mistake in order for the chain of command to be handed over to the military in the United States. Although military officers may not want war as individuals, once the order goes down, the entire process, especially in light of the massive increase in drones and robots in the military, will be literally on automatic.
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No, We Can't Deport Our Way Out of Gun Violence
Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies. But this is exactly the mindset that motivates mass shooters.
Dec 21, 2025
I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country—the world—into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated... randomly,
On Saturday, December 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. Rhode Island. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia—in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.
So do the questions: Why? How can we stop this? How can we guarantee that life is safe?
Usually, the calls for change after mass shootings focus on political action: specifically, more serious gun control. Ironically, Australia does have serious gun control. And, unlike the US, mass shootings there are extremely rare, but they still happen, which indicates that legal efforts can play a significant, but not total, role in reducing violence.
Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking.
But that ain’t gonna happen in the USA—not until God knows when, which seriously expands and intensifies the nature of the questions we must start asking. Yeah, there are an incredible number of guns in the United States. Some 400 million of them. And embedded into American culture along with the presence of guns is the belief that they are necessary for our safety, even as they also jeopardize it. Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. What a paradox.
And here’s where the process of change must begin. Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking. One person wins, one person loses. And if I draw my gun first, yeehaw, I’m the winner. This simplistic mindset is, and has long been, part of who we are—ultimately resulting, good God, in stockpiles of nuclear weapons, giving humanity the opportunity to commit mass suicide.
And while nukes may be declared to be simply deterrents for our enemies—threatening mutually assured destruction (oh, the MADness)—the global, and especially the US, non-nuclear military budget is itself almost beyond comprehension: larger by far than what we spend on healthcare, education, diplomacy, or environmental salvation, aka, human survival.
As Ivana Nikolić Hughes writes at Common Dreams: “But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.”
And this thinking isn’t sheerly political. It permeates our social and cultural infrastructure. And it gets personal. “We live in a culture of violence, where weapons are a symbol of power,” Ana Nogales writes in Psychology Today. And having power—over others—also means having the ability, and perhaps the motive, to dehumanize them. And this is the source of human violence—both the kind we hate (mass killings) and the kind we worship (war).
All of which leads me to a quote I heard the other day, in regard to the Bondi Beach shootings, which left me groping for sanity. The speaker was Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks, speaking on Fox News. “In America,” he said, “we have to do more to deport terrorists out of the United States to make sure this doesn’t happen in the homeland, and root out antisemitism around the world as well.”
Flush ’em out! All of them—you know, the ones that are different from us. Skin color, whatever. This is the essence of dehumanization, and it’s how we govern. Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies and declare them... deportable, and if necessary, killable. This mindset is infectious. Just ask the students at Brown University or the Hanukkah celebrants at Bondi Beach.
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Authoritarianism Feeds on a Bloated Military Budget
Squeezed domestic spending and extravagant military spending have widened inequality, with dire consequences for democracy.
Dec 19, 2025
No single explanation exists for how our American democracy came under siege. But with Donald Trump having spent 2025 in escalating conflict across the hemispheres, there is one big factor we shouldn't keep ignoring: the role that our bloated military budget has played in expanding authoritarianism in the United States.
Year after year, trillions are spent on military affairs—via the Pentagon, nuclear weapons programs, Veterans Affairs, and interest on war debt. War and preparation for it takes an ever-bigger bite—now two-thirds—of the discretionary federal budget. Add security work in Homeland Security and the Justice Department, and just 25% of Trump's 2026 budget request is left for Americans' other needs, including transportation, housing, disaster response, cancer research, education, and more.
Squeezed domestic spending and extravagant military spending have widened inequality, with dire consequences for democracy.
That Pentagon spending creates a more unequal America may seem counterintuitive when it is so often touted as a boon to communities with military bases or weapons makers. But military spending has complex effects that belie its reputation as an economic good for the American public as a whole.
Making it harder to go to war is one critical way to help revive democracy.
The truth is that millitary expenditures create far fewer domestic jobs than other types of federal spending—health, education or housing, for example. What Mary Kaldor called the "baroque arsenal" of ultraexpensive, advanced technologies requires a much smaller workforce than did the more numerous mass-produced weapons of the past.
So, where does all of that federal spending on defense go? To military contractors. In the 1980s, many uniformed military jobs were outsourced to private companies; then came phenomenal consolidation in the defense industry. The top five contractors now eat more than half the Pentagon budget. While enlisted soldiers receive pay that leaves many qualifying for SNAP benefits, CEOs and stockholders of these firms dine on the rewards of larger budgets.
Some of this spending goes to a few tech billionaires, whose wealth explodes as most Americans' sputters. Pro-authoritarian Trump donors such as Palantir's Peter Thiel and SpaceX's Elon Musk walk the halls of power as systems providers, policy advisors, and surveillance installers.
Inequality has also been worsened by how the U.S. finances its military. Political scientist Rosella Capella Zielinski explains: “Deficit financing, indirect taxation, and printing money…contribute to war inflation, reducing the purchasing power of low- to middle-income households."
Studies of 21st century democracies show that the risk of electing an authoritarian leader rises as the wealth gap widens. In the U.S., the contrast between the yachts of the oligarchs and the leaky boats of the majority has fostered cynicism and a sense that our government cannot meet people's needs. MAGA politicians have capitalized on this cynicism to scapegoat immigrants and others for the disappointments and struggles caused by tax and spending policies that promote inequality. This dark tangle of experience and disinformation helped Trump regain power.
Trump’s authoritarian impulses have an outlet in a presidency that has become more “imperial” as our military reach has expanded across the globe since World War II. POTUS's war-making role, meant by the founders to be rarely exercised, has moved to the center of presidential energy and identity. Our massive military budget meets Trump's thirst to use the military as the crucial instrument and spectacle of his power. The repressive capacity of a man with more military dollars in his fist than any authoritarian in history should inspire dread.
The campaign story many voters embraced—that Trump was reticent to start wars and eager to end them—has been blown up by the man himself. He has struck inside Iran and Yemen; suggested seizing the Panama Canal, annexing Greenland and Canada, and invading Mexico; and extended U.S. support of Israel's destruction in Gaza. He is calling for renewed nuclear testing, reviving old Latin American bases, striking boats in the Caribbean, and provoking war with Venezuela.
Therein lies some hope. Pushback from the MAGA base and pols who wish to lead them in the future might help as Trump's net approval drops lower than low. Before Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene split from Trump on the Epstein files, she had diverged on his Iran bombings and on Gaza. She lamented, “We elected the president to stop sending tax dollars and weapons for the foreign wars.” Americans have soured on militarism: Only a quarter surveyed in 2023 believed the US improves things in the countries in which it intervenes militarily.
Serious change, however, can only come after Congress reasserts its authority to declare war and provide oversight informed by public opinion. Making it harder to go to war is one critical way to help revive democracy. It could allow us to reallocate funding to improve the lives of Americans and restore faith in the democratic system.
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