The disproportionate rift between military spending and money spent on programs that would potentially advance or sustain human rights has become a disturbing worldwide standard. As William Felice points out in his article from International Affairs, many of the world’s nations are denying basic fiscal rights to their citizens, instead favoring major investments in military force and defense. This trend serves as a red flag that, conspiratorial or accidental, the world’s economic gap between the rich and the poor is growing exponentially larger, faster.
According to Anup Shah of globalissues.org, the United States has been the most aggressive purveyor of military spending, likely setting off a worldwide chain reaction that begins within the American borders. The global average for military spending is over one trillion dollars per year. This number rose 3.4 percent from 2004 to 2005 and 34 percent between the decades time of 1996 to 2005. Shah contests that the military expenditures made by the United States comprises 80 percent of the 2004 to 2005 increase and, currently, 48 percent of the entire world’s total. The next runners-up at 4 – 5 percent each include the United Kingdom, France, Japan and China. Even the United Nations, amidst all of their departments, only accounts for a mere 2 percent of worldwide military expenditure. Obviously, these numbers make the United States the perfect paradigm for military spending and its effects on human rights.
The largest current military expense in America is for the ongoing war in Iraq. In 2003, Niko Matsakis of Boston, Massachusetts and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, Maryland created costofwar.com as a means of keeping up with the Iraq war expenses, as well as determining the civil rights benefits that are being neglected in the process. After a year of maintaining the website themselves, they eventually presented it to The National Priorities Project, who now house the tally on their website. According to this count, the United States has spent nearly 473 billion dollars on the Iraq war alone since the war’s inception on March 20th, 2003 until today, November 29, 2007. It further contends that this amount would have been enough to fund over 4 million public housing units, hire over 8 million public school teachers for one year, pay for over 62 million children to attend Head Start for a year, insure 238 million children for one year or provide four-year scholarships to public universities for nearly 23 million students. With the possibility of all these civil benefits, what is the reason for all the military spending instead?
To answer this question, one need not look any further than the days of aristocrats and serfs, for this seems to be the inevitable direction of devolution caused and aided by such a large imbalance of wealth distribution. Unfortunate as it is, the modern world is governed by the flow of money and the power it is capable of purchasing. The human thirst to obtain more and more of it is the foundation of the military industrial complex, which is fueled by the aforementioned misappropriation of funds. Basically, those who posses the majority of the world’s finances also posses the ability to advertise their ideas further and more intensely than those who are financially lacking. This allows for the use of mass media to push personal agendas through legally paid for propaganda. This propaganda can bring about a number of after effects, such as the public acceptance of a preemptive rush to war, which was brought upon largely by appealing to the emotions that Americans felt regarding the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11th, 2001. With public support and high emotions in the air, the war can then be publicized and played with in ways that further propagate ideas about the war that the wealthy elite would like to foster, regardless of their actual truth or lack thereof. With this comes the ability to incite national (or even international) fear and to squash dissent, making further public claims that those who do oppose the ideas presented are unpatriotic or disrespectful toward soldiers who have been killed in battle. This, of course, continues to stir great, albeit often blind, emotion in those who support the war. The wealthy power holders use this support as well as their money and influence to prop up their own pocketed politicians (often themselves) here in America and hence the war continues. This is good business for those power holders as they are then able to contract their own privatized corporations to handle the arsenal production as well as other aspects of the war (security and rebuilding, for example).
This is where the wealthy powermongers then accumulate exponentially more wealth. With their control in American politics as well as industry, and the war being fought on the terms of American politicians and corporations, they are then free to pay their war-based industries any amount that they choose and have the taxpayers foot the bill. This is a definitive illustration of the military industrial complex. According to Anup’s article, 41 percent of American’s 2006 taxes went to military costs. That means that a massive percent of money paid to the federal government by taxpayers in 2006 actually went to corporations profiting within the war industry. So why choose the military industry as a primary means of profit, as opposed to healthcare or education? The most obvious reason is simply that items produced for war are an extinguishable resource. Bullets, once fired, and bombs, once exploded, can be replaced, respectively, more rapidly for more money. This logic is not only detrimental to the poverty stricken taxpayers of America, but the middle class taxpayers as well. Rep. Bernie Sanders, in a guest commentary on BuzzFlash.com, asserts that if these practices continue, the middle class will ultimately collapse, returning America to a two class system of the poor and the wealthy.
It could be argued that a change in voting habits could change military spending, which could change this possible fate. This may very well be true, and we may do well to have faith that it is. There also, however, sits the possibility that mass media and/or the corporate dealings of Diebold Systems (the company that designs and builds the electronic voting machines), are so dominated by the interests of the military industrial complex that we may watch America plunge into a Dark Age, after all. With so many proverbial wolves in sheep clothing among the 2007 political spectrum, one would be wise to fully research their favorite candidate before casting their vote for him or her. When voting in primary elections, one may also be wise to choose a candidate that is largely ignored by the mass media, for this is the candidate with no negative past to be exploited and enough socially progressive ideas to be ignored in favor of a wealthier, more militant minded contender. This is all presuming, however, that Diebold does not already have the fate of the next American election preprogrammed into their machines, in which case we may do well to request write-in ballots. In any case, the American public has a lot on their plate in regards to the next presidential election, and perhaps even more in regards to the next primary election.
Felice, William F. (1998). Militarism and human rights. International Affairs, 74, 25-40.
National Priorities Project – Cost of War. Retrieved November 29, 2007, from http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Cost-of-War/Cost-of-War-3.html.
Sanders, Bernie. (2003). The Collapse of the Middle Class – A BuzzFlash Guest Commentary. Retrieved November 29, 2007, from http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/09/04_sanders.html.
Shah, Anup. (2007). World Military Spending – Global Issues. Retrieved November 29, 2007, from http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp.