Journalist Murtaza Hussain has a good article at The Intercept entitled, “Corona Virus is Exposing How Foreign Crusades Bled America’s Domestic Resources Dry.”
He details some of the ways our entrenched establishment leaders have
prioritized and heavily funded US military adventurism around the world, leaving the domestic cupboard bare in the face of national emergencies like the one we now face.
I have an excerpt below, or click on the title above to see the full article.
But first let me also plug the newest film (16:30) from journalist Abby Martin at The Empire Files. It is called “US Empire Exploits COVID-19 For More War.” Click on the title to watch.
Abby graphically explains the president’s escalation of US military attacks around the world, few of which have received any coverage in the corporate media, while the public is distracted by the corona virus pandemic.
Here is the article excerpt:
“THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC now ravaging the United States should lead every American to a series of important questions: What are the real threats that I face? What has my government been prioritizing in terms of my — and the nation’s — security? And where has all my tax money been going?
“Considering these questions, it’s hard not to conclude that the American government’s national security priorities have been so askew of reality that they
left the country dramatically unprepared for an acute threat to millions of its people.
“. . . Over a period of two decades, the United States spent trillions of dollars waging wars and occupations across the region. These confrontations have won America an ever-growing list of enemies around the world. They are still making life miserable for millions in the Middle East. But their impact on the United States itself is now also being painfully revealed: a country that has spent trillions on foreign wars but is unable to defend its citizens from basic threats like disease and economic collapse.
“The last few weeks have revealed a spectacle of a federal government apparently incapable of doing what is required to stop the spread of a pandemic
on American soil. Not only has testing capacity lagged far behind much smaller and less wealthy countries like Taiwan and South Korea, but shortages of critical health infrastructure will likely mean the excess deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans in the foreseeable future. Governors of large states have been publicly begging the federal government for ventilators, masks, and other basic tools to deal with the outbreak. There is little sign that the capacity even exists at present to respond to these requests.
“Meanwhile, the avalanche of military spending that was released after the September 11 attacks continues to roll onwards. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the U.S. government has spent a staggering $6.4 trillion on its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan since 2001. This gargantuan number
does not even account for interest payments on the borrowing needed to pay for the wars, which could run to as much as $8 trillion by midcentury, let alone the opportunity costs to American society of this massive spending on foreign adventurism. Then there are the attendant inflations of the Pentagon’s base budget; domestic “war on terror” spending at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security; and of course the wild expansion of our intelligence apparatuses, all but unaccountable to the general public in both their acts and spending.
“That American counterterrorism wars have killed hundreds of thousands of people while failing to achieve any clear political or strategic benefit makes the squandering of this generational wealth even more bitter.”
