•  HOME 
  •  ARCHIVES 
  •  BOOKS 
  •  PDF ARCHIVE 
  •  WWP 
  •  SUBSCRIBE 
  •  DONATE 
  •  MUNDOOBRERO.ORG
  • Loading


Follow workers.org on
Twitter Facebook iGoogle




EDITORIAL

Turning swords into ploughshares? Not!

Published Jan 16, 2012 4:37 PM

President Barack Obama, flanked by the top brass of all the military forces, announced changes in the Pentagon budget on Jan. 5 that will supposedly make it leaner and meaner.

What will this mean for the tens of millions of U.S. workers suffering through these times of high unemployment, low pay and all the ills that follow?

Not much, we’re sorry to say. While the plan proposes to cut $487 billion in Pentagon spending over the next decade, this is small compared to the trillions that will still be lavished on the business of war. Taking all the agencies involved, the cost of U.S. military domination of the world takes up about one-quarter of the federal budget, and will continue to do so, especially as government spending on human services shrinks.

If anything, the change in focus from “counter-insurgency“ to high-tech warfare — drones, satellites, cyber war and Special Forces — will add up to fewer jobs in the economy for all but the most skilled workers.

In addition, the armed forces will shrink, with the Army and Marine Corps taking the biggest hits. It is sad but true that for a lot of young people, the military has represented a job when no others could be found — especially in oppressed communities and rural areas where the options for survival have become so limited.

But relying on actual human beings to carry out their brutal orders is becoming less appealing to the brass. Sending troops into other countries, no matter how much they destroy, has proven not very effective in cowing the populations. In Iraq, Afghanistan and earlier in Vietnam, it has only consolidated opposition to the invaders.

Moreover, the recent wars have left a generation of young men and women with deep physical and psychological scars. They are bitter and angry, often at the military, because of what they were forced to do. Their high levels of unemployment, homelessness and suicide bear witness to the profound dislocation of their lives.

When one of these veterans was badly injured by police during an Occupy Oakland march, and hundreds of other veterans then joined the movement in solidarity, it was a wakeup call to the rulers that they may be sitting on a powder keg.

So the new emphasis of the Pentagon is to get away from “labor-intensive” wars and interventions and concentrate more on high-tech devices that rain down death and destruction from the skies. It will spend more money on training operators of its doomsday weapons and on developing hardened killers, like Navy Seals, to “take out” those the Pentagon deems a threat to U.S. domination.

Respect for national borders, sovereignty, the right of nations to self-determination — all are chucked overboard as the Pentagon and CIA plan to focus more on satellite-guided spying devices to select “targets” wherever they like and then guide in high-powered explosives to kill and, they hope, terrorize the population into submitting. They have already begun this strategy in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and elsewhere in Africa.

While announcing the cuts, Obama stressed that the U.S. will nevertheless be “strengthening our presence in the Asia Pacific, and budget reductions will not come at the expense of this critical region.” Why is it so critical? Have countries in this region been threatening the U.S. lately so that it needs to beef up its military there?

The answer is only too plain. Their target is China, which has been developing at an extraordinary rate because of the strength of its planned economy. For a country like China, which just half a century ago was so poor and underdeveloped, to become a modern economic power is viewed with alarm by the U.S. imperialist ruling class — no matter how much China abides by international laws that Washington violates all the time.

Imperialism is a danger to the rest of the world. It also wreaks havoc on the workers here. The bosses’ success in super-exploiting workers abroad lets them shed workers here, cut the wages of those still employed and decimate vitally needed social services such as the heating assistance program, HEAP, and food stamps. And the huge military exists for this very purpose.

Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler of the Marine Corps, who changed sides because of the Great Depression, said it best in a speech in 1933. His military job had made him “a high class muscle-man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” Butler’s photo was carried recently in an Occupy Wall Street demo. Consciousness is catching up to reality.