“War is a Racket”
Community Christian
Church June 18, 2017 Roger Ray,
pastor
Brigadier General
Smedley D. Butler “War is a racket. It always has been. It is
possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is
the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits
are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
It is certainly no secret to
any of you that during the 2016 primary season, I was an enthusiastic supporter
of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.
I was not taken with him
because he was a political savior who just happened to comb his hair with a
balloon, but because he advocated for a rapid change to renewable energy, for
making higher education tuition-free, for raising the minimum wage, lowering
military spending, and reigning in the excesses of Wall Street investment
banks.
Republicans derided him as
being crazy. Traditional Democrats said that he was impractical and pro-banking
media said that he lived in a fantasyland.
However the famous French
economist, Thomas Piketty, heartily endorsed him and his economic plan as did
Noam Chomsky. So, the world’s
leading economist and the world’s leading political philosopher both endorsed
Bernie Sander’s policies and, true to Chomsky’s form, he even said that voting
for Sanders might be the last chance we will have in our life times to save the
modern world.
And so, you might reasonably
ask if I am grouping myself with the likes of Piketty and Chomsky, and I can
only say, that’s ridiculous… but if the shoe fits….
So what is going on here? The
world’s leading experts in the field are applauding the economic revolution
proposed by Bernie Sanders while both political parties, the corporate geniuses
of the world, and virtually all of the media agreed to be entirely dismissive
of him? Well, honestly, it is not that one side was right and the other was
wrong. If you assume, as the Republicans and Democrats do, and Wall Street
does, and the corporate media does, that the constant accumulation of wealth at
the top of the ladder cannot be challenged, then Bernie’s program is just a
fantasy. If, however, you are willing to challenge the current trend of
redistributing all wealth to the top, then it really isn’t even that hard to do
what he envisioned.
The complaint is that there is
not enough money to pay for these fantasies of education, housing, nutrition,
and health care. When the government wants to talk to us about federal
spending, they show us a chart like this:
If 60% of our budget is spent
on Medicare and Social Security before we even think about universal healthcare
and higher education then it is easy to fall into a mindset of scarcity, and
hence we have all of the political hand wringing about cutting entitlements.
Of course, what Sanders, Piketty,
Chomsky, and I hope you know is that Medicare and Social Security pay for
themselves and even universal healthcare, if it were a Medicare for all
program, could pay for itself if we paid for Medicare instead of a for-profit
health insurance policy…. It would pay for itself and save us money at the same
time. This is not hard, in fact, it is easy-peasy if you can accept that
insurance companies do not have a God-given right to a significant profit out
of your wallet.
So the pie chart that includes
entitlements is really just a way of tricking you into accepting the status
quo. If you look only at the remaining portion of the budget, you see an
entirely different situation in which military spending comprises more than
half of every dollar we spend on the government.
As a percentage of the budget,
our military spending is more now than at any time since World War II. And when
you factor in parts of this budget that are really military…. Like Veterans’
Benefits, (you don’t create veterans out of thin air… veterans come from
fighting wars), then the elephant in the room just gets bigger.
Now, I am no Mahatma Gandhi, I’m
well aware that we live in a dangerous world and that our military means more
to the world’s stability than just defending our shores. But we could make
public colleges tuition free for about a 5% cut in military spending and anyone
who claims that we couldn’t find 5% of wasteful spending in that budget is not
being realistic. They are the ones who should be labeled as being crazy, or
impractical, or living in a fantasyland.
We took our wisdom lesson today
from this man:
Brigadier General Smedley Butler.
Butler is interesting in
several ways not the least of which was that he managed to bring down a Fascist
plot to overthrow the American government during the Roosevelt era. He was a
recently retired and wildly popular general and a group of corporate bosses
were afraid that the New Deal might diminish their power that was based on
their wealth.
They tried to recruit Butler to
lead their revolt but instead Butler managed to bring their plot to a sudden
end… even though, and you may not be shocked by this, those who intended to
violently overthrow the American government were never put on trial. The super
rich rarely are.
My interest is in this slim
volume that Butler wrote in the 1930’s that deserves to be read again in our
age:
Told in the authentic voice of
one of our history’s most decorated soldiers, Butler describes even his service
in WWI as being “a high-class muscle man
for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer
for Capitalism.” As necessary as some of the aspects of WWI were, when it
was over, there were 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires in the USA.
Military spending is the
fastest way to move the largest amount of money from the whole of the
population into the pockets of a tiny fraction of the country. And, in many
cases, nothing much has to be shown for it. Reagan’s Star Wars initiative was a
sham from the start. There was no science behind
it, just a lot of spending. Hundreds of
billions of dollars were paid out to defense contractors who simply had to
“look busy,” all the while knowing that the project was impossible to fulfill.
If we had all day, we could go
on and on with examples of military bases that are still open that were built
for use in WWII, for weapons systems that are manufactured and sent straight to
scrap piles, and that is without even mentioning that we keep building ships
and airplanes when modern wars will not be fought with ships and airplanes.
Modern offensive weapons just
make aircraft carriers great big, slow moving targets. There are 19 operating
aircraft carriers in the world right now. We have 10 of them. China has 2,
Russia has 1. Great Britain, still, after all these years, totally surrounded
by water, Britain used to have 40 of them but now, 0. Who just asked for a new
one to be built? Our very own Clementine Caligula, though, trust me, you don’t
want your sons or daughters serving on it because if there is ever any real
shooting, it will be the first to hit the sand on the bottom of the ocean.
We keep trying to negotiate our
way into peace accords, forming defense alliances, and using trade agreements
for forge lasting peaceful partners. I have my own ideas about making friends
with the world through education, clean water, and micro-business initiatives
but in spite of the fact that I did just a few minutes ago Photoshop myself in
between Thomas Piketty and Noam Chomsky, I might as well claim that I just
slept in a Holiday Inn Express when it comes to this.
But General Butler actually
published a plan to stop all unnecessary wars and useless military spending,
acknowledging that sometimes it just has to happen, but when a government goes
to way, Butler suggested, take all of the profit out of it.
His plan was pretty dramatic. He
said that before going to war the government must literally draft all of the
executives and employees in the military industrial complex and that they, as
well as generals and politicians, would all earn the same salary as the soldier
drafted to serve in the trenches, until the conflict was over.
The truth of modern warfare is
that we send the children of the poor in one country to go kill the children of
the poor in another country. There are noble and patriotic exceptions but by
and large, the Trump family doesn’t serve in uniform nor any of their private
club members. War is a racket designed to enrich the few at the cost of life
and limb among the poor. It has always been that and now it may be more that
than in any time General Butler lived to see.
As he watched the world
building towards WWII through the build up of armies and machinery that always
mean that they will eventually be used, he proposed that we add a Peace
Amendment to the constitution. The amendment would make it illegal for American
troops to leave the Americas or for our ships or planes to stray farther from
our shores than necessary to defend ourselves against invasion unless we were
dispatching them on a mission of mercy.
That may sound entirely
impractical but let me remind you that we basically imposed that on the
constitutions of Japan and Germany after WWII and both have obeyed their
federal documents and have stayed out of military entanglements. He was a
Republican but I think that Bernie Sanders and General Butler would have been
friends!
Financial and natural resources
are limited. We can’t do everything that we can imagine but what we can do is
redirect our use of natural and financial resources to create a world that is
sufficiently stable as to make military action less likely because if our wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us nothing else, it is nearly impossible to
actually win a conventional war in the modern era.
We can defeat an army but not
an ideology. We can build better war technology but we cannot engineer peace
through warfare. And, clearly, we cannot expect the manufacturers of military
hardware to police their own excesses and we cannot hope for sane leadership
out of politicians whose elections are financed by the military industrial
complex.
I know that talking about the
end of war in our time sounds far fetched and idealistic and therefore
unlikely… I know that, but what I am telling you is that is not only achievable
it is not complicated. It would be very easy to accomplish… granted, we have to
talk about campaign finance reform, but that is for another day. We can end war
by changing how we spend our federal budget and, wonder of wonders, you are the
federal government.
