“Just War, War Crimes, War is a Crime, War is a Racket”

“Just War, War Crimes, War is a Crime, War is a Racket”   July 5, 2020    

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor     click here to see the video

14^th Dalia Lama – “Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous - an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.”

Winston Churchill did not say it exactly this way but the popular form of the comment he made in Parliament is this, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others.” Any democracy is inherently inefficient and wasteful and this appears to become increasingly true the bigger the democratic institution becomes.

The last denominational church I served was fairly large with several full-time staff members and many more part time staff and once a year we had to balance a budget that was just a few hundred thousand shy of a million dollars. We had a very aggressive outreach program that involved building a Habitat for Humanity house every year and supporting social services in a village in Nicaragua along with a lot of local poverty related work. 

But we also had a very large board that was populated by a number of well- intended people who watched way too much television. They would insist on adding or defending budget line items that sent money to their favorite charity. 

They didn’t necessarily love these charities enough to send their own money, but they loved them enough to gum up our budget writing process to insist that we send them money from the church. So, while I’m trying to make sure that we keep the feeding center that feeds 200 kids in Matagalpa, Nicaragua everyday open, they also felt the need to make sure that we supported the no-kill Animal Shelter where three or four hundred cats are being housed. This was one of dozens of line items of different people’s favorite causes.

There were some red-faced arguments every fall as these bureaucratic ego battles took place and at some point, I regularly offered, “give me a line item veto and I can balance the church’s budget in five minutes and put a good deal of money into savings” . . . an offer they never had the wisdom to grant to me. 

We like democracy because we all get a voice and even though we don’t get everything our way, we usually get at least a piece of what we want. But, when a lot of people get a piece of what they want, efficiency, thrift, goes out the window. I never suggested that we go ahead and euthanize the cats and anyone who says I did is a damned liar, however, my sympathy grew smaller every year for 16 years.

But during that time, I also served on the boards of several community agencies to include the United Way and Burrell Mental Health and the Community Foundation. Then I was often the minority voice as we looked a very big budgets in the tens of millions of dollars and had to make decisions about what programs got funded and which ones had to be scaled back. And, again, these things get very personal. If one board member is a recovering alcoholic, they are going to defend addiction treatment programs, tooth and nail. 

Another board member has a sibling in an assisted living housing program for people with special needs and for them, every other program is expendable. Still, mental health is generally under-funded and writing that budget was like trying to spread one jar of peanut butter over a hundred loaves of bread. But it wasn’t all well thought out.

Not to beat a dead horse but let me give you an example: 

This is a photo of a part of the main campus of Burrell where we built about $30 million worth of buildings that house most of our counseling, psychiatric, and child treatment programs. It is built on some of the most expensive land in the region, next to the Cox Hospital complex. We realized that fewer than 10% of our clients lived in this part of town and many had to take a series of bus trips to get to us to receive services.

90% of our local clients lived on the north side of town where land would have cost us about one-tenth of what this land cost. We could have put millions of dollars back into the services we delivered in mental health, been closer to our client base, and dramatically improved the property values and lowered the crime rate in a northside blighted neighborhood. And it is for observations like this that I am no longer on the board of Burrell Behavioral Health. 

I had my sacred cows in each program and could be quite difficult to get along with when I felt like politics or favoritism was having too much sway in the final writing of the budget. And when you start to talk about a really big budget, like a hospital or a university, and I was always on the sidelines of those battles, but a lot of the decisions about vendors, construction, legal services, auditing firms, these contracts were sometimes granted in the midst of kickbacks, bribes, and revolving door arrangements that would have embarrassed any third world dictator. 

I could be more specific, but I would almost certainly be sued if I actually said anything about Cox Hospitals granting multi-million dollar contracts on the basis of non-competitive bidding from members of their own board. Oops…. Sorry, not sorry. And, of course, while medical costs sky-rocket, our local hospitals make the same prime real estate decisions that Burrell made, which is a large part of why our healthcare costs are so high. 

I get my primary health care from a group of doctors that charge me $60 a month for everything. They are bright, professional, and caring people. And they lease office space downtown on the bottom floor of a parking garage surrounded by closed retail shops and empty warehouses. But my healthcare costs less than 10% of what most people in this area pay. This is not hard. It is just unpopular.

Generally speaking, the larger an institution becomes, the less efficient it is. Some of that is due simply to the complexity of scale and some of that is due to the greed that always creeps in when a lot of money is changing hands.  Just consider how our economy has changed during the current pandemic. 40 million people have filed for unemployment.

Many, if not most, small businesses will not survive this. And yet, the top billionaires in our nation have seen their wealth go up by 50% just in the past three months, exploiting the government spending and special demands of the pandemic.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a lot of other nasty rich people whose names are not in the news as much are experiencing rapid wealth growth while tens of millions of Americans head for bankruptcy. 

That’s how our economy works though. Whenever a lot of money is being moved, the big guys step in and grab the majority of it while working class and poor people are still brushing their teeth and lacing up their boots to go to work. Now, I don’t want to go all Steve Rattner on you guys, but I have a few of charts.

This is an average municipal government budget pie chart. The big blue section is the police budget and the red section is the fire budget and this shows you what we are talking about when we talk about defunding the police. At least I am not talking about getting rid of the police force entirely but it is clear that mental health workers, social workers, the kind of people who could meaningfully respond to most of what the police are called out for, are hardly present in the budget because it is taken up, almost entirely, by the police and fire departments. 

Every mental health emergency, every public acting out of an alcoholic or drug addict, and every domestic disturbance doesn’t need two heavily armed cops to show up, and, in fact, more than a thousand times a year, that’s how someone gets shot. Save the armed cops for bank robberies and domestic terrorism but, as you have heard me say many times, if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. You don’t need an armed cop to give traffic tickets any more than we arm meter maids who give out parking tickets. Most police shootings happen in traffic stops. So, stop making traffic stops! You have their license number – just mail them a speeding ticket. That’s what they do in the United Kingdom and it not only works to avoid police shootings, no one speeds anymore because they know that they will get a ticket in the mail.

When an institution gets this big, it has so much power, the municipal government has tremendous difficulty in getting the budget cut to a more appropriate size in relation to the rest of the city’s needs. This is a problem that will not be fixed overnight and correcting it at all will require tremendous political will on the part of voters. As important as it is and as much as it is in the news, we’re not here to talk about police budgets, or mental health or hospital budgets. On this 4^th of July weekend, we are here to talk about the military budget. My previous illustrations were just to prime the pump so that it will be easier for you to accept that what I am about to tell you is entirely true.

When you go from the city budget to the national budget you see what an amazing problem this becomes.

The federal government will move over $4 trillion dollars this year but just over half of that is not really income and budget issues for politicians to manage. Social Security and Medicare are self-funding programs, so it is deceptive to look at our federal budget in this way. 

It makes a lot more sense to look at what we allegedly have discretion over. It is horrifying enough to realize that military and veterans spending accounts for nearly 70 cents of every federal dollar spent, but what you don’t see is how much is spent off the books… trillions spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were never even budgeted.

The scandal reported by the Nation in 2018 revealed that when the Department of Defense was finally pinned down to be audited, the auditing firm of Ernst and Young reported that they could not finish the audit because there were hundreds of billions of dollars unaccounted for and more than 16,000 pages of supporting documents had been destroyed. Please don’t let this slip passed you. This is not a matter of Hillary deleting thousands of personal emails about her yoga classes and her daughter’s wedding. This is the military hiding 16,000 pages of budget and acquisition documentation. The military has lost hundreds of billions of dollars that they cannot tell you where it went. 

You all know what it is like. You get a little refund check and you misplace it and you can’t get another one. You let a $10 bill slip out of your pocket while you are fishing for your keys in a dark parking lot. But this is what one billion dollars looks like . . . almost a dozen pallets stacked tightly with hundred-dollar bills six feet tall. How do you lose this, hundreds of times? The military industrial complex feeds on the bloated military budget that buys airplanes we can’t use, ships we will never need, and weapons systems designed to win wars like World War II when we will never fight wars like that again. 

Last spring, in a broadly reported interview, Jimmy Carter talked about a(https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/18/jimmy-carter-us-most-warlike-nation-history-world)

Conversation he had with President Trump. Trump was worried about China’s growing economic strength and their competitiveness on world trade. The 94 year old Carter spelled it out for him: the United States is perpetually at war and China almost never is. Carter said that the US is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world” having been engaged in conflict of one kind or another for all but 16 of our 243 years of existence. China has not been engaged in any armed conflict for more than 40 years. 

While we are losing hundreds of billions on military spending that we can’t even account for, China is building airports, housing projects, wind and solar power generation, and investing in international trade. We don’t see it so much here but I can tell you that in every Caribbean and Central American country that I have visited in the past generation, the grocery store to go to is the Chinese store, and they are backed by government initiatives to spread their language, culture, and citizens around the globe in positive and helpful ways while we build aircraft carriers that will never be used and would be useless if we tried to use them…. They are all just one drone strike away from sleeping with the fishes and every nation on earth knows it and yet the USA keeps building more of them. 

It is not an accident that I am bringing this up on the 4^th of July weekend. We tend to talk about every war as a war fought for freedom and independence. We say that every soldier deployed to a battlefield is fighting to protect our freedom. And folks, wishing that it was so does not make it so. We invaded Afghanistan because there were Taliban training camps there. The whole nation wasn’t a Taliban training camp, in fact, the military targets there that had anything to do with the 9-11 attacks on the USA were few. But we invaded, occupied, and we are still there, with the Russians paying insurgents a bounty for every American soldier they kill. But 19 years later, does Afghanistan pose a threat to our freedom and independence?  Not for nearly a generation.

Dick Cheney spun up a case for invading Iraq, though they had nothing to do with 9-11, they posed no threat to us, and their military was the only counter-balance to the growing power of Iran in the region. But what that war did was increase the value of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton stock by more than 3000%. The real reason behind almost every war is not the noble stuff they sell in the media to recruit soldiers and gain support for a war, it is to enrich those who are, generally speaking, already rich. If war was such a noble enterprise, it would be illegal to profit off of it and we would spare no expense to care for our wounded veterans but, as you know, the truth of it is the exact opposite. War kills the children of the poor on both sides of the conflict, and enriches the war profiteers. 

I briefly worked as a military journalist. I have stood on the training grounds at Ft. Leonard Wood and felt the electric passion of young soldiers as they prepared for deployment. I know that they were willing to give their lives in service to their country in defense of the values we claim to hold dear. But I’m telling you, I had a very short career as a military journalist because I could see that these young women and men were being lied to. They were willing to die in defense of freedom, but they were being sent to give up arms and legs, eyes, sanity, and their very lives for cheap oil and the profits of Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Boeing, and Raytheon. 

War is a racket in which noble young soldiers are killed for ignoble profit and that men and women, is a fact. And listeners, you don’t have to write to tell me how angry you are at me for saying it, I have heard it many times. But the fact that you are angry doesn’t mean that what I am saying is not true. I’m not being unpatriotic. War profiteers are the ones who are not being patriotic, but they never seem to pay a price in the media.

As the Dalai Lama said, we allow ourselves to be brainwashed into believing that wars turn soldiers into heroes and that they make our nation safe for democracy.

It simply isn’t true. American democracy is in peril but not from the armies of Afghanistan or Iraq. Our democracy is threatened by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian meddling in our elections but that is a war our President has not only chosen not to fight but he has, in fact, encouraged Russian and Chinese meddling in our elections to hold onto an office for which he is not qualified and which he has already disgraced for more than three years. 

Here is the moral dilemma of our age:  If we cannot afford to provide health care to our sick, education to our young, a living wage to our workers, then what exactly are we spending trillions of dollars to defend? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have a Department of Defense or Homeland Security, I’m just saying that they are so big that they have dominated our nation’s budget and robbed us of the things that really would make America great if we just got our priorities in order. 

I love my country, but my government is a disgrace. I respect our service women and men, but I despise the people who have sent them into battle to profit from their sacrifices. I want to be able to stand at attention for our flag, but first America is going to have to get its head straight about what it is that we really stand for.

I will close with a bit of trivia that may be news to many of you. We all know that our grand Statue of Liberty was a gift to America from France. But it was not a gift given to us at the end of our War for Independence at the end of the 18^th century. It was not given to us until the end of the 19^thcentury and it was given to honor the fact that America had finally freed its slaves. The whole association with immigration and famous poem on the base of the statue came later. The French gave us this great monument to liberty because we had finally done the right and moral thing in giving liberty to African slaves. 

This is not a difficult thing. If you want to be honored and respected, do something that is honorable and respectable. Cut the military budget and give workers a raise to a living wage. Make higher education available to the children of the rich and the poor. Give healthcare to the sick, housing to the homeless, jobs to the unemployed, and for God’s sake, pay reparations to the decedents of those freed slaves for which lady liberty holds high her torch of freedom. Oh, and not that I watch football, but give Colin Kaepernick a job in the NFL, and tear down some statue of Robert E. Lee and put up a statue of Fredrick Douglas, or even Colin Kaepernick for that matter…. Celebrate some history that is worth preserving . . . or create some history that would be worth remembering. 

It may be a symbolic gesture to take Indian murdering Andrew Jackson off of the $20 bill and put Harriet Tubman’s face on our currency, but you can’t say that it is just symbolic, or we would have done it already. There is a reason why Trump is delaying that change and the reason is we have a racist in the White House. Come on America, you are better than this. Give me something to celebrate on Independence Day. 

I have a great deal more that I want to say on this topic but I know that I have already taxed your patience and frayed your nerves and so I will end with what I think was the greatest line from all of the 9 episodes of the fictional Star Wars movies: When Luke Skywalker crash lands on the jungle planet of Tatooine, he meets a tiny alien and he tells him that he is looking for a great warrior. 

The strange looking creature was Yoda, whom Luke came to find, but Yoda is quick to correct him saying, "Wars not make one great." I want to be proud of a great America, but America is not now great. I can’t vouch for whether or not it ever was, but I know that right now it is not and that there is no war that will ever make it great again. 

The ball is in your court America. If you want to reclaim your honor, do something honorable. If you want to be respected, do the things that would make you respectable. End your ceaseless wars. Find a solution to racism. Bring an end to ignorance and poverty, and for God’s sake, elect national leaders that you don’t have to constantly apologize for. Nobody is perfect but then, nobody I can think of is as imperfect as our current president. Do better America. Be better. Earn our respect and you will have it. I am a son of the South. I am a natural born patriot. All you have to do to win me back is stop embarrassing yourself and start to do the right thing.