Humanitarian

This week, President Bush presented his proposed budget for 2006.  The budget would increase the already astronomical military budget by 6.9%, to $439.3 billion, and would also increase spending on “homeland security” to $30 billion.  To pay for the increase in military spending, Bush has proposed potentially devastating cuts in funding to already under-funded social services.  Medicare would be gutted by $36 billion over the next five years, and aid to children’s hospitals would be reduced, as would be the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a government organization which works to prevent the spread of disease and combat health hazards.  The proposed budget cut from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention occurs in the midst of panic regarding the spread of avian flu, which, experts fear, could kill hundreds of millions of people if  its mutates into a form which is easily transferable between humans.

To put the US government’s colossal military budget in perspective, consider this: at the end of the 20^th century, the United Nations estimated that the cost of providing universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, clean water, and safe sewers was only $40 billion dollars, [i]  approximately 9% of the proposed US military budget for 2006, and between 2 and 4% of the estimated amount of money to be spent on the invasion of Iraq, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The justification for the astronomically large military budget that is currently in vogue amongst elite pundits is that the United States needs a powerful “defense” force in order to win the “war against terrorism.”  Somehow, we are supposed to believe that by spending trillions of dollars on its military and waging vicious imperialist wars in which hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives, the US government can not only defeat all clandestine and decentralized terrorist organizations, but can destroy the very anti-imperialist ideology which unites these organizations and which is shared by a large portion of the world’s population!   Never do mainstream pundits consider the possibility that the United States government’s choice to spend trillions of dollars on campaigns of mass slaughter and imperial conquest while neglecting to invest a mere fraction of that money to end global poverty might itself actually be a major reason for the prevalence of anti-American sentiment worldwide, and thus of anti-American terrorism.

If the US government was serious about fighting terrorism, it would immediately put an end to its policies interventionism and imperialism, which are increasingly terrorism,[ii] and would invest a mere $40 billion providing universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, clean water, and safe sewers.  If people saw the United States extending a benevolent hand to the world and lifting billions of people out of poverty and doing its part to end war and injustice globally, how could Osama bin Laden and his ilk possibly recruit terrorists to fight the United States?  The truth is, the terrorist threat to the US could be eradicated with without illegal domestic wire tapping programs and illegal wars of aggression abroad in this manner, if the US government really was actually interested in ending the threat. However, the US government is clearly not concerned with ending terrorism; it is concerned only with protecting and advancing the interests of the capitalist elite that controls it, so it funnels astronomical amounts of money into the military-industrial economy, and spends astronomical amounts of money on wars to secure resources and markets, leaving ordinary Americans to deal with the consequences of preventable terrorism.

The sad truth of the matter is this: our country could invest its immense wealth caring for the sick and injured and preventing disease in our country and around the world, but instead, our government invests its wealth on programs which are causing more health problems by the hour, like the war in Iraq, which has already wounded between 15,000 and 48,100 American soldiers[iii] and countless Iraqis.  Our country could be using its wealth in the interest of advancing peace, but the American government continues to devote the vast majority of its resources to fighting unjust wars and participating in other less overt campaigns of imperialist violence.  Our country could use its wealth to permanently eradicate global poverty, but our government instead uses its wealth and power to exacerbate and perpetuate the problems of poverty and economic inequality.

Bush’s proposed budget for 2006 epitomizes the priorities of America’s capitalist elite and the wastefulness of the capitalist system in general.  In order to perpetuate economic inequality and elite privilege, the ruling class wastes trillions of dollars worth of resources on violent institutions such as military and police forces which protect their interests.  This is money that could otherwise be spent eradicating poverty worldwide and ensuring prosperity for everyone, providing high-quality health care for all the world’s citizens, combating existing pandemics and preventing future outbreaks, and advancing scientific knowledge, but because of the deadly priorities of the capitalist system and those who control it, humans are instead using it to perpetuate poverty, violence, and disease.  Everyone in the world suffers because of capitalism’s deadly priorities which consistently put profit over people, from the American children whose hospitals will be denied aid because of the increase in the US military budget, to the Fallujan children whose hospitals have been decimated by US bombs, and it’s time that we all unite to put an end to this anti-human system once and for all.