{"id":26802,"date":"2023-06-02T13:30:02","date_gmt":"2023-06-02T20:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=26802"},"modified":"2023-06-02T20:22:44","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T03:22:44","slug":"what-word-would-mlk-have-used-to-describe-bidens-debt-ceiling-deal-demonic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/06\/02\/what-word-would-mlk-have-used-to-describe-bidens-debt-ceiling-deal-demonic\/","title":{"rendered":"What word would MLK have used to describe Biden\u2019s debt ceiling deal? \u2018Demonic\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by\u00a0Norman Solomon, San Francisco Chronicle<\/strong>\u00a0on\u00a0May 31, 2023<\/strong> (sfchronicle.com)<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"President
President Biden meets with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the White House to discuss the debt limit on May 22. The budget deal reached doesn\u2019t cut\u00a0military spendingAlex Brandon\/Associated Press<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The debt-ceiling deal reached by President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a picture of priorities that Martin Luther King Jr. deplored. While reductions in military spending are completely off the table, the knives are out for deep cuts in government programs to feed the hungry, aid children in low-income families, provide housing assistance, assist seniors and much more. This is the latest version of what King called \u201cthe madness of militarism.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking a year before his death, King described huge spending for war as a \u201cdemonic, destructive suction tube\u201d<\/a> siphoning vast resources away from anti-poverty programs to pay for warfare in Vietnam. Now, 56 years later, the nation\u2019s military expenditures are at record highs while the Pentagon \u201csuction tube\u201d easily blends in with the political scenery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The accolades were bipartisan and dissent sparse when Congress upped an annual military spending package to\u00a0$858 billion<\/a>\u00a0last winter. The House vote was 350-80; the Senate tally was 83-11.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such lopsided margins are routine. While corporations feast on Defense Department contracts, an estimated 34 million Americans<\/a> \u201cface hunger each and every day.\u201d In cities, suburbs and rural areas, the cascading effects of chronic neglect are rife, from underfunded public schools and social services to inadequate and exorbitant housing to life-threatening shortfalls of health care from infancy to old age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While war industries thrive on giant Pentagon budgets, opposition to them gains little visibility. In Congress, the same two parties at loggerheads on domestic policies largely enjoy across-the-aisle unity on military spending. Democrats mostly defend programs like food assistance and health care for children, but few Democratic lawmakers challenge the budgetary core of what President Dwight Eisenhower called, in his farewell address<\/a>, the \u201cmilitary-industrial complex.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United States spends more money<\/a> on its military than the next 10 countries combined, and most of those countries are allies<\/a>. The U.S. has 750 military bases in foreign countries and territories, compared to no more than three dozen for Russia<\/a> and five for China<\/a>. Basic facts about these multibillion-dollar outlays don\u2019t often see the light of day, much less receive critical scrutiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the dominant approach of news coverage is to treat escalating Pentagon budgets as common-sense realism. Major journalistic challenges to corporate war profiteering and its consequences are few and far between. As for punditry in mainstream media, condemnation of the military-industrial complex is rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s bloated military spending is immensely powerful, yet the end use of its power is scarcely visible to Americans. During the past decade, U.S. military actions have required fewer and fewer boots on the ground while increasingly relying on the latest technologies to appear above it all, dropping bombs and firing missiles from on high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries,\u201d President Biden assured Americans<\/a> in late summer 2021 when the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan. \u201cWe just don\u2019t need to fight a ground war to do it. We have what\u2019s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground \u2014 or very few, if needed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When tens of thousands of ground troops were engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. news media provided some coverage of the impacts on them and their loved ones. American deaths and injuries were deemed newsworthy, in sharp contrast to scant coverage of the deaths and suffering of Afghans and Iraqis due to military actions subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Now, with so much of U.S. warfare relying on air power and secrecy, media coverage of the Pentagon\u2019s war efforts has faded almost to the vanishing point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Biden claimed<\/a> during a speech at the United Nations in September 2021 that \u201cI stand here today, for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,\u201d in the same month the Costs of War Project at Brown University issued a report showing that the U.S. \u201cwar on terror\u201d was still underway on several continents. The project\u2019s co-director, Professor Catherine Lutz, pointed out<\/a> that \u201cthe war continues in over 80 countries.\u201d And, in fact, \u201ccounterterrorism operations have become more widespread in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With little public scrutiny, eye-popping line items for special operations are larded into yearly Pentagon appropriations before gliding through Congress and landing on the Oval Office desk for certain signature. The financing is profuse for secret military actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pentagon has  reluctantly acknowledged <\/a>that U.S. special operations commandos were deployed in 141 countries as this decade began. But for U.S. media, America\u2019s engagement in some kind of warfare, whether on the ground or from the air, has been less and less likely to rise above the level of a dog-bites-human story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making war invisible goes hand in hand with making gigantic military budgets uncontroversial \u2014 and disconnecting the profligate spending for the Pentagon from the depletion of resources for the common good. As long as the grim impacts of massive funding for the military are concealed from the American people, the actual consequences of the \u201cdemonic, destructive suction tube\u201d will remain hidden in plain sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written By Norman Solomon<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman Solomon, a Marin County author of a dozen books on media and politics including \u201cWar Made Easy,\u201d is co-founder of\u00a0RootsAction.org\u00a0and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book \u201cWar Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine\u201d will be published in June by the New Press.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published by San Francisco Chronicle<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Norman Solomon, San Francisco Chronicle\u00a0on\u00a0May 31, 2023 (sfchronicle.com) The debt-ceiling deal reached by President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a picture of priorities that Martin Luther King Jr. deplored. While reductions in military spending are completely off the table, the knives are out for deep cuts in government programs… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[655],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26802"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26818,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26802\/revisions\/26818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}