The Military as a Jobs Program: There are More Efficient Ways to Stimulate the Economy

Ellen Brown

Dwight David Eisenhower

Global Research, June 22, 2011
Web of Debt

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."

–Dwight David Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace," speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953

In a Wall Street Journal editorial on June 8 bemoaning the failure of the Obama stimulus package, Martin Feldstein wrote:

"Experience shows that the most cost-effective form of temporary fiscal stimulus is direct government spending. The most obvious way to achieve that in 2009 was to repair and replace the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan that would otherwise have to be done in the future.?But the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department."

You can’t make this stuff up. The most obvious way to stimulate the economy is to replace military equipment? And the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department? When veterans’ benefits and other past military costs are factored in, the military now devours half the U.S. budget. If military spending is such a cost-effective stimulus, why have the trillions poured into it in the last decade left the economy reeling?

The military is the nation’s largest and most firmly entrenched entitlement program, one that takes half of every tax dollar. Even if "national security" is considered our number one priority (a dubious choice when the real unemployment rate is over 16%), estimates are that the military budget could be cut in half or more and we would still have the most powerful military machine in the world. Our enemies (if any) are now "terrorists," not countries; and what is needed to contain them (if anything) is local policing, not global warfare. Much of our military hardware is just good for "shock and awe," not needed for any "real and present danger."

Military spending is the very essence of "built-in obsolescence": it turns out products that are designed to blow up. The military is not subject to ordinary market principles but works on a "cost-plus" basis, with producers reimbursed for whatever they have spent plus a guaranteed profit. Gone are the usual competitive restraints that keep capitalist corporations "lean and mean." Private contractors hired by the government on no-bid contracts can be as wasteful and inefficient as they like and still make a tidy profit. Yet legislators looking to slash wasteful "entitlements" persist in overlooking this obvious elephant in the room.

The reason massive military spending is considered the most "obvious" way to produce a fiscal stimulus is simply that it is the only form of direct government spending that gets a pass from the deficit hawks. The economy is desperate to get money flowing through it, and today only the government is in a position to turn on the spigots; but there is a tourniquet on government spending. That is true for everything but the military, the only program on which the government is allowed to spend seemingly without limit, often even without oversight.

Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past

New York Times

By STEPHEN SCHLESINGE

IN 1954, the American government committed one of the most reprehensible acts in its history when it authorized the C.I.A. to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz. It did so secretly but later rationalized the coup on the ground that the country was about to fall into communist hands.

Guatemalan society has only recently recovered from the suffering that this intervention caused, including brutal military dictatorships and a genocidal civil war against its Indian population, which led to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people. Only in the 1980s, when a peace process commenced, did democratic governance resume. But a silence about the Arbenz era continued.

Now, after 25 years of increasingly vibrant democratic rule, Guatemalans feel confident enough to honor the memory of their deposed leader by incorporating his achievements into the national school curriculum, naming a highway after him, and preparing an official biography. America should follow suit by owning up to its own ignoble deed and recognizing Arbenz as the genuine social progressive that he was.

Washington feared Arbenz because he tried to institute agrarian reforms that would hand over fallow land to dispossessed peasants, thereby creating a middle class in a country where 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. Unfortunately for him, most of that territory belonged to the largest landowner and most powerful body in the state: the American-owned United Fruit Company. Though Arbenz was willing to compensate United Fruit for its losses, it tried to persuade Washington that Arbenz was a crypto-communist who must be ousted.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the C.I.A.’s director, were a receptive audience. In the cold war fervor of the times, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers believed a strike against Arbenz would roll back communism. And the Dulleses had their own personal sympathies for United Fruit: they had done legal work for the company, and counted executives there among their close friends.

It is true that Arbenz’s supporters in the Guatemalan Legislature did include the Communist Party, but it was the smallest part of his coalition. Arbenz had also appointed a few communists to lower-level jobs in his administration. But there was no evidence that Arbenz himself was anything more than a European-style democratic socialist. And Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous to peasants than a similar venture pushed by the Reagan administration in El Salvador several decades later.

Eisenhower’s attack on Guatemala was brilliantly executed. A faux invasion force consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize the fledgling democracy into surrender. Arbenz stepped down from the presidency and left the country. Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit’s lands. For three decades, military strongmen ruled Guatemala.

The covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala’s fragile political and civic institutions might grow. It permanently stunted political life. And the destruction of Guatemala’s democracy also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras — all of which drew the lesson that Washington was more interested in unquestioning allies than democratic ones. It was only after the cold war and a United Nations-negotiated peace deal with leftist guerrillas in 1996 that genuine democracy began to take hold in Guatemala. And even since then, the cycle of violence and lawlessness unleashed by the 1954 coup has continued.

In 1998, an assassin bludgeoned to death the Catholic bishop Juan Gerardi shortly after he issued a damning report blaming the army for widespread massacres. In 2007, Guatemala had the world’s third-highest homicide rate, according to a United Nations-World Bank study. In 2009, more civilians were murdered in Guatemala than were killed in the war zones of Iraq.

Washington took the first step toward making amends when President Bill Clinton visited Guatemala in 1999 and offered a vague apology for America’s support of violent and repressive forces there. This year is an opportunity for Washington to fully own up to its shameful role in destabilizing Guatemala and honor Arbenz for having the courage to lead one of Central America’s first democracies — and send a signal that America has learned to stop placing its ideological concerns and business interests ahead of its ideals.

Stephen Schlesinger, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is a co-author of “Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.”

How The Global Food System Is Failing

Free Internet Press
Intellpuke

Domingo Tamupsis works on a Guatemalan sugar plantation for a company that exports bioethanol to fill the fuel tanks of U.S. cars. He has a job as a harvester, six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, in a country that is a major producer of food for global markets. His settlement in the fertile Pacific coastal area is surrounded by industrial farms, but he earns so little that his family can't afford to eat every day. Some days he survives his shift of hard physical labor on nothing but the mangoes that drop from trees by the roadside.

His wife, Marina, is 23-years-old, but is so slight she might be mistaken for a young teenager. She has two daughters, Yeimi aged six and Jessica aged two. Jessica is the size of the average European one-year-old, her distended stomach a sign of chronic malnutrition. When she tries to smile, hollow creases form in her cheeks, betraying her semi-permanent state of hunger.

Last year, Marina gave birth in the eighth month of pregnancy to a stillborn child. She had been ill and hungry throughout, but then felt severe pains one day while making a breakfast of a small corn tortilla for Domingo before he went out to work. She carried on, knowing that if they miss a day on the plantation the men often get fired.

When she finally reached the nearest medical help, a hospital a 45-minute bus ride away, staff told her the baby was dead. They operated and returned the baby's body to her, but she and Domingo had no money for the return bus fare. A compassionate doctor gave them the price of a fare, and a friend in town lent the money for a coffin. So it was that their third child, Marvin Orlando, a brother for their two little girls, came home to be buried.

Guatemala is a prime example, according to a new report by Oxfam, of how the global food system is failing. It predicts that the average price of staple foods will double by 2030.  "Spiraling food prices, climate chaos, rising demand on top of a collapsing resource base, and markets rigged against the many in favour of the few" are taking us into a new era of crisis in which more and more people are going hungry, the charity warns.

Its new research predicts that the international prices of key staples will more than double in the next 20 years, raising "the prospect of a wholesale reversal in human development". The world's poorest people spend up to 80% of their income on food and will be hit the hardest. The global food system is broken and its power structures must be overhauled, it says.

Developing countries like Guatemala are on the front-line of the crisis. Half of all its children aged under five are malnourished, one the highest rates of malnutrition in the world – yet it has food in abundance. It is the fifth largest exporter globally of sugar, of coffee, and of bananas. Its rural areas are witnessing a palm oil rush as international traders seek to cash in on demand for biofuels created by U.S. and E.U. mandates and subsidies.

Despite being a leading agroexporter, half of Guatemala's population of 14 million live in extreme poverty on less than $2 a day, and the indicators are getting worse. The money to be made from the food chain here, as in most poor countries, has been captured by elites and transnational corporations, leaving half the population excluded.

No Way Out

Domingo Tamupsis can see no way out of his dilemma. "The money I make is not enough to feed us," he says. "We feed the children first because the girls cry so much when they are hungry, but it's not enough and I think that's why they get ill and don't thrive. I don't know where to get more money: I can't work any harder and I can't steal because they shoot you if you steal." If he had a little land, he would grow food to support the family, but the promised government redistribution of unproductive land that drew him to the area never took place.

"The food is here," Oxfam's country director, Aida Pesquera, says, "but the main problem is distribution. Land is concentrated in very few hands. The big companies pay very little tax. Labor conditions on plantations are appalling. It's a classic case of how a very productive country with high rates of exclusion, especially among the indigenous population, cannot feed its own people."

The economic policies favored by the international financial institutions in the last decades have here, as in so many developing countries, weakened food security.

In the 1980s, a structural adjustment program imposed by the IMF on the debt-laden nation resulted in the slashing of technical assistance provided by the Ministry of Agriculture to small farmers. Guatemala, which had been self-sufficient in grain, was encouraged to pursue growth through agricultural exports. Local production of staples declined.

Although the government disputes it, Oxfam believes that Cafta, the free trade agreement between the U.S. and central American states approved in 2005, has undermined local farmers further, as subsidized U.S. grains have poured in. (Industrialized countries, including the U.S. and the E.U., subsidize their farmers to the tune of $252 billion a year, making it impossible for small farmers in developing countries to compete.)

The result is that Guatemala is now dependent on imports of staple foods, mostly from the U.S.  and at the mercy of increasingly volatile food prices internationally. The average poor rural family here spend 80% of their income on food, so when world prices go up dramatically, they simply can't afford to eat. When the food price spike occurred in 2008, the price of corn locally was 240% higher than the year before.

The government is now distributing food rations to around 90,000 desperate families. The program is led by Sandra Torres, who has neatly sidestepped the law that bars spouses of presidents from standing to succeed them, by divorcing her husband, President Alvaro Colom.  Critics say money for the handout is being diverted from other vital government services, and that what is needed is fundamental structural reform.

Over two-thirds of productive land is in the hands of 2% to 3% of the population. The current social democratic government drafted legislation to promote rural development, including some land reallocation, but it was blocked by the congress after fierce lobbying from agribusiness, which makes substantial donations to political parties and members of congress. Land reform is a subject freighted with a violent history in Guatemala.

Major Exporters

When the leftwing President Jacobo Arbenz was elected in 1950, he began a program of expropriating unused lands owned by major exporters. These included a large chunk of territory owned by the American United Fruit Company. Arbenz said compensation for the land would be based on valuations calculated from the companies' declared taxable profits. UFCo countered that this was a fraction of what they were really worth. Arbenz was labelled a communist and Soviet sympathizer by President Eisenhower, who, with much urging from UFCo, authorized the CIA to sponsor a "liberation army". The army invaded in 1954 and led a coup against Arbenz. A return to repressive rule followed, and marked the beginning of decades of agrarian conflict and civil war.

The minster of agriculture today, Juan Alfonso de León García, is not optimistic that serious land reform can now be achieved. "Agriculture is the engine of our economy, but we have to recognize that Guatemala has a very complicated agricultural structure that is very unequal. We have big owners who have the best land, and the majority have a very small percentage of the fertile land," he explains.

"Food security is a serious problem for us. We have to talk about land distribution, but it's not easy. In the 1950s, we tried to have agricultural reform but that promoted the fall of the government and marked the beginning of armed conflict that lasted 36 years."

However, he still hopes some land that is not being used can be acquired for reallocation to smallholders. Meanwhile, his government has increased technical assistance for small farmers to help improve yields. The theory of the agroexport model of development is that growth stimulated by increased foreign revenues will trickle down to the rest of the population. But most of the profits made from Guatemalan resources have so far gone untaxed. Total tax revenue amounts to less than 12% of GDP (roughly less than half that of rich countries).

As De León García explains: "We have very low rates of taxation, and we cannot even determine whether the agroexporters pay even that. But it's not just big business that avoids tax here, all taxpayers do."

The global food system in the last two decades has seen a dramatic flight of capital, as transnationals make use of offshore subsidiaries to minimize the tax they pay both in the countries where they produce food and in the countries where they sell it. To take one example, U.N. trade data, analyzed by Christian Aid, also shows that Guatemala received an average export price of just $0.18 per kilo for its bananas. By the time those bananas had reached their destination of importing countries, the average price of the same bananas was $0.46, suggesting various costs are added offshore by trans-nationals trading with their own subsidiaries in other jurisdictions. Christian Aid estimates more than $50 million a year may have been lost by Guatemala as a result in 2006 and 2007.

Low Minimum Wage

In theory, agroexport-led growth also benefits the rural poor by enabling them to move from marginal subsistence farming to becoming waged labor, but in Guatemala the minimum wage is so low it does not meet the most basic needs. The pattern is repeated in many developing countries that depend on agricultural exports. Labor relations in Guatemala are also characterized by extreme repression and violence.

Earlier this month, Idar Hernández Godoy, one of the secretaries of Sitrabi, the banana workers' union, was shot several times by unknown assailants on a motorbike while on his way to local union headquarters in the Atlantic region.

His death brings to five the number of banana union leaders assassinated since 2007. Trying to organize workers or demand better conditions is likely to result in death threats. Luis Fuentes, Guatemalan representative of the Danish food workers' union 3F, describes typical conditions on the plantations – whether banana, sugar or palm – as "inhuman". He too has received many death threats. In the sugar sector, unions were effectively dismantled in the 1970s, when leaders were persecuted and assassinated.

All the transnational companies and national producers in the country say they respect labor rights, respect the environment and have corporate social responsibility policies in place to tackle any abuses. However, the Guardian interviewed several current and former plantation workers from each of the sugar, palm and banana sectors this month. Many were afraid to speak out, and said it was only safe to do so on guarantee of anonymity. A consistent account emerged: many were working day to day with no proper contract. Most reported being set impossible targets by middle managers and then given warnings or having pay deducted if they failed to meet them.

Many were working with highly toxic agrochemicals, often without protective clothing, including paraquat, which is banned in Europe. Several reported chronic health problems from chemical exposure. They also reported workers being bitten by poisonous snakes in the palm plantations.

They typically earned 1,500 ($190) to 1,800 quetzales a month, whereas the National Statistics Institute, a Guatemalan government organization, has calculated that a minimum of 4,100 quetzales a month is needed to feed the average family.

Without exception, they said that joining a union would be a sackable offenze that would lead to blacklisting. Even where top management has tried to put in place contracts or better conditions, usually under pressure from outside buyers, they said the managers in the field abuse workers. When auditors arrive, they are told what to say and given protective clothing for the day. Persistent allegations also emerged of a new phenomenon, of workers being given or taking stimulant drugs to help them through the pain of the punishing shifts.

Those who have land supplement their exhausting work with growing their own food. Those without are often driven into illegal migration to the U.S. The week of our visit, two U.S.-bound tractor-trailers packed full of illegal migrants were stopped by the Mexican border authorities. The 513 men on board were half dead from suffocation. Most of them were Guatemalan. One of them told reporters: "We have no choice, there is not enough food for us at home."

Intellpuke: You can read this article by Guardian special correspondent and author Felicity Lawrence, reporting from Guatemala City, Guatemala, in context here: www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/may/31/global-food-crisis-guatemala-system-failure

Deconstructing the US Military: America's Global War against Planet Earth

GlobalResearch
By Dana Visalli

While in Kabul in March of this year, I visited the U.S. military base in that city, Camp Eggers . Knowing I would need a pretext to gain entry, I typed up a letter offering to give a presentation on wildlife in Afghanistan , which I had been studying. When approaching the base, one passes through an initial checkpoint, where a Hummer topped with a machine-gun nest stands guard. Then there is a 100-yard walk down a narrow corridor between high concrete blast walls, at which point one arrives at a guarded entry point through the wall. I showed my passport and letter, and was escorted through a second layer of blast walls to a little wooden information booth in this still-peripheral circle of defense. The pimply young lad manning the booth was flustered by my request; he had never seen anything quite like it. He did what all soldiers do when faced with something new; he phoned his superior for orders on how to proceed.

Permission was granted to pass to the next entry level. At hut #2 another friendly young male soldier by the name of Ryan was equally baffled by my written request, and he dialed up his commanding officer for instructions on what to do with me. Then, with Ryan as my escort, I made it into the inner sanctum of the base, where soldiers and military contractors strolled leisurely around the streets of the former Kabul residential area. After being passed around to several more levels of authority, I finally ended up at the office of Morale, Welfare and Recreation. The female officer in charge there was as confused by my presence as everyone else had been, and after reading my proposal asked rather sternly, “How did he get on the base?” She reprimanded Ryan for bringing me to the center of Camp Eggers, then realized that she would have to phone her commanding officer because there was no standardized protocol on how to deal with me. As we retraced our steps, Ryan remarked that he certainly could not be held accountable for letting me on the base because all he had done was follow orders. In fact, the primary concern of everyone I interacted with at Camp Eggers was to follow the directives of their superiors; no one appeared to have the capacity to take responsibility for their actions.

In the mid-1960s, political scientist Hannah Arendt published a book-length study of how some of the great evils of history, such as slavery and the Holocaust, managed to occur. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, concluded that generally such crimes are not carried out by fanatics or sociopaths, but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their superiors and their state and therefore do what they are told to do, and participate with the view that their actions are normal. The word “banal” is defined as “something that is trite, normal, and commonplace.” The root of the word comes from the Old French word ban, referring to feudal military service, which was compulsory and thus commonly accepted. Thus, military culture is by definition synonymous with banal, which my acquaintances at Camp Eggers demonstrated as they strove to find orders to follow and avoid responsibility for their actions.

Most members of the military establishment receive extensive training in combat techniques, including of course how to kill other human beings. One common drill at boot camp is to have recruits lunge repeatedly at mock human targets with mounted bayonets, shouting “Kill! Kill!” as they stab their imaginary victims. After months of such training, killing itself becomes banal, something normal and commonplace. The military culture of thoughtless submission to authority combined with heavy conditioning to snuff out human life creates a wide path towards the “great evils” that Hannah Arendt addressed.

Examples of what a sane society would call evil acts abound in the annuals of our current wars. For example, in 2010 a group of five American soldiers  murdered a number of Afghan civilians “for sport,” and collected fingers of their victims as trophies. Killing for them had become normal and banal; it was in fact what the soldiers were trained to do.

In March of 2011 two U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters came upon 10 Afghan children ages 7 to 13 gathering brush to warm their huts and attacked them with heavy machine gun fire. When the parents of the children arrived on the scene, attracted by the gunfire, they could only collect body parts of their children. For the pilots of the helicopters, killing was their job, a normal part of military life.

On March 12, 2006, four U.S. soldiers entered the home of a 14-year old girl in the Iraqi city of Mahmudiya, took her mother, father and sister into a bedroom and shot them, and then gang-raped the girl. Afterwards, they shot her in the head and attempted to burn her body. They then reported the deaths as being the result of an insurgent attack.

On March 25, 2003, Marine Sgt. Eric Schrumpf was participating in the U.S. invasion of Iraq when he spotted an Iraqi soldier in his field of view behind a female Iraqi citizen. He couldn’t get a clear shot with the woman blocking his line of sight, so he shot her to get her out of the line of fire. “I’m sorry, but the chick was in the way,” Schrumpf explained. Later he elaborated, “We had a great day. We killed a lot of people.”

Over the long term, most soldiers committing such murders become victims of their own lack of judgment, unable to live with the profoundly antisocial acts they have committed. Sergeant Schrumpf is himself now debilitated by PTSD, and can scarcely function in civilian society. He has attacked people in movie theaters because he mistakes their cans of Coke for military weapons. "I'll never be the same again," says Schrumpf, who seems somehow mystified by the etiology of his emotional dysfunction.

Similar stories of the fruits of combat duty are limited only by time available to tell them. After serving in the Marines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq , Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned home and soon killed his wife, Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children.  He drowned her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason. In reflecting on his heinous crime, Smith said, “I know for a fact that before I went to Iraq , there’s no way I would have taken somebody else’s life.”

After serving in the Army in Iraq in 2004, Spc. Brandon Bare, 19, of Wilkesboro, N.C, came home and stabbed his wife Nabila Bare, 18, at least 71 times with knives and a meat cleaver. About three dozen of the wounds were on her head and neck. Killing is what he was trained to do.

Mental angst and dysfunction in soldiers returning from combat is commonplace. A recent study indicates that 62% of soldiers returning from the war in Iraq have asked for mental health counseling, with 27% showing dangerous levels of alcohol abuse. Suicide rates among soldiers and vets have increased dramatically in recent years. Over 100,000 Vietnam vets have now killed themselves, far more than died in the Vietnam War. More than 300,000 veterans of the U.S. military are currently homeless, another study reveals.

If war is in fact destroying the youth of America by turning them into trained and traumatized killers, one could at least hope that the wars themselves have some value to American society. 

Objective evidence indicates otherwise. The actual conduct of war bears more resemblance to a circus act than the noble endeavor it is often portrayed to be. To cite one of the many examples of the senselessness of war related in the book Achilles in Vietnam, author and Vietnam vet Jonathan Shay describes how, “During one patrol in the dry season, a U.S. Army squad ran out of water and was not resupplied. They walked for a day and a half in search of water in Vietcong-controlled territory. When men started to collapse from dehydration in the heat, an officer’s plea for emergency resupply was heeded: a helicopter flew over and “bombed” the squad with cases of Tab, seriously injuring one of the men. The major whose helicopter dropped the Tab was recalled to evacuate the casualty. There was no enemy activity. I subsequently read in the division newspaper that the major had put himself in for and had received the Bronze Star for resupplying the troops and evacuating the wounded ‘under fire.’ ” Remember that story the next time you see a soldier’s chest full of medals.

The Vietnam war itself was fought because at the end of World War II, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam ’s independence from the colonizing French, reading from the U.S. Declaration of Independence to emphasize his people’s reasonable claim to self-determination. Instead of supporting this universal urge that humanity has for freedom, the U.S. supported the French effort to regain their colony for 10 long years (1945-1954). After the French were defeated, the U.S. fought the Vietnamese for another 22 years (1955-1975). Thus, 32 years of brutal mayhem took place, when all the Vietnamese people were asking for was their independence. The American lives that were ruined—the 58,000 combat deaths, 100,000+ suicides, 300,000 homeless men—were all expended for nothing, as were the 3.4 million Vietnamese who died in that war. To briefly mention another of our recent wars, today the nation of Iraq lies in ruins, the people impoverished, a million dead and 5 million living as refugees, while the entire basis of the U.S. invasion in 2003 is widely acknowledged to have been a complete fabrication.

War itself is not only “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” as Dwight Eisenhower noted in a speech in 1953, but war is also destructive to the physical earth, the very source of human life, and indeed of all life. The U.S. has dropped 15 million tons of bombs on the earth’s surface in last 60 years, spread 1 million tons of napalm on fields and forests, and sprayed 20 million gallons of defoliants on some of the most diverse rainforests on the planet. By any measure, the U.S. military is conducting a war against the earth itself. Such an inane effort does not come cheaply. The total cost of all military expenses for 2012 is estimated to be $1.2 trillion dollars, one-third of the total federal budget. It is the U.S. military that is driving the U.S. itself into bankruptcy.

In summary, the U.S. military is destroying the lives of its own young men while at the same time it devastates other human cultures; it threatens the economic survival of the United States while it is fraying the ecological fabric that makes life on earth possible.

Mikhail Gorbachev once noted that the Soviet system was evil and had to be dismantled. The U.S. military is a similarly evil force loosened on the world. As was done to the repugnant Soviet system, the equally repugnant U.S. military should be completely dismantled, with all soldiers and ships and planes and weapons brought home from the vast web of 1000 American military bases spanning the globe. The savings in terms of human lives, human suffering, ecological integrity and American dollars will be immeasurable. We can then begin to rebuild a national defense consisting of a small militia that can guard our borders and “repel invasions,” as called for in the U.S. Constitution, all the while remembering that the best defense is the making of friends.

Dana Visalli is an ecologist, botanist, and market gardener living in Washington state.

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