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Recently, a new word burst into our political world. I'm thinking, of course, of "weaponization." In response to the charges Special Counsel Jack Smith recently lodged against Donald Trump for misusing and abusing classified documents, Republicans like Ron DeSantis are now talking ominously about the "weaponization" of the Justice Department against the former president and 2024 presidential candidate. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy typically said, "House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable." And when it comes to "weaponization," that's hardly been the end of it either. Another election loser who refused to concede, former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, offered this threatening response to those charges: "If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have to go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I'm going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A."
There is, of course, something distinctly ominous in such language, especially since an estimated one-fifth of American households purchased guns, almost 60 million of them (including staggering numbers of AR-15 semi-automatic rifles), in the pandemic years. But when it comes to the buying of weaponry in a big-time fashion, none of that compares to the record of the Pentagon. To this day, it continues to weaponize our world by sinking staggering numbers of taxpayer dollars into weaponry of every devastating sort (including a possible $2 trillion, in the decades to come, for the "modernizing" of the American nuclear arsenal).
While Republicans may now be "weaponizing" the political scene, the Pentagon's weaponization story has lasted forever and a day. As TomDispatch regulars and Pentagon experts William Hartung and Julia Gledhill point out, when it comes to major purchases of weaponry (and the "investment" of taxpayer dollars in the giant weapons-making corporations that produce them), there simply is no parallel on earth (or, best guess, anywhere else in the galaxy). After all, more than half of the taxpayer dollars that Congress appropriates every year now goes into what passes for "defense" in this country. More than half of that, according to the latest report from the invaluable Costs of War Project, goes directly to military contractors. And speaking about weaponization, much of that money lands directly in the pockets of the big five weapons-making corporations -- Lockheed Martin ($39 billion), Boeing ($23 billion), Raytheon ($20.6 billion), General Dynamics ($16.6 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($14.7 billion).
And worse yet, as Hartung and Gledhill document today, despite congressional freezes or funding cuts in many programs in the debt-ceiling-debate moment, the Pentagon will continue to prove exempt from ceilings of any sort when it comes to the weaponization of our world. Tom
The Ultimate All-American Slush Fund
How A New Budget Loophole Could Send Pentagon Spending Soaring Even Higher
By Julia Gledhill and William D. Hartung
On June 3rd, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that lifted the government's debt ceiling and capped some categories of government spending. The big winner was -- surprise, surprise! -- the Pentagon.
Congress spared military-related programs any cuts while freezing all other categories of discretionary spending at the fiscal year 2023 level (except support for veterans). Indeed, lawmakers set the budget for the Pentagon and for other national security programs like nuclear-related work developing nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy at the level requested in the administration's Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal -- a 3.3% increase in military spending to a whopping total of $886 billion. Consider that preferential treatment of the first order and, mind you, for the only government agency that's failed to pass a single financial audit!
Even so, that $886 billion hike in Pentagon and related spending is likely to prove just a floor, not a ceiling, on what will be allocated for "national defense" next year. An analysis of the deal by the Wall Street Journal found that spending on the Pentagon and veterans' care -- neither of which is frozen in the agreement -- is likely to pass $1 trillion next year.
Compare that to the $637 billion left for the rest of the government's discretionary budget. In other words, public health, environmental protection, housing, transportation, and almost everything else the government undertakes will have to make do with not even 45% of the federal government's discretionary budget, less than what would be needed to keep up with inflation. (Forget addressing unmet needs in this country.)
And count on one thing: national security spending is likely to increase even more, thanks to a huge (if little-noticed) loophole in that budget deal, one that hawks in Congress are already salivating over how best to exploit. Yes, that loophole is easy to miss, given the bureaucratese used to explain it, but its potential impact on soaring military budgets couldn't be clearer. In its analysis of the budget deal, the Congressional Budget Office noted that "funding designated as an emergency requirement or for overseas contingency operations would not be constrained" by anything the senators and House congressional representatives had agreed to.
As we should have learned from the 20 years of all-American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the term "overseas contingency" can be stretched to cover almost anything the Pentagon wants to spend your tax dollars on. In fact, there was even an "Overseas Contingency Operations" (OCO) account supposedly reserved for funding this country's seemingly never-ending post-9/11 wars. And it certainly was used to fund them, but hundreds of billions of dollars of Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan were funded that way as well. The critics of Pentagon overspending quickly dubbed it that department's "slush fund."
So, prepare yourself for "Slush Fund II" (coming soon to a theater near you). This time the vehicle for padding the Pentagon budget is likely to be the next military aid package for Ukraine, which will likely be put forward as an emergency bill later this year. Expect that package to include not only aid to help Ukraine fend off Russia's ongoing brutal invasion but tens of billions of dollars more to -- yes, of course! -- pump up the Pentagon's already bloated budget.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made just such a point in talking with reporters shortly after the debt-ceiling deal was passed by Congress. "There will be a day before too long," he told them, "where we'll have to deal with the Ukrainian situation. And that will create an opportunity for me and others to fill in the deficiencies that exist from this budget deal."
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