William D. Hartung
While Donald Trump and crew have been altering so much and changing our world in so many ways — if you doubt that, wave a Mexican flag and say goodbye to democracy — there’s one place where they remain stuck fast in the past. Yes, once upon a time, when it came to what’s still called the “defense” budget (though it should undoubtedly be called either the “offense” or “offensive” budget), there weren’t all those high-tech producers of wildly futuristic weaponry like Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir Technologies, aka “the AI arms dealer of the 21st century.” You know, the fellow who invented… oops, sorry, first employed and then invested an estimated $15 million in promoting J.D. Vance to senator and then vice-president.
And yes, President Trump has recently made history after a fashion by sending in the Marines and calling up the California National Guard to put down protests in Los Angeles — no matter that California Governor Gavin Newsom didn’t want either of them; no matter that it changes American history (for the worse) and brings us ever closer to the end of democracy in this country; no matter that the president of the United States essentially called for the arrest of the governor of California, suggesting border “czar” Tom Holman could do so. (“I would do it if I were Tom. I think it’s great.”) No matter, no matter, none at all.
Yes, everything right now seems so eerily new that it’s hard sometimes to imagine what’s so eerily old and still goes on and on. And yet, today, TomDispatch regular William Hartung, most recently co-author of the upcoming book The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home, explores just how the American taxpayer continues to feed the lions of the American military machine in a fashion that only grows ever more expensive as the years pass by. It’s quite a (grim) tale of what even Donald Trump can’t change and, as Hartung makes clear today, it only grows worse, year after Trumpian year. Tom
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