The Department of Empire
And Its Bloated Imperial Budget
Language and repetition of the same is so important. We hear about the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Pentagon budget and we think little of it. The DoD, of course, used to be called the Department of War until 1947, a far more telling and accurate name, and there wasn’t a Pentagon until we built one during World War II. In the old days, the Army fought the Navy for which service would get more money in the War Budget, with the Navy usually winning as America sought to control the seas as a means of dominating trade and “intercourse” among nations.
Those were more honest times when retired generals like Smedley Butler wrote in the 1930s that he’d served as a “gangster” for capitalism. Butler was a Marine who was twice awarded the Medal of Honor, so it wasn’t easy for the imperialists to smear him, though they certainly tried (as they did to David M. Shoup, another Marine Corps general and Medal of Honor recipient who turned against the Vietnam War in the 1960s).
Anyhow, I just saw at Antiwar.com that President Trump is proposing a $1.01 trillion budget for the Pentagon for FY2026, a 13% increase in imperial spending. Trump, of course, is proud of reaching the Trillion Dollar threshold. Big numbers have always appealed to him.
It doesn’t seem to matter who is president, whether it’s Biden or Trump, Democrat or Republican, when it comes to the Department of Empire and its bloated imperial budget. For that is what it is, a budget that seeks to sustain and enlarge America’s imperial domain. If you add other costs related to imperial dominance, such as interest on the national debt due to war spending, VA costs, nuclear weapons, and the like, the true imperial budget soars toward $1.7 trillion yearly.
No matter. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
The Pentagon tries to disguise the enormous waste of this imperial budget by speaking of it as an “investment,” but imagine an “investment” that you’re involved in which fails seven audits in a row. How likely would you be to see this as anything other than theft?
Dwight D. Eisenhower had it right in 1953 when he spoke of military spending as a theft from those who hunger. Ike’s words are almost never heard today inside the Washington Beltway. It’s worth reflecting upon them again as America’s leaders boast of trillion-dollar war budgets:
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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
America, I can’t improve upon that.
But doesn't all that money give us 'the finest fighting force in history"?
A fighting force that has expensive 'weapons systems' that don't work or are ineffective; has faced no peer, or near-peer, power in 75 years; and has been unable to beat peasant armies wearing black pajamas or flip flops and man-dresses. But a fighting force that produces flag officers who provide no real leadership, do not understand operational art, or do not take care of 'the troops', while waiting for their post-military sinecures with defense companies.
Given the recent news headlines, I fear we're about to see all those manifested as body bags start coming back from the mid East.
The empire we supposedly defeated in 1776 has led us to become the same and the blindness of the citizens to see or understand this fact is clear at every sporting event with flyovers, military marching bands and coaches wearing camo. It is a false sense of imperial power and like all who seek to rule the world, we will implode as all empires do. The sheep do not think that the Sheppard will shear them and then slaughter them. Technology will be the end of human freedom and the powers that actually rule this planet are salivating at the prospect of total domination of humanity and this nightmare is about to become a reality. Just listen to Claus Schaub and his antihuman minion, Uval Noah Harrari speak of these verry things as if humans were beast to be controlled by brain chips. Orwell would not be surprised! Thank you, Bill, for yet another accurate description of reality, Jack.