Now Sanders is no longer running. To their credit, some are still working hard to get him more votes (whether he wants them or not) in hopes of influencing the Democratic Party (and perhaps of making sure that Sanders is the nominee should the Biden train wreck ever entirely derail). But Sanders himself is focused on claiming that Biden is open to moving left, even as Biden proposes to increase police funding and rehabilitate his fellow Iraq-era war criminals.
This moment of not running might be an ideal one for an outburst of honesty, and of the level of public support for it that politicians never seem to have been convinced of. If we want decent things instead of mass murder, we have to seize this opportunity to show that we really mean it, and that we don't care who acts on it or what they are or are not running for. We want Mitt Romney marching for Black Lives Matter not because we plan to put up a Mitt Romney Statue, not because we agree with Mitt Romney on a single other thing, not because the balance of Mitt Romney's life appears to be anything other than a catastrophe, not because we think he "means it in his heart of hearts," but because we want black lives to matter. We also want the money moved from militarism to decent things, no matter who is part of that process (and whether we love, admire, despise, or feel any way whatsoever about Bernie Sanders), because:
- War is immoral.
- War endangers us.
- War threatens our environment.
- War erodes our liberties.
- War impoverishes us.
- War promotes bigotry. And:
- We need $2 trillion/year for other things.
Last month, 29 Congress Members proposed moving money from militarism to human needs. We could add to that number if we all make our voices heard. And even that number could possibly be enough if they were to actually take a stand when it comes to voting on the next big military bill (the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021).
According to Common Dreams:
"The United States is projected to spend close to $660 billion on non-defense discretionary programs in fiscal year 2021around $80 billion less than the defense budget proposed by the Senate NDAA. If Sanders' amendment is added to the bill, the U.S. would instead spend more on non-defense discretionary programswhich encompass education, the environment, housing, healthcare, and other areasthan on defense."
Of course militarism has nothing to do with "defense" outside of propaganda as absurd and damaging as the notion of putting police in children's schools, and the discretionary-and-otherwise total U.S. military budget is over $1.25 trillion a year. And, of course, Sanders' talk of "right here in the United States" (see his tweet above) still seems to echo the notion that war is a public service for its distant victims, and certainly misses the size of the military budget, which we would have a hard time spending on the entire globe if we took a large enough chunk away from it. We don't need to play into the old standby pretense that the alternative to war is "isolationism." Any major cut to military spending should allow significant benefits to people within the U.S. and without.
The U.S. currently arms and trains and funds brutal dictators around the globe. The U.S. currently maintains military bases all over the globe. The U.S. is building and stockpiling vast quantities of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. These and many similar policies are not in the same category as actual humanitarian aid, or diplomacy. And the latter wouldn't cost much to significantly increase.
Christian Sorensen writes in Understanding the War Industry, "The U.S. Census Bureau indicates that 5.7 million very poor families with children would need, on average, $11,400 more to live above the poverty line (as of 2016). The total money needed . . . would be roughly $69.4 billion/year." Why not eliminate poverty in the United States for $69.4 billion and take the other $4.6 billion in your $74 billion amendment and provide no-strings-attached actual-humanitarian aid to the world based on severity of need rather than ulterior military motives?
Of course it is not true, as Senator Sanders endlessly claims, that the United States is the richest country in the history of the world. It's not even the richest right now, per capita, which is the relevant measure in all of the Senator's tweets and Facebook posts. Whether it's the richest in absolute total depends on how you measure it, but is hardly relevant to addressing education, poverty, etc. We do need eventually to move politicians away from even the most benign sorts of U.S. exceptionalism. And we need to move them to recognizing that moving money out of war is just as important as moving money into good projects.
Even if you could fix everything by taxing the wealthy and leaving war spending in place, you couldn't reduce the risk of nuclear apocalypse that way. You couldn't decrease wars, slow the environmental destruction of the most environmentally destructive institution we have, curtail the impacts on civil liberties and morality, or put a stop to the mass slaughter of human beings without moving money out of militarism. The money needs to be moved out, which as a side-benefit produces jobs, whether the money is moved to humane spending or to tax cuts for working people. A program of economic conversion needs to transition to decent employment those engaged in supplying weaponry to governments around the world. A program of cultural conversion needs to replace racism and bigotry and violence-dependence with wisdom and humanism.
For many years now, the Congressional Delegate from Colonized Washington D.C., Eleanor Holmes Norton, has introduced a resolution to move funding from nuclear weapons to useful projects. At some point, bills like that one need to rise to the top of our agenda. But Sanders' amendment is a current priority, because it can be attached this month to a bill that the supposedly partisan and divided and gridlocked U.S. Congress has consistently and harmoniously passed with overwhelming majorities every year since time immemorial.
We need this step now and it is obtainable. Get out there and demand it!
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