Biden sends stimulus checks to military contractors instead of ordinary people

Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°141 | 30 December 2021

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Also–new article out today in Jacobin. Please read & share:

Stephen Semler @stephensemler

My latest in @jacobin looks at Biden’s attempt to pass his domestic agenda by saber-rattling against China. That reckless experiment failed—turns out Cold War discourse only works one way:

jacobinmag.comJoe Biden Has Been Very Good for the Military-Industrial ComplexJoe Biden signed a record-breaking defense budget even as his domestic agenda is languishing. We’re getting all of the Pentagon spending and anti-China saber-rattling — and none of the supposedly transformative social programs.

Situation

Democracy Now! @democracynow

Biden Signs NDAA, Lifting Pentagon Budget to Record-Shattering $778 Billion

democracynow.orgBiden Signs NDAA, Lifting Pentagon Budget to Record-Shattering $778 BillionPresident Biden signed a military budget bill Monday that will see the Pentagon receive nearly $778 billion during the next fiscal year. It’s a record high for a National Defense Authorization Act, surpassing the previous record set under Trump, and $24 billion more than the White House requested fr…

Analysis

Military spending involves a massive redistribution of wealth from the public to private sector. There are over 700 lobbyists representing for-profit military contractors in DC, and this redistribution of wealth is why they’re there.

Below is a chart that shows how much of the Pentagon’s budget ends up going to the private sector by way of contracts. I calculated that from fiscal year (FY) 2002 to FY2021, 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors. (This is just for the Pentagon’s ‘base’ budget—aka, the Department of Defense proper, and not nuclear funding from the Energy Department or funding from elsewhere, even though that stuff is rightly considered military spending, too. This means that I’m only looking at $740B out of the $778B in Biden’s Pentagon budget.)

Biden’s military budget raises the Pentagon’s base budget by about $40 billion. If the privatization of funds rate over the last 20 years holds, it means military industry will get about $405 billion from Biden’s first military budget—$16 billion more than the $391 billion those $1,400 stimulus checks cost the government earlier this year.

Thanks for your time,

Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)

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