(Counterpunch: On the Military Industrial Complex) - Starving the Real Beast

February 14, 2012 Under fiscal strain the United States is abandoning its $6 billion plutonium bomb factory Starving the Real Beast by DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM "How does the American state finance both its expensive social welfare programs and its powerful military, while most other nation-states can barely afford one or the other? The answer lies in the system of progressive income taxation resurrected by political leaders in the early twentieth century and perfected during the Second World War. The income tax is the centerpiece of a robust system of revenue extraction that provides the national government with an efficient means of penetrating society and appropriating wealth from the domestic economy..." "Revenue is critical to state development because modern states, with their powerful armies and vast bureaucracies, require enormous revenue. Without that revenue, maintenance of state institutions, let alone expansion is impossible [....]when the revenue-raising capacity of a state is in jeopardy, there arises the distinct possibility of institutional decay and perhaps even regime collapse." --Sheldon Pollack, War, Revenue and State Building. In the 2013 US federal budget proposal released yesterday by the Obama administration some of the contradictions of American empire are finding expression in cuts, delays, and cancellations of once "absolutely necessary" weapons systems. What's happening isn't even close to regime collapse, but it is a product of institutional decay resulting from the now chronic fiscal crisis of the federal state. The war machine has begun to eat itself for the sake of preserving hyper-inequalities resulting directly from the less progressive tax code instituted a decade prior, and the multitude of shelters capital now hides behind. The plutocratic society today literally devours plutonium in order to sustain this social inequality, and to shield citadels of corporate wealth from the otherwise universal devaluation of equity resulting from a global economy that actually shrank last year. Admittedly the monster's autosarcophagy is only nibbling bites at this point, but still the appendages, the fingers and toes being chewed off are significant, and may portend greater opportunities for the American people to check the largest single source of expanded federal deficit spending (besides privatized health care) - the US military. Most conspicuous among cuts in the 2013 budget is the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR). The Obama administration proposes "deferring construction for at least five years," and cuts $165 million (actually $265 since the expected funding level was $300) from the project's budget, leaving a paltry $35 million this year, barely enough to keep the lights on for an undertaking so massively expensive (http://www.scribd.com/doc/81479308/CMRR-Cut-from-2013-Budget). It's effectively the end, unless Congress dramatically rebels and restores funding. Moans of defeat and unsatisfied greed can be heard drifting out of the offices and boardrooms of Bechtel and the University of California, and their subcontractors who until recently were burning through hundreds of millions of federal dollars yearly designing the project.... It is a pity this "disarmament" is not the result of "pro-disarmament"-politics, but the result of just lack of money. Anyway still it helps to disarm the World a little more and that is what counts ! Ak Malten, Pro Peaceful Energy Use Starving the Real Beast (hit and scroll down a little for the start of the article) For a greener planet website  For a greener planet ( blog - this blog in: Atom - RSS ) More websites by Ak Malten