You can’t build the Empire and drain the Swamp at the same time.
That’s because the Swamp is largely the fruit of Empire. And it’s also the
reason that the Donald is being rapidly undone.
Indeed, it is the
Empire’s $800 billionnational security
budget which feeds Washington’s vast complex of weapons suppliers, intelligence
contractors, national security bureaucrats, NGOs, think tanks, K-street
lobbies, so-called “law” firms and all-purpose racketeers. It’s what accounts
for the Imperial City’s unseemly and ill-gotten prosperity.
It goes without saying that the number one priority of these
denizens of Empire is to keep the gravy train rolling. That is accomplished by
inventing and exaggerating threats to America’s homeland security and by
formulating far-flung and misbegotten missions designed to extend and reinforce
Washington’s global hegemony.
As we demonstrate
elsewhere, a true homeland security defense budget would consist of the
strategic nuclear triad and modest conventional forces to defend the nation’s
shoreline and air space; it would cost about $250
billion per year plus a few $10 billion more for a State
Department which minded its own business.
So the $500 billion difference
is the fiscal cost of Empire, which is pushing the US toward an immense
generational fiscal crisis. But it’s also a measure of the giant larder that
fills the Swamp with the projects and busywork of Washington’s global hegemony.
In fact, it is the vasty
deep of that $500 billion larder which gives rise to the forces that not only
thwart the Donald’s desire to drain the Swamp, but actually enlist him the
cause of deepening its brackish waters.
Moreover, these missions encompass far more than direct military
occupations, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq; or indirect aggressions, such as
in Washington’s arming of antigovernment terrorists in Syria and facilitating
and supplying Saudi Arabia’s genocidal bombing campaign in Yemen; or even the
kind of rank provocation implicit in the 29,000 troops Washington still
bivouacs on the Korean peninsula 65 years after the war there ended and the
thousands of US and NATO forces which conduct virtually constant maneuvers and
war games on the very borders of Russia.
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