The pro-war American regime consistently chooses Ukrainians over American citizens.. infrastructure, humanity, and health be damned.
It has been reported recently that the Biden Administration has approved yet another arms package for Ukraine, largely with bipartisan support from Congress, this time with a worth of approximately $2.5 Billion.
The package, to include an array of weaponry such as Bradley armored fighting vehicles, Stryker armored combat vehicles, Surface-to-Air Missile munitions, MRAPs, and other equipment is among the latest in a recent series of escalations in the ongoing proxy war, as Washington's reckless decisions continue to march us ever closer the very real possibility of nuclear conflict.
In the days since, the White House announced it would also be sending a slew of M1 Abrams tanks, despite previous objections from the Pentagon. Following the announcement, talk began almost immediately of sending fighter jets, as well as the January 31st announcement that the US is already preparing its next arms package which will include longer-range rockets as the next step in escalation…
Most recently, as of February 24th, the Biden administration has also announced the delivery of another security aid package, totaling $2 billion, to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the war.
In total after a year of the grinding proxy war, Washington has pledged a grand sum well exceeding that of $100 billion to the war effort to support the neo-fascist coup regime in the latest geostrategic bid by the military-industrial complex to hold on to the US empire's ailing unipolar hegemony.
As of the time of this writing, the total sum is actually closer to $117 billion. The $100 billion milestone was actually surpassed in late December, with the passage of the latest omnibus bill.
To put that total in perspective, as congressman Thomas Massie pointed out at the time, that is the equivalent of $200 million from every Congressional District in the United States.
Meanwhile, as a corruption scandal rocks the foundations of Ukraine's government, and the ever-bumptious Zelensky continues to remind us that tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars still “isn't enough”, regular Americans in our nation's capital and beyond suffer in the most deplorable of conditions.
But that brings into focus a stark reality and a glaring question that every single one of us should be asking — why are our so-called leaders so hell-bent on proliferating death and destruction when the very same effort could be put into improving life and wellness? Unfortunately, it answers itself. Death and destruction are a business model for the corporatist US empire. Weapons manufacturers and other war profiteers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, with whom current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was once a board member, are making a killing off of senseless killing.
By deliberately sabotaging efforts for peace the US has ensured that the bombs will keep dropping and more innocent Ukrainians will die as their country is used as a puppet by the West attempting to weaken Russia.
What isn’t a question at this point, nor has it ever been, is that the conflict in Ukraine was an entirely unnecessary one, much like most of the rest of America's wars, which Washington knew for decades that it was provoking until it finally reached a flashpoint in February 2022.
The real question begs, if we lived in a sane world with rational leaders who harbored even a shred of morality or concern for their own people, how could we have better allocated the use of more than one hundred billion dollars?
With any number of crises facing the American public at any given moment, policymakers surely have a variety to pick from. Could perhaps, for instance, it may have been used to put a dent in our steadily climbing $31 trillion national debt? Or aid in the desperately needed repairs of our crumbling infrastructure? One hundred billion dollars allocated to either of those issues would merely be a drop in the bucket of what is necessary to solve them completely, but it would certainly be a good start.
Similarly, addressing America's staggering homelessness epidemic could also be a point of focus. Over the course of the last few years, California has attained the grim moniker of having the highest homeless population in the nation, accounting for 30% of all homelessness in the United States, according to Cal Matters.
However, it doesn't have to be. As Josh Gohlke writes for The Sacramento Bee, it is estimated California could house its entire homeless population with less than 3% of the state's annual budget.
Currently, California's annual budget for fiscal year 2023-2024 is approximately $296.9 billion.
Gohlke writes,
“The recent Corporation for Supportive Housing report estimated that California would have to spend $8.1 billion a year for the next 12 years to house its entire homeless population, nearly eight times projected expenses.
That sounds like more than it is for this huge, rich state, which would need to devote just 2.7% of its budget to the crisis to reach that level. The Legislative Analyst’s Office has arrived at an even lower estimate based on what New York spends to bring most of its homeless people indoors, partly because officials there rely heavily on emergency shelter rather than full-fledged housing. By any measure, as other states’ relative success suggests, this is a project well within California’s means. As Wallace Richardson, a formerly homeless advocate with the corporation, put it, “The data shows California the facts; the data shows California the falsehoods.”
Keep in mind this is merely an analysis of the average annual state budget, not counting the exorbitant war spending that is the primary focus of this article.
If we were to factor in Thomas Massie’s aforementioned $200 million per Congressional District, multiplied by California's 52 congressional districts, we would reach a total sum of $10.4 billion.
Going by the estimates, if it would take approximately $8.1 billion over the course of 12 years to house the entirety of California's homeless population, that would equal $97.2 billion. Just shy of the over $100 billion already spent in Ukraine.
Thus, for the cost of the US empire’s proxy war in Ukraine, we could have already ended homelessness for the entire state of California in less than one year.
Quite a startling revelation when put into perspective. Especially considering the government's brutal war on the nation's unhoused population. Displacing encampments during frigid winter months, raiding charities to destroy food, in some cases making being homeless outright illegal, and various other forms of inhumanity; ― From San Francisco to Las Vegas, Denver, Kansas City, and beyond. For well over a decade states have done their utmost to criminalize and often brutalize their poorest and most vulnerable denizens.
Surely the same amount of effort and resources put into worsening the misery of the destitute would be better suited to help them instead. It makes you wonder exactly what else could be done in place of waging a war of unprecedented cruelty at home or the other numerous unnecessary conflicts our nation involves itself in abroad.
For example, according to Brown university’s Costs Of War project, the estimated price tag for the Iraq war alone is approximately $2 trillion. But some estimates place the figures even higher, at over $3 trillion according to Harvard economics professor Linda J. Bilmes and Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor Joseph E. Stiglitz.
According to World Food Program executive director David Beasley, it would cost roughly $40 billion every year until 2030 to effectively end world hunger.
For the cost of the Iraq war, we could have ended world hunger for upwards of a decade. Far longer if we factor in the total cost of the War on Terror as a whole, rather than just the Iraq war alone. Even without that, for what’s been spent in Ukraine we could have kickstarted that initiative more than three times over.
Finally, while Washington remains poised to provide funds ensuring a steady flow of blood abroad, it appears much less concerned about the flow of water here at home and how vital it is to all living things. As the recent train derailment disaster in East Palestine, Ohio reminds us, not only are our railways in critical need of repair, but our water infrastructure is in dire need of preservation as well.
Since the February 3rd derailment toxic chemicals spewing from the wreckage of the Norfolk Southern train cars have continued to seep into the air and water of the surrounding area, leaving many residents alarmed and concerned despite the Biden administration's assurances that the area is safe. Meanwhile fish and other wildlife are dying off at alarming rates, and locals continue to develop bizarre health issues as the spill threatens to contaminate the water supply of 5 million people.
But this is only the latest incident in a long line of mishaps that have led to disastrous contaminations of American water supplies that remind us just how important it is to protect filtration and pipeline infrastructure.
Just last August the city of Jackson, Mississippi experienced a catastrophic breakdown of its pipelines, causing toxic water to flow to the homes of residents creating a crisis that left thousands without clean drinking water. Despite the immediate urgency of the crisis, which has still yet to be fully resolved, the Biden administration saw it appropriate to instead continue funneling billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine.
The crisis in Jackson was early reminiscent of yet another water emergency just a few years prior, that of the infamous disaster in Flint, Michigan. A combination of a breakdown in piping infrastructure and government negligence left residents reeling from contaminated water supplies for years.
Beyond Flint was the water crisis experienced by the indigenous peoples of the Navajo Nation, whereupon reservations were constantly plagued by toxic levels of contaminants in their drinking water, oftentimes far worse than Flint yet consistently left unaddressed by government officials.
Even more alarming, shocking tests from the CDC in recent years have revealed 3,800 water supplies across the United States are up to 400 times more contaminated than Flint.
Obviously, the deterioration of America's water infrastructure is an immediately pressing issue, but to repair the entirety of the nations sprawling water infrastructure would cost a hefty price tag, wouldn't it? Surprisingly not as much as one might assume.
According to a published report by the American Society for Civil Engineers infrastructure report card, the needed cost for America's water infrastructure is only approximately $129 billion, with $48 billion of that cost already put forward by the various government departments that manage such projects. It leaves an investing gap of $81 billion in funding that needs to be met.
With over $100 billion already spent on this costly proxy war in Ukraine, for that price, we could have funded a total overhaul of the United States' critical water infrastructure at a time when it's needed most.
Housing the houseless, feeding the hungry, and protecting the single most essential resource vital to the very existence of life on this planet are all noble aspirations worth working toward. But as many American cities look like third-world countries and the President consistently chooses Ukrainians over American citizens, it appears all of these things take a back seat to Washington's prerogative to continue waging the racket of perpetual war, pushing us all to the brink of total nuclear annihilation in the process.
This is why now more than ever we are in need of a robust and relentless antiwar movement. One in which the people display the courage necessary to stand up to the machinations of madmen for the sake of our species. Where de-escalation and diplomacy are more than just pipe dreams of the pollyanna.
On February 19th organizers brought together a pro-peace coalition of thousands of demonstrators from across all political ideologies to the streets of Washington DC demanding a swift end to imperialist warmongering. Similar rallies continue to take place around the world and more are planned for the future.
The people of the world need to find the same spirit they did during the peak of COVID-19 hysteria when millions worldwide took to the streets week after week for the better part of a year demanding an end to authoritarian lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Never forget that when things seemed their bleakest we came together in droves and pulled the world out of the dark clutches of tyranny, and we can do so again. For the survival of humanity, we must do so again. By reinvigorating that spirit of resistance and replicating those strategies at every City Hall, every Statehouse, every Capital building until We The People are heard, until our world is pulled back from the brink of doomsday and this belligerent insanity comes to an end once and for all.
With that, we can shift our society to focus on all the positive things that we could do if our efforts weren't wasted on proliferating ever-lasting chaos. Housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, curing the sick, healing the planet, and all of the other wonders well within our reach that the masters of war continue to rob us of.
The world is a reflection of ourselves. It is what we allow it to be. And what we allow it to be, we are. If we wish the world to be more peaceful then we must be more peaceful. If we wish for the world to be more kind and loving then we must be more kind and loving. Whatever we wish for the world to be we must project it ourselves outwardly and manifest it into existence. We must be the change we wish to see in the world.
