Spending Big Bucks to Burn More Oil

Dear George,

One of our more visionary presidents was William Howard Taft. Looking at the Western Hemisphere, he foresaw the day when three American flags would define the extent of our influence and control: one at the North Pole, one in Panama and one in the South Pole. Then he added that, “by virtue of our superiority of race, it is already ours morally.”[1]

You say the same about the world, and you have the defense budget to back that up.

Five Hundred and fifteen billion in defense spending will reinforce a hell of a lot of racial superiority. And that doesn’t even cover our moral ownership of Iraq and Afghanistan. When you throw in our off-book expenditures, we are looking at a trillion dollar defense budget.

Much of this money is going to develop new and advanced weapon systems that would have been useful during the Cold War. Someask why these expenditures are necessary, since the Cold War has been over for some time.

Not!

Surely, people don’t think our Military-Industrial-Security Complex would let a cash cow like that die a natural death.

Michael Klare says, “If you look at the new budget which came out just this week, it calls for vast spending on new weapons systems that can only be reasonably justified by what they call a ‘peer competitor’, a future superpower that could threaten the United States. Only China conceivably can fit that bill. Not Iran, Not Iraq, or some [other] rogue state. Only China fits that bill.”

If there is one thing Corporatism can’t abide, it is the competition that is the scourge of the free enterprise system. This is why corporatists over the last century have been doing everything in their power to eliminate it. If shady dealing won’t work, we can always nuke the competition.

As always, it’s about the oil stupid! Klare go on to say, “The Pentagon and US strategists talk openly about US-China competition for energy in Africa, in the Caspian Sea basin, and in the Persian Gulf, and they talk about the danger of a China-Russia alliance that the US has to be able to counter. This is very much part of US concerns. They talk about the Shanghai Co-operation Organization as a proto-military alliance that threatens America’s vital interests.” (Our alliances, of course, are not a problem since they are products of our racial superiority.)

Therein is the beauty of resource wars. We are prepared to burn millions of barrels of oil to protect the world’s shrinking oil supply, justifying even more military expenditures so we can burn even more oil to protect less oil. Burning all this oil will require even more sophisticated weapons systems that burn even more oil to protect the oil that is rapidly disappearing because we have to burn so much oil to save the oil.

Truly, leadership is genius.

I see the day, George, when a blood-stained American flag will droop from every flagpole in the world. It will be a golden age when the oligarchies of the world have united beneath the stars and stripes so they may cower in their fortified vaults, counting their few remaining barrels of oil while angry mobs, brandishing pitchforks and torches, riot in the streets.

What makes this doubly delicious is that the financial brains at Moody's are threatening to cut our credit rating because we're spending so much on Social Security and Medicare. Doesn't that just set your serotonin to bubbling?

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones




[1] Eduardo Galeano. Open Veins of Latin America. Pg. 107