All right, y'all, it's Anti-War Radio.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and next up is Joshua Holland.
He's an editor and senior writer at Alternet.
He's the author of the 15 biggest lies about the economy and everything else the right doesn't want you to know about taxes, jobs, and corporate America.
He's got a piece at Alternet, or I think it's the latest one, five eye opening facts about our bloated post 9-11 defense spending.
So this is kind of a nice follow-up to our previous interview with John Glazer about the growth of the national security state here, break it down for us, Joshua.
How much does all this cost?
Oh, it's costing us a fortune.
You know, the top line number is that we've spent $7.6 trillion on defense spending, including Homeland defense spending since the 9-11 attacks.
And what you see is these really dramatic increases in the budget lines.
You know, we've increased the Pentagon's base budget, for example, by 43% after adjusting for inflation.
And that doesn't include the cost of actually fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as those have mostly been done off budget.
So they're not even included in the Pentagon budget.
And what it all tells me is that when you look at the numbers here, it's just, it strikes home how ironic it is that we're talking about, you know, entitlements and Medicare and, you know, these kind of popular social programs and not really focusing on the really, really large amounts of money that are going to the defense budget.
And not all of this is well used.
I point out in the piece that since 9-11, just as an example of where there's a disconnect between the logic of a war on terror and the kind of money that we're talking about, the nuclear weapons budget has been increased by over 20% when, after you adjust it for inflation.
And you have to ask yourself, you know, how does, how do, you know, intercontinental ballistic missiles help anybody in a battle against terrorists?
I don't know.
I guess Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama like to threaten Pakistan with a nuclear first strike, remember back in, you know, wait, but yeah, I'm not really sure what's the point of that other than making the hydrogen bomb factory makers rich.
And, you know, it's the specter of this war on terror.
And I would argue that we should never have addressed it as a war per se, that being used as a justification to increase, you know, defense spending across the board, as well as restrict our civil liberties.
And we just saw the renewal of the Patriot Act, et cetera, et cetera.
And just to drive home the point that I just made, you know, the amount of spending that we've increased, the amount of defense spending that we have increased since 9-11 is five times this Medicare gap that everybody's talking about.
So, you know, we talk about, and you see this, it's ubiquitous, every time you turn on the TV, every time you turn on CNN or Fox or whatever, or open the newspaper, you see this kind of ubiquitous fear mongering about Medicare.
That's one, the gap that we're facing in Medicare is one fifth of the amount that we've increased defense spending since 9-11.
Well, you know, it's funny, the, it seems like probably older people are, you know, oftentimes the most stuck in, you know, their World War II movies and whatever, and and support the foreign policy.
And they're the ones who are dependent on these programs.
And really, I guess my hope would be that probably if there's any lobby in America that could take on the military industrial complex, it would be the elderly.
I mean, they vote that AARP is almost as powerful as AIPAC, if only they were on our side in terms of what our foreign policy should look like.
Well, you know, I don't think people frequently enough make the connection between these things, right?
They don't understand that it's, you know, a dollar spent on guns that put in peace is a dollar less available for butter.
And unless you see that connection, you know, AARP, for example, is a very good lobbying group on Medicare, period.
I mean, they always stand up against efforts to privatize and, you know, Social Security as well.
But they're not going to go after the defense budget because they don't see the correlation.
Well, you know, I thought it's you nailed it right here in paragraph three, the Pentagon's base budget, which doesn't include the cost of fighting our wars.
So this is not the Iraq and Afghan wars and all the drone programs in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan and all that stuff.
This is just the the defense budget has increased by 81 percent during that time.
Forty three percent when adjusted for when adjusted for inflation.
So I don't know.
You know, I'm not that good at all the math and whatever.
But that just seems to me like, wow, that's a lot of inflation.
And of course, what's the biggest enemy of the budget of a retired senior citizen in America?
But inflation decreasing, you know, stealing the value of their savings right out from under, you know, tearing off corners of the dollars and destroying the value of their savings that they worked hard for this whole time and right along the same line, you know.
And of course, all that inflation comes from they got to print the money in order to pay for all their bonus wars.
Otherwise, they'd have to raise the taxes to pay for them and the people would then buck.
So they make it seem free for 10 years by printing all the money.
And then, of course, blowing up big bubbles and creating all these distortions and a terrible recession.
We're all suffering now.
Right, right.
Well, you know, I'd also add one other point to this.
All of the numbers that I used in this piece are just looking at the kind of immediate spending that's actually in the budget or in the case of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts in terms of these supplemental appropriations.
What it doesn't include is the very great long term costs of these wars.
I mean, we're going to have young people coming home and we are having young people coming home who are very, very severely wounded and will require intensive care for the rest of their lives.
Those kind of costs are not even factored into this discussion.
So, you know, we have to remember that this is only the tip of the iceberg we're looking at.
Right.
Remember, Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, one point that the three trillion dollar war.
Yeah.
Well, then they wrote a follow up for The Washington Post saying, you know, we're really sorry we actually got that wrong.
It's going to be more like five.
That's right.
And we've only spent one point something.
You can read the piece for the exact numbers.
So, again, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
This is only what we're seeing so far coming into the budgets that we've paid so far.
These these these conflicts, we're going to be paying for them for a very, very long time.
Well, now, here's my thing.
I'm a libertarian, which means that my political point of view is a very minority position in the society.
But I'm really hell bent on preserving the Bill of Rights and ending the wars.
And so I think what we have to have is a coalition of left, right and libertarian of us regular folk against the war party.
That's the real division, not left and right the way I see it.
And so I wonder whether it could be possible for someone like you to support someone like Ron Paul, who, after all, says he wants to, even though he thinks, you know, in principle, that they're unconstitutional, that everybody's paid into these programs and they've the promises have been made and people are dependent on the programs.
And the way to shore up Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid is to abolish that empire post haste.
I mean, I know he's in the wrong party from Alternet and everything.
I just wonder what you think.
Well, I'm not I'm not a big party person, but my my take on that is that, you know, there's this is one of these things where it's there is every every possibility of forming issue based coalitions here.
So you're talking about, you know, on foreign policy, Ron Paul's views come a lot closer to, say, the views of a typical Alternet reader than do many Democrats, you know, most Democrats, I would say.
We have very great differences when you get into economic issues.
And that's where we have to part ways.
But, you know, you talk about civil liberties, you talk about war and peace.
Ron Paul is a lot closer, again, to our views than, you know, the Democratic mainstream ever.
Well, and even on social issues, again, you know, which I don't mean to just, you know, beat you over the head with it or whatever, but oh, well, I will anyway.
He's basically saying, I mean, he might not expand these programs in ways that you might imagine they could be, you know, better or something like that.
But he's certainly saying he wants to shore them up.
He does not want to make an effort to dismantle those social programs.
He wants to dismantle the world empire.
Well, he would also do away with the Department of Education and other things like that.
So, you know, we definitely I'm thinking of the big ticket ones, you know, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
Certainly on, you know, again, on half of a dozen of the most important issues, our views line up very well.
All right.
Well, when we get back, I'm gonna let you talk instead of talking at you.
It's Joshua Holland from Alternet, everybody.
Hang tight.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Just saw this journalist, Salim Shahzad, found dead near Islamabad, murdered by the ISI.
He went to Human Rights Watch, apparently, according to this article at dawn.com just a few days ago and said, I've been threatened by the ISI.
If anything happens to me, tell everybody I said that.
Now he's dead.
He wrote an article.
Let me read it from the dawn.
The way they phrase it is a bit complicated.
You all know Salim Shahzad.
He's a friend of Anti-War Radio.
Been on the show once or twice.
Anyway, he wrote for the Asia Times online.
He was a great guy.
And it says here, he disappeared two days after writing an investigative report in Asia Times online, saying that Al-Qaeda carried out last week's attack on a naval base to avenge the arrest of naval officials arrested on suspicion of Al-Qaeda links.
He then went to Human Rights Watch and said, they're gonna kill me.
And then they killed him.
This is Anti-War Radio.
So back to Joshua Holland from Alternet.org.
He's got a great piece here about the cost of war.
And it's called Five Eye-Opening Facts About Our Bloated Post-9-11 Defense Spending.
The massive world empire, the national security state, and the homeland security state, such as they call it.
And I was hoping that, Joshua, again, you could, in fact, be more specific and go through your list of the five facts, and number five is kind of six or seven, and go through and, you know, like Ike Eisenhower did, not in the military industrial complex speech, but in the big one before that, where he compares the cost of a battleship to the cost of a schoolhouse, the cost of, you know, et cetera like that.
Yeah, I think that that's really important to understand that these are trade-offs.
And as I say in the piece, and as I've written many times, you know, budgets aren't just a list of numbers.
They're a real reflection of our national priorities, of what we think is important.
Just a few of these things, as I mentioned, the amount that we've increased our defense spending since 9-11 is equal to five times the Medicare gap that everybody's talking about.
Another thing that I highlighted was that just looking at the Afghanistan war costs alone, and that doesn't include the base Pentagon budget, that doesn't include the Department of Homeland Security or anything else, you could pay for 15.6 years of the Head Start program for every eligible child.
And this is a very successful program.
People like it across the political spectrum.
It's been shown to be effective in terms of future test scores, et cetera, et cetera.
Right now, there's 2.5 million eligible kids, but there's only 900,000 places available.
And so we could pay for all of that, for all of those kids, for 15 years, just from Afghanistan alone.
Let's look at the uninsured.
I point to a study in 2007, a Harvard University study, and they estimated that about 45,000 people die every year in the United States from illnesses that are untreated, for problems associated with not having any insurance coverage.
And according to the National Priority Projects analysis, the cost of just Afghanistan could cover every uninsured American for 1.7 years.
Now again, just Afghanistan.
You can add Iraq.
You can add Homeland Security.
You can add that nuclear defense budget, et cetera, et cetera.
Another thing that I point out is that we have all of these state budget shortfalls.
It's been in the news a lot.
If you add them all up, they total $130 billion.
That's in all 50 states.
And if you looked at just the supplemental requests for Iraq and Afghanistan this year, that adds up to $170 billion, again, not including the Pentagon-based budget, nukes, the Homeland Security.
So it's more than the entire state, cumulative state budget gaps for all 50 states.
And I look at a whole bunch of other things, just in terms of the money allocated for Iraq this year.
You could give 24 million children low-income kids health care for a year.
It equals 725,000 elementary school teachers for a year.
You can hire 830,000 firefighters, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And you can look down the whole list, and I think it really puts in perspective what these costs are, because, you know, what is a trillion dollars?
The numbers themselves are so huge, it's hard to really, you know, get your head around what that means, and these, you know, equivalents, I think, are much more tangible.
And another point that I make in the piece is that, you know, depending on how you calculate it, I cite an economist named Robert Higgs.
He's also a libertarian.
He added up all of the public debt, that is, not annual deficits, but the accumulated national debt, going back to 1915, 1960, when it was nearly zero, and he figured out how much was based on national security spending.
And what he came up with is a number that was over 91 percent of our public debt he attributed to past deficit spending for military and defense budgets.
So again, when you talk about, you know, this kind of relentless focus that Washington has on the debt, they're not being specific about what causes that debt.
And when you look back historically, such a very large chunk is from this kind of unsustainable empire we've built, and, you know, obviously it should follow that that's where we should be looking to save money, given that that's such a large, such a large share of that outstanding debt.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I mean, you look at, I mean, just in my lifetime, you know, I don't know how old you are, I'm almost 35, yikes, but, you know, in the Reagan years, when Reagan took office, the national debt was, I think, like 1.1 trillion or something, maybe even less than a trillion.
And when he left, it was four.
And then, you know, it just goes on and on.
And you know, Bob Higgs is, I always recommend Robert Higgs as a place to look for this kind of thing.
And I'm sure he would agree that it's no coincidence that it's the wars and the deficits and all the inflation and all the debt is all tied together because, you know, like we saw with Iraq, you know, if they had to raise our taxes to invade Iraq, the people would have bucked.
And instead, they just turn the money machine on, borrow a bunch of money from China and send everybody a check, a stimulus check in the mail, tell them it's all going to, you know, the oil will pay for it, we're going to have this war for free.
And then the cost comes due later, you know.
And in fact, I saw a thing right now that I think just last week that said the deficit this year is 1.5 trillion, and the military budget this year is 1.2, which means it's probably more like three, you know.
So there you go.
Just abolish the empire, budget's balanced, we're all good, you know.
I mean, it's right there.
It's a significant chunk.
It is a significant chunk.
And you have to really look at the, you know, I think it's very important to remember that we did have options.
It wasn't an automatic, you know, it wasn't automatically the case that we had to start these wars in reaction to the attacks of 9-11.
I mean, you know, there is tried and proven methods of counterterrorism that don't incur these kinds of costs.
It was, you know, this was a choice that we made.
And I remember after the attacks, there was a real effort to narrow the discourse and prevent kind of dissenting opinions from taking hold.
You know, we were basically ushered into these wars as if it was an inevitability.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, it's amazing now for people who got the long-term memory to even think back on how it was in 2002.
It's almost hilarious how well they got away with, I mean, just think MSNBC and Fox News just like lawnmower man, just blasting virtual reality American flags at you at the speed of light, you know, just like, you know, subliminal, like some kind of a Terry Gilliam flick or something, the propaganda, the march to war.
Not that subliminal.
Pretty liminal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, it wasn't quite the speed of light, more like the speed of sound on the screen, right?
Right.
But yellow ribbons and gold everywhere and the march to war.
How long before the material breach is breached?
Yes, it was.
It was really a frenzy.
And you know, those of us who are saying, wait, maybe we should slow down and think this through, were quickly shunted to the sidelines.
Yep.
Yep.
Too bad, too, because, you know, it's funny, I read articles nowadays going, wow, you know, seems like we fell into Bin Laden's trap and did everything he wanted, which I read one of yours like that, too.
But I've read some that basically, you know, like in regular mainstream newspapers that just forget to mention at all that, you know what?
Some people got this right.
Some people warned us we weren't supposed to give in to fear and overreact.
We were supposed to play it cool and do the minimal approach to this thing.
And that kind of deal.
No one gets any credit for getting it right back then.
You're still, you know, only a bad person of some kind who just hated George Bush if you were right back then.
No redemption for any of us.
Well, anyway, we're going to have to leave it there, too, because the taxi theme song's playing.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate your time on the show.
Everybody, it's Joshua Holland from Alternet.
