Destroying What Works, Replacing It with What Can’t

 

Destroying What Works, Replacing It with What Can’t

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” 

President Dwight David Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Since 2023, overall global military spending has increased by almost 10%. The Department of Defense, under the profoundly unqualified former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, submitted a defense budget with a 13% (roughly $1 trillion) increase – lacking in detail and without the input of recently discharged experienced senior flag officers. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has slashed our overall budget, passed in the Big Beautiful Bill (under a simple majority “reconciliation” rule) by Congress and signed into law by the President.

The real value creators – federal support for education, research and infrastructure – have been slashed and burned beyond recognition, all to accommodate a huge tax cut that disproportionately benefits corporations and the mega-rich with no measurable offsetting benefits. Oh, according to the Congressional Budget Office, we did pick up an unsustainable increase to our deficit of $3.1 trillion, representing about 6.5 percent of our entire gross domestic product. Medical and nutritional programs have been “obliterated” (unlike Iran’s nuclear enrichment program which continues, albeit somewhat damaged). The benefits to be enjoyed by the mega-rich are deeply offset by the misery imposed on the bottom half of America… and the loss to most of us just may take decades to undo… if that is even possible.

To exacerbate the absurd damage new policies are beginning to cause – in lost jobs and rapidly rising consumer prices – the Trump administration is reconfiguring world order by reversing an 80-year US move to free trade, a period during which the US economy exploded disproportionately compared to any other country on earth – to enjoy the greatest economic success in our history. The last time we had tariffs like this was the tariff-boosting Smoot-Hawley Act which many believe seriously accelerated the damage caused by the Great Depression. For myriad reasons detailed in my past blogs, Trump’s fabrication of an “emergency” (the only basis for a president to take tariff-setting away from Congress under our Constitution) has resulted in the chaos of uncertainty, the deep and probably sustaining animosity of our allies and a regressive tax on US consumers.

While we clearly need big corporations in this competitive world, the people/government need to control them… and not the reverse. Pro-business policies need to be balanced by pro-people realities. The United States is setting global standards… until the world is able to counter such measures. We may control 15% of the world's economy, but 85% of the world is figuring out the necessary workarounds to contain our efforts to dictate… everything. We are inadvertently pushing much of the world into China’s hands.

The Western world is also finally beginning to build its own military infrastructure and weapon systems, led by Germany. While we will sell our military hardware to our allies as a gap measure, our policies have so infuriated our allies (take a look at how being an American visiting Canada is being treated), that such countries are only reluctantly accepting those military alliances with the United States… for now. We’ve joined Israel in blaming a severely weakened Hamas for starvation in Gaza (the rest of the world knows the blame sits with Netanyahu’s severe restrictions on the import of food and medicine), while lambasting our allies’ (UK, Canada, France, etc.) moving to support an independent Palestinian state. The ultimate disconnect and isolationism that defines our future international influence is only partially reversible. Even if we were to undo this Trumpian destruction, few nations trust that another MAGA president won’t be elected in the future.

Our going forward military is more focused on maintaining MAGA domestic control than on foreign enemies: “A leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security suggests that the Trump administration is considering using the U.S. military to boost its ongoing mass deportation agenda, while acknowledging the deployment of troops in Los Angeles earlier this year wasn’t ‘perfect,’ according to a new report… The memo was allegedly written by DHS senior adviser Phil Hegseth, the brother of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The New Republic published the texts on Saturday [8/2].

“President Donald Trump has already used U.S. military personnel in his aggressive deportation campaign. In June, Trump nationalized approximately 5,000 National Guard members and sent them to LA to push back against protesters demonstrating against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids in their neighborhoods… In addition to the National Guard members, Trump also sent 700 U.S. Marines to the city to stomp out the ‘violent insurrectionist mob.’” Graig Graziosi, the August 2nd The Independent. America “First” has become “only Trump.” Will the escalating Epstein scandal temper this movement?

The level of skepticism, perhaps downright rejection, shown by developed nations at the result of data generated by Trump era governmental agencies, particularly given the clown car cabinet of “anti-woke,” antivaxx, anti-science, climate change denying, anti-international treaties and cooperation third-rate appointments, should truly scare all Americans. “European governments are taking steps to break their dependence on critical scientific data the United States historically made freely available to the world, and are ramping up their own data collection systems to monitor climate change and weather extremes, according to Reuters interviews.

“The effort - which has not been previously reported - marks the most concrete response from the European Union and other European governments so far to the U.S. government's retreat from scientific research under President Donald Trump's administration… Since his return to the White House, Trump has initiated sweeping budget cuts to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies, dismantling programs conducting climate, weather, geospatial and health research, and taking some public databases offline.

“As those cuts take effect, European officials have expressed increasing alarm that - without continued access to U.S.-supported weather and climate data - governments and businesses will face challenges in planning for extreme weather events and long-term infrastructure investment, according to Reuters interviews. In March, more than a dozen European countries urged the EU Commission to move fast to recruit American scientists who lose their jobs to those cuts.” Kate Abnett, Valerie Volcovici and Sarah Marsh, writing on August 1st for Reuters. In short, Trump has destroyed our global credibility in ways that are no so easily reversed… giving the United States a open road to unilateral road to be wrong… alone and isolated. Do you trust RFK, Jr’s vaccine/ disease reports?

In the end, too many Americans have accepted the simplistic solutions from Donald Trump and his team, but those bad chickens are coming home to roost. Perhaps knowing that the GOP has voted for these failed policies, red states are busy trying to rig elections through redistricting and culling voter roles because they are sensing that the majority of people are likely to cull Republicans running for office.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for those who wonder how nation-destroying autocrats ever get elected to power, they only need to look at what is happening all around them.