Power does
not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest
in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers,
Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory
health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war
industry.
No mainstream
politician, including Bernie Sanders, dares utter a word against our entrenched
militarism. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader, who was turned into a
pariah by a compliant media and our corporate-indentured political parties.
Nader spoke the truth. He paid for his honesty.
We are about
to witness the largest increase in war spending in American history with a
proposed $1.5 trillion budget. The average taxpayer already shells out over
$4,000 a year to the war industry as consumer and environmental
agencies are dismantled, health care and education are defunded and
programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)
are slashed.
The new
Pentagon budget will hand $58.5 billion to artificial intelligence and military
command-and-control centers and see the effective merging of the United States and Israeli military
industrial complexes. Seventy-four percent of the increase in the proposed $1.5
trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on
military bases.
None of this
is good for us or good for the planet. The Pentagon, powered by the fossil fuel
industry, is the world’s largest institutional polluter, emitting an estimated 66 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024.
Americans,
meanwhile, struggle with rising prices — nearly 30 percent of people go into debt to buy groceries. An estimated114,174. Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance or inadequate
health care while a single-payer universal health care system could cover every
American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and reduce annual health
expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20 percent. Twenty-five percent of
Americans are functionally unemployed. The minimum wage remains frozen,
despite Democratic Party promises to raise it, at $ 7.25 an hour.
The elites use
war not only for personal enrichment, but to stifle class conflict.
War, as W.E.B.
Du Bois said, diverts the poor from their real interests. It funnels national
frustrations into the “heroic” battle against a common enemy. The nationalist
cant, with its endemic racism, seduces those who are alienated or on the
margins of society into feeling they suddenly belong. It entices them to
sacrifice themselves for a “noble” cause. They become the architects of their
own enslavement. They march like sheep into war’s purgatory.
By the time
they wake up, it is too late. They are cast aside, as so many of our veterans have painfully discovered, like human
refuse. But as a tactic to consolidate power and enrich the billionaire
class, it is unbeatable.
Wars will only
be curtailed, if not halted, when we nationalize the weapons industry and
dramatically reduce the military budget. Until then, nothing, absolutely
nothing, will change. Indeed, things will only get worse. No one in
Congress — or any other branch of government — will do this for us.
The masters of
war sitting in the boardrooms of Boeing, General Dynamics or Northrop Grumman
are not praying for peace in the Middle East or coexistence with China and
Russia. The generals — who build their careers by orchestrating wars and post
military careers enriching themselves working for defense contractors — are not
seeking a cessation of global conflicts. They are seeking hundreds of billions
in taxpayer dollars and government debt to fuel the self-defeating cycle of
endless war.
The corporate
vultures — especially the war makers — are, as I write, descending on Congress.
They are meeting with Democratic Party leaders and holding out promises of
millions in cash. They will corrupt, neutralize and compromise most. They will
destroy the careers of the very few who refuse to do their bidding.
They hold the
real power. They have no intention of surrendering it. The manufacturing
of weapons systems and the waging of war are the chief activities of the U.S.
government. It is no longer one among other means of advancing the national
interest. War and violence are how we speak to the rest of the world.
The “shadow
world,” — as the author Andrew Feinstein calls it in his book on the global arms trade — is defined by staggering
levels of corruption, deception and senseless death. It is lawless and
unregulated. Its criminal activities, cannibalization of national budgets and
secrecy are sanctified in the name of “national security.”
Lockheed
Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Boeing, General Dynamics,
Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Airbus, Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp,
along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and
Exxon, are the state.
We, including
our political class, are the vassals. The voters can send whoever
they want to Congress, but until these corporations and the billionaire class
are regulated, taxed and controlled, until their vast monopolies are broken up,
until we stop squandering half of all discretionary spending on war, nothing
will change.
Nothing.
Civilizations,
as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.”
They are disemboweled by an uncontrollable and unaccountable military that
drains state budgets and plunges dying empires into one military debacle after
the next. These decaying civilizations finally collapse from within.
This is where
we are headed. The corporations, and the billionaires who run them, buy
and trade politicians, academics and journalists like Pokémon cards. Their
lobbyists write the legislation. They own the media. They have stifled the
academy, shutting down free speech and purging critics. Judges offer them
unlimited power. To defy them — and I speak from personal experience — is to be
cast into the wilderness.
The
military-industrial complex, as Karl Liebknecht said of German imperialists on
the eve of World War I, is the enemy within. “Making a Killing: How the West Profits from Slaughter in Gaza
and Yemen,” co-authored by Andrew Feinstein, Ruth Rohde and Jack Cinamon —
with contributions from Paul Holden and Professor Anna Stavrianakis — examines
the global arms trade in the Middle East.
The authors
estimate that $130 billion was made from arms exports by Western nations to
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the war on Yemen and over $50
billion from Israeli foreign military procurements.
“RTX Chairman
and CEO Christopher T. Calio made $18 million in 2024, after being appointed
halfway through the year, while his compensation package surged to almost $25
million in 2025,” the authors note. “His predecessor, Gregory Hayes, was
remunerated to the tune of nearly $22 million in 2023. Lockheed Martin CEO and
former U.S. Air Force pilot Jim Taiclet, who was deployed in Saudi Arabia while
serving during the Gulf War, earns an annual package of more than $23 million.
Since his appointment in 2020 he has raked in more than $136 million in total
Lockheed Martin compensation.”
Phebe
Novakovic, the CEO of General Dynamics, has a net worth estimated at $420
million, up $270 million since 2020. But it is not only the CEOs who
profit. Members of Congress and their families traded between $24 million and $113 million worth of
Pentagon contractor stocks in 2024.
Representative
Josh Gottheimer from New Jersey — a Democrat — is a former Clinton speechwriter
and a close ally of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Gottheimer, who is
heavily funded by the pro-Israel lobby and an ardent
Zionist, traded $22 million worth of stock in the top 100 Pentagon
contractors, including Microsoft — which received $414 million from the
Department of Defense in 2023 for software and cloud computing services —
Northrop Grumman and IBM.
Gottheimer
serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House
Financial Services Committee. He is well placed to know which defense companies
are enriched by government contracts and which are not.
Former
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is not any better. She made an estimated
$38.6 million profit in one year from her stock trading, the most of any
lawmaker, in 2024. These politicians run the Democratic Party. They carry
out the same illegal insider trading and have the same conflicts of interest as
the Republicans and the Trump White House. Hunter Biden is no less odious than
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
“Honeywell —
which provides sensors and guiding devices to assist the Israeli military in
airstrikes in Gaza — is the most commonly held arms company stock among members
of Congress, followed by RTX, the company that makes missiles for Israel’s Iron
Dome, among other weapons systems,” the authors write.
Members of Congress, they report, “made more than 13,300 trades totaling over $635 million in 2025.” The arms trade, the authors illustrate, has created an unelected, shadowy cabal of foreign policy, corporate and military officials, along with academics, who — no matter who is in the White House or the Congress — feed the military beast.
This cabal,
many parked in think tanks funded by the defense industry and given prominent
platforms on cable news channels, preach endless war. They ensure the
fabrication of bombs, missiles, warplanes, drones, ships, tanks and guns. They
ship these weapons around the globe. They sustain the interconnected network of
cutting-edge, high-tech systems of information warfare and surveillance,
powered by data processing centers, cloud technologies and artificial
intelligence.
Once these
weapons and tools of surveillance are tested on Palestinians or Yemenis, they
are brought back to manage and surveil us — an imperial boomerang
abolishing what is left of our civil liberties and freedom.
The tyranny
empire imposes on others, as Thucydides reminded us, it finally imposes on
itself. The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, is socialism or
barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism, if we do not free
ourselves from the tentacles of the war industry, we will descend into the
Hobbesian world of totalitarian capitalism, failed states, mass migrations,
endless war, ecocide and permanent immiseration.
The genocide in Gaza is the harbinger of this coming dystopia.
It is a stark message by the industrialized nations to the Global South,
especially with the breakdown of the climate. The message is this:
There are
no rules. International Humanitarian Law is dead. The strong will annihilate
the weak. We control the world’s resources and most of its wealth. We will not
relinquish it. Your suffering and lives are meaningless to us. Defy us and you
too will be slaughtered.
Fear is the
only language these vampires understand. This is a dark fact about human
nature. It is why Richard Nixon was our last liberal president. Nixon was not a
liberal. He was devoid of empathy. He lacked a conscience. But he was scared of
movements. He knew the power of the strike.
It is not our
job to take power. It is our job to create radical movements to hold power in
check. Without these movements, we are doomed.
“You get
freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom;
then you’ll get it,” Malcolm X told young civil rights activists from Mississippi 51 days
before his assassination on February 21, 1965. “When you get that kind of
attitude, they’ll label you as a ‘crazy Negro,’ or they’ll call you a ‘crazy
nigger’ — they don’t say Negro. Or they’ll call you an extremist or a
subversive, or seditious, or a red, or a radical. But when you stay radical
long enough, and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom…So
don’t you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who’s depriving
you of your rights. They’re not your friends, no, they’re your enemies. Treat
them like that and fight them, and you’ll get your freedom; and after you get
your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And I say that with no hate. I don’t
have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I don’t have any hate. I’ve got some
sense. I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him.”
The disease of
permanent war and militarism is devouring the guts of our nation. These forces
snuff out democracy. They turn culture into nationalist cant and sentimental
kitsch. They turn education and the media into echo chambers for the rich and
the powerful. They wreck the economy. They immiserate the citizenry. They pump
toxins into the air, soil and water. They strip us of our liberty. They foster
moral nihilism.
War is the apotheosis of this corporate rule, designed to exploit people and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. And time is running out. If we don’t transform this system we, and most other species, will go extinct. Literally. We must mobilize to defeat these forces. This means organized mass disruptions of government and commerce as we have seen in France, Spain and India, and with organizations such as Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil.
If we remain
supplicants, if we hope desperately for a feckless political class to save us,
the barbarians will triumph.
-Chris Hedges
