Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The Cost of Occupying Planet Earth

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, December 30, 2012

The Cost of Occupying Planet Earth

Click here to access article by David Vine from The PeaceWorker.

The author ventured into the world of Pentagon accounting to try to determine the real costs incurred by American taxpayers to impose the Empire's dominance over the rest of the world. In contrast to domestic social spending, such costs are rarely debated in the halls of Congress.

Ever the fool and armed only with the power of searchable PDFs, I nonetheless plunged into the bizarro world of Pentagon accounting, where ledgers are sometimes still handwritten and $1 billion can be a rounding error. I reviewed thousands of pages of budget documents, government and independent reports, and hundreds of line items for everything from shopping malls to military intelligence to postal subsidies.