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MERCHANTS OF DEATH FATTEN UP

As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing,
Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office.
President Trump moved boldly in his first budget, seeking to outdo last year’s
budget with an additional $54 billion in Pentagon funding for fiscal year 2018.
Those paltry billions, tagged on with Trumpish bravado, equal the entire military
budgets of allies like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Then, in
a bipartisan stampede, Congress egged on Trump to go even higher, putting
forward a defense authorization bill that would raise the Pentagon’s budget by
an astonishing $85 billion.
Based on what we know of Pentagon expenditures in 2016, up to half of such
funds are likely to go directly into the coffers of defense contractors rather than
to the troops or to basic military tasks like training and maintenance. When
selling to other countries, these merchants of death normally charge higher
prices for weapons systems than they even charge the Pentagon, with the
customary costly follow-on agreements for maintenance, training, and things
like additional bombs, missiles, or ammunition that can continue for decades.
As the official Arms Dealer In Chief weaponry sales approvals in the first year
of his administration exceeded the Obama administration’s record in its last
year in office—no mean feat given that President Obama set a record for
overseas arms deals during his eight-year tenure.
President Trump has been doubling down on many of the wars he inherited
from Obama. The moves of his administration (peopled, of course, by generals
from those very wars) include the increasing use of Special Operations forces,
engaged in a staggering 149 countries last year with 70,000  in personnel, as
well as a dramatic rise in air strikes, and an increase in troop levels in conflicts
ranging from Afghanistan and Yemen to Syria and Somalia.
As a study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute
recently noted, our post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan,
Somalia, Syria, and Yemen have already cost at least $5.6 trillion when one
takes into account both direct budgetary commitments and long-term
obligations, including lifetime care for the hundreds of thousands of American
veterans who.survived their injuries.  (Recall that our invasions and occupations
in the early GDub days were expected to cap off at a cut-rate $50 billion to
$200 billion.)
A recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, for example,
suggests that a projected three-decade Pentagon plan to build a new
generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines, initiated under President Obama and close to the heart of Donald Trump, will cost up to $1.7
trillion dollars.
Genuine opposition to runaway Pentagon spending may yet emerge, if, as expected, President Trump, Paul Ryan, and the Republican Congress follow up their
trillion-dollar tax giveaway with an assault on Medicare and Social Security. At that point, the devastating domestic costs of overspending on the Pentagon
should become far more difficult to ignore.
 (Thanks to William D. Hartung of the World Policy Institute. Read more at TomDispatch.com)

FORWARD TO THE PAST

My SciFi stories keep turning into film scripts. Last month it was a time travel
epic in which 4 brilliant college students go back to successfully prevent
President Palin!  They were
married? It said so right in the
newspaper.  Inside there was a
sympathetic article on
transexuality and a picture of Bill
with quite nice hormone induced
Martin Luther King jr.’s assassination. This month’s SciFi installment is a breasts.  So she was the First
journey into the future.  Lady!  Billie Palin -  and actually
Wendy thought she was cute.
  Get this clear, the students didn’t use a Time Machine.  No machinery was
Beautiful white shoulders in her
involved. You might have guessed – it was a drug. And yes, it was created by
tank top and shorts, showing
a Mad Scientist type – maybe all real scientists are mad –  with  a doctorate in
smooth white legs. No denying
chemistry.  Dr. Wendle Anderson, Wendy to his family (which had disowned
lust even in the almost
him), was not an old geezer with frizzly hair and a lab in the garage. He was
posthumous.
quite bald, no facial hair of any kind, with only a couple storage units next to
his trailer. The stores were still there - like
Old Town Coffee. He had plenty of
Wendy was old enough that his death would be no surprise, except maybe to
money but when he offered a five
him. Meanwhile, the Young had targeted the past; he was Old so he targeted
to  the woman at the counter she
the future. He was itching for a look really, having experimented with short
gave him a weird look and he left,
trips and so, with enough of the drug in his pack to come back with, he went.
afraid she was going to call the
The physical repercussions of the drug were very physical– the shakes, police.  The guy behind him in line
sweats, throbbing headache – and then the body began to emit clouds of wanted to know if he wanted to
lights creating  a Nimbus that, as it stabilized, could be inserted into the trade any of them for stamps. He
Interstices of Time. Wendy was starting to develop a jargon of his own in the showed Wendy a thick booklet of
scientific papers that he refused to publish. What Peers could review him?  ration stamps for every imaginable
What the unreviewable Dr. Anderson, to impress you with his professional product and service.
persona, discovered was that Time was not linear, a thin and narrow path Wendy was a quick thinker. He
upon which you could go, theoretically,  backward and forward. Go back and grabbed the booklet and handed the guy a wad of bills. Chortle, chortle, said
kill a dinosaur and change this outcome of this day, argued SciFi-ers. Time the guy and beat it out the door.  Wendy flipped the pages, pulled out a coffee
would be made circular if we were always going back and changing it. Get that stamp for a 20 ouncer and, sitting down next to the stack of papers on the
going and you have a veritable whirlpool.  window sill, he started researching.
Absurd said Wendy. He disagreed that Time had a bow and a stern. Not a thing There was an old Time magazine that devoted itself to the history of
or stuff in space. It was instead a simultaneous instant that enclosed you in a Neo-totalitarian Socialism. Trump had been indicted in 2018, a mere 7 years
Big Bang of Bliss in which you could select your relationship. Taking the drug in ago, but he holed up in the White House, claiming the Presidency was above
small doses would send you oscillating through your possibilities. The instant the Courts. What followed was weeks of chaos in D.C. with massive crowds
was an infinite bag of choices.  Wendy experimented daily and after some surrounding the White House. A Civil War was emerging many places.  Rural
preliminary vomiting he found he could control his destination. The question America – the South and the MidWest in particular – declared for Trump. He
was selecting the Instant you were looking for – in his case not too far away – called out the Military to keep the peace in D.C. which they did by shooting a lot
2025 to be exact. more people than was usual in the U.S. if you weren’t black. But white people
The first thing he saw when he emerged from his safe transition room into old were dying. The now Imperial President cancelled the elections for 2018,
Town Eureka was a large poster with BIG SISTER IS WATCHING OUT FOR YOU expelled most of the Democrats, and like Cromwell before him, ruled with a
inscribed beneath a photo of... Elizabeth Warren?  No it was Sarah Palin.  Rump Congress – Trump’s Rump they called it.
Fascism had triumphed he thought and reached in his pack for a dose to The Imperial Presidency had reached its full flower.  
reverse his course.
Where did Palin figure in this?  
But behind her on the poster he saw some familiar faces: Naomi Klein! Noam
Chomsky! And Bill McKibben!  He had a lot to learn and he grabbed up a
newspaper, free, from a rack.  Bill McKibben was the first Gentleman to    Paul Encimer’s unpublished SciFi continued next week

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