{"id":62716,"date":"2022-05-24T06:41:17","date_gmt":"2022-05-24T11:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62716"},"modified":"2022-05-24T06:41:17","modified_gmt":"2022-05-24T11:41:17","slug":"hedges-no-way-out-but-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62716","title":{"rendered":"Hedges: No Way Out but War"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hedges: No Way Out but War<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Original Illustration by Mr. Fish \u2014 \u201cNo Guts No Glory\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion<\/a>\u00a0to fix the 43,586\u00a0structurally deficient<\/a>\u00a0bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student\u00a0debt<\/a>. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the\u00a017 million<\/a>\u00a0children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the\u00a0100,000<\/a>\u00a0Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of\u00a0wage stagnation<\/a>. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.<\/p>\n

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion<\/a>, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $\u00a0813 billion<\/a>\u00a0for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.<\/p>\n

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hedges: No Way Out but War Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana. Original Illustration by Mr. Fish \u2014 \u201cNo Guts No Glory\u201d The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[130,9035,524,694,30799,827,862,5482,891],"class_list":["post-62716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-china","tag-chris-hedges","tag-militarism","tag-russia","tag-scheer-post","tag-united-states","tag-war","tag-world-reserve-currency","tag-world-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62717,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62716\/revisions\/62717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}