U.S. government best at killing its own

David Sherman

Advisory: AI was used to gather statistics. Author was a happy student of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Mao Tse Tung and other subversive communists. He also watched excessive amounts of Bugs Bunny cartoons where he first learned Albuquerque existed.

The newly christened U.S. Department of War, christen appropriate considering the so-called Christian Right — though the Christianity part must’ve made a wrong turn in Albuquerque -- is not so great at war.

Under you-know-who, it transformed the Department of Defense into the Department of War, stopped promoting Black men and women of any colour and is as inept as it was during the slaughter in Vietnam.

Americans had their kids fighting there for about eight years but had their noses there for about 20. They killed anywhere from one to three million and lost almost 60,000 mostly teenagers who couldn’t find a way out of the draft or had inherited bloodlust and/or hegemony.

They’re still paying benefits to wounded soldiers today. Estimates of the cost of the defeat at the hands of Vietnamese men and women on bicycles and living in tunnels, is anywhere from one to two trillion in today’s dollars, about a quarter of U.S. expenditures on the “War on Terror,” in the Middle East, though who was terrorizing who is open to debate.

They’ve spent $8 trillion trying to teach the world not to mess with the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they’ve succeeded. They’re roundly hated almost everywhere, except by those in corporate offices and shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Grumman, Northrop, etc., etc., etc.

But nowhere has their never-ending wars been as deadly as the war they’ve waged on its own citizens since the country was founded. If it wasn’t indigenous peoples, it was Africans brought in as slaves. And then and now it was and is an American-born rainbow coalition of white and people of colour that the country systemically, knowingly, willingly lets die or kills through neglect. Their fatal failure is poverty.

The U.S. may be hit and miss when it sets about killing citizens of other countries as their latest Iranian adventure proves. Oh, “the beauty of their weapons.” Missiles, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, destroyers, bombers, bunker busters. A military budget larger than the entire economy of most countries could not defeat the Vietnamese and cannot defeat the Iranians. And the multiple wars in the Middle East succeeded against an enemy that wasn’t really into fighting.

Americans bombed fleeing defenceless soldiers and civilians, killing anywhere from 1,000-2,000 on the “Highway of Death,” a parallel to the American war on its own. A mere pittance compared to the 22,000 to 48,000 civilians killed in two decades of U.S. bombing in the Middle East, which dwarfs what sociologists call “indirect deaths,” meaning starvation, disease, lack of medical care, bombed out cities, poisoned water, etc. Those after-effects of U.S. military enthusiasm after 9/11 killed around 4.5 million and counting.

The war on its own citizens uses no bullets, unless you add  policies that encourage everyone to carry guns. Mass shootings, almost 300 to date this year, kill regardless of skin colour or income level. Americans shoot to death about 45,000 of their own annually. And another 50,000, give or take, decide life in the greatest democracy in the world isn’t so great and kill themselves. That doesn’t include drug overdoses but that’s folded into “deaths of despair,” as are deaths attributed to alcohol.

But, the heavyweight champ of killing is the U.S. government and its policies of neglect -- enshrined poverty, homelessness, “deaths of despair,” starvation minimum wages, lack of health care, highest incarceration and fetal death rates in the world, higher education only for the wealthy and elite athletes, cuts to food stamps and health insurance subsidies. Americans are artists at killing their own.

Causes of death by policy are not secrets. Legislators and courts have access to the same info my computer does. American policies kill and state and federal governments know it and condone it.

As the New York Times put it this week, services to the needy were cut so that taxes to the wealthy could be cut. In the U.S. and most, if not all western countries, there is no such thing as being too wealthy. In the U.S. money buys you government. See: Musk, DOGE. But it is fair to say nowhere does greed destroy lives better than the U.S.

Poverty kills about 300,000 a year. Trump et al knew well that cutting SNAP benefits – one state demanded food stamp applicants show receipts from income derived from panhandling, worried beggars were secretly driving Cadillacs – would kill thousands. Republican austerity doesn’t include their president’s golf excursions to his courses in Florida at $3.5 million per, not counting what local governments pay for policing his motorcades and trying to stop adoring voters from using their beloved semi-automatics on him.

In a recent piece by Nicolas Kristof in the Times, he shared his travels through parts of the U.S. and his encounters with Americans who sell blood to stop from starving. Most skip meals to pay the rent or end up on the street. Food banks can’t keep up with overwhelming demand but no one in government is skipping a round of golf or a private jet trip to wherever.

And there are millions hungry at home looking after children because their partners are the millions in jail or prison. They can’t work, even if they could find a job because child care’s unaffordable. And the job would be minimum wage which doesn’t cover the cost of life anywhere in North America. Increasingly, children are becoming primary caregivers of ailing parents because there is no other care.

This is not a new story, only a more murderous one. From colleague Earl Fowler comes this excerpt from the late author and social critic, Kurt Vonnegut:

“Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”

Vonnegut might be rolling around in his grave. Hate is now more in than ever, stoked by the government. Hate is manifested by blaming “the other.”

“It’s not my fault or the government’s that I’m hungry. It’s the fault of those people from (Pick a place.) that are making all the money.”

The media now uses the term “affordability crisis,” but the crisis is an intentional lack of education and the ignorance it encourages and festers. An ignorance that allows Americans to vote for people who care nothing for them, to elect representatives that willingly murder them.

They’re paying their own hangmen.