It's Official — Trump Wants $1.5 Trillion For Our War Machine!

Column by Lee Camp

Column and voice-over by Lee Camp

Last week the Trump regime made it official. They’re asking for $1.5 Trillion dollars per year for the US war machine. It’s tough to comprehend just how much money that is and how utterly insane it is, but I’m gonna try.

Most Americans right now can’t afford a $1,000 emergency without finding themselves neck-deep in debt and/or poverty. About half of all American children live at or near the poverty line, often going without basic necessities. The younger generation — trying to make sense of this backwards morally vacant system by using video game terminology — have begun referring to this as “the kill line.”

The majority of Americans are at the kill line while the US regime seeks to spend $1.5 Trillion per year killing people in other lands.

To try to help the human brain to understand the number 1.5 Trillion, think about this: the average American (lucky enough to have a full-time job) makes a little less than $60,000 a year after taxes. This means if you’re an average American worker, to earn $1.5 Trillion you’d have to work for 25 million years. (That’s not a typo. I wish to holy hell it were.)

Trump wants to spend that much every year on killing people in other countries until they allow the full-frontal pillaging of all their resources.

Currently — even before the $500 billion increase — the US spends more on the military than 144 countries combined. With another half-Trill increase, the Pentagon will be spending more than 192 countries combined (that would be the combined expenditure of every nation on planet Earth minus China and Russia).

This chart shows the numbers from 2022:

But what am I complaining about? Our war machine is the envy of the world. Just look at all these records it holds:

• The Pentagon is the largest money-laundering operation the world has ever seen. Tax dollars are taken, rinsed in a big washing machine called “National Defense,” and then spit out into the pockets of bloodthirsty war profiteers.

• The Pentagon has the most unaccountable expenditures of any organization in history. (More on that in a moment.)

• The Pentagon is the largest corruption and fraud system the world has ever seen.

• The Pentagon is the largest polluter the world has ever seen.

• The Pentagon is the largest death machine the world has ever seen.

I assume this list adorns the wall in the Pentagon’s cafeteria with quinceañera balloons tied to it.

So where does all this Pentagon cash go while American children struggle to find some non-nutritive cheez ballz to eat? Well, no one really knows.

The Pentagon has failed 8 straight audits — meaning it has never successfully been audited. A few years back it became widely known that the Pentagon had $21 Trillion of unaccounted-for financial adjustments. Then in 2019, they had $35 Trillion of unaccounted-for adjustments just in that single year. While they tried to claim it was merely poor bookkeeping (as if their accounting is done by a chimpanzee who has had his eyes gouged out), that’s clearly not the case.

Some of the missing money is literal pallets containing billions of dollars in cash disappearing. Some of it is “ghost schools” and “ghost troops” the Pentagon paid for in places like Afghanistan. Billions of dollars filled the pockets of people building schools and training soldiers while in reality those people were totally not building schools or training soldiers.

In fact, the Pentagon has admitted it can’t account for 63% of its assets.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once stated that he couldn’t even figure out how many people worked in any given Pentagon department. Meaning, the Pentagon is only moderately aware of who works there.

But by all means, let’s give this gargantuan death machine $1.5 Trillion a year.

Every empire follows a similar path in its waning days. In an act of extreme desperation, the parasitic imperial rulers throw ungodly amounts of money at their morally bankrupt army. No longer able to offer anything of benefit to the world around them, the “leaders” think they can simply threaten other nations into maintaining the status quo.

Those who don’t kiss the ring and allow the pillaging of their resources are attacked, besieged, and punished. Those who do fall to their knees before the furious kleptocrats are pillaged and exploited. Meanwhile, the actual citizens of the empire don’t realize a war is being waged against them as well — their labor and life-force extracted and pumped into the veins of the vampiric ruling elite.

We don’t have to go along with this. We can inform ourselves, evolve, and create a new world based on cooperation, empathy, and equality.

(Some of this column comes from my previous column on the Pentagon budget.)