Monday, Monday, can't trust that day

I live in a nice neighborhood, which in the typical American sense means a zone of well-maintained private residences, upscale shops and places to eat, suburban office parks and malls, and abundant greenery. Public schools, for the most part, look like medium-security prisons, inside and out, and all public amenities are indifferently maintained, again in the quintessential American style. I buy coffee out at the local boutique grocery store every morning, and as I drive home I use my outstretched arm holding the cup as a shock absorber to keep from spilling the rich, oily brew (again, it's how we do it in America now). The beverage holders won't work because the streets are seamed, rutted and potholed. If you pay attention as you drive, it can get to you, the rhythmic lurches and bone-jarring bumps of your car's suspension as you crash along the road.

I was watching Jeff Sessions, Republican Senator from Alabama, on C-SPAN the other day extolling the sense of "private enterprise" in the U.S.A. versus the socialist approaches of the Western European nations. He pointed out that we take care of the "truly needy" in America, but do not provide the "coddling" welfare state of the Nordic nations, or even France and Germany. The spirit of individual initiative is alive and well in America, Jeff proudly asserted to an empty Senate chamber, and it's why our economy is the envy of the world. Sessions sees himself as a kind of bipartisan fence-mender, I think, and laments the lack of cooperation in Congress, by which I think he means the unwillingness of liberals to see things in his practical, common sense way.

What Sessions leaves out, I think, is that the United States does operate a welfare state as surely as the Netherlands or Sweden. It just has different beneficiaries. It's true the effective taxation rates are higher in Western Europe, but we have to remember that taxation provides such essentials as comprehensive medical coverage, which in the United States has to be purchased individually, at higher and higher costs. The Europeans ride around on serviceable public transportation, such as commuter and long-haul passenger trains, and on highly useful metro and subway systems, and when they drive, it's on roads that are smooth and well-built. Entering a train station or airport in Europe is not an exercise in soul-killing depression, as it often is in the USA, because value is placed on public spaces, and such places are often bright and cheery.

So the Europeans receive a bang for the tax buck. Americans pay taxes too, but it's for the sake of the military establishment. That's the forest which Jeff Sessions cannot see because of his American boosterism. As Chalmers Johnson describes in his "blowback" trilogy (particularly Nemesis), if you add it all up, the U.S.A. spends three-fourths of a trillion dollars every year on defense, including the military and intelligence, and taking into account the budgets of the Department of Energy and State, for example, for nuclear weapons and diplomatic spying, respectively. This is one-half of the discretionary budget of the federal government. $1.5 trillion is the cash-in, cash-out system of Social Security and Medicare. Social Security runs a slight "surplus" which the federal government "borrows" and spends on "general" expenses, such as defense. The social entitlements, in effect, have their own tax system which the federal government administers and undermines by stealing its necessary reserves.

European nations have tiny budgets for defense compared to the American colossus. That's why they can afford nice trains, smooth roads and well-maintained parks, and can make sure their citizens don't have to die prematurely because they have to choose between going to the doctor or becoming homeless. Servicing the military-industrial complex with American tax dollars has become so ingrained in the minds of solons like Jeff Sessions that they no longer see it for what it obviously is. Spending money on war and materiel is the American emphasis, and has been ever since the early 1940's. As a publicly-supported enterprise, the military is socialist to its core, but it is socialism of the kind the late, not-so-great U.S.S.R. practiced. The Congress is so locked into the inexorable logic of military spending, with its positive feedback loops of defense contractors and bought-and-paid-for legislators, that no internal force can now dislodge its stranglehold on American priorities. As Johnson describes, external forces will, in time, break the system apart, but it will be a disintegration no smoother than that ride home from the boutique coffee bar.