Imagine having an addiction so destructive that it consumed more than half of your earnings. Now imagine borrowing from your family, friends and neighbours to keep up this addiction. Imagine the sacrifices made by these people in order to subsidize your destructive lifestyle. How long would it be before they staged some kind of an intervention?

The United States government is addicted to war. It has a long history of war spending and the interest payments to prove it.

How much are we spending on militarism?

According to annual reports published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the military spending tab for 2008 totaled nearly $1.4 trillion:

$740.8 billion for the Department of Defense;
$430.4 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs;
$193.2 billion for Interest Payments on Military Debt;
and $9.1 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

With so many outstanding debts for military spending, an empire of 1000 military bases, plans to dominate space, and a trend that continues to add hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending for a technological revolution in military affairs (RMA), it is no wonder that the U.S. plans to spend more than 54% of its entire federal budget on militarism in 2009.

Who pays for this?

Of the $2862.4 billion in consolidated government revenue for 2008, $299.7 billion (10.5%) came from corporations, while individuals paid a whopping $2078.4 billion (72.6%). Not exactly an equitable ratio, is it?

With the "economic meltdown" - and the resulting bank bailouts - bringing many new (and old) debates to kitchen tables across America, many people are bound to be questioning the existing economic and military order, but in order to overcome the ongoing cycle of debt and violence, Americans need more education on the connections between militarism and finance.

In an interview with America's Defense Monitor (ADM), Steven Kull (Co-director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the Center for International & Security Studies at the University of Maryland) illustrated how uninformed the average American is about military spending:

ADM: Do policy makers misread the public when it comes to military spending at all?

MR. KULL: Well, this is somewhat complex, because if the question is simply, do you feel comfortable with the current level of defense spending, most Americans say they're fairly comfortable. But if you scratch the surface a bit you find that there is, underneath, some feeling that the U.S. is spending more than it should. Asking specifically, now, what level do you think the U.S. should be spending, the average respondent actually says that we should cut spending about 10 percent.

Now, in the most recent study that we did, we did also set up an exercise where we had respondents balance the budget. We said, "Okay, here's the discretionary budget and here are the twelve key areas of the discretionary budget," and include a whole variety of issues: education, transportation, and international spending on State Department, foreign aid, and so on, and defense was one of them. And we told the respondents, "Okay, the average taxpayer has $600.00 going to these twelve areas. Now, imagine that you have $600.00. How would you like to divide up these $600.00? And we're going to tell you now how much goes to each of these areas." And then they could divide up their money as they wished.

And under those circumstances, it turned out that defense spending was cut -- 80 percent cut defense spending and, on average, it was cut 42 percent. So, clearly, Americans don't fully understand how much goes to defense. Because in this budget exercise, when they found out how much actually went, as a proportion of the whole, then they cut it really very deeply.

Creative accounting turns the Social Security surplus into military spending

The attack on Social Security has become a central talking point for a whole school of political pundits who insist that aging baby boomers will soon push the U.S. government into terminal bankruptcy. It is not the future liabilities of Social Security that are the problem, it is the Social Security accounting methods.

Social Security is an "off-balance" budget item that is funded from payroll taxes (which are separate from income taxes) that are collected from employers and employees and transferred into the Social Security Trust Fund. Excess funds not required for annual benefits payments are invested - by law - into U.S. Treasury securities.

According to Larry DeWitt of the Social Security Administration (SSA) Historian's Office, "the taxes collected under the Social Security payroll tax are in effect being lent to the federal government to be expended for whatever present purposes the government requires. In this indirect sense, one could say that the Social Security trust funds are being spent for non-Social Security purposes. However, all this really means is that the trust funds hold their assets in the form of Treasury securities."

As DeWitt notes, "These financing procedures have not changed in any fundamental way since payroll taxes were first collected in 1937. What has changed, however, is the accounting procedures used in federal budgeting when it comes to the Social Security Trust Funds . . . In early 1968 President Lyndon Johnson made a change in the budget presentation by including Social Security and all other trust funds in a 'unified budget.' This is likewise sometimes described by saying that Social Security was placed 'on-budget.'"

The Social Security Trust Fund began running deliberate surpluses in the 1980s in preparation for pending baby boomer retirements. New legislation was introduced to push the funds "off-balance" again, but they were also mandated to remain in budget deficit calculations.

Johnson's trust fund shell game was a clever move to hide Vietnam war deficit spending, and this accounting practice has been continued by every subsequent administration - using your payroll taxes.

With the Department of Defense listed as the number one spending item in the GAO annual financial statement, the $2.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury Securities held by the Social Security Administration represent a major share of the debt incurred for funding military appropriations.

Meanwhile, the spin doctors tell us that Social Security is going to bankrupt us, when in fact the ongoing history of military spending has robbed the future of Social Security. The narrative of the propaganda pivots on phrases like "entitlements programs" and targets the boomer generation - those unpatriotic hippies who stopped the Vietnam war. Military spending is never discussed.

When the SSA starts cashing in those U.S. Treasury Securities (IOU's) to pay benefits to those who paid into the system, the government will either have to raise taxes, borrow more money, or reduce benefits. And who will be targeted when the clouds of that political shit-storm roll into town? You can bet your ass it won't be the military, that would be unpatriotic!

The international burden of U.S. military spending

Complaints about the costs of militarism interfering with social spending and the development of public infrastructure are nothing new, but American taxpayers aren't the only ones suffering. U.S. Treasury securities that fund appropriation bills for military spending are increasingly purchased by foreign central banks because of U.S. dollar hegemony.

As detailed by Michael Hudson, "the 'dollar glut' finances America's global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the costs of America's expanding military empire . . . Keeping international reserves in U.S. dollars means recycling their dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bills . . . issued largely to finance the military."

According to Henry C.K. Liu, "A strong-dollar policy is in the US national interest because it keeps US inflation low through low-cost imports and it makes US assets expensive for foreign investors. This arrangement . . . has distorted globalization into a 'race to the bottom' process of exploiting the lowest labor costs and the highest environmental abuse worldwide to produce items and produce for export to US markets in a quest for the almighty dollar . . . The adverse effect of this type of globalization on the developing economies are obvious. It robs them of the meager fruits of their exports and keeps their domestic economies starved for capital, as all surplus dollars must be reinvested in US treasuries to prevent the collapse of their own domestic currencies."

Militarism feeds economic entropy

U.S. Treasury certificates also fuel the privatized money creation engine of the Federal Reserve and its member banks through the legalized fraud known as fractional-reserve banking. So militarism is directly related to inflation as well, and inflation affects everyone, including military budgets. Costs and taxes rise while wages remain relatively stable. Thus military spending leads to a form of economic entropy, where less and less money is available for use in a productive economy that benefits those contributing the most to it: workers. The banks and the military-industrial-complex destroy both cash flow and purchasing power to the average citizen while contributing little, if any, real value to the economy and society as a whole.

Staging the intervention

Reductions in military spending would mean smaller appropriations, less treasury certificates and a contraction of credit (money) created by commercial banks through the federal reserve system. More money would be available for discretionary government spending on health care, education, and green initiatives in transportation, housing and more. The federal government would also be able to pay down its debt, which would lower interest payments and free up more money for future discretionary spending.

With the right political will, greater control over government spending could be returned to the local level, reducing the size and power of the federal government.

Jamming the bankers lever

But reductions in military spending would only be the first step. The bankers still control the levers of money creation and their power is likely to concentrate even more under the terms of the ongoing bailouts. They can retaliate quite easily by contracting the money supply at will, manufacturing or extending economic recessions.

Congress must restore the sovereignty of money creation to the U.S. government, while increasing the reserve requirements of the commercial banks. This would give congress powers of discretionary spending by the power of taxation, but without the cycle of inflation and debt, thus creating built-in accountability for politicians.

In the short term, the Federal Reserve would maintain its power to leverage "money from nothing", but with a much smaller lever. In the long term, fractional reserve banking would be eliminated entirely, with the Federal Reserve remaining as administrator for bank settlements and other inter-bank activities - a role it is already responsible for and familiar with.

The banks would serve the people

With 100% reserve requirements, the face of commercial banking would change completely. The current facade of savings accounts - which are actually loans to banks - would be replaced by service accounts, where banks and credit unions would be paid nominal fees for safe storage of currency and for the completion of physical and electronic transactions. Bank loans would come from term deposit accounts and depositors would enter into contracts that disclosed detailed risk assessments.

For the first time in centuries, bankers would serve the interests of the many and not of the few, and transparency in all activities would be mandated as part of a bank's charter. The credit facilities that empowered monopoly capitalism and corporate globalization would no longer exist, and local economies would have a chance to thrive again. The military-industrial-complex would finally host that long-awaited bake sale, and the world - always reacting to American economic and military hegemony - might actually breathe a sigh of relief.

And now the catch

Without dollar hegemony, the U.S. would no longer be able to flex its economic and military muscles so aggressively on the world stage, a relationship that - like it or not - is tied to the American lifestyle. It is "we the people" who are enabling the destructive addict through our complacency, and it is time for us to take responsibility for it.

In this possible future, the influx of cheap resources, energy, and products would come to and end, as the U.S. would no longer be able to export its monetary inflation and project military power at will anywhere in the world. America would have to get busy producing its own wealth again, and that is no easy task.

Americans are fortunate enough to live within a geographic region that has a high potential for human security, but within certain limits. The mantra of endless growth and hyper-individualism (a multi-syllable euphemism for selfishness) would be exposed as a harmful illusion.

Food security would no longer be able to depend on the availability of massive petrochemical inputs, and labour-intensive organic methods would become the norm.

Technological innovation could adapt the existing energy and transportation infrastructures to some degree, but individual mobility would be reduced to a great degree. People would travel much shorter distances for work and recreation. There would be more travel by foot and bicycle than ever before.

The increased demand in farm labour would also remove many people from the institutions responsible for technological innovation, and so "progress" - as currently defined - would proceed at a much slower pace. Innovation would become localized and would serve local needs through a local manufacturing base.

The good news is that the contracting military empire would bring soldiers back into civilian life. Considering their training, discipline, and dedication, just imagine their potential contributions when they are able to tap their creative potential for peaceful purposes!

Arguably, all of these changes combined would do more for the problem of climate change than all of the efforts of biotechnology, geoengineering, and carbon credit schemes (scams) combined. But it would require us to change our mindsets; our values; and our priorities. It would require cooperation rather than competition. It would require the replacement of power politics with a true participatory democracy.

It would require us to confront the military junkies, the bankers, and the government that enables them.

That requires strong, organized communities.

And that requires you!