President Joe Biden
“Missile Theft,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3/ IbisPaint, 2023
Dear Joe,
I would wish you a Happy New Year; but it seems trite and banal, given all the challenges and troubles you and our country face in 2024 – some inherited from previous administrations, others of your own making.
Americans are 10 times more likely to be shot to death than people in other wealthy countries, with homicides, suicides and mass shootings on the increase. For the past four years, mass murders have skyrocketed into the 600s per year, breaking all past records. Since 2020 more children and teens are killed by firearms than any other cause.
Don’t these sound like war statistics?
Yes, you have established the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. But it is rare to find anyone in your administration making the connection between our country’s record-breaking gun violence at home and our country’s record-breaking military weapons sales across the world, to democracies and autocracies alike, having grown dramatically over the past 5 years.
To re-state, isn’t it possible that the US global culture of weapons and militarism with nearly 100 military bases ringing the world, and our long and persistent history of war (nearly 40 in your and my lifetime), rebounds back to infect our violent culture here at home?
The US pledged $17.5 million to a loss and damage fund for poor countries vulnerable to extreme climate damage (for which the US is more responsible than any other country) at the 2023 UN climate conference while doling out over $100 billion in weapons and military aid in the same year to feed and fuel wars in Gaza and Ukraine, wars that destroy and contaminate, likely irreparably, the homeland and ecosystems of those peoples who survive these wars and genocide in the case of Gaza. Crumbs for climate crisis and ruined ecosystems fall from the Master’s table, while feasts of weapons abound.
Our habit of war “has yielded a host of perverse results here at home,” writes war veteran and noted historian of American military history, Andrew Bacevich. Neither have our wars brought about “peace [or democracy] by even the loosest definition of the word… the opposite in most case.” His wise counsel: discard militarism in favor of “prudence and pragmatism.”
You often state proudly that we are the strongest military in the world, as if it is a crown of excellence, when in fact it is a crown of thorns on our country, which hangs on a cross of iron.
As Eisenhower memorably said in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” What felonious theft our military budget is from the 140 million or 40% of US citizens poor and low-income American people, for whom the crucial Poor People’s Campaign advocates. Forty-four million Americans “struggled with hunger” in 2022, according to USDA. Diseases of despair are rampant….
https://www.juancole.com/2024/01/president-record-belligerence.html
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After the truth-shower 