Summit of U.S. democracy

December events in the U.S. have overflowed with contradictions.

Most of the countries who put in an appearance at Biden’s sham “Democracy Summit” house U.S. military bases. Most have some deal with the U.S. government to use “aid” dollars to buy weapons. Each takes a little slice of the nearly $800 billion the U.S. slotted for military spending.

The massive rise in military spending stems from the U.S.government’s relentlessly false claims that China poses a military threat to its neighbors.

None of the claims have been substantiated. Nor can they be.

Huge military contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and others no longer know what to do with so much cash.

The list of top contractors includes non-weapons makers like Humana, a health insurance company, and Analytics Services, a data analysis mega corporation.

The reshaping of the military industrial complex (MIC) in the U.S. to include information technology giants, healthcare corporations, and medical services indicates the deepening reach of the MIC across numerous sectors of the U.S. economy. Even Amazon, which dominates both consumer products sales and web services, has a close relationship with the Pentagon.

Indeed, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle all compete to win lucrative Pentagon deals such as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (also known as JEDI).

In the closing weeks of the year, the U.S. government announced renewed spying operations by the CIA on China. So far, the operations amount to little more than supplying western media outlets with vast amounts of disinformation about the Chinese military to intensify public misperceptions of danger.

The renewed focus on China, it should be remembered, comes after major CIA intelligence successes as the claim that Iraq possessed WMD which led to a failed 10-year military operation, which cost the U.S. $1 trillion in treasure and cost 1 million Iraqi lives.

In the past 6 years of U.S. politics, deep political divisions between far-right extremism and tepid neoliberal policies have ground U.S. democracy to a halt. The only two points of agreement seem to repeatedly occur on excessive military spending and tax cuts for the rich. Indeed, when social policies like education spending, infrastructure rebuilding, anti-poverty programs, public health resources, environmental protections, or civil rights protections come up for debate, the political class tied to the military-industrial complex begin to cry about the deficit or fears of inflation.

Just before Congress adjourned Dec. 15 without passing the Biden administration’s signature social policy “Build Back Better,” some members of the Washington media asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if members of Congress should be restricted from buying and selling stocks while in government. She flatly rejected the idea saying, “We are a free-market economy. (Members of Congress) should be able to participate in that.”

Photo taken on April 13, 2021 shows the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

Critics correctly point out that allowing politicians to collect donations from companies who benefit from their votes and the laws they write is an endemic form of corruption within the U.S. system.

Here we detect a vicious cycle: announce that China is a threat, collect donations from military contractors, vote to raise the Pentagon budget, create new offices to manufacture false information about the China threat for media consumption, and many major U.S. corporations get to feed at the trough of the public treasury.

This is the summit of U.S. democracy.

The author is an associate professor of Liberal Studies Department at Grand Valley State University in the U.S.

The opinions expressed in the article reflect those of the author, and not necessarily those of People's Daily Online.