The Price of Militarism?

The Price of Militarism?

2004. Not quite as futuristic as the movies portrayed. But still impressive. Ballistic missiles. Nuclear bombs. A dynasty in the White House. Religious fundamentalism reigns.*

A military budget larger than the rest of the world combined. A legislative branch, paralyzed with fear and blind American nationalism, giving the pentagon an extra $87 billion to pay for it’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. $51 billion to Iraq, $11 billion to Afghanistan, and the rest to assorted terrorism elsewhere.

A search containing ’87 billion’ brings up 83,000 hits on google. The first few pages alone were able to list thousands of different places the money could of gone to. I’ll let you decide where it could have been better spent.

But a new Common Dreams article shows one such place where it perhaps would of been more fruitful than the “War Against Terrorism”.

“At the costs projected by Alpine Power Co, $87 billion would buy 192,904 windmills. The total resulting electricity production, again assuming each windmill can run one third of the time, would come to more than 1,015 billion kilowatt-hours per year. This amounts to about more than a quarter of all US electricity consumption in 2000.”

A quarter of all U.S. electricity consumption. This seems an adequate estimate, considering they predicted the windmills running only a third of the time. Imagine how much foreign oil could be avoided. Consider the environmental implications of wind power, one of the most green sources of power available, to burning oil. Or we could end our dependency on nuclear power, which accounts for about 20% of electricity consumption in the U.S. Dissolving our dependency on foreign oil would likely decrease the chances of any expansion on the War on Terror.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, the $87 billion. The Pentagon’s budget will stand at roughly $370 billion in 2004. Imagine if the United States Government cared more about it’s populace, than cold war posturing!

Kucinich will scale back the Pentagon’s budget by 15%. I have heard none of the other candidates even express distaste at its current enormity.

* I am, of course, talking about the religious right and it’s death grip on the current administration.