Commentary: Was U.S. military the first to rob the Treasury?

2 October 2008
by Vic Hummert

In 1946, U.S. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg told President Truman, "If you want to keep this country on a military economy, you must scare the hell out of the people."

Since World War II, U.S. military analysts claim Washington has spent more than $10 trillion on "defense." In 2007, a whistleblower from the Pentagon appeared on Bill Moyers Journal claiming the accounting system there is a farce and trillions cannot be accounted for.

The financial collapse of 2008 has its roots in Defense Department bilking of our Treasury. As of September, analysts of Wall Street's collapse have not put the Defense Department under scrutiny. The bleeding goes back decades.

An Associated Press report from 2000 states: "The military's money managers last year made almost $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers in an attempt to make them add up, the Pentagon's inspector general said in a report released Friday. The Pentagon could not show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those changes, and a half-trillion dollars of it was just corrections of mistakes made in earlier adjustments." (The Daily Advertiser, March 4, 2000)

Chalmers Johnson, author of three books on U.S. militarism, claims the U.S. defense budget is greater than the defense budgets of nearly 200 countries combined.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in its 2007 annual report, claimed total global military expenditures passed $1 trillion. Unless we take the keys from arms manufacturers, generals and admirals, economies around the world will find their treasuries sacked.

Bickering continues between political parties of the United States as to who is at fault for the September financial failure. Could we expand our historical analysis to include Truman, Vandenberg and the War Resisters League?

The WRL produces a yearly financial "pie" outlining how many billions go for paying off past wars, billions for ongoing conflicts and billions more planning weapons for future wars.