The True Costs Of War

This conversation  focuses on the cultural and economic costs of war, highlighting the U.S. military budget's impact on domestic programs. Lindsay Kosharian notes that the military budget is approaching a trillion dollars leaving little for social services. Kareem Sariahmed discusses the relationship between U.S. military spending and global conflicts, such as in Gaza, and its impact on domestic issues like poverty and healthcare. Both emphasize the need for a shift from a culture of violence to one of care, advocating for redirecting military spending to address social needs and promote peace.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:08

Music, welcome. Welcome to Kairos time. It's Kairos time. Welcome everybody to it's Kairos time. Kairos time. It's Kairos time. You music, hello and welcome to it's Kairos time. Thank you for listening. Today, this season stop the war on the poor. It's a podcast series dedicated to lifting up the calls for demilitarization and the call for a permanent ceasefire. Now, this special season of its Kairos time convenes leaders from movements for racial, economic, climate, gender justice and more who are calling for an end to the war and the war economy. With this latest season, we aim to remind listeners and ourselves that we are not alone in these times and silence is betrayal. Recent events have vividly reminded us that nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. And I think it's especially timely that we're having this conversation about the costs of war today, because among these costs are not just dollar signs, but also a cultural cost. How have political elites and mainstream media justified and glorified violence in our culture, and how does our society consume and reproduce that violence? Homelessness is political violence. Killing civilians in the name of safety is political violence. Policy violence is political violence. How can we transition from a culture of violence to a culture of care, and what are the costs if we don't I'm really excited for this conversation today and to be joined by two amazing and very smart guests. We have Lindsay kosharian, who is the program director the national priorities project. Her work on federal budget priorities highlights the militarization of the federal budget and the corresponding lack of investment in people and the planet. And we're also joined by Kareem sarhimad, who is a physician researcher and organizer with the non Medicaid army and healthcare workers for Palestine. He learned how to organize from put people first. Pa, thank you both again for joining us today. I want to start with you, Lindsay. We're talking about this cultural violence and the cost of war. So let's just jump straight into that. What does the current military budget look like? How does it all add up, and how has it possibly changed over the past 20 years? Yeah, Tony, thanks. Thanks for having me, and thanks for the question. So the military budget right now, what we're what we're watching is we're watching it inch closer and closer to a trillion dollars. And that is a one with 12 zeros after it. That's far more, far bigger number than any of us are are used to imagining. And so what we're seeing right now is the House of Representatives has just passed the current year more than $895 billion military budget. The Senate has passed a$923 billion budget, and on top of that, we can expect that they'll eventually pass more money for the wars in Ukraine and for the genocide in Gaza. So those numbers are only going to grow. And what that means is that we're very close to a trillion dollars. And just to put that in context of our federal budget, the budget that Congress passes every year is called the discretionary budget, and every year this military budget is more than half of that. So that means that there's only so much left for all of the other things that need to fit into that budget. That's housing programs, it's public education, it's public health, it's science and medical research, all of those other things and priorities that we need. Environmental Protection, clean drinking water, which we know all some of these issues, has just been gutted by the Supreme Court. But these mechanisms that our federal government has to provide these programs and to make up for where our capitalistic system fails, which is so many places all of those have to fit into a remainder, and that's not even including the portion of those that budget that goes to what we call, what they call Homeland Security. So much of that is actually immigration enforcement, border walls and deportations and detentions and federal law enforcement, so mass incarceration and and federal grants for policing. When you add all of those things up, it's well over 60% of the budget that goes toward militarization. And that. What that means is that only about one in three federal dollars are actually. Available for those other priorities. I think it's just crazy these numbers that you're talking about. And when we have this conversation about militarism in this country, it's so much bigger than just, you know, what is spent for the Pentagon? As you're saying, we're thinking of Homeland Security and detention like, just how big that number gets? Over 60% that's what's left for all these other life saving programs, and the fact that every year this budget keeps increasing, in fact, in the news recently Senator Roger Wicker, who's the ranking member of the Senate Committee on armed services, he recently proposed that we need to spend even more billions of dollars on the military budget, with little hesitation from other members. So, you know, kind of diving a little bit deeper on this point. How do we justify spending so much money on the war economy, and does it actually make our world more dangerous if we're spending more so, of course, the answer is yes. The short answer, the longer answer, is that folks like Senator wicker, justify what they want. And to be clear, there is no ceiling on what they would want. For the military budget, they will always want more. It will never be enough for them. And so that's one important thing to recognize, is that even if you gave them this, they'd ask for the next thing, and the reason that they want it is really, plainly for us, global military dominance right now. What you'll hear, if you listen in on a congressional hearing in the Senate or the House of Representatives about this, is you'll hear a lot of talk about China. You'll hear that the US needs to counter China. You'll hear that China is a threat to the US. You'll hear that the US needs to maintain its military dominance all around the world. And this is part of a bigger picture where the US has what, what this budget is funding and is one a global military presence of more than 750 military installations around the world. In every continent, more than half of the world's countries have US military installations, and that's just wild. No other country comes even close to that in terms of their military footprint around the world. So it's it's talking about maintaining and growing that military presence right now, for example, the US is very involved in growing its military presence in the Philippines, and that is entirely about the US dominance over China in that region. So that's the kind of thing that Senator wicker is looking for. And of course, it does make the world more dangerous. It makes conflict with China more likely, which could be the precipice of world war three. That means that we're they're also interested project 2025, which is the Heritage Foundation project, has also said that they want to actually sell more weapons for the US, to sell more weapons around the world. And the US is already the number one weapons provider for militaries around the world, sometimes even providing weapons to both sides in a conflict. And so yes, absolutely, all of this makes the world more dangerous. Karim, I want to bring you into the mix now, as we're thinking more globally, tell us a little bit about your work in the organization of the healthcare workers for Palestine, and what relationship do you see between the horrific death toll going on in Gaza right now, and this war economy here in this country, and the bombs and weapons supplied by the US, yeah, happy to talk about these things. So health workers for Palestine, and in particular, is a network of health workers of all kinds throughout the US, mostly using a variety of tactics to mobilize against the genocide and the apartheid and the Israeli apartheid regime more broadly. And so they're, you know, they're folks campaigning against the American Medical Association to come out with some kind of ceasefire, I think that they've continued to be silent, even on the matter of a ceasefire, which has been mainstream for many months now. There have been hospital walkouts, public demonstrations, boycott, divest, sanction campaigns which some of some of which are targeting healthcare, direct actions of other kinds as well. There are sort of connections in the labor movement and folks trying to get namely a CIU, but other health worker unions to take bolder stances against the war economy in general, and the genocide neglect in particular. And then there's also some direct aid going on as well. There are sort of efforts to provide telehealth. You know particular specialties are especially needed and scarce consultations, because oftentimes, right now, there's just such a heavy load of sort of trauma cases, and the health system is actively, purposefully being destroyed. Right? And health workers are being killed in the hundreds by the Israeli military and reducing capacity. And so you have, you know someone that I a Palestinian doctor, that I do some research with, one of his colleagues, is in his last year of medical school, but he's basically been working as an assistant surgeon, and people are working kind of far beyond where their training was in the beginning, and so they get these kind of consults. And the reality is we don't have, we don't have appropriate infrastructure to provide the support that is needed. And the infrastructure that is needed is being actively destroyed, not just by the by the by the Israeli military, but by the American industrial like military industrial complex. This is a war being waged by by the US state. So a lot of my, you know, orientation and thinking about, like the latter, the latter part of your question, like, what is sort of the relationship between military military funding and the genocide. And as I kind of come to it through my my main organizing home, which is the nonviolent Medicaid army. And back in November and December, we were sort of having this conversation about, what is the relationship between the movement of the poor and dispossessed, and in the United States, who you know poverty being a member for cause of death, 800 people dying of poverty every day in the United States, in part due to the neglect of the things that Lindsay was was talking about, and the fact that our that the US state, actively funds and funds the destruction of these things abroad and operates a very sophisticated and growing killing machine. And you sort of encapsulate that, that lesson, and talking about how, you know, there's no Zionist state without the US state. This is sort of a war that that we are, that we are waging. And, you know, we can't really talk about ending genocide, ending the war on the poor, without really a full sort of social, social transformation. But in order to have that, you know, I think a lot, we think a lot about, you know, Willie Baptist, sort of teaching from, you know, National Union of the homeless and sort of wealth, the sort of welfare rights traditions, and talking about, how do we, how do we identify the leading social force that can, that can do that, and that, that's, that's the poor, dispossessed, that's, that's the 100 40 million. That's the people who have, you know, everything to gain and nothing to lose, because they have no stake in in the war economy that we, that we have. And so we think about, what are the fronts of struggle that can help sort of organize and sort of cohere that force to challenge, to challenge the war economy and challenge this sort of state power behind it. And so we think of healthcare, not just as you know, one one issue, one need, but actually something that that is a is a uniting force for that group of people now, you're making some really important connections here and relating. You know these terrible statistics about poverty being the fourth leading cause of death, and 800 folks dying in this country every day because of poverty. And if we want to tackle poverty, if we want to tackle homelessness, if we want to tackle health care, like seeing these issues as related to the war economy are really key here, even getting to this culture of violence framing that we had at the start of this episode. So I want to dive a little bit more into that, thinking some of your work with the nonviolent Medicaid army and thinking about the culture of violence and how we confront that. What concerns do you and the folks that you organize with have when it comes to this country's military spending and the lack of spending on domestic life saving care like health care. What kind of conversations are you having around that? And secondly, what would, what would spending on life saving care and policy actually look like like? What? Let's do some imagination like, what would that new future look like if we actually have a culture of care instead of a culture of violence? Yeah, thanks for this question. I'm really, I'm so, like, impressed and inspired by so many of the health workers that I've that I've met, and it's really something that's really striking me about the way so many people I've met kind of narrate their experience. Many of them are Arab, Arab or Muslim, just because, you know, culturally we are, we just identify really strongly with, like, the Palestinian, cause I grew up with that, even though I grew up in an area where, you know, Zionism was, like, loud and proud, kind of everywhere and very normalized. I just always had this, you know, I just kind of already always have, like the Palestinian cause in my in my heart, my my family is um is Algerian, and there's sort of a lot of love between those peoples, even though maybe the the Arab states don't, don't provide that the solidarity Palestine that they should be. And at the same time, health workers that I'm in care that I'm encountering, however they identify, are equally distraught by by two things they encounter at work. So one is the conditions in which they give care and the patients receive care. Things are, you know, things in the health system are just generally getting worse. You know, safe staff, like safe staffing, is not getting better. People are sort of being asked to do more with less all the time. And that's, I think, a trend, like throughout, throughout our economy and and that that hurts, that is sort of, like deeply painful, especially for for people who are, like, full time clinicians trying to keep this sort of like stuttering health system running. There's kind of all this automation throughout, throughout our economy. It's sort of like labor replacing trend, but in things like healthcare and say, also education other things, there's something that's, you know, in theory, like intrinsically resistant to being replaced by by technology, about these sort of fundamentally human, human endeavors of of providing healthcare. But if you're trying to do that, it's just comes at a at a profound personal cost, because you're not supported to to do so. And so that's why we just have insane levels of burnout. And the healthcare professions and our patients are are getting worse care as as poverty worsens. You know, there's sort of a lot of talk about social determinants and sort of, you know, elaborate referral systems and this and that. But, you know, I can refer to a community health worker, which often will give my, you know, most of my patients are poor. I work in, I work in a safety net system. And when they're struggling with housing, you know, they they go to talk with someone who, you know, talk to them about how hard it is to get housing. There is no safety net to refer them to, and that really wears on us. And then the other piece, which is, I think, is part of what, what came, what gave rise to health workers for Palestine, is like just censorship around talking about these things that the deep need to form this network was because people just felt like they couldn't even keep their jobs if they were sort of raised this in the way that that it needed to be raised in terms of your the second part of your question, like, what? What would it look like? I think you know, so many of these solutions are, are out there, and so many of the problems that we have in the health system would be fixed by, like, adequate staffing and adequate funding. Like, we need an actual safety net. We need places to refer people who aren't having their basic needs met, their human rights met. But you know, you look at some other countries in the way they they trained doctors and sort of their the systematic like, access to primary care in places with, just with more humanist like, health systems, and you just don't have to wait forever and ever for for your primary care doctor. You need, sort of, like, integrated health systems. You need mental health. You need, like, easy access to to specialty care thing, things like this. But all of those things are getting worse, and a lot of that is because we've just normalized devoting so much of our human potential and our money to killing people domestically and overseas. Thank you for tuning in to it's charis, time stop the war on the poor. We're going to take a brief break from our conversation to hear about an upcoming policy summit on october 17, the Cairo center is bringing together experts on the economy, militarism, the rise of authoritarianism, and project 2025 alongside religious leaders and organizers to offer a concrete analysis of our current context and how our movements and organizations are responding. Join us as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of this kairos moment and how we can build on lessons from the pandemic era to build up powerful movements for the long haul. Visit us@www.kairoscenter.org Welcome back to it's Kairos time stop the war on the poor Lindsey. I want to get you back in the mixing cream. You can also chime in on this question as well. What's it going to take to shift this culture, this culture of violence? We have this exploding budget that, you know, grows year after year on spending on war and weapons. I even think back to, you know, early in President Biden's term, we're thinking about build back better, like what it would cost to secure our water system, what it would cost to build new affordable homes, and just that price in comparison to this explosive military budget, and how there's so much justification, and no one bats an eye the money that's passed for this. But when it comes to funding these life saving infrastructure programs, there is, you know, so much opposition to that, despite how popular these things would be for so much of the country, especially the poor and dispossessed, which make up, you know, before the pandemic, 140 million of us. So what's it going to take to change. Shift that culture, like, what do we as researchers, activists, what must we be throwing down on, and how can we contribute to this larger movement that that shifts that so first of all, I want to say, you know, there's, there's kind of some good news hiding in this, which is that when we're spending almost a trillion dollars on the military budget, that means that we have almost a trillion dollars that we could be spending on other things. There is huge potential there, and all we have to do is kind of reimagine what we're doing with with that money. And these are policy choices, right? And what we talk about all the time is that all of these things are policy choices. These are decisions that are being made, and that means that there can be a different decision. So what that might look like? You know, one of the things we talked about a little bit, what military spending has looked like over the past 20 years. And, you know, we could do a lot with one year, you know, a trill, almost a trillion dollars. But think about what we could do over 20 years with all of this, right? If we, if we took that trillion dollars a year and turned it around. So we've looked at this a little bit, and some of the things that we found is that it would cost just about four or $5 trillion to build a fully decarbonized electric grid for the country. So this is infrastructure that the country needs. This is addressing power outages that are affecting people in big storms in places like Texas and that are costing lives. That's that's one thing we could do, it would only cost 1.7 trillion to erase all student debt. It would only cost 449 billion to continue the expansion of the child tax credit for 10 years. These are all numbers that are smaller than what we're spending on the military, right? And so these are all things that are possible with the money that we're currently spending. And what we would have to do, to do that is actually make our world safer in the in the meantime, we would have to do things like close some of those 750, military installations that are targets for conflict, that are feeding conflict that are feeding helping to feed weapons and military training and other inputs into conflict, into conflicts around the world, we would have to give less to Pentagon contractors. Could he mentioned the role of contractors and in the genocide in Gaza, but these contractors are taking about half of the Pentagon budget every year, billions, hundreds of billions of dollars that they take. We would have to shut down their role, and that would mean ending some of their big favorite weapons systems, like the F 35 jet fighter. So these are things that we could do, and then it would also mean taking a different approach to immigration right, recognizing that immigration is good, that people have a right, a human right, to move and to migrate, that we can welcome immigrants and that they can become a part of our culture and society, and that we really need is pathways to immigration, not spending billions of dollars year after year on immigration enforcement and borders and detentions and keeping people out and sending people away. Those are things where we spend now twice as much, adjusted for inflation, on those things, as we did 20 years ago. So this spending is growing enormously. We know where some of the drive for that is coming from, but it's too accepted in all of our politics, and we need to demand a change in that. And so, of course, it's movements like the Poor People's Campaign that are where this demand is going to come from, and those contractors won't stand a chance if there is a political public uprising, mass uprising that is large enough that folks know that they had better satisfy these demands than the contractors and all of their lobbying funds and all of their campaign donations and everything that They do, they won't stand a chance if they know that there are enough people in numbers on the other side demanding change. Yeah, I really appreciate what, what Lindsay is highlighting in terms of, like, where does the money go? These are things that we need to be aware of and keep track of, and we kind of need to know. You know, the the US, like, military complex is not the friend of poor and dispossess people as much as there is all this kind of, you know, military propaganda. And also, like, relatedly, like, kind of propaganda on TV and everywhere around us all the time, the militarized police force in the New York City, New York City subway system, all of this that's trying to convince us that we're deeply unsafe because of each other, and the only thing that's going to keep us safe this is this sort of egregious spending on on life ending machinery and weapons. I appreciate the sort of culture of violence framing because it relates to kind of what's longer view, like trends and sort of our political economic system. And so in that context, like the things that Lindsay is talking about are really like revolutionary demands. And so we have to think about like, how do we, how do we get, sort of mass, like, mass participation in a. On these kinds of issues, and there has been a lot of mobilization around the genocide in particular and related issues, because there is just a crisis after crisis, month after month, like you just change new cycle. There's like a new like life threatening crisis for born dispossessed people here and around the world, I think a kind of neglected task in our movement ecosystem, often is the hard work of meeting, identifying, developing, uniting leaders of the poor and dispossessed, that leading social force that can make these kinds of demands on this system of of death, of policy murder that we live in which says that four people in the US are superfluous. They're like extra people that we don't need. Like that's what produces a system of violence that says Palestinians are a superfluous population. We don't care if 40,000 going on 180,000 according to sort of Lancet medical journal projections. They're a superfluous population. And so with, you know, two parties that are on the same page about that, you know, there's no there's no dispute about poverty, there's no discussion. You know, we have presidential debates, like around the time of this recording the, you know, the first ones, they didn't talk about 20 people, 20 million people losing their health care at all, and because that's accepted. And so the only people who can change that, who can put all those folks in the street are the people who have no interest in this sick system of just death and devastation. So that's, that's, I think, what we need to do. I truly believe that y'all are both the perfect people to have this conversation with, and when I think about where we go from here, how can folks learn more about your work and get plugged into this movement? Lindsay, how can folks find out more about your research on this explosive military budget and learning about your research on the moral budget and Korean How can folks get more involved in the non non Medicaid army, perhaps in their own state. Yeah. So you can find our work at our website, www.nationalpriorities.org, and where we also have a calculator where you can put in what do you want to take funding away from and find out what else you could do with that money. And you can do that for your own city or state. So nationalpriorities.org So the website is nonviolent Medicaid army.org, and there's some contact information there, and there's also our main pages on Facebook. Just look up nonviolent Medicaid army, you can see the sort of Medicaid Mondays folks are, sort of sharing their stories about their trouble, their their struggles in the healthcare system and kind of breaking that, that isolation, that's something anyone can participate in. There are monthly Saturday schools where we talk about, like, how do you have an organizing conversation? How do you build a base? How do you have a productive one on one? What is the role of arts and culture in our movements? These sort of basic tools that all of us need to, sort of to do what we need to do, which is sort of transform the society and unite the leading social force. So nonviolent, Medicaid, army.org, on Facebook, you'll find contact info and can get more involved again. Thank you both for sitting down for this conversation. I know I learned so much, and I know our listeners will too. Thank you again for tuning in to it's Karis time in our season to stop the war on the poor. We hope you'll continue to Join us. Thanks so much. You.