In the early 1980s the President at the time, Ronald Reagan, proposed that the U.S. embark on a project called SDI, or the Strategic Defense Initiative. It would be a missile defense shield designed to use satellites and high-tech missiles to detect and then shoot down inter-continental ballistic nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union. Although never fully implemented, this “Star Wars” program, as it was mockingly called, was always in the minds of officials in the Department of Defense, Congress, and in the corporate boardrooms of military-industrial companies. Although various presidents and congresspeople and companies have slowly initiated pieces of the system over the past 40 years, today Trump is pushing it once again as an entire system. Only this time they’re calling it “Golden Dome.”
The U.S. ruling class is already spending an estimated $1.7 trillion to renovate and rebuild its aging nuclear arsenal of nearly 4,000 warheads. Now they’re going to spend somewhere between an additional $1 and $3 trillion to build this new system, supposedly to meet the threats of today’s so-called adversaries.
These massive expenditures are occurring at the same time as Trump allowed Elon Musk’s DOGE to cut at least hundreds of billions from programs that we need, including things like health care subsidies, daycare programs, food programs, education, disease control and treatment, and more. At the same time as Trump has stated openly: “The United States can’t take care of daycare…That has to be up to a state…We have all these people, we’re fighting wars…It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare…We have to take care of one things: military protection.”
These are the priorities of their system. While we need medicine, health care, affordable food, real education, early childhood care, and much more, they couldn’t care less.
And while a sane person would say, “shouldn’t we try to prevent wars rather than spend all our money to fight wars,” that also is impossible under their system. The billionaires and corporate CEOs who shape our government make their money by competing for profit with other corporations and other governments from other nations, making conflict impossible to avoid. To address the conflicts that their own system creates, they know they need a massive and destructive military fight when the inevitable conflicts begin.
This system is the completely logical to them. For us, it’s the definition of insanity.
This system and the people who run it don’t represent us and our needs. And they certainly don’t care that we’ll be the ones incinerated in a nuclear blast or dying on a battlefield or getting killed by a drone attack.
To really protect ourselves, we need to get rid of them. There’s no other way.
