Anybody seen a fighter plane?

America claims to be a democracy, but is in fact a sophisticated racket that forces hundreds of millions of taxpayers to subsidize weapons manufacturing.

Sometimes reality offers irony that exceeds any fiction.

If ever the boondoggle of Pentagon spending needed a concrete illustration, last week’s events made the absurdity of military procurement—and Washington’s bipartisan spending priorities—painfully clear.

It also continued to sharpen the inversion among the corporate parties, as GOP voices (predictably, under a Democratic administration) continue to claim the mantle of an antiwar movement lacking any sincere representation in our nation’s capital.

#Priorities

The disconnect between policy rhetoric, and the reality encountered by our communities, has grown so vast that it can fairly be described at this point as grotesque. Homelessness is skyrocketing around the country as a pandemic continues to rage. Meanwhile, natural disasters fueled by climate chaos devastate one community after another through everything from floods and hurricanes to storms and fires.

Yet Washington’s bipartisan priority remains sending weapons to Ukraine.

Militarism not only offers a distraction from climate chaos, it actively contributes to the global climate catastrophe. American support for Ukraine included a covert operation to bomb civilian energy infrastructure. The attack on the Nordstream pipeline entailed the greatest release of methane in human history, and was documented by the same journalist who exposed U.S. Marines who committed a massacre, killing hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai, in 1968.

As transparently foolish and ridiculous as it may be for Washington to continue enabling war and accelerating the climate catastrophe, while millions of Americans struggle to subsist without food, shelter, or medicine, last week offered an even more glaring indication of the Pentagon’s institutional failures—and continuing need for accountability that our co-opted policymakers in Washington are poorly poised to provide.

The absurd spectacle of the Pentagon asking the public to help it find a missing fighter plane, when the federal government can’t help struggling working people find homes, is a fitting juxtaposition that exposes the reality of life in the United States today.