Defund the Police ... Defund the Military
by John Lawrence, June 11, 2020
Police have been given jobs social workers should be doing. They've criminalized everything from homelessness to mental illness to drug addiction. That's what defunding the police is all about. They should hire more social workers and less police. The police are asked to do a lot more than what police work should be all about. So has the military. Every problem overseas, many of which could be solved by teachers, social workers and doctors has been looked at as a problem for the military to solve. Many of these problems derive from the fact that people are in dire poverty. They need help building schools, houses, sanitation systems. Instead we send the military in to bomb them just as we send the police in at home to take them to jail by any means necessary.
We glorify police work with all kinds of TV shows just as we glorify the military. No one ever glorifies the Peace Corps though, and, if they were sent in more often, there would be more positive results. Instead of helping people, the first thought of American leaders is to send in the police or the military. The Washington Post reported:
To fix policing, we must first recognize how much we have come to over-rely on law enforcement. We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue.
Police themselves often complain about having to “do too much,” including handling social problems for which they are ill-equipped. Some have been vocal about the need to decriminalize social problems and take police out of the equation. It is clear that we must reimagine the role they play in public safety.
Everything that could be said about the police could be said about the military. Instead of helping people overseas to escape from the poverty they experience, we police them instead. What a novel idea to spend less on the military and more on the Peace Corps. Let's reimagine the role they play in public safety. Policing has been the primary vehicle for using violence to perpetuate the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people that has been with us since slavery. The military has been the primary vehicle to perpetuate American control over black and brown bodies in other parts of the world.
The Peace Corps budget is $410.5 million. The military budget is $934 billion. The military budget covers the DoD, overseas contingency operations, the VA, Homeland Security, the State Department, and many others that involve national security. By contrast in 2003, the military budget was less than half that - $437.4 billion. The US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. If the Soviet Union collapsed because of overspending on the Cold War, the US is in danger of collapse from overspending on its military when it is not even engaged in a major war. Overspending on the military is just a jobs program that Congress will not curtail. Trump for all his bluster about wanting our NATO allies to spend more on defense, nevertheless, authorized a $34 billion increase in military spending for 2020. Meanwhile, China, the world's second largest spender on its military is spending $178.2 billion in 2020 while Russia spends a mere $70 billion.
The U.S. spends some $100 billion annually on policing — most of it coming from local budgets — and an additional $80 billion on incarceration, according to a detailed 2017 report by the Center for Popular Democracy. In cities across the country, policing alone can take up anything between a third and 60 percent of the entire annual budget. Many major cities spend as much as 40 percent of their municipal budgets on policing, leaving a dwindling pool of resources for poverty prevention, infrastructure and everything else. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated this dynamic: Cities facing steep revenue declines are trying to decide which services to cut to remain solvent, and mayors are often hesitant to cut law and order spending. Welfare spending has been on a long, uneven decline, while law and order spending ballooned almost unabated until about 2010, when it amounted to nearly 2.5 percent of national income. Since then, law and order spending has fallen to a hair under 2 percent, while welfare spending stands at about 0.8 percent of national income less than half what we spend on police.
The US domestic Peace Corps called AmeriCorps has a budget of $560 million. So the US spends a paltry $1 billion on its foreign and domestic Peace Corps while spending $180 billion on police and almost a trillion on its military. Without this spending the economy would surely collapse. Military and police jobs are jobs of last resort for non college educated youth. However, this could be turned around. This money could be spent on other pursuits like housing the homeless (Habitat for Humanity), social workers, teachers, sanitation systems in foreign countries lacking them, building green infrastructure (Green New Deal), eradicating poverty, education (giving "The Talk" as part of public school curriculum), sustainable agriculture, clean water, cleaning the oceans, cleaning the rivers and more.
While the US spends a huge amount of its budgets on police and military work, China is spending its budget building infrastructure all over the world with its Belt and Road initiative (BRI). Whatever you want to say about it, it represents peaceful development of countries outside of China while the US does nothing of the sort, preferring instead to police the world with its 800 military bases in more than 70 countries. So while the US presence outside the US is mainly military in nature, China's presence outside China is basically peaceful development. This development will also lead to economic advantages for China through increased trade.
China’s overall ambition for the BRI is staggering. To date, more than sixty countries—accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population—have signed on to projects or indicated an interest in doing so. Analysts estimate the largest so far to be the $68 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a collection of projects connecting China to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea. In total, China has already spent an estimated $200 billion on such efforts. Morgan Stanley has predicted China’s overall expenses over the life of the BRI could reach $1.2–1.3 trillion by 2027, though estimates on total investments vary.
The US has sought to demonize China's BRI and to create a second Cold War to justify its military expenditures. Throw Russia into the mix as well. The US wants to line up its group of allies in a potential contest versus China and its allies. However, many US purported allies are jumping ship as they read the tea leaves and realize that the US sees its role in the world and at home as mainly police work. Poverty alleviation is something the US doesn't do. This needs to change if we are ever to combat our common enemy, the coronavirus and climate change, and forget about creating a Second Cold War which will only drain US resources while China goes ahead building infrastructure and increasing trade.
