To the editor:
The corporate mainstream news media’s coverage of the U.S. military budget and of the companies that make the killer technology that our government exports around the world (and that has killed and maimed many civilians, including children, in places like Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria) is habitually sloppy and superficial. Sometimes it is disgustingly fawning, like the May 18 CBS “60 Minutes” segment about the war contractor Anduril.
Even the New York Times business section, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News fail to do any investigative reporting on both the short- and long-term corrosive effects (during my 77 years) on our domestic economy of the U.S.’s reflexive spending on war and preparation for war.
These effects are an important cause of the inability of U.S. manufacturing to make the vast array of essential goods, from medical supplies to bicycle tires, that we have to import from China, Vietnam, India, and other distant countries.
As the late New York Yankees Manager Casey Stengel (1890–1975) was fond of saying in another context, “You could look it up.”
For example, see the website for Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
Or the many books on the comprehensive destructive domestic economic effects of war spending by Seymour Melman (1917- 2004), who was a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His detailed but very lucid economic and technical arguments are, sadly, not outdated. But Melman’s work is as much ignored by U.S. corporate news media editors and publishers as is the brilliant, well-sourced, and prolific scholarly writing on foreign policy and war-related issues by MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky.
Corporate news media editors and reporters in the U.S. behave in their work as if they are dedicated acolytes of what the theologian Walter Wink (1935–2012), who lived in Sandisfield, called “The Myth of Redemptive Violence” and “The Domination System.” Their apparently willful neglect of abundant, open-source scholarship which gives the lie to these pernicious myths, enables the lies of political leaders like Donald Trump and Victor Orban, and hastens the descent of our nation into a police state.
John Breasted
Great Barrington
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