Financing The Warfare State

"Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

- President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953.

There are no longer any voices to enunciate such logic, not even the editors of the New York Times. Norman Solomon writes in Dodging the Costs of the Warfare State that the pugblic is now well ahead of both politicians and the media, and the anti-war movement actually has an historic opportunity to force cutbacks in military spending.

Contradictions between humane rhetoric and death-machine spending are more glaring than ever.

Solomon is also the author of a new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."