The United States military faces a great adversary: It’s not a climate change crisis —that’s a big headache for them as we will see— but the Pentagon grabbed a billion dollars’ worth of Covid-19 help to bolster some military projects. A move that comes in a context where the Trump administration is under heavy criticism for the general management of the crisis has taken the lives of nearly 200.000 people in less than 11 months. That’s more lives than US casualties in World War I, Vietnam, Irak, and Afghanistan combined.
The US healthcare system is in shambles and shows profound inequality for the most disenfranchised sectors, despite being the pioneer in healthcare development worldwide. These 200.000 dead account for nearly 20% of all deaths registered in the world due to the Wuhan Plague. Still, the US population merely accounts for roughly 5% of the community.
Without a significant policy shift, the disasters that already exceed the White House’s capacity to cope with an ever-growing social instability in an election year might trigger the downfall of many arms lobbies and military industries, despite their billionaire boost in budget. Not long after the Congress of the United States of America passed the Cares Act, the Pentagon chose to redirect COVID relief to defense contractors for jet engine parts.
The US administration perceived as budgetary issues in their defense industry was quickly fixed by using money intended for facemasks and personal protection equipment. The gaping budgetary holes regarding healthcare in the United States reach the gigantic sum of six billion dollars for vaccine distribution in the future, the procurement of N95 face masks, and other medical equipment.
One billion dollars is a small fraction of the nearly three trillion —with a T— dollars used in emergency spending that the US Congress allocated this year to deal with the Wuhan Plage spread in its territory. This billionaire fiasco shows that even taxative, well-written laws in countries like the US have loopholes. Many special interests can thwart the intentions of bipartisan approaches to politics.
The COVID situation is a chaotic situation from the workforce point of view. It is no surprise that the Defense industry, including the military-industrial complex of private contractors in the US, has also suffered from the workforce hit. With the White House not limiting defense contracting companies from financial ruin by tapping into bailout money, and not laying off employees, the cocktail is served, and it is business as usual for the military-industrial complex, which enjoys special treatment from Washington DC’s Capitol Hill on both sides of the political spectrum.
Because while the Republicans will do very little to change funding and reallocation of funds, Democrats will cry outrage for how the loopholes that feed the giant, ever-hungry and greedy military contractors in the defense sector, at the time that they are also recipients to campaign contributions, special interest lobbying.
The coronavirus pandemic has many governments weighing on defense at many levels, not only big jet engines but also mass surveillance programs that get the attention of privacy group defense advocates who consider civil rights.
