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military-industrial complex
Resisting Trump Isn’t Enough; We Need a Plan for a Better World
The promise and possibility of ending poverty, reclaiming democracy, and advancing peace and justice remain closer than any of us may think.
Jan 24, 2025
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, advocates for peace, social justice, racial and economic equality, fair immigration policies, climate renewal, trans rights, and other movements for change are bracing for hard times. The new administration will be doggedly opposed to so many of the values we hold dear, as well as programs that have helped keep millions of Americans above the poverty line.
Only recently, newly reelected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) reaffirmed his commitment to an “America First” agenda, which distills the most harmful aspirations of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 into 10 priority areas, including slashing social welfare, healthcare programs, and public education; supporting increased military spending to promote “peace through strength”; unleashing a nightmarish version of immigration enforcement; and restricting voting rights.
Many of us are now asking ourselves, how did we end up here? Part of the answer is simple enough: The status quo, regardless of which party has been in power, simply hasn’t been working for all too many Americans. Research compiled by our colleague Shailly Gupta Barnes of the Kairos Center indicates that some 140 million of us live either in poverty or one financial emergency away from joining the ranks of the poor. One out of six children in this country now lives below the official poverty line, and the families of nearly half of all kids are in a state of economic precarity or food insecurity. Meanwhile, the average life span of white American males is actually declining, while more than 20 million people lost their access to healthcare in 2024 alone.
This is no time to blame those who are going to be hurt by Trump’s draconian policies, nor is it a moment to get in a defensive crouch to fight off only the worst policies in the making without also putting forth a vision of the world we’d actually like to see.
All of this is, of course, a far cry from the conventional wisdom that America’s economy is doing well, based on statistics like the unemployment rate or the rate of economic growth as a whole, none of which capture the lived experience of so many of us. Indeed, the head of Moody’s Analytics recently told the Financial Times that, while “high-income households are doing fine, the bottom third of U.S. consumers are tapped out.”
Although the system isn’t working for millions of Americans, a business-as-usual, market-based approach remains what’s on offer in official Washington. This has been the governing modus operandi across party lines for the past 30 years and continues to enjoy bipartisan support, even as faith in government declines in the country as a whole. Without a viable plan that could change the basic living conditions of people in need, it’s easier for right-wing populists to offer false promises of change or, even worse, provide scapegoats like undocumented immigrants to “explain” declining living standards and the outright desperation so many people now feel.
Of course, this propaganda is fueled by countless millions of dollars contributed by rich donors, often enough billionaires, who, for starters, want more tax cuts, more deregulation of business, unfettered access to government contracts, and free rein for cryptocurrency. It’s reinforced by proponents of religious nationalism who organize around single issues like opposition to abortion, while falsely portraying moves towards racial and gender equality as “threats” to Christian values. Over the past several years, such interests have combined forces to usher Donald Trump back into the White House and dozens of “Christian nationalists” into the judicial and legislative branches of government, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Contrary to mainstream accounts that put the responsibility for Trump’s rise and then return to power on working-class voters (some of whom did indeed press the lever for him), the real victors in the November elections were the wealthy and powerful, many of whom used their public profiles and deep pockets to help propel the Trump-Vance ticket to victory. They and their corporations are now ready to receive ample government contracts and benefit from the erasure of corporate regulations. Meanwhile, religious extremists will welcome further encroachment on reproductive and LGBTQ rights.
Case in point: On the day that Donald Trump was pronounced victorious in the 2024 election, the eight richest men in the world were instantly worth another $64 billion. Nevertheless, much of the analysis surrounding the 2024 elections continues to emphasize the notion that Trump’s victory was primarily due to decisions made by the working class and the poorest Americans.
So, what is to be done? This is no time to blame those who are going to be hurt by Trump’s draconian policies, nor is it a moment to get in a defensive crouch to fight off only the worst policies in the making without also putting forth a vision of the world we’d actually like to see, a world where people’s needs are met with real programs, not diversionary rhetoric and false promises.
Promoting a Government That Works for All
While people like billionaire Elon Musk are busy hatching schemes to dismantle large parts of the federal government, we need to push for an agenda in which the government actually works for everyone. Shifting federal budget priorities toward improving lives and away from war spending and tax breaks for the rich would be a central element of such a program. Pouring resources—more than a trillion dollars a year—into the war machine and the national security state starves other priorities, ranging from public health to environmental protection. In fact, defunding such programs, an essential part of Trump’s second-term plans, risks another pandemic or the “quad-demic” that health officials have been warning about, as well as increased hunger, untreated medical conditions, and dirtier air and water. The problems to come won’t just involve an imbalance on a spreadsheet. There are all too many lives at stake, as surely as lives are at stake in a shooting war.
Imagine how starkly different this country would be if we were to invest in the lives of people rather than filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex. Take the expanded (and fully refundable) child tax credit, or CTC. Created in March 2021 through the American Rescue Plan, this federal policy granted modest monthly cash payments to families with children, including poor families, independent of their work or tax status. Families making less than $150,000 received regular cash infusions they could use to pay daily expenses or shore up slim to nonexistent savings.
Imagine a country where everyone could exist free of the fear of poverty, hunger, homelessness, or lack of access to quality healthcare.
The results were staggering. By December 2021, that program had reached more than 61 million children, nearly 4 million of whom had been lifted above the official poverty line. In its first and only year, official child poverty witnessed a dramatic decline, the single largest drop in American history, including a 25% decrease in poverty among Black children, narrowing the overall racial gap among poor kids. At the time, Moody’s estimated that the impact of the CTC on the economy was comparable to, if not greater than, the jobs created through military spending.
Despite its success, the expanded CTC was abandoned as 2021 ended. Two Democrats and 49 Republicans voted to end it, with West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin claiming that poor families might be using the money to buy drugs. The CTC, of course, hadn’t failed. The failure was that of an impoverished democracy, increasingly captive to the interests of the rich and powerful and willing to leave nearly half the population living hand to mouth, despite proven policies that could help lift the load of poverty.
And consider that the real danger of the second Trump administration, which has already appointed a record 13 billionaires to government posts, is its debt to the enormously wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. You need look no further than Trump’s cozy relationship with future trillionaire Elon Musk. As head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with business interests in the very institutions he’ll have some authority over, Musk will also, it seems, have an undue influence on future federal budgets, priorities, and programs. Indeed, before the inauguration, Musk and former DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy had already set their sights on shutting down the Department of Education and cutting about one-third of the federal government’s annual budget, or $2 trillion.
We’re preparing for this and more in the coming weeks and months, but it doesn’t need to be this way.
What Is to Be Done?
In 1968, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing against the triple evils of racism, militarism, and poverty in what would be the last crusade of his life, he said, “Power for poor people will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when they may be desirous to say no.” His theory of change was to turn those most adversely impacted by poverty into a political force powerful enough not to be denied, even by the greatest economic and military power in the world.
Under the second Trump administration, there will be a torrent of emergencies to deal with, including threats of mass deportation, the shredding of the social safety net, and attacks on efforts to promote racial and economic justice and gender equality. Some of this will be new to us, including potentially massive immigration raids on schools and churches, while much of it has already been unfolding at a state level. For example, in 2024 alone, more than 650 bills were introduced nationwide to restrict the rights of trans people. Because such bills were massively unpopular, well over 600 of them failed. This may change, however, if they’re taken up at the federal level in 2025.
What’s needed is a coordinated series of campaigns that could change the conditions that produce poverty for good.
As people of conscience fight back against such assaults, we should connect that resistance to calls for a government that reflects our deepest values and commitments to justice. To fight for such a future means making demands that are far beyond what’s politically possible now. Simply resisting what Donald Trump’s government tries to do won’t be enough. We need to build public support for a robust, carefully crafted plan for public investment that will be a viable stepping-stone toward a more equitable, peaceful, and just world.
During the first Trump administration, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival produced an ambitious social and economic agenda, “The Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody’s Got a Right to Live.” It called for the right to living-wage jobs, affordable housing, debt cancellation, strong anti-poverty programs, guaranteed adequate income, and much more. It made clear that, through far fairer taxation and the shifting of funds from bloated military budgets to programs of social uplift, it would be possible to “lift from the bottom” in America.
Imagine a country where everyone could exist free of the fear of poverty, hunger, homelessness, or lack of access to quality healthcare. Of course, trying to shift this country’s priorities in such a way would pose a major political challenge, but social and political organizations and movements have succeeded in the past, even in the darkest of times. The organizing of the Citizen’s Army during the Mine Wars in West Virginia early in the last century and the birth of the labor union movement successfully pressured both corporations and the government for better wages and working conditions that workers still benefit from today. In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, military veterans in the Bonus Army Encampment in Washington, D.C., demanded that the government pay those promised “bonuses” and won. The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Programs fed more children in the late 1960s than any other institutional entity. It paved the way for free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools across the country, while calling out the failures of the government to provide life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people. During those same years, welfare rights leaders formed the largest poor people’s organization of the time and secured essential benefits for tens of thousands of people, while more than doubling the amount of federal support flowing to the poorest Americans.
Because they did it then, we can do it now.
This is not to suggest that shifting funds from the Pentagon to domestic programs is a magic solution to America’s economic problems. Even cutting the Pentagon budget in half would not be enough to meet all this country’s unmet needs. That would require a comprehensive package, involving a major shift in budget priorities; an increase in federal revenues; and a crackdown on waste, fraud, and abuse in the expenditure of government loans and grants. It would, in fact, require the kind of attention and focus now reserved for war planning.
Imagine a real war on poverty, not the “skirmish” (as Dr. King called it) of the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s effort that would be cut short by the war in Vietnam. What’s needed is a coordinated series of campaigns that could change the conditions that produce poverty for good.
Now, let’s be real: 2025 is going to be a truly hard year for the poor and vulnerable in our society. But the promise and possibility of ending poverty, reclaiming democracy, and advancing peace and justice remain closer than any of us may think. What’s needed is to begin to build something better, with, as Dr. King suggested, “the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness” to make it so.
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Trump’s Second Inauguration Symbolized the Reality of Oligarchic Power
The inaugural ceremony featured America’s three richest men—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—seated prominently in attendance, alongside other billionaires, as Trump addressed the nation.
Jan 23, 2025
Over three score years ago, former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had a warning for America.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower exhorted in his 1961 farewell address. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
“We must never let the weight of this combination,” Ike continued, “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
Our wealthiest have never enjoyed a greater direct presence at our government’s highest levels.
Sadly, Eisenhower’s warning went largely unheeded. In the years since, the “military-industrial complex” has morphed into an even more worrisome concentration of wealth and power.
In his own farewell address, former President Joe Biden gave that concentration a grim label. An “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power, and influence,” Biden intoned, now “literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
We now face a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people,” a reality that Biden warned is eroding our “unity and common purpose” and fomenting “distrust and division.”
The end result? We stand today unable to adequately confront the challenges that face us.
America’s oligarchs, Biden explained, are wielding “their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis.” By resisting safeguards over artificial intelligence—“the most consequential technology of our time”—they’re also opening the door to “new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation.”
Perhaps most ominously of all, these oligarchs are burying Americans “under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation.”
”Participating in our democracy,” the departing president lamented, has become “exhausting and even disillusioning” for average Americans. They no longer “feel like they have a fair shot.”
But Biden also stressed that by working together, average Americans can shear our new oligarchy—and its “tech-industrial complex” core—down to democratic size. We can get the “dark money” of billionaires out of our politics. We can ban members of Congress from making stock trades while they’re legislating. We can tax the richest among us and make sure they’re paying their fair tax share.
In the days right after Biden’s farewell address, progressives added more specifics to Biden’s list of antidotes to oligarchy. We could and should, as former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich pointed out, either bust up giant, billionaire-owned tech media platforms like X and Facebook or start treating these platforms as public utilities.
We could even ban our wealthiest from owning critical media properties.
But realizing any of these reforms won’t be easy. Our wealthiest have never enjoyed a greater direct presence at our government’s highest levels.
Nothing symbolized the reality of this oligarchic power like President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The inaugural ceremony featured America’s three richest men—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—seated prominently in attendance, alongside other billionaires, as Trump addressed the nation.
“Everybody,” a satisfied president-elect Trump mused last month at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, “wants to be my friend.” Well, no, not everybody. Just everybody with a grand fortune that our new president—and his Republican controlled Congress—can zealously safeguard and grow.
So what can the rest of us do? With Trumpism locked in federally, we can challenge our oligarchs at the state and local level.
Maryland’s governor, for instance, has proposed a series of tax changes that would raise the combined state and local income tax rate on most Marylanders making over $1 million a year to 10.7%. But Maryland, one of the nation’s richest states, could do better. Rich Californians are already paying taxes at a 12% rate.
But that won’t happen more broadly unless average Americans organize—and confront our oligarchs at every opportunity.
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Now It Can Be Told... After All the Harm Has Been Done
Timing is crucial in media and politics—and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report on atrocities.
Dec 26, 2024
This week, The New York Times reported that the U.S. government made war in Afghanistan while helping to “recruit, train, and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities.” Those militias “tortured civilians, kidnapped for ransom, massacred dozens in vendetta killings, and razed entire villages, sowing more than a decade of hatred toward the Afghan government and its American allies.”
Written by a former Kabul bureau chief for the Times, the article appeared under a headline saying that “U.S.-backed militias” in Afghanistan were “worse than the Taliban.”
Now they tell us.
The new reporting made me think of a chapter in my book War Made Invisible titled “Now It Can Be Told.” Here’s an excerpt:
* * * * *
Timing is crucial in media and politics—and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect: Now it can be told—years too late.
Virtually the entire U.S. media establishment gave full-throated support to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in early October 2001. Twenty years later, many of the same outlets were saying the war was ill-conceived and doomed from the start.
Immediately after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, with very few exceptions, even the mainstream news organizations that had been expressing trepidation or opposition swung into line to support the war effort. Two decades later, many of the same media outlets were calling the invasion of Iraq the worst U.S. foreign-policy blunder in history.
A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized.
But such framing evades the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings. War is so normalized that its casualties, as if struck by acts of God, are routinely viewed as victims without victimizers, perhaps no more aggrieved than people suffering the consequences of bad weather.
What American policymakers call mistakes and errors are, for others, more aptly described with words like catastrophes and atrocities. Attributing the U.S. wars to faulty judgment—not premeditated and hugely profitable aggression—is expedient, setting the policy table for supposed resolve to use better judgment next time rather than challenging the presumed prerogative to attack another country at will.
When the warfare in Afghanistan finally ended, major U.S. media—after avidly supporting the invasion and then the occupation—were awash in accounts of how the war had been badly run with ineptitude or deception from the White House and the Pentagon. Some of the media analysis and commentaries might have seemed a bit sheepish, but news outlets preferred not to recall their prior support for the same war in Afghanistan that they were now calling folly.
A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized from America’s foreign-policy leadership or major news media, let alone its political economy. On the contrary: the forces that have dragged the United States into an array of wars in numerous countries still retain enormous sway over foreign and military affairs. For those forces, over time, shape-shifting is essential, while the warfare state continues to rule.
The fact that strategies and forms of intervention are evolving, most conspicuously in the direction of further reliance on airpower rather than ground troops, makes the victims of the USA’s firepower even less visible to American eyes. This presents a challenge to take a fresh look at ongoing militarism and insist that the actual consequences for people at the other end of U.S. weaponry be exposed to the light of day—and taken seriously in human terms.
Despite all that has happened since President George W. Bush vowed in mid-September 2001 to “rid the world of the evil-doers,” pivotal issues have been largely dodged by dominant U.S. media and political leaders. The toll that red-white-and-blue militarism takes on other countries is not only a matter of moral principles. The United States is also in jeopardy.
That we live in one interdependent world is no longer debatable. Illusions about American exceptionalism have been conclusively refuted by the global climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the ever-present and worsening dangers of thermonuclear war. On a planet so circular in so many ways, what goes around comes around.
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