Curiously, the official US defence budget for 2006 (not including supplemental spending bills for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), comes remarkably close to the US treasury’s estimated total receipts from corporate income taxes—and the two figures have almost always come within a few percentage points of each other every budget year since the end of World War II. In 2007, for example, the defence budget is expected to be US$563 billion, while US corporate income taxes are expected to reach US$525 billion.

A vast majority of US military spending is by contracts with US corporations. Obviously, the ones paying the income taxes and the ones receiving military contracts are not all the same, but taken as a whole, almost every dollar corporate America hands over to the federal government by way of taxes on profits comes immediately back to corporate America in the form of military spending. The two figures have no logical reason to be nearly the same, and in fact in no other country are the two figures anywhere near the same. The way they closely track each other over a long period of time throughout diverse administrations and differing periods of history in the US, however, suggests some kind of long-term fixed arrangement.

The War Resisters’ League (warresisters.org) estimates that a realistic assessment shows that 49% of the US$2.25 trillion budget for 2007 will go to military spending, while the government itself claims only 19% goes to the military.

Blame Gerald Ford for Iraq

In all the glory bestowed on the late Gerald Ford, recently deceased unelected US president, what hasn’t been mentioned (perhaps because of the inconvenient taboo of never speaking ill of the recently deceased) is his direct culpability in the crimes of the present Bush Whitehouse. Not in his attempts to restore the power and prestige to the Oval Office following the excrement-smearing episode known as the Nixon Administration (which allowed Bush to assert greater powers than ever, helped by Rumsfeld and Cheney, two principles from the Ford administration, incidentally), but rather in his cutting short a necessary investigation into Nixon’s crimes, and thence an investigation into the true nature of US military conduct in Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.

Less than one month after being appointed US President, Ford issued a “presidential pardon” to his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who had only a few months earlier appointed Ford his vice-president—and probably after it was clear he may well be resigning from office and handing it over to Ford. Ford always maintained no deal had been secretly in the works.

Had he not pardoned Nixon, but instead allowed criminal charges and a trial to proceed, Americans would have been exposed to the full horror of what the Nixon Whitehouse had perpetrated in Vietnam and Cambodia. Had this occurred, it is unlikely there would have been, in the following three decades, any debate about whether or not the US lost the war in Vietnam. The myth of victory, pure intent, and invincibility of the US military, built up by the Ronald Reagan administration in the 80s, allowed first George Bush Senior to lure Iraq into a trap in Kuwait (to “exorcise the demons of Vietnam,” as right-wing commentators explicitly stated, as in “How did America's military exorcise the specter of Vietnam?”, which appeared in US News and World Report, in 1991), and then Bush Junior to recklessly send the military into a trap laid in Baghdad in 2003.

Until the last couple of years, the myth had become so entrenched, US leaders were even able to speak confidently of a military able to conduct two major wars at the same time, and of the “Powell Doctrine,” wherein America would only “choose” wars where they can pour in “overwhelming” superiority on the ground and in the sky. With successful post-Vietnam missions to Grenada, Panama, and Serbia, the myth of invincibility had been solidified. By the time Bush Junior planned to send the military into Iraq in 2003, enough Republicans, and not incidentally enough Conservatives in Canada, were so thoroughly convinced America’s missions were always pure of heart and always guaranteed of success, that the insurgency that arose shortly after, and continues to get stronger by the day, was a total surprise. Today, nobody in the Bush administration, nor for that matter anybody from both major parties in the Senate or the Congress, have a clue what to do now that a major portion of the US military is pinned down in Iraq and unable to extricate itself from a boiling-over three-way civil war that threatens to become a regional conflagration. It’s not all Ford’s fault, but if he wasn’t so eager to get his nation beyond “the national nightmare,” his nation might have learned valuable lessons about war, military myths, and the dangers that arise with the unexamined national life.

Here come the Chinese cars

At the very end of the year, Chrysler announced a deal with Chery Automobile Company, a state-owned enterprise in Wuhu City, Anhui province, just west of Shanghai, to build a new subcompact car for export to the US market. This will mark the first Chinese-made car sold in US showrooms and driven on US roads. Production is expected to begin in early 2008 and Chinese cars are expected on US roads shortly thereafter.

Chery, which this past year produced 281,000 cars, a miniscule number next to the world’s biggest producer, General Motors, at nine million cars, is already China’s first auto export company, having moved 30,000 cars to foreign countries in 2006. But Chinese auto companies as a whole already produce over 5 million vehicles, and will likely pass Germany this year into third place in the world behind Japan and the United States, which will both come in at around 11 million cars.

Business analysts suggest the announcement was intended to force the United Auto Workers in the US to accept massively rolled back health care spending on employees.

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