Reclaiming Armistice Day: Veterans for Peace Confront America’s Trillion-Dollar War Machine
Host Mimi Rosenberg marks Armistice Day—the day originally meant to end all wars—with antiwar veterans and advocates Susan Schnall, Mike Ferner, Paul Cox, and Ben Freeman, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine. Together they examine how Armistice Day was transformed into Veterans Day, turning remembrance into celebration of militarism. They trace the rise of the U.S. military-industrial complex, corporate war profiteering, and the gutting of the Veterans Administration, while connecting endless war abroad to repression and fascism at home. Through Wilfred Owen’s searing poetry, critiques of AI warfare, and calls for solidarity with Gaza and working people, the guests demand that Armistice Day be reclaimed as a true day for peace and justice.
00:00 Introduction and Overview
02:01 Armistice Day and the Vision of Peace
03:12 Veterans for Peace and the Meaning of the Day
06:25 Mike Ferner on Restoring Armistice Day
07:54 Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”
13:03 Susan Schnall on War Without End
14:11 Ben Freeman on the Trillion-Dollar War Machine
17:55 Reading from The Trillion Dollar War Machine
21:00 War Spending, Climate Costs, and Gaza
23:21 Paul Cox on Veterans’ Health and the VA
31:29 Erosion of VA Services and Privatization
33:05 Militarism, DEI Attacks, and Fascism’s Rise
37:46 War Profiteering from World War I to AI
42:11 The Pentagon, Hollywood, and Cultural Militarization
45:49 Tech Firms, Palantir, and the New War Economy
46:41 The Economy of Death and Dr. King’s Warning
49:05 Corporate Power and the Need for Resistance
50:16 Militarization at Home and the Threat of Martial Law
52:39 Conscience, Soldiers, and Civil Resistance
53:40 Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous War
54:47 Stop the Carnage in Gaza—A Call to Action
55:21 Ben Freeman on Knowledge as a Weapon for Peace
57:05 Closing Reflections from Paul Cox and Mike Ferner
59:02 Conclusion – Building Peace through Equal Rights and Justice
Rough TRANSCRIPT:
I’m Mimi Rosenberg, and today we commemorate Armistice Day, the original day marking the end of World War I,
a day meant to end all wars, not glorify them. before it was transformed into veterans day armistice day called on us to reflect on the futility and horror of war to recommit to peace But today, as we witness an exploding trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, the gutting of social needs,
and renewed calls for militarization at home and abroad, we must ask What happened to that vision of peace? We’re joined by those who’ve worn the uniform and who now raise their voices against the machinery of endless war and militarism. Susan Schnall, president of Veterans for Peace,
who has long worked to reclaim Armistice Day as a day for peace, not parade. She was a Navy nurse on active duty in the U. S. Navy during the Vietnam War era. While serving at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, she grew increasingly opposed to the US war in Vietnam and to her role in the
military system. In October 1968, she participated in a protest by dropping anti-war leaflets from a small airplane over multiple military installations in the San Francisco Bay Area. She also marched in her uniform in an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco and thereby violated Navy regulations. She was tried by a general court-martial and convicted for conduct, unbecoming an officer.
The case became a noteworthy instance of GI, military personnel resistance, during the Vietnam War, and she hasn’t stopped going since. Mike Ferner is a former Navy corpsman and past president of Veterans for Peace, whose activism ties the fight for peace with the struggle for justice here at home. And recently,
Mike and I had the pleasure of meeting during our mutual support for students on hunger strike for Palestine, and during which he was also engaged in a human rights struggle, a strike for a hunger strike as well for a ceasefire in Palestine. Paul Cox is a veteran, of the Vietnam War and tireless advocate for veterans’ health and the protection of VA benefits.
And Ben Freeman is co-author with William Hartong of the Trillion Dollar War Machine and Research Director at the Quincy Institute. He’s been tracking the vast reach and audacity of the military-industrial complex, its lobbyists, think tanks, and profiteers. And together.
. . We’ll examine how the U. S. has turned a solemn day for peace into a celebration of militarism and how veterans and civilians alike are standing up to say, no more war.
And it is a great honor and a great pleasure to have all of you with us. And I hope you’ll engage each other. You have so much, respectively, to offer each other. Now, I want to begin with Mike. As I mentioned, we’re commemorating Armistice Day, not Veterans Day. A Day to End War. I want you to talk a little bit about how you have come to accept that and
designate November 11th as that day with Veterans for Peace. And then I want you, if you would be so kind, to give us a poem that you just sent to me before airtime that I think we should read to get the spirit going. And thank you, Mike, for being with us. Thank you, Mimi.
In 2008, at the Veterans for Peace Convention, the chapter from the Twin Cities, Minnesota, submitted a resolution to start calling November 11th its historic name, original name, Armistice Day instead of Veterans Day.
At that time, even among Veterans for Peace, that was kind of a new idea, but the resolution passed and we’ve been working ever since then to get Armistice Day to become more popular in the lexicon and explain why it’s important that that’s popular. And this is the basic motivation
for Veterans for Peace adopting that resolution. Armistice Day for many years observed the day in 1918 when the guns of the Great War finally fell silent, ending industrial slaughter on a scale the world had never seen. Over 30 million soldiers were killed, wounded, or taken captive. 13 million civilians died. In 1920,
Congress passed a resolution calling for, quote, exercises designed to perpetuate peace through goodwill and mutual understanding, inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples. Later, Congress added that November 11th was to be a day dedicated to the cause of world peace. And finally, after a number of years, it became a federal holiday in 1938.
And then at the height of the Red Scare, after World War II, in the early 1950s, Congress changed it to Veterans Day as part of a national full court press. to militarize Americans’ thinking in preparation for the Russian invasion we were told to fear. And that’s how we got Veterans Day. Now,
there’s a poem that you sent me by Wilfred Owen, and I think it takes us straight into the atrocity, the horror, that always is war. And from there, we’ll really get a handle on why I announced one of our guests as the author of What?
The Trillion Dollar? the trillion-dollar Department of War budget. But take us to that poem of Wilfred Owen to just give us some of that sensitivity, some of that humanity that has been so flayed by the war machine. Well, Owen was a brilliant poet. He was a junior officer in the British Army, and he died. He was killed in war one week before Armistice Day in 1918, and it makes me think of all of the
poets and doctors and all sorts of people who have all sorts of promise for society who have their lives cut short by war and we are the poorer for it. But this particular poem, he wrote a lot of poems, this particular one I think is best known. It’s called Dulce et Decorum Est. And that’s a Latin phrase, the entire phrase is Dulce et Decorum Est pro patria mori. And it means it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. So this is Dulce at the Quorum Est by Wilfred Owen.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, till on the haunting flares we turned our backs and towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched to sleep. Many had lost their boots, but limped on, blood shod. All went lame, all blind, drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots of gas shells dropping softly behind. Gas!
Gas! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling, fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, but someone was still yelling out and stumbling and floundering like a man in fire or lime. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light as under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in and watch the white eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face like a devil’s sick of sin. If you could hear at every jolt the blood come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer,
bitter as the cud of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues. My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie. Dolce et decorum est, pro patria mori. Mimi, I wonder before we go on, I just would like to make another statement. Susan, please.
Thank you. The difference between Armistice Day and Veterans Day. Armistice Day was identified as a day of peace. This was a war to end all wars. That’s why it was so important that, in fact, we recognize the destruction and the death of of wars and vowed to end it. Veterans Day becomes non-ending wars,
which is what the United States has been involved with since then. We have war after war after war and many more poems like the one that Mike just read because we have many more people who are destroyed by war. And I believe that that was the political significance In changing the day, that’s why on Veterans Day in most major cities, what we see are the guns and the arms and the tanks and the soldiers and the young
folks marching from military academies. So again, just. . . kind of a continuation of bridge between the difference between Armistice Day, the end of all wars, and Veterans Day,
which is the continuation of wars and war profits. Thank you. Oh, not at all. Ben, we are operating in the context of of A Trillion Dollar War Machine. You are the co-author with William Hartong of The Trillion Dollar War Machine. And as I said earlier,
research director at the Quincy Institute that’s been tracking the vast reach and audacity of the military industrial complex. As you listen to that poem, how does that coalesce with the work that you are doing? And I wonder if you can talk more about the evolution, the development of what General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower,
was to call the military-industrial complex, which of course flies exactly in the face where it’s at now, of the poem that was read and what Susan Schnall was just saying and thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me Mimi and it’s an honor to be here with you and Susan and Paul and Mike and that was a touching poem and unfortunately I think Susan is exactly right that the issues this You know,
Veterans Day and Armistice Day, the militarization personified in that poem has only continued. You know, we’ve seen the devastation and the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Gaza, Ukraine,
so many wars, many more wars around the world that the U. S. remains involved in. We don’t have a Department of Defense. The reason Bill Hartung and I called our book The Trillion Dollar War Machine is because that’s what we have.
You know, we have a trillion dollar Pentagon budget and we can only justify that by staying on this perpetual war footing and by this military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about more than 60 years ago now. It is only metastasized. It’s only gotten bigger, more influential and more powerful. Everything that Eisenhower warned us about has come to fruition and and so much more.
And so we we maintain this military footing. And unfortunately, you know, the horrors that are personified in the poem my cred are only continuing around the world. Ben, I wonder if you can read a passage of your book,
which is actually—we’re getting a preview. It’s scheduled for release on November 11th. But it’s so critically important. It puts meat on the bone for those of us who have felt and understand and witnessed, whether it’s through social media or the like, the atrocities of war.
But— To understand exactly how it’s functioning, how this machinery is being built up, is critical if we are going to do the kinds of things that Susan Schnall and Mike Ferner and Paul Cox do, which is to fight back against the military-industrial attack. So can you read us a passage to whet our appetites for a book that I know people
need and should be reading? very, very immediate on their reading list. Yeah, I’d be happy to. Here we are. We have built a nearly trillion-dollar war machine, and that machine is broken. More than half the Pentagon budget goes to private contractors every year, not to military personnel.
Meanwhile, even as Orem’s company CEOs earn $20 million per year or more, there are military families whose budgets are so stretched that they rely on food banks to make ends meet. There are also hundreds of thousands of veterans of America’s post 9-11 wars suffering from physical and psychological damage and high levels of suicide. Despite sharp increases in the budget of the Veterans Administration,
which now receives more than 360 billion per year, essential services needed to support returning military personnel are often inadequate. When all the impacts of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are taken into account, they cost U. S.
taxpayers a staggering eight trillion dollars. Much of that spending went directly to Pentagon contractors. The big five contractors alone, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics,
and Northrop Grumman, split an astonishing $2. 1 trillion in Pentagon contracts in the two decades after the 9-11 attacks as they benefited from soaring military budgets. The spending spree only continues with a near record Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2025, and now with a trillion-dollar budget in 2026. Every year,
more money is spent on the Department of Defense than on the departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, State, Justice, Commerce, Education,
and Labor combined. If these same funds had been spent on domestic needs, they would have transformed American society almost beyond imagination. They could have financed big changes that we’ve been repeatedly told we cannot afford. Those $8 trillion that the US spent on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been enough to decarbonize America’s entire electrical grid, which would have been a huge step forward in combating climate change.
There would have been enough money left over to erase all student debt. And even after that, there would still be enough funding left to quadruple the Biden administration’s investment in developing green energy and other green gas reducing measures over the next 10 years but the eight trillion dollars for the u. s wars of this century has already been spent or obligated the real question is
whether you the united states as a society can make better choices going forward that’s the end of the ex excerpt and that is the uh i i chose to leave it on that sentence because this is what i’m hoping you know we can talk about more of in this conversation with with our wonderful friends at veterans for peace And thank you for that information. You’re just reminding me of the enormous impact, the negative impact that the military has on climate change.
The fact that we build these armaments, and I’m thinking now of the military airshows, because Veterans for Peace is a very active project. protesting the use of military air shows that cost about a million dollars every time they go out and they show off the Blue Angels. All of that money, in fact, could be put into domestic priorities. But instead, not only do we spend money on armaments to create
the deleterious impact on climate change. But we use it for fun and for entertainment so we can get the society more used to seeing shows of American right and American military and saying, yes, isn’t that wonderful? And it’s like a football game where you’re looking to see who is going to win, which team is going to win.
Well, let’s go watch the Blue Angels and watch them shoot up into the sky and entertain us and have that negative impact on climate. Ben, you just got me started on this subject, but I just see it’s the impact if we spend all of this money, the Pentagon,
the war machine spends it, and how much in addition. . . Are we sending armaments and destruction to Israel to destroy the people in Gaza to create genocide? This country continues to fund corporate greed,
to do it just adding in what you just gave us in terms of numbers, how much, in fact, we are using to support the genocide in Israel. And. . .
why we continue to support this instead of taking care of the veterans who return home. And I think about our project of Veterans for Peace Save our VA that Paul is very much engaged in. Well, Paul, you just had your entry into the discussion by Susan Schnall, and I was most interested in how what Ben Freeman was saying in terms of the
expenditures and stuff juxtaposed with the enormity of the hypocrisy in the way we actually treat veterans. I mean, you are a tireless advocate for veterans’ health and the protection of VA benefits. Tell us about what’s actually happening with that. And then I would be remiss if we didn’t all collectively talk about the use now of the military, of veterans,
but of the military, to police our city against dissent. But Paul, talk about the Vietnam veterans, the veterans of Iraq, and your advocacy against the money that is spent on war for veterans’ health and protection.
Yeah, thank you, Mimi. The VA, I don’t want to put veterans on a pedestal, but You know, we are also not just the perpetrators, but also the victims of wars that the United States has put together since 1619. But the VA is a more recent construction started by Abraham Lincoln, who talked at the Gettysburg Address about helping for the veteran and his widow
and child, or an orphan, And it has had its ups and downs. In some years, it was some decades, it was in pretty good shape. During the time of the Vietnam War, it was in terrible shape. Right after World War II, it was,
you know, they did a tremendous amount to help those many millions of veterans that fought in World War II to recover and to get medical care they need for their injuries. And then it kind of hit the skids during the Vietnam era. And then by 1990, though, um the president had hired some decent people and they had hired a bunch of decent people the VA became really an exemplar of health care in this country it is the
only health care system that is comprehensive in this country that where a veteran can go in and get whatever problems health problems mental health problems physical problems that they have taken care of in a warm and inviting environment and that those hospitals, 170 hospitals around the country, really provide tremendous care. However, since 2014, the Republicans have decided to,
well, and a number of Democrats and some of the veterans organizations have decided that, oh, the VA is a cash cow that they can try to, if they can privatize it, they can get all that taxpayer money for their private corporations. Right.
And so they started in 2014 with an attack against a so-called scandal in the Phoenix VA hospital, which was really jacked up, not really much at all. And they’ve continued since then with the Mission Act and other things that they’ve done to undermine, understaff,
and ultimately destroy the VA and turn it into a into medicare medicare is being privatized now but but they were going to turn it into medicare where the government would pay private corporations to provide care to health to veterans which was not a good idea veterans are taken as a whole veterans are older sicker more damaged by their military service than the average patient in this country and that care uh that comprehensive care that the va provided
cannot and will not be replicated at the local medical supply store down the street at the shopping center or in the local rural hospitals, which are also closing. So if the VA closes many of its hospitals, the veterans will be thrown into the same health care system that is failing this country from coast to coast. And that is not the way we should be going.
What we should be doing is creating VAs for everybody that you can go in. And if you’ve got a problem, the VA will take care of it. That is called, they call it socialized medicine. I call it a right that the American people deserve. So that care and what they’re doing just this year, that Collins, the secretary of the veterans affairs has
Declared that they’re going to reduce the staffing in the VA by 30,000. That’s a tremendous number of people. That’s about 20% of our total VA population. And morale in the VA is just going down the tubes. They’ve canceled all the union contracts. Unions officers within the VA cannot use VA facilities or VA time at all for what they do. you know morale is just hitting the skids and that when people leave they retire
they move on they’re not replacing them and the VA is tremendous was already understaffed and now it’s tremendously understaffed and it’s really destroying the system meanwhile the VA medical care budget for 2026 is dropping 17% while the money allocated to send veterans down the street to the strip mall is going up by 50%. And that is, it’s well underway to destroy the VA and the American people will not be well
served by that. Not just veterans, but the VA provides research, has done, provided tremendous research, Nobel Laureate level research on a number of healthcare issues over the years. And it also provides emergency care during natural disasters.
I mean, there are a number of things that the VA does that are just irreplaceable if they destroy it. And I think it’s really important to mention, too, in terms of the different experiences that veterans have that lead to post-traumatic stress.
And I’m just going to say, you know, again, important to remember that the illness is post-traumatic stress. It is not post-traumatic stress disorder. Disorder is the disorder of this society that sends people off to war that creates war. so that we have a military industrial complex.
But we have all sorts of mental health facilities and experts in civilian society that do not know and do not understand what armed struggle creates in the individual who has to go through that. And just another quick addition to what Paul said, the VA says and the government says we are not going to decreased staffing of nurses and doctors. So all other healthcare personnel
that they don’t have a problem decreasing that staffing. If you do not have enough support staff, clerical staff, nurse aides, dietary aids, pharmaceutical departments, you do not have appropriate facilities for doctors and nurses to work in to take
appropriate care of the patients they serve. And important for all of us to remember that when you send people off to war, the responsibilities on that government and that people to take care of those who return. We have that responsibility. The government passed the PACT Act three, four years ago, Paul,
that in fact enlarged the number of issues for which veterans could get care and treatment. That also increased the 30,000 numbers for the VA, which now is being taken away from our bone spurs administrator, or whatever you want to call him. Well, there’s other things I would call him. We’ll settle for felon number 47.
But I also want to look, and Mike, I want you to talk about this before we go back and again look at the evolution and the development with Ben. of the military-industrial complex and the now $1 trillion budget. I want to ask you about your thoughts about the current administrations attacks on DEI,
diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the targeting of women and trans service members, and how that represents a rollback of rights, even within the military itself. I mean, what does that tell us about the broader direction of U.
S. militarism and militarization under Trump’s influence, as well as the use of the military for internal, to quash or terrorize internal dissent and to terrorize the immigrant populations that work and build this country. Your thoughts on that, Mike and Susan Schnall?
And then I want to get back to also. . . continuing to look at how the military-industrial complex has grown and where it is today, and whether there’s some kind of a decipherable shift by virtue of the technologizing of the military as well.
Mike? Well, Mimi, if I could, I would defer to my. . . colleagues here to talk about the impact of what this administration’s doing on trans members of the military and the other categories that you mentioned. And I’d like to join back in when you pick up the impact of the military-industrial
complex, if I can do that. Yeah, Susan Schnell, take it. There is no question, I think, for most of us in terms of what the myth of the United States stands for, which is supposed to be equality,
concern for the individual, assisting people who are in need. And the fact that we now have this government that does nothing but decimate and take away from people who are not And this is, I think we see it when we see the news every day, who is not white,
primarily male or female with long flowing hair and every hair in place, that’s a plastic Barbie. This is the idealization and it reminds me of the Stepford Wives, that this is the society that these people want to create, this white society in which everybody looks alike. This country and this society has changed dramatically over the last 50, 60 years.
It’s a struggle we’ve all been involved with, and that is that we work together We go out together, we gather together in communities that want to have change in which every individual is valued, every life is valued, cultures are valued. In fact, what has built this country is the diversity that we have.
And that because we’ve been built on this diversity of people, we need to ensure that all of us have the same rights. And that means people who go into the military. So that is the same for people of color, for women, and for transgender. And I need to send this to Paul. You know, just in terms of hollowing out the military for what they think they need to do,
this is a really stupid move. This toxic masculinity that is eliminating women or trans or, you know, just anybody that doesn’t fit Hegseth’s style of Nazism is really stupid. The Vietnamese kicked our ass by mobilizing not just the men in Vietnam against the United States,
but the women. They were snipers. They built roads. They drove trucks. They fought tooth and nail. They ran the, in the northern Vietnam, they ran the anti-aircraft guns. You know,
the women are, you know, you give a great big guy, you give a Goliath a gun, and you give a tiny little woman a gun, and it’s even Stephen, you know.
And so just in terms of what the military wants to do, it’s stupid for them, for Hegseth and those fools to be making these kinds of mistakes. In addition to just being vicious and destroying lives, it’s going to destroy the empire. And if we think Hegseth’s description of what the, quote, soldier needs to look like and how he’s going to get the fat admirals and generals
out of the Pentagon, he prances on a stage talking about this, and then the commander-in-chief loafs and kind of staggers across the stage the way I think Neanderthals did And Mike, you wanted to weigh in then, and I want to get back then to Ben to talk a little bit more about the influence of
some of the tech firms like Palantir and Peter Thiel’s Ventures and what that has meant, the fusion of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. But Mike Furna? Thank you. And what I have to say at the end will dovetail right into what you’re asking Ben about. Going back to the First World War again briefly, companies made out like criminals.
And in fact, the congressional hearings that followed World War I named a lot of these companies as war profiteers. And those congressional hearings are available for anybody who wants to look them up. So there, you know, get back to what Smedley Butler said about war is a racket and the few profit and
the many pay. Well, the companies that were building the arms and financing the war and profiting from the rebuilding after the war These companies, some of the same ones or their subsidiaries are the ones that are in the same game now.
We’ve got Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, GE, all the way down to some of the companies that Ben mentioned, companies that are financing the war. We know who some of them are that are rebuilding after the war. Carlisle Group in Iraq,
you know, the vice president was an officer in Carlisle and got us into the war. And Carlisle had these fat contracts to do some rebuilding. So it’s an insider’s game. And we keep chasing one horror after another that comes off the empire’s assembly line. And with artificial intelligence, these are going to come off the assembly line even faster.
And we’re not going to, we can’t keep up with them now, frankly. We are on the defensive and resisting where we can. But I really think if we could take some time to look at the fact that It’s the corporate form. These things have eternal life. They have an institutional memory. And the system gets over on young men and women because every generation,
there’s another bunch of young men and women that can get lied to about the glory of war and how America always stands for freedom and democracy. And behind the scenes are these companies that make the arms and finance the wars, laughing all the way to the bank. And these companies do this over and over and over again, generation after generation. So I’m hoping that one of the things we can focus on in addition to the work that we do working for peace and opposing some of these horrors is to look at the rights
that these corporations have of free speech and other constitutional protections that allow them to govern the country. They give them the power to actually determine our policy, and not just in the military field. The health care insurance companies write the health insurance policy, the highway lobby writes the transportation policy, and on and on.
So one of the things that I hope Veterans for Peace can do is when we add our voice to the movement for peace and justice is to try to look behind the scenes a little bit, take a little time to look at where these companies get their power to run the government and think about what we need to do to cut that off at that point so we’re not always following up the treadmill of the horrors that the Empire cranks out.
And again, like I said, with AI, they’re going to be coming off that assembly line even quicker. Well, Ben, your thoughts about what Mike has been saying and the influence now of the tech firms such as Palantir, Peter Thiel. I mean, where are we at?
How does your work fit into some of the things that Mike was saying? And again, we’re talking to Ben Freeman, who is a co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machines. No, and thank you, Mimi. And, you know, I really think this, if I can try to triangulate everybody’s comments,
because all of your wonderful comments got me thinking in three very linear path, if you could follow me for a second, back to Paul’s point about the gutting of the VA happening right now. That is happening. It’s very important to put that in the context of what else is happening right now. That is happening at a time when the Pentagon just got over $100 billion plus up in its budget. And so this summer, you know, we passed the big, beautiful bill.
That gives tens of billions of dollars to new weapon systems, to some of these tech firms are getting literally billions of dollars out of that. There’s always more money to buy the new weaponry at the same time that we are slashing the VA. And so you look at that and you’re like, how is that happening? And that takes me back to a point that Susan made about the spectacle that’s provided to us. Whether we realize it or not right now, we are surrounded effectively by the old Roman Colosseum.
And these entrees of militarism are presented to us wherever we go. And this is what we document in the Trillion Dollar War Machine. You go to the movies. The Pentagon’s there. The Pentagon has been involved in over 2,500 television shows and blockbuster movies. You see the Marvel movies. Almost every single movie in the Marvel franchise has been influenced,
had script corrections made by the Pentagon. Sometimes they alter the entire plot lines of movie. Well, you think, well, maybe I’ll just listen to the news. You know, I’ll take some of that in. Well, it turns out Pentagon contractors are giving millions of dollars to think tanks. And when you very often, not on not on this station,
but very often the experts you hear opining about foreign policy, they hail from think tanks that are funded by the very warm machine that we’re talking about right now. So your news gets biased from that going in colleges and universities, huge front funding from military contractors. And to your point about the tech firms, you know,
I was coming home from work and I was on the D. C. Metro system tonight. And guess what I saw in an ad on the D. C. Metro, which is which is just loaded with defense contractor propaganda. Next week is defense tech week in D.
C. And guess who’s brought to you by the defense tech firms who were led to Mike’s point on this. We are we are told that, yes, the Pentagon’s broken. You know, everything is wrong. But that’s the old guard, the new guard. They’re going to fix everything. The Peter Thiels of the world, the Elon Musk of the world, we’re told.
But we’ve been told this before for decades and decades. You’re always told some new miracle weapon is going to fix it. If you remember, for your listeners who can remember back to the 80s when we had the Star Wars program. You know, if that sounds a lot like Golden Dome, that’s because it is. And after tens of billions of dollars dumped into that Star Wars missile defense
program, we have nothing to show for it. And this is the concern with the defense tech firms coming up is that we’re going to throw a lot of money at them. They’re going to over promise and under deliver. And to Mike’s point, it’s the same racket that it’s always been. They are going to privatize those gains and socialize those losses,
which means you, dear taxpayer, will be helping to subsidize defense contractors for years to come. And would you say that this is also not building our economy, but actually destroying our economy? We came from Eisenhower, who warned us,
which you’ve referenced in some ways, the military-industrial complex. He warned about that. But today, it’s metastasized into a war machine on steroids, consuming not just our tax dollars, but our humanity as well.
So is this an economy that which is part of what’s going on with Israel? Actually, Israel benefits financially from its atrocities, its Holocaust against the Palestinians. Is that the case here? Or are we, in essence, destroying our economy? It is an economy of death.
Me. That’s what it is. Oh, that’s Mike. Okay, Mike, you can get in, and I want to hear from Ben on that as well. Okay, it’s an economy of death. I’ll let somebody who’s got a better memory than mine quote that famous line from Dr.
King about when a nation spends more on armaments than it spends on social uplift, it’s approaching spiritual death, and that’s exactly where we’re at right now. I completely agree with Mike, but even if you take a sort of callous, pure economic mindset to it, spending on the military industrial complex is a terrible investment.
We know, the research has been done on this. We know that investments in any number of other things that the government does, investments in higher education, investments in green energy, investments in In infrastructure, these are all better for the American economy than defense spending. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to think about it,
because if the military industrial complex, you know, does what it says, things go boom, they blow up. They don’t help other people. You build a school, you build a hospital, you build a road.
Other people can use that. It can help the American people grow and to prosper. I’d like to take off on what Ben said there for just a second, and I’d like to challenge us. And Ben, this isn’t personally directed at you. This is to the movement. Back in the early 80s, before I joined Veterans for Peace,
I started looking at military spending. And the Andersons out of Michigan State did some wonderful research that proved the very thing that you’re talking about, Ben. You invest a billion dollars in the military or any of these other things, and you get a hell of a lot more jobs and, of course, more benefits to society.
That was in the early 80s. How many decades ago was that? And we’re still going back to saying this, you know, well, we get more money, we get better investment if we don’t put it into the military.
Well, we know that. But I guess the challenge that I would throw out, not just to us here, but to the movement, is when are we going to come up with a plan that’s going to do something about the ability of these corporations to keep running the government and doing this crap that we keep proving over and over again is not any good.
I would add my own voice for socialist revolution there, but we’ll leave that for another discussion. But I do want to raise, in the time we have left, Paul, your thoughts about any of the things that we’ve said, and Susan Schnall as well,
but I specifically want to look at your thoughts about the use of the military now as a personal. . . army for Trump, for Trumpism, and which I think has,
of course, nothing to do with the issue of safety for the populace, but has everything to do with the possible declaration of martial law. And this is all a testing ground. This is all a testing ground for whatever the dissent may come down the pike at the totalitarian, the authoritarian activity of Trump,
whether it’s to stay in office indefinitely and or to enforce really Gestapo tactics against the populace and to prevent dissent. So your thoughts on that, Paul Cox, and similarly, Susan Schnall and Then perhaps a minute or two of each one of you to wrap up this day and this very important conversation that we’ve been having. Thank you, Mimi. I’m not sure I have anything eloquent to say about this.
The clearly fascist intentions of our president and his lackeys, his bootlickers. But it’s, you know, when the president says he wants to send the military in to Portland for training purposes, if nothing else, That is an extraordinarily scary thing to even contemplate.
In the past, we’ve always trained for the next war by having a war with poor people in other countries. Now we’re going to have a war with our own citizens. If that’s not the snake eating its own tail, I don’t know what is. And I think I’d just leave it at that. I’ll be glad to add to that.
I think what we absolutely all have to do, and particularly Veterans for Peace, we need to go and talk to those active duty folks, to the soldiers and to the National Guard, and say to them very clearly, what you do today, you will live with for the rest of your life.
Is this what you want to live with, that you are going into communities to destroy them, to export them, to harm them, to tear apart families, to take children from their parents? You will live with that.
And you need to think about it. Even in the military, you have a responsibility to the self and the self that you will become. And I think that’s really an important message that we get out there and that Veterans for Peace supports those who oppose ICE, that in fact, we will stand with our immigrants, that we will stand in poor communities,
and that we will stand to deal with the military that’s sent in. But in addition, we need to educate those soldiers and those people in the National Guard. I just need to say quickly something about artificial intelligence that we haven’t mentioned on this program, that when you have artificial intelligence in charge of drone warfare, you take out any kind of the human element that remains with hopefully some sense of right and wrong and conscience that has some hesitancy in killing other people.
Artificial intelligence, folks, it’s not just everything is going to be all right and we’re going to solve every disease and every illness out there. It is training again and enforcing the power of the military industrial complex. It won’t be Darth Vader that you see who becomes a human. It will be a machine,
and that machine will be trained to eliminate, quote, who they see as the enemy. And it won’t be just Israelis. It’s going to be artificial intelligence. We have that responsibility, and I just need to say this,
we have that responsibility to stop the carnage in Gaza. I know that there are multiple trouble spots all over the world and that American military is all over the world. We need to make an example of what the peace movement can do, of what those of us who fight for social justice can do, and that is stop that carnage in Gaza and understand that as horrible as the things are that are going on today,
it will last for decades to come, as has the carnage that we caused in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. People continue to be sickened and die from what we did. What we did, it’s not just the government, it’s what we, the American people,
if we don’t pull ourselves together and do something, to stop it, to stop Trump and to stop what Mike Furners called the madman arsonist. We need to do it and we can do it if we work together. And that is a constant plea that we have in Veterans for Peace. We need to all work together to stop what is going on in our country today and what it has become. And Ben Freeman, the, again, co-author with William Hartung of The Trillion Dollar War Machine.
Where does your book and what you espouse in there fit into what Susan Schnall was saying? And we just have about a minute or two to kind of sum that up. And then I want to hear a final word from Paul Cox and Mike Furna. Ben? Yeah, I’ll be very quick. We hope this book is a tool in the hands of folks like Susan, Paul, and Mike. We hope this book is your sword.
We talk about swords to plowshares. Our book is filled with the information we think people need. to create a level playing field in this fight against these corporations who want to dominate the information environment. So, you know, if you go out and get a copy of the Trillion Dollar War Machine,
I think you’ll be at least armed with the information you need. To Mike’s point of how can we reverse these things that we know about, you know, it starts with having that information and we begin with, and we’ve tried to pack all that information into just 300 pages in the Trillion Dollar War Machine. So we hope this movement and our wonderful friends at Veterans for Peace use this.
Yeah, and I will say that it tracks the incredible web, this vast web of war profiteers, of lobbyists, of think tanks, and Hollywood partners, as Ben has been indicating.
And the reason I mentioned that is because it’s a perfect prima. It’s deep, it’s profound, but it’s elementary in some ways to give us to give us the tools to use to do what Susan was talking about, which is to have an arms embargo against immediate arms embargo against and its use of weaponry to destroy, to commit genocide and ethnocide against the Palestinian people. And Paul Cox,
Mike Furner, if you can take maybe a minute apiece and take us out on this armistice celebration that we’re having to counter what is the war machine and.
Veterans Day transformed into a day to end war. Mike Furna, Paul Cox.
Thank you, Mimi. Yeah, my. . . Last bit would be to say, as an example, that I look forward to the day when Ben can ride the DC Metro and not see any
advertisements for military corporations. And we won’t see them anywhere in the country because advertising will no longer be free speech, because we will have amended the Constitution and taken the ability of corporations to influence and pervert society with those ads and say, you no longer have that as free speech because you’re not a human being. Beautifully said.
That’s what I hope. Paul Cox, 30 seconds. Yeah, no country wants to pay the cost of its wars. Period. We haven’t paid the cost of Agent Orange or unexploded ordinance in Vietnam. And the Vietnam War in 2019 dollars only cost $850 billion. And now we have a defense budget that’s over a trillion a year.
You know, the entire war cost less than one year of our national budget. And where are we going with this? We have consumed the earth so badly that we need to really stop and take a look at who we are as a species. And I think that’s really kind of an issue. Paul Cox, Vietnam veteran and advocate for veterans’ health and protection of VA benefits. Ben Freeman, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine.
Susan Schnall, president of Veterans for Peace. Mike Ferner. former president of Veterans for Peace, activist extraordinaire, and my friend from the work that he has done in support of the Free, Free Palestine movement. I’m Mimi Rosenberg.
I have been really pleased to have these four folks with us to fight for. Nothing else other than a real peace, which means equal rights and justice for all to build towards peace. Thanks for listening.
