Ukraine Part 4 July 27, 2022

Intro music: Monolith by Fear Factory

Hello and welcome to another episode of Left to it all, I am your host C.M. Phillips.

Today we will be continuing with The Russia-Ukraine Conflict, part 4.

An article from the WSWS website titled: “Who will pay for Biden’s new “forever war”? By Andre Damon on July 1st.

“This week, the United States and its NATO allies pledged to increase their troop presence in Europe seven-fold in order to prepare for what they called “warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors”–that is, war against Russia and China.

The NATO members declared that they would increase their “high readiness forces” from 40,000 to 300,000. Biden announced the US would send another 20,000 troops to Europe amid the escalating war with Russia, accompanied by the permanent deployment of guided missile destroyers and F-35 aircraft.

The US, which spends more on its armed forces than the next 10 largest militaries combined, has increased its military spending for six years in a row. Biden’s military budget for 2023, already the largest on record, was boosted another 6 percent by a vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee, bringing the total to $858 billion.

Since the start of the Biden administration, the US has pledged over $50 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Zelensky stated that the country needs at least $60 billion a year in aid to continue its war effort, a figure equivalent to nearly half of Ukraine’s pre-war economic output.

Last year, when Biden announced the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said, “We’ve been a nation too long at war. If you’re 20 years old today, you have never known an
America at peace.” He declared, “It’s time to end the forever war.”

Now Biden is committing the American population to a new perpetual war, asserting that there are no limits to the resources that must be devoted to it.
Asked Thursday at a news conference at the NATO Summit in Madrid to “explain what that means to the American people” and whether he was pledging “indefinite support from the United States for Ukraine,” Biden said “We are going to support Ukraine as long as it takes.”

Another reporter asked about the “high price of gasoline in the United States and around the world,” inquiring, “How long is it fair to expect American drivers and drivers around the world to pay that premium for this war?”

Biden reiterated, “As long as it takes.”
No one thought to ask Biden an obvious question: How long will “it” take? What will be the cost of this open-ended war, and what will be the consequences?
The United States is spearheading a global conflict that threatens the lives of millions of people and, if it develops into a nuclear exchange, the fate of humanity itself.

Can anyone imagine, moreover, that a war against Russia, the aim of which is to overthrow the government of the world’s largest country, coupled with a war against China, the world’s second-largest economy, can be achieved without totally impoverishing the American population?

The social and economic consequences of the militarization of society pledged by the US and its allies at the NATO summit are incalculable. In every country, government spending on public health and social infrastructure is to be gutted to free up resources for the war effort.

The costs of the war are to be imposed onto the working class through the dismantling of social programs and the demand that workers accept a reduction in real wages in the name of the “national interest....Not a single Democratic member of Congress has criticized Biden’s pledge of endless resources for the war effort...."