Bush's blasting budget
United States President Bush's 2004 budget pledges more to the army and less to the environment or health, writes Moheb Costandi
On 3 February, with this year's budget still unfinished, United States President George W Bush presented Congress with a $2.3 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2004.
The budget reflects the administration's commitments to the "war on terrorism", "homeland defence" and "transformation" of the US military, proposes a modest increase in overall expenditure (4 per cent), an increase of 5.5 per cent in defence spending, and creates a deficit of $307 billion, the largest in the country's history.
After mandatory spending on social security, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, retirements, entitlements, benefits and interest payments, approximately half of the remaining $782 billion of non-mandatory spending ($379 billion) will go to the Department of Defence (DoD). Education and health budgets will both increase to $55 billion and $49 billion, respectively. Many departments will either increase at or around the projected inflation rate (1.9 per cent), or decrease.
The newly created Department for Homeland Security, a merger of 22 governmental agencies, will receive $36.2 billion, an increase of 37 per cent on comparable programmes in 2002.
The defence budget includes a 4 per cent increase for weapons procurement -- nearly $78 billion for an aircraft carrier, a destroyer, helicopters, and an array of fighter and bomber aircraft, including $4.4 billion on F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, manufactured by the Anglo-American Lockheed-Martin/BAE alliance. New classes of carriers, destroyers and aircraft are being developed, such as the DDX destroyer, for which Northrup Grumman has a $2.9 billion contract.
The "transformation" of the US military will, says the DoD, "ensure that the US military maintains its technological superiority... to meet the challenges of an uncertain world."
Therefore, the emphasis is shifting to information technology to create a more efficient and dynamic "network- centric" military, connected by digital and laser satellite communication systems to act as "nodes" in an "integrated" battlefield, which are "capable of projecting power rapidly, precisely, and on a global basis".
This is the beginning of the "revolution in military affairs" which, according to some analysts, will make futuristic warfare seem more like playing a computer game than being in the trenches of World War I.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, such as the Global Hawk surveillance craft which was deployed in Afghanistan, will form part of this new hi-tech arsenal. The DoD will continue "advanced space programmes" and "modernise intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and electronic warfare systems" to gain "information superiority".
Although spending on scientific research and development will be the highest yet at $123 billion, more than half of that sum ($62.7 billion) will go to the DoD, an increase of 9.1 per cent. The entire 9.1 per cent will be spent on developing new weapons systems. More research grants will be awarded to mathematics, nano- technology and information technology projects with direct applications in the new digital battlefield.
The research budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has doubled to over $25 billion since 1998, will only increase by around two per cent; funding for many other institutions will remain the same. The number of NIH grants for bioterrorism-related projects will double to 660, whereas only 21 new grants will be awarded for work unrelated to biological defence.
President Bush's lack of concern about the environment was evident as soon as he came into office, when he rejected plans for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the industrialised countries at the Kyoto Conference on Climate Change two years ago.
Prospects of the Bush administration implementing any beneficial change in environmental policy are not good; the budget proposes to slash Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding by 11.5 per cent.
Subsidies will go to timber companies, resulting in increased logging, a move which, according to Bush, will reduce the risk of forest fires. Funding for conservation, on the other hand, will decrease, and investments in improving water quality will plummet by a huge 32 per cent compared with 2002.
Money allocated to developing renewable energy programmes, such as solar and geothermal energy, which are cleaner than fossil fuels, will be reduced, as will funding for the enforcement of the environmental law.
Clearly, President Bush is too busy upgrading his army to concern himself with trivial matters such as public health, global warming, biodiversity or AIDS in Africa, which will get less than half of the $1 billion pledged by Bush in the first year of a decade-long plan.
Reductions in EPA funding amount to fewer restrictions on American industry, the world's largest polluter -- and the amount of pollutants and toxins created by American industry can only increase. Trying to combat pollution, of course, equates directly with lower profits, and Mr Bush wouldn't want to upset his big business buddies.
These budget details will be probably overshadowed by Bush's Medicare reforms and proposed tax cuts, which critics argue will only benefit the wealthy, just as its announcement was overshadowed by the Columbia disaster.
Next year, the Bush administration will spend over eight times more on defence than it will on either education or health. The six-year-plan proposes at least a $20- billion annual increase in defence spending; this will approach $500 billion by 2006 and will total $2.7 trillion over the six year period. The estimated deficit associated with the six-year-plan will be almost $1 trillion.
The Bush administration is pouring astronomical amounts of money into the development of increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction -- "killer applications" for the "defence of the homeland" and the "war on terrorism", and the administration can continue to increase its defence budget -- economic growth will keep the budget at about three per cent of the gross domestic product, making the defence budget look stable.
Meanwhile, the American, and now British, media continue to instill fear in the public, making them feel that the weapons are actually needed. An empire needs a well-oiled war-machine, and effective propaganda, if it is to achieve its ambitions.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 20 - 26 February 2003 (Issue No. 626)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/626/in2.htm