NATO Delivers Its Billionaires’ Message to the Public

14 December 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On December 12th, NATO warned its non-U.S. members that they all need to increase sharply their military expenses and cut back on non-military expenses, or else Russia will do to them what it now is doing to Ukraine. Here is why that warning was issued:

Basically, ever since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the mega-corporations that derive all or most of their incomes from selling to the U.S. Government and to its allied Governments — corporations such as Lockheed Martin — have boomed like never before and have been increasing their market-values by far more, enormously more, than the rest of the U.S. stock-market has. You can see here the graph showing this. At the very same time when the only possible foreign danger to America’s national security ended (so that a person would have expected the opposite to happen), these firms took off like a rocket, growing so fast that they’ve been the reason America’s economy has been growing faster than in the EU and almost as fast as the entire world’s economy has been growing.

In other words: America’s economy would have performed far less well after 1990 if the ‘defense’ (or ‘offense’?) stocks were sinking as they should have been doing, instead of booming as they actually did.

The U.S. Government might be controlled by firms such as Lockheed Martin, since these are the firms that need to control the U.S.-and-allied Governments in order to be able to control their markets, but the U.S. Government controls its NATO military alliance against Russia, and is now trying to expand this alliance or else create an equivalent to it in the Asia-Pacific region, so as to expand the U.S. economy even more in the future, by increasing even more than it already has done, the wealth of the owners of America’s ‘defense’ (or is it “aggression”) firms.

According to SIPRI, the U.S. spent on “defense” in 2023 $916.0147 billion. America’s GDP in 2023 was $27.36 trillion. So, according to SIPRI’s numbers, America spends 3.3% of its GDP on “defense.” However, SIPRI is and always has been a propaganda-agency for the U.S. Government (which might also be a reason why SIPRI’s web-site is very user-hostile), and more than a third of U.S. military expenses are and have been being paid out of other federal Departments than the “Defense” Department — expenditures that SIPRI ignores — in order to fool the world into thinking that the U.S. Government isn’t spending at least 50% of the entire world’s military expenses as it is and long has been doing. The U.S. is now spending at least $1.5 trillion per year on its military, which is at least $504 billion per year more than SIPRI’s 2023 count — 63% more. As a percentage of GDP, this is 5.48% of America’s GDP, instead of 3.3%.

Other nations, including the other members of America’s NATO alliance, are not playing any such propaganda-games with the “defense” numbers that the U.S. and its agents are doing. The only significant way in which SIPRI’s numbers are way off is this — the U.S. Government’s trick just referred to.

On July 9th, America’s Aviation Week magazine totaled SIPRI’s nation-by-nation data and headlined “Global Defense Spending Surges”, reporting that “global defense outlays have reached $2.3 trillion in 2024, surging past 2021’s $2 trillion.” If one subtracts the $916B that SIPRI allocated to the U.S. Government, that leaves $1.384T for all other countries, so that in 2023 or 2024, America, at an actual $1.5+ trillion, was spending 1.5/2.3 = 65% OF TOTAL ANNUAL WORLD MILITARY EXPENDITURES.

Donald Trump is trying to force the other NATO-member-nations to match the SIPRI low-balled U.S. 3.3%-of-GDP figure, and it’s not in order to protect any of these nations from what happened to Ukraine (as NATO’s warning on December 12th alleged), because what happened to Ukraine is that in February 2014 the U.S. Government took control over Ukraine in a bloody coup, and the U.S. Government’s selected appointees to run that country started the civil war there against the country’s Russian-speaking population and aimed to get Ukraine into NATO so that America will be able to post a nuclear missile there 300 miles, or five minutes of missile-flying-time, away from evaporating Russia’s central command in The Kremlin. Obviously, no NATO-member-nation faces the danger that Ukraine does. But propaganda wins the day in the U.S.-and-allied nations; so, NATO announces this.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.