Islam Times - US always ready to ‘execute violence’ against other nations

Islam Times - The massive US military budget underscores Washington’s desire to continue its global military interventions, despite President Donald Trump’s promise to scale back US military commitments abroad during his election campaign, an American peace activist and political commentator says.

The US Senate on Monday voted to give the military $716 billion for 2019, approving one of the biggest military budgets in modern American history despite concerns from some economists and lawmakers about the rapidly rising federal deficit.

Critics say Congress should not be giving a significant boost to spending at the Pentagon at a moment of relatively diminished American military involvement around the globe.

Experts say the dramatic increase in military spending will push the government further into the red and increasing the amount the federal government spends on debt interest payments.

The latest US military budget “is indicative of what really is the political DNA of the United States,” said Mark Glenn, a writer and co-founder of the Crescent and Cross Solidarity Movement, an interfaith forum dedicated to uniting Muslims and Christians against Zionists.

“The United States is an empire, and irrespective of what type of government happens to be in power at the moment, whether its Republican or Democrat, whether its left or right, whether its conservative or liberal it makes no difference, the United States is still an invading, marauding empire,” Glenn said.

“Irrespective of what side of the political spectrum the United States happens to be on…it still carries that gun with at all times and with an itchy trigger finger ready to execute violence against other nations that happen to be standing in the way of something that the United States wants,” he added.

The latest military budget follows the logic of an unbreakable trend to date: The United States has waged war 93 percent of the time since it became a country 242 years ago in 1776, according to the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG), an independent research and media organization based in Montreal, Canada.

In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the US did not wage any wars. No US president truly qualifies as being considered a peacetime president, CRG said.