You’ve probably played it. Your friend poses a question that starts with “Would you rather...”
Sometimes the dilemma is goofy or harmless: Would you rather live on a boat or in a tree house? Sometimes it’s a little harder: Would you rather be stranded in the jungle or the desert? Good players make the question fun or challenging. Would you rather only be able to listen to a song you hate or never listen to music again? You get the idea.
Today, the stakes are higher. It’s life and death.
You Decide
Every weekday, the U.S. military pays corporations to develop technology for war and espionage.
Well, what if we injected democracy into the process?
Would you rather…
pay $8.4 billion to the corporation RTX for “management, material, and services associated with the sustaining engineering and product support services” for surface-to-air missiles
OR
send 175,000 young adults to university?1
Would you rather…
pay the corporation Anduril $200,000,000 a year to consolidate different IT products into “unified, mission-ready” technology for the Army’s “operational and business needs”
OR
establish 48,780 community gardens across the country every year?2
Would you rather…
pay the corporation Tyto Athene $10 billion for military cyber infrastructure around the United States
OR
cover a year of medicaid for 1,162,790 people?3
Such choices happen daily. Destruction instead of communion. Greed instead of care.
Every day, the American people get stiffed, the ruling class gets richer, and the wars continue.
Do you now understand why the ruling class rejects democracy in the United States?
It can’t allow democracy. Allowing democracy would result in system change, an end to the wars, and a government by and for the people.
Christian Sorensen is a researcher focused on the U.S.-based corporations profiting from war. He is associate director of the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN).
The RTX contract increase was $8.4 billion.
$8,400,000,000 / $12,000 (average in-state public university tuition for one year)
=
700,000 students.
700,000 / 4 years = 175,000 students.
$20 billion (total value of the 10-year contract) / 10 years
=
$200,000,000 per year.
$200,000,000 / $4,100 (estimated average cost for a community garden) = 48,870 gardens.
Well done, Christian.
Put bluntly, would you rather live fully or die abjectly in yet another wasteful and worthless war?
Great way to illustrate trade-offs and to suggest the scale of U.S. expenditures on militarism as compared with spending on domestic needs. Ending with your succinct explanation of why we have only the hollow shell of democracy remaining.