Guns and butter
Building up the military while tearing down social programs
The production possibilities frontier (PPF) for guns versus butter. Points like X that are outside the PPF are impossible to achieve. Points such as B, C, and D illustrate the trade-off between guns and butter: at these levels of production, producing more of one requires producing less of the other. Points located along the PPF curve represent sustainable combinations of each type of production in a world where scarcity is a binding constrain. A, however, is inside of the PPF and represents a combination of output that is not utilizing all available resources.
Perhaps the best known use of the phrase (in translation) was in Nazi Germany. In a speech on January 17, 1936, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels stated: "We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns." Referencing the same concept, sometime in the summer of the same year another Nazi official, Hermann Göring, announced in a speech: "Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."[The Columbia World of Quotations. Columbia University Press. 1996. ISBN 0-231-10298-4.]
If you believe that quoting Goebbels in relation to the Trump/Musk regime is an exaggeration, consider this:
“When Nazis Are Quoted from the Bench: MAGA’s March Toward Tyranny”
Republican Congressman Keith Self, during a House hearing on censorship and public discourse, looked into the camera and quoted Joseph Goebbels — Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda — as if he were citing a respected authority on governance. “It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.”
Donald Trump Announces $1 Trillion Pentagon Budget: 'Have to Be Strong'
President Donald Trump has said his administration will raise the Pentagon's budget to $1 trillion, a record high for the U.S. military.
"We have to build our military and we're very cost-conscious, but the military is something that we have to build," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. "And we have to be strong because you've got a lot of bad forces out there now."
This Executive Order Reveals the Trump-Musk Endgame
The orders and actions of Donald Trump and his copresident Elon Musk are all part of a piece. The most obvious goal is to establish authoritarian, single-party control in the United States of America, and we know that because they wrote down their plan in Project 2025 and have been executing that plan every day since they took office. But we should understand why they want such power.
It’s not just so they can win the culture wars; Trump and Musk are misogynists and provable racists, but their hatred of women and Black people (and gay people and trans people and Latino people and Muslim people and truth and science and journalism and fact-based reality) are all just their means to an end. The thing Trump and Musk value most of all is money. Their entire regime is best understood as a criminal junta whose end goal is to redirect the wealth of the nation into their own pockets. They are running a kleptocracy, and they’ve figured out that fascism is actually the quickest path to riches.
Elon Musk's fat new government contract will make your blood boil
The U.S. Space Force announced on April 4 that Musk’s SpaceX was among three companies awarded government contracts for the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 program. Space X will receive more than $5.9 billion of the $13.7 billion in spending that was announced.
While building the war machine, Trump continues to denigrate veterans.
Trump's war on veterans targets program to help them keep their homes
The Department of Veterans Affairs is ending a program that has helped over 17,000 veterans attain homeownership. It is just the latest in a series of attacks and slights against veterans from President Donald Trump.
Make no mistake, the Trump administration’s fascist agenda is not a sudden departure from previous blue and red operations, but simply a ramp-up of already established policies, for example the Biden administration’s failure to provide help to North Carolina after the manufactured weather disaster as a means to facilitate corporate access to lithium deposits.
States feel the pain as Trump team schemes to ‘eliminate’ FEMA
… according to Smoky Mountain News, a county in North Carolina with about $15 million in Hurricane Helene damages has yet to receive a cent from FEMA
As we discussed in a recent post, Fortress America: Locking down the US—Fascism steps out from behind the curtain, the build-up of the US military and the various threats surrounding this, including the takeover of Greenland and the Panama Canal, are part of a larger international strategy (involving China, Russia, and India) to carve up the world into spheres of influence, as US dominance via Federal Reserve Notes (a privately controlled currency) begins to wane.
Why is BRICS+ suddenly running everything?
BRICS+ collectively represents nearly half of the world’s population and is set to overtake the G7 in terms of global GDP share by 2028. The figures underscore the critical role of BRICS in the international arena, showcasing its influence over essential sectors like agriculture, energy, manufacturing, and the extraction of minerals.
At the Kazan summit in October 2024, BRICS+ leaders invited 13 more countries to join as partners. The new BRICS partner states which accepted the invitation are Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda, Nigeria, Algeria, and Uzbekistan. On January 6, 2025, Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populus country, joined BRICS as a full member, making it the first Southeast Asian state to join the bloc, as well as the tenth member of BRICS.
BRICS member states’ combined GDP accounts for more than 41% of global GDP. India is 8% of world GDP, Russia over 3.5%, Brazil over 2.4%, and Indonesia 2.4%, while China’s economy accounts for approximately 19.5% of the world’s GDP.
The question remains whether increasing the military budget will address the deficiencies in US missile performance and whether such expenditures will continue to enable the dominance of US troops in over 160 countries. One glaring example of arsenal failures is the situation in Ukraine which, at the beginning, served as a profitable dump of outdated weapons for armament manufacturers; and which, later, served as an example of Russian technical and strategic superiority as they continue to gain ground.
Let’s recap the Ukraine timeline from 2014 to the present:
(1) The US was behind much of the political upheaval that toppled the democratically elected (and pro-Russian) government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
(2) The US supplied arms to the fascist pro-nationalist militias that were attacking Russian speaking minorities and businesses in the Donbas
(3) The US obstructed efforts by Zelenskyy to end the conflict in the Donbas (part of the ticket upon which he was elected)
(4) The US encouraged Zelenskyy to talk darkly about Ukraine having its own nuclear weapons and drew Ukrainian army units into NATO exercises.
(5) The US insisted that Ukraine renege on all agreements made with Russia.
(6) Back in 2022, just a few weeks after the Russian invasion a peace deal was ready to be signed - but the US blocked the deal.
(7) Despite the advice of Ukrainian military officers on the ground, the US forced Ukraine to plan and execute grand offensive attacks for the sake of domestic US opinion - the offensives were all disasters and contributed directly to the defeat we now see.
( 8 ) NATO has known for at least 18 months (and probably longer) that the war was a lost cause for Ukraine but kept pushing Ukraine to commit more and more troops to the front, displaying a depth of callous cynicism and disregard for life that almost defies belief.
(9) NATO has consistently failed to supply Ukraine with the shells and ammunition it needed — and knew full well that it would be unable to do so throughout.
(10) Once it became clear that the war was lost the US engaged in ridiculous 'peace talks' in Saudi Arabia that excluded the winning Russian side.
(11) With the election of Trump - the US has thrown Ukraine aside, demanding a losers reparations in the form of mineral assets that are now under Russian control.
(12) In a final ignominy, Trump now blames Ukraine for the war with Russia saying that they could have made a deal to stop it all - which is true but the UA blocked peace oft and over!
(13) Trump is now concluding the terms of Ukraine's defeat in secret talks with Russia that neither Ukraine nor Europe are invited to!
Ukraine's economy is wrecked, its infrastructure destroyed, huge swathes of territory are lost, an entire generation of fathers and sons have laid down their lives for nothing.
Trump’s position, blaming Ukraine for the war, is a lie that is coming home to roost, as he feigns surprise that Putin is unwilling to agree to his absurd terms given the situation on the ground.
U.S. negotiators outmatched by Russians in Ukraine talks, analysts say
Trump’s display of temper last weekend — when he criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin for seeking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s replacement even before peace talks could take place — was the first tacit admission that the talks so far are not going as planned, with the Kremlin offering no meaningful compromises despite a number of important gestures from the United States.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed Trump’s brief flash of ire on Friday, saying that the administration needs to “begin to see real progress” from Russia soon, “or we’ll have to conclude that they’re not interested in peace.”
As we have discussed, it’s a real possibility that the US strategy is to pretend to engage in good faith negotiations and then hand off the war it started to the EU, which has already ramped up military conscription and deployed troops along its entire eastern border with Russia, Ukraine being the only indeterminate demarcation.
* * *
NEW: Our two-volume published work, 7 Steps to Global Economic and Spiritual Transformation, is available at Volume I, Access to Tools, here and here and at Volume II, Application of Tools, here.