As with the United States where some 74 percent of the plantation workers of Slavelandia are living paycheck-to-paycheck, across Europe—thanks to their governments fighting the COVID War which destroyed the lives and livelihoods of countless millions and the sanctions they imposed on Russia—households are suffering from the worst cost of living crisis since World War II.

According to a study released yesterday by the Financial Times real incomes have fallen 6.5 percent since the COVID War was launched in 2020. 

And now, the politicians that created the socio-economic hardships are making a bad situation worse by stealing more taxpayer money to ramp up their war machine. 

The money EU countries spent on their militaries in 2022 has been unprecedented and appears to show that they are preparing for a world war, according to a recent report. 

WSWS, citing the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, reported that the biggest jump was the 13 percent increase by U.S. allies in Europe. The report said the European continent is “once again being turned into an armed camp.”

The report said Central and Western European military budgets hit a combined $345 billion, which is 30 percent higher than in 2013. The U.S. spends $877 billion on its military, which the report noted is three times the spending of China, which is in second place.

The WSWS report noted that Sweden, Finland, Poland, and Lithuania have all increased spending by at least 10 percent in 2022. 

The report noted that France announced plans to increase its budget by a third. France and Germany both vowed to spend 2 percent of their GDPs on their militaries. (See “RAMPING UP WWIII: MACRON INCREASING DEFENSE SPENDING” 24 Jan 2023, “MORE EVIDENCE POLS BOOKED PROFITS OFF OF U.S. RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR SPENDING” 10 Jan 2023, and “JAPAN DOUBLES UP MILITARY SPENDING, ENDS PACIFIST DEFENSE STRATEGY” 20 Dec 2022.)

Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, told a German newspaper recently that he believes that 2 percent will increase after the upcoming alliance meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, because “everyone sees that we need to invest more.”

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute noted that globally, countries spent $2.24 trillion on their militaries in the last year, or the equivalent of 2.2 percent of the world’s gross domestic product on arms.

“The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) has even posited that Europe is the victim of US ‘vassalisation’, notably in light of the Ukraine War. Visions of strategic autonomy are more distant than ever,” Binoy Kampmark, a commonwealth scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge wrote in the Eurasia Review. 

He wrote: “whether Europe chooses to throw in its lot with Washington or not, the arms dealers and manufacturers will do a merry jig.”

He noted that Warsaw, which grew its military by 11 percent, to $16.6 billion in 2022 has made no secret that it “wishes to have the continent’s largest army.”

TRENDPOST: The WSWS report noted that it is nearly impossible to provide an accurate assessment of how much military aid Ukraine received in 2022 and put the number at around $30 billion, but Stoltenberg said the figure is more like $70 billion. Indeed, Ukraine’s military may have spent more than Russia on its defense last year—even with Russia’s 9.2 percent increase of its own budget. Ukraine’s spending increased by 640 percent or 34 percent of its GDP in 2022. (That total does not include military aid supplied to Ukraine.)

Yet, there are hardly any peace movements and not a word from the mainstream media or politicians that peace is more profitable than war.