Manaford millions and US National Security

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-inside-paul-manafort-money-machine-20180223-story.html  Manafort’s offshore millions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-seeking-400-million-to-replace-lab-for-deadliest-germs/2018/02/23/9d45df62-18ce-11e8-930c-45838ad0d77a_story.html?utm_term=.464e3c5016ba  CDC Biosecurity labs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-kleptocracy/2017/01/04/42b30d72-c78f-11e6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html    $32 trillion in Offshore accounts

What’s the connection between Manafort’s offshore millions and US national security?  It has nothing to do with Russia as you might think.  It has everything to do with the a global economic system that allows people like Manafort, drug cartel kingpins, and government kleptocrats - like Russia’s billionaire president Putin -- stashing trillions in cash in legal offshore accounts.  Trillions that could go to addressing the dire human needs globally that underlie a range of biosecurity risk to every American.  (Shockingly, even a few US states have similar banking laws that make them legal repositories for an estimated $12 trillion from such ‘private’ entities.)

Now consider today’s news report regarding the aging of CDC’s most important biosecurity facilities.  At 15 year and aging they must continue research on the most highly infectious and non-curable viral diseases now know.  They are in funding competition for limited resources with dozens of other vital (and some not-so-vital) government agencies.   And it will take 4 years to safely upgrade them.

With the current and growing risk of pandemics, the slow spread of new or re-emerging infectious diseases (think HIV/AIDS), or the loss of our antibiotic arsenal, all being inevitable threats, time is not on our side.  Then there is the not inevitable but increasing likely criminal use of engineered biological WMD.  Bioterrorism can be as catastrophic to American lives, prosperity, and national security as a limited nuclear exchange.   Engineering of bioweapons is relatively easy compared to nuclear WMD and the technology to do it is ubiquitous and affordable technology.  And the results anonymous,  easy to deliver, and then multiply and spread by themselves.

Our security would be far better served by freezing and ceasing some of these offshore accounts and devoting the fresh resources to achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.  These goals represent the comprehensive global approach to security by addressing the poverty and injustices that are fueling a range of serious threats.   More military spending won’t help and may even exacerbate these human threats as foreign wars expand and our military involvement continues to create refugees and more enemies with the collateral damage that are inevitable in waging any kinetic war.

A 1980 Presidential Commission on World Hunger warned “The Commission believes that promoting economic development in general, and overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S. national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe. Since the advent of nuclear weapons most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. The Commission considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion. Armed might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.

With the evolution of weapons, war and other threats…time is running out.  It should be clear there is no shortage of money that should have been devoted to improving humanities condition, not just the greedy and callous 1 percent.