PV staff
While working people around the globe struggle to keep up with the soaring cost of living, the world’s largest military organization voted to give itself a double digit raise for more war-making.
On December 13, NATO announced it was increasing its military budget for 2024 by 12 percent to 2.03 billion euros. The military budget covers the operating costs of NATO Command Structure headquarters, missions and operations around the world. The military alliance says that increasing its funding – which comes from its member countries including Canada – will allow it to “more effectively address shared security challenges.”
In the immediate sense, this will mean escalating the war in Ukraine which NATO provoked through its eastward expansion and drive to encircle Russia.
The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which represents 105 million workers throughout the world, responded to the NATO announcement by condemning the increase. The WFTU warned on December 15 that an increased NATO budget “sharpens even more the confrontation and deepens the preparations and the risk for a generalized imperialist conflict with disastrous consequences for the ordinary people who always pay the cost of the imperialist antagonism.”
The labour body, which was formed in 1945 to united working people and unions throughout the world on a class struggle basis, noted the irony of increasing military spending at a time when working people’s real wages are declining. “This new provocative soaring of military expenditures, which is taking place in a period of a generalized lack of adequate policies for the protection of ordinary people from inflation and shrinking of their purchasing power, proves once again that for military expenditures there is always money while the social expenditures are constantly decreasing.”
The WFTU calls for the immediate dissolution of NATO and all military alliances, the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, and respect for the independence and sovereignty of all states.
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