One of the problems we face is the result of having such a high proportion of our income going directly to the military means that generations of people in this country have grown up thinking 'boy we really need some austerity because we just don't have the money for health care for everybody.' And that's just not true. We can afford it. It's a problem of where the money goes, it's not that we don't have the money.

Policy analyst Phyllis Bennis connects American militarism abroad to deep poverty at home - from the ways a permanent, unchallenged war economy steals money from the health and well-being of regular people, to the harsh world created by a society with no ways to solve its own social problems except fear and violence.

Phyllis is co-author of The Institute for Policy Studies report The Souls of Poor Folk.