Obama a figurehead of imperialist government: Dr. Wilmer Leon

US President Barack Obama is merely a figurehead of an imperialist government that is continuing to channel money to its military-industrial complex at the expense of domestic social programs, an American political scientist says.

“I don’t think that enough Americans, who really should be concerned about this increase in military spending of $35 billion, know enough about it and really understand what it means,” Dr. Wilmer Leon told Press TV in an interview on Thursday.

Obama will unveil his fiscal 2016 budget proposal, reversing many of the cuts instituted in 2013 and requesting the largest base military budget in American history.

He was scheduled to address a meeting of House Democrats on Thursday in Philadelphia to lay out details of his budget proposal, set for release on February 2, which would give a major boost to both domestic programs and the military.

The new spending blueprint would increase federal caps on military spending by $35 billion, hitting a base Pentagon budget of $534 billion for 2016, the largest in American history.

“This really can’t be attributable to President Barack Obama as an individual. He is really just the caretaker or the figurehead on an imperialist hegemon government that is just continuing the same practices that it has been involved in since World War I,” Dr. Leon said.

He said that former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 warned about the military-industrial complex. “He said in the councils of government that ‘We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.’”

“So what we are really seeing here is that the American military-industrial machine is just continuing to crank itself up, as America causes problems in Libya, in Mali, in Nigeria… in Yemen, and in Ukraine,” he added.

“And you’ve got outgoing Secretary of Defense Hagel calling for between 55 and 80 billion dollars for a new bomber program.  And all of this happening in a country whose infrastructure is crumbling, whose schools are being proven to be less than at the top of the international standards, who cannot afford to pay its healthcare, who has starving children in its midst,” he stated.

“This continued ramp-up of military spending at the expense of domestic social programs unfortunately is not going to get the attention that it needs in the mainstream American media because of the influence, if not ownership, that the military contractors and companies have over the American media,” Dr. Leon noted.

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