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[YVR Man]

America’s national debt is mainly due to the war industry, a national debt that is measured in trillions of dollars. It is well known that trying to keep up with America in the arms race, a race that the U.S. always instigated, not the Soviets, largely bankrupted the Soviet Empire. It was even admitted by Reagan and his policy-makers.
Trillions of dollars went into arming both sides to the teeth, and the only winners were the arms manufacturers and the imperial exploiters.
Today, the United States is the leading international arms dealer, and has been so for many years. America’s "foreign aid" is generally in arms sales.
Far more money is spent on arms internationally (about twenty times as much.) than is spent on helping the poor and hungry. Other side effects are the widespread environmental devastation that the war industry inflicts on the world, even when they are not fighting wars.[294] The war industry is probably the most costly and unnecessary undertaking on earth today, especially if World War III exterminates the human species.

The "defense" industry in the United States has raked in trillions of dollars during the past fifty years (one authoritative estimate puts it at nearly twenty trillion dollars[295]). When the Cold War ended, there literally were no more enemies worth worrying about.
Once the "Soviet Menace" evaporated, the US defense establishment searched high and low to find enemies to keep justifying the pork barrel. Muammar Qaddafi, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, drug dealers, Castro, etc., had to be magically transformed into malevolent demons that threatened America’s very existence.
America has the biggest killing machine the world has ever seen, and no military rivals. The Gulf War and pounding Yugoslavia were excuses to test weapons and increase America’s hegemony. The war racket is related to the government racket. Ronald Reagan told tall tales about welfare mothers driving Cadillacs, while he threw mentally ill people onto the streets. There is a small book that summarizes all the ways that the American public is bilked to buy Cadillacs for the rich, not the welfare mothers.[296]

The Savings and Loan Scandal lined the pockets of the rich to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars at the taxpayer's expense. It was a scandal that CPA professionals actively abetted, taking in its huge audit fees for signing off on fictitious financial statements. The authors of Take the Rich off Welfare summarize the many ways that the rich get handouts from the American government, such as: social security tax inequities, accelerated depreciation, capital gains deductions, homeowner's tax breaks, agribusiness subsidies, aviation subsidies, insurance loopholes, tax free bonds, timber subsidies, oil and gas tax breaks, nuclear subsidies, etc. These are laws that primarily benefit the wealthy. The rationale is that they are subsidies that benefit the economic producers, giving them incentives or help to make the economy more productive. The media, being owned by those corporate welfare recipients, rarely highlights the real welfare.

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[YVR Man]

When I was a tax accountant, I saw the scam in action. Politicians write laws that benefit their constituencies, which are the rich people who bankroll their campaigns and basically own them. The accounting in Take the Rich off Welfare is conservative, as the authors add up all the boondoggles that rip off the American taxpayer to benefit the rich. The biggest single category of rip off is what the authors call "military waste and fraud." The waste and fraud are for weapons systems that nobody in the military wants, but billions are still spent for them, and other outrages. The authors summarized some of the defense contractors’ pricing schemes:

A nut that can be bought at a hardware store for a few cents that McDonnell Douglas charged the US government $2,043 for;

A pair of pliers that Boeing tried charging $2,548 for, but the Air Force slashed the price to $748;

The famous toilet seat that Lockheed charged "only" $640 for;

A $240 flashlight from Grimes Manufacturing;

The authors' favorite was a plastic cap that goes over the end of a stool leg, that Boeing charged $1,118 each for.[297]
That barely scratches the surface of the waste and fraud that is a daily part of America’s military-industrial establishment. Billions of dollars in military equipment simply "disappears" every year. There are many weapons systems that cannot be justified by the most fervent imagination, especially with the Soviet Empire gone, but America keeps upgrading nuclear missiles, transport planes, jet fighters, submarines and the like to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Some items, such as the Seawolf submarine, the Navy itself says that it does not need or want it, but they are getting one for a few billion dollars. There is the Black Budget, the totally unaccountable budget of about $30 billion a year to fund the NSA and other spook agencies. If Americans found out what really happened in the spook world, it would curl their hair. I have had friends who worked in that world, and it can be sickening and nearly beyond belief at times.

The authors of Take the Rich off Welfare conservatively calculate how much of the military expenditures are a complete waste of money, and arrive at $172 billion a year. When they add up merely the major categories of welfare for the rich, their conservative calculation is that it costs America at least $448 billion a year, money that lines the pockets of the rich for no perceived public benefit. That is partly how the rich get richer. The authors then calculate how much public money goes to serving the needs of the poor in America. The number is about $130 billion.[298] In the end, the American government is a mechanism that makes the rich richer, taxes the middle class, and throws some crumbs to the poor who do the work.

I have professional friends who have tried justifying why poor Mexicans pick America’s food and make its clothes, why poor Indonesians and Filipinos staff luxury cruise ships and make America’s tennis shoes, why black Americans work in the most wretched factories in the worst jobs, and the like, as if it was the natural order of things, with them at the top of the heap due to their unique virtue. Then they say that we are trying to help Indonesia by putting our shoe factories there, to get them "capital." They read the Wall Street Journal too much.

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[YVR Man]

The war racket makes huge sums of money for certain people, while others die horrible deaths or live in unspeakable misery. There are persuasive arguments that the same interests arm both sides in the wars, not really caring much who wins, just as long as everybody "plays."[299] The Soviet and German war machines in World War II were partly built, some say largely built, by American industrialists. Chomsky's Year 501, the Conquest Continues, looks at this 500-year period of European dominance of the world from another, non-conspiratorial, perspective. C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite looked at the post-war evolution of the power structure that runs America today, and Mills endured great grief for daring to publish his book.

There is another facet of the war racket, and perhaps the most important of all. Those corporate individuals behind the scenes, pulling the strings, truly enjoy all the death and suffering that war creates. That may be their biggest payoff, watching all the death and suffering they manipulate the world into being, and it nourishes them, literally.


Comments ?

[Munday]

look at it as just another infrastructure project......which you like, so....STFU

[Gay Boy Bob]

Americans will pay for the sins, omissions and lies of GW Bush for decades to come.

[kiebers]

Americans will pay for the sins, omissions and lies of GW Bush for decades to come.

And you got that out of that copied and pasted article? Damn.

[Lochdubh]

Americans will pay for the sins, omissions and lies of GW Bush for decades to come.

^Bob blames Bush!