Community | August 29, 2011 | 21 comments

The Decade's Biggest Scam

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Vic_Romano
By Glenn Greenwald

The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security" projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that -- which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:

"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29." That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality -- are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html
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21 comments // The Decade's Biggest Scam

  • squarethecircle
  • IfYouSeeSomething_SaySomething
  • squarethecircle
  • Snails
    • +1
      Snails  
    • IfYouSeeSomething_SaySomething:

      "Investing in national safely infrastructure is never a waste of money"

      75 billion a year to protect a lake in Nebraska, and a movie studio in hollywood from "terrorist" attack is extremely wasteful! How does that possibly prevent anything? All it takes is one guy with a vest bomb, all the money we throw at the problem can never protect us from that.

    • 9 months ago
  • jubal
  • PressCore
    • +4
      PressCore  
    • And newest long running cash cow. Since they can no longer milk
      the cow of Communism any more, they needed a new scam to use
      to exploit the fearful and the suckers. I prefer to adhere to the sage
      words spoken by the Norseman in Antonio Banderas movie the 13th
      Warrior: " The scane of your life was woven by your father, grand
      father, great grandfather all the way back to the beginning, long
      before you were born. Indulge in worry and the weakness it brings
      if you will, but fear will not help you live even one moment longer "
      Sage advice, that. The scam artists know if they can make people
      loose sleep over it, they can make them loose money over it also.
      The phony war on terrorism isn't a war AGAINST genuine threats to
      the USA. It's a phony war conducted BY the genuine threats to the USA.
      Because it's a domesticly launched war intended to reduce the Liberty
      we've achieved in the USA over the past 2.25 centuries back to 0.

      The Corporations who grease those in power by trying to merge with
      them in Benito Musolini's definition of Fascism use public money and
      military personelle to guard the Corporate presence & it's Piracy in
      foreign lands like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. It's no secret that since
      the C.I.A. was created in 1947, Corporate policies have become C.I.A.
      policies, have become State Dept. policies, have become MI.C. policies.
      The C.I.A. created Al Qaeda to prep for the American military invasion
      of Afghanistan as far back as 1980. As soon as the C.I.A. used the
      Muja Hadin to force the Russians out, they waited a while, used Holly
      wood to produce all the propaganda movies inventing foreign terrorists
      in the 1980s and 1990s ( as they did in the 1930s to promote Prohibition )
      until American consciousness was saturated with it. Then they engineered
      the false flag of the 9/11 demonlitions of the WTC once they knew the
      plane hijackers were in range...Then armed with another Pearl Harbor
      style sneak attack mustered public opinion to back Hitler Bush's foreign
      wars. Because we needed PROTECTION ! That's what the people of
      Chicago were told during the 20s and 30s when a new gang tried to
      muscle into another gang's territory with their shakedown. That m.o needs
      arm twisting mainly because they didn't control people's minds first.

      What's realy interesting to me is that the first modern movie I've seen
      about terrorism is copyrighted 1972, and it's about terrorist attacks
      against Israeli citizens. Kind of makes me wonder, considering the vast
      control Isreal has over the USA and the foreign policy of the U.S., whether
      they needed help to combat their terrorist problem by including us in it.
      Wouldn't be the first time in History that happened. It happened 12/7/1941
      too with other allies. W/o judgement, we still need to know the whole story.
      The saga of Sisiphus is all about the futility of someone who never learned.


      ..

    • 9 months ago
  • Argon18
    • +3
      Argon18  
    • I wouldn't say BIGGEST scam since Wall Street derivatives, making money appear out of nothing but a Ponzi scheme was a whole lot worse.

      Even if they exagerated the threat at the bottom there still was one and at least they still produced products that were functional. They might've overcharged a great deal for something could've been done with a few SEAL teams to take care of the problem, but at least progress was made with high profile terrorists being taken out.

      But that's a VERY distant second to what Wall Street did to the housing market, making the taxpayers put up billions for their bad decisions and then give that bailout money as bonuses to their executives. We're still no closer to fixing the economy than when it crashed.

    • 9 months ago
  • Vic_Romano
    • +2
      Vic_Romano  
    • Argon18:

      I understand where you're coming from in THAT sense. However, I just don't see how places like Excelsior Springs, Missouri need a homeland security division. But they now have a nice counterterrorism unit with all kinds of weird military-type hardware. I think that's what Greenwald was attempting to expose--that countless billions of taxpayer dollars are just being dumped into programs and stuff that's really not going to help us all that much...

      I mean, that money could sure be put to better use given our shit economy. But that's because of the scam you described.

    • 9 months ago
  • Argon18
    • +2
      Argon18  
    • Vic_Romano:

      I'd agree the money could be put to better use, and what still puzzles me is most of the defense contractors like McDonnell, Lockheed and Boeing are also aerospace contractors too so they could've made the profits off of tech for satellites, probes and other stuf for NASA

    • 9 months ago
  • Vic_Romano
  • Argon18
  • Schnookums
  • Vic_Romano
  • KB723
  • WagonMaster
  • WagonMaster
  • artemis6
  • remanns
    • +2
      remanns  
    • Yep -
      [ First, this wastefulness is seen as inefficient only if one falsely assumes that its real objective is to combat Terrorist threats. That is not the purpose of what the U.S. Government does. As Daniel Weeks explains today, the Congress -- contrary to popular opinion -- is not "broken"; it is working perfectly for its actual owners. Or, as he puts it, "Washington isn't broken -- it’s fixed":

      Our problem today is not a broken government but a beholden one: government is more beholden to special-interest shareholders who fund campaigns than it is to ordinary voters. Like any sound investor, the funders seek nothing more and nothing less than a handsome return -- deficits be darned -- in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and government contracts. ]

    • 9 months ago
  • Vic_Romano
    • +2
      Vic_Romano  
    • remanns:

      You would think that it is in our "homeland security" interest to stop spending money on stupid shit like this and work on getting some sort of jobs for the rest of us. Unless, of course, they actually want civil unrest to start breaking out on our streets.

    • 9 months ago
  • Vic_Romano
    • +4
      Vic_Romano  
    • Very good read.

      "Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fear-mongering So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated."

    • 9 months ago
  • remanns
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