PENTAGON SCORES A BIGGER RIP-OFF THAN BAILOUT

America Is Completely Broke, And Here We Are Funding Fantasy Wars at the Pentagon
By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 3, 2009.

Americans don't usually think of the Pentagon as a scam operation -- but it's never to late to wake up and smell the rip-off. http://www.alternet.org/workplace/124881/

Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGG!

The corporatocracy and the master elite could care less about the planet or the people thereon. They only care about manipulating this world to benefit their needs. they employ the use of EMPIRE BUILDING to con other countries into selling their souls so they, the elitists, can rape and pillage all of the natural resources, so that they can remain on their high horses, looking down on the rest of the world...

WhiteNoise and others on this site, you are intense... keep bringing on the truth and the light, eventually the masses will see and understand...

The more and more I look...the more and more it looks like Bush is trying to screw the country before vacating the WH...

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, The Pentagon Bailout Fraud

Let's start with the money the Bush administration has already thrown at the war in Iraq. According to the June congressional testimony of William Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis, the war has cost $646 billion so far. The new defense budget for 2009 tacks on another $68.6 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming year. However, military expert Bill Hartung of the New America Foundation puts a conservative estimate of the costs of a single week of the Iraq War at approximately $3.5 billion (or about $180 billion a year).

In other words, the war in Iraq will cost far more in the next year than the Iraq portion of that $68.6 billion Congress is about to pony up in the defense budget, and so will be funded, as has long been true, through supplemental war bills submitted by the Bush administration (and then whatever administration follows). In other words, sometime in 2009 the direct costs of the war the Bush administration once predicted would cost perhaps $50-60 billion in total will stand at more than $800 billion, or $100 billion above the cost (if all goes well, which it won't) of the bailout of the financial system now being proposed in Washington.

Estimates of the true long-term costs of the President's war of choice, including payments of health care and veterans benefits into the distant future, soar into the budgetary stratosphere. They range from the Congressional Budget Office's $1-2 trillion to an estimate by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes of up to $4-5 trillion. So we're talking somewhere between one-and-a-half and seven bailouts-worth of taxpayer dollars flowing into the morass of disaster, corruption, and carnage in Iraq.

As Chalmers Johnson, author most recently of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy, has pointed out for years, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, and America's wars are in the process of bankrupting us. How strange then that, as he indicates below, no one in the mainstream even blinks when a staggering new Pentagon budget sails through the House of Representatives and then, by voice vote, through the Senate just as negotiators in Washington are scrambling to find a similar sum to deal with a catastrophic financial meltdown; nor does anyone in the mainstream bother to make any connection between that budget and the funds we don't have available to use elsewhere, or between the looting of Iraq and the looting of our financial system (and, in both cases, of course, the looting of the American taxpayer). Tom

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174982/chalmers_johnson_the_pentagon_bailout_fra...

"In keeping with the tradition of recent years, Bush held a gun to his own head and threatened to pull the trigger if his demands weren't met."

Somebody please!!!! Don't meet his demands!!!

...and I would add : let's keep on educating each other via the web since the 4th estate has betrayed us so badly...

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the Journalist is to destroy truth; To lie outright; To pervert; To vilify; To fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - John Swinton, the former chief of staff of the New York Times, called by his peers, "The Dean of his profession," in a speech at the New York Press Club.

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." – Richard Salant, former President of CBS News

"The mass media is itself part of the same power structure that plunders the planet and inflicts human rights abuses on a massive scale" – David Cromwell

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I think we need to start thinking and planning for how we will respond if there is marshal law imposed after the stolen election of 08.

If I could be confident of a clean and fair election, I would not worry, but I can not sleep. I am working, writing, talking, volunteering and even working at the polls. The Democratic candidate is as strong as there ever was a candidate, even if he has the race handicap, if the election was fair, it would be a landslide. People know it and if it is lost they will know it is stolen.

Military deployment begins for the first time since the civil war on the streets of America on October 1st, in case of "civil unrest". Republican hate talkers are broadcasting fear of race riots if Obama looses, police are already militarized as we saw around the GOP convention.

It is not enough to say "but we have guns" because, as after Katrina, Blackwater came in and took those guns away 1st thing, During the GOP convention the reporters with cameras were arrested first. There still remains a "no fly zone" over Texas after Ivan.

How will we respond if it is stolen and our streets are militarized?

I say we just stop. Stop shopping, driving, working and moving. Bring the corporate machine to a grinding halt. Stock up now and tell your friends.

Classic bait and switch!!

Interesting post...would love to see the candidates grilled on this one after their votes: "On Wednesday, the House passed a mammoth defense bill by a 392-39 vote. It's expected to clear the Senate with little difficulty next week."

So will McCain and Obama vote for or against it?

Wow man. That was some WORK. Thanks. I'll be passing this on as well... Thanks

Once again I thank you for this compilation - will pass it forward to those beyond current.