Chalmers Johnson: America Is Completely Broke, And Here We Are Funding Fantasy Wars at the Pentagon

[marmar]

via AlterNet:




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.



Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles, and much earth-moving equipment -- and that's to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service, and fuel economy, among other things.

A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.

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.

Double Crisis at the Pentagon

This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding the Armed Forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/124881/america_is_completely_broke%2C_and_here_we_are_funding_fantasy_wars_at_the_pentagon/

[raccoon]

1. One more puts this on greatest, yall! Rec'd.

Chalmers Johnson is no fool.

[immoderate]

2. Chalmers Johnson is one of the smartest people in America.

He has been warning us against these problems for more than 20 years.

--imm

[bertman]

3. I have a neo-con family member who works at one of the factories that assembles

fuel systems for fighter aircraft. Great job, great benefits, job security. As long as we're fighting wars with high-performance aircraft.

Political engineering indeed. And it works.

Rec and kick.

[DCKit]

4. "...a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy...

as jobs in the civilian sector..."

Pretty much the argument Kay Bailey Hutchinson gave on a Sunday news show, while John Kerry sat beside her looking as if he were having a stroke.

Until the Republics learn the difference between "swords" and "plowshares", they should be excluded from any economic decisions.