GLOBAL POWER; BUT AT WHAT COST?

It is a little late for asking this question.
At this point nothing can change.
It is a mindset - 
We convince ourselves we need this.


But at what cost?
the Ol'Buzzard

WE CAN’T AFFORD UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE!

Determining how to allocate our federal budget is a difficult dilemma that Congress must wrestle with each year.   How to fund all the necessary request for expenditures, I am sure, keep our elected representatives up at night.   They must balance the need to cut taxes on the job creators, pay farmers not to grow crops, supplement oil companies, send millions to foreign governments and then split what is left over between improvements on homeland infrastructure and as handouts to people who don’t want to work.  

Of course that is all after funding our military with an amount larger than the next ten militarized countries combined.  

But we can be properly proud of our newest military weapon - the F-35 Money Pit, also known as the F-35 Stealth Warplane. 

 The research and development of the F-35 has so far cost $400,000,000,000 (four hundred billion dollars – more than double the initial cost estimate,)  The aircraft are turning out at a price of $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollars) each; and it is estimate that by 2035 (according to Popular Mechanics) there will be at least 3000 flying worldwide.

It is something else to be proud of that the US pays Lockheed Martin for the research and development of an aircraft that Lockheed Martin can then sale to other foreign governments – spreading the technology around the world. 

Of course we must justify this expenditure in order to be able to carry out stealth air wars across the world.   We obviously need this aircraft to protect our homeland – because if we don’t attack them over there we will have to fight them over here; or mushroom clouds or some such… that is if some deranged nation decided to attack the country that has stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire world.    

It makes you feel sorry for Canada, doesn’t it?

the Ol’Buzzard

THE AMERICAN WAY: WAR, MOM AND APPLE PIE

Did you ever wonder about the term ‘The American Military Industrial Complex?’   It is said that one third of our national budget is spent on National Security; but, once we include the military, Homeland Security, NSA, CIA (and all the other A’s we don’t know about) along with foreign aide and nation building we are probably closer to fifty-percent. 

We can’t afford health care for US citizens but we can spend a projected one trillion, five hundred billion ($1,500,000,000) for a new F-35 fighter aircraft that so far has been a production disaster.

(Just to get an idea how ridiculous this sum is: If you banged a hammer on top of your desk once every second for twenty four hours a day – it would take you 48,000 YEARS to bang out 1.5 trillion)

I have often written in this blog that war is the natural state with intervals of peace between conflicts in order to regroup.   But the real fact is that war and the military are a financial necessity for this country.  

The base of the US economy is no longer farming, but a military industrial complex.

We buy oil from Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia in turn buys military weaponry from us.   We give foreign aide to Israel and Israel returns the money in the form of weapons purchases.  We don’t just police the world, we arm the world.   We are supplying American weapons to Iraqi Kurdistan to fight ISIL that is armed with American weapons that we originally supplied to the Iraqi military.  This is not new.   The sick joke in Vietnam was: You can tell the North Vietnamese Army from the South Vietnamese Army – because the North Vietnamese have only fifty-percent American weapons. Many of the M-16s in Vietnam were made by the Mattel Toy Company (Made by Mattel – It’s Swell) and I was once issued a military 45 pistol made by Singer – a weapons spin off of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. 

Our economy depends on the military industrial complex.   The military is constantly purchasing tanks, cars, trucks, aircraft, ships, fuel, uniforms, electronic equipment, ordinance, small arms, medical supplies, food and toilet paper…   Much of the U.S.  economy is directly or indirectly supported by military expenditures and by the sales of weapons and supplies sold, or furnished to foreign nations in the form or foreign aide. 

WAR, GOOD GOD YOU ALL – WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR – THE ECONOMY”

the Ol’Buzzard