0312blog
Where Does All The Money Go, I Want To Know
Every American coughs up an average of $2,166 a year toward the defense of the country, for a total annual yield of $732 billion, more than defense spending in China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil — combined.
We don’t question it and just why we don’t question it is a good question. Maybe the number is just so astronomical as to be beyond the grasp of normal people like you and me or maybe we have gotten so brainwashed to believe that we live in such an increasingly dangerous world and we can spare no expense to be protected or maybe we have become nothing more than an instrument of the timeless military industrial complex, and maybe this happens to be the fox protecting the chicken coop. Maybe.
So where does the money go? And what rabbit hole do you choose for answers? Coincidentally, the same people who bring you massive military spending also own the rabbit hole and control what goes in and what comes out. It’s way beyond me but I think we ought to be doing a lot more questioning, especially when our government has a very bad and very costly track record about lying to us when it comes to foreign entanglements. It would be nice if our elected leaders would spend a bit of time explaining where the money goes but then again, they are probably as much in the dark about it as you and I.
A case in point struck me while I was watching “The Cuba Libre Story,” the eight-part series on Netflix that documents the history of Cuba from the Spanish rule through the present day. In the 1950s, the U.S. was a staunch and major supporter of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who raped the country and ran the country under a brutal martial law and ultimately was overthrown by Fidel Castro. The U.S. gave billions in military aid to prop up Batista not to protect the poor, downtrodden Cuban people but to protect the goldmine of U.S. corporate interests on the island, not to mention protecting certain gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano and the rest of the Mafia that built the mega-lucrative casinos in Cuba.
And you can see how that strategy worked out, just ask Fidel Castro and Nikita Kruschev and John F. Kennedy and the millions of Cubans who suffered at the cost of Castro’s military policies.
Go back further to the Spanish American War. The Spanish occupiers were bleeding the island dry and reports of brutal torture and other mistreatment of Cubans had drawn the attention and concerns of the U.S. and no doubt it seemed like a tailor made excuse to rescue the poor Cubans from their Spanish oppressors so that the U.S. could control the island to benefit U.S. corporate interests. So the U.S. destroyer USS Maine mysteriously exploded, the U.S. blamed the Spanish and invaded and, lickety split, in 10 weeks, Spain surrendered and retreated back to the homeland its tail between its Spanish legs, while the U.S. took control over Cuba and as an added bonus, also took ownership of the former Spanish colony of the Philippines.
The sad list is long as historically the U.S. spent billions to prop up dictators from Iran to Brazil and all points in between and while leader spouted concerns about social welfare, their real goal was to protect good, old U.S. corporate interests. And then there was that annoying invasion of Iraq, spurred by spurious reports of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of dastardly dictator Saddam Hussein. The weapons of mass destruction were a fiction made up to conceal the real reason to attack and that was to protect oil, oil and more oil rather than to extend some phony protections for the poor, tortured Iraqis.
Which gets me back to military spending and why in the world we would continue to believe our leaders who claim they just want to make the world safe for us and fail to mention that maybe, in the process, we can also help out Exxon, Mobil, Northrop, Boeing and the rest.
Join me for a leisurely stroll down the rabbit hole where we can learn a bit about future U.S. spending for so-called defense and why the price tag will continue to explode like a big, fat mushroom.
On Feb. 9, the Congressional Budget Office released its report on the threat that adversaries might attack with cruise missiles and estimated the costs of several defensive systems that could be fielded to protect the United States from such attacks
The so-called National Cruise Missile Defense: Issues and Alternatives Report said the current national defense system was made to fend off ballistic missile attacks and the system would not be very effective against a cruise missile attack. The cost to upgrade the system against cruise missiles: $75 billion to $180 billion.
And then there is the vital system of space-based interceptors that would cost $50 billion to $400 billion, based on 2004 and 2012 estimates, although that figure was probably low and it would only cost $40 billion to $250 billion, a mere bag of shells.
Throw me a rope, I’m drowning.