"Every gun that is made, very warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. this world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of it's laborers, the genius of it's scientists, the hopes of it's children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this:
a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two fine fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This isn't a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under a cloak of threatening war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
Five Star General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower 4/16/53
"The Cause for Peace"
http://costofwar.com/And now Obama promises to cut federal spending on 121 projects that will save 17 billion dollars in a 3.55 billion dollar budget?
Obama thinks saving less than one half of one percent in our budget will stop the bloodletting in Washington?
But these cuts are not to Entitlements or National Defence?
But aren't these two aspects of the budget where the majority of our money is spent?
Maybe it's just me but I'm still not sure whether Washington takes the advice of a military man when it comes to dealing with the military.
(Maybe it has something to do with creating a market for our country's world leading military arms exporting business.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry
4 comments:
uncle john is truth.
accept no substitutes...,
But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.
President Barack Obama
It's only in the last year that I've become disengaged from my myopic focus on the United States to see how complicit Europe is in the expansion of American war socialism. The compromise after the Second World War is that the US would assume the burden of defending Western interests in exchage for financing an exceptionally extravagant lifestyle. So the American presence in Germany, to take an example, is perhaps best interpreted less as a defense posture against USSR, since no conventional force could ever have impeded Soviet entry, and more as an occupation engaged on behalf of the British and French.
America's foreign policy stance allowed Europe to develop it's political economy with defense being subordinate to social needs. The question I have is since the US war machine has reached its Malthusian imposed limit, can it willingly cede military power in the manner the UK did?
Are you surprised??!!?? Bullshit is eternal.
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