That's why we have a permanent standing army, contrary to the Constitution and our history, so industrialists get their lucrative defense contracts.

How much should we give, the answer is more, more, more.....

Zillions for Wall Street bailouts, wars, favorite political parties.
Not a penny of my taxes for my health.

You sound like Chomsky! Good Job!

We have achieved saturation that's all I know. Problem I see is that we are going to have to have a French Revolution Moment to deal with it. They own congress. They have huge swath's of society literally brainwashed to reflexively back them even the church's and schools. It wouldn't be so bad but they are eating us out of house and home and all the killing and destruction and well the fact that it isn't going to be so nice when the rest of the world decides that it's time to take us down a notch...oh why do they hate us so much...I wonder if that's why they gave Obuma the peace prize to kind of guilt him into bucking the trend.

U$A

Spreading peace and prosperity at the point of a gun cannon strategic bomber ICBM Carrier Task Force since 1946.

The parallels to the Roman Military-Economic Empire are striking. Rome collapsed because it couldn't afford to support its military, much of which was made up of mercenaries.

http://sonyclassics.com/whywefight/

Enter Site after the promo. Poke around.

Why We Fight
Complete

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiFTXckh0zU&fe...

Why do we always have money for war? Why not for constructive programs at home?

Easy. Programs like health care, or social programs are budgeted. If you increase spending, you increase the budget deficit (or reduce surplus). It's easy to argue against increasing the deficit, after all, it enlarges the debt and is a burden on our children and grandchildren.

War, on the other hand, is funded "ad hoc". For Afghanistan and Iraq, the President periodically requests Congress to appropriate funding. These war funding allocations are not budgeted, and therefore do not increase the budget deficit (by definition). They increase the government accounts deficit, but that's a technicality. The important thing is they don't increase the budget deficit.

And you can't deny the "troops" money. If we did, we'd leave them without ammunition and food -- it wouldn't occur to the leadership to bring 'em home, of course. So we'd basically be killing them with our stinginess, see?

Seriously. Go check the US budget for 2008 (last completed fiscal year with data). The military is budgeted, but not operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brilliant, huh?

obama will send troops he does not want to go down in history as a weak president.

he is half way there now with the weak president idea.

the demos are timid the repubs the end justifies the means

there is a reason for that but few would understand my words.

ike warned us but we preferred being the super power.

ie national ego thing that is now biting us you know where.

what we sow we reap and few understood those words.

the students in calif are in protest over tuition hikes.

when I protested the iraq and afghan war with the pink ladies on the largest university in america not one student joined in that protest. too busy on their cell phones.

it matters who it effects those students cared less about these two wars as in their limited minds the wars have nothing to do with them or their tuition hikes.

the sixties were about the draft not the illegal war in nam where we killed one million men women and children vietnamese.

hang your heads in shame americans for the iraqis and vietnamese we have killed and harmed.

a national shame

there is one thing you can say about most americans they only care for americans.

we will self destruct from within. occuring now right before our eyes.

but there is always hope. :-)

unlike neo-con losers like William the Bloody Kristol, has a good article over at Anti-War that brings up a lot of the same points as Lyons.

http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/11/18/...

"We’re gushing blood and treasure into Southwest and Central Asia for no other reason than to keep the military-industrial cash caisson and gravy ship and wild-blue budget alive."

At most, they're a symptom of the problem.

We know that today's military-industrial complex does not survive because it has legislators bought and paid for, true as it might be that our non-system of campaign finance essentially legalizes bribery. We know this because we have erected vast military industrial complexes many times before, with every major war effort we have engaged in. These complexes have wielded great influence by spreading their wealth around, often in environments in which the bribe money didn't have to be even notionally reserved strictly for campaigning expenses, and yet, in the end, the politicians always found it to their advantage to sell the industrialists down the river and dismantle the whole complex until the next war emergency arose. It's not as if the military industrial complex is the only industry out there waiting to be exploited for campaign cash, and that our legislators would have to get by honestly were this particular industry to disappear. There has to be some new factor, some new dynamic at work that prevents the enterprising legislator from making a name for his/herself as a crusading cost-cutter by taking down any and all of these war profiteers for their numerous crimes, then quietly resuming a criminal realitionship of bribery with some less vulnerable industries.

What we have now, in this era following WWII, is a situation in which both our elites and the wider public have bought into an underlying mythology of the usefulness, no, the stark necessity, of keeping a large military establishment maintained even in times of peace, between wars. You know that this propensity has become a belief system, and devolved into almost a fundamemtalist religion, because it has managed to cut itself off from the supposed threat of Communism that was the original rationale for not disbanding our military establishment after WWII as we always had previously done after a war. We now have to find enemies to justify retrospectively the folly of keeping large forces around to meet merely prospective threats. We don't really know what those threats might be, so of course we feel, having followed bad logic so far as to keep forces in peacetime ready for expeditions to wherever, compelled to follow that bad logic to its end and insist on the very best possible shiny new equipment, capable of meeting all contingencies, for our expeditionary forces.

The whole foolish, disastrously stupid and counter-productive enterprise flows, not from the bribes the industry pays to Congresscritters, but from the bad premise that it is even reasonable, much less necessary, to keep large military forces in peacetime. If we had kept a 20-division army after WWI, and an activist foreign policy to match, the only difference that would have made to WWII is that we would have sent 10-15 divisions of a force wrongly configured to refight WWI (only better this time!) to France to be destroyed by the Wehrmacht in 1940 along with the French and British armies. Instead, we had to start from a corporal's guard in 1939, and so we were compelled to build a new force to meet the new circumstances, a force actually suited to fight WWII instead of WWI again. All that keeping a large force now gets us is a military establishment in being with an irresistable inertial force keeping us on the path to replaying our victory in WWII (only better this time!), or worse yet, replaying our defeat in Vietnam (only better this time!).

Start with that premise, and nature, the natural processes that killed off the military industrial complex after all of our wars before WWII, cannot kill off the current complex. Ambitious legislators can't kill off even a Halliburton for even the most gross war-profiteering, much less the big makers of the big hardware systems, because we imagine that we can't do without these dinosaurs, that we would be horribly exposed if we don't get the next generation of tanks or fighters, no matter that we're already two/three generations ahead of anyone else, or that we really need the capability to occupy foreign countries at the drop of a hat that Halliburton helps us to maintain logistically. We're not getting rid of these dinosaurs, and the huge bills they generate, until we get rid of the underlying dinosaurian ideology that tells us that our security lies in what is actually wasteful folly, a standing army any bigger than the corporal's guard we need to defend out own shores.

Ike knew damn well what he was talking about. They coocked up a war on his watch. Just take a close look at the reasons for 1956 Israeli (at the time an international pariah becouse of terrorism and expulsion of Palestinians) invasion of Egypt. As usual at the time the main suspects are the Dulles brothers. One being the big lobbyist for weapons industry (in addition to his job at United fruit co.) the other sec. of state. To make long story short Nasser was an US golden boy at the time who wanted to modernise Egypt (a lot of oportunities for doing bussines) for which he needed electricity i.e. Assuan dam. US gave guarranties for the loan. At the same time he wanted to modernise the army. Soviets were pushing hard to make some sales in the area and offered good quality at an extremly low price (instead of second rate junk US pushed for high price) so Nasser bought a small quantity of AT rockets and inf. waeapons. Dulles the sec. of state furously rescinded the US guarranties for the loan without even bothering to consult or inform Ike. So the only place Nasser could get the money was by nationalising the Suez canal company which of course incensed the Brits and the French who then bought of the Israelis (promises of change of policy) to make an excuse i.e. attack Egypt (BTW the only neighbour who was prepared to make peace with them) which would then allow Brits and French to intervene as "peace makers". Things took to the road when war started seeming as distint possibility and the only ones who would sell anything to the Egyptians and do it fast were the Soviets which became a problem as MiG-15's, Il-28's... were way better than equipment used by Brits and French who now had to hurry the plan along without sufficient international political preparation.
Dulles worked hard behind the scenes to make it happen.

It is still a gift that keeps on giving to US military industry even today as Israel is recipient of a couple of billions worth of US military aid paid by US taxpayers every year.