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February 02, 2009

New Tomdispatch

link

The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon
How Taxpayers Finance Fantasy Wars

By Chalmers Johnson

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.

The rest.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Posted at February 2, 2009 07:37 PM
Comments

Does this mean we're actually the Empire now?

Posted by: hf at February 3, 2009 07:06 PM

"makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons."
Right. Like we want them to work.
http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html
Betrayal is the name of the game.
http://texaskaos.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5730

Posted by: opit at February 4, 2009 03:32 PM