WARS- A "JOBS PROJECT" FOR BIG CORPORATIONS

In these days of financial pain, (so aptly summarized by the NYT Bob Herbert's last column) "when 14 million Americans remain jobless and when only one job is available for every five applicants, when the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth, and the wealthiest top 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth, leaving the overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively holding just 12.8 percent of that wealth."

With that as background we should be shocked and angered(at least I am) to listen to our gevernment representatives of both parties bewail the government deficit, as they ignore the "big ticket" items of unnecessary wars and so-called "defense spending" (read here jobs program for the very rich and huge influential corporations) while they gleefully slash at the minimalist social-saftey-net of this nation (which by the way is the weakest and most shabby in all of the industrial nations of the western world) for spending cuts to balance the budget. We must be shocked and flabbergasted at the unbeleivable hutspaha, cynicism, and hypocracy of these so-called deficit hawks. They glibly target social security, medicare and medicaid, and any expeditures for education, and child care, but remain silent as a sphinx regarding the trillions of dollars spent on the unwarranted Iraq, Afghanistan, (and covert Pakistan) and now Lybian wars.

But today there surfaces a story from the Center For Public Integrity that goes a long way to explain the underlying motives and reasons for our present circumstances. Read it and understand why we spend so much on "defence" and where your tax dollar really goes. It will also make it clear why the middle class have become an underclass in last last several decades and why the upper 5% of earners own nearly two-thirds of the nation's wealth.

From the Center for Publicv Integrity (http://www.publicintegrity.org/) March 27, 2011

"As the invasion of Iraq turned into an occupation, a new and deadly threat to U.S. troops emerged, one for which the U.S. was ill prepared: the roadside bomb.

This piece is a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy Newspapers. Peter Cary is a freelance writer working for the Center. Nancy Youssef is the Pentagon correspondent for McClatchy.

So in February 2006, with casualties mounting, the Pentagon responded by creating a new agency designed to attack the problem by harnessing the full might of America’s technology community. The new organization was dubbed the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, and a retired four-star general was tasked to run it.

The launch of JIEDDO eventually turned what had been a 12-person Army anti-homemade bomb task force into a 1,900 person behemoth with nearly $21 billion to spend.

Yet after five years of work, hundreds of projects, and a blizzard of cash paid to some of America’s biggest defense contractors, JIEDDO has not found a high-tech way to detect or defeat these so-called Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) from a safe distance. In fact, the rate at which soldiers are able to find IEDs before they explode has remained mostly steady, at roughly 50 percent, since JIEDDO was formed. And while in the past few months the detection rate of IEDs has improved a bit, it is not clear whether this trend can be maintained.

JIEDDO’s outgoing director, Lt. General Michael Oates admits “there are no silver bullets that are going to solve this problem,” Indeed, the most effective IED detectors today are the same as before JIEDDO, and they don’t hum, whir, shoot, scan, or fly. They talk. And they bark. The best bomb detectors, Oates says, are still dogs working with handlers, local informants, and the trained soldier’s eye."

Lets forget the three trillion dollar Iraq war and the fact that it was a sham..there were no weapons of mass destruction, no threat and no need for the vast expenditure or blood and treasure there. There was no need for the JIEDDO project's
21 billion dollars either. Wasted money! Wasted lives! Think what could have been done with that 21 billion dollars spent here in the USA. But the money entered the coffers of the giant defense contractors. It moved from your pocket into the government's coffers and there into the pockests of the wealthy. Who profited? The top echelon. Who is pauperized the poor and middle class. Follow the money trail and undertand why we manufacture enemies (Gaddafi is our newest) and why we fight "terrorism" abroad. There is great profit in it for the wealthy and the giant corporations. But why is there no complaint from those of us who sacrifice our money, our young men and women, and the well being of future generations? Is it blissful ignorance? Perhaps! Don't forget somehow the media and government of this nation have somehow convinced its citizens that it is rational and necessary to field 100,000 plus troops in Afghanistan (at a million bucks a piece) to fight the estimated 100 or so al Qaida known to be there!