Military Industrial Complex and GOP Plans To Rob Taxpayers and Bankrupt America

By: Rmusemore
Saturday, November 28th, 2015, 3:46 pm

Apparently, there are Americans who hate the idea of contributing to the general welfare of the United States, what George Washington called “the people,” by paying taxes. It is likely that nearly all Americans hate the idea of their tax dollars being spent to enrich corporations; especially when those very same corporations control where Americans’ tax dollars are spent. As one might expect, with Republicans in charge of the nation’s purse strings, “those corporations” direct their GOP lackeys’ attention to spending as much, if not all, of the nation’s funds on their interests; not the people.

It is not enough that the 2015-16 budget allotted well over 60 percent of all “on the book” government spending to the military; if a bevy of defense contractor lobbies have their way Americans will likely see the lion’s share of their tax dollars going directly to the military industrial complex. Now, defense spending is crucial to America’s security, but so is infrastructure like power grids, hospitals and the nation’s decrepit roads and bridges as well as social programs that are crucial to the “general welfare of the people.” Still, Republicans have never seen a bloated defense budget they, or their defense contractor lobbies, believe is too small and their corporate defense donors have a plan to blow through trillions of taxpayers’ dollars in the next decade because building war machines is a very profitable affair.

It was barely three weeks ago that the U.S. Air Force announced it had chosen Northrop Grumman as the defense contractor to build 100 new bombers; allegedly to replace the B-2 long range bomber. However, an affiliate of a defense lobby decided that when the Air Force requested 100 aircraft, they really meant 200. The recommendation to double the Air Force’s request, albeit without the Air Force or Pentagon’s input, came from a “study” by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The Mitchell Institute is very closely tied to the Air Force Association (AFA) that is staffed by retired Air Force personnel and depends on very hefty and overly generous contributions from over 600 defense contractors including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing: the three defense contractors that competed for the bomber contract.

AFA boasts on its website that one of its greatest assets is having a “crack government relations staff” whose current crusade is “recapitalizing the entire Air Force” and “strengthening America’s nuclear mission.” What AFA never mentions is where the government will get the trillions to pad their “corporate” friends’ bottom line or how much of the government will be eliminated to increase defense contractors’ profits and build weapons of war the Pentagon does not need.

One of the things the Mitchell Institute propaganda piece failed to note is that the new bomber is both unnecessary and unaffordable according experts with the Ploughshares Fund who assessed the proposals in Aviation Week and Space Technology. Tom Collina and Will Saetren point out that the 100 bombers currently proposed will cost at least $1 billion each “that doesn’t even count classified funding in the Pentagon’s so-called ‘black budget’ or reflect the cost overruns that are “a chronic feature of every Pentagon aircraft procurement program.” Still, the defense industry is putting no small amount of money into helping Republicans increase defense spending on unwanted and unnecessary military hardware while America rots from the inside.

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http://www.politicususa.com/2015/11/28/military-industrial-complex-gop-plans-rob-taxpayers-bankrupt-america.html