Cost overruns for major weapons programs now total $296 billion. We could never afford this rampant squandering of public money, but now, with the economy in crisis, the need to end the Pentagon's profligacy has become even more urgent. Full Story »
Posted by Derek Hawkins
MoJo takes on reporting in depth budget spending related to the military. The full rating of quality will have to await the release of all the planned segments of the report. Inevitably, even this will ignore the opportunity cost of human inventiveness and effort going into weapons instead of into pursuits that might improve quality of life and the environment, or the arts.
Treating military projects as pork is a sickness of the military industrial media complex, fed both by political contributions of military corporations and the desire for local jobs. Publicly financed elections would remove much of the influence from the first.
These articles pertain to one of the greatest problems in the world today. The need of the American industrio-military complex to justify its existance by finding reasons for war.
Ike warned us when he left office and he was correct. However, if one tenth of the salaries in the USA derive from spending on the military and if in this economic climate someone could make the American military bubble contract to a rational size, what would that do to the American economy. How much of the ecoquake would transmit to the rest of the world as the one we are in did. Not a pretty picture. You're dammed if you do and dammed if you dont.
Quick read, readily confirming the totally insane level of "defense" spending that erodes the strength of the nation but fattens the bank balances of the hordes of people who benefit from the insanity.
This aspect of the military-industrial complex that continues to eat away at the strenth of the Republic, should receive far more attention than it will.
I would put this in the quality journalism department mostly because of the fact that this type of research is absent from the national dialogue and should be added. Although brief, Rachel Morris (and Mother Jones apparently) has dedicated some time to researching and distributing information on how our tax money is used and misused unquestionably and has been for some time in the name of defense.
In an environmental and economic reality that is demonstrating its limitations to us through recession, and a refocus on national resources, it is gross folly to maintain the age-old quest for the resources of others by means of force (war). The economic cost--a subset of the environment--is unsustainable and at odds with a nation interested in democratic dialogue. The environmental cost of this maintenance is loss of future resources and degradation of health. It is past time to ... More »
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