...add up the yearly salary of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you'll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute's sum...So who gets all the money? Think about it...
26 December 2009
The Afghan War: $57,000 per MINUTE
And how much of that goes to the troops themselves?
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"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
ReplyDelete"A few profit – and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war."
War Is A Racket- Gen. Smedley Butler USMC 1935
so, how do you take the profit out?
ReplyDelete"Xe"/Blackwater gets the profit, and all the other private companies the gov pays to keep operations going over there. Not just mercenary groups such as Xe/Blackwater, but cooks, artillery/equipment design and manufacture, non-military security guards, etc. etc. etc.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much of the US economy comes from these pentagon-funded, non-military organizations. And I wonder if that's why Obama changed his tune so quickly about "ending the war" in the midst of a recession. Maybe he was/is being blackmailed. Or maybe it's just another way he's trying (fruitlessly, unfortunately) to garner some kind of support from the hell-raising Right.
How do you take the profit out?
ReplyDeleteI think Smedley answered it best- by making sure that no one makes a penny more than what the soldier in the field makes.
sounds good. so, how do you do that?
ReplyDeleteI'm not being sarcastic. I'm seriously interested in any workable idea which could do such a thing in western society.