Ron Paul Institute: "Bernie Sanders Exposes Bloated Military and Intelligence Spending"

[snagglepuss]

saturday december 21, 2013

Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a US Senate floor speech Thursday explaining his “no” vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (HR 3304), exposes “wasteful, inefficient, and often fraudulent” Department of Defense spending.

Sanders also addresses the bloated nature of US military spending compared to military spending by other governments as well as the tens of billions of dollars sucked yearly into US intelligence agencies’ “black budget.”




From Sanders speech in the Senate:

I think everybody in the Congress believes and understands that we need a strong defense--no debate about that--but we do not need a defense budget that is bloated, that is wasteful, and that has in it many areas of fraud.

In this respect, I hope my Republican colleagues and, in fact, all of my colleagues remember what former President Dwight Eisenhower, a good Republican, said on April 16, 1953, just as he was leaving office. What he said then was profound, and it is as true today as when he said it 60 years ago. This is what he said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

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