Why Do You Pay $1.2 Trillion a Year to Prop Up a Vast, Secretive National Security State? [View All]

[MrScorpio]

Tomdispatch.com / By Tom Engelhardt

A blanket of secrecy over our military complex ensures that most Americans have no idea what’s being done with their money.

Think of Iraq as the AIG of wars -- the only difference being that the bailout there didn’t involve just three payouts. More than eight years after the Bush administration invaded that country, the bailout is, unbelievably enough, still going. Even as the U.S. military withdraws, the State Department is planning to spend billions more in taxpayer dollars to field an army of hired-gun contractors to replace it. Afghanistan? It could have been the Lehman Brothers of conflicts, but when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office he chose the Citigroup model instead, and surged troops in twice in 2009. In other words, he double-TARPed that war, and ever since, the bailout money has been flooding in.

Until now -- as the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations make clear -- “too big to fail” has meant only one set of institutions: the plundering financial outfits that played such a role in driving the U.S. economy off a cliff in 2008, looked like they might themselves collapse in a heap of bad deals and indebtedness, and were bailed out by Washington. Isn’t it finally time to expand the too-big-to-fail category to include the Pentagon, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and more generally the National Security Complex?

There is, of course, one major difference between those bailed-out financial institutions and the Complex: however powerful the banks may be, however much money financial outfits and Wall Street sink into K-Street lobbyists and the election campaigns of politicians, however much influence the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may wield, when too-big-to-fail financial institutions totter, they have to come to the federal government hat (and future bonuses) in hand.

For the Pentagon and the National Security Complex, it’s quite another matter. These days it’s only a slight exaggeration to claim that they are Washington and that their very size, influence, and power protects them from the consequences of failure.

http://www.alternet.org/world/152801/why_do_you_pay_%241.2_trillion_a_year_to_prop_up_a_vast%2C_secretive_national_security_state

Welcome to the raison d'être for your government, fellow Americans. It's been a long time coming and very few people could see what has been done.

The National Security State is now the primary symbiotic organism which infests the body politic, it transcends party politics and is the driving force behind our economy.

It's not about security, it's all about money.

"Security" is merely the tool by which an American Oligarchy now has control over our society.

Unless everyone decides that our fear based path is changed to one without fear, it's going to be bigger, more pervasive and more secret…

It'll be the thing that will eventually destroy America from within, instead of the phantom threats from beyond that barely threaten you and I.