Senator Bernie Sanders said the obvious about American spending insanity

© 2021 Peter Free

 

19 November 2021

 

 

Who are the real America-killing villains?

 

The guys in the Military Industrial Complex.

 

And the congresses and presidents, who feed those obese parasites every day.

 

 

Of this reality . . .

 

. . . and faced with yet another essentially undebated approval of a trillion dollar 'defense' spending bill, Senator Bernie Sanders wrote the following:

 

 

Many of my colleagues tell the American people, day after day, how deeply concerned they are about the deficit and the national debt.

 

They tell us that we just don’t have enough money to expand Medicare, guarantee paid family and medical leave, and address the climate crisis to the degree that we should if we want to protect the well-being of future generations.

 

Yet, tomorrow, the U.S. Senate will be voting on an annual defense budget that costs $778 billion – $37 billion more than President Trump’s last defense budget and $25 billion more than what President Biden requested.

 

All this for an agency, the Department of Defense, that continues to have massive fraud and cost overruns year after year and is the only major government agency not to successfully complete an independent audit.

 

Isn’t it strange how even as we end the longest war in our nation’s history concerns about the deficit and national debt seem to melt away under the influence of the powerful Military Industrial Complex?

 

Further, it is likely that the Senate leadership will attach to the National Defense Authorization Act the so-called ‘competitiveness bill,’ which includes $52 billion in corporate welfare, with no strings attached, for a handful of extremely profitable microchip companies.

 

This bill also contains a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration.

 

Combining these two pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the defense bill to over $1 trillion – with very little scrutiny.

 

Meanwhile, the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor and the future of our planet.

 

As a nation, we need to get our priorities right. I will vote ‘NO’ on the National Defense Authorization Act.

 

© 2021 Bernie Sanders, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) Tuesday issued the following statement ahead of the U.S. Senate’s consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act, sanders.senate.gov (16 November 2021)

 

 

Should the above disappear from Government's electronic record

 

You can find the same message at:

 

 

Andrew Emett, Bernie opposes exorbitant defense spending bill, Nation of Change (18 November 2021)

 

 

Bernie, of course, is constantly vilified . . .

 

. . . in the United States, as a pinko commie socialist. Who should have been disposed along with Stalin, Mao and Castro.

 

And all those other horrible demons of anti-American doom that pop up all the time in places like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

 

Always some place that is conveniently powerless enough for us to blood-suck on Corporatist whim.

 

You do know (don'tcha?) that:

 

 

an FDR era

 

liberal holdover

 

from the United States' own 1940s

 

just has to be

 

a 'communist'

 

in America's new 2021.

 

 

The moral? — Freedom, according to the Military Industrial Complex . . .

 

. . . means trillions and trillions of dollars — annually coerced from taxpayers — so as to fund American Leadership in killing (or being able to kill) everything that moves.

 

Everywhere. Always. Forever and beyond.

 

Naturally, this excess of alleged Defense means that there is no money left to afford building things that are worth being defended. Other than, inferably, defending our culture's self-granted Right of Avarice to pillage abroad.

 

Almost no one talks about these societal lapses in vision and insight.

 

Those who do address them, are labeled as intolerable 'socialists' — or even (horrors!) — 'communists'.

 

Culturally speaking, we are existentially as clueless as seagull droppings.

 

Thus, Bernie will be ignored. And America's militarists will keep yapping. Like the rabid Dogs of War that they are.