Guns-For-Hire: No, The Government Shouldn't Be Using The Military To Police The Globe

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/guns-hire-no-government-shouldnt-be-using-military-police-globe

Wed, 10/02/2019 - 00:05

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison

Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.

It happened in Rome.

It’s happening again.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its best buyers and sellers. In fact, as Reuters reports, “[President] Trump has gone further than any of his predecessors to act as a salesman for the U.S. defense industry.”

Under Trump’s leadership, the U.S. military is dropping a bomb every 12 minutes.

This follows on the heels of President Obama, the so-called antiwar candidate and Nobel Peace Prize winner who waged war longer than any American president and whose targeted-drone killings resulted in at least 1.3 million lives lost to the U.S.-led war on terror.

Most recently, the Trump Administration signaled its willingness to put the lives of American troops on the line in order to guard Saudi Arabia’s oil resources. Roughly 200 American troops will join the 500 troops already stationed in Saudi Arabia. That’s in addition to the 60,000 U.S. troops that have been deployed throughout the Middle East for decades.

As The Washington Post points out, “The United States is now the world’s largest producer — and its reliance on Saudi imports has dropped dramatically, including by 50 percent in the past two years alone.”

So if we’re not protecting the oil for ourselves, whose interests are we protecting?

The military industrial complex is calling the shots, of course, and profit is its primary objective.

The military-industrial complex is also the world’s largest employer.

America has long had a penchant for endless wars that empty our national coffers while fattening those of the military industrial complex.

Aided and abetted by the U.S government, the American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. Indeed, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

Unfortunately, this level of war-mongering doesn’t come cheap to the taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

With more than 800 U.S. military bases in 80 countries, the U.S. is now operating in 40 percent of the world’s nations at a cost of $160 to $200 billion annually.

Despite the fact that Congress has only officially declared war eleven times in the nation’s short history, the last time being during World War II, the United States has been at war for all but 21 of the past 243 years.

It’s cost the American taxpayer more than $4.7 trillion since 2001 to fight the government’s so-called “war on terrorism.” That’s in addition to “$127 billion in the last 17 years to train police, military and border patrol agents in many countries and to develop antiterrorism education programs, among other activities.” That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 800-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

The cost of perpetuating those endless wars and military exercises around the globe is expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors.

For example, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

Consider that the government lost more than $160 billion to waste and fraud by the military and defense contractors. With paid contractors often outnumbering enlisted combat troops, the American war effort dubbed as the “coalition of the willing” has quickly evolved into the “coalition of the billing,” with American taxpayers forced to cough up billions of dollars for cash bribes, luxury bases, a highway to nowhere, faulty equipment, salaries for so-called “ghost soldiers,” and overpriced anything and everything associated with the war effort, including a $640 toilet seat and a $7600 coffee pot.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. Trump, no different from his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically, calling on Congress to approve billions more to hire cops, build more prisons and wage more profit-driven war-on-drugs/war-on-terrorism/war-on-crime programs that pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Essentially, in order to fund this burgeoning military empire that polices the globe, the U.S. government is prepared to bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse.

Making matters worse, taxpayers are being forced to pay $1.4 million per hour to provide U.S. weapons to countries that can’t afford them. As Mother Jones reports, the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Finance program “opens the way for the US government to pay for weapons for other countries—only to ‘promote world peace,’ of course—using your tax dollars, which are then recycled into the hands of military-industrial-complex corporations.”

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

As Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez rightly asks:

Why throw money at defense when everything is falling down around us? Do we need to spend more money on our military (about $600 billion this year) than the next seven countries combined? Do we need 1.4 million active military personnel and 850,000 reserves when the enemy at the moment — ISIS — numbers in the low tens of thousands? If so, it seems there's something radically wrong with our strategy. Should 55% of the federal government's discretionary spending go to the military and only 3% to transportation when the toll in American lives is far greater from failing infrastructure than from terrorism? Does California need nearly as many active military bases (31, according to militarybases.com) as it has UC and state university campuses (33)? And does the state need more active duty military personnel (168,000, according to Governing magazine) than public elementary school teachers (139,000)?

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

This is exactly the scenario Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired 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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. 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.”

We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.

What we have is a confluence of factors and influences that go beyond mere comparisons to Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government—i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers—and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the growth of and reliance on militarism as the solution for our problems both domestically and abroad bodes ill for the constitutional principles which form the basis of the American experiment in freedom.

After all, a military empire ruled by martial law does not rely on principles of equality and justice for its authority but on the power of the sword. As author Aldous Huxley warned: “Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

~~~

Ever noticed how resources get wasted by narrow perceptions? How governments and corporations think very narrowly? The financial and power aspect is all that is of concern.

The goals of each institution are so removed from their fundamental founding purposes, that the people in the various positions quickly lose sight of the bigger picture of reality. The vision narrows to the bottom line. The agenda narrows to the bottom line. Simpletons.

Ever heard the phrase, stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime?

Stepping over life itself, to make a profit, which was initially sought for the purpose of sustaining life?

Absurdity.

I used to know a mechanic that worked for the air-force. He told me how the planes or jets used titanium screws on the sheet metal panels. Whenever they had to remove a panel to work on something inside, they had to throw away those screws, and use new ones. One of the other mechanics decided to go and get some of that titanium to sell it, and was promptly arrested. There are financial reasons for wasting resources like that. The military was not going to recycle that titanium.

I had a family member who used to work in retail, for a major department store chain. Any clothes that did not sell were to have paint poured on them and then be thrown in the dumpster.

I knew a foreman who previously worked for a major international contractor. One of those that was frequently hired by the US military to do work overseas. When their jobs were done, the company would bury their perfectly operating heavy equipment, backhoes, scrapers, etc.. Why? Was there monetary incentive to do this? It reminds me of stories I've heard about spending the remainder of an allotted budget, so as to justify next years budget.

Government and corporate behavior is wasteful. They are not to be trusted. But they will crawl up your ass to count the hairs, when they want to be critical of you.

~~~

Why Retailers Damage and Throw Away Good Product

https://www.destructoid.com/blogs/SpielerDad/why-retailers-damage-and-throw-away-good-product-289166.phtml

10:32 AM on 03.17.2015

Early this week, a YouTube video posted in February of an intrepid dumpster diver went viral, and started making the rounds at various gaming and tech related websites. This individual braved possible attack from rabid raccoons, crack foxes, Oscar the Grouch, and ornery hobos to point out, in his own words, that GameStop is “greedy and cheap.”

I hate to say this, but I can tell you that GameStop is greedy and cheap without diving into a dumpster and risk coming down with consumption by breathing in bad humors or other old timey ailments.

Welp, my job is done here.

However, GameStop is not alone in destroying perfectly good items and tossing them in the garbage. The sad truth is that retailers do this all the time and the reason they do is simple, it’s about their bottom line.

Many retailers have arrangements with their suppliers to return any unsold or outdated product to their suppliers for credit. Retailers take a risk when they purchase goods from suppliers. Sometimes new product does not resonate with consumers and it sells poorly. To mitigate this risk, suppliers will agree to take back unsold goods.

This happens a lot with clothing, electronics, and even food products. If the stuff does not sell, stores just pack that shit up and send it back.

However, packaging and shipping stuff can be expensive. When the shipping of goods becomes cost prohibitive, suppliers just ask the stores how much product they have left over, so that they can credit them, and then the stores destroy it and simply throw it away.

In a previous job, I had the opportunity to actually see the back rooms of various Walmart stores. It’s what you would expect and really nothing special. There were plenty of shelves and pallets holding various goods. There was machinery for recycling, crushing cardboard, etc… A portal to hell where sinners and underperforming sales associates were cast into.

Uhh, I'm just look for a pallet of Rice Crispies.

Sometimes I saw dedicated machines that destroyed clothing that was not worth sending back to the supplier. I would imagine that every Walmart has this equipment.

When I worked at a clothing retailer back in my college days, one of the tasks of the people in the back room was to destroy clothing that has been marked down multiple times and still did not sell.

Doing some research online, I also found that this is the case as well at other retailers like Best Buy and Staples. If electronics did not sell, power cords and USB cables were cut and the goods would simply be tossed into the trash.

All in all, GameStop is in good company here. All retailers are horrible and would rather destroy and toss perfectly good product than donate it.

The reason retailers do this is very complex. Yes, profit and their bottom line is a big component, but if you want to learn more, I would recommend checking out this article.

What I find interesting is that GameStop also deals in the second hand market. Why destroy used product since you cannot send it back to the original supplier?

I believe, and I may be wrong (almost definitely), that again, it’s simply cheaper to destroy the goods than to give it away or send it to a GameStop warehouse to be refurbished.

This sounds horrible, but these corporations are in business to make a profit and not for making charitable donations. Yes, many give some stuff away to charity and they get a tax write-off and more importantly, free publicity.

I can’t really blame them. In a perfect world, of course they should donate everything that does not sell. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a complex and often flawed world, where right and wrong is easily blurred. One can make the argument for both sides and it would be impossible to say which was right and which was wrong.

~~~

Why H&M Destroys Unsold Clothes

https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/01/why-h-m-destroys-unsold-clothes.html

By Erika Kawalek
Jan 07, 20106:00 PM

Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about a cache of trash bags containing unsold H&M clothing that had been mutilated and trashed behind the H&M store on 35 th Street. More unworn mutilated clothes were found in the trash of a Wal-Mart contractor nearby. The story enraged people and rightfully so, and it became the 2 nd most tweeted topic on Twitter yesterday, forcing H&M to finally release this lame statement by spokeswoman Nicole Christie: “It will not happen again. We are committed 100 percent to make sure this practice is not happening anywhere else, as it is not our standard practice.”

The reason H&M mutilated the clothes is simple. If they trash them intact, H&M the retailer will be in competition with H&M the gifter. Clearly H&M is not concerned with street scavengers or mongo hunters colonizing their dumpsters. They are more concerned with their cheap merch flooding discount channels or coming back as “unpaid” returns at their cash registers. I understand the theory of not wanting to undercut your business. But I can’t understand why H&M would deliberately trash its unsold merch when it could easily turn it into a revenue stream.

Destroying new clothes is a shameful and irresponsible act. It was also fiscally dumb, perhaps the least profitable way of handling unsold inventory. I called one of my sources (I’m writing a book about this topic), a man who buys and resells unsold textile inventory from retail and charity circuits. He asked that I withhold his name and business (the business is highly competitive and secretive). According to this “ragpicker,” H&M could have done the following:

1. H&M could have made arrangements with a charity that would have carted away the garments and sorted and sold them as they do other high-volume donations. For this plan, H&M would have to be OK with the fact that its unsold merchandise would be resold as is and accept the potential market flooding and self-competition this would trigger. This plan is for karmic purposes only-but it could have been deftly used in a public relations campaign.

2. If the charities could not absorb the costs of trucking to and fro (no small matter) or integrate the H&M pick-up into their schedules, or if H&M was hellbent on mutilating the unsold merch to avoid competing with itself, the mega-chain could have opted to PAY approximately 10 cents per garment to have them carted away by a clothing recycler who would then shred the clothes into reusable fiber. (Usually, fiber ends up as car-seat and airplane-seat stuffing.) H&M could also use this as the basis of a “green” marketing campaign and, I wager, write off the costs as a marketing expense. Instead, however, they were caught punching holes and lobbing heels off their own merch, in a location that happens to be adjacent to a charity that clothes the poor. In the process, H&M pissed off Twitter and by extension, the universe.

3. By far the savviest option would have been for H&M to make a deal with a textile sorter and recycler-the same enterprise that could organize the fiber conversion-to cart away the garments but resell them to used clothes importers in Africa and South America. There are boatloads of money to be made by H&M in this scenario: The clothes would be picked up FOR FREE by the textile recycler (which would also save on labor-all that time cutting holes and packing Glad bags), plus H&M would be PAID about 50 cents per garment by the recycler. When you consider the volume of unsold clothes produced by the fast-fashion mega-chain, I’m guessing the revenue could reach tens of millions.

Many designers destroy their unsold stock. This is one of the many secrets of the fashion industry. They don’t want their brands ending up on the hoi polloi or in some unsightly discount bin. I can’t name the brand, but a VERY high-up and profitable one recently sent two million dollars worth of clothing and purses to the shredder. This goes on all the time; it’s part of the business. Companies would rather destroy serviceable products than risk diluting their brand. The next time you’re on a flight, think about what’s inside the chair. If they advertise in Vogue, your butt is on it.

Fashion is a filthy business. I’m glad the cat’s out of the bag.

~~~

Why do dept stores throw everything away?

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080408102319AAGZPyK

"Not only department stores, grocery stores, drug stores and most profit making businesses. It is a tax write-off to dispose of obsolesce items. It cost money, time and labor to warehouse or keep in inventory items that are considered slow movers or just plain obsolete. A lot of times the items look perfectly normal and usable, but it is the bottom line that counts. A question most businesses must ask is, "Is it less expensive to keep or write-off." Most times it is the latter. Sometimes donating is not an option, if you have a trademark item, the donated item could get in the wrong hands and not used properly, there goes your company's stellar reputation or worst a law suit. This could go for food, drugs, toys, clothes etc. So you see it is not always black and white and businesses are not always doing things out of greed."