We should be putting a fair bit of mental energy into working out how to reduce the size of the MIC _without_ sacrificing human beings in the process.

Certainly veterans benefits should be included in the military spending category in the pie chart, which would make the total 63%, or almost two thirds.

It is bizarre that social security/medicare, which is fully self-funding and with a large current surplus, is under attack as a cause of the deficit when military spending is totally to blame. It is even more bewildering that the Democrats, lead by Obama, do not hammer that point home.

When exactly did China become a "rival"? Didn't US based multinational corporations and the financial world create "modern" China. Shouldn't we be proud of what we created rather than fearful of it?

There is bipartisan agreement that the United States must continue to terrorize the world using the constant threat of mass murder to intimidate countries into supporting the empire and that is why there is no actual debate on the pentagon's budget. The foreign policy of both parties is the same.

Oh, for crying out LOUD!!!! Who is this Morris critter, and why is he blaming it on the Rethugs???!?! Hell, the Rethug Congress just approved a military budget that was $9 billion SMALLER than the one Obomber had asked for!

The U.S. military is also the world's largest consumer of oil and the world's worst polluter.
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Mainstreet economy collapses. Bipartisan solution endorsed by corporate whore president, shove more money into the pockets of the filthy stinky rich bastards that collapsed the economy. Force feed private military contractors starve the soldiers cut domestic programs.

We need a general strike that literally shuts this country down. Nothing moves until these theives called our elected leaders are held accountable for the corruption they have overseen. Don't stop with this administration either. Papa Bush, Clinton, Baby Bush, Obama along with most of their cabinets belong in jail. Everyone of these administrations have worked to put the Con back in confidence.

The one overriding reason to abandon the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is the fact that we are accomplishing nothing there. Both countries are far worse now then before we got there. The US is engaged in acts of terrorism against populations instead of concentrating on the criminals. These modern terrorists are little more than gangs, and should be treated as a law enforcement problem with targeted police actions against the responsible individuals. Bombing an entire town because of a few criminals is not only completely wrong, but it is not effective, and the widespread hatred generated by these horrible losses create hatred which adds to the numbers of our opposition. Even more of the very uneducated people can see the difference between capturing criminals and killing innocents. The "war on terror" is a huge pork barrel project for multitudes of people to raid the treasury of funds for their own little parts of the war machine. The goals of the war on terror are unrealistic and unreachable through the methods employed.

Another horrible addition is the financing of mercenary groups like Blackwater (Xe) and other private contractors. They are nothing more than than thugs operating as part of the US warmongering and cost the US billions of dollars each year. To the citizens of these countries, there is no difference between them and our military. Many recruits to these horrible entities are not even US citizens, but they were allowed to operate within our own borders in the post-Katrina days. More often than not, these groups are better equipped, housed and fed than some of our own troops - even notoriously supplied with child prostitutes - all paid for by the US taxpayer. There should be an immediate cessation of funding to these groups. It is estimated that there are now about 150,000 of these thugs operated in the various war theaters of the US. Removing them would save the US taxpayer a good portion of the military budget.

Around 1980 Seymour Melman published a book, "The Permanent War Economy," that essentially put forward the thesis that the US economy depended almost entirely on military spending and war making. That's over 30 years ago. All the writing was on the wall back then for anyone to see who cared to look and refused to bow and scrape to this goddamn military monolith President Obama worshipfully calls "the greatest fighting force in the world." Now, everyone half-conscious knows it.

It's taken decades for the progressive punditocracy to call attention to this obvious and self-defeating feature of the broken and corrupted American landscape. Real military spending is now over $1 trillion a year. With less than half of that we could have universal health care for all, and a totally revitalized educational system that actually looked as if it cared a damn about teachers and students. We could even modernize our bankrupt and decrepit transportation system and transition toward alternative energy sources, getting us off the oil addiction.

Instead, we have one warmongering administration after another--because the REAL government in this insane country is THE MILITARY. The Pentagon has orders of magnitude more power than Congress or even the Executive, because both have relinquished power to the Pentagon. They embody our top priorities, which include terrorizing our own population into accepting obscene military budgets with empty threats about terrorists lurking around every corner and behind every door. It's not just wasteful, corrupt and inefficient; it's a criminal enterprise. And without it, none of us would even recognize this country. It's what we are. Now, isn't that something to be proud of!

President Eisenhower's warning about the MIC has come true in spades. It's time we all insist on dismantling it!!!!!

We have a President and a bunch of war-mongers in Congress. Obama should be forced to return his "International Peace Prize!" He thoroughly demeans and dishonors it!!!

This most informative and well written article brings to mind the scene in the 2006 documentary Why We Fight when congress person after congress person would give a speech on the House floor which would attempt to justify why a particular missile or bomber should be built in their particular state.

"Endless money forms the sinews of war."-Cicero [106-43 BC], Roman statesman and philosopher

Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, Mussolini and Mao headed five totalitarian systems during less than half of the 20th century. Clinically insane, historically psychopathological and legally dead, now. But, the U.S. has had to fight them all directly and through proxies, building up its military, defense and police forces for most of two generations, now.

The U.S. system has become secretly, yet fiercely totalitarian in the face of these challenges, even while slavery, the nearly complete destruction of native American culture, support for Latin American dictators and wars across Asia demonstrate a long history of imperialist violence.

I have been involved in the development of the totalitarian U.S. system we live in, but the press refuses to acknowledge this, including the alternative press. I have been a consultant and architect of the U.S. military-industrial-organized crime complex and it is more grandiose and corrupt than the Eurasian totalitarian systems it has followed. The public is in darkness even with accurate information from articles like David Morris'.

I very strongly believe the U.S. will be attacked by nuclear and biological devices before it even begins to straighten out. I do not think the current good information in this article can generate any remedy whatsoever. But, thanks if it can possibly lead to my own offering of information and analysis, which may generate a remedial process for the U.S. of A. Good people of Common Dreams -- read a startling true story about totalitarian America: It is absolutely free and safe -- http://www.lulu.com/product/file-download/revolution-or-extinction/11772671

Here's more of my slightly jaundiced, deeply cynical views of the forces behind recent American history.

America does not really exist as a country anymore. Our sons and daughters are being sent overseas to fight and die in wars against nations that pose no threat to our national security. Those wars are being fought for one purpose only: to transfer more and more of our wealth to the already super wealthy multinational corporations and the oligarchs who control them. Instead of strengthening us, these wars are destroying what little remains of our sense of "country" because they leave us with nothing left to build and maintain a nation.

We are also being pillaged internally. No, it is not the way invading armies once pillaged nations. It is much more insidious than that. Every day, more and more of what once constituted our wealth is being stripped from the American people, gobbled up by multinational corporations and transferred into the private accounts of wealthy oligarchs and entire nations that pose as our allies, but see us only as a means of increasing their own standing in the world.

Permanent war is only one of the many ways our nation's wealth is being transferred into the accounts of these multinational corporations and other oligarchs. It is, however, one of the easier ways to pillage a country because it exploits the people's sense of patriotism and uses it as a form of psychological blackmail to demand an ever-greater percentage of a nation's wealth.

Virtually our entire federal government under the two-party system has been functioning as corrupt gatekeepers who, instead of protecting the interests of the American people, have opened up the vaults and made our resources available to these thieves.

There is good reason why Social Security is under attack, and why Obama and his minions, together with the entire Republican Party, are aiding and abetting yet another criminal transfer of our resources. Social Security is where the money that is used to support the American people is still protected--somewhat. Once that vault is completely compromised by our political leaders, it will be quickly stripped of all revenue (indeed, much of this has already happened) and quietly slipped into the accounts of these same multinational corporations, while the nation's infrastructure quite literally falls apart.

Any attempt to direct even a modest percentage of our tax money into domestic needs will be quickly undermined because the whole GOAL IS TO DESTROY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and render them incapable of standing up to corporate exploitation. An entire lower- and middle-class population, reduced to scrounging through garbage cans for a little something to eat, cannot offer much in the way of resistance to the multinational corporations that control most of the world's wealth.

It would have been much easier to repel an invading army that announced as its intentions the pillaging of America. These new corporate pillagers have completely corrupted our political leaders, the media, and the two major political parties. They are like some insidious virus that gets inside healthy cells and turns them into genetic factories to replicate more and more of themselves.

The only certainty is that if our generation does not act more effectively to expose and repel these corporate pillagers, our children and grandchildren will be reduced to the status of a slave work force with no future--and certainly no reason to live.