US Military Spending Rolls Relentlessly Forwards

All empires go bankrupt if they spend too much money on wars and holding hostile territories.  Worse is, this invariably happens when empires go in the red in trade.  When red ink flows, empires die.  Especially when the trade deficit for an empire is with a rival, growing empire.  The US is in a classic situation leading to an obvious bankruptcy.  Yet, we can’t rein in (by the way, I am using the correct word here, this has to do with pulling on a horse’s rein to stop it from galloping away!) military spending at all.  Which will kill our nation.  This is life and death for us and our leaders think otherwise.

Gates Slams House GOP Over Military Spending

• Gates went on to insist that those calling for a cut in the record budget were “disconnected from the real world.” Several freshmen Republicans have called for such a cut as part of the effort to curb the massive budget deficit.  The Pentagon, which is still operating at the levels of funding from fiscal year 2010, itself a record level, insists that the lack of an increase has created a “crisis,” including preventing them from buying a new submarine they had their eyes on.

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ΩΩThe Pentagon/Secret government spending spree continues totally out of control.  All empires destroy themselves the same way: wild military adventures and spending coupled with total corruption by kleptocrats who run the capital city.  Add to this a total inability to tax the very rich and you get the fall of Rome and a host of other empires since then.  The real danger to our empire isn’t Muslims rioting in Egypt or Iran having a nuclear bomb.  It is going bankrupt due to wild military spending.

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ΩΩOn top of that, the other thing that kills empires is when they import more than they export.  This killed the Roman empire (importing silk and spices from China and India) and this is killing our empire.  England’s empire collapsed when it went from exporting goods to its conquests (india and China) to importing stuff from the US and Germany.  The WWI/WWII collapse of the British empire was presaged by its failure to export more than it imported.

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ΩΩThe US is deep, deep, deep in the red due to persistent import/export imbalances and this, in turn, has made our government deficit worse.  We went from being a creditor nation from 1860-1960 to increasingly, a debtor nation.  The first hint of disaster came when the US dropped the gold standard during the Vietnam War years.  The Vietnam War was a classic: we used very expensive equipment and bombs to destroy mud huts and kill barely armed peasants who hated us.  We not only lost that war, we lost our minds.

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ΩΩThe military and political establishment learned absolutely not one tiny thing from the Vietnam War.  Not a thing.  Instead, they thought, they could better prosecute insane colonialist wars with mercenaries who cost ten times more than conscripts.  This made our military even more expensive.  On top of this, the US continued the Cold War hyper-arming strategy even as we turned China into our biggest trade partner.  China, who then proceeded to buy up immense amounts of US debt which now hangs over our heads like a sword on a silk thread.  One that the Chinese told me directly, they plan to eventually cut.  It WILL fall.  There is not the slightest doubt about this.  None.  It is already fated to happen.

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ΩΩWhile deciding the freeze Americans to death (remember, liberals today have decided Global Warming is going to destroy the planet so they have ceased agitating to heat the homes of the poor living in super-cold places), Obama is still passively allowing the Afghan War to rage on despite Costs of around $300 Million a Day.  Why isn’t he, why isn’t the Democratic liberals in Congress utterly sickened by this information?  The answer is simple: too many Democrats and way too many Republicans get oodles of money from the military/industrialists and or they ARE the owners of these corporations or systems which are eating up all our fiances.

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ΩΩEven so, there are feeble attempts at curbing billions in spending but these are fake.  That is, not serious.  Just a way of Congress eking out more campaign donations from bribers who suck up our public finances, playing games all over the planet.   Pentagon to Defund NATO Missile Defense After 2013: this is a classic.  The EU is richer than the US.  The EU has much more social services than the US.  The EU is perfectly capable of defending itself from Russia for decades due to the Russian empire going bankrupt due to high military costs.

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ΩΩWorse, not a soul is menacing the EU except for internally.  That is, they all hate each other.  They refuse to form a real country and keep things a very unworkable confederation due to religious, ethnic, linguistic and historic hatreds.  So these clever, well-heeled, better off Europeans con the stupid US into going bankrupt, playing war games there and confronting or confounding Russia.  There is zero reason we should spend even one penny protecting Europe.  We should have zero troops there.  Zero bases.  These things are killing our home country by bankrupting it.

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ΩΩI couldn’t get the charts and graphs for this year’s budget yet but here is the old one.  Congress hasn’t voted even on the 2011 budget so this is the one that is operational this year, anyway:  http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2010/fy2010_SSJ_Overseas_Contingency_Operations.pdf

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ΩΩThe two bar graphs here show how the US government spends less and less in Iraq.  Iraq is finally peeling away from us and will soon enough vanish into the greater mass of anti-American pan-Arab configuration that is growing stronger as the people in countries dominated by the US and EU erupt into revolutions or Islamic revivals.  All of that trillion dollars we spent in Afghanistan and Iraq will end up producing absolutely nothing for us.

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ΩΩThe spending in Afghanistan is supposedly going down this year according to this graph made in 2009 but it didn’t do this at all.  It is still climbing.  Note also the dark top of each bar: this is money spent ‘rebuilding’ countries we are bombing.  As we bomb, we build.  This is totally insane but then, we did this in Vietnam and we know this was a failure back then.

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ΩΩThe amount spend on this insane rebuilding while bombing strategy in Afghanistan is even smaller in proportion to the bombing money.  It is what?  0.03%?  Incredible.  The two graphs also show another shocking fact:  the Iraq graph goes from 0 to 100 billion a year while the Afghanistan one is from 0 to 150 billion a year!  And in general, we misspent over $140 billion a year from 2002-2011.

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ΩΩThis means that every 10 years, we are wasting $1.4 trillion fighting Muslims in just two countries.  This is exactly what bin Laden wanted to see us do.  He even openly boasted about this.  And he knew, based on his operations on behalf of the CIA, exactly which country was best for bankrupting the empire.  We see from these graphs that Afghanistan is tremendously expensive to subdue.

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ΩΩThe above graph show how our wild military spending has erupted to the point, it is a Krakatoa of destruction…of our finances.  In2001, it was only $316 billion.  Today, it is around $664-667 billion.  This is a 100% increase!!!!  What other spending has increased this much?  Ah, US healthcare which was never reformed, just deformed!

Here is another graph which has more dire information:  US Health Care Spending 1792-2016 – Charts

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ΩΩHere, Defense has nearly a TRILLION dollars this year!  Of course, pensions and health together are $1.6 trillion but still, what do we need to reform if we wish to exist as a nation in 20 years?  The answer is obvious: we need to imitate successful countries that have saner healthcare systems and we need to spend as much on ‘defense’ as the EU and Japan which is…virtually nothing.  We just spent nearly $10 trillion on military/war spending in one decade.  We gained absolutely nothing from this.

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ΩΩWe see zero trade benefits.  We see zero industrial benefits that help us fix our trade deficit.  We peddle arms, mostly. Boeing Craft, Helicopters Gain in Pentagon’s $671 Billion Defense …is all about how this corporation feeds on the taxpayers.  Our Presidents and Secretary of States spend much of their time peddling Boeing junk.  But even the countries we conquer are canceling contracts with Boeing and other operations here in order to prevent social disorders at home:   Iraq Shelves US Arms Deal to Buy Food.  Iraq’s rulers are saner than our rulers!  Imagine that!

The Post–9/11 Feeding Frenzy by Sheldon Richman

• “The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2½ times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” No one knows how much the whole thieving operation costs.  And no one seems to care. Money is like water. For example, “[The] chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness,” Priest and Arkin wrote…It is no surprise, then, that the mega-bureaucracy isn’t even much help fighting current wars (which shouldn’t be fought): “When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the [National Counterterrorism Center]. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. ‘I told him that after 4½ years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!’ he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.”

• …According to Post estimates, 265,000 out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances are contractors. But Gates confesses, “I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.” Nearly 2,000 companies are involved in post–9/11 intelligence operations. “Hiring contractors was supposed to save the government money. But that has not turned out to be the case,” Priest and Arkin wrote.

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ΩΩThe KGB destroyed the Soviet Union and the morons running our ‘intelligence’ system are hard at work, replicating this.  They are all out for #1 which is their own bank accounts.  Like our bankers and our industrialists, they all want to get rich, quick and to hell with the US society, finances and operational systems.  The point is to enrich the few at the expense of the US future taxpayers.  Who cares?  There is money to be made and one can always move to some pirate island afterwards.  Or move to the EU.

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ΩΩOur intelligence systems has got to be one of the stupidest operations on earth.  This is because it works on behalf of Israel, not the US.  Like Congress, it ignores domestic finances and needs and focuses entirely on what is good for Israel.  So far, this has been hidden deep inside of a fog of propaganda and hidden costs.  But these costs are coming into view now that the Fed is buying much of the red ink since China is no longer buying it and neither is Japan nor the EU.  All are stepping aside and letting the bleeding go.  This, in turn, is causing world inflation as the Fed also is keeping interest rates at near zero.

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ΩΩChina ruthlessly crushes inflation which is at slightly less than 5% while in the US, the rigged inflation statistics hides true inflation so the Fed can fund our wars without batting an eye.  This false stats system is like the Soviet Union which falsified industrial output data the same way.  The end result has to be ‘no inflation’ so all things inflating are removed from the numbers.  In general, when people lie about statistics in order to get a pre-determined answer, they end up destroyed.  The entire point of having any statistics is simple: it lets you see if you are in a hockey stick graph situation!  Which is invariably fatal!

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ΩΩThe swine running us into bankruptcy are furious that there might be even tiny cuts in wild spending:  CEOs urge passage of fiscal 2011 Pentagon budget | Reuters

Here is another government graph from the study above:

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ΩΩAccording to the other government graphs, the military is spending nearly a trillion dollars.  I suppose a lot of this extra $300 billion is for our wild intelligence community which is so spectacularly useless.  On to Pakistan, a country that loathes us:  Pakistan May Trade Jailed US Diplomat for Scientist

• But just when we thought the situation couldn’t get any more complicated, a number of outlets are reporting that Pakistan is considering “trading” Davis back to the United States in return for Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist who was sentenced to 86 years in prison for “trying to kill her American interrogators.” Siddiqui’s imprisonment has been a sore spot amongst Pakistanis, and might be one of the few things which would overcome anger about the Davis killings and the US demands that he be released unconditionally.

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ΩΩWhat sort of idiocy is this?  Obviously, this guy is very important to our mis-named ‘intelligence community’.  Siddiqui is someone I have mentioned in the past.  Her American citizen children were kidnapped by the CIA and threatened with torture if they didn’t tell information that would put mommy in prison.  She, in turn, is accused of trying to fight off the guys torturing her.  If this were a WWII movie, this would be all about the brave resistance woman being tortured by the Nazis who kidnap her children, etc.  Ugh.  I hope she is released simply because we shouldn’t imprison people we have illegally tortured.  Even if that person was Saddam or is bin Laden.  It doesn’t matter.  Torture is illegal.

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ΩΩNow, on to international news we should heed:  Outlook bleak for Japan-Russia isle row › Japan Today:

• As part of their effort to stop an unproductive blame game over the sovereignty of the four islands, Maehara and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov agreed to set up a high-level task force to study the possibility of Tokyo taking part in joint economic development projects on the disputed islands….The professor also pointed to the relative decline of Japan as a political and economic power as a factor behind its currently stymied relations with Russia.

• Hakamada said Russia has been expanding its investment in the disputed remote islands against the background of a stronger economic position with its abundant resources such as oil and natural gas. Furthermore, the area is important for security reasons as the country needs to ensure navigation of Russian military vessels toward the Pacific Ocean, he added.

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ΩΩAs I correctly predicted, the Japanese briefly flirted with spooking Russia and China by being banzai-aggressive over the issue of sovereignty of various islands.  All this did was shove forwards the Russian/Chinese alliance.  Now that this whole thing was a total failure, the Japanese leaders (sic) are back peddling rapidly.  Japan was hoping to start a war a la Korea and have the US jump in, guns blazing.  But this required having China and Russia be enemies, not close buddies.

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ΩΩIf anything, the Japanese intelligence community is stupider than the US.  And the rulers there even more demented.  They hoped we would banazi into war there, not huddle back at our base in Okinawa where the people hate us with a passion.  Nope.  The US blasts China constantly but never, ever pokes at China since this would mean China will have a good excuse to overrun all of Asia and we have zero ability to stop China.  Note our lack of success anywhere except against isolated, tiny, and DISARMED Iraq.  Saddam was a trusting fool to disarm.

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ΩΩHere is another reason the war with Russia will be a total failure for Japan:  Residents on disputed island increasingly shun Japan

• Residents once used to pin hopes on Japan to take control but views of the islanders have undergone changes in the past 20 years. There now appears to be a shift in their views marked by an increasing stand to snub Japan.  When President Medvedev arrived on the island by air in November, some likened it to the descent of a savior. Dmitry Sokov, a 45-year-old hotel manager, said many islanders at the time thought, ‘‘The island has not been abandoned. If more key officials pay visits, our livelihood would never go down.’‘

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ΩΩThis is because Russia is going up and Japan is dying: Japan Turning Into Most Indebted Developed Nation In History.  Here is another example:  Mitsui Working To Globalize Staff.  Japan is madly offshoring now.  The leaders there gave up on ‘fortress Japan’ which is going bankrupt so they are bailing out.  Japan-U.S. alliance unbalanced › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

• Dennis Blair, former director of National Intelligence, was critical of the current form of the security alliance under which the United States ‘‘would do all of the military work and Japan would simply pay…host nation support and provide some bases.’‘ Noting that the Japan-U.S. relationship has been ‘‘the linchpin for both countries,’’ Blair said the existing bilateral security alliance arrangement may have been ‘‘okay in 1955, but it’s not okay in 2011….‘I’m all in favor of changing the Japanese Constitution, developing Japanese military capability so that they can take part in things like international peacekeeping and extended self-defense,’’ he added.

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ΩΩJapan can’t become a military power anymore.  The WWII troops were due to a huge surge in population from 1860-1940 (and post-war until 1980).  The introduction of vaccinations which cut down childhood diseases tremendously, better sanitation and above all, more food as goods were exported and food imported, Japan could afford to send in wave after wave of suicide maniacs and not blink an eye.  Now, they can’t afford to lose even a dozen casualties.  They could use killer robot assassin machines.

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ΩΩBut the country is going bankrupt.  Yes, all military operations tend to run in the red a great deal and Japan can’t afford this.  Their government debt is 200% GDP, by far and away the highest on earth.  They can only see capital, jobs and power drain from the country as the elites prepare to flee.

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ΩΩNow on to that other dying empire:  UK rate rise is common sense – whatever the inflation-deniers say – Telegraph

Last week, the Bank once again refused to raise interest rates. The base rate remains at its record 0.5pc low – where it’s been for almost two years. Yet December CPI inflation, at 3.7pc, was way above the official 2pc target. This is nothing new. CPI growth has exceeded 2pc for 31 of the past 36 months. For no fewer than 20 of those months, it has been above 3pc – requiring the Bank Governor, Mervyn King, to write an explanatory letter to the Chancellor….The Bank’s claim that above-target inflation is “temporary” has been blown out of the water. As a result, UK monetary policy has a serious credibility problem. That matters – a lot.

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ΩΩThe same excuses used by the Fed are being used in Japan and the UK.  Fake statistics, fake information, fake analysis leads to bankruptcy.  Of course, due to bailing the bankers out and QE actions, the budgets of all three countries running deep in the red are leading to cutting social services in all three, offshoring even more jobs and…inflation hidden by ZIRP lending regimes in all three.  This insane troika of imperialism (Japan and UK riding on the US imperial tiger’s back) is going to crash into an ice bank while careening down an icy road to Moscow.

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ΩΩNot that the EU is going to survive much longer:  Germany and France Roll Out Plan to Boost Euro – NYTimes.com

• In exchange for bolstering the fund, Berlin hopes to use the new “pact for competitiveness” to force weaker euro-zone economies to mirror Germany’s more disciplined example….“The E.U. — but above all those countries that use the euro — wants to grow together,” Mrs. Merkel said. “Politically we will grow step-by-step closer together.”…Reservations even emerged from neighboring Holland, where the government generally supports Germany on economic policy. “We welcome stronger economic coordination on the basis of best practices, but we will always remain the master of our taxes, pensions and wages,” said the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte.

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ΩΩGermany and France take turns invading everyone.  There is no unity in Europe.  It has to split up just as the US will collapse into warring states when we go bankrupt.  Nicolas Sarkozy declares multiculturalism had failed – Telegraph

• Prime Minister David Cameron last month pronounced his country’s long-standing policy of multiculturalism a failure, calling for better integration of young Muslims to combat home-grown extremism. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia’s former prime minister John Howard and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar have also in recent months said multicultural policies have not successfully integrated immigrants.

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ΩΩMulticulturalism is dying because unity is impossible when entities are going bankrupt.  This has been cynically used by EU and US empires for centuries as they pried apart and destroyed the Ottoman, Molgul Indian and Chinese empires.  We know from history and our own actions how this works.  Bankrupt empires can’t keep even their core home provinces under military control if the government goes bankrupt.  All other empires always exploit this by encouraging dissension, riots, coups and ethnic warfare to weaken rivals.  This continues today.  We are in a race with time. How soon will the EU, Japan and US go bankrupt?  An interesting question, one the Chinese examine daily as they track our spending disasters.

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