$1.2 Trillion Spent on the Military While the Rest of Us Fight Over Crumbs

Friends,

Once in a while someone tells the story so completely, so graphically and so succinctly that it is staggering!!!  Laura Flanders has done just that in the following piece from AlterNet.  It is, quite ironically, the ages old story (think back to the Caesars of Rome) of keeping the little people fighting over the crumbs while those in power continue to spend our treasure on the Empire's destructive bacchanalia.

Interestingly enough, many people are waking up and speaking out against the bloodletting of wasteful and immoral military spending.  One such campaign is Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation's Bring Our Billions Home campaign.  The only suggestion I have for them - having read Laura's article - is to make it Bring our Trillions Home!!!  I know; it destroys the alliteration, but hey folks, this is a bloodletting - literally, figuratively and economically.

So read Laura's article, or watch her on the tube.  Then, let's get to work bringing the TRILLIONS home!!!

Peace,

Leonard

***************

$1.2 Trillion Spent on the Military While the Rest of Us Fight Over Crumbs

By Laura Flanders, AlterNet.org, March 6, 2011

So after all that cash is gone, what are we left with? Not a whole heck of a lot for the rest of us.

There’s been a joke going around the labor protests. It goes something like this:
A union member, a CEO and a Tea Party member are sitting at a table with 12 cookies. The CEO grabs 11, turns to the Tea Partier and says “The Union’s out to take your cookie!”

I’ve been thinking that the joke applies pretty well to another situation. For instance, the military. Our military spending grabs 11 cookies and leaves us all battling over the 12th.

Christopher Hellman at TomDispatch added up all the military-related spending in the budget and came to a startling number: for fiscal year 2012, the actual military budget is something like $1.2 trillion dollars.

Trillion with a T.

Just to put that in perspective for a second, a million seconds is 12 days. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

So after all that cash is gone, what are we left with? Not a whole heck of a lot for the rest of us. “Discretionary” spending is nearly 40% of the budget, but if Hellman’s numbers are accurate, that $1.2 trillion eats up nearly 90% of discretionary funds, leaving just 10% for the rest of us. (That doesn’t include mandatory spending on things like Social Security and Medicare, which are separate.)

To be fair, Tea Partiers have called for military spending cuts, too. Rand Paul, hardly a progressive, pointed out that you could cut all of the non-military discretionary spending and not balance the budget—and Politifact rated it True.

The point behind the joke still holds, though. Instead of fighting over the last crumbs, maybe it’s time to team up and grab some of the cookies back from the people who’ve been hanging on to far more than their share.

Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv, Mon-Thursday on Free Speech TV (Dish Network chn. 9315) and streaming at GRITtv.org.

(Source: http://www.alternet.org/news/150142/$1.2_trillion_spent_on_the_military_while_the_rest_of_us_fight_over_crumbs)