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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush
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To: jttmab who wrote (15765)10/21/2002 1:59:34 AM
From: MSI  Read Replies (1) of 93284
 
The sentiment of the time strongly disfavored standing armies

Good point, IMO, one of the major problems of the US today: Instead of reducing standing armies after war as was intended, starting in 1947 the DOD discovered it could extort perpetual funding thru official secrecy and deception... An abnornal growth on the body politic, a larger and larger hammer looking at the rest of the world as a bucket of nails.

It always cracks me up to listen to some SecDef justifying the DOD budget increase as a "percentage of GDP", as if that was somehow related to the security produced.
It's like a mafia protection racket, "how much can we extort from this dry cleaner without putting him out of business?" They're figuring out how they can sufficiently scare the crap out of Americans to extort maximum GDP.

After Eisenhower the extortion had a limit - it used to be: too much, and Americans will stay inside and work less and pay fewer taxes. Too little, and there's money still left on the table.

Then Reagan/Bush I discovered it doesn't matter if the economy is sickened by war extortion, they can just extract trillions from the future, raising the nat'l debt as high as they like, using overwhelming US military threat to force dollars down the throats of the rest of the world.
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