Quote:
Originally posted by Cletus Miller
The whole M-I complex is the business lobby to kill all others. What's irrational even within the corrupt system is the steady allocation among the Army, Navy, Air Force, regardless of the actual and genuine potential threats (35 percent to the Air Force, 35 percent to the Navy, and 30 percent to the Army, per Fred Kaplan (e.g. http://www.slate.com/id/2133059 ), going back at least 25 years). While I wouldn't advocate allowing our air and naval superiority to erode significantly, there isn't any foreseeable need for a brand new fighter/interceptor as we already have total, global air superiority.
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I think the message of Why We Fight has a much broader reach than the military/industrial complex. There's a real problem with the government - state and federal - becoming the biggest client of a lot of businesses. I see a lot of atrocious spending going on because business has been in a cost cutting mode for the better part of the last six years and in the place of private sector revenues, companies are eager to grab Uncle Sam or their state's business.
This creates the worst of all worlds by encouraging profligate govt spending. I think business has unfortunately learned that its much easier to service the govt than compete with it, which was the original aim of the push toward privatization. I still beleive in privatization, now more than ever, but I'm not sure business does anymore. I think its a lot happier to just be a subcontractor where we all pay for the redundancies.
I have a state contract right now and I hate it. Its wasteful. The service provided to the govt is a service necessitated because its own workers are too lazy to perform their job properly. The redundancy is awful. If the state fired the dept we provide the service for and inserted us in its place we could do it for 1/5 the cost to taxpayers.
But that will never happen because its politically unpalatable. It's fine for me. I get paid either way, but it really does fuck taxpayers and people who might benefit from the wages paid to those state workers.
Fuck it, right... That's the human condition. The useless have to do something. We can't just let them starve.
