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20 August 2012

private sector triumphs

Last Thursday evening, quietly, and with little fanfare, the private companies constituting America's military industrial complex declared success in their efforts to undermine and ultimately destroy liberty, democracy, and free speech at home and abroad. During a lavish ceremony held at an opulent dining room located in a convention center built using local taxes-dollars, these enemies of freedom toasted themselves, each other, and their cronies in Washington, cronies who used the federal 2012 defense bill to enrich these fools by nearly $400 billion. “NASA just spent $1.6 billion sending a miniature laboratory to Mars,” said the head of a powerful aeronautics contractor, to uproarious applause. “One point six billion? I can see from this here podium seventeen different fellow defense contractors who made that much in stock options in the ten minutes after the President signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA 2012). It warms my heart to know that those $400 billion were used to make the persons in this room rich instead of being wasted on launching more scientific labs into space, feeding malnourished children, or developing methods for raising crops in Earth's barren and waterless places. We have done it, gentlemen – hoodwinked hundreds of millions of clueless motherfuckers into making us wealthier and more powerful than they could possibly imagine.”

Called in 1961 by outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower the greatest threat to democracy that this country has ever known, a few tens of thousands of defense contractors routinely cheat over three hundred and ten millions of common American citizens out of roughly half the money we commoners give the government in the form of taxes, every year. “With four hundred billion dollars, we could refurbish a thousand schools, explore the seas and space, pay a hundred thousand school-teachers decently, rebuild a thousand bridges, cure a dozen diseases, and perfect renewable-energy-gathering-systems such as solar, tidal, wind, and thermal,” said Shurucq Tamzal, PhD, spokeswoman for the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). “But no matter how many recommendations this office makes to leaders in the White House or Congress, they keep shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of private individuals who profit from constant and continuous conflict – war on a global scale. So, basically, when the U.S. makes war, defense contractors get rich. This is a disgrace, a farce, not at all how the persons who founded this nation intended us to be doing things. At least, that's my opinion; please don't quote me on it.”

Defense contracting is as old as war itself, a business which in the age of modern warfare and endless armed struggle has no time for or interest in maintaining freedom and democracy for an uneducated, disinterested, television-addled population. In his closing remarks before ceding the stage to Creed – a religiously-conservative music group – the aforementioned aeronautics contractor said, “Frankly, we need the general American public to stay stupid and glued to the idiot-box for five hours every day, because, otherwise, it would ask too many questions, wanting to know who keeps giving us hundreds of billions of its tax-dollars. I thank my lucky stars for the wizards who make compelling, high-drama, high-quality TV programming.”

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

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