The world’s largest arms dealer, the USA, which is also the country with the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons (it maintains a current arsenal of around 9,960 intact warheads… how many DO you need to destroy the world?), will spend more that $1 trillion on “defence” for the first time in history in 2008, according to this article in Le Monde. I put inverted commas around “defence” because their current strategy of non-UNSC sanctioned pre-emptive attacks can hardly be called “defence”. It’s a typical PR sleight-of-hand. Let’s call it what it is. It’s an “ATTACK” budget.
As part of this $1 trillion, the US will spend $23.4bn towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads.
The older I get, the more I read, and the more unconvinced I am becoming that democracy and capitalism contain the model for the future for the human race. If the USA is the beacon of modern democracy, then I believe we need a new system, a better system.
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It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defence budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defence-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The US has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush’s two on-going wars, defence spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defence budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.
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The US shouldn’t be a model for anything except maybe on how to keep millions of people living in poverty. The US is chock full of people running like hell just to stay in the same place in life. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again–They can spend a billion dollars on designing a bomb that will blow up one person in a bunker 50 feet underground, but they won’t spend a dollar on ending poverty in their own backyards, or 50 cents to ensure that their children are being properly educated.
Because the people with the money find blowing things up more interesting than helping people in poverty. Big explosions are more impressive than getting someone back on their feet. They srsly need to grow up 🙂