The toll from the triumvirate's lesser wrongdoing
Being a "lesser" wrongdoing is obviously both a relative and an absolute matter. Troubled veterans' suicides, which number in the thousands, and are occurring once a day or so, are essentially almost equivalent to murder but by a different name and agent.
Being physically or psychologically maimed for life from having
participated in or targeted by a military intervention leaves the victim alive,
not dead, but the victim's remaining lifetime condition is almost too awful to
imagine. Pulitzer prize winning journalist David Wood reports that "Almost a
quarter million
Author, movie maker and social activist Michael Moore has compiled in a book poignant letters written to him from U.S. soldiers on duty.[21] In the book's inside flap Mr. Moore writes: "---after being lied to about weapons of mass destruction and about the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq; after being forced by stop-loss orders to extend their deployment; after being undertrained, underequipped, and overworked long after George Bush declared Iraq "Mission Accomplished,' these soldiers have something to say." Reading what they have to say is one reason one of this writer's slogans is "honor veterans, dishonor war."
A nation slowly deteriorating morally and socioeconomically
from the lost opportunities for rebuilding America that cannot be done because
this triumvirate swallows up 50% or so of the federal government's
discretionary budget has to be next in line along the spectrum of wrongdoing and its consequences. Over 20
trillion dollars reportedly has been spent since 1948 on the military budget.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that one-half of that amount is sheer
warfare welfare, the other half reflecting a realistic defense budget limited
to the costs of responding to attacks on our shores by foreign states and
terrorist groups. That means 10 trillion dollars worth of lost opportunities
that in a triumvirate-free America would not have been poured down a sinkhole,
money that could have been constructively spent over more than a 60-year period
on meeting pressing domestic and global needs in employment, education,
nutrition, health care, sanitation, you name it. We would be a very different
Actions and consequences spread along the opposite end of
that spectrum seem almost too trivial to mention in comparison to those at the
other end. Long before the internet era this writer collected and stuffed in to
a bulging filing cabinet, newsprint accounts of incidents of various and sundry
wrongdoing by the defense industry. Here are four illustrative cases. Arms
maker uses front organization to skirt
Ralph Nader, decades later, did his own compiling of news stories and included them along with scores of stories about wrongdoing investigations and lawsuits in other industrial sectors in a recently published book: DoD employees accepting free flights, accommodations and hospitality from private and foreign interest that do business with the Pentagon; thousands of private military contractors operating in Afghanistan; overbilling, faulty products and services and bribery by Halliburton and a subsidiary; offshore manufacturing of integrated circuits for use in military gear; Northrop Grumman's overbilling of improperly tested parts; false claims for bullet-proof vests; cost overruns by the Missile Defense Agency; laxity in prosecuting contractor fraud; and overbilling by tens of millions of dollars work done in Iraq by a company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide. [22]
Who are "those
people?"
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