Harper, Obama and the Impossible Fat Albert

If one wanted to personify the military industrial complex it would be a very fat and repulsive man sitting at a very big table with big chubby hands grasping, always grasping, at the public purse( Let’s call him Fat Albert!) He never has to reach very far as there is always a steady stream of politicians bellying up to the table with an endless supply of taxpayers hard- earned money to buy his varied assortment of war toys. Money, in its magical flight, has also been known to pass under the table.

Fat Albert is a very clever guy as once he and his buddies get the politicians hooked on a project in the development stage the price just keeps going up and up.

Another of Albert’s clever little tricks is to hire former military as lobbyists to drop in on politicians and acquaint them with their latest project. This lobbying is in itself a multi-billion dollar business.

Fat Albert knows what every politicians fears- job losses in their home constituency so he and his buddies spread their production facilities over all 50 states of the union to insure that no politician would dare say no to their every wish.

This excessive abundance of war toys creates a bit of a problem. They can’t sit around unused as there might actually be awkward questions asked. To justify these vast expenditures there must be wars. In order for there to be wars there must be enemies. Enemies cannot be relied upon to show up on schedule and pose a genuine threat. It is left to politicians to manufacture enemies as necessary and exaggerate their capabilities to suit the agenda( This was the true genius of George W. Bush). In the real world(where too many politicians have lapsed memberships) this is called “collusion” which is synonymous with “conspiracy.”

It is also called corporate welfarism, and Fat Albert is the most eminent of corporate welfare bums. There was a time as an aspiring politician that Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper denounced corporate welfarism, but now he is all too willing to collude with these corporate pick pockets.

So we see an ever expanding military industrial state, endless warfare, corporate welfare, and catastrophic public debt.

Shooting down the F-35

The late 1980’s saw the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This was an opportunity for Fat Albert to lose some weight and trim down to a respectable size, but this was not to be. Militarism in the US had become a national addiction and Fat Albert’s appetite just grew and grew.

Then came the war on terror and Fat Albert grew some more to where his ravenous appetite consumes almost half of the US annual budget and the US is spending more money on “defense” than the next twenty or so countries combined.

If Americans wonder why they don’t have effective and affordable Medicare it’s because Fat Albert is devouring an obscene portion of the national budget.

To keep Fat Albert really happy and well fed other countries are coerced into buying war toys they don’t need and can’t afford. Thus we have Canada about to buy 65 F-35 fighters at an astounding 140 million dollars each.

These fighters are really relics of the Cold War where they were build in mass numbers for conventional warfare to deter any Soviet attack on Europe. We are now in a very different type of warfare where the use of these planes has been a disaster all too often killing civilians instead of the enemy. Just one of the reasons we are losing such wars is that we continually try to use conventional weapons to win guerrilla wars. This is as true in Afghanistan as it was in Viet Nam.

The only reason they are still being sold is because of collusion between politicians and the planes manufacturers. Similarly, as one observer has commented US aircraft carriers still wander the seas looking for a long extinct Japanese fleet. The point being they too are obsolete and the nuclear submarine is really the more effective weapon.

Canada’s purchase of 65 of these high tech dinosaurs is modest in the face of the US buying 2,443 of them at a cost of .3 trillion dollars. One wonders where Obama is going to get the money as he is fighting foreign wars on borrowed money and borrowed time and he leads the world’s most indebted country. America’s creditors are getting very nervous. It would seem a good time to put Fat Albert on a very strict diet.

As Western countries struggle with economic recession and huge debt loads what better time to start dealing with the Fat Albert monster child who compulsively gorges himself on public dollars.

Instead of waging wars to secure the last rapidly dwindling supplies of oil we should be waging war in favor of energy conservation and more efficient technologies. Politicians must not only end this collusion but also re-direct excessive military spending into the new economy; one that diversifies into new strategies, products and technologies that invest in our future and not a corrupted past.

Fat Albert is the bad boy nobody wants to talk about but dealing with him we must. Shooting down the F 35 is an essential first step.

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