U.S. Foreign & Military Aid: Do Ask & Do Tell
Isn’t it amazing? The government puts on all these shows. Their media tentacles help with the shows by hyping them royally and pumping up scare tactic headlines hourly. Take this new shenanigan called the war over the debt ceiling.
Now, that was not the amazing part I was referring to. What I meant by amazing was the public’s response to all this nonsense baloney. The government is telling us to ‘be afraid! Our food stamp program will no longer feed you, your Medicaid will no longer get you medicine, our airports will no longer remain operational, our homeland security guys won’t be able to protect you against those boogey men terrorists who are hiding behind your sheds … you are going to starve, suffer and most likely drop dead. So be afraid! We ain’t got no money, and if we don’t raise this debt ceiling and print more money, you all are gonna die!’
And our people, amazingly, buy into all this. They don’t even look at the most obvious facts. Now isn’t that amazing?!
I just finished reading news headlines geared to calm nerves in one particular area: Thou shalt not be afraid. Our military and foreign aid will continue pouring into our usual recipient nations. Hooray. Hooray. We’ll continue to send them dollars and guns… in the billions. Hooray, hooray!
Who were they attempting to comfort and calm? I have no idea. Probably some nervous recipient(s) in some miserable country (s) out there. But most importantly, where the heck is the response to this here in our nation? Nowhere to be heard or seen. And what’s up with that?! Come on, they are saying we are right now at this default line, with our current debt level in the trillions of dollars, with our unaccountable loony expenditures totally out of control, with our miserable unemployment reflecting the more miserable overall economy crashing down, yet we are going to send billions and billions of dollars to some nations out there. Yet not a peep from our zombie-turned majority.
Just listen to this (okay, just read this): In fiscal 2013, U.S. government funding for humanitarian assistance and international development totals around $23 billion= $23,000,000,000.
And this too: In fiscal 2013, U.S. funding for foreign military assistance is estimated at $14 billion= $14,000,000,000
When you combine the two you get a whopping $37,000,000,000 of our hard-earned money spent by our government on … on exactly what?
To give you an idea I am going to provide a few examples:
Afghanistan gets around $7 Billion= $7,000,000,000. Now, don’t mistake this for our money spent on our war in Afghanistan. That’s in the trillions of dollars. That’s a separate deal. No, this money goes to Afghanistan’s government – known for being crooks, criminals, heroin dealers, and terrorist breeders. They take the money, and misplace it- so the money, some of it, ends up with the guys we are supposedly bombing and waging war against. Then we point at those guys and say, hey, you see these armed terrorists, and then we go bomb the hell out of them. They take the money and invest it in some highly lucrative poppy fields and heroin production, so that we can spend billions of dollars pretending to destroy those poppy fields and production centers. And then we give more money to these government guys, so that we can go and bomb them some more, and target more poppy fields … and the cycle continues, and continues. Trust me, it makes sense …Not necessarily to you and me, but it makes lots of sense to our fat war-profiteers here at home. After all, who gives a damn if things make sense to the people-since when have they counted?
Of course Israel gets quite a lion’s share. That goes without saying. They get nearly $3 billion=$3,000,000,000, in military aid and another large sum as financial aid for …well, let’s put aside all the diplomacy and political correctness and call a duck a duck: They get all the military and foreign aid so that they can turn around and spend those dollars through their powerful network and lobby here, to make sure we are all screwed up in developing and implementing our foreign policy. Does that make sense? Just think about the billions of dollars, directly or indirectly, spent by the Israel lobby to form and control our foreign policy, aka war-war and more war. They get all those billions of dollars in foreign and military aid, come over here, get us into wars so that we go spend trillions of additional dollars in wars and screwing up the world … and ourselves… and then give Israel more in foreign and military aid. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Of course not, It’s not supposed to make sense, dude!
Egypt gets its $1 billion of our tax money for … for what? Thank God it’s been in the news lately so even the mass ignoramus population in our nation is able to have an idea: guns and bullets to kill political dissenters, tanks and tear gas to be used against civilians, helicopters to fire at civilians below … bring about a coup de tat, and then bring about another one …Okay, so that one we get. We know what they use our money and military equipment for. No brainer. As to why we would shower Egypt with all this money and military power? Why in the world do we end up giving all these dollars to the side that gets in via a coup, and to the side who takes out those who brought about the coup and gets in with its own coup … and another coup after that, and many dead … Why? Well, duh. It’s because that’s what we do. Since when has our government been in the business of providing reasons and justification to its people? Since when do they worry about having to make sense to their lowly people? Maybe, referring to the paragraph above, maybe it’s because of the billions of dollars we gave Israel, which came back here and were spent so that our government would put together this policy of giving billions of dollars to many different sides in Egypt – so that they would continue coups and butcher their people.
Pakistan gets more or less $1 Billion. They get military aid to make sure they create desirable conditions so that our military can send its drones out there and bomb the hell out of them every day. Makes sense. No? All right, try this: How else do we give these drones and our other killing machines a real-life test run? See! Like shooting ranges, our government needs to go out there, pick countries (and their inhabitants), and make them viable war-practice fields. Call them Human Target Practice Fields. You haven’t heard?! Nothing like a real test drive. Of course these things ain’t free, so of course the money has to be spent, thus, our foreign aid to countries like Pakistan. Why is the price so high? Because Pakistan is dangerous, and it has nuclear weapons that we made sure they would get, and that makes Pakistan kinda expensive.
Let’s make sure we don’t totally leave out the little-money guys. Little money for little guys tells some stories as well. Here is one:
Yemen gets $13 Million or so. Why so little? Well, because it is just this tiny little poor non-entity entity; no real military might, no nuclear arsenal, poor, and almost invisible. Then, why do we bother giving them anything? Because sometimes we need to engage in target practice in a desert environment … and frankly, the international community doesn’t give a damn when the targets we kill are some Yemeni Bedouins on camels. The money goes to the few guys in charge of the desert who must play their part when we go there for our target practice. Once in a while, a few of our fallen nobody targets make their way into the media here-somehow. The Yemeni government guys in charge have a role to play; briefly. They are supposed to look confused and say, ‘Yah, yah, they were some dangerous terrorist children riding camels, and no, we have never officially granted your guys the permission to come here and use our kids for target practice, but, we never officially told them ‘no, you can’t’ either.’ That’s how it goes. Really. To get all that, in Yemen, we must spend ten million bucks or so. It’s a real good deal- almost as good as a Walmart post-holiday sale. So why not?
So, yes. Our government, somehow, amazingly, has plenty of money, thanks to its limitless money printing authority with zero oversight or accountability. They have trillions to spend on target practice, killing, butchering, torturing, kidnapping. They have billions and billions to spend on spying on you and just messing around with you and me for the heck of it-too much printed money gives them that luxury, you know. And of course, as we see, they’ve got billions of dollars to give crooks, criminals, tyrants, despots, heroin dealers and producers, terrorists, terrorist supporters …
The next time around when our government tells you we are miserably broke, believe them. It’s a no brainer: we are a broke nation. However, don’t let them give you bullsh.. about where they’re going to cut and snip to make ends meet. Do not let them tell you we must go on this way, and just keep printing the green in order to survive. Give them the amount in trillions spent on wars and target practice-shooting around the world.
Point to the billions of dollars yearly given to despots, torturers, criminals, and human target practice fields. Show them the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted by unaccountable agencies every single month. Just question, demand, and insist. Show that you matter and count. For once!
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Sibel Edmonds is the Publisher & Editor of Boiling Frogs Post and the author of the Memoir Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story. She is the recipient of the 2006 PEN Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for her “commitment to preserving the free flow of information in the United States in a time of growing international isolation and increasing government secrecy” Ms. Edmonds has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University.
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