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These Are Our Tax Dollars
by James Glaser January 22, 2008 Again, here is something headlined in a foreign paper, but I don't find it in the American media. From BBC News, "US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns has signed a deal that will provide Israel with $30 bn of military aid over the next 10 years." That would be 30,000 million dollar piles of our tax dollars. Also in this story is this tidbit about our generosity to our friends in the Middle East.
If I am not mistaken, I believe that Bahrain is one of the richest countries in the world, and with oil near a hundred dollars a barrel, all of these countries have the funds to buy their own weapons. Here is the deal though. If these countries had to use their own money, they could buy weapons from anybody they wanted to. Russia, France, and Great Britain are all arms merchants like we are, so the $83,000,000,000.00 American tax dollars we are giving away will be going to our defense industry, and a tiny little bit of the profits from these sales will go to the politicians in Washington, so they can stay in power. When he retires, George Bush will be giving talks for a living, just like his dad and Bill Clinton do now. Those international corporations know how to thank the world leaders who send profits their way. It has been reported that George's dad got over one million dollars for just one speech, and I would bet Bill doesn't come cheap either People is our State Department and our Department of Defense will someday get high paying jobs for setting up these long term military gifts to foreign countries. In the end everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, except for the American tax payer, but this has been going on for decades, and it is part of the reason we have a $9,193,552,710,962.66 national debt. That is 9 plus trillion. Every day now our debt is going up by $ 1.43 billion dollars. When we are talking about this kind of money, the amount needed to pay off our politicians is almost nothing. The profits are in the billions of dollars, and the rich get richer.
I look at all the money we are giving to these oil producing countries, and I think about all the children who live on the streets of America. I think about all the veterans who wait and wait and wait to get an appointment at the VA Hospital. I think about the 17 veterans a day who commit suicide, and then I think about how it can take years before the VA will give a vet the help he needs for his combat stress problems. I think about how we closed all the asylums in America to save money, and how the people they kicked out are living on the streets. And the list of my thoughts goes on and on with needed infrastructure repairs, and get this, there are people living in the South, who use sheets in place of doors and not only do they not have windows in their houses, but they have no screens to keep the bugs out. The politicians in Washington, who give our money away, have no idea of how down and out some Americans are. I find it sad and criminal. |
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