All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
America’s military is the only branch of the federal Government that the American people respect, and “The military” is also the most respected of all institutions in America. The military is also the most corrupt part of the federal Government, and the only part of the federal government that’s so corrupt that it has never been audited. Although the U.S. Congress recently required it to pass an audit — i.e., to become approved by an independent team of auditors as to the completeness and honesty of its financial records — the five audit-attempts that were then made all failed and had to be aborted, and no audit has yet been successfully completed on the most corrupt and publicly respected branch of the U.S. federal Government.
Instead of the military getting less money in the federal budgets as a consequence of that, it still keeps getting not only increasing budgets but an increasing proportion of the Government’s money. It gets rewarded as-if it weren’t what it is. And what it is, isn’t merely corrupt, but a stunning failure at what any military is supposed to achieve, which is to win wars.
It has failed not only in Afghanistan, and not only in Syria, and not only in Libya, and not only in Iraq, and not only in Vietnam, but in many other countries. But what’s especially shocking is that it’s getting rewarded, instead of punished, for flouting the (now obviously insincere) “demand” by Congress to be audited.
Is this too much to expect from a nation’s military? It is, in America.
This unaudited “it,” which routinely fails at its basic task, constantly produces mayhem and mass-murder instead of democracy, or even any type of improvement, in other countries, the ones it invades, and the ones — including America’s ‘allies’ or vassal-nations — which it militarily occupies, such as by its 231 military bases in Germany. And it (plus America’s sanctions and coups) produced the majority of the world’s refugees.
Yet it’s the only federal branch that Americans respect. The reality about it is effectively hidden from the public. And the politicians serve it, even if they serve nothing else. While the Representatives and Senators want the public to think these public officials to be disturbed by ‘waste, fraud or abuse in the military’, they even more want the campaign donations by the billionaires’ various agents, and their other fronts to praise them and to advertise them during political campaigns and thus to deceive the public so as to keep these corrupt persons in office. Because the only thing that is actually bipartisan — and even essentially unanimous — in the U.S. federal Government, is support for the military weapons-makers and weapons-users and for the invasions that provide excuses for those weapons to be purchased by the federal Government and used by its military, in America’s 900 foreign military bases (in addition to America’s 749 domestic U.S. military bases). The biggest winners of America’s recent wars have actually been America’s billionaires (look at this graph, which shows that ever since the 1991 termination of the Cold War on Russia’s side, America’s armaments-makers’ profits soared, instead of plunged). America’s military consumes annually about half — this year it’s 53% — of all of the federal Government’s spending that Congress and the President authorize, throughout the year. Only 47% goes to all other purposes.
The reason for this rotten military and its admiring public is that this is a country that at its topmost level — its Executive branch, and its Legislative branch, and its Judicial branch, especially at the very top of each one of those branches, all of them doing what the megadonors want instead of what the public needs or even wants — is profoundly and virtually 100% corrupt. The owners of the megacorporations, and especially of the ones (such as Lockheed Martin) that sell to the Government and to its allies (such as in NATO) instead of to the public, will and do pour into political-campaign donations and lobbying expenses, and funding ‘non-profit’ think tanks, whatever money is necessary in order for them to be able to control the federal Government, which is their main (if not exclusive) market. That is what they do and how they get it done, through their hired employees and sub-contractors and their other paid agents both inside and outside of the Government and their ‘non-profits’ and their ‘news’-media — whatever must be done in order to ‘earn’ their extraordinarily rates of return on their investments (both profit and ’non-profit’) that make and keep them as billionaires. And it works, for them, but against the public everywhere. And that’s the way it works.
Right now, it has gotten so bad, so that there are at least two pieces of proposed new legislation in the U.S. Congress in order to facilitate, if not to produce, a U.S. declaration of war against Russia (to keep those armaments-sales going): one which would commit the U.S. Government to Ukrainian “victory” against Russia (which would mean WW III), and the other which would introduce martial law over all U.S. media in order to make the public accept going to WW III in order to defeat Russia. How far will America’s rulers go in order to sell weapons and to expand yet farther the U.S. empire? We’ll see.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
This article was originally published on The Duran.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
