Egypt's Democratic Uprising Exposes the U.S. Corporate Welfare Scheme of Military 'Foreign Aid'

The military budget is a massive wealth transfer program from ordinary taxpayers to major corporations, and it has proven easy over the years to wrap this transfer in the red, white and blue and have a portion of the American people burst out in a rousing chorus of the national anthem and applaud their own mugging.

Amplify’d from www.bradblog.com

Egypt's Democratic Uprising Exposes the U.S. Corporate Welfare Scheme of Military 'Foreign Aid'

As more than a million protesters are said to have "flooded into central Cairo" this week, demanding an end to Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian rule, William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, explained a little understood fact about the "tens of billions of dollars" in US military aid used to prop up the authoritarian Mubarak regime.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: It’s a form of corporate welfare for companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, because it goes to Egypt, then it comes back for F-16 aircraft, for M1 tanks, for aircraft engines, for all kinds of missiles, for guns, for tear gas canisters, as was discussed, a company called Combined Systems International, which actually has its name on the side of the canisters that have been found on the streets there. So these companies—for example, Lockheed Martin has been the leader in deals worth $3.8 billion over that period of the last 10 years; General Dynamics, $2.5 billion for tanks; Boeing, $1.7 billion for missiles, for helicopters; Raytheon for all manner of missiles for the armed forces.

Hartung, however, has merely focused upon the military component of a much broader scam --- foreign aid --- which John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and in The Secret History of the American Empire exposes to be corporate welfare designed to enhance the power and control of a corrupt and brutal corporate Empire that benefits only a select few local authoritarian elites and the billionaires at the pinnacle of U.S.-based, giant multinational corporations. All at the expense of the great mass of humanity and a sustainable planet...

In Confessions, Perkins, himself a self-described former "Economic Hit Man" (EHM) reveals how he, and other EHMs, persuade corrupt foreign "leaders" to accept "loans to develop infrastructure --- electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industry parks. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices.":

Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil…Of course, the debtor still owes us the money and another country is added to our global empire…

In Secret History, Perkins explains that the key to the U.S. corporate Empire's success is its invisibility. "Most of its own citizens are not aware of its existence; however, those exploited by it are, and many of them suffer extreme poverty. On average twenty-four thousand people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every day. More than half the planet's population lives on less than two dollars a day..." Read more at www.bradblog.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/aoq25