PommeDeGuerre said:
How much money is invested in the training of a soldier?
It's not the corporations who pay for it, nor for the funeral, so it doesn't matter, does it?
It is not a sinister conspiration theory, it's simply a fact and the original nature of a corporation that it needs to make money and doesn't care for anything else. When they can fire tens of thousands of people and destroy lifes and families that way, just to increase the stockmarket worth and because it is shareholder value, then what is too "evil" for them?
It's just the system. I know, i sound like a old hippie, but it simply is true.
I'm actually quite rational and pragmatic on this issue, believe it or not.
If you look at it from the other way... If you give some professional your money so he makes more money for you, you don't want him to be a nice guy and lose it or only make a tiny amount of more money for you. You want him to be a bad ass maneater who fights and does everything and uses every opportunity to make as much money for you as possible, right?
That is perfectly understandable and nothing evil. Still the results of that combined are what hippies call "the system".
I'm no left wing wacko or conspiration theory freak when i say that the world is pretty much divided in winners and losers. More than 80 percent of the stockmarket belong to about 1% of the population. They simply own everything and they are pretty much living in their own world, far above normal people like us and like the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How many sons of the really rich and influencial are serving in dangerous positions? Nowadays, with a professional army that doesn't show so obviously anymore, but already in the days of the draft, they had their ways of avoiding it, didn't they?
The present president is a good example for that.
And when you think that all the fancy military equipment we are talking about here is build and purchased to serve you and to to protect you and your family, think again. They are there to protect "their" investments, to project "their" power into the world and they belong to "them", including the pilot who so proudly flies the fighter jet and thinks he kicks ass for his country when he bombs some sheephurdlers somewhere at the end of the world.
When an average John Anybody looks into the sky and sees a F-22 fly there and is proud of it, that is just like an israely slave in the times of Moses looking proudly at the pyramids he build under the wips of the egyptian guards. They are not yours, they are "theirs". You just payd for it.
And it is the same on the other side. The Saudi family for example. They encouraged anti-american and anti-western sentiments for decades and supportet islamist groups while at the same time playing golf with the western elites and the US president (whoever that was at that time).
Just look at the decades old friendship and business ties between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family.
It has always been like that. Look at medieval Europe. Kings and Emperors were all related to each other and met for tea parties while the peasants of their countries were making war against each other.
The elites of the world don't hate each other. (Ever saw the pictures of Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM sitting on a table and having breackfast with Adolf Hitler?) They do business with each other and are the best friends. They just want the masses to hate each other because that makes them easier to controll.
Do you think George Orwell wrote his book "1984" just about a vivid but meaningless nightmare he had the night before? (I strongly recomend to read it iof you haven't. You'll see many things that seem pretty familiar from the reality we life in. And while you're on it, read Noam Chomsky.)
And they have no real sense of nationality. When you are rich and a part of that world's elite, you can live and prosper everywhere. The USA is just their favourite place to live because it's the perfect place for them. A country where you can buy politicians or can buy yourself into politics and everybody knows it but nobody calls it corruption. A place where you can hire and fire people without problems and they won't fight it because they believe into the american dream and rather dream of being part of the elite one day themselves instead of thinking about how you could cut the power of that elite and if ever one of them starts to fight, you can just call him a communist and a bad american and the fight is won.
And a place where people easily can be convinced to go to war by appealing to their patriotism and anger and often religiously fuelled will to fight "evil" (what you tell them is "evil", which often are the people you later play golf with), while it really is only to make more money for you, the elite.
War is a great way to squeeze money out of the masses. Not just because you want to sell weapons or because you can bomb foreign competitors out of a oil producing country to take it over yourself, but also because war means fear and if the masses are frightened, you can controll them easier and can take away rights from them and convince them that it is neccessary to cut social spending because you need that money for more weapons.
The problem with all of this is that it doesn't matter whether it is sinister or not, it just is natural. Rich people want to get richer and doing it like that is a very simple and effective way to get richer and as long as all the poor people want to get rich too, they will do what the rich people want.
And who can throw the first stone? Who knows whether he or she would do it different if he or she would have been born into one of those powerful families? And who knows whether he or she would still care for the lifes of a few soldiers coming from the masses?
I really strolled away from the topic here, i know, but i'll go back on topic and sum it all up:
Raytheon belongs to the people who made the gouvernment of the USA and the israely company that sells Trophy does not (i guess so, but who knows). It doesn't matter whether a few more soldiers will die till they got their system ready and if a few more vehicles will be blown up and need to be replaced by tax money, that is an additional benefit to the shareholders of the companies that produce those vehicles.
