Posted by bcsuperfan23 on 11/23/2010 12:11:00 PM (view original):
Posted by dravz on 11/23/2010 9:26:00 AM (view original):
Posted by bcsuperfan23 on 11/23/2010 12:43:00 AM (view original):
It has to do with the size of the military and the amount of money which is geared toward funding the war machine. Simply put, you cant justify spending so much money on the military if you are not going to be fighting in any wars. If you buy 20 new bombers at $500 million a piece you arent going to just let them sit at some American air force base collecting dust, you are going to deploy them somewhere and drop some damn bombs. When that happens the people who profit from the sale and construction of those bombers are going to have influence over the decision to engage in conflict, which is wrong. That is what it has to do with.
Obviously you've never actually worked in any government capacity because there really are billions of dollars in equipment collecting dust at every military post around the world.
Contractors don't dictate policy, congressmen do. You are getting your boogeymen mixed up.
first, the fact that there are billions of dollars worth of weapons collecting dust is irrelavant, those weapons were most likely already used to kill some poor schmuch somewhere.
Second, of course the contractors dictate policy. Who do you think finances the campaigns for those congressmen to get elected? Answer me this, why are the parts for a single fighter plane manufactured in like 30 different states? Because, it forces congressmen to support the building of new ones so as not to lose a few hundred jobs, and as a result hundreds of votes, back in their home districts. This is not done by coincidence. These corporations and lobbyists have intertwined themselves so much with our government officials its getting so hard to tell who is working in whose interest anymore. Yea, the congressmen dictate the policy but when a congressman who voted to increase military spending and go to war retires from office and then immedeatly gets a job making 5 million a year to lobby for Haliburton I think it is safe to say that there was something nefarious going on and make the leap that those corporations do in fact hold an influence over policy
Contractors do not dictate policy any more than any other industry 'partner' does in Washington. Yes they have influence, but so does every large industry with many jobs in a congressman's district -- the auto industry (omg GM bailout), the airlines (omg airline bailout), banks and financial institutions (omg bank bailout), just to name a few. That's what it means to be a special interest group and a lobbyist in Washington, they
all "dictate policy" by your definition. Every corporation has "intertwined" themselves because that's how our democracy works today.
And planes and whatever else are manufactured in many different states (if this is actually even true and not something you just read on the internet by some hyperbolic blogger) because of how the government bidding process works. Congressmen are not in the acquisitions business.
Furthermore, they are often hired on to companies who have government dealings because they know how things work on the government side, and this applies equally to former congressmen becoming lobbyists, taking over universities, or getting on NASA's board of directors, etc. You keep singling out defense contractors like they are especially evil when the fact of the matter is it's status quo.
I don't care what your political party is, I'm just pointing out you are being unfair to some amorphous group of defense contractors because of your political beliefs. We get it, you don't like wars or "American Imperialism," that doesn't mean defense contractors are getting sent to a special level of hell, ok.