Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Friday, December 9, 2016
MASSIVE PENTAGON SPENDING COVER-UP
PENTAGON SPENDING COVER-UP
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was targeted for condemnation by his former, so-called civil rights allies for opposing the Vietnam War after April 1967, when famously he delivered a jeremiad for the ages from the rostrum at Riverside Church in New York City against that horrific military, financial , political boondoggle of foreign war.
Although Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower had previously referred acerbically to the "military -industrial complex" as exerting a venal, disproportionate influence on federal fiscal policy, in the 1950s, which "Ike" warned about, well before Rev. Dr. King is publicly known for having done so, it was Dr. King who really ratcheted up that salacious economic issue's pernicious connection to our civil rights , lives of black, poor people and the, too-brief, War on Poverty.
With the current Pentagon crisis, flying for now beneath public radar, related to corruption, waste or theft of roughly one hundred twenty five billion dollars from its budget, and its coverup from Congress, the stage is reset to replay that game over federal spending and domestic policy by Donald Trump.
The centerpiece is Boeing Aircraft. It has manufactured Air Force One, the President's plane, since 1944.
Donald Trump has criticized the amount of money that they are making on that plane as exorbitant.
This flap threatens to rip open the fraud report showing $125 billion in waste, corruption and/or excesses.
With that money, infrastructure jobs would overflow America, reducing that "legion of lost," who now live squandered existences in American cities, towns, rural areas.
That takes us full back to 1967, when Dr. King criticized exorbitant Pentagon spending and waste as destroying amounts needed and available for the reduction of the poverty, domestically, even as its applications in foreign war in Vietnam killed many young men.
The Washington Post article detailing the Pentagon waste is linked here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-buries-evidence-of-125-billion-in-bureaucratic-waste/2016/12/05/e0668c76-9af6-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?utm_term=.7e102c645f11