Secrets, The Military Industrial Complex, Weapons

What annoys me the most in life is the fact I never really know what is going on or even went on in the past. It is looking more and more like there is an incredible amount of information being hidden from us. I understand there is some information which has to be hidden for the good of the country, but there is no doubt our hiding of information has certainly gotten out of hand. Some will say I am beating a dead horse since I mentioned this a lot on my other website, About Facts Net which no longer exists, but there is a valid reason for talking about this. When governments and civilians decide to hide information it is usually for two different reasons. The government supposedly is trying to protect our secrets from perceived enemies while companies are thought to be protecting their secrets from competitors. All this has changed.

There are many cases with which involve the government keeping a secret which other governments, both allies and perceived enemies, already know about. So who is the secret being kept from? It is being kept from us of course. We used to think we were the government, you know a government by and for the people. Our government has distanced itself from us over the years and the needs of the government are not necessarily the needs of the people. Let’s look at an example. New Orleans was battered and bruised from hurricane Katrina and to this day has not been fully restored to what it was prior to the storm. Shouldn’t one of the most important things the government does be rebuild after a disaster? It can’t be a money problem can it, after all we are spending so much money on weapons we have given the military industrial complex one of the most profitable years they have ever had. Just the price of a few missiles would have went a long way in New Orleans.

I have to ask the question, why is so much being kept from us when other nations already know it? To me this is one of the most important questions one can ask. It seems some of the things being kept from us would probably anger us if we knew about them and might even affect political careers. Sometimes we find out about these things, but we are at fault too when we do nothing about them. If we look at the Vietnam War and the revelations which showed us we were lied to, to get us to fight, we should be a lot angrier and looking for justice for all our loved ones who either died in that war or were wounded and for those who were forced to go there and kill for a lie. We were told the North Vietnamese fired on our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin and this started the war. Years later we found out this story was made up by President Johnson and his staff. Did we do anything to those who were responsible who were still living? Did we press criminal charges for malfeasance in public office? We did nothing and they got away with what they did.

The government is not the only one keeping secrets, our history is full of them. We can look at something very simple and common and see what I am talking about and that is who gets credit for being the first to discover the new world. We know the credit is given to Christopher Columbus, but it has become painfully clear there were many others who got here before him and yet we still celebrate Columbus Day, why? We do it because it is politically correct and no government official wants to offend and segment of our society, it is bad for getting elected. I am not putting down the Italians, I am some Italian blood myself and they are a great people. I would be saying this no matter what race Columbus was. We are finding out there were people here as far back as 25,000 B.C. and maybe further back. It also looks like the Vikings, Chinese, Egyptians and Polynesians came here, to mention a few. It has also been said many English fishermen used to fish off the Grand Banks, but kept the location secret because of competition.

Some companies keep secrets from us because they are protecting formulas or industrial processes, but others do not want us to know what is going on and how much they are making. There is no way one would ever know the true profit of the military industrial companies, because of all the black projects they are involved in. Black projects are those projects which even Congress doesn’t know about in most cases. Some government agencies are now allowed to dip into other government agencies budgets without notice so we never really know everything about what is being spent, such as who is really doing the spending, the amount and on what. What we do know is we are being raped when it comes to the cost of new weapons. We have the absolutely most expensive weapons in the world and the biggest military budget in the world which is so big, it is bigger than the next seven nations combined. The truth is we do not get our money’s worth, so much has to be kept secret by the companies and the government.

Why is it we never know how much some major weapon system is costing us until it is finished? It has become routine for a weapons company to ask for more money for cost overrides several times during the construction of a system. One has only to look at the cost of aircraft carriers and the new advanced fighter planes to know what I am talking about. The aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan cost 6.2 billion dollars more than the carrier before it which cost 4.5 billion dollars. The Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier cost us over 13 billion dollars and the costs just keep going up. The F-35 fighter comes in three versions and the unit costs are incredible. The F-35A costs 124 million dollars each, the F-35B cost 156 million dollars each and the F-35C costs 142 million dollars each and these figures have been rounded down to the nearest million dollars. Can any nation sustain costs like these, especially for a plane which pilots are not crazy about flying because it has over 700 defects and one cuts off oxygen. The plane is being called a 1.5 trillion dollar mistake.

Is it any wonder so much info is being hidden from us? If we had the money we wasted on just the F-35 we could make sure everyone in this country had enough to eat and create a job training program for them and perhaps even hire them and repair our infrastructure instead of giving tons of money to companies with strong lobbies. The worst part is not even the wasting of money, but the wasting of lives in the senseless wars we continuously fight for the enrichment of the military industrial complex. Keeping wars going means purchasing weapons and notice how we have been in some sort of constant war for decades. This is exactly what these companies want and the payoffs for this must be incredible.

The average fighter plane in World War II cost $30,000. As I said the cheapest F-35 is over $142,000,000. Even accounting for inflation and added electronics how can this be tolerated by an intelligent society? This is over 4733 times as much. Sure things cost more now, but this is obscene.