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Got stocks? Is that invested in profitable companies? or unprofitable ones? Well, ok lots of people invested in unprofitable companies back in the dot.com era, so companies with good expectations of future profits.
Got a pension? A Mutual Fund? and you expect them to invest your money profitably.
I suspect ;) that you have a computer. Open it up and try to find a part thats american made. Might find one if your computer is 15 years old. Open a 25 year old computer and you will see lots and lots. We didn't scream when American dominance in computers (the future) got shipped overseas before it had even started to mature.
Got a soldier? We sent 150,000 to Iraq and now our force of 1.2 million is overextended. How many of the 150,000 are reserves (I don't know) but we have 1.2 active duty and sending 12% of them overextends us. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem if we closed a few hundred of our 600+ overseas bases.
Why do we pay $400,000,000,000 in taxes for our military? 3 times what all our potential enemies combined spend? Oops now it's $500,000,000,000. Wonder how much of that is actually defending us?
But hey, if we didn't spend $500 Billion a year, then we would have to send five times as many soldiers and have 50X the death toll as opposed to the risk-less, remote-control cruise missiles we pay $600,000 each for. That kind of overt death toll would be unconscionable to americans, but we can get them to pay $2,000 a year for every man and child. It's just 100 hours a year, times 250 million = 40,000 lifetimes - per year - spent slaving to pay for the military - a much more acceptable covert death toll. Well ok we could just stop making wars and violence, but that would cost us a lot more than $2,000 each.
So we all have substantial investments in greed, violence, weapons of mass destruction and so on. Just as the land we live on was bought by the genocide of 20,000,000+ native americans, and the global dominance we enjoy is at the cost of starting and prolonging hundreds of wars and dictatorships. And a few hundred thousand more totalitarian regimes we call corporations.
And why shouldn't a CEO make 1,000 X what his workers make? Its only a half what we pay the lobbyists, a quarter of what the bosses used to make before they all merged into one corporation. Only a 10th what we pay the liars, er psychosocial consumption inducers, er marketers. Only 5 percent of whats being paid to the stockholders and most of those just read a few pages of research, picked the best profit projection and clicked a few buttons.
Ooh Yuck! did I say that? sorry please flame and pick apart so I can stop believing it's true
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