A Boring Dystopia

Meanwhile people are concerned that the post office isn’t turning a profit.

This might seem like a minor quibble, but that money doesn't really come from taxpayers, and understanding what seems like a very technical financial thing is really important if you want to understand geopolitics in general. Here's an except from the beginning of David Graeber's Debt: the First 5,000 years, easily one of the single most interesting and enlightening books I've ever read:

Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re- payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined — mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much — even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.

So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as "empires," and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire — but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these pay- ments as "loans" and not as "tribute" is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on.

Anytime a journalist thinks about covering this they probably die in a tragic accident suddenly.

But it’s unpatriotic to question spending dropping multi million dollar bombs and using expensive tech to wage war in impoverished countries.

We need the Karen's to combine their might and talk the the Mega Manager.

We're all outraged but theres no customer service complaint phone number for the black hole that all of our taxpayer dollars disappear into

It's funny because the audit process for FedRAMP approval businesses is an absolute nightmare.

One day the Pentagon will just drop warp drives and energy 2 out of nowhere and the world will be like "what?"

Probably used to throw million dollar bombs on countries like mine

Been there, done that. It goes to other assets.... and probably to the CIA for funding Regan's Iran/Contra deals.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/the-pentagons-435-hammer/2011/05/19/AGoGKHMH_blog.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Commission

the outrage will not be televised

Shut up, Robert Greenwald! I'm busy shouting at people who believe different things than me!

Well, the military has a lot of projects and operations the public doesn't, and shouldn't, know about. If you see about a sting in Syria on CNN, so do the hostile insurgents, or whomever are the enemies du jour. But how can you expense the operation on a public budget sheet, if the operation can't, for security reasons, be public? The answer is simple: you spend $10,000 on $10 toilet seats, and the $9,990 now accounted for dollars are paying for equipment, ammunition, transportation, training, payroll, and benefits for something that officially never happened.