Home | Friday 13th June 2008 | Issue 635

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PENT UP ANGER

We all know that balancing yer books and keeping your credit in control is tough in these economically shaky times, but you’d think that if anyone could it would be the all powerful give’em-as-much-as-they-want-anf-then-some US Pentagon. But no, last year they accidentally managed to go over their spending budget – oops, just a slight miscalculation here and there, er, comes to about $295 billion, sorry Guv! Talk about losing track of a few receipts.

An auditors report released to Congress last week revealed that the US has been involved in the biggest self-arming exercise since WWII. The $790 billion promised to merchants of death for supplying the full catalogue of ‘state of the art’ weapons systems in 2007 just wasn’t enough, so in 2008 they increased that spend to a genocidally-big $1.6 trillion. To put it another way, that’s roughly an average of extra $3.5 billion of US taxpayers cash that Pentagon ‘defence’ buyers had to dish out every working day last year to friendly weapons contractors. That’s a hellfire of a task in anyone’s book, so it’s little wonder no-one was really counting – too busy shaking hands on deals, putting in for bonuses and investing in their own arms companies no doubt.

So due to woeful mismanagement of contracts, plus equipment being delivered late, faulty and overbudget, the final bill for casting a scary shadow over the planet to nearly three hundred billion more than even the Dubya’n’Rumsfeld gang had the gall to approve.

But it all can’t have come as too much of a surprise though as Pentagon spending has gone over budget for each of the last six years. And despite promises by ‘defence’ chiefs to be a little more ‘together’ with the readies, the problem is apparently just getting worse. Still, just cos they’re financially incompetent doesn’t mean we can’t trust them to rule the world with their iron fists, does it?

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