I have seen the cost per day of being in Afghanistan as $300 million, each day, for 20 years.
While that greatly increased stock price for defense contractors, there seems in retrospect to be little other value for that money.
More of that tax money should have been devoted to cybersecurity, stem education, and even physical infrastructure that would safeguard water and food supply.
I am not naïve, I understand that both political parties are controlled by corporate/Wall Street interests. Still, you would hope that our elected officials could perhaps accept fewer kickbacks and function more in the interests of the American tax payer and not serve those financial interests who pay to get them elected and control them.
Really a sad situation. President Eisenhower was a good guy, and he nailed it when he warned the American public about the military industrial complex.
I'm against both parties funneling tax payer money to defense contractors in never-ending wars, but more government programs to give them more options to funnel money is not the solution.
Totally for high speed rail depending on if the money gets to it. Japan has shown a private/public transportation system is possible. That being said, it'll probably go to a politicians friend's company and it'll end up like the $90 billion California train.
The current K-12 public school system is a joke, lets fix that first. I'd rather see school of choice. You can already qualify for preschool if you need it. For college, let's lower tuition before making the tax payer pay off the current tuition debt and then paying for free college for even more. (but really lets not pay people's debt)
> I'm against both parties funneling tax payer money to defense contractors in never-ending wars, but more government programs to give them more options to funnel money is not the solution.
I get what you're saying, but consider this. If you explicitly funnel money to these people for the purpose of warfare, they will only make weapons and train people to engage in warfare and supporting activities.
Best case scenario, you got some specialists who are "also" proficient in adjacent technical skills, related to warfare (e.g. cybersecurity), and a bunch of military hardware sitting on parking lots (or falling into the hands of the Taliban).
But if you engage them for education or high speed rail, sure, they pad their pockets, sure, but at the end of the day you at least got some infrastructure for schools, rail engineers and supporting roles for those fields. You don't have to deal with depreciating military machines, who are only fit for destruction.
I don't mean to say I have the ultimate truth regarding this, but personally, I will pick the $90 billion California train over 300 days in Afghanistan every single time.
I’m not saying it has to be spent, or that it has to be spent on what I said. The scale is the thing. Austerity since 2008 seems like it leads to much worse outcomes.
I understand, my point was, the never ending war gave them the opportunity to funnel to Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, etc.
Making "universal" programs is the same thing as Afghanistan, you won't get anything out of it in the end and it'll end up costing you trillions.
The best government program is near to no program. Don't print more, let it hold it's value, don't steal from the people. Then you'll have oodles of wealth to help the true people in need, either through private companies or through limited government programs with oversight.
Stop giving them tax payer fund spigots, they can't be trusted.
Governments around the world are able to provide more services to all of their citizens, being less rich than us. I think the “government is always the problem” mindset ignores the downsides of the alternative that we’re living through now, with the only proscribed thing to do being a zero example “doubling down” on less government.
If you want your country to have healthcare, at the very minimum you do the Swiss system.
My point was OUR government can't be trusted with the money. You think the same people playing games with lives over seas just to funnel money to defense contractors is going to truly implement the system promised?
That being said, no I don't believe in socialist programs, Sweden was a pretty good example they aren't feasible, it crushed their economy and they are slowly reversing course. I think there should be safety nets, but the government should not be in charge of your life.
There's a reason America is the economic powerhouse it is today, limited programs, less taxes. Our private healthcare system is expensive but leads the world in innovation (cancer treatments, experimental drugs, vaccines, etc.) The American people pay for that R&D while the world gets it basically for free. I don't have an issue with universal healthcare, but we should lower costs first, not throw more tax payer money to hospitals and pharma.
I don’t think American government is special compared to a lot of other places that provide more services. Often we have less corruption. What we do have is a lot of corporate de facto control of government IE the pharmaceutical industry - this comes out of a desire to have minimal government.
The American healthcare system is not better because we spend more money, it’s better because we have good universities and lots of immigrants.
Agree we should lower costs - deregulation does not lower costs in this case.
> The best government program is near to no program.
1000x no! We need government to work - that's not negotiable - the question is not whether it works well enough to make you happy, it's what it should work on. The US didn't go to the moon or build the interstate highway system by saying, "Politicians suck, I hope the private sector solves this."
While the space programs gave us a lot of technology early on and were definitely needed, private sector entities such as SpaceX have shown they can do it more efficiently. I'd say NASA was a massive outlier in terms of government program effectiveness. I wish they would get more funding tbh, instead they get cuts :(
I'm all for R&D spending, defense spending, infrastructure spending, etc. But time and time again OUR recent government has shown they cannot be trusted with the funds and programs they suggest. They make these massive bills and none of the money makes it to anything meaningful.
I'm for SPECIFIC programs, not UNIVERSAL slush funds.
Name the bridges you want to repair, repair them. Don't try to steal $5 trillion while funneling it to "green companies" without fixing a single pothole.
The US should only spend money on rail infrastructure if it’s willing to pay the Japanese or Europeans all that money to build the infrastructure with no American involvement whatsoever.
School choice doesn't work. The "success stories" are just funneling the smart kids into other schools while letting others fail while charter corporations make millions. The problem isn't the "school", it's poverty and the home situation.
One major reason for why not, I would say that water and electricity are essential services too (esp given that free internet is useless if you dont have electricity access), but they aren’t free yet.
So before we jump onto thinking about making internet free (if that was ever even a plan), I think it would make sense to make water+electricity free first.
Unlike water and electricity, internet can be provided without a physical connection. Which makes it much easier to provide than water or electricity. So I'm not actually sure "no free electricity/water => no free internet" is a sensible implication here. (Though I'm not opining on the merits of any of them here. Only discussing the implication.)
Interesting idea.
What if electricity and water were free?
Aren't they essential also?
Instead of ubi; electricity, Water, and energy - basic amount to survive (heat or cold.)
Together with medicine.
And education. That would make a huge difference to make an even playing field.
Instead of all the other attempts to make up for this, with equal access, etc.
And a huge difference to fight basic poverty, because these would just be there.
True equal opportunity then?
I think your proposal is actually pretty sound. Never thought of this before, but it is an interesting idea.
Having utilities free sounds pretty good, but idk how helpful it would be to deal with homelessness (which is one of the main issues with basic access to all of those things), given how small of a fraction utilities make up when it comes to overall housing costs. Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely not in the camp of "just because this improvement proposal might have some issues, we should just sit and do nothing", and free utilities would definitely be an improvement, and a massive one at that. I just think that, while we are floating those proposals, we shouldn't forget the elephant in the room either, which is "how do we make sure that everyone who needs access to housing has access to housing".
The change in politics required to get us out of Afghanistan before wasting all that money would probably also have been conducive to an updated social safety net.
When was the last time you had serious input into national policy?
And I don't mean with a (token) vote. I mean actually designing and implementing national policy, designing and setting up monitoring of outcomes, and reporting back to everyone else on how the policy idea performed.
A Princeton study argues convincingly that average citizens and organizations representing the interests of average citizens have little effect on policy:
A lot of people get all the way through college without ever considering the total cost of compound interest or the value of their major. Many college educations and critical thinking are not remotely the same thing.
Being in a PhD program has shown me that academic education does not solve any of the political problems. I mean we can also look at other countries and see highly educated populations still not question their governments.
The government gives out loans so that politicians can claim they helped people while also claiming they controlled spending and kept taxes low.
Those taxpayer guaranteed loans are just taking money from future taxpayers and giving it to the higher education business by letting them increase tuition without limit since there is no underwriting process.
And of course the students get saddled with lifelong debt with no exit since they are not dischargeable in regular bankruptcy, and future taxpayers get soaked with paying for the defaulted loans.
Private banks used to give out those loans because they were still guaranteed by the government, and I think Obama changed that, but they still have special status that make them harder to discharge in bankruptcy.
Tl:dr taxpayer funded loans for higher education are a net negative for society
What happens to that debt if a person leaves the US and doesn't return?
Ignoring how expensive and difficult that is if you're already saddled with 6 figures of debt for the purpose of discussion. I'm not American and haven't found a clear answer though my Googlefoo.
If a person defaults, the debt stays on their credit report in the US for (I think...) seven years.
This can have various consequences depending on the new home country and its agreements with the US - from credit issues and possible legal action, to absolutely no consequences at all.
Obviously if the person moves back to the US, they'll likely be chased by debt collectors and possibly the IRS.
Why is the govt (i.e., taxpayers) paying off a mortgage good for society? And if you later sell the house, do you keep the money, or pay back what the govt paid? Who benefits from the enormous appreciation (if the govt will be paying off the mortgage, why not offer $5 million for a typical 3br?)?
Money is a social construct. We create money for investment every day. Investing in the population creates returns in tax revenue. You open opportunities for wealth creation by putting down roads and train stations and modes of commerce.
Current life says that's not the case. Some of that may be supply chain issues, and they say inflation is at 5% or so, but most things have had at least a 20% price increase this year.
Edit: to poster below, it varies, very noticeable if you are traveling. For your cost of living, it's noticeable over the month if you are living paycheck to paycheck. My point is don't just "print away", inflation is a tax on the poor.
Check US inflation since the early 80's. It's 200%.
For something more recent, look at US home prices over the past year. It's crazy.
Food costs are also rising. Anecdotally, grocery prices have gone up quite a bit. Restaurants, too. I don't remember a large pizza costing $25 a couple years ago.
> Check US inflation since the early 80's. It's 200%.
It's been 40 years. Applying the rule of 72 ('cause I can't be bothered to do a more sophisticated analysis) and assuming that your "200%" means prices have doubled since then, that comes to 1.8% annual inflation. Very reasonable.
Eisenhower waited until the very last days of his office to say something about it. He took no actions. He also neutered his speech by rewriting "congressional military industrial complex" to "military industrial complex". Yes, I appreciate he said something at all, but he could have done much much more.
It reminds me of employees at Facebook leaving saying its so unethical what the company is doing, after having received massive pay for years.
If anyone could have killed the demon, surely it would have been a reelected president and 5-star "General of the Army". (It's not as though Truman the haberdasher would have had that sort of clout!) But that would have required years of work, and he was more interested in British Petroleum's plans for Iran.
He may have been thinking of his son John's safety and career in the military (somehow John became a general). If they can't get to you any other way, they can always put the screws to your kids. Look at how many presidential (and presidential candidate) children have been awarded bullshit media jobs for which they have no qualifications or aptitude.
The further irony is, that this was EXACTLY Al-Qaeda's plan - to draw the west into a long, expensive war, providing endless recruitment opportunities: Those who suffer from it (each person you bomb makes > 1 person hate you) and also home grown lone wolf types in the US/UK/EU
Through 2050, the cost could be closer to 6.5 trillion in interest alone for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the first set of wars that were not funded by raising the top tax rate. Our grandchildren will be paying for for these mistakes long after the architects of this catastrophe are dead.
"Overall, the U.S.' net interest costs — payments the federal government sends to investors and public debt holders minus interest it collects — are rising. That includes the interest on borrowing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Net interest is projected to widen to 2.7% of GDP in 2031, up from 1.3% in 2024, according to a July report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office." [1]
As a point of reference, we spent 2.5% of GDP for a decade to pay for the Apollo missions.
Imperial overstretch is what happens when suppliers to the military become so powerful that they get to decide when to go to and when to withdraw from war. Their motivation is to keep fighting and to never actually win. Eventually it unwinds like a ponzi scheme.
But in practice the people are getting more complacent -- perhaps more individualistic, or more overburdened with livelihood concerns, and there's a massive clout of PR to dissuade anyone from thinking that war is, actually, a bad thing.
I'm thinking of "thank you for your service", and the general sentiment of sympathy for veterans. Surely they're not imperialistic red shirts fighting for an evil king supported by a bunch of robber barons, nor are they mercenaries fighting a runaway proxy war, are they?
Though they do get paid to go overseas and murder foreign nationals, while the local branches of the government are putting the screws on us with more militarized policing, more surveillance, and less liberties, since there's an ever-growing world-wide network of anti-American sentiment, and the terrorists may be hiding in that house in the cul-de-sac.
Not to mention a generally declining education system, coupled with rising groupthink, PC, and patriotism. With all these factors in effect, assisted by a ton of PR, joining the army to go kill for the industrialists isn't socially unacceptable at all -- it's a career choice, and there's no critical thinking available to either the aspiring soldier or their social circle to indicate any other possibilities.
One would wonder how we burned through all that pro-American goodwill, if there was really anything to wonder about the whole deal.
Point in place, military activity in Yemen was going on before the general public really knew about it. I know, I deployed under both Obama and Trump primarily for military activities in Yemen. When news finally broken, there was not a serious mass of people up-in-arms about it.
When people thank me for my service, I always tell them they can thank me by telling their representatives to stop sending kids to war for no good reason.
Was a fighting a runaway proxy war? Or a part of one. Most definitely yes. We supported the Saudis in Yemen because the Houthis in Yemen were favorable to Iran. Neither country really deserves out support. But we support the Houthis in other regions of the ME because they oppose Al Queda.
My guess is all the military contractors in Afghanistan are pivoting to "cybersecurity", and this is just marketing toward that. As one door closes, another one opens.
I think it’s a bit naive to expect that a government which wasted a huge sum of money would have achieved great things with that money if not but for that one event. A more realistic assessment would be that they’d just waste it a different way.
Funny how the money went to (at least an attempt to) build schools in Afghanistan instead. That country has/had free universal healthcare coverage. Time for Alanis Morissette to male version 3 of "Ironic"...
See, the thing about waste is that it doesn't actually achieve what it claims that it's going to achieve. So wasting it on education isn't going to result in more actual education.
(And yes, I know it isn't binary. It can be 70% waste and still produce 30% education, which is 30% more than we would have had - which I think is your point. It's still 70% waste, though.)
Maybe the answer is to stop letting government spend huge amounts of money, and let the people do so instead?
This is the wrong takeaway from the whole ordeal. It was largely so-called fiscal conservatives who were very in favor of invading Afghanistan in the first place. Their reasoning was that military defense is one of the few legitimate functions of a government, and since 9/11 had just happened, well, of course we needed more defense. Now that trillions of dollars have been thrown in the trash, they want to pretend this is a teachable moment about goverment waste in general, when it was really their waste. George W. Bush was a two-term president, and his pro-small-government voters share the credit for this fiscal disaster; nobody gets to spin this as a warning against big government.
That money absolutely could have been put to much better use in other programs.
That’s a dangerous over-simplification. Multiple super-powers were at Afghanistan before the US. The place is strategic because it’s a gate to Russia and China. It’s also wrong to assume that the US will leave Afghanistan. They’ll either operate by proxy or re-deploy at a future date.
> cybersecurity, stem education, and even physical infrastructure that would safeguard water and food supply.
...But then there would be less people dumb enough to not raise issue to the provoking of non-stop wars that funnel money into the military industrial complex
They're not going to work against their own interest, you surely know.
Over a 100 years ago this was part of Lenins analysis of capitalism, and the closely connected aspect of imperialism, both military and economic. This is not new, it has been a central part of a Marxist (in particular Marxism Leninism) understanding of the world in its economic expression long before it became obvious to Eisenhower.
The value of that money is the continued global class oppression by the international financial bourgeoisie, and the US-lead western hegemony.
The Afghanistan stalemate served several purposes as I see it.
1) To funnel money to the military industrial complex.
2) To contain China's Belt and Road initiative.
3) To maintain an active military presence in oil producing regions in order to dominate and control trade and to ensure supply (same for Iraq and Libya).
America's invasion. BRI wasn't a thing back then. Also, the USSR was invited by the Afghanistan government to contain a rebellion, it wasn't an aggressive (imperialist) invasion.
>>>Also, the USSR was invited by the Afghanistan government to contain a rebellion, it wasn't an aggressive (imperialist) invasion.
Another way to articulate that moment in history: "the USSR was disappointed with the main strongman in their puppet regime so they sent their best operators to murder him in the night".
Afghanistan and the USSR were on good terms, and had signed a treaty which included military assistance. The USSR was called upon to assist Afghanistan to contain uprisings. However, only after the Soviet-friendly leader of Afghanistan was assassinated by his own party members, did they intervene.
How? The planned economic system of USSR means that wartime production is a net economic loss serving no financial purpose. In contrast with the capitalist system, where war serves as a basis for the transfer of capital to the war profiteers, i.e. the national bourgeoisie. The comparison is invalid.
>The planned economic system of USSR means that wartime production is a net economic loss serving no financial purpose.
It's a net loss under capitalist systems, too. Both systems can and do commit huge amounts of resources to pointless, destructive forever-wars. The political/military/security bureacracy of the USSR watched out for its own interests and sought ways to justify its own existence just as the military-industrial complex does in the USA.
The Soviet invasion enriched fewer bureacrats, but it also (compared to the NATO invasion) killed 10x more civilians and 3x more invaders in half the time, so in that sense I suppose we can say it was more efficient.
> Both systems can and do commit huge amounts of resources to pointless, destructive forever-wars.
Only in capitalist systems is this a process of enrichment of the ruling class. The transfer of wealth in the US to the richest % on the basis of war has been immense. They're not pointless geopolitically either, since it serves to stifle and subjugate foreign governments into US alignment to support western predatory and exploitative economic policies (enforcing predatory loans and commanding oil trade). Hence aggressive imperialism combines several aspects of maintaining economic and military hegemony.
I think you'd have to be quite naive to maintain that the USSR didn't have its local equivalent of a bourgeoisie. Or that a nominally Marxist economy like North Korea isn't really a dynastic monarchy hiding behind Marxist iconography.
A lot of people have opinions on the class structure in the USSR. What is common to most of these people is that they don't understand or use Marx's conception of class, and instead use their own intuitions based off a liberal perspective, and often confusing state function with private power. The USSR was not classless, but it did not have a ruling bourgeoisie-like class (although bourgeois ideology lay latent in society).
>On 27 December 1979, 700 Soviet troops dressed in Afghan uniforms, including KGB and GRU special forces officers from the Alpha Group and Zenith Group, occupied major governmental, military and media buildings in Kabul, including their primary target, the Tajbeg Palace. The operation began at 19:00, when the KGB-led Soviet Zenith Group destroyed Kabul's communications hub, paralyzing Afghan military command. At 19:15, the assault on Tajbeg Palace began; as planned, General Secretary Hafizullah Amin was killed. Simultaneously, other objectives were occupied (e.g., the Ministry of Interior at 19:15). The operation was fully complete by the morning of 28 December 1979.
> If the US is truly a nation of free people, why do they keep doing as they are told?
They want to and choose to. Working for those entities gets you paid and (at least theoretically) raises your quality of life if you don't have a lot of money. Fighting the man gets you a life of hardship and pain. For some people it is worth it but for most its not. Most people care more about their own well being than that of others; I don't think that is news or even a particularly offensive statement.
Why is this comment at the top of the thread? [Sure, go ahead and bury me]
It is only slightly related to the original article, the rant is just an opinion with no value than to instill anti-gov discourse.
Is this what we say to the thousands of Americans who served and lost their lives over 20 years? To the sacrifices of their families to help Taliban oppressed girls/citizens crying for help?
HN needs a dose of honesty. I come here for its value: the insights of the comments, but recently I find myself logging out and contributing less and less due to the quality decline. I get it, it is the pandemic and everyone needs a safe place to rant/express themselves- even Reddit's toxicity was given a refuge here.
Hide in your pseudonyms and rant all you want, after all unlike the Afghans, you take for granted your freedom of speech. Hype crypto and anti-gov sentiment to gain from your pump and dumps, support cybercriminals (for all we know, you might be one of them)
You are intelligent, so think: is government the real enemy?
A word of caution, big tech might be leeching on your brain, brainwashing you with their ads to support their causes that ultimately lead to these sentiments in the 1st place.
PS: For the moderators, I still really appreciate your work and I know it is getting harder, this is more feedback than a critique. A really big thanks to you.
The state department, hell, a big portion of the entire government is a joke when it comes to cybersecurity.
This comes with the turf of refusing to pay competitive compensation. I'd personally love to help secure the government, but I'm not going to take a massive hit in QoL just for a sense of patriotism.
During the Black Hat 2021 closing keynote, the Secretary of Homeland Security was begging for more cybersecurity engineers to join the government, but there was no acknowledgement of the compensation problem, which is one of their biggest roadblocks. It makes zero sense to whine about getting hacked while paying a fifth of the compensation of private industry. The government ought to put up or shut up.
You see the same issues across government. I remember listening to Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, talk about the major problems in academic life sciences at my University. He opened by saying he wasn't there to talk about comp or funding which was amusing considering that every problem in the space ultimately tracks back to hilariously inadequate funding and comp.
Unfortunately I don't remember as this presentation happened almost ten years ago. I do distinctly remember the one element I mentioned though as it seemed sort of absurd (even though he is obviously not responsible for the NIH budget and would almost surely agree with me that it should be raised).
That requires congress to "vote to massively raise the salaries of bureaucrats." How do you suggest that happening? The media won't care about the distinction of it only being for security experts.
They don't have a choice. GS and military pay bands require Congressional approval. The agencies putting out requisitions can't just decide to pay more.
In practice, however, this is part of why so many technical roles are contracted instead of being permanent agency positions. Contractors can and do pay more than the government itself.
Contracting itself has many flaws: who makes more out of the contracting? The contracting companies. Such companies filter out good candidates who wants better pay.
At least they are moving in the right direction. IIRC, in the past .gov had a policy saying you can't have used marijuana in the past 3 years or any other drug in the past 10. Now I think it's 1 year and 3 or 5 years respectively?
> Without confirming any incident, a knowledgeable source told Reuters the State Department has not experienced significant disruptions and has not had its operations impeded in any way.
Note also that the Reuters article specifically mentions that the source of their information about the breach is this exact tweet, and that they cannot independently verify.
The overall Twitter feed of the Fox News reporter in question https://twitter.com/JacquiHeinrich , while generally sticking to facts unlike some of her Fox News colleagues, nonetheless has a preponderance of tweets critical of the current administration. One should keep this in mind when deciding whether the reporter would have been incentivized to do thorough verification before choosing to share the word of an anonymous source that would paint said administration in a poor light.
This is an impressive non-answer. It provides a fair bit of reassuring detail while saying absolutely nothing of value of at all. Was there a cyber attack? Wasn’t there? Either way this answer looks better in an article than “no comment” but still admits nothing that could come back to bite you.
I would also. Still, I stand by my other comment in this thread that much more resources need to be devoted to cybersecurity and stem education - regardless if this particular story is true or not.
After the fallout of the SolarWinds hack, and the situation in Afghanistan, I'm afraid I don't want to know the answer to the question of what the climate is like inside the State Department at the moment.
Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires. No western country has ever invaded Afghanistan and won. The British failed, the Russians failed, it was no surprise for the US to fail.
Western countries don't wage war in the way that lets you hold Afghanistan. Contrast with a successful historic conquering:
"In the Mongol invasion of Khwarezmia (1219–1221), Genghis Khan invaded the region from the northeast in one of his many conquests to create the huge Mongol Empire. His armies slaughtered thousands in the cities of Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad etc. After Genghis Khan returned to Mongolia, there was a rebellion in the region of Helmand which was brutally put down by his son and successor, Ogedei Khan, who put all male residents of Ghazni and Helmand to the sword in 1222; the women were enslaved and sold. Thereafter most parts of Afghanistan other than the extreme south-eastern remained under Mongol rule as part of the Ilkhanate and Chagatai Khanate." (Wikipedia)
Modern gentlemans agreement wars only really work between modern Westernized industrial societies. The idea that you could ever nation build in Afghanistan on a mere 20 year period was laughable even in 2001. It's possible results would have been different given a multi-generational timeline but when you aren't annexing the country it's hardly worth the effort.
But an eastern country might? I wonder what happens if you apply the Uyghur playbook to this. You know, carry your Huawei with the state spyware app everywhere or its off to "reeducation camp".
Current pleas for help notwithstanding, there were never very many such Afghans. The fact that someone temporarily worked for pay for the violent invaders who had violently taken over is not an indication of trust. An Afghan I met in 2005 really opened my eye on this.
This isn't exactly true. Forensic evidence is never 100% certain, but intelligence agencies can and do infiltrate hostile organizations either via remote signals surveillance or embedding actual human spies. In both cases, they obviously can't publicly reveal the source of information, but they can be certain.
I have long theorized that State Department infrastructure is intentionally insecure to allow the dissemination of information or disinformation that we want foreign interests to get.
While that greatly increased stock price for defense contractors, there seems in retrospect to be little other value for that money.
More of that tax money should have been devoted to cybersecurity, stem education, and even physical infrastructure that would safeguard water and food supply.
I am not naïve, I understand that both political parties are controlled by corporate/Wall Street interests. Still, you would hope that our elected officials could perhaps accept fewer kickbacks and function more in the interests of the American tax payer and not serve those financial interests who pay to get them elected and control them.
Really a sad situation. President Eisenhower was a good guy, and he nailed it when he warned the American public about the military industrial complex.
/rant