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Quotes about Military Spending from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"The first scare came in 1946, right after World War II. military spending was cut drastically with scarcely a ripple. The second scare came in 1949. The public went right on buying, oblivious to the worries of businessmen, and this scare faded. The third scare began in mid-1953. It now is little more than a memory.17 The sense that investors were terribly optimistic and confident of the market was in and of itself part of the new era thinking." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"Governments seek to contain violence through organized war- 8 fare; world military spending has risen for the past eight years running and has reached more than one trillion dollars a year. • One in three urban dwellers in the world live in slums, shanty-towns, and urban ghettos. More than 900 million people are classified as slum-dwellers. In the poorest countries 78 percent of the urban population subsists under life-threatening circumstances." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.) "Global military spending experiences a sharp rise, as the U.S. and its allies and the opposing bloc countries enter the spiral of an arms race. • Global economic stagnation combined with U.S. unilateralism weakens the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. As regional economic agreements become more attractive than multilateral trade arrangements and bilateral trade with the U.S., trade wars become frequent and destabilizing. • North-South trade agreements are cancelled and trade flows disrupted; the international economic/financial system is in shambles." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.)

"Moreover, vast amounts of military spending could be better spent elsewhere. The world spends close to $1 trillion every year on weapons. And yet the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates that it would only take $7 billion per year to provide 2.6 billion additional people with access to clean water, saving around four thousand lives per day. Debt forgiveness saves lives as well: according to another UNDP estimate, nineteen thousand children die every day in sub-Saharan Africa because governments must spend money on debt payment and servicing rather than on basic health care." - David H. Rippe, Jared Rosen, The Flip: Turn Your World Around (Get the book.)

"North Korea Israel United Germany Kingdom Japan China Iran India Figure 16.3 military spending as a Percentage of GDP around the World Source: CIA World Factbook. Figure 16.4 P/E Ratios around the World Source: Dow Jones, Standard & Poor's. United States, and Americans would still not be a penny richer—unless they could sell their houses to foreigners. A house cannot go up in value. It can only go up in price. But what about other investments? Suppose stocks doubled in value? Or bonds? Or gold coins? What difference would it make?" - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.) "He increased military spending by 25 percent between 1981 and 1985. He talked to the American people, not about malaise (as Mr. Carter had done), but about 'morning in America.' By the end of his second presidency, much of the talk about American decline had gone out of fashion: the country regarded itself once again not only as the world's greatest superpower, but also as the world's most dynamic economy."2 Now, we look around and we see no trace of self-doubt. Instead, we see a bubble in confidence." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.) "The federal budget had been $184 billion in 1969 at the height of the military spending. In 1972, it rose to $231 billion. In 1969, the federal government actually ran a surplus of $3 billion. By 1972, with the war winding down, we expected to see the surpluses continue; but instead the surplus turned into a deficit of $23 billion. The empire grew, and kept growing. Before launching the attack on the USSR, June 22, 1941, Hitler remarked that the Soviet Union was like a rickety old house. All we have to do, he said, was "kick in the door and the whole thing will fall down." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.) "The romantic lure of empire—the political pull of military spending, the economic delusion, the polished brass and boots—it was all too much to resist. Despite a disastrous experience in World War I, even the fun-loving Italians were soon marching around in jackboots and getting out maps of Abyssinia under Mussolini's new leadership. Mussolini was the perfect fascist. Like America's leading neoconserva-tives, he was really a leftist, who saw an opportunity." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.)

"Chalmers Johnson, in reaction to the huge growth of American military spending, states, "I guarantee you when war becomes that profitable, you are going to see more of it." In a fundamentalist market economy, when anything—including mental illness?becomes extremely profitable, you are likely to see more of it. U.S. rates of depression and "disabling mental illness," as noted, have steadily increased. Those given psychiatric diagnoses are increasingly medicated. And pharmaceutical corporations' profits from psychiatric drugs are dramatically rising." - Bruce E. Levine, Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Get the book.)

"A New York Times dispatch from Washington (December 1, 1994) reported: Trying to quiet Republican criticism that the military is underfinanced, president Clinton held a Rose Garden ceremony today to announce that he would seek a $25 billion increase in military spending over the next six years. Clinton had been in office barely six months when he sent the Air Force to drop bombs on Baghdad, presumably in retaliation for an assassination plot against George Bush on the occasion of the former president's visit to Kuwait." - Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (Get the book.) "In 1984, the CIA admitted that it had exaggerated Soviet military expenditures, that since 1975 it had claimed Soviet military spending was growing by 4 to 5 percent each year when the actual figure was 2 percent. Thus, by misinformation, even deception, the result was to inflate military expenditures. One of the favorite military programs of the Reagan administration was the Star Wars program, in which billions were spent, supposedly to build a shield in space to stop enemy nuclear missiles in midair. But the first three tests of the technology failed." - Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (Get the book.) "These organized groups were campaigning for environmental protection or women's rights or decent health care (including anguished concern about the horrors of AIDS) or housing for the homeless, or against military spending. This activism was unlike that of the sixties, when the surge of protest against race segregation and war became an overwhelming national force. It struggled uphill, against callous political leaders, trying to reach fellow Americans most of whom saw little hope in either the politics of voting or the politics of protest." - Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (Get the book.) "Kennedy was elected President, and he immediately moved to increase military spending. In fourteen months, the Kennedy administration added $9 billion to defense funds, according to Edgar Bottome {The Balance of Terror). By 1962, based on a series of invented scares about Soviet military build-ups, a false "bomber gap" and a false "missile gap," the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority." - Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (Get the book.)

"Soviet military spending. The major impact was to exaggerate Soviet military spending and to encourage the U.S. to divert more of its resources to military purposes. The end result led to foreign and domestic economic policies and decisions that cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars in wasted resources (Challenge, May 1992). On May 20, 1992, CIA Director Robert Gates admitted the CIA intelligence data had been cooked to portray the Soviet economy as stronger than it was." - Carl Jensen, 20 Years of Censored News (Get the book.) "The Myth of the Massive Soviet Build-up: In 1983, testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made a significant downward revision of its estimate of Soviet military spending for the period 1976-1981 which went almost unreported in the press. The new estimate showed an increase of only two percent per year overall and no increase in the buying of weapons. Inflating Soviet Military Expenditures: The CIA was responsible for estimating Soviet military spending." - Carl Jensen, 20 Years of Censored News (Get the book.)

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