18. The Military Industrial Complex Episode: The United States of Raytheon
I'M THE VILLAIN
English - October 23, 2019 12:19 - 36 minutes - 50.1 MB - ★★★★★ - 41 ratingsSociety & Culture Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
WAR. Good god y'all. What is it good for? Making a FUCK TON of money for defense contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. The US currently spends $649 billion dollars on our military, which is more than the next 7 countries combined. And to justify that expenditure, we are constantly at war. Every single child living in America today has lived in a country that has been at war their entire lives, and for the most part, they couldn't even tell you who we are fighting. In this episode, we sit down with Rahul Kulkarni, a nonviolence advocate who tells us his thoughts on how we came to be in this state of perpetual war, why we need to start talking about it more, and why we need to think more about the actions of the military when we go to the voting booth.
Notes:
At around 4:00, Rahul states that we have never not been at war since World War 2. If you want to see who exactly we have been fighting, see the Wikipedia page on wars involving America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States#21st-century_wars
At around 5:00, we talk about the military budget as a share of the total US federal budget. Currently it is at 15%: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-the-federal-government-spend-your-tax-dollars-on-social-insurance-programs-mostly/
US military budget surpasses next 7 countries' military budgets: https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
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