On the dark logic of guns versus butter

Shorter Far Too Many Members of Congress:

"Health care, did you say? What the fuck is that? If it isn't on these pages, we can't afford it. Go away, you silly media outliers and you, you even sillier bloggers, go away. Isn't there a beauty queen sex tape you should be investigating, just like all the mainstream Big Boys?"

This document discloses only yesterday's awards. Of our money. To various private defense corporations who make the things--and the technology to run the things, and the vehicles to transport and deliver the things--that we use to kill brown people. Every afternoon at 5 pm, the DOD publishes another day's worth of expenditures.

Especially chilling is this line, at the end of the Northrop Grumman award of a $6,793,942 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (just one of countless such awards to that particular company over the past few years):

Work is expected to be completed July 31, 2012. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The contract was not competitively procured.

You were wondering how, and why, we stay in Afghanistan (and everywhere else we invade) so very long? Now you know. Ah, forgive me, you probably already knew and are (wisely) trying to not pay attention to this stuff.

But me, well, I can't help myself--following the weapons and defense markets is my own private Vertigo wherein, again and again, I gaze upon this neverending trainwreck accompanied by firestreams and high-tech thunder, all set to Tchaikovsky on a loop; meanwhile, watching from the wings, evil masterminds the likes of which Ian Fleming never imagined are stroking their calculators in eerie unison. I gaze upon them, too, and in my small, pathetic way, I pray to someone, somewhere, and ask for justice, only justice.

And again. And again.

Also at Cogitamus.