that our elected officials do what they do solely for the benefit of the private military industry, then look no further than this.
George Bush's neoconservative regime was made up of thugs heavily invested in the war-making industry, and many of these same people (and their associated think tanks) have been present in the Obama administration and it should be clear to all how they operate. Find a oil/resource-rich country with a leader who is not down with their program, demonize them, send in troops to overthrow them, destabilize the country, blame any of the resulting violence on the Islamic terror group of the moment (formerly al-Qa'ida - guess we wiped them all out?, now IS) so we'll have an excuse to spend more money on military stuff and kill more people. It's the same shit, over and over again, and the American people are just sitting back watching it happen.
These people are like leeches, slowly draining the life blood of the country. They take money that should be used for teachers, healthcare, infrastructure revitalization, and other things that benefit the common good and use it to wage war and pad their own pockets. We need to understand that they absolutely will not stop (or be stopped) unless we, as a people, demand it. We will always waste over half of this country's discretionary spending on war and welfare to military contractors simply because it's profitable (not because there's some existential Islamic threat to us). Yesterday it was al-Qa'ida everywhere, now it's ISIS everywhere. Tomorrow there will be another "threat" and we'll still be feeding the war machine.
When people like Hillary Clinton say that Bernie Sanders is "weak" on foreign policy, they are saying that he doesn't understand how the aforementioned system works, and is supposed to work into the future. Bernie doesn't understand that the new, post-9/11 norm for us is constant and unending warfare and the accompanying drain on our revenues, but we all know Hillary understands it and she dutifully served her role as Secretary of State by pushing for the removal of Gaddafi and the destruction of Libya. Obama didn't understand foreign policy, but his "advisors" (all of whom were down with the neocon model) did and they convinced him to stay with the Bush era neoconservative model - a model which brought us more warfare and killing around the world.
Obama didn't do his foreign policy homework, and I hope Bernie does his before becoming president and allowing "advisors" to make up for his foreign policy shortcomings.
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