As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Has anything changed since then? Apparently not. There is still violence in our streets, and the Pentagon has become a supermarket of weapons for sale to almost anyone, anywhere. We'll even loan them the money needed to buy the stuff:
Endless US wars mean endless sales for well-positioned US arms makers, but military officials today are detailing a growing effort within the Pentagon to fund not just the weapons they intend to actually buy, but also weapons they figure other people might want to buy in the future.
The Pentagon’s Special Defense Acquisition Fund (SDAF) is meant for exactly that, with officials saying it allows them to “prime the pump” and placing advanced orders for weapons from arms makers “so we can stockpile things when we know there’s going to be an immediate rush or demand.”
In practice a lot of this money is being thrown at the ISIS war, with the expectation that all the nations that have gotten sucked into participating in the US-led coalition airstrikes against ISIS are going to need to buy a bunch of American bombs to drop on ISIS.
Since the US is dropping much of its own substantial collection of bombs on ISIS, this SDAF is being used to put in a whole bunch of extra orders for such bombs and related parts, with the expectation that customers will show up eventually.
You can read the rest @
http://news.antiwar.com/2016/10/05/pentagon-fund-pushed-bomb-production-expecting-ally-orders-to-target-isis/
It is a falsehood to believe the US sells and uses massive amounts of armaments to somehow "protect" people around the world. These weapons are used to wound, kill, and destroy; not for any positive purpose, but to ensure that US hegemony cannot ever be successfully overthrown.
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