The U.S. government is always funneling money to its corporate friends.
That’s true at home, and it’s true overseas as well.
But this Afghanistan combat vet just exposed the depth of the corruption, and it’s absolutely shocking.
Joe Kent is running for Congress in Washington state as a Republican against a RINO incumbent, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump.
He is also a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan and has a wife who was killed in Syria.
So, when he talks about the corruption of the Pentagon and the greed of the defense industry who funds pro-war politicians, he knows what he’s talking about.
“For us not to have learned from all this, just shows that there’s people making money and making their careers at the other end of it, and they’ve been doing it on the backs and on the dead bodies of U.S. soldiers, and they’ve been doing it on the back of U.S. credibility. Because they don’t care about U.S. credibility,” Kent said this week after Kabul fell to the Taliban.
“And that’s what’s behind the scenes with the permanent ruling class and the defense industry, unfortunately,” Kent continued.
Kent is not wrong. The defense industry funded politicians for years who lied about what was going on in Afghanistan and deceived the American public into thinking progress was being made.
They were able to do this because the defense industry is one of the most prolific lobbying groups in D.C. when it comes to political contributions.
Companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and others, routinely give enormous sums of money to politicians like Obama, Romney, Biden, and others.
Then, they make that money back when politicians create chaos in the Middle East, and those companies sell the government weapons to try to clean up the mess. They profit off chaos and war.
Kent also destroyed the lie that the Taliban taking over Afghanistan was some kind of unforeseen outcome.
“The vast majority of (Afghans), they knew this was going to end at some point, they knew that the Taliban was going to come back. There’s never been a functioning Afghan government. They knew this was a pipe dream of foreigners. The whole history of the country is that a foreign power goes in there, attempts to either conquer or build some form of government, and then they get their butts kicked, and they leave in disgrace like we’re leaving right now.”
“For us not to see that just speaks to our hubris, but also how much greed that the Pentagon had, and how much absolute hubris and lack of caring for the American soldier that the Pentagon had.”
“(The Afghans) knew this day was coming, that we were going to leave, and I think a lot of them cut their deals.”
If people like Joe Kent had been in charge in the early 2000s when the plan for the war in Afghanistan was being put together, this outcome surely would have never happened.
Maybe, if people like Kent can get elected to Congress, they can help avoid future disasters like this.