Everyone knows that a lot of money is wasted by the Pentagon, but the amount of this waste is staggering, making most of the fraud reported by the media paltry by comparison. Scot Paltrow puts things in perspective: The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery. The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or “plugs,” to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.

At Huffpo, Jeff Cohen writes:

Today there's an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don't. It's arguably our country's biggest problem -- a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War). That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war. In 1967, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" -- and said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." . . . What our mainstream media so obediently call the "War on Terror" is experienced in other countries as a U.S. war of terror -- kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent civilians -- that creates new enemies for our country.