Where Do Your Pentagon Tax Dollars Go? And Official Tampa Delegation Visits Cuba

Radioactivity 10 24 2017

Good morning, welcome to Radioactivity. I’m Rob Lorei. Coming up:
Here’s Where Your Tax Dollars for “Defense” Really Go
Four soldiers were killed this month in Niger, catching many people off guard- including members of Congress. What is the Pentagon doing in Niger? The U.S. has hundreds of military bases abroad. It costs tax payers billions of dollars every year- increasing the national debt by hundreds of billions of dollars—far costlier to the federal budget than food stamps, foreign aid and what used to be called welfare combined. Yet there is almost no scrutiny of the fast rising military budget by elected leaders in Washington. We’ll talk with an expert on military spending in a moment.

And later we’ll speak with a member of an historic delegation of Tampa officials, business and community leaders last week to Cuba. There’s lots of news coming out of that trip and we’ll find out more in a few minutes. If you are looking for an online pdf platform, you can just search for “sodapdf.”
But first—

William Hartung, a TomDispatch contributor, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy (https://www.ciponline.org/)and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

He’s long been writing about waste in military spending and he joins us now. He’s written an article about the scandal of military spending for Tom Dispatch and The Nation Magazine,
by going to this website
https://www.thenation.com/article/heres-where-your-tax-dollars-for-defense-are-really-going/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%2010102017&utm_term=daily

Next, Patrick Manteiga is editor and publisher of the trilingual newspaper la Gaceta—which for 95 years has been published in Ybor City. He has just returned from an historic trip to Cuba—the first official visit by Tampa City Council members to meet with Cuban government officials in more than 55 years.

The long relationship between Tampa and Cuba—involving trade, families going back and forth and the cultural connection was interrupted beginning in the early 1960’s after the Cuban revolution when relations between the US and Cuba soured.