Your Local Military Industrial Complex  by David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/your-local-military-industrial-complex

As in any other U.S. city, things are looking up for Charlottesville, Va., job seekers who don't mind helping to kill tons of people for no good reason. This week's "community job fair" features some prominent members of the Charlottesville community whom we don't usually think of as such. When I travel the country, people often inform me that their town is a military-industrial town as if that were unusual. I always ask them if they can name a U.S. town that isn't -- in part because nobody has yet been able to, and in part because if someone ever does I might want to move there.

Once you weed through the predictable dead-end poverty-wage, fast-food, and box-store jobs at the job fair, much of what's left is jobs that help kill people. Whether you support or oppose what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and 75 or so other countries, you're probably not aware that the machinery behind it dominates the local economy here, just as in the rest of the United States. The "community" at the job fair is the community of death.And let's hope you're lucky enough to support what the dozens of countries that U.S. corporations sell weapons to do with them. 

Would you be proud of having built weapons for Muammar Gadaffi and also of having built weapons for U.S. attacks on his military? Would you take pride in building engines of death for a so-called democracy and also for Saudi Arabia? It's still a little known fact, but our biggest business is the machinery of death, not only because the U.S. military could be cut by 85% and still be the world's largest, but also because the United States is far and away the leading seller of weapons to other countries. Often we end up arming additional countries to fend off countries we've armed. Often we end up at war with countries we've armed. Much of U.S. "foreign aid" is actually cash with which other nations are expected to purchase U.S.-made weaponry.