The Very High Cost of Not Knowing

I sat down with a friend last week and the conversation

drifted to whatever it was in the current news. I prefer to think of it as the

news torrent, because it comes in a

downpour and is gone in a flash.

Oh, he

told me, I’ve given

up the newspapers and TV because it’s all so dreary these days. If it isn’t a

cyclone in Asia, it’s half the world population of animals going extinct. Cant’

bear it. I’ve too many of my own problems.

 

I understand that.

We’re coming close to times where, despite having 1500

friends on Facebook, there’s no one to call at 2am when there’s an emergency.

911 doesn’t help much when your child has a raging fever and what you really

need is someone to come stay with the kids while you and your spouse rush off

to the hospital.

But there’s a cost

to that not knowing and it seeps into our lives like water through an open

window that might better have been closed. Could

have been closed and surely should

have been closed.

Sixty Fortune 500 corporations

paid no taxes in 2018. Their total

U.S. income, including such names as Amazon, Chevron, General Motors, Delta,

Halliburton, and IBM was more than $79 billion. Amazon got a tax refund of $129 million after net

earnings of $13.4 billion.

That’s more than seeping through the window and yet not knowing cost my friend his share of

that tax refund.

I didn’t

know that, he tells me.

Okay, so what if he did

know? How would that have mattered? Well, awareness

is the key to who we vote for. Is he aware that for the past 29 years Republicans have honored a no tax increase pledge?

Probably not, but Amazon knows. They

dumped more than $13 million into the 2018 elections.

Let’s go back a bit—but not too far.

An example was the complex

financial products that contributed to the housing market collapse of 2007.

Investment banks sold shit mortgages to anyone,

including those who didn’t even have a steady job. Want a house? Sign here and

we’ll give you half a million.

I didn’t

know that.

I know you didn’t. Neither did

Alan Greenspan and he was the head of the Federal Reserve. But four million Americans lost their homes.

In the aftermath, Americans lost $10 trillion

in wealth as their home values plummeted and many more ended up owing more than

their homes were worth.

Four million families losing

their homes and ten-thousand billion

dollars sucked down the sewer is a high cost of not knowing.

Let’s go longer in the not-knowing game. In the fifty years

following the Second World War, military spending totaled about $13 trillion,

give or take a buck or two.

In a  mere seventeen

years between 1998 and 2015 a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon

financial transactions could not be

traced, documented, or explained. That’s roughly five times more than the entire

federal government spends in a year.

In all, at least a

mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and

2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained. To

convey the vastness of that sum, $21 trillion is roughly five times more than

the entire federal government spends in a year. 

To quote General and President

Dwight Eisenhower,

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired

signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,

those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending

money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its

scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any

true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

I didn’t

know that.

Many of us have given up the newspapers and TV. It is dreary these days. Most of us can’t

bear it and we all have problems.

But the very high cost of not knowing is tearing at the very fabric of our constitutional

republic and we dare not find ourselves losing it while we admire all the cute

kittens on Facebook.

Knowing is all we have with

which to defend ourselves.