A South Korean videographer asked a number of international students in Japan how they recognized Americans traveling abroad. The stereotypes are fascinating. Like all stereotypes, they are both offensive and amusing (which is probably the reason why humans indulge in such weird analysis).
The Jubilee Debt Campaign is a non-governmental organization dedicated to erasing many of the onerous debts held by many governments, both rich and poor. Thus, it has a clear point of view and one has to take that point of view into account when reading its material. But its estimate of how much the IMF has made from its loans to Greece (€2.5 billion since 2010) seems to me to be about right. The human costs of the repayment have been very high for the Greek people, and one is not unreasonable when one asks if profit made from the suffering (not the actual repayment of the loan) is justifiable.
In fiscal year 2014, the US Federal government gave out $444 billion in contracts. Over $117 billion–nearly 27%–went to just 10 companies and all ten are military contractors. The top contracts went to Lockheed-Martin and the most expensive contract to that company was for the development of the F-35 fighter plane which has been under development since 2001, or 14 years. The F-35 has been plagued with all sorts of problems and its total cost over the 55 year life of the program is likely to be $1.5. trillion. Lockheed-Martin “saw over $5.5 billion in profit, and paid its CEO more than $70 million in 2014. And the $32 billion it received from the U.S. government made up more than seventy percent of its total sales.” The SNAP program, which offers money for food to almost 47 million Americans in 2015, has a total cost of about $74 billion.
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