Welcome to The Socialist Program. This is the audio of our monthly seminar. Subscribe and support

this programming at patreon.com slash the Socialist Program to join live once a month and ask

Brian Becker your questions and listen to them as soon as they come out. Thanks so much for your help

in keeping this independent show going. We can make this program with you,

but not without you. All right. Thank you, Nicole. And thanks again. Yeah, as Nicole said to all of you

without the support of patrons, we can't do the show. For people listening to the preview edition

of our patrons-only seminar, we have a few minutes trying to entice those who are not

yet subscribers to become subscribers because we need to expand the subscriber base. And I know, you know,

thousands of people who are listening to the show very regularly and rely on the show. We get

tons of feedback, but it's a smaller

fraction that actually steps up and actually becomes a subscriber. And that makes all the

difference. So if you're not a subscriber yet, please become one. I had said, Nicole, that the

theme of this, the opening, at least of this webinar would be

the new stage of the military industrial complex, and I want to talk about that.

There's a particular article that I'm going to reference about what's going on inside the Pentagon

in its negotiations with the White House, with Congress,

insisting in a way that the U.S. industrial base is currently inadequate, not because it's

inadequate to build the bridges that are necessary to be built or to be repaired or the highways,

the infrastructure that in many parts of the country are really crumbling. 70,000 bridges in

urgent need of repair, for instance. The lack of high-speed rail in the United States. I mean,

a real scandal. One of the articles,

the flow of arms to Ukraine has exposed a worrisome lack of production capacity in the United

...