I thought Googlers were paid $500K+ and already worked 60-80 hours weeks?

We (Europe) already did most of the heavy lifting for Ukraine. The US mostly gave old stockpiles of weapons that they would’ve needed to destroy anyway. We are the ones actually paying cash to keep them afloat.

The problem is, in the post-WW2 order, our defense and our defense industry was made dependent on the USA by design. And even up until last November, Europe didn’t want to challenge this arrangement and just went full steam ahead with this arrangement, ordering US made weapons. I think Europe was in denial that Biden could lose or that NATO could ever end.

Only France, and to a limited extent, Sweden and Turkey, have independent defense industries.

In the future, we will have it again. And Ukraine will actually be a key player.

But in the short term, there is no magical button to press that can produce the arms.

Undoing decades of integration isn’t going to be easy.

Free would be a bargain compared to what US taxpayers are actually paying lol 😂

The money for these “sales” is aid from the US government.

Israel is unique in that they are the only country that gets its aid from the US government on January 1st, with interest, in cash. They have to use a part of it on American weapons and the rest they just get in cash.

I’m sure Sanders also has a bill or intentions to stop that, but that would be a separate bill.

I kinda wondered about BSW though. They are left, they are anti-immigration and they are capable of pulling votes from AfD and Die Linke - the two parties that compete most with CDU/CSU and SPD, respectively.

So they could be quite a strategic partner.