Similarities: Contemporary US and WWII Germany

Tell me if I'm lying:

Germany,  during WWII,  boasted the largest, most powerful military in the world;
a military Germany arrayed around the globe in order to project her military might, secure natural resources in foreign lands, promote her political sphere of influence, develop her domestic economy in order to increase national wealth, which all attributed to job creation and social security,  for the German people.  All of the previous also contributed to the vast personal enrichment of a powerful minority of German politicians, military figures, bankers and industrialists.

To that end, the German financial and industrial sectors worked closely with the political leadership in order to stimulate the German economy through an economic strategy which came to gravitate around the core activity of warfare.  The most obvious symptom of this strategy was Germany's constant need to find enemies from which she must defend herself.  Germany's dreaded enemies were initially weak and militarily insignificant,  countries such as Poland made do quite nicely.  But as the military / industrial complex needed to expand it's base of production,  and as productive activity such as domestic economic growth required raw material inputs which could not be had locally,  the German alliance of capital, industry and the political leadership saw fit to use military force or the threat of the same to seize or  acquire those resources abroad. 

The Geman people did not mind all of this so much.  For they were a strong and proud people with a history of dominating and attempting to dominate other local peoples.  Many Germans also believed that their racial origin bestowed a natural superiority on themselves as a people.  Thus,  capital, industry, political leadership and race had for a short time,  far less than the envisioned "thousand year[s]", created a magnificiently positive feedback loop for the German people.  However, it would not be entirely fair to blame the German people for their *superior* behavior. After all,  they had previously experienced a terrible crash in their stock market,  they suffered from an incredible rate of inflation, they had a high rate of unemployment and they labored under  a collousal debt load.  There experience, therefore, was not unlike that of and perhaps worse than the psychic shock that hit America at the time of the Great Depression.   For the sake of fairness,  it must be remembered that the German outlook on the world was initially quite bleak:  they understood it as a world filled with political, military, economic, social and racial conflict.  The German attempt to control the world in which they lived served to give the German people a sense of group security.  It also instilled in the German people a positive outlook on their future as well as bestowing individual pride in their nation's accomplishments.   The problem though is this:  they were a bunch of nazi scum.  The question is this:  did Germany's initial rapid economic expansion and ascension to world power leave to deep and lasting and too positive an impression on our own financial, industrial and political leadership?    In short, are they all *nazi* scum?   I must confess, when Ted Kennedy squabbles about the lack of accountability and the theft of Iraqi under*development funds*,  I genuinely wonder if he's bitching because his own political patrons aren't getting their cut on the deal.

KR