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What ever happened to "war is last resort"?
What ever happened to the "peace dividend"?
What ever happened to our Founders' opposition--and many generations' opposition--to the U.S. maintaining a standing army?
Wasn't this one of the reasons for the American Revolution? That the colonists were forced to quarter British troops in their homes? We aren't forced to do that, exactly, but how many military personnel are we being forced to support--housing, food, training, equipment, medical care and other individual and family benefits--by paying taxes under threat of serious penalty? And how many military bases worldwide? And how much fuel at inflated prices? And how many fighter jets, spy planes, bombers, drones, aircraft carriers, tanks, armored vehicles, guns, bullets, bombs, missiles and God knows what all? And how many pilots? And how many technicians and engineers? And how many "special ops" teams? And how many mercenaries? And how many spies, and psyops teams, and P.R. firms? And on and on and on!
The war budget should be cut by 90%, down to a true defensive posture. All U.S. troops should be brought home and demobilized, and all these military bases worldwide shut down! We don't need 90% of what we are spending on war and militarism to defend our shores, or to join UN-sanctioned necessary peacekeeping missions. It is the worst kind of tyranny--and that is WHY our Founders opposed a standing army. They knew what the temptations would be.
Until we can join with others to institute world disarmament, we probably need some defense, but defense is certainly not what is happening now. When was the last time the Pentagon actually defended us? They couldn't even defend our nation's capitol on 9/11! No, what is happening now are wars of aggression--wars for resources, corporate wars--that have absolutely nothing to do with defending us from attack. Even if you buy the official 9/11 story, that it was Saudi Arabians and Yemenis who attacked us on 9/11, what the hell are we doing killing scores of Afghan civilians every week? We are occupying three countries right now--Iraq, which has nothing to do with 9/11, Afghanistan, where 99% of the people had nothing to do with 9/11 and Colombia, which has a long border with another Pentagon oil target--Venezuela.
The new U.S./Colombia military agreement includes U.S. military use of SEVEN bases in Colombia--three on the Venezuelan border--U.S. military use of ALL civilian airports and other infrastructure, U.S. fighter and spy planes and their pilots, U.S. Navy ships and their crews (at the ports), and (if you can believe this number) 1,600 U.S. soldiers and U.S. 'contractors'--hauntingly described as "just a few military advisers--with total diplomatic immunity for all U.S. military personnel and 'contractors,' no matter what they do in Colombia. Tell me what this occupation of Colombia is really FOR! And that is by no means the total picture of U.S. war assets now surrounding Venezuela's oil coast and northern oil provinces.
The temptations are overwhelming--with all this great war machine at the service of those who really run this country--the corporate rulers. We have come to the nether end of the American Revolution and are now committing every mistake that our Founders tried to prevent us from making--from maintaining not just a "standing army," but a huge war machine, worldwide, to an imperial presidency--probably inevitable with the dawn of nuclear weapons, but still, the president was not meant to be a king, let alone the king of the world--to corporations living forever, accumulating vast wealth and power, acquiring "human rights," and dominating all decisions just like the British East India Company!
The problems of undoing these anti-democratic horrors seem overwhelming, but in that case, you've got to take a step by step approach, addressing the first steps to very practical considerations of power. Where does our power as a people reside? It resides mostly in our vote. Who counts our votes? Not us any more. No, we now have a handful of private, rightwing corporations 'counting' all our votes with 'TRADE SECRET' programming code and virtually no audit/recount controls--and one of them, ES&S, just bought out Diebold and now has an 85% monopoly on U.S. voting systems, and they are the worst of the lot--worse even than Diebold--as to far rightwing connections. Changing this is DOABLE. The power over selecting voting systems still resides at the state/local level where ordinary people still have some potential influence. The person who makes those decisions--your county registrar--may live right down the street from you. And for most Americans, the state capitol is not that far away. We cannot reform anything else until we restore vote counting that everyone can see and understand, and can guarantee, through transparency, that the people we vote for in primaries and general elections are the people who take office. This is so obvious that it is difficult to explain. Transparent vote counting is the most fundamental condition for democracy. It has been taken away. We must get it back. We MUST! And until we do, corporations and war profiteers are going to run us, not the other way around, as it should be.
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