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after WW II and the takeover of our government by war profiteers whose interests are served and whose pockets are lined by the Forever War--Korea blending into Vietnam blending into Cambodia/Laos blending into U.S. funded proxy wars and installation of bloody dictators in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and throughout Latin America and Africa, blending into "mutually assured destruction," blending into 'little wars' like Panama and Grenada, big wars like Gulf War I, the U.S. "war on drugs," and finally, full scale invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and sneaky occupations of Colombia and Honduras.
What is all this FOR? Not for you and me and most U.S. citizens. It is a self-perpetuating, blood-soaked juggernaut to enrich the rich, at our expense and the expense and lives of other peoples.
That IS the central problem in the U.S. But how to solve it involves another set of problems having to do with the fundamentals of democracy--for instance, the loss of transparency in our vote counting system--the takeover of all vote counting in the U.S. by rightwing-connected electronic voting machine corporations, using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY code to tabulate our votes, with virtually no audit/recount controls. This EASY capability of fiddling every election in the U.S. now resides largely with ONE far rightwing-connected corporation--ES&S, which just bought out Diebold and thus achieved an 80% monopoly over the U.S. voting machine 'market.' Until we rid ourselves of these 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines--which is still doable (since power over voting systems still resides at the local/state level, where ordinary people have some potential influence)--we cannot even begin to address other critically needed reforms, such as cutting the war budget down to true defensive posture or busting corpo-fascist media monopolies.
The takeover of vote counting by rightwing corporations was fast-tracked across the U.S. during the 2002 to 2004 period and is closely related to accelerating the Forever War and bending it to corporate resource purposes. Nearly 60% of the American people opposed the invasion of Iraq, for instance (Feb. '03, all polls) and this peace-minded, progressive majority had to be overcome. We really need to understand the WHY of these things--of privatized, 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting and corpo-fascist, lying, propagandistic 'news' monopolies--in order to devise remedies and organize people to implement remedies. We desperately need to "connect the dots." Just a for instance, the initial funder and major investor in ES&S was Howard Ahmanson, a reclusive, far rightwing billionaire who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation which promotes the death penalty for homosexuals. THAT is who has been 'counting' the votes on ballot propositions against gays and lesbians!
The Forever War is wrong, wrong, WRONG! It is anti-democratic, grievously inhumane and ruinous to most Americans. We are seeing the ruinous part in this Great Depression. And we have seen some of the blowback on the grievously inhumane part and will likely see more. As to the anti-democratic part, we not only see its impact here, in policy that favors multinational corporations and disfavors or completely ignores the interests of most Americans, no matter who is president, we see it in U.S. attacks on truly democratic countries, like Venezuela, while it lards $7 BILLION in military aid on Colombia--a country with the second worst human rights record on earth.
How to END the Forever War? The answer is how to restore democracy. Step no. 1: Restore the bottom line of democracy--vote counting that everyone can SEE and understand.
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