Do this exercise for a minute: Take all the money you have on you and lay it on a table. Then count it. Then give half of it to your spouse or partner and say, “Spend it for a good cause.” Now, let a little time go by and then ask that person how they spent it, your personal money. Do you think you might just care how and what they spent it on? Of course you would. Most of us would care about how our hard earned money was spent.
Well, apparently, this Military Industrial Empire does not wish for you to know something as important as that. You send your hard earned tax dollars to Uncle Sam and he decides to spend over HALF of it towards military spending. Whoa, wait a minute. What if you don’t like the fact that we have enough nukes and other WMD to blow up the entire world 1,000 times over? What if you don’t like the fact that we invaded and occupied Iraq based on lies and misinformation? Or that we now continue to spend over ONE MILLION DOLLARS yearly to keep ONE soldier in Afghanistan! How many new lead free pipes would that pay for in cities like Flint?
If one views the ‘ Two Party/One Party ‘ debates (in the case of the Republicans, circus is a better word) as yours truly does, you would be shocked. Not just for the gamesmanship and ‘playing to the crowd,’ but for the lack of understanding or acknowledgement of this Military Industrial Empire. Under the Bush/Cheney gang, military spending soared to record highs (up to that time) of about 50% of our federal tax dollars. In 2011, under Mr. ‘Hope and Change’ (yeah , you who voted for him hoped he’d change) a new record was set of close to 56%.
Imagine how many other things could have been done with even 1/4 of that spending? Imagine how the rest of the world, especially the Middle Eastern countries, not the leaders but the average working stiffs there, would have had an epiphany if we took our jackboots off of their necks, closed our bases and stopped bombing the **** out of their infrastructure? “Cannot do that,” the empire’s maggots tell us (especially the ones wearing the fruit salad on their chests). “We need to fight the terrorists over there so they don’t come here.” Of course, these clowns know that WE helped to create the very terrorists that we now fight! Trump and Sanders agree on a few things, like the fact that our actions against Iraq (and Trump at least puts in Libya as well, Sanders won’t stray that far) was the greatest recruiting tool for the crazies like Al-Qaeda and now ISIL.
You listen to the Republican freak show and all you digest is whose Manhood is bigger and who wants to blow away and waterboard the A-Rabs the most. Of course, ALL of them want to take MORE of your tax dollars and give it to the Military Industrial Empire . . . and then they (especially the most dangerous of the four dangerous men, Cruz) recite how much Jesus or the Lord is on their side. Imagine that the same Jesus, who was called the Prince of Peace, would ever condone the military aggressiveness, the greed, the exploitation that these men champion? Yet, the crowds shout and scream for this show of shows over and over.
You turn to the ‘Hillary vs. Bernie’ show and see the total absence of any discussion on this obscene military spending, the use of drone missiles, the foreign occupations and what we did to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Hillary, as any true progressive or lefty knows, is simply full of **** on just about everything (after all, she is married to ‘Slick Willie’) that comes out of her mouth. I mean, come on, for her to run to Flint right after the lead in water scandal made the news and speak at some black church about how she will do this and that. . . . come on! But Bernie really lets true progressives down each time he avoids the empire. He does ‘ talk the talk’ and yes he did ‘ walk the walk’ when it comes to the Wall Street banksters and the need for public funding of all elections. On his ‘Medicare for All’ mantra, I agree but . . . Bernie caved in on Obamacare too quickly for this progressive’s taste. Yet, because he is running as a ‘loyal Democrat,’ Sanders refuses to speak out against the empire because the guy he refuses to comprehensively critique (and he cannot do that and still be in this race) has done so much for it and so little against it! Thus, all those fine and sincere young folks who latched onto ‘Feel the Bern’ will be burned if and when he loses out to the Wicked Witch and he asks them to support her and this corrupt party that serves the empire so well and for so long.
The Two Party/One Party system is in full swing folks . . . and stronger than ever!
Philip A Farruggio is a semi-retired baby boomer born and bred in blue collar Brooklyn, NYC. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn longshoremen, and educated at ‘free tuition’ Brooklyn College, class of ’74. Philip has written over 300 columns since 2001 and his work is found on many fine progressive sites like World News Trust, Nation of Change, Information Clearinghouse, Intrepid Report, Sleuth Journal, Dandelion Salad, Counterpunch and Dissident Voice. He can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net.
Bernie’s role in this affair is to sheepdog the progressive base of the Democrat Party into supporting Hillary. Just as Obama used one sentence uttered that invading Iraq was stupid, Bernie does the same with his own vote and statements against invading Iraq. Of course Bernie was right and his opposition to the Iraq invasion was a good thing, but where is his critique of our overall policy of empire? Of the Libyan disaster, the Syrian disaster, the Afghanistan disaster, the U.S. creation of Isis?
On Wall Street Bernie wants to break up the big banks and accomplish exactly what? What he should be calling for is an end to bank creation of our money. We don’t need to nationalize banks, we need to nationalize money creation. For those that would like an understandable explanation of how banks create our money as debt and thus give us a nation of debt slaves and an impossible to pay within the present system national debt, please check out Linking Social Justice to Monetary Reform http://www.alpheus.org/linking-social-justice-to-monetary-reform/