SUBHEAD: Our military is the greatest misappropriation of resources in the world.
By Juan Wilson on 8 April 2015 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2015/04/america-wins-battle-loses-war.html)
Image above: NASA photograph of a now lifeless Martian surface. A recent analysis has revealed that Mars contains about as much water under the surface as Earth does, indicating a very water-rich history. From (http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mars-Contains-Vast-Amount-of-Water-Within-277307.shtml).
I was born at the end of World War II. The United States, with its vast oil supplies, unrivaled industrial capacity, and safe isolation from its enemies, was able to decisively end that war in 1945 with the use of nuclear weapons used against civilian populations.
The US was virtually undamaged physically from the war and became the world's "Peacekeeper", "Banker" and "Philanthropist" while defending the world from godless Communism. A key part of that strategy was the "Atoms for Peace" initiative. Or so they told us.
What really happened was America had a green light to financialize and industrialize the planet in our own image and for our own profit. And god forbid you got in the way of progress. Do you remember the 1960's motto "Progress is our most important product."
If your as old as I am you might remember those words were delivered by Ronald Reagan as the spokesperson for the General Electric Company - that's the company that spread nuclear power plants across the "free world" and produced the eternal disaster that is the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station for the Japanese.
How do you make a reluctant world kowtow to the will of GE, Westinghouse, Monsanto, DuPont, DOW, Ratheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Grumman, United Technologies, General Dynamics et al?
You point a gun at them!
I'm sure I don't have to tell you this, but America has become a war mongering player on the world stage. Since our last official declared war (World War II) that ended 70 years ago we have been in so many large and small conflicts that it would be hard to list or distinguish between them.
Wikipedia lists over 120 conflicts the US has been involved in the last six decades. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#1945.E2.80.931949). That averages about two a year. Some, like our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, have gone on for decades. What are we working on now? War in Yemen and the Ukraine.
What's it cost?
The proposed US military budget (including veteran's benefits) for 2015 amounts to over 60% of all discretionary spending that includes:
Image above: Pie chart of US discretionary spending budget proposed for 2015. From (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/military-spending-united-states/?gclid=CN6Go4Pk6cQCFZBgfgodeiQAig).
What's goes it get us?
Not much when you consider the reaction of two young Chechen brothers. They were able bring a large American metropolitan area to its knees with two pressure cooker bombs hidden in backpacks during a public event. Two years ago Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Anzorovich detonated home made devises at the finish of the Boston Marathon and killed three people, injuring over 250 others.
Subsequently the city was put under martial law enforced by US military and Homeland Security forces in conjunction with local and state police and emergency personnel. The constitutional rights of citizen's were abrogated until one surviving suspect was injured and arrested.
One lesson learned is that it doesn't take much for Americans to lose their freedoms if even one or two people act effectively. The terrorists won - again.
As horrific as the Boston Bombing was it pales with many violent scenes on America's streets during our history.
There is little to refute that the recent militarization of our local police after the World Trade Center attack on 9/11/2001 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security has turned the muzzle of US weapons on American civilians.
That and the revelation of the NSA's massive illegal spying on US citizens brings one to the conclusion that Americans as well as much of the rest of the world is the enemy of the United States military-intelligence-industrial complex.
It's not new to find out that our own citizenry are the enemey.
The Battle of Blair Mountain was one of the largest civil uprisings in United States history and the largest armed rebellion since the American Civil War. For five days in late August and early September 1921, in Logan County, West Virginia, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers, called the Logan Defenders,who were backed by coal mine operators during an attempt by the miners to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields.
The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired, and the United States Army intervened by presidential order. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain).
Not to worry...
One thing that can be said for the US military is that after WWII it has been increasingly ineffective in getting the results it wants by achieving its goals. By that I mean that its major confrontations that include Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan have left our enemies stronger and us poorer.
If you want to know what defeat looks like just revisit the history of our panicked retreat 40 years from Saigon, South Vietnam, in April of 1975.
It was not too long after that that we started arming the the Mujahiddeen (along with the Saudi Osama Bin Laden) in Afghanistan with shoulder rocket launchers and techniques to take out the imperial Soviet military.
The Mujahiddeen ended in the Taliban taking over Afghanistan and making it a Muslim State that included executing women in soccer stadiums because they were wearing the wrong clothes.
Lesson learned: Bin Laden organized Al Queda in Afghanistan and turned his attention to the imperial America in September of 2001. America has been fighting in Afghanistan ever since - and losing. Yes we pushed back on the Taliban and eventually killed Osama a decade later in Pakistan, but by that time Al Queda had metastasized throughout the Muslim world.
It has recently morphed into something even worse for the USA and the world - The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ushered in the sport of hacking off peoples heads on YouTube.
It seems that each iteration of "victory" for America in Afghanistan yields a worse situation - Mujahiddeen > Taliban > Al Queda > ISIS. Can it get worse. You bet.
Right now the US military is backing the Saudis (sunni) as they bomb the Houthi (shia) in Yemen back to the Stone Age. One problem is that both sides of the conflict now have hundreds of millions of dollars in US weapons to use on each other (or us). Moreover, The Iranian (shia) navy is on the scene and as of two hours ago John Kerry (the haircut in search of a brain) warned Iran against backing the Yemen rebels, as Tehran seems defiant.
So it goes. One thing is sure. America will be taken down another peg no matter what happens.
The rest of the world is working feverishly to get off the dollar and obligations to the USA before we go down in flames. And we do seem in a fever to go somewhere nasty.
The Good News
The world economy is stalling. Resource extraction is slowing as energy returned on energy expended is making it uneconomical to find new fossil fuels. Demand for industrialized products has been dropping as consumers are tapped out and losing interest in the game.
The financial bubbles leveraged on debt are about to burst. Before they do we should be allocating our military budget to mitigating the damage we have already caused to the planet.
If we play are cards right we might be able to get through this before we turn the Earth into Mars.
.
By Juan Wilson on 8 April 2015 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2015/04/america-wins-battle-loses-war.html)
Image above: NASA photograph of a now lifeless Martian surface. A recent analysis has revealed that Mars contains about as much water under the surface as Earth does, indicating a very water-rich history. From (http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mars-Contains-Vast-Amount-of-Water-Within-277307.shtml).
I was born at the end of World War II. The United States, with its vast oil supplies, unrivaled industrial capacity, and safe isolation from its enemies, was able to decisively end that war in 1945 with the use of nuclear weapons used against civilian populations.
The US was virtually undamaged physically from the war and became the world's "Peacekeeper", "Banker" and "Philanthropist" while defending the world from godless Communism. A key part of that strategy was the "Atoms for Peace" initiative. Or so they told us.
What really happened was America had a green light to financialize and industrialize the planet in our own image and for our own profit. And god forbid you got in the way of progress. Do you remember the 1960's motto "Progress is our most important product."
If your as old as I am you might remember those words were delivered by Ronald Reagan as the spokesperson for the General Electric Company - that's the company that spread nuclear power plants across the "free world" and produced the eternal disaster that is the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station for the Japanese.
How do you make a reluctant world kowtow to the will of GE, Westinghouse, Monsanto, DuPont, DOW, Ratheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Grumman, United Technologies, General Dynamics et al?
You point a gun at them!
I'm sure I don't have to tell you this, but America has become a war mongering player on the world stage. Since our last official declared war (World War II) that ended 70 years ago we have been in so many large and small conflicts that it would be hard to list or distinguish between them.
Wikipedia lists over 120 conflicts the US has been involved in the last six decades. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#1945.E2.80.931949). That averages about two a year. Some, like our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, have gone on for decades. What are we working on now? War in Yemen and the Ukraine.
What's it cost?
The proposed US military budget (including veteran's benefits) for 2015 amounts to over 60% of all discretionary spending that includes:
- Transportation
- Science
- Government
- International Affairs
- Energy
- Environment
- Social Security
- Unemployment - Labor
- Medicare - Health
- Education
- Food - Agriculture
Image above: Pie chart of US discretionary spending budget proposed for 2015. From (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/military-spending-united-states/?gclid=CN6Go4Pk6cQCFZBgfgodeiQAig).
What's goes it get us?
Not much when you consider the reaction of two young Chechen brothers. They were able bring a large American metropolitan area to its knees with two pressure cooker bombs hidden in backpacks during a public event. Two years ago Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Anzorovich detonated home made devises at the finish of the Boston Marathon and killed three people, injuring over 250 others.
Subsequently the city was put under martial law enforced by US military and Homeland Security forces in conjunction with local and state police and emergency personnel. The constitutional rights of citizen's were abrogated until one surviving suspect was injured and arrested.
One lesson learned is that it doesn't take much for Americans to lose their freedoms if even one or two people act effectively. The terrorists won - again.
As horrific as the Boston Bombing was it pales with many violent scenes on America's streets during our history.
There is little to refute that the recent militarization of our local police after the World Trade Center attack on 9/11/2001 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security has turned the muzzle of US weapons on American civilians.
That and the revelation of the NSA's massive illegal spying on US citizens brings one to the conclusion that Americans as well as much of the rest of the world is the enemy of the United States military-intelligence-industrial complex.
It's not new to find out that our own citizenry are the enemey.
The Battle of Blair Mountain was one of the largest civil uprisings in United States history and the largest armed rebellion since the American Civil War. For five days in late August and early September 1921, in Logan County, West Virginia, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers, called the Logan Defenders,who were backed by coal mine operators during an attempt by the miners to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields.
The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired, and the United States Army intervened by presidential order. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain).
Not to worry...
One thing that can be said for the US military is that after WWII it has been increasingly ineffective in getting the results it wants by achieving its goals. By that I mean that its major confrontations that include Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan have left our enemies stronger and us poorer.
If you want to know what defeat looks like just revisit the history of our panicked retreat 40 years from Saigon, South Vietnam, in April of 1975.
It was not too long after that that we started arming the the Mujahiddeen (along with the Saudi Osama Bin Laden) in Afghanistan with shoulder rocket launchers and techniques to take out the imperial Soviet military.
The Mujahiddeen ended in the Taliban taking over Afghanistan and making it a Muslim State that included executing women in soccer stadiums because they were wearing the wrong clothes.
Lesson learned: Bin Laden organized Al Queda in Afghanistan and turned his attention to the imperial America in September of 2001. America has been fighting in Afghanistan ever since - and losing. Yes we pushed back on the Taliban and eventually killed Osama a decade later in Pakistan, but by that time Al Queda had metastasized throughout the Muslim world.
It has recently morphed into something even worse for the USA and the world - The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ushered in the sport of hacking off peoples heads on YouTube.
It seems that each iteration of "victory" for America in Afghanistan yields a worse situation - Mujahiddeen > Taliban > Al Queda > ISIS. Can it get worse. You bet.
Right now the US military is backing the Saudis (sunni) as they bomb the Houthi (shia) in Yemen back to the Stone Age. One problem is that both sides of the conflict now have hundreds of millions of dollars in US weapons to use on each other (or us). Moreover, The Iranian (shia) navy is on the scene and as of two hours ago John Kerry (the haircut in search of a brain) warned Iran against backing the Yemen rebels, as Tehran seems defiant.
So it goes. One thing is sure. America will be taken down another peg no matter what happens.
The rest of the world is working feverishly to get off the dollar and obligations to the USA before we go down in flames. And we do seem in a fever to go somewhere nasty.
The Good News
The world economy is stalling. Resource extraction is slowing as energy returned on energy expended is making it uneconomical to find new fossil fuels. Demand for industrialized products has been dropping as consumers are tapped out and losing interest in the game.
The financial bubbles leveraged on debt are about to burst. Before they do we should be allocating our military budget to mitigating the damage we have already caused to the planet.
If we play are cards right we might be able to get through this before we turn the Earth into Mars.
.
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