Why We Are No Longer Prosperous

united states currency seal – IMG_7366_web (Photo credit: kevindean)

TURNING A NATION OF PEACE AND PROSPERITY INTO A NATION
OF CORPORATE WAR-MONGERING AUSTERITY.
By Grant Marcus, guest blogger
one in a series of political posts for peace

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more
money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Let’s say your spouse starts having sudden delusions about your
neighbors.  He insists they are after him, after the family.  These fears
build uncontrollably until he has bought several glock automatic weap-
ons, and he is busy changing your humble abode into a compound.

You think, for an instant, “boys will be boys,” but then you realize
his Project Paranoia will consume half of both your salaries.  You’ve
already downgraded your auto, life, and health insurance policies.
You are now on a second mortgage,  The time it is taking for this
huge distraction is jeopardizing both your jobs; and yet the project is
only half completed, and seems as though, as new things develop,
it will only cost more than it should, while never getting finished.

This is the microcosm of the macrocosm.
This is our national situation.
Half of every dollar we pay in taxes goes down the war drain:

the pentagon, Das Homeland, the Defense Department, Star Wars and
the Patriot Act, or the surveillance of ourselves.  War has become
so expensive that we barely have enough money to pay for depart-
ments of war, then have to borrow the rest from China to make it.
And yet, in spite of all the mistakes and over-reactions we have made,
half of America still believes that all of these wars are necessary. Or,
as Voltaire once said, “Those who can make you believe in ab-
surdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

    Bin Laden may be dead, but he is victorious.  Freedom of speech is lost through war contractors, corporatization and corporate personhood.

And the fourth and fifth amendments, including search
and seizures, due process and double jeopardy, which have been
with humanity since the Magna Carta, have all but been decimated.

We may be technologically sound and produce half the world’s
weapons, but by our actions and on paper, when it comes to hu-
man rights, at home and abroad, we are no more than a third world
country.  Thanks to Bush-Bama, Americans can now be rendi-
tioned and detained by suspicion and tortured.  This includes
American soldiers.

Just ask Brian Manning, who whistleblew on American murders,
and violations of International law, but instead of Manning being
a hero, who stood for deep-seated American values, he has been
tortured, ensured of no defense through a military tribunal, and
will likely serve the rest of his life in prison.  Because of the Na-
tional Defense Act, what happened to Brian Manning can happen
even more easily to .any of us.  A third world country indeed.  A
country Bin Laden, smiling down on us, would understand; that
even, I dare say, Hitler and Nazzi Germany would understand.

Back in our history, before politicians were groomed CEOs
mouthing for oil, war, and security contractors, or before the media
sold out to Murdock Inc–that age when a few ounces of truth
could slip past primetime–our leaders were there to readily make
clear to us that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  But now
fear is the ignition switch that quickstarts every decision and im-
pulsive process of government, with everything orchestrated or
packaged as crisis.

      Abraham Lincoln told us who the real enemy of our fears
are and will be.  They certainly are not to be blamed on 19 hijack-
ers with boxcutters, or even the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.  Lincoln
saw the enemy within when he said, “America will never be des-
troyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be
because we destroyed ourselves.”  Maybe we should start
looking in the mirror, and then at our leaders.

Democracy, or rule by the majority, is not possible when
propaganda is so prevalent, the majority can be mislead.  It is
impossible when both parties are part and parcel of this propa-
ganda, with no one left to represent the average American. We
should wakeup and realize a corporatized democracy does
not a democracy make, though it has prospered well colluding
through insider trading with our privileged representation (?).

But what about the rest of us?

Meanwhile, the media convinces us what ipods to buy and
what poor nutrition to get addicted to.  Orwellian corporate
America has become “Big Brother” and so we have the best
damn, forsaken government money can buy.  It is why you
and I may never get to speak to the likes of Elton Gallegly,
or other war-mongering legislators, but war contractors,
talking drones in Pakistan not only get their undivided at-
tention,but they have their personal phone numbers, and
shuffle more stocks of trade.

As Tom Paine once suggested, to abolish war is im-
possible, because it “would be to take from such govern-
ment the most lucrative of its branches.”  I wonder what he
would think now of our modern $3-4 trillion dollar wars?
of course he thought, “any offensive war is murder.” Or,
as George Orwell expressed, “If you want a picture of
the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–
forever.” (Such as our eternal wars on terror).

  We have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world
50 times over, and yet 50,000 people died last year because
of inadequate healthcare.  That’s five times the deathrate of
all 10 years of war in the Mideast, as well as the 3,000 killed
at the Twin Towers combined.  But this statistic isn’t good
for business, or corporate insurance companies, and so the
media won’t bite the hand that feeds it.

And you can look at every social program up for slash-
ing, including Social Security and Medicare.  It’s our wars
that are eating it.  The war is the bad economy stupid! (Of
course, not  you are an ‘investor’).

There are songs written about American stupidity when
it comes to politics, such as having “one wheel in the ditch
and the other on the track,” or just “asleep at the wheel.” Un-
fortunately, it is politics, and the decisions in Washington
that drive just about everything we do, from the vitamins
and pharmaceuticals and breakfast cereals we eat in the
morning, to what schools our sons and daughters go to
and what they will be learning–or of what wars they will
be fighting before they turn 20.

If we spend half of Washington’s budget on weapons
of mass destruction for war games (because that is
what they have become) guess what our children will be
doing with their lives, short as life will be for them?  When
will we begin to realize the truth of our actions, that war,
is abortion, the abortion of our children, our flesh and blood
our namesake, our future?.

The Women’s International Leage of Peace and Free-
dom did a study years back on what each weapons sys-
tem costs us in terms of our general welfare.  One
fighter jet, I believe, could give every poor child a school
lunch program across the nation.  But judging from all
the chemtrails streaking across our skies these days, it
doesn’t look like WILPF has taught us one lesson, Mean-
while 50 million children live in poveverty, a statistic
that rarely gets mentioned, and what we don’t see, won’t
concerns us.

And so we move ever onward, like Christian soldiers,
from posterity into austerity.  Funny thing about it is?
The Germans too, fought for Christian superiority. They
too were onward Christian soldiers, albeit more blond
and blue-eyed than most of us.

It is why today Germany sets rules, and regulates
its banks, its energy companies, and avoids wars.  The
German people learned the harsh lessons of austerity
and what it means when a country invests in nothing
but war and devastation.  (You remember, back in the
day when Jews were considered Muslims).

Will the world, someday, make us pay for our at-
rocities?  Will we too look back on these days of on-
ward Christian soldiers and realize, we have repeated
the mistakes of history because we never bothered
to understand the politics of history?  Will our so-
called Christian leaders be condemned as the second
generation of “good Germans?”.

Or perhaps we should just continue to ignore the day-
to-day ethics of the whole thing, turn the channel, and
glimpse at the next war playing on Wolf Blitzer.  We can
watch it with a good German beer, toast, say “skoll,” and
casually go about our dirty dancing–or goosestepping.
After all, this is the U.S.S. of America, i.e. America
Incorporated.

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