Scott SoCal said:
You, of course, are correct. Dis-band the military so we can re-direct the 600 billion to social programs (in triplicate.... or in some cases 85 redundencies).
I spit up my coffee too.
Well keep spitting up your coffee with this.
An empire that holds itself together by the strength of its armies and not by its ideas, is destined to fall. The decline of the American empire is thus well under way. America is in steep decline. It's national debt and military have, since the 90's, been financed by Chinese investments.
An empire and a state that replaces social justice with the brutality of force, becomes a tyranny. America preaches civil and human rights at home and throughout the world, but then with its military actions on foreign soil breaks every principle underscoring them whenever its economic interests gain the upper hand. This is a hypocrisy of which not even a nation laking in those fundamental democratic principles, such as a China or an Iran, can be rightfully accused.
Now in terms of the spending cuts. Yes, in my book, America would do very well to spend less public funds on its immense military apparatus, just as it would behave with more dignity by not using tax payers dollars to bail out the private excesses of the Goldman Sachs of Wall Street.
The gargantuan public sums the government has thrown at the private and military sectors could have been much more wisely spent on funding public schools, research, the environment, pensions and health care, but for a heinous and thoroughly perverse ideology that has arisen form the Regan so called reforms, they prefer to spend them on warfare and private business (and warfare to uphold the interests of private business).
With this financial maneuver the repubs want, 700,000 jobs will be at risk. If the economy is what's truly at stake, and not blindly following an ideology of greed in the interests of the American oligarchy, then they are really f-ing things up. Indeed 320 economists have written a letter to the Republican Party asking it to desist from its folly: "Such enormous cuts in public spending will inflict a mortal blow to the US economy", they claim.
While that "brilliant" and fascist republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, threatens to ban public workers' strikes if his state financial package is not approved, which will, of course, spell the end of state subsidized jobs, the schools and its road and bridge infrastructure.
Walker reminds us that what the republicans truly want is less democracy and more oligarchy. Even if the unions are not the best organizations, they do offer the only legitimate workers' defense in the name of democracy and the right to protest against the oligarchs who really run the political and economic agenda. Thus a democracy without them is decidedly less democratic. But in terms of the repubs' political and economic agendas, these things are merely the fruit of a ghastly and criminal ideology. It's one that caters exclusively to the interests of a select elite who rule over the economy and their lobbyists. Even if the dems also have their fare share in lobby politics, there are those within the party who at least call for much needed reforms. But, unfortunately, as a whole, the US democratic party does not represent a left I can aspire to, nor live with.
Moreover US national debt is approaching the 14.3 trillion dollar limit, beyond which, as stipulated by congress, it is illegal to go. At this point America will be unable to finance its debt by the traditional and privileged means of emitting more treasury bonds on the market to entice foreign state investments. And how did America arrive at the world's largest national debt (also in relation to its GNP, which is even higher than that of "socialist" Greece)? Well I can tell you that it wasn't because of a socialist agenda and spending on the public wellbeing, but rather due to a deregulation that caused the flop at Wall Street and to finance its ideological wars to "bring democracy" to the oil rich Arab nations, which covers up the private economic interests that have really spawned them. And these initiatives have arisen much more within the conservative American body politic, even if the left has largely given its support. Unlike the Roosevelt New Deal years and the Kennedy social security reforms, today we have that wonderful reactionary movement the Tea Party that has accounted for 87 Republican Party members getting elected nationally. It's the same intransigent political movement, at times arriving at the folly of a pure fanaticism, that is animated by a fervent and paranoid anti-State, anti-taxes, anti-politics ideology, which is the driving force of right-wing America today. More than a disaster for American politics as a whole, the Tea Party is a disaster for the Republican Party, which has sold its entire movement out to a part of the citizenry that frankly hates the state, the same state to which they owe their very political careers and paychecks.
So we have right wing politicians in America who hate the entire political process and thus the rules of democracy, who despise eveything that has to do with the state while in part making it up, who look pitilessly upon society and hence its own citizenry, while they pursue their political careers with all the perks afforded them by the state without the least compunction and for their own base interests. All of this is, naturally, appalling and grotesque. Like parasites they live off the host, which is the State, while trying to destroy it in the interests of a private elite. How maddening!