The Welfare of Warfare.

 

Somehow our long nightmare of four years has supposedly ended. That's because we as a nation , well, I suppose as most nations are, are inward-looking. We don't care about the countries we've invaded never mind about how their citizens are faring, so the long, as in almost a generation long, nightmare we plunged them into was never mentioned once during this longer-than-ever, presidential contest. 

But our Nation differs from every other country's, because ours is a pick and choose type of xenophobia. We want to go into self-imposed isolation and tariff wars only after we've spent a decade and a half using foreign venues to test the efficacy of our latest murder machines and assassination technologies. Trump-a-dump admittedly dropped a big one in Iraq, supplied Death-for-profits to bone Sawdi Arabia in their merciless war against the poorest nation on earth, and sent missiles screaming into Syria to win praise from his Zionist supporters, but compared to the level of warfare, one that included an Assassination Tuesday during the Obama administration to decide who the targets of the week were, at least his worst damage was reserved for his fellow countrymen, as it is in most countries. 

I believe Glenn Greenwald is the only journalist who acknowledged that fact, or at least tacitly, as he suggested that the GW regime was far worse than the Trump Circus, a sentiment I am completely on board with, (but dare not mention to the Freedom of the Press stalwarts on the left who will scream you down for such a suggestion). 

Which ideas, when they are harbored by twenty-somethings, is perfectly understandable, but when they come from those who barely reacted to the twin invasions of the early years of this century with nothing but a shrug of the shoulders, and a determination to follow the President's advise and Go Shopping, the silence about the international crimes of GW is, for me, far more disturbing ... as it was then ... during both of the Iraq Wars ... which they all too easily signed up for, with but the flimsiest of justifications necessary to gain their acquiescence.

And now, as the military budget continues to swell, even as the size of the economy that is necessary to support it continues to contract, the burden of military expenditure, more and more dependent on, not big corporate taxation, the very beneficiaries of War profiteering, but, having slashed their tax liabilities, paying the costs of welfare for Warfare becomes an increasingly heavy burden of taxation on every other taxpayer in the country. The growth of the military far exceeds that of the wage earners whose checks are garnished on a weekly basis to pad the bottom line of the Corporations that provide the Wehrmacht with its deadly arsenal as though they are producing new delights for Toys R US and who then use the embarrassing inflow of booty to buy lobbyists to take the burden for paying for those wars, that benefitted none of the rest of us (in fact the first of which was directly responsible for the attack on the WTC in 2001), and put them squarely on wage earners' already burdened down-to-breaking shoulders. Their increases in wages over the last generation or two, pale in comparison to the percentage increases heaped onto the military. Yet year after year we increase that amount, despite the fact that we now spend annually on militarization (to fight that frightening nemesis of little, backwards, Afghanistan; a country whose own budget is also largely extracted from the pockets of the US taxpayer) what it used to take a generation to spend ... as though we are always at War against an enemy hurling its air force across our borders, or bombing the bejesus out of our allies' cities. Yet no one wonders why the only profitable enterprises are those directly attached to the  military's procurements: the more money the Pentagon shovels into the coffers of MacDonald's and KFC, the more that smaller enterprises go bankrupt until one day only MacDonald's and KFC are left standing, and that's when prices really start to skyrocket. The main reason for this is that the largest procurement they have made since the Reagan/Bush era has been the mind of the polity, which they have convinced that without War against communism whatever, Capitalism crumbles, as War is the only means of income redistribution the religious community, and therefore their flocks, the number one supporter of murdering people in other countries, will tolerate. And without income redistribution, the monopolization of the entire business sector continues until everything is owned by IBM. Or one of the other monopolized entities that can't function without annual infusions from the Central Government.

And given that there was never a whisper raised about spending trillions to keep and feed people in barracks while throwing them bodily out of SRO's to starve in the streets, this situation will not change appreciably under the Biden presidency. Socialism will be available only for those willing to kill for their room and board. Everyone else must work to pay for their keep.

Instead, similar to in the 90's when the Corporate leaders were insisting we help China develop so we would have an enemy worth our mettle, once the inauguration has ended, and the excitement of victory dies down, given our lack of hot wars anywhere in the world, the insanity of allocating resources to "defense", a defense that is offensive, it is bound to happen that even in the USA!USA!, someone might notice that we are throwing all of our best minds and all of our profits, into an enterprise that marches gun-toting citizens around in bootcamps to play soldier while looking down its nose at civilian culture, which it for the most part holds in more contempt than any civilians in other countries do, making it far more dangerous to us than them thar ferrinners are, even though it is supposedly the Iraqi's, Iranian, Syrians and Afghans, the Bosnians and Chinese, Serbs and Russians, Mexicans and Guatemalans, Venezuelans and Somalis, Cubans and Canadians, Vietnamese and Libyans, Palestinians and Kurds, who are our enemies ... somehow. 

Enduring Freedom.

Because it is largely Israel, as the Neo-Cons so adroitly demonstrated, that decides that for us, and then let's our "leaders" know, who then obliges them by setting the propaganda machine, run all but entirely by "people of faith", in motion to manufacture consent. A fairly easy task in the USA! USA! As GW, with Pat Robertson as his vitriolic war-monger, Christ with a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other, was so adept at demonstrating. NO one hates tolerance and embraces murderous rampages through other people's countries like the religious, railing venomously against gay marriage while spitting their bloodlust into the microphone, spreading god's Love using depleted uranium bullets and phosphorous bombs as god's messengers from on high: it's the only sexual excitement that is allowed to them. Displacement indeed.

So while the US takes a deep breath and thanks the lord the years of chaos have ended, they ended four years ago for the rest of the world, because the American's troops weren't on the march for the first time in the 21'st Century. So for them, for whom we care not a jot, the chaos may now be ready to start all over again. An assessment I sure hope is wrong; but hope doesn't get too far against the onerous weight and crushing embrace of American Arms.