Posted on September 8, 2010 by Benjamin David Steele
I thought this was perfectly symbolic of America’s role in the world. The US government putting bases all over the world, attacking countries sometimes with little or no good reason given, the military and CIA toppling governments, allying with theocracies and supporting dictatorships when it’s convenient, funding and training foreign military and para-military groups…. and I could go on for pages.
The only difference between the American empire today and the colonial empires of past centuries is that the US government is more powerful and far-reaching than any empire in history. Britain is still a colonial empire. It’s not surprising at all that the British government is the closest ally of the US government.
Britain who has a long history of invading countries predicably supports the US invasion of Afghanistan. Business as usual. The British soldiers just return to occupy the fort in Afghanistan that they built more than a century ago.
It’s not about terrorists or even ultimately about oil. It’s simply about of power.
Posted on September 7, 2010 by Benjamin David Steele
This video reminded me of why it doesn’t help the economy to give tax cuts to the rich and generally increase the wealth of rich while leaving behind everyone who isn’t part of the ruling elite. From just an economic perspective, there are three problems:
1) Increasing the wealth of the wealthy doesn’t necessarily increase investment. At some point, a person becomes so wealthy that further wealth becomes meaningless. This leads the super rich to gamble with their excess wealth which was one of the contributing factors to our recent economic crash. Financial gambling doesn’t make for a stable economy nor does it have any social value. So, if the government genuinely wants an economy that grows with stability rather than constantly crashing, they should create regulation and taxation that helps decrease wealth disparity so that excess wealth isn’t concentrated at the very top.
2) Most new jobs are created by small businesses, but the tax cuts for the rich mostly only help big businesses. Also, the bailouts help Wall Street while leaving Main Street to suffer. Why help the rich who helped break the economy while sacrificing the working and middle classes which are simply trying to get by? A lot of the working and middle class was in debt for the reason that wages were stagnating even as the rich were getting richer. So, if the government genuinely wants to stimulate job growth, they should ensure that wages grow as the economy grows and they should give bailouts to small businesses while breaking up corporations that are too big to fail.
3) Even ignoring all that, giving more wealth to the wealthy doesn’t stimulate the economy for some simple reasons. Assuming they don’t gamble it, the other choice the rich could do with excess wealth is simply to put it into savings. The middle and working classes, however, will spend any extra money they have which invests back into the economy. For good or ill, the US economy is based on consumerism and consumerism is based on working and middle classes that have money to spend. Let me explain why. A rich person spends several hundred or even several thousand on a pair of shoes. For the same amount of money, hundreds of working and middle class people could buy shoes. The purchase of hundreds of shoes stimulates the economy more than buying one pair of shoes even if it’s the same amount of money. So, if government genuinely wants to stimulate the economy, they should give tax cuts to the working and middle classes.
All of this assumes that those in power actually care about the economy as a whole and actually care about the average American. I suspect that this is a false assumption. It’s hard for me to believe that after all these decades intelligent people (including Democrats like Obama apparently) think that trickle down economics actually works. I think these people know that it just makes the rich richer. That is why they do what they do. Politicians are of the rich and have campaigns funded by the rich. Why would they help the lower classes? So, what if the economy collapses? The rich will always maintain their wealth. If the country gets bad enough, they’ll just move to a pleasant tropical island and take their wealth with them.
Here is another video that relates, but it’s from more of a libertarian perspective:
The author interviewed, Thomas E. Woods Jr, is criticizing the US military-industrial complex. Besides the moral argument, he mentions that military is not a very good investment. When we invest in military that is less that can be invested in other things such as education or infrastructure. Also, funding goes to defense research which uses up public tax money and wastes the most brilliant minds on discovering more efficient ways to kill people. Those same dollars and those same brilliant minds could be used for research to cure cancer or research into alternative energy.
Once again, the only people who benefit from the military-industrial complex are the defense contractors and the wealthy investors in these companies. Certainly, the average American who pays for these wars and dies in these wars aren’t benefiting. The only reason we have any interest in the Middle East in the first place is because of the oil that is there and those most interested in that oil is of course the big oil companies seeking profit from a dwindling resurce.
There were some comments below that last video which gave me some hope. Here is one from a user going by the name capitalist4life:
“I am a recovering neocon. I was converted through Dr. Paul’s gentle suggestion that our foreign entanglements may cause some foreigners to want to kill us. I found that reasonable and I became more anti-war as I saw Hannity and Limbaugh vicously attack that reasonable idea. The one thing that didn’t convince me was strong anti-war rhetoric. I had to be eased into it. Just keep that in mind. Don’t be aggressive and extreme. Gently ease our “conservative” friends into the anti-war way of thinking.”
But let me end with a different quote. One of the last truly moral Republican leaders was Dwight D. Eisenhower who, of course, is famous for warning about the military-industrial complex. He was far from being a pacifist liberal and for that reason his words are all that more important. He seemed to genuinely believe that politicians should serve all Americans and not just the wealthy. Here is what he said in a 1953 speech:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Posted on August 29, 2010 by Benjamin David Steele
Pierre-Richard Prosper said: “We’re applying the Geneva Conventions, but he by his conduct has not earned the benefits or privileges of being labelled a prisoner of war.”
That is some evil sounding rhetoric.
It’s my understanding that, according to Geneva Conventions, either someone is or is not a prisoner of war. A person doesn’t have to earn the benefits and privileges of being a prisoner of war. If you are being detained by a government because of allegations of involvment in fighting against that government, then you are by definition a prisoner of war.
Basically, Prosper is saying that the US government doesn’t care about international law and will apply it at whim without any explanation. Prosper doesn’t even explain the US policy about how someone earns the right to be treated like a human.
Prosper in this next video argues that we’re in an unconventional war that is against a private organization rather than a state. If that is the case, why did we invade and occupy two countries? And this is further confusing since the US government and other governments are increasingly relying upon private organiztions as mercenaries. Are we getting to the point where governments are stepping away from taking any responsibility of the wars they start and the killing they cause? In the future, governments will pull the strings behind the scenes while private organizations fight other private organizations. Meanwhile, innocent citizens will be caught in the middle.
Anarcho-capitalists argue only governments can fight wars and not private organizations, but I fear they are sadly wrong. If there is another world war (not of the cold war variety), it quite likely could be between private organizations that have no loyalty to any specific nation and so would have no responsibility to any specific citizenry. The private organizations who fight the wars could be the same that own the media. Just imagine if Blackwater became an large international mercenary force and imagine that it was owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Yesterday was the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima day. I’d actually been thinking about that event off and on recently. It’s representative of what is wrong with Americans specifically and humanity in general.
A lot of people were killed in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sad part was that the bombs were designed to kill a lot more, but for two reasons the death toll was lower. As I recall, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima failed to cause as big of an explosion as was designed to cause. So, instead of killing as many people, it left many of them severely injured. And, as I recall, the bomb targeted for Nagasaki was accidentally dropped on a nearby village and so the people of Nagasaki didn’t get a direct hit.
Still, the death and suffering caused was immense. More importantly, it was unnecessary. The Japanese military was decimated to the point of non-existence. The Japanese had practically no defense. Many Americans like to rationalize that the bombings were necessary, but such rationalizations have absolutely no validity. The people who espouse such rationalizations are brainwashed by patriotic propaganda.
The rationalization is two part. First, the rationalizers say that Japan wouldn’t surrender. This is only partly true. The emperor and many others wanted to surrender, but some leaders didn’t want to surrender. However, it didn’t really matter. Since they couldn’t defend themselves, surrender was inevitable and it wouldn’t have taken long. Secondly, the rationalizers argue that we would’ve had to send troops onto the Japanese islands in order to force them to surrender. This would’ve caused many more deaths and so killing all the innocent Japanese civilians helped reduce the death of innocent American soldiers. This is utter bullshit. We didn’t need to do anything. The Japanese were stuck on an island. They were trapped and defenseless. All we had to do was surround them with our navy in order to create a blockade and wait until the people started to starve.
At the point we dropped the nuclear bombs, we had already been firebombing their major cities to oblivion. The war was over at that point. The nuclear bombs accomplished nothing in terms of practical military tactics. These cities were civilian populations. Dropping bombs on cities in order to terrorize the population is the very definition of a war crime. This bombing was the largest and most horrific terrorist attack in all of the world’s history. As Americans, we should be ashamed. We have absolutely no moral superiority over anyone.
The reason why this has occupied my mind is because I personally know of someone who has made these very rationalizations (I first discussed this in a much earlier post: Morality: Christians vs. Jesus). This person considers themselves to be a good Christian and tries to live a good Christian life. Still, this person is able to blindly accept this propagandistic rationalization. This person’s national pride is greater than their personal sense of morality. If someone can rationalize such a horrendous act of terrorism, there is absolutely nothing that such a person couldn’t rationalize. That is scary. This person is completely normal by society’s standards. In fact, this person would be considered a respectable community leader. I understand that people of other nationalities just as easily rationalize the war crimes their own governments have commited. That is what is sad. This ability to rationalize anything is normal for humans. This is the state of humanity. There is nothing humans won’t do to other humans, nothing that humans can’t rationalize.
I’ve heard many people say that Japan deserved it because they attacked us first. Sure. And the serial killer says the whores deserved being killed for being whores. In terms of an eye for an eye, we all deserve horrible punishment. But, as a wise man once said, an eye for an eye leads to everyone being blind. Forgiveness and understanding is a better option. I can promise you that Americans better hope that America never gets what it deserves. The US govt has committed genocide, supported dictators, and of course obliterated whole cities. If America ever gets what it deserves, the entire US will be wiped from the face of the earth.
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
In the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised to invest in a global education fund. Since then, he seems to have forgotten the idea — even though he is spending enough every five weeks in Afghanistan to ensure that practically every child on our planet gets a primary education.
We won our nation’s independence for $2.4 billion in today’s money, the Congressional Research Service report said. That was good value, considering that we now fritter the same amount every nine days in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama, isn’t it time to rebalance our priorities?
I’ve known these kinds of statistics for a long time, but the comparisons help to put the abstract numbers into practical terms. I always wonder why it is that conservatives see it as a patriotic duty to support the military at all costs even when the cost is high… in terms of money spent and in terms of loss of moral high ground and loss of global goodwill. Why is it that data like this tends to only make sense to liberals? Why shouldn’t conservatives care about making the world a better place, about actually helping the Afghanistan people rather than merely bombing them into oblivion?
(By the way, when I speak of liberals I’m not equating them to Democrats. Most Americans, including most Democrats, identify as conservatives. It’s liberals, whether Democrats or Independents, who were the most critical of Bush on his wanting to start wars and who are now the most critical of Obama for wanting to continue those wars.)
The cost of such wars wouldn’t be too high if the end result was worthy. I’d be more than happy if all my tax money was spent on building schools for poor people instead of bombing the homes of poor people. Even if you’re selfish and hate the idea of helping poor people in other countries, then why not bring our troops home and use the money to help the poor in our own country? Or even if you hate all poor people including those in the US, why not spend the money on building infrastructure or for loans to small business owners?
The worst part is that the cost isn’t just money. In our War against Terror, we’ve merely created more terrorists who will have to be fought in the future by the next generations. Also, US veterans come back with severe disabilities, brain trauma, PTSD, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, unemployment, homelessness, and violent tendencies. To put it simply, war fucks people up. No one is a winner in war.
You want to know why wars go on? There is the wealth elite who makes massive profits off of war. Military contracts are probably the single largest industry in the entire US economy. This is what Eisenhower called the Military-Industrial Complex. And guess what? The children of these wealthy elite aren’t the soldiers dying in foreign lands. It’s the children of the poor and the working class who are dying for the profits of the wealthy elite.
I understand that the wealthy elite want to maintain their power and increase their profits. That is normal human behavior. They are acting in their own self-interst. What I don’t understand is why do the American people (in particular, conservatives) continually believe the lies and propaganda? When will the American people wake up? Why does the average American want to pay into the wealthy elite’s profit-making so that the wealthy elite can send their children off to die killing the children of poor working class people in other countries?
Tell me that Bill Maher is wrong when he says Americans are stupid. I want to believe Americans aren’t stupid, I honestly must say that any American who believed the rationalizations Bush gave for going to war is a complete and utter retard. If you supported Bush in his warmongering, you are fucking worthless. It’s because people who simply do what they’re told and don’t question that the world is so fucked up.
I hope that one day Americans will know all the misery they’ve caused around the world by toppling democratically elected leaders and supporting oppressive governments, by bombing innocent people. I hope one day that Americans personally experience all of the horror they’ve inflicted on others. I can promise you that if Americans ever do experience the same amount of suffering that the US military and CIA has caused, the 9/11 terrorist attack will seem like child’s play.
There would be a lot less suffering in the world if people had to experience the same suffering they cause others. Just imagine if wealthy politicians and capitalists had to experience the suffering the poor parent feels when their child is brought home in a body bag. Just imagine if the soldier had to feel the suffering of all the people disabled from the bomb he dropped, had to feel the suffering of the child who lost her father. Just imagine if the American people had to feel all the suffering of the people living under oppressive regimes supported by their tax-funded government, had to feel the suffering of people living in war zones created by the US military.
Here is further proof of a view with which I concur. Afghanis don’t want us or any other military force to occupy their country and their tribal lands. The longer we remain there the more we actively turn them against us.
Instead of decreasing the terrorist threat, we are polarizing them to allign with terrorists. By killing Afghanis, we create new terrorists. Every person we kill has a father, brother, son, cousin or fellow tribal member who quite likely will seek retribution.
I came across this video. The guy apparently is a fundamentalist of some variety. I’m typically critical of fundamentalists because of their not unusual hypocritical behavior. I was surprised to hear this fundamentalist voicing criticisms of the hypocritical rightwing Christian leadership which has led us into unjust wars. He comes at it from his own Christian perspective, but what impressed me is that he was considering data that comes from views other than his own.
I’m so used to fundamentalists defending other fundamentalists at all costs. It’s quite refreshing to see this particular fundamentalist struggle with his own sense of morality. Could you imagine if Bush had struggled with his own morality to the degree this guy is doing in this video? If Bush had, so many vile atrocities would never have happened.
