Why?

Why do we in the United States have a $1,000,000,000,000 - that's a trillion dollars - military establishment? Our government likes to play games with us by hiding parts of the military budget (the parts for black projects and spying) and putting part of it into other departments' budgets. But if you add it all up: Defense authorizations + Supplementals (Iraq and Afghanistan) + Nuclear Weapons (Dept. of Energy) + Veterans Affairs + who knows what = a trillion dollars minimum. Whatever happened to the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War? Why has the United States withdrawn from nuclear arms limiting treaties? Why are we installing anti-missile defense systems in Eastern Europe? (Just this week the Senate voted to spend money to "ease" the process of incorporating Georgia and the Ukraine into Nato.) Why is the United States expanding Nato after Bush I promised Gorbachev that Nato would not expand if the USSR allowed German reunification? Why is Russia feeling the need to develop their Topol M missile which apparently maintains rocket propulsion throughout flight rather than a ballistic trajectory in order to evade missile defense? Why is Putin saying that Poland and the Czech Republic will become targets if they install American missiles? What kind of maniacally criminal elements are running the US government?

A report claims that last year 3100 soldiers deserted from the Army. During the VietNam war there were as many as 30,000 per year! That is one reason why the draft was eliminated and an all-volunteer force instituted. From desertion to killing (known then as fragging) of junior officers the Army had serious problems. Unfortunately the powers that be drew the wrong lesson. If Americans are unwilling to go overseas and fight wars, unwilling to kill and be killed, then the right lesson to learn was that we shouldn't be fighting those wars. The people, if left to decide, would rarely fight any wars. And oh, how sweet that would be. In addition to the franchise for 18-year-olds and floating exchange rates with permanent inflation, the VietNam experience totally divorced the military establishment from the citizenry and today the military controls our country.

We have a war that was brought on through lies and deceptions to fuel an imperialistic, criminal, and utterly incompetent regime that is bent on world domination and which doesn't care how many of us are killed or impoverished. And all the new Congress does is haggle over non-binding resolutions for some troop withdrawal sometime in the future. We are creating enemies all over the world and devastating our economy. But the fat cats keep getting richer. If we truly had a government of, by, and for the people we would be out, totally out, of Iraq by the first day of summer. We would have single payer nationalized health care. We'd have restraints on the movement of capital. Instead of using our tax dollars to build stadiums for billionaires while our libraries shrink their hours and services we'd make corporations accountable to the communities where they operate and make them fund our needs, and not our funding their greed. The people ruling over us are not really of us nor are they for us. And if we're waiting for them to just wake up one day and apologize and make things right then we're watching too much fantasy tv. We will get what we need, what we've worked for and what we deserve only when we force the issue and take back democratic control of our lives and our society.