Dear Progressives....Why You Are Losing the People and What You Can Do About It

"[The task is to] covertly lower the standard of living, the whole social structure, of America so that we can be merged with all other nations." -- Rowan Gaither (1909-1961) Attorney, investment banker, President of the Ford Foundation (1953-1956).  The Ford Foundation is a rich and powerful progressive institution.

Headlines can be hilarious as was Alternet's It's a Rout: Democrats Lose Badly as GOP Extremists Consolidate Power In Congress and Across America.  The article then goes on to bitch and moan about America's discriminatory election.  Guess what?  Nobody stopped anybody from voting.  Even the suffering Democrat base couldn't even hold their noses and vote because they knew they had been screwed.  Life for them was no better under Obama and Gang than it was under Bush and Gang.

OKAY, progressives are in deep mourning over the 2014 elections.  I'm not gloating or rubbing it in because as a liberty activist who abhors the damn wars, the thieving banking system, corporate welfare, the militarized police state, the Patriot Act, the NSA and many other nasties that have rendered America nothing more than a totalitarian empire controlled by oligarchs, I do observe and understand the American people.

I have no skin in the game; I didn't vote this year although when I do vote I generally vote 3rd party and AGAINST the Republicans and Democrats.  The DNC and RNC machines are wholly owned subsidiaries of the banksters, defense contractors and corporate welfare queens.  Moreover, my contempt for the Republicans is just as great as my contempt for the Democrats.  In many ways, I despise the Republicans more, especially since the GOP was hijacked by neocons and theocons years ago.  While I was happy that a slew of Congress Critters were fired by the voters, I was anything but happy that they were replaced with Republicans.

Rest assured, the American people didn't actually vote for Republicans.  The people were just so pissed off that they wanted to fire somebody and this election cycle it was Dems who were most vulnerable.   Why are the American people so pissed off?  Why it's the economy of course.  If folks are lucky enough to have a decent paying job, taxes are eating them alive.  Those who don't have jobs are suffering and many who do have jobs have low wage jobs with no future.

America is a place where the middle class is vanishing and the poor are getting poorer.  The rich are definitely getting richer and at the expense of the poor and middle class.  The Dems love the poor which is why they function as plantation owners doling out subsistence level goodies to their devoted slaves.  Vote buying can only go so far until it bankrupts a nation under the weight of the entitlement state where everybody is entitled to substantial freebies as evidenced by the fact that over 92 million Americans don't even bother to work, here, and many live off the dole.

Yes, progressives, the Republicans and Democrats are all responsible for the demise of the American middle class and the future-less lives of the poor. How did it happen?  Well, it started back in 1913 when progressives passed the Federal Reserve Act that transferred all monetary power to Wall Street. That was the beginning of the death of the middle class because it resulted in a massive wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the rich.  But not to worry says progressive, we will pass welfare bills that throw you the picked bones of the steaks we eat because you don't need to build wealth and financial security, you must be dependent on US because we OWN you.

Things got far uglier in 1971 when Nixon de-tethered the dollar from gold and made the dollar a 100% fiat currency that totally destroyed the purchasing power of the dollar.

Yet, progressives pay scant attention to monetary policy and all they ever care about is throwing a few moldy crumbs at the dutifully compliant sheeple people who are definitely growing restless.

Besides collaborating with Wall Street to pass the Federal Reserve Act to destroy the purchasing power of the dollar, progressives were also instrumental in passing some job killing legislation and bankster protection bills over the years.

Although inflation, taxation, lower wages and massive job losses have been bleeding the middle class dry, the history of the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs is quite interesting. Even more interesting, it was actually planned! And while there are other components to the systematic sell-off of America, like our criminal Congress Critters passing bills that tax domestic corporate earnings at much higher rates if they produced and earned on US soil versus earning their dough offshore, another major component of our national misery is NAFTA and other horrifying trade agreements supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. The expediting of the real bleed of American jobs is fully attributable to Bill Clinton who enthusiastically supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Despite numerous warnings that NAFTA would be catastrophic to the American middle class and domestic manufacturing, the political class was more interested in filing its campaign coffers with special interest dough by selling multi-national corporatists legal protectionism.

NAFTA was a piece of legislation that was unprecedented in its scope and economic consequences as it conferred dictatorial powers of implementation upon the executive branch of government without any congressional oversight whatsoever. Moreover, NAFTA established secret working groups that are publicly funded, totally unaccountable to anyone and they operate off the radar of congressional and public scrutiny.

NAFTA passed in both houses of a Democratic controlled Congress in 1993. In the Senate, it passed with 61 yeas and 38 nays. In the House, it was much closer at 234 yeas to 200 nays. The Republicans in the House really came through for Clinton by providing 132 Yeas to counter 156 Democratic nays. Still, 40% of the Democrats in the House voted for NAFTA.

The vote itself is more than a bit intriguing. Many of NAFTA’s congressional supporters ended up as presidential candidates or secured congressional leadership positions. On the Senate side, the big name Democrats who voted for NAFTA includes Bill Bradley, Tom Daschle, Christopher Dodd, Ted Kennedy (deceased), Joe Lieberman, John Kerry and Joe Biden, now Vice President. A lot of these Democrats had made various bids for the presidency or vice presidency of the United States. Interestingly, big name NAFTA supporting Republicans includes John McCain, Bob Dole (defeated by Clinton), Mitch McConnell (soon to be Senate Minority Leader post 2014 elections) and many others who were none too eager to assist Bill Clinton in the sellout of the American worker.

On the House side, NAFTA supporters included big name GOPers like Dennis Hastert, Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, John Boehner and Ron Portman, all of whom rose to leadership positions in the House or the Bush Administration. Democrat Nancy Pelsoi, who voted yes on NAFTA, ended up Speaker of the House for her role in decimating U.S. manufacturing and jobs.

Clearly, these traitorous rogues were handsomely rewarded with greater political power for engineering the systematic dismantling of the world’s greatest manufacturing legend in all of human history.

Progressives handsomely rewarded Nancy Pelosi for her NAFTA vote by anointing her Speaker of the House.  Now that's truly ironic considering that progressives are chronically ranting about the injustice of rich Republicans, especially rich white Republicans, yet they rabidly endorse a rich white bitch and the 12th richest member of Congress, here.  LOL, Pelosi sold the poor and middle class down the river and was rewarded! For more information on NAFTA and its devastating economic consequences, see my blog post The Kleptocracy of Cannibal Crony Capitalism. Bill Clinton and his Republican NAFTA Baby Co-Conspirators.

As if playing a key role in the destruction of US manufacturing and middle class jobs with corporatist crony capitalist boondoggles like NAFTA isn't bad enough, progressive icon Bill Clinton paved the road in 1999 for Banksters Gone Wild that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis.

Photo Above: Bill Clinton signs into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, November 12, 1999

Who are the Architects of Economic Collapse? Global Research

This extraordinary Global Research article documents how the same folks that were behind the Financial Services Modernization Act ended up in top positions in the Obama Administration.

The simple truth is that Wall Street and its interests rule America and they also own both political parties.  It's even more interesting to note that liberal progressive icons were in fact part of the ruling elite cabal that's that been selling out the poor and middle class since 1913.

My issues with progressives are numerous and my most intense hatred of progressivism is their love of wars and interventions, although these days that mantle appears to have somewhat passed to the Republicans.  But let's look at the facts:  Who got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Balkan Wars?  All liberal progressive Dems  - Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ and Clinton.  The body counts of those progressive wars exceed 100 million folks.  Yes, progressive hands are dripping in blood.

Where's the anti-war movement that was so awesome in the 1960's?  Well, it's somewhere between invisible and non-existent.

Where were progressives when Bush and the Republicans needed the Patriot Act passed?  They were voting with Bush and the Republicans and they continued with each successive Patriot Act renewal. Who in Congress is standing up to the NSA?  Not many, just a few Libertarian leaning Republicans like Rand Paul and Justin Amash, along with a few Dems.

Progressive don't stand for civil liberties and privacy.  In fact, they seem to be addicted to totalitarian government power.  Progressive policies are rooted in command and control economies where nobody is allowed to earn a living unless they grant permission and that permission comes with economy destroying bureaucratic dictates.

Although progressives have embraced marijuana legalization and decriminalization, they've botched it up in CO and WA with insane bureaucracies and taxes to the extent that underground marijuana markets continue to flourish because the taxed price is too damn high (vs. the free market price) and it's quite difficult to grow and sell pot if one seeks to be a an entrepreneur.  New York, the poster child for anti-business, anti-entrepreneurship progressive economic policies, may be the most absurd example of how progressives botch something as simple as growing and selling medical marijuana.

$20M to Start an MMJ Business in New York?

Medical marijuana in New York might prove to be a pretty wealthy club.

Startup costs to open a dispensary and grow could run over $20 million, according to a recent report by The New York Times. And it might take upwards of $1 million just to navigate through the application process, estimated one cannabis lobbyist quoted in The Times piece. These lofty costs would make it difficult for small businesses to get involved.

What the hell do progressives have against folks seeking to start small businesses?  Apparently, a lot!  Economically, progressives are like the mafia demanding tribute for the privilege of working and earning a living.  When it comes to folks who want to work and produce, progressives are like Shylock from the Merchant of Venice demanding a pound of flesh.

While the Nazified Police State is a draconian assault on natural rights and civil liberties that is at least tolerated if not encouraged by progressives, the Progressive Economic Police State against small businesses is just as destructive because it utterly denies folks the right to earn a living.

Perhaps it's long overdue for progressives to do some serious soul searching, starting with admitting their own roles in growing Police State USA, destroying small businesses by making it impossible for limited capital small business operators to even start a business.  And then there are the damn wars that never end.

America needs less laws, less regulation and more freedom.  On the criminal code, progressives should embrace the Libertarian approach:  No Victim, No Crime.  America has more folks in prison than any nation on the planet and many of these folks are imprisoned for victim-less crimes. Progressives should stop criminalizing every act that they personally disapprove of.

Progressives need a revolution within the Democrat party and they need to get rid of the old, fraudulent leadership that is owned by the same special interests that own the GOP.

Progressives need to fight to end the damn wars and yes they also need to give up their imperial aspirations of non-stop intervention that so devastated the world in WW I, WW II, Korean War, Vietnam and other murderous interventions.

Progressives need to support limited government,  business growth and lower taxes.  If anything, progressives are famous for being anti-business.   Progressives need to be more Libertarian and they must learn to stop controlling everything at the point of a gun.  Speaking of guns, progressives should absolutely support the 2nd amendment because the right to defend yourself from violence, sexual assault or death is an absolute natural right that no free citizen should ever be denied.

Libertarians and 'sane' progressives, well, at least the progressives that aren't Nazis, have a lot in common.

Ralph Nader gets it and his book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State lays out a solid argument on why liberals and Libertarians should unite to defeat the corporate state.  As a Libertarian, I find Nader to be honest and sane even if he is more statist than my Libertarian ideology but he's definitely on the right track.

Ralph Nader On Why Libertarians And Liberals Should Unite

Defeating the corporate state, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and the security industrial complex is a damn good place to start where we can demolish the absolute worst aspects of government power.

This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue; there is only one issue at stake here - namely the freedom and prosperity of the people.

Hello progressives?  Where art thou? Can you possibly resist the temptation to CONTROL every possible aspect of human existence and champion historical classical liberalism that embodied a high level of personal and economic freedom with minimal government interference?

The principles of voluntarism enshrine classical liberalism because it's based on the absence of state violence and coercion.  I never understood why progressives are so supportive of state violence and coercion and so oppose voluntary cooperation and transactions among people to deliver peace, harmony, goods, services and consent.

Finally, while progressives may toss a few crumbs at folks to achieve political power they utterly fail to understand that humans desperately seek personal sovereignty, independence and economic opportunity.  People don't want to be tethered to the impoverishment of the progressive plantation anymore than more than they would consent to be slaves.

If progressives truly advocated for progress rather than raw and absolute power, they could kick GOP ass.  However, progress will never come from state power.



Image: Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. "The composition is part of a pyramid whose base are the bodies that have fallen in the struggle against tyranny, corpses lit to emphasize its importance." http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_libertad_guiando_al_pueblo.png

History Lesson - Why America Doesn't Need a Standing Army

During WW I, Japanese General Yamamoto supposedly said "“You cannot invade America. There is a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

Many Americans live in fear and dread of what would happen if America didn't have a military and standing army. However, most of America's founding fathers opposed a standing army because they understood that so long as one existed dangerous psychopaths would concoct reasons to use it for endless warmongering and war profiteering.

But Americans should also be thinking about the War of 1812.  The British invaded America and headed straight for DC but those in the capital, including the military, had all fled and never even offered an honorable defense.  So the Brits burned DC and headed straight to Baltimore where they planned a land and sea invasion believing that Baltimore would easily fall.  But the Brits encountered the armed citizens of Baltimore and butted heads with 1,0000 defenders of Ft. McHenry who valiantly fought the Brits from 6:00 a.m. on September 13, 1814 until 7:00 a.m. September 14th when the British shells fell silent and "our flag was still there".  Thus, the words to the Star Spangled Banner were born as a captured America lawyer, Francis Scott Key, watched as a prisoner of war on a British ship and wrote down those now memorialized words.

Folks near and around Baltimore also valiantly fought the British land invasion.  Defeated and demoralized by folks just defending their country from a foreign invasion, the Brits immediately sailed to New Orleans where they anticipated that the undefended city would easily fall.

But the Brits were forced to butt heads with the legendary Andrew Jackson and his hastily raised rag tag army of yeomen farmers who despite being vastly out-gunned and outnumbered managed to deliver a devastating and humiliating defeat to the Brits and sent them packing.

The passion and tenacity to defend one's homeland against a foreign invader is just so much a part of the human condition that it cannot be ignored.  The ghosts of history firmly attest to the fact that our current crop of wars will never, ever be winnable.  No nation wants to be attacked, have its citizens murdered and suffer the humiliating occupation of an invading foreign military.

America's only invasion by a foreign military, the War of 1812, not only resulted in a defeat for the invader, an invader considered the most military powerful nation on earth at the time, but proved that armies do not defend nations.  It was the American people who successfully defended America and sent the British packing.

What's the Empire to do? Iran, Iraq and a US-Iran alliance? Geo-politics makes the strangest of bedfellows!!

Invading Iraq, a nation with a 60-70% Shiite majority, was one of the most monumentally stupidest things the US ever did.  Saddam Hussein was a Sunni strongman and really no different than any of the other psychopaths in the region that the US eagerly endorsed, bribed, supported, funded and armed. However, Hussein was no Sunni Islamist, he feared them and he kept them out of Iraq.  It has been reported that Hussein enjoyed drinking western whiskey and watching Godfather movies, activities decidedly deemed un-Islamic.  I don't even know why the US invaded and occupied Iraq except that the Bush Crime Family and the military industrial complex was obsessed with flexing its military muscle by waging war on SOMEBODY. In any event, my best guess for invading Iraq is that the American crime syndicate that lords over the District of Crime in DC was absolutely obsessed with destroying Iran, a Shiite nation with a 90% plus Shia majority.

To begin to understand the situation one has to first understand the petro-dollar.  When Nixon made the unilateral decision to destroy the dollar and its purchasing power by de-tethering the dollar from gold in 1971 via an Executive Order that bypassed Congress, the dollar became a petro-dollar.   But for the dollar to become a petro-dollar and maintain its world reserve currency status, the world's oil supplies had to trade exclusively in dollars.  Once oil traded in any currency other than dollars, the dollar would become toast and America would become just another bankrupt banana boat republic.

The cost of maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency came with a whopper of a price tag, a real compact with Satan and that deal was cut with Saudi Arabia and other oil rich Sunni nations.  They agreed to forever trade oil in dollars in exchange for having the power of the US military at its fingertips to advance the most vile, the most intolerant and the most evil form of Islam ever to exist - Sunni Salafist Wahabbist Islam - and Sunni nations have reportedly dumped over $100 billion into radicalizing Muslims everywhere, including Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia and many other nations with significant Sunni populations.  On a side note, Bill Clinton was tight with his Sunni masters, as is the Bush Crime Family, and Bill Clinton advanced the cause of Sunni Salafist Wahhabism in the Balkan by invading, bombing and destroying Serbia and other Balkan nations.  In exchange for his loyalty to advancing radical Sunni Islam, Clinton was rewarded with millions from the Sunni Arab world for his presidential library.  Also, Saudi Arabia is reported to be one of the biggest financial contributors to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), here, which states "One of the Clinton Foundation’s largest donors is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

Back to Iraq.  It was impossible for the US not to know that invading Iraq and imposing a US styled 'democracy', complete with purple fingers no less, would result in Shiite majority rule.  Was the US and its neocon MIC so desperate to use Iraq as a forward base for invading Iran that it risked achieving the probable, namely pushing Shiite Iraq further towards its natural ally of Shiite Iran?  The whole thing makes no sense except in the context that the Sunni Muslim world fully expected the US to bomb and destroy Shiite Iran or even ordered the US to do it.  Bear in mind that those who control the world's reserve currency (the petro-dollar) also controls the world, US foreign policy, the Federal Reserve and the entire US government.

However, things began to unravel.  From the Sunni Salafist Wahhabist terror attacks on 911, the bombing of 2 US embassies in Africa, the bombing of the USS Cole, the London bombings, the Madrid bombings, the Mumbai bombings, the Moscow bombings, the Bali bombings and numerous other Saudi engineered Sunni terror attacks, the western world in general became horrified and experienced their WTF moment by implying "what have we done".

Iraq is in shambles and that's no surprise because it's been a fictitious nation ever since British aristocrat Gertrude Bell galloped through the region as the female Lawrence of Arabia and literally drew Iraq's borders with a pencil on a piece of paper and created for the British Empire modern day Iraq, complete with installing a British lackey on the throne.  Besides the perpetual Sunni-Shiite conflict, the Kurds are also victims in the never ending Shiite-Sunni-Kurd conflict.

Heck, even Joe Biden said in 2006 that Iraq should be divided into 3 separate regions, here.  But Biden's idea was insanely foolish because he still wanted centralized control in Baghdad and any centralized government in a nation torn by civil war and constant internal feuding is a guaranteed disaster.  And then there is Iraq's immense oil reserves so the fight isn't just about religious and ethnic differences, it's also a battle for control of Iraq's vast oil wealth.

The Sunni world is paranoid that the Shiite world, namely Iran and Iraq, will become the new kingpins of middle east oil and the Sunni world definitely wants control of that oil and will do anything to achieve that goal. Oil is wealth and wealth is power.  With the OPEC Sunni oil oligarchy already being challenged by Russia, now a major global oil and gas producer, OPEC and its Sunni chieftains are becoming unhinged as they rightfully perceive that their cozy cartel is threatened by significant oil discoveries in other nations as well as chronic Sunni-Shiite feuds in the middle east.

It's a good damn thing that 'bomb, bomb, bomb Iran' McCain never became president because, astounding, the unthinkable is being openly discussed - the possibility that the US might consider allying with Iran.  I know it's an utterly preposterous idea but the idea is surfacing.

Iran open to shared role with US in Iraq CNBC

US airstrikes to support Iranian Revolutionary Guard's offensive in Iraq? Russia Today

Exclusive: Alarmed by Iraq, Iran open to shared role with U.S. - Iran official Reuters

Iran Deploys Forces to Fight al Qaeda-Inspired Militants in Iraq WSJ

Now what?  Iran also supports Syria and Assad who the US and radical Sunnis have vowed to destroy.

Is it even likely that the US would consider ending military aid to Sunni Salafist Wahabbist terrorists simply because the fate of the dollar is at stake?

With Russia also emerging as a major oil-gas power, pissing off Russia by supporting the neo-Nazis regime in Kiev has driven Russia and a neurotic China to cut energy deals that will not be dollar dominated, a situation that directly threatens the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

As with any dying empire on life support, it grows more violent as its extinction is glaring them in the face. The US is accustomed to barking orders and having folks all over the planet just humbly genuflect before DC and comply.  But no more.  The barking dogs of the US Empire have resulted in absolute and raw hatred toward the US, its murderous wars, its bloody interventions, its foreign policy and its profound arrogance. Folks all over the planet are rising up and barking back and they are not content to just bark, they fully intend to bite the vermin that has been biting them for decades and sucking the life and liberty out of their people and nations.

For a recap of what is currently happening in Iraq, Drudge 6/13/14 headlines  provides just about everything you need to know about the current situation in Iraq.

BAGHDAD FALLING
Exodus from Iraq as chaos spreads...
UN: 800k refugees...
CHRISTIANS ON THE RUN...
Terrorists 'full-blown army'...
Medieval Sharia Law Imposed...
'Roads lined with decapitated police and soldiers'...
Iraqi government 'paralyzed'...
Army Collapses...
VIDEO: Thousands of soldiers captured by ISIS...
Iran Deploys Forces...
Americans evacuated...
USA Secretly Flying Drones...
ISIS terror leader released from U.S. custody in 2009...
Pentagon: Rebels may have captured military equipment...
PAPER: 'Worst case scenario'...
FLASHBACK: Biden: Iraq One of Obama's 'Great Achievements'...
Vets in Congress: 'What was point of all that?'...
Oil Soars...
OBAMA HINTS AT ACTION...

What is the Empire to do?  Ally with Al Qaeda and Sunni Salafist terrorists?  That's precisely what America has been doing for so long that it's ingrained as a foreign policy imperative, despite all the propaganda that America marched off to war to fight Al Qaeda and similar Sunni terrorist groups.  Americans are no longer buying into the War on Terror phony baloney talking points propagated by the government and its partner in crime, the US media.  Sane folks on the right and left fully comprehend that they were lied to and duped.

Geo-politics is profoundly complicated which why most folks avoid it because it involves an eternal quest for knowledge and truth, especially in  history and economics.  It's where history, resources, religions, cultures and empires have always collided. More information on these issues for those folks who do search for truth:

A Guide To Understanding the Middle East, Syria, The West and Oil

Why Sunni Islam is Crucial to World Peace and Crushing the NWO

Why Syria is Serious - It's Where Oil, Monetary Power and Religious Feuds Collide

The Making of the Modern Middle East

A Cruise Through History: Islam, the West and the Rest of the World

With Charity Toward None, A History of Israel

America's $2.3 Trillion Dollar Foreign Aid is Mostly a Defense Contractor Subsidy

The Cost of America's Wars - $3 Trillion, $4 Trillion, $5 Trillion, $7 Trillion, $8 Trillion, Going Once, Going Twice, SOLD

Will the GOP Masturbate & Legitimately Rape Itself to Death?

It's bad enough that Republicans raised the 'legitimate rape' issue that cost the GOP 2 senate seats in 2012 when Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost elections because neither believed that a woman could possibly become pregnant from an act of rape.  According to Akin and Mourdock, a pregnancy is a gift from God and God wouldn't allow an act of violent rape to produce a child or gift from God.  Therefore, any woman who is impregnated as a result of rape is a liar and the sex must have been consensual.

The American people and voters were appalled.  Perhaps Republicans could use some remedial biology courses.

But it gets even worse.  Astoundingly, Texas Republican Mike Burgess took the abortion debate to an even higher level is insanity by asserting that late term abortion should be abolished because male fetuses pleasure themselves as early as 15 weeks.

Republican cites masturbating fetuses to support new abortion restrictions

Representative Michael Burgess (R-TX) on Monday asserted that he witnessed male fetuses pleasuring themselves as early as 15-weeks after conception, RH Reality Check reported. His comments came during a House Rules committee debate on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban abortions nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy. “This is a subject that I do know something about,” Burgess said, citing his experience as an OB/GYN. “There is no question in my mind that a baby at 20-weeks after conception can feel pain. The fact of the matter is, I argue with the chairman because I thought the date was far too late. We should be setting this at 15-weeks, 16-weeks.”

I personally oppose late term abortion but not for the reasons offered by Rep. Michael Burgess.  My own personal views on abortion are expressed here and yes I do support the right to an early abortion.  However, I absolutely oppose public funding of all abortions and I further believe that constitutionally the issue should should reside with the states, not the federal government.

In a 228-196 vote, the House passed a ban on abortion after 20 weeks knowing full well that it won't survive in the Democrat controlled Senate, not to mention a presidential veto.

The Republicans are once again pandering to their base.  Really, since when have the Republicans ever cared about human life?  Republicans have no problem using foreign policy to murder men, women and children who pose no threat whatsoever to the US.

Moreover, an alarming number of badly wounded veterans are returning from combat duty missing their 'junk'.

Alarming Rise in Sexually Mutilated US Troops in Afghanistan

How much is a penis worth? Actuarially speaking that is. More or less than a thumb or a toe? More or less than an arm or a leg? While these questions are not on the minds of most Americans, the Department of Veterans Affairs has been forced to confront them because of the changing nature of combat injuries in Afghanistan. And, more importantly, the impact of the traumatic psychological after-effects of devastating wounds to genitalia is very much on the minds of returning servicemen and women and their families.....

For veterans whose physical lives have been forever altered by combat injuries, there is all of the above plus an additional set of excruciatingly difficult challenges awaiting them involving the loss of limbs, and traumatic brain disorders. And, within this group are a subset of veterans forced to deal with the loss or mangling of an organ of their manhood; the penis.

"The signature physical wound of the war in Afghanistan begins when you step on a homemade bomb," Men's Health contributing editor Bob Drury wrote in the November 2011 edition of the magazine. Drury, who has covered both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, pointed out that, "Most of these are built with the fertilizer ammonium nitrate, an ingredient widely available throughout Afghanistan. The detonation, triggered either by a buried pressure plate or, less often, a command wire operated by a nearby enemy, instantly pulverizes the flesh, bone, tissue, and muscle of one or both of your lower limbs. In all likelihood the force of the explosion will sever the nerves in your leg or legs, and yet you will experience little pain. Surprisingly, as shock sets in and you lie in your pooling blood, you may not feel anything but a vague sense of pressure, as if a strong man were wrapping both hands around one of your calves and squeezing as hard as he could.

"In many cases, the force of the explosion also travels straight up into your genital and pelvic area, blasting tiny shards of rock and dirt into your torso between your front and rear Kevlar body-armor flaps," Drury continued. "If all or part of your 'package' is not blown off by the detonation itself, the flying debris from the blast often penetrates soft tissue, leaving you vulnerable to penile, scrotal, testicular, and rectal infections. If the damage is bad enough, it could even lead to a full or partial amputation of your genitals."

At the very least Rep. Burgess raises an important issue that is totally ignored, namely that we really should be very concerned about the fate of male 'junk'.  Furthermore, wars are very dangerous to male genitalia and a hit from a IED is very likely to guarantee the destruction of penises and testicles.

In utero or fully mature out of utero, Republicans definitely put a much higher value on the manhood of the unborn male than it does on a member of the military.  I guess soldier 'junk' is deemed expendable so long as it serves the goals of the Empire.

Oh well, the Republicans stepped into it again.  So what else is new?

While American voters are notoriously forgetful, their memories are indeed selective and when they go to vote they remember things like 'legitimate rape' and 'masturbating fetuses'.

The Republicans will never bring foreign policy out of the closet for debate and neither will the Dems for that matter.  But this old  broad is all for bringing penises out of the closet for a real debate.

Fetal pain should be a legitimate issue but so should the excruciating pain of soldiers whose penises and testicles went flying in neocon wars.

What is a man without his manhood?  

Memorial Day - Let's do War By the Numbers Because We Love to Kill

Memorial Day should be the saddest day of the year for Americans and a day of profound reflection.  The parades, honoring the war dead/wounded and cheering US wars is what Memorial Day is all about but does anybody ever stop to pause and ask "Why did they die or survive to come home with debilitating injuries?".   It's frequently been said that young men die for old men's wars. While young folks who voluntarily enlist in the military are indeed smitten with the belief that they are actually serving their country and that military service is the highest form of patriotism, the real tragedy is that they have been duped by a government and military industrial complex that does not value their life or humanity.  Soldiers are merely pawns on the geopolitical chessboard as wars are endlessly waged for resource control, defense contractor profits and the never ending game to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, Americans are addicted to the fantasy that war is noble, that murder is moral and that righteous people kill in the name of their flag.  Defending the homeland is the chronic battle cry.  Last I checked, America hadn’t been invaded by a foreign power since the War of 1812.   Yet, America has been involved in non-stop murderous wars for well over a century. Evergreen State College documented US wars and foreign interventions since 1890. It's a shocking documentation of the raw aggressiveness of American foreign policy and the waging of criminal wars against nations who did absolutely nothing to America nor threatened America in any way.

FROM WOUNDED KNEE TO LIBYA: A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

While it would be extremely difficult and time consuming to do an actual body count of all the wars listed in the above link, we can do a body count on what has been documented for the major wars and we can also document other estimates of deaths resulting from US foreign policy.

WW I resulted in the deaths of 35,000,000 folks. Historian Martin Gilbert puts the military death toll (soldiers killed) at 8,626 million. “The destructiveness of the First World War, in terms of the number of soldiers killed, exceeded that of all other wars known to history.”. But as with most wars, it is the civilians who bear the brunt of the horrors of war.

What caused WW I? A Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip shoots and kills on June 28, 1914 Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, Bosnia (a component of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Within weeks, Europe breaks out into total war. Two murdered members of a European royal house triggered the deaths of 35 million folks.

How did America get involved? No Americans were killed and all the insanity of Europe’s ruling families and their long history of wars and empires was not an American problem. But was it? America own brand of royalty, Wall Street banking houses, gambled heavily on the outcome of the WW I by funding the governments involved, notably Britain and France. The Banksters were losing their bets and were about to lose all their money so they hatched a plan to get America involved. The horror of that Bankster Bailout is documented in the following blog post.

World War I, the Banksters, the Lusitania and Bailing Out America’s Wealthiest Families

World War II killed approximately 50 millions people and its documented that the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany were funded by US and British banksters. Behind every war, a bankster is lurking like a lascivious and carnivorous beast ready to drink the blood of its victims and devour its body. No one really knows for sure how many folks died during WW II but historian Martin Gilbert estimated that in excess of 46 million were killed and he only counted those nations that lost a million or more. The numbers are staggering; here’s a list of nations who lost a million or more:

Country                         Civilian Deaths           Military Deaths

Soviet Union                    7.0 million                   13.3 million
Germany                          3.6 million                    3.1 million
China                               6.0 million
Japan                               2.0 million                    1.0 million
Poland (3 million Jews)     6.0 million
Jews (non-Polish)             3.0 million
Yugoslavia (mostly Serbs) 1.5 million

Total                             29.2 million                  17.4 million

With WW I and WW II killing a minimum of 85,000,000 million folks, how many more folks have been killed since the end of WW II? It’s estimated that America and American foreign policy are directly responsible for another 20,000,000-30,000,000 kills since the end of WW II.

“US covert and overt criminal Wars of Aggression caused 20-30 million deaths of human beings since World War 2, according to the outstanding documentation of James Lucas of Countercurrents.org. The US use/support of armed attacks is documented in 37 countries..." Read the rest here.

Major post WW II deaths include the death tolls from the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Wikipedia estimates the deaths from the Korean War at 2,500,000 – 3,500,000 and the deaths from the Vietnam War at 2,500,000-6,000,000, here.

Ironically, the Republican Party is now being dubbed the War Party and righteously so because the GOP’s Evangelical base screams for non-stop war, murder and plunder. But America’s conservative Republican Christians were not always a gang of murderous psychopaths and the GOP at one time opposed foreign interventions. In fact, WW I, WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars were all initiated by liberal, progressive Democrats (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton). Harry Truman also dropped two big atomic bombs on Japan, despite knowing that Japan would surrender, was unable to continue the war and was finished.

Let’s recap the war dead attributable to America, American foreign policy and American Banksters, all of which vastly enabled war by funding it while contributing to the massive death tolls.

WW I, 35,000,000 dead

WW II, At least 50,000,000 dead

Since the end of WW II, another 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 folks have died as a direct result of U.S. foreign interventionism. 

American politicians love to talk about American Exceptionalism and the flag waving voters eat it up. We are exceptional all right – exceptional in the art of war and murder.

What has our lust for blood cost us? It’s cost us ‘Shock and Awe’ economic destruction. We are now barely a shadow of our once free and prosperous republic and we’ve morphed into Nazi Germany.  America is now the Evil Empire that threatens life, peace and prosperity everywhere. 

When will the American blood lust be satiated? When Americans vote to fire the warmongers and replace them with constitutionalists who believe in the peaceful foreign policy of our founders.

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. James Madison

Memorial Day?  I'll pass on the celebrations and mourn what I know will be our fate.

The government propaganda and media complex can be counted on to leap into high gear with lies, deceptions, false flag attacks and a whole menu of psychological manipulations to con “we the people” into believing that war and murder are noble, just and patriotic.

But by far the worst manifestations of power transgress beyond the horrifying spectacle of the physical carnage of war because those same folks who deceptively internalized that war is noble also become its ultimate victims. Sooner or later the flag waving stops when folks realize that they have been systematically shorn of their own liberty and prosperity, and condemned to a miserable life under totalitarian tyranny. The film clips of euphorically happy flag waving Germans idolizing Hitler and his evil is a stark contrast to the starving, homeless and terrified Germans in bombed out and burned out German cities at the end of WW II. Worshiping the flag is most dangerous when folks fail to even realize precisely the flag stands for.

For Americans, they will eventually come to the frightening realization that they put their faith and trust in a government that betrayed them as they are forced to accept that they have been nothing more than pawns on the financial chessboard of empire wherein the wealth and power of the nation has been viciously concentrated into the hands of the ruling few – Banksters and their power brokers who delivered unto the people unemployment, economic misery, fiat currency, wars and grim futures.

At this point, what does the flag stand for? Nothing but the tens of trillions poured down the scary black hole of dark nothingness and militarism gone mad as they ponder the failures of an evil debt ridden empire that utterly bankrupted and destroyed a once great, glorious and prosperous nation.

Memorial Days should be about mourning the 100 million plus bodies that would never have been needlessly snuffed out had it not been for the evil US Empire, the military industrial complex and the banksters.  Memorial Day should be about deep soul searching and about how can the American people reject the insanity and reclaim their long lost moral compass.

President Andrew Jackson, a flawed and morally inconsistent man who opposed public debt and who also declared war on the national bank, was smart enough to understand human nature and its perennial quest for concentrated powers, whatever the cost.

“I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.”

And what do we have today – a moneyed aristocracy with raw and absolute power and they have crushed the nation, destroyed the prosperity of the people and its evil military industrial security Bankster complex has decimated human beings all over the planet.

This is what U.S. foreign policy has delivered to America, yet we drink the poison because we lack the courage to think the unthinkable and to speak the unspeakable as we sellout out liberty with each election and march off into totalitarian statist hell.

Two time Medal of Honor winner Maj. General Smedley (USMC) spent over 3 decades fighting wars and concluded in 1933:

 War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. 

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. 

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

How to End the Wars - It really is easy and it's been done before

Americans are somewhat aware that our current crop of wars not only never seem to end but they actually are expanding into other countries.  It's as if the US Military is a global militarized dictatorship that resembles a giant octopus that is enveloping and devouring everything in its deadly path.  The war in Afghanistan has expanded into Pakistan, courtesy of Obama.  Obama launched the war in Libya, engineered the takeover of Egypt by dangerous Sunni Salafist Wahhabist psychopaths and he's arming Sunni rebels in Syria as part of his regime change schemes to topple Assad, a man who has done absolutely nothing to America or threatened us in any way.  We've got the  "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" Republicans and Democrats who are lusting to bomb, nuke, invade and occupy a nation of 75 million folks.  America's foreign policy insanity is on steroids and  continues to multiply exponentially.

Will we ever have peace?  Only if we kill the military industrial complex that lords over us and is devouring our liberty and prosperity as well as reigning terror and death upon numerous foreign nations and innocent people.  American's won't admit it but America is really a military dictatorship.  Our local police forces have been transformed into para-military, federally funded militarized gestapos.

Here's the bitter truth that Americans cannot face:  We murder for defense contractor and Wall Street profits.  If that's not the epitome of a thoroughly debauched and degenerate nation, I don't know what is.

But here's another truth:  Americans have the power to end the wars and the military dictatorship that lords over us with a terrorizing iron fist.

The military industrial complex (MIC) and its enormous powers expanded greatly with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and the US entry into WW I in 1914.  By WW II, the MIC had grown significantly more powerful and by the time the Vietnam War rolled around, America was in its infancy of a full fledged military dictatorship.  Today, we are bearing witness to the scourges of military power and its oppressive tyranny.

So how precisely do We the People end MIC power?  It's really quite simple because it's happened before.  As the Vietnam War raged in the 1960's and expanded into Laos and Cambodia, anti-war sentiments were building strongly in America.  The slaughter of millions of southeast Asians and a rising US military death toll was angering the people.    LBJ's war was such a disaster that his re-election was in jeopardy.  As the situation grew progressively worse for LBJ, he feared the humiliation of a general election or primary defeat so he decided NOT to run for re-election in 1968.  Nixon, a foreign policy hawk,  won the 1968 election.  The Vietnam War resulted in over 58,000 dead Americans but the hawks were determined to wage the Vietnam War for all eternity.

However, Nixon was soon smothered with anti-war Congress Critters who ferociously fought to end the Vietnam War. By 1973, Congress simply refused to fund it.  The American Prospect did an excellent analysis of the Vietnam War and how it ended.

How Congress Got Us Out of Vietnam

...in January 1973, the president knew that he only had a limited amount of time before Congress finally used the power of the purse to bring the war to an end -- regardless of what the administration wanted. Indeed, to make certain that the president could not reverse course, in June 1973 Congress passed legislation that included an amendment sponsored by Church and Case to prohibit the use of more funds in Southeast Asia after August 15. Sixty-four senators voted in favor. When the House assented, its vote marked the first time that chamber had agreed to cut off funds, too.

And that's precisely how the Vietnam War finally ended - it was defunded by Congress when Congress refused to appropriate anymore money for it.  

While presidential war making powers have expanded considerably since the Vietnam War era, what hasn't change is that the president can't wage wars or do much of anything unless Congress appropriates money to fund the wars.  It's Congress that controls the purse strings, not the president.

We the People elect Congress Critters and We the People have the power to fire the warmongers who vote to fund the wars.  With 100 Senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives, finding information is very easy in the Internet age because voting records and roll call votes are available online.  Moreover, organizations like opensecrets.org have huge databases of political campaign contributions and it's easy to identify the Congress Critters who are wholly owned subsidiaries of defense contractors.

If We the People want peace, it's within our power to achieve peace by not electing anymore warmongers to Congress.

It really is that simple.  It's been done before and we can do it again.  Slaying the military industrial complex is not only critical to world peace and peaceful co-existence, it's absolutely critical to our economy and fiscal stability.  Wars have consumed American prosperity, vastly contributed to our $16.8 trillion in unsustainable debt and are directly responsible for the miserable decline of the American middle class.

It's long over due to end the blood money that flows to Wall Street and defense contractors.  Americans who vote for warmongers definitely have blood on their hands and they are no different nor any less vile than the evil banksters and defense contractors.

Let's do it. No Excuses!

Are the Neocons Changing their Stripes? Don't count on it and here's why.

Like the Bob Dylan song, Times They Are a-Changin, Senator Rand Paul struck a raw nerve in GOP circles with his famous, media and Twitter viral filibuster.  Rand Paul didn't succeed in stopping John Brennan, the godfather of murderous drone strikes, from being confirmed as the new head of the CIA but he definitely succeeded in bringing drone use and US foreign policy out of the GOP's closet. For that he was cheered and jeered but mostly cheered by civil libertarians on the right and left.  The jeers flowed from old guard neocon whackjobs like John McCain, Lindsay Graham and their reliable partners on the left.

The Jeers:

McCain, Graham Attack Rand Paul for Anti-Drone Filibuster, Antiwar.com that stated "Paul's question about Obama's authority to kill US citizens doesn't deserve an answer, Graham said".

James Carville: Rand Paul’s ‘Nutty’ Concerns About Drones Akin To Birtherism, Evolution Deniers Mediaite

MSNBC Hosts Mock Rand Paul: Made Serious Issue Of Drones Sound ‘Absurd,’ ‘Crazy,’ ‘And On The Fringe’  Mediaite

It should come as no surprise that the far left and far right were at the forefront in attacking Rand Paul. These bat shit crazies have no respect whatsoever for the constitution, civil liberties or peace.  They are a pox upon humanity everywhere.

The Cheers:

While the cheers were loudest among civil libertarians, the cheers also hailed from some surprising places like the traditional standard bearers of neocon foreign policy.  Rush Limbaugh, the icon of Republican talk radio, actually smacked McCain and Graham while defending Rand Paul.

Limbaugh Hits McCain And Graham For Opposing Rand Paul, Dining With Obama: ‘Who Are They Siding With?’

Laura Ingraham, another popular neocon icon of Republican talk radio wasted no time praising Rand Paul and promptly interviewing him on her radio show.

Laura Ingraham: Neoconservative view has clearly hurt the GOP (Rand Paul interview 3/08/13)

The neocon armor is slowly cracking. With both Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham standing with Rand, the foreign policy debate will be brought out of the Republican closet and this will not bode well for Republican foreign policy hawks. It's not that either Limbaugh or Ingraham even care about peace, liberty or the constitution but they are apoplectic over back to back Republican general election losses. Folks like Limbaugh and Ingraham are not motivated by ideology; in fact, they are merely weathermen who sense and follow the political winds. Right now in America, the political winds are strongly blowing away from costly foreign interventionism and non-stop wars.

Despite all the glowing and supportive tweets, as well as the right wing media professing its undying love for Rand Paul, we have to ask ourselves if any of this in any way signals that the Republican Party and its pundits are serious.

Or is it more like a stealth date when the guy has a romance strategy to get in her pants because he really only wants to screw her?

Despite the barrage of poetic wing nut words, the neocons can never be trusted.  Every conservative, constitutionalist and small government advocate has been down this road many, many times and drank the Koolaid with the flavor FOOL.

How will we ever know if they are serious?  That's not difficult.  Just look back in history and how the Vietnam War finally ended.

How Congress Ends Wars, It always comes down to money

As the Democratically-controlled 110th Congress searches for a way to end the Iraq war authorized by the Republican-controlled 107th Congress, it seems appropriate to recall how the U.S. Congress ended the Vietnam War, and more recently, further U.S. military combat involvement in Somalia. At the end of those dark days, ending the battle came down to ending the money.

On Aug. 5, 1964, Congress enacted the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, authorizing President Lyndon Johnson to use "all necessary measures" to repel armed attacks against U.S. forces in Vietnam. The resolution passed easily, 466-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate, with the only dissenting votes coming from Democratic Sens. Wayne Morse (Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (Alaska).

Unlike the resolution authorizing the use of U.S. military force in Iraq, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution contained language allowing Congress to repeal it at any time. Unsuccessful congressional efforts to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution began as early as 1966, just two "quagmire-ish" years after its passage. Finally in January of 1971, Congress succeeded in passing a measure repealing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. While he did not veto it, President Richard M. Nixon refused to honor the measure and continued to wage the war, claiming presidential authority to do so as commander in chief of the military. But, another far more effective act of Congress would ultimately end the Vietnam War by closing the federal purse strings.

In December 1970, Congress reacted to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia by passing the landmark Cooper-Church amendment to the Foreign Military Sales Bill. The amendment, named for and sponsored by Sens. John Sherman Cooper (R-Kentucky) and Frank Church (D-Idaho), prohibited the use of any funds already appropriated for military spending on the introduction of additional U.S. troops into Cambodia. While President Nixon denounced Cooper-Church as harming the war effort, he failed to veto it. Today, the Cooper-Church amendment is regarded as the first congressional action taken limiting presidential powers during a war.

Following Cooper-Church, and even after the Paris cease-fire agreement, Congress literally dropped the hammer on the Vietnam War with its passage in 1973 of a joint resolution (H.J.Res. 636) prohibiting any further appropriation or expenditure of any funds for any "combat in or over or from the shores of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia.

And that's precise how wars end.  When Congress finally refuses to fund them through appropriations, they are over.

Let's get back to the GOP.  What Republicans are willing to defund the current wars?  For that matter, the same question also applies to the war friendly Democrats.  It would be nearly impossible to find a Republican or Democrat who would agree to defund the wars, let alone reign in executive powers.

When Republicans and their pundits start demanding that the wars be defunded along with military spending, that's when you know somebody is serious about ending the wars.  If a candidate is unwilling to vociferously and loudly campaign on ending war funding, then they are still fully committed neocons.

Who is talking about the cost of the wars?  Absolutely nobody but I blogged about war costs.

The Cost of America's Wars - $3 Trillion, $4 Trillion, $5 Trillion, $7 Trillion, $8 Trillion, Going Once, Going Twice, SOLD

If Americans want to understand why America is bankrupt and why the economy lies in ruins, look no further than war spending.

Meanwhile, it's definitely not time to start singing Bob Dylan's song, Times They are a-Changin.

The US Globalized Military Dictatorship Strangling the Planet with Nukes and Military Bases

Most Americans believe that the US Military exists to defend America. That assumption is no longer true, hasn't been true in decades and in fact may never have been true. The modern US Military exists for one purpose only:  to become the UN's Global Governance Military. The taxpayers of the broke and bankrupt nation of America fund the endless wars for resource control, ruthless militarized people control and a globalized tyranny, all on behalf of the New World Order, defense contractors, the banksters, the corporatists and the statist elites.  Simply put, America murders for corporate profits and empire.

CBS reported that there are 700 US and/or NATO military bases in Afghanistan alone. 

The 700 Military Bases of Afghanistan

Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces.? Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns.? Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a?base-building boom that began last year.

Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also extraordinarily expensive.? It has added significantly to the already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and raises questions about just how long, after the planned beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the U.S. will still be garrisoning Afghanistan.

How many US military bases dot the planet?  Nobody really knows as some bases are quite large and many are small.  There are also numerous NATO military bases. Estimates of the number of military bases do not include the US Navy that literally operates floating military bases on the seas or the highly secretive CIA bases that are mostly used for torture, drone operations and many other clandestine operations.  The CIA bases generally operate out of the US State Department and many US consulates and US Aid offices are nothing more than CIA fronts that funnel money and arms to terrorists and radical Islamists for the purpose of regime change.  The Benghazi cover-up was a classic CIA mission and it was providing arms and money for Syrian terrorists.

The National Post (Canadian) provided a stellar infographic of US military bases around the world.

Graphic: Mapping a superpower-sized military - United Bases of America

America just isn't strangling the planet with military bases, soldiers, drone operations and CIA bases, it's also strangling the planet with nuclear weapons. Armscontrol.org discloses that America has a staggering 5,113 nuclear warheads.

Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance

China: About 240 total warheads.

France: Fewer than 300 operational warheads.

Russia: Approximately 1,499 deployed strategic warheads [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates Russia has another 1,022 nondeployed strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads. Additional thousands are awaiting dismantlement.

United Kingdom: Fewer than 160 deployed strategic warheads, total stockpile of up to 225.

United States: Approximately 5,113 nuclear warheads [2], including tactical, strategic, and nondeployed weapons. According to the latest official New START declaration, the United States deploys 1,722 strategic nuclear warheads on 806 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the United States' nondeployed strategic arsenal is approximately 2,800 warheads and the U.S. tactical nuclear arsenal numbers 500 warheads. Additional warheads are retired and await dismantlement.

How many trillions of dollars have been spent/squandered over the decades to manufacture nuclear weapons and constantly update the inventories? We don't know. However, going forward the US is planning on spending hundreds of billions on nuclear warheads according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post.

How many nukes does it take to be safe?

The country is engaged in a costly, ambitious modernization of its nuclear weapons complex and development of a new generation of delivery systems — new strategic submarines, bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles that will be operating more than 50 years from now.

Start with the Navy’s plan for 12 new SSBN-X strategic submarines to replace the 14 Ohio-class subs now in service. A Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the program, released Dec. 10, asks whether the Navy can stay within the cost targets for their procurement ($4.9 billion each) and whether each sub should carry 16 or 20 missiles.

But shouldn’t the questions be more basic, such as who is the enemy and how many subs would be needed to deter that enemy?

There will be at least four or five warheads on each of the 16 ICBMs carried on each of the new subs. Their destructive power will be eight to more than 20 times that of the atomic bomb that all but destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

That bomb killed 45,000 men, women and children instantly. Another 19,000 died during the next four months, according to a 1946 study by the Manhattan Engineer District, which built the bomb. The majority of those killed were civilians, though Hiroshima was picked because planners saw it as a military target with army barracks and defense factories. But the bomb — its 12.5 kiloton explosive power [equal to 12,500 tons of TNT], its heat effects and radiation — went well beyond those military targets. Today’s nuclear weapons are 100 kilotons and above.

It’s agreed that nuclear weapons don’t deter terrorist groups. And if history is any guide, the more the United States and other nuclear-armed countries modernize their weapons, the more tempting it is for other countries to want nuclear arsenals.

So how many warheads does the United States need over the next 40 years to deter others?

That’s a multibillion-dollar question, and among those President Obama and his new national security team will have to wrestle with as they try to tighten Defense spending.

I have written before that it’s time to get a rational, long-range nuclear strategy because the cost of replacing the nation’s three nuclear delivery systems will top $100 billion and require another $300 billion over the next 10 years to keep them operational.

Empire and military worship are latest deities that the American people embrace and worship as evidenced by how they vote.  Republican or Democrat, American voters reliably and consistently vote for war and empire.  Even more horrifying is the fact that Americans have also sacrificed their humanity and morality which begs the question: are the American people evil?  Americans have willfully and consciously sacrificed their prosperity and liberty on the alter the the most evil and murderous gods ever to exist in human history.

But by far the worst manifestations of power transgress beyond the horrifying spectacle of the physical carnage of war because those same folks who deceptively internalized that war is noble also become its ultimate victims. Sooner or later the flag waving stops when folks realize that they have been systematically shorn of their own liberty and prosperity. The film clips of euphorically happy flag waving Germans idolizing Hitler and his evil is a stark contrast to the starving, homeless and terrified Germans in bombed out and burned out cities after Nazism was defeated. Worshiping the flag is most dangerous when folks fail to even realize what precisely the flag stands for.

For Americans, they will eventually come to the frightening realization that they put their faith and trust in a government that betrayed them as they are forced to accept that they have been nothing more than pawns on the financial chessboard of empire wherein the wealth and power of the nation has been viciously concentrated into the hands of the ruling few – defense contractors, banksters and their power brokers who delivered unto the people unemployment, economic misery, fiat currency, wars and grim futures. At this point, what does the flag stand for? Nothing but the tens of trillions poured down the scary black hole of dark nothingness and militarism gone mad as they ponder the failures of an evil debt ridden empire that bankrupted a once great, glorious, free and prosperous nation.

This is what U.S. foreign policy has delivered to America, yet we drink the poison because we lack the courage to think the unthinkable and to speak the unspeakable as we sellout out our liberty with each election and march off into totalitarian statist hell.

Bankrupting America: Churning the US Military into the UN's Global Governance Military one Nation at a Time

Neocons are a most peculiar group of folks and they dominate the Republican Party. They worship the empire, the wars, the military and and all the inhumane evil that accompanies our brutal and barbarous foreign policy. Their lust for empire is so great that they would gladly sacrifice the constitution and even economic prosperity on the alter of empire. While the Democrats claim to have the humanitarian moral high ground, they too worship the state, its wars and the empire.

In fact, it was the progressives, liberals and Democrats got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton were all empire building militarists as well as highly revered Democrats and progressives.

Except for a handful of liberty activists, anti-war folks, Ron Paul supporters and a few decent Democrats in the mold of Dennis Kucinich, America has literally morphed into some horror that is beginning to resemble Nazi Germany.

As the economy continues to plunge into the dark abyss and profound human suffering escalates in America, few Americans understand that the root cause of our misery is directly attributable to military spending and endless wars. Yet, the government is somehow always successful in selling the propaganda that wars and murder are good for the US economy.

What most Americans cannot grasp is the simple fact that the US military is morphing into the global governance military of the United Nations.

TomDispatch.com has an interesting piece on the US empire.

The True Costs of Empire

We built, for example, 505 bases at the cost of billions of dollars in Iraq (without a single reporter uncovering anything close to that number until we abandoned all of them in 2011). Over the years, millions of soldiers, private contractors, spies, civilian employees of the U.S. government, special ops types, and who knows who else spent time on them, as undoubtedly did hundreds of reporters, and yet news of those American ziggurats was rare to vanishing. On the whole, reporters on bases so large that one had a 27-mile fortified perimeter, multiple bus lines, and its own electricity grid and water-bottling plant generally looked elsewhere for their “news.”

Our latest base-building mania: Washington’s expanding "empire of bases" for its secret CIA and Special Forces drone wars in the Greater Middle East goes almost unnoticed (except at sites like this). We now, for instance, have a drone base in the Seychelles, an archipelago that evidently needs an infusion of money. Unless you had the dough for a high-end wedding in the middle of the Indian Ocean or a vacation in “paradise,” you’ve probably never heard of the place.

No matter. You’re still paying for the deployment of 82 people to those islands to fly and land crash-prone drones in our now endless “covert” robotic air wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa. With the so-called fiscal cliff now eternally on the media horizon, there’s been reporting recently on how your tax dollars are being spent, but do you have the faintest idea what it actually costs you to garrison the globe? No? Then you’re in good company, and the Pentagon certainly isn’t interested in telling you either.

Fortunately, basing expert and TomDispatch regular David Vine decided to make sense of what garrisoning the planet means to our pocketbooks. Read this piece and you’ll know what it costs all of us to build and support that Baseworld and more generally the American global military presence. Think about it: at the cost of possibly $2 trillion since 9/11, it should be one of the stories of the century. If it were, maybe by now we would be starting to pull back from the “military cliff.”

It may be a tragic irony that Republican and Democrat Americans willingly drink the poisonous neocon Koolaid but history is always the great vindicator. It's practically a law of physics that every empire in human history ultimately bites the dust and always through currency devaluation/debasement and bankruptcy. America is already there and it's only a matter of time before the full impact of our obsession with empire finally reduces us to a pathetic and poverty stricken nation.

$2 trillion spent on the wars since 9/11?  Soon enough, we'll be choking on the empire and its ashes as the freest and most prosperous nation in human history joins the trash heap of history and empire.

How the Government Destroys the Environment

The environment is always a hot issue. After all, who doesn’t want clean air, safe drinking water, healthy foods, fuel efficient transportation and an environment free of toxins? Yet, federal, state and local governments have done more to fund environmental disasters than anybody on the planet.

Take our coastal, wetlands and beach areas that were once lovely, pristine and sparsely inhabited. They are now high density urban disasters that are cramped, crowded and lined with endless rows of high-rise buildings, beach houses and shopping centers. But how did this happen? Just ask John Stossel, the ABC journalist and 20/20 host. Stossel wrote a piece titled: Confessions of a Welfare Queen, How rich bastards like me rip off the taxpayers for millions of dollars.

Stossel’s own beach house was destroyed in a storm and he wrote:

If the ocean took my house, Uncle Sam would pay to replace it under the National Flood Insurance Program. Since private insurers weren’t dumb enough to sell cheap insurance to people who built on the edges of oceans or rivers, Congress decided the government should step in and do it.

For more information on how the government subsidizes environmental holocausts in environmentally sensitive coastal areas, see:

Hurricanes, Sandy, Federal Flood Insurance and the Environment

Federal Flood Insurance is a federal entitlement that insures a ton of beach front properties and other properties in flood zones that typically include low lying real estate in areas highly susceptible to floods, storms and hurricanes. Low cost federal flood insurance only encourages real estate development in environmentally sensitive areas that are prone to storms and flooding.

Then there is the issue of private insurance and/or federal flood insurance and whether or not it is a Constitutional function of the federal government to spend into oblivion to keep a city or geographic area afloat with chronic rebuilding and rehabilitation following a destructive storm in areas that may in fact be geologically doomed to nearly constant flooding and storm surges.

The free market has a built-in conservation mechanism simply because so much of what is built these days is subsidized with tax dollars and public bond proceeds, and certainly would not be financially feasible without government subsidies. If developers and home builder were not loaded up with subsidies and public bond proceeds, the true cost of economic development in flood plains would definitely act as an economic conservation measure because it would deter development in environmentally sensitive areas. Government entities are notorious for saddling tax payers with the cost of development bonds for infrastructure like roads and bridges and the Federal government is notorious for its various subsidies, loan guarantees and insurance programs. If the true economic cost of a project was allowed, costs that would include un-subsidized insurance and construction costs, there would be a whole lot less development. Folks who constantly complain about suburban sprawl never realize that it is government that mostly funds and subsidizes it.

The Federal Flood Insurance Program and various state insurance schemes to subsidize the wealthy is not only welfare for the wealthy but it’s also responsible for endless development in environmentally sensitive areas that would never have been developed without government subsidies. It’s the government that taxes citizen to subsidize growth that destroys the environment. In a free market system such development would be significantly reduced simply because these projects would not be financially feasible. For starters, insurance costs would be incredibly high and this alone would act as a deterrent as well as a free market approach to conservation. Furthermore, many environmentally sensitive properties would simply be 'free market' uninsurable without massive government subsidies and programs. Few businesses or individuals would risk the massive financial losses of investing resources into uninsurable or prohibitively expensive to insure properties, especially in areas highly susceptible to floods, hurricanes and natural disasters.

While a ton of environmental devastation is the direct result of builders and developers bribing federal and state public officials for government financing and cheap taxpayer funded flood insurance, government entities have even built public housing in high risk coastal areas.  Astoundingly, NY government officials built nursing homes and public housing projects in Hurricane Sandy ravaged Rockaway Beach, NY.

This is Truly EPIC, the NYT Admits that the Government Built and Subsidized Nursing Homes and Public Housing in Sandy Ravaged Rockaway Beach

The ravages of Hurricane Sandy are extensive as is the human misery.

Along comes, lo and behold, the New York Times with an article documenting that the Federal government and local government officials encouraged and subsidized the development of nursing homes and public housing projects for the poor in Rockaway Beach, NY. The Rockaways were especially hard hit by Hurricane Sandy...

Welcome to government central planning! It's deadly and dangerous. Putting the poor, the old and the sick on a beach and in the path of storms and hurricanes is so liberal, so statist, so totalitarian and undoubtedly very profitable for the politically connected real estate developers who made fortunes off of these taxpayer funded projects.

Even more shocking, on 4/1/10 the Washington Times reported on a bill in Congress written by Florida Democrat Ron Klein, dubbed the Homeowners Defense Act, and reported that it was “nothing more than a targeted TARP-style taxpayer-funded bailout….there are no income-level or home- or property-value restrictions on who benefits from this beach-house bailout. In fact, the Florida system provides massive subsidies to homeowners of $2-million-plus properties. The claim that this bill will help low-income families is so egregious that state Sen. Al Lawson of Tallahassee said, "You're robbing from the poor to take care of the rich ... to subsidize these million-dollar homes built on the coast."

Such legislation is like welfare for Rush Limbaugh who happens to have a monster mansion on the beach.  However, the government has a very long history of providing welfare for the wealthy and a beach house or ocean front condo on the taxpayer's nickel is just one of the many financial perks of the governments numerous programs to subsidize the rich.

Water is becoming a scarce resource, especially in the notoriously dry western parts of the  US. California is famous for droughts, wildfires and earthquakes. The media is reporting that water taps to farmers have been cut-off in some areas that have simply run out of water or have run low on water.

In Tom Bethell’s book The Noblest Triumph, Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, Bethell puts forth a convincing and documented position that free market capitalism is a much more efficient conservator of scarce resources than politicians and government. Although Bethell’s book was published in 1998, it’s a timeless classic.

Bethell talks extensively on how the State of California kept the cost of water cheap by subsidizing it and he’s point blank in his analysis:

Why don’t government agencies charge more for water? The answer is that they have been captured by their clients. “Without the farmers, the government agencies would never have been able to get the political support they needed to build the dams in the first place,” said the economist Gordon Tullock. ….The relevant dam-building agencies were able to expand from small beginnings by actively seeking out customers who “demanded” their services. These agencies – the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, primarily, then enjoyed political support from farmers and could rely on them to lobby on their behalf when budget appropriations were needed....

With California’s population growing rapidly, and water being poured into the ground for farming, the water agencies saw shortages ahead. As before, they weren’t concerned….as before they would build more dams…the farmers would still get cheap water….By the 1970’s, however, there was a new variable in the political equation: Environmentalists.

Environmentalists recognized that the cheap water that was drenching the CA farm belt areas also held the potential to dry up rivers, streams etc. and affect fish and wildlife. These days this drama has exploded into a full-fledged hot potato political and judicial issue as farming interest line up in the courts against what they consider unreasonable and punitive environmental policies. Obviously, the California water disaster has significantly intensified since Bethell’s 1998 book. A fairly recent court ruling held that the fish trump the subsidized farmers, and with the current draught, the situation is acute. The NYT reports, here:

TULARE, Calif. — For the third year in a row, Mark Watte plans to rely on the aquifer beneath his family farm for three-quarters of the water he needs to keep his cotton, corn and alfalfa growing, his young pistachio trees healthy and his 900 dairy cows cool. That is 50 percent more than he used to take, because the water that once flowed to the farm from snow in the Sierra Nevada has been reduced by a long dry spell and diversions to benefit endangered fish.

Since 2006 the surface of the aquifer, in the Kaweah subbasin of the San Joaquin basin, has dropped 50 feet as farmers pumped deeper, Mr. Watte says. Some of his pumps no longer reach far enough to bring any water to the surface….

Beginning in midcentury, the state enjoyed a respite with completion of the Central Valley Project, a large hydroengineering effort to redistribute surface water around the San Joaquin Valley.

But this year, the Westland water district— the state’s largest, in the San Joaquin Valley — got a taste of what the future may hold when its allocation of surface water from the Central Valley Project was cut by about 90 percent. As a result, area farmers expect to pump two and a half times the usual amount of groundwater this year.

The California water nightmare is the direct result of government subsidizing farmers, Big Agriculture and Big Food.

The Central Valley Project is a project of the federal Bureau of Reclamation. The federal government poured money into subsidizing California’s farmers. But the State of California gave the powerful farm lobby the authority to pump all the ground water it wanted. As the water tables in California are now vastly reduced as a direct result of prolonged drought, water in California is quickly becoming a scarce resource. Meanwhile, California gets its congressional contingent to get more and more federal money for more water projects.

With 1.64 million acres of farmland that supports a $30 billion agricultural industry, the economic ramifications are huge for CA and so is the burden upon taxpayers and water starved residents of California. As water dries up, farmers in California are being paid by the federal government not to produce which is another corporate welfare subsidy program concocted by the statist central planners.

Moving on from the water nightmare, the federal US Forest Service is another boondoggle that has been rapacious in its pursuit of wholesale environment destruction. Another government environmental disaster that was exposed by Bethell involves the Forest Service, dubbed “the world’s largest road-building company” by John Baden of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. The Forest Service as of 1991 had constructed 360,000 miles of roads which is 8 times the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway System. Bethell documents how the Forest Service went on a taxpayer funded road building extravaganza post WW II and actively engaged in the timber business.

The cost of road-building was paid out of the U.S. Treasury, but some receipts from the timber sales could be retained in the service’s own budget. So it didn’t matter to the Forest Service if it lost money on every sale. According to one study, below-cost timber sales cost taxpayers $5.6 billion in the 1980’s alone. In effect, the treasury subsidizes the Forest Service to cut down trees, and Congress permits the service to retain part of the proceeds...

...With employees in 46 states, the service keeps many private logging companies in business…..Since 1976, then, the service has logged a lot of timber...

Bethell then goes on to quote a Forest Service volunteer who said “entire mountainsides were shorn of cover, and rough roads crisscrossed their faces, creating terraces that bled topsoil into the rivers when the snow melted in spring…The Forest Service is deforesting our national timberlands….”.

The economics of government funded deforestation are insane and Bethell quotes the Washington Post who “reported that in just four national forests in North Carolina in l989, the Forest Service spent $4.8 million selling trees worth $2.9 million”.

Logging is very expensive and it is not financially feasible in many areas because of exorbitant costs and accessibility issues. But hey, with the Forest Service paving roads for loggers with taxpayer dollars, who won’t jump on the bandwagon of easy subsidized timber profits?

What environmentalists fail to grasp is that much of our environmental degradation was actually caused by the government subsidizing special interests that fill campaign coffers. In DC, it’s all about money and special interests, nothing more.  However, the destruction of the environment by the government is vastly magnified when we factor in the environmental impact of the US military and our endless wars.

US Department of Defense is the Worst Polluter on the Planet

Our unconstitutional and murderous wars are destroying the planet and the US Military burns through about 350-400,000 barrels of oil a day. One of my favorite blogs (Washingtonsblog.com) posted some great information in a piece titled “The Elephant in the Room: The U.S. Military is One of the World's Largest Sources of C02” that includes:

"The military accounts for a full 80 percent of the federal government's energy demand." Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

And in 2008, Oil Change International released a report showing that:

The [Iraq] war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year.

The fact that the U.S. military is one of the world's largest sources of C02 is an open secret that no one is addressing. If C02 causes warming and the military is one of the largest producers of C02, then any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air."

Environmentalists Against War (http://envirosagainstwar.org) disclosed some of the horrific consequences of our wars.

War destroys human settlements and native habitats.

War destroys wildlife and contaminates the land, air and water. The damage can last for generations.

US clusterbombs, thermobaric explosions, electromagnetic bursts and weapons made with depleted uranium are indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction.

Bombs pollute, poisoning the land with unexploded shells and toxic chemicals. Bombs can't locate or neatly destroy hidden chemical or biological weapons (CBW), but they can cause the uncontrolled spread of deadly CBW agents.

Although this blog post only deals with a few of the nasty ways in which government massively contributes to environmental destruction, they are very significant and have a lasting and profound impact on the environment. Millions of folks live in low lying coastal areas that are highly susceptible to hurricanes and flooding, and largely because the government subsidizes building in environmentally sensitive and high risk areas. Big agricultural interests in areas that are prone to drought lobby government officials for endless supplies of cheap water; hence the water nightmare in California. The US Forest Services builds taxpayer funded roads and leases federal lands to loggers with the net result being that entire forests have been shorn of trees, courtesy of government intervention and subsidies. The US military is the biggest polluter on the planet and its criminal activities are devastating to people and their natural resources.

No sane environmentalist can morally defend such government interventions on any grounds. But in America, it's all about politics at the DC and state level wheels of fortune where special interests line up and bribe the politicos for their cut of government largess, regardless of the consequences.  Unfortunately, many unsuspecting environmentalists get sucked into to supporting nasty government programs and wars that actually harm the environment.

None of the above discussed environmental degradation and devastation could have been possible without government interference and subsidies to special interests and defense contractors.  Accordingly, when we think about the environment we need to recognize that secure property rights and free markets are indeed the best path to a healthy and toxin free environment, as well as sound public and foreign policy that doesn't contribute to the carnage.  Private interests have a vested interest in maintaining the value of their property while government officials just feed off the disease of crony capitalism, special interests and rent seeking corporate welfare recipients.

The free market libertarian solution to the environment is simple:  I own a patch of dirt and I can do anything I want with it and without government permission so long as my actions don't pollute, devalue or molest your neighboring property in any way, and that includes the surface of the land, the air above it and everything under it (water rights are an extremely complex legal issue).  Once property rights get moved from the private realm to the public realm, that is a recipe for chronic environmental holocausts.