Michael Hoffman
The media and the Obama administration have forgotten that we are supposed to be broke: there’s no money for quality public schools, public employee pensions, roads, bridges, high speed rail, Social Security and Medicare, but there’s always money for bombs and missiles.
Let’s call on Congress to require a daily report to the American people on how much our 700 military bases around the world cost us to operate per day!
How much does one tomahawk missile cost? How many have been fired at Libya thus far? How much does one day of our useless war in Afghanistan cost? How much does it cost us to fire missiles from Predator drones at civilians in Pakistan, per attack? What is the day to day price tag for our nation-building in Iraq?
Why does the Establishment media consistently fail to provide the cost of these wars and military bases?
Let’s call on the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and the neocons to show us where in the Constitution does it say our armed forces are required to police the world? I challenge these mountebank “Constitutionalists” to show me one line in the United States Constitution authorizing this socialism for the military-industrial complex.
But Hoffman, we must protect the civilians in Libya. Don’t make me laugh! We want to install our own Hamid Karzai type of puppet in Libya, that’s all. Ghaddafy was our puppet, but not enough of a puppet. We desire a 100% puppet. If protecting innocent civilians was the goal of the US government we wouldn’t launch missiles at jirga meetings in Pakistan or fund the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza (we provided the arms and the cash for the killing of 1600 people, mostly civilians). In Bahrain, civilians are being killed. The U.S. Seventh Fleet in based in Bahrain. We could stop the killings at any time, but since these are Shiites beings murdered, we approve.The bottom line that must be emphasized is the cost of our two-faced policing of the world —we can’t afford it, yet the Obama regime is doing it anyway, because there is no democracy in America. The people’s will is not done.
The American people desire quality of life first and foremost for our own. We don’t want our elderly eating out of garbage bins. We don’t want our poor denied medical care. We demand high speed rail to get us off the dangerous highways and off our addiction to $4-per-gallon gasoline. We want top quality public and private education for the next generation; expansion of libraries, parks and green space; a living wage and a decent pension for all workers, but we can’t afford these things because Bush Jr. and Bush III (Obama) have blown the treasury on war and more war, in perpetuity, and the cost is not an issue for our media and politicians. If it were, they would report the cost, but they don’t. They’re afraid to report it because it would wake us up.
I write from Idaho, where the governor and the superintendent of schools seek to increase classroom size to “save money.” The size of the class is a determinant of the quality of the education the child receives. This fact is not subject to debate. Hence, the governor of Idaho and the superintendent of Idaho’s schools are knowingly degrading the education of our youth in order to pinch pennies. Idaho, once a peace-loving state with senators of the calibre of Frank Church, is now a right wing “patriot” enclave that gives a blank check to useless foreign wars of the kind endorsed by neocon Charles Krauthammer, liberal Sen. Charles Schumer and Sarah “Half Term Governor” Palin. Penny-pinching Republican misers encourage unlimited government spending on foreign wars. We must make this an issue.
Ask questions and demand answers! Start with this one: If there is a budget crisis why is there always taxpayer money for useless foreign wars?
Hoffman is the author of seven books of history and literature including his banned and damned 1100 page textbook, Judaism Discovered.
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