The following is a KSCO commentary. Here is Kay Zwerling:
This is called “Time to Cut Military Spending”.
Kudos to Andrew Russo who published this material last November in the Salinas, California newspaper. He clarified for us the work of the military-industrial complex.
While both political parties are loathe to admit it, our Country can no longer withstand the horrendous expenses to support the military needs of almost the entire world. Our military expenses must come to a halt if we are to remain a free nation.
Today, the U.S. officially spends about $750B per year on the military, but the real figure probably exceeds $1 trillion. This is far more than every other nation of the world combined spends.
This trillion dollar military budget goes to fund an empire of over 700 overseas bases and the U.S. military presence in over 130 countries. It includes funding to pay for the unnecessary and unconstitutional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will ultimately cost taxpayers over $3 trillion. It pays for the occupation of Japan, which has not been our enemy since 1945. It funds the presence of 75,000 GI’s in Germany, 20 years after the Berlin wall came down. It covers the cost of maintaining tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea 50 years after the end of the Korean War.
Military-industrial complex is indeed just as great a threat to our survival as the private banking institutions which Thomas Jefferson denounced, and which provide the funding mechanism for nations to go deeper into debt to finance war and global adventurism. A central bank – the Federal Reserve system – was critical to America’s unnecessary involvement in the European war of 1914.
The phony “neo-conservatives” who want America involved in a perpetual war for perpetual peace ignore the fact that war is almost always associated with a massive expansion of the powers of government. Of course, war generates massive profits for the military-industrial complex and their shareholders just as Eisenhower said.
I ask, who are these people and these shareholders?
Today, America is bankrupt. We are buried in a debt of unimaginable dimensions, and the value of the dollar is collapsing and a panicky Fed tries to print our way out of economic catastrophe.
We need to slash military spending down to a level consistent with protecting America’s national security, and not that of other nations. That means an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. occupation forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Germany, Korea, Japan, and the shutting of our bases abroad. It is time for America to come home, or very shortly we will not have an America to come home to.
For KSCO, this is Kay Zwerling.
© copyright 2011
