The Folly of Afghanistan

Taking A Stand Against War

“No nation ever profited from a long war.” – Sun Tzu

Today's commentary is about the ongoing and undeclared war in Afghanistan and the fact that no good is apparently coming from it. As far as I am concerned, no Christian can be a true follower of Christ unless they are willing to take a stand against war in all its forms. In order to worship the Prince of Peace you must first and foremost be a peaceful person yourself. You cannot be warlike and then worship Christ in the same breath, the two are incompatible with one another. War is about killing and being killed. It is bloody and gory beyond description. It is so bad that even those who survive the conflict are often left with mental scars that never heal. Thousands of veterans are homeless today partly because they suffer from mental illnesses of one kind or another. In fact, one out of five veterans of the Iraq war #1, Iraq war #2, and Afghanistan campaigns return home with psychiatric disabilities so severe that they will never work again. That's what war does to people.

Here's a statistic about the illegal occupation of Afghanistan that most people are barely aware of: $57,000.00 per minute. That's how much money the United States is spending on the illegal occupation of Afghanistan. That works out to a million dollars a year for each man we have in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan War has been going on for eleven years and counting. Nearly 100,000 American troops are currently deployed there. More than 2,000 American service members have lost their lives there. The United States has wasted billions on the effort so far. Yet polling suggests that the war in Afghanistan is barely a blip on the public's radar.

In a nationwide New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last year, 60 percent of Americans said that the economy or jobs were the most important problems facing the country. A mere 3 percent mentioned Afghanistan or the war. The war is all but forgotten while death and destruction grinds on. For example, in September, at the NATO hospital doctors amputated a major limb – a leg or arm – an average of once every other day according to Navy Capt. Michael Mullins, a hospital spokesman. The number of civilian dead and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan stands in the hundreds of thousands. The cost of the Iraq war alone is likely to be more than three trillion dollars.

The National Security Advisor says there are less than 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and we have over 100,000 troops and probably as many mercenaries chasing them. Maintaining one American soldier in Afghanistan for one year costs one million dollars. This expenditure could be for twenty jobs at home with a salary of $50,000 each. There are now over 90,000 battlefield casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Over 500,000 veterans patients from the two wars (not counting Iraq #1) have flooded into VA hospitals and clinics. That's one new war casualty walking into a VA medical facility every five minutes of every day – about 9,000 new patients every month with no end in sight.

The Iraqis still don't have a real government and Christians are being ethnically cleansed. 190,000 AK-47s handed out by the US Army to Iraqi security force recruits vanished and wound up in the hands of militants. Afghani soldiers may be shooting our own troops! The total D.O.D. budget for the current fiscal year is over $700 billion. It is an amount just under what the entire rest of the world spends for defense and most of them are allies. America's defense budget is about three times the combined budgets of China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. The Defense Department spends in a few hours more than al Qaeda spends in an entire year. For this post-World War II high in spending, we get the smallest Army, Navy, and Air Force we have had since 1946. And, our tanks, ships, and aircraft are, on average, older than they have ever been before.

The Pentagon budget does not include what we pay for foreign aid, arms sales and arms control, Veterans, Homeland Security, the Pentagon's share of interest on the national debt, and other defense expenditures like nuclear weapons that are hidden in the energy department. To tally up our entire national security budget, we are cozy with $1 trillion. How many jobs could this wasteful spending that is bankrupting America generate?

How many indeed! What a beautiful world it would be if there were no more wars, and all the money that was formerly spent on them was redirected towards peaceful pursuits for the advancement of science and medicine, and for the exploration, commercialization and eventual colonization of the moon and planets. Meanwhile back on earth, everybody would get a free college education, national health care and senior care and there would be gleaming new infrastructure everywhere. There would be a vigorous space program that will put the first city on the moon and the first man on Mars. There would be no more disease in the third world because everybody would have access to fresh water. Untold millions could be fed, and all with the money that used to be spent on wars. Just think of the limitless possibilities!

Let's look at this another way. If the US military took all the money spent in one single day on its wartime expenditures and put it into a savings account, there would be enough funds to pay for the college education of every school kid in America from pre-K through high school – tuition, books, dorms, food, transportation and a new portable PC. Let me give you another example. The money in our hypothetical bank account from one day's military expenditures would be sufficient to take every homeless person in America off the street and put them into a 2,500 square foot house – fully furnished, stocked with groceries, and with all utilities included. And yes, I meant they would own the home free and clear. Hopefully that puts into focus the obscene amount of money our country is spending on wars overseas.

So what could America do with all that money currently being squandered on illegal military occupations and endless wars that serve only the top one tenth of one percent of the American corporate establishment? First and most obvious is the dire need to rebuild America's infrastructure, such as widening and repaving roads, rebuilding or replacing worn out bridges, and ditto for sewage and drainage systems across the country. Then there is the problem with America's ramshackle power grid. The US electrical power grid is based on technology that is over 125 years old. Certain people have been too busy resting on their laurels and depositing their paychecks instead of doing their jobs, otherwise this critically necessary rebuild would already be well under way. In point of fact, America needs to convert to a digital low-voltage direct-current power grid that can be run far more cheaply than the existing 110 volt grid. Remember, the higher the voltage required, the more current is necessary to generate it. So, if electricity in your area comes from a coal-fired power plant, your utilities company will only need to generate about 20% of the power needed for the existing high-voltage AC system to run the new one. Also, let's not forget the fact that any one of the above public works projects would create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

So now you can see that being a Christian is not about being a nice person or going to church. Being a good Christian means being anti-war to the point of refusing to serve in the military. It means being in favor of free college education, free health care, plus free day care and senior care for everybody without qualification. Make all of the above fundamental human rights for everyone, not just for those who have large sums of cash or stellar credit scores. War does irreparable harm, but being Christian – or at least being a decidedly peaceful person – does everybody tremendous good. Make a commitment to yourself and to God today to stand against war and to be in favor of world peace. Our only other choice is annihilation.

Where Are The Jobs? Where Have They Gone?

The Plight of American Workers

(excerpt from, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto”, by Paul J. Bern)

The circumstances and situations that the middle and working classes in the US find themselves in today are a series of gross social injustices that demands a sharply focused and well-coordinated response from the entire populace, a rebuttal and decisive counterattack designed and intended to right, correct and re-balance US political and economic power back into the hands of the overwhelming majority of American citizens to whom it rightfully belongs. There can be no doubt that class warfare has been declared in the US, perpetrated by the wealthy against the middle and working classes while simultaneously crushing the poor, minorities, the marginalized, the elderly and the disabled – for the sole express purpose of eliminating from society the constitutional majority of working Americans, with the end result being the complete and merciless liquidation of middle and working class wealth, of our general prosperity through loss of income, and even our access to higher education and health care. This has been accomplished by the largest transfer of wealth in all of human history, and it has been manifested in four different ways. Today I will write about the first phase of the illegal confiscation of US wealth, that of unemployment. The employment of working Americans, particularly of the US working class, has been decimated by closing down manufacturing facilities and shipping jobs overseas to the third world for pennies on the dollar. The result of this has been mass unemployment of many millions of the best qualified American workers, something I have had first-hand experience with.

Today the USA finds itself in the midst of an economic crisis that is divided up into three parts of equal importance. The first is rampant unemployment, the second is the housing crisis, and the third is the crisis in inequality. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are far worse than the Lame Stream Media has been telling us. While the official unemployment rate is stuck at approximately 8.5 percent, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 18.5 percent. This is what a broken economic model looks like: record profits for corporate America, Wall Street paying out fat bonuses to its execs and the wealthy doing well enough to create a surge in demand for luxury items, while most of the rest of us struggle just to make ends meet in a devastated economic landscape. The problem of rampant unemployment in America is far more than just an economic issue or a social issue. It has become one of the new civil rights issues of the 21^st century. As many people as there are hurting across middle America, including those who are having difficulty feeding themselves and their families as well as those who have lost homes and vehicles because their source of income has been cut off, I would not be surprised to see social unrest and civil disobedience across the American social and political landscape throughout 2012 and well beyond that. 

 

People everywhere are angry, and rightfully so, and yet there doesn't seem to be much protesting in the streets, or at least not yet. The Occupy and 99% Movements are one big step in the right direction, but much more is needed. Since the government is unwilling or unable to solve the economic problems of middle America, we are going to have to take the initiative and do it ourselves. It is my sincere hope that working Americans from all professions will begin to do so exactly that after reading this posting. My primary argument is that everyone has the right to a livelihood, to a living wage, to the repeal of the federal income tax and to the elimination of the federal withholding tax from our paychecks so that working Americans will be able to earn enough money for the necessities of life. To deny any person such inalienable rights is a human rights violation and therefore by extension a civil rights violation because it amounts to economic discrimination. And so my argument is that unemployment as we have known it must come to an end forever, meaning that the system is broken, pathetically out of date, and urgently needs to be replaced.

1 in 7 Americans rely on food stamps. What does it say about the richest country in the world when 1 in 7 of its citizens require government assistance so they can eat? We live in a nation that is the most prosperous of any other in human history. We have the largest per-capita income and the largest gross national product of any nation on earth. In spite of this, there are many developing countries such as Russia, China, India and South Africa, not to mention developed countries such as those in western Europe or Japan or Canada, where hunger is not as prevalent as it is in the US. This is a national disgrace and a civil rights issue of the highest order, and our current government is not doing nearly enough about it. Everyone has the right to good nutrition. To make children go hungry because their parents are unable to pay for food is absolutely barbaric. Having a realistic minimum wage would be a good first step towards solving this problem. The Bible says, “A workman is worth his wages”, and he or she surely is, otherwise it wouldn't be in there.

The foundation of the problem with mass unemployment, then, is that it breeds inequality because it has thrown millions of working professionals into poverty, creating an ever-growing underclass of people who are comprising an ever-larger segment of society. This vicious circle of growing despair will become a festering and malignant political and economic tumor as time goes on, and it threatens to destroy America from the inside out if something isn't done. This is only the first example of class warfare in the form of confiscation of jobs. All of this activity by the governmental and financial sectors amounts to far more than class warfare – it is tantamount to an illegal declaration of civil war. This new civil war (or class war, take your pick) has been declared by the rich, powerful and politically well connected, and it is continually being waged against the remaining 99%. Last time I checked, that includes us. This has resulted in a systemic liquidation of the middle class while crushing the poor, minorities, the disabled, the elderly, and other vulnerable individuals. 

 

There can be no doubt that this ongoing crisis threatens to turn into a storm of protest, public demonstrations and civil disobedience on a level not seen since the 1960's. I think it is high time for these protests, demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and civil uprisings to commence, because the fact of the matter is that if we working Americans don't start fighting back, we will wind up being financially and politically obliterated. Anyone who does not fight back against an aggressor or a bully deserves their fate. As for me, I choose to fight back, and it is my hope that as many of you as possible will join with me today after reading this article.

The fundamental change that is coming must have its beginnings with the hearts and minds of the American people. The level of anger and mistrust directed against the federal government by the US working and middle classes – and particularly by the poor and vulnerable – is at a level not seen in this country since the civil rights marches and anti-war protests of the 1960's, which I still remember quite clearly. With stubbornly high unemployment, record numbers of foreclosures and newly homeless people, governmental mass intrusion into our private lives including the violation of certain freedoms guaranteed by the US Constitution, endless wars overseas while America is crumbling, and exorbitant costs for higher education and medical care that are so outrageous they would be considered a human rights violation – even a criminal act – in other developed countries, Americans of all backgrounds and colors regardless of social, religious, marital or economic status have a right to be angry and dissatisfied about the current sorry state of US affairs both domestically and abroad. Therefore, it is our patriotic responsibility to do something about it, to force the system to change. The top 1% will not surrender their power voluntarily, so it will have to be taken away.

Economic or social problems, in turn, are caused by economic barriers erected by the same criminal minority that have hijacked America and its economy to the detriment of all but the top 1% income bracket. So we can conclude from this data that America's current crop of pressing economic issues such as stubbornly high unemployment can be solved by bringing back the civil rights movement of the 1960's. Instead of racial oppression as was the case a generation or more ago, the civil rights issues of today have to do with economic oppression that knows no racial boundaries. But because this is the case, untold multitudes of oppressed, besieged, disenfranchised, disillusioned and exasperated Americans will rise up together as if on cue against the incurably corrupt, basically unfair and irreparably polluted US government.

The right to earn a living wage, to better economic opportunities through free higher education, to low-cost universal health insurance and to home ownership, and to have a life free from hunger, homelessness, violence and crime, are no longer privileges reserved for the most affluent neighborhoods and families, they are basic human rights that can be denied to no one. In fact the entire governmental system, especially at the federal level, has become so decrepit due to crushing debt from without and from deep-seated corruption from within that trying to get anything done within the existing system is a waste of the American people's time. So a little civil disobedience, organized protesting, sit-ins and demonstrating, with a tasty touch of peaceful revolution conducted primarily online and in the streets is our responsibility as patriotic Americans.

The USA isn't going away, we just need to remove the rich from the driver's seat and put the US middle class into their place. That will be easy since there are over ninety-nine of us for every one of them. Remember that the future and the financial liquidity of the US middle and working classes are at stake, so this is going to be very serious business indeed. Let's come together in unity and take back our country from those who have shamelessly stolen it.