Just say no. To picking up a weapon.

While American's heads were turned to look at the hippies smoking their benign pot, the real addicts were sitting in offices in the Pentagon, with friends in their think tanks figuring out how to dupe Americans with their magic.

What slight of hand can get people to not see the killing? That takes some real smarts.

Now it's time for change. It's time to see people as brothers and sisters.

If I ever meet you in person, I'll know I'm with a friend. That is actually what this is all about. And it IS binary.

Amen, old friend.

Thank you.

I've always been optimistic that peace is possible. It seems to me that it all stems from the fear of scarcity. It is a mirage. It just looks like we won't get what we want. I keep learning more and more about this as time goes on. I fall victim to it, and then recover, realizing that being kind will get me far more happiness than getting "mine".

I just began negotiations with one of the big corporations in the US. I have been tempted to grab all I can get since I have them by the short hairs. But it began weighing on me after first trying to get all I could out of them. I had them running, and decided for a number of reasons to be human. I realized that mistreating anyone is still mistreatment. Last week I contacted them and renegotiated my offer with the phrase "whatever works for both of us". I can't tell you how relieved I am. People say nice guys come in last. You know, I'd rather come in last and have a conscience. I can breathe easier. I can live with myself. I can drive by their office and not feel like the bad guy.

Whether it's our overuse of resources or our fear that China might get that oil and grow too fast, it all comes from fear that we won't get what we want. And that comes from seeing others as opponents rather than fellow occupants of this tiny planet in the dark vastness of space. Together we make art; Separated we make enemies.

I hope you're doing well.

Thank you Gregorian!

Stellar quote, too. Mind if I steal it?

"Together we make art. Separated we make enemies."

That is SO "IT"! That is just so absolutely IT. We need a whole different mindset nowadays. We have to adopt a new mentality - particularly in THESE times. When we face problems that are planet-wide. Problems like climate change. Health crises like AIDS and Ebola. Mass migrations of people - many of them poor. Dwindling resources. Terrorism, which knows no boundaries. Cyber-war - also an issue that knows no boundaries.

These and other issues affect, and afflict, everybody. No matter the locale, the language, the skin color, the gender, the belief system, the nationality, the age, OR what's in one's bank account. Across-the-Board. Unfortunately these common, broad-based, widespread problems both unite us and divide us ss the same time! We HAVE TO solve them together rather than let them compel us to set upon each other and blame and fight and hate and resent and misunderstand.

It's been said here many times before and it applies like crazy: we all need to hang together, or we all hang separately.

I'm laughing because I just got back from a walk, and saw your reply. I had to reread my post to see what I had written. To be honest, I don't remember writing that. It IS pretty good.

Well, it WAS a great post!

The late R. Buckminster Fuller talked to turning our efforts from "killingry to livingry." We're still ignoring him, and Pres. Eisenhower's warnings about the Military-Industrial Complex.

The true criminal acts are apparently poor folks having any kind of happiness, so says the media, so must we all believe.

I agree the budget for killing (bullets, rifles, armor, etc) needs fixing. One thing that is over looked in this area is the technology advancement made via DoD funding. Companies don't have the means to fund "experimental engineering", and we would literally not have the modern day mode of communication (including the internet), which has been a great catalyst for change, without the DARPA programs that developed it.

At an average cost of $178 million a copy with a projected program cost of $1.5 trillion unless it's cancelled, which seems unlikely even if it never flies right. If it isn't cancelled and stays on schedule, it will be the most expensive weapons program in history.

Sen. Sanders Balances Opposition to Lockheed Corruption With Energy/Labor Partnerships W/Affiliates

By 2011, Sanders was also supporting the Pentagon’s proposal to base Lockheed-built F-35 fight jets at the Burlington International Airport. Despite his past criticisms of the corporation’s serial misconduct and excess, he joined with Vermont’s most enthusiastic booster, Senator Patrick Leahy, signing on to a joint statement of support. If the fighter jet, widely considered a massive military boondoggle, was going to be built and deployed anyway, Sanders argued that some of the work ought to done by Vermonters, while Vermont National Guard jobs should certainly be protected. Noise impacts and neighborhood dislocation were minimized, while criticism of corporate exploitation had given way to pork barrel politics and a justification based on protecting military jobs.


more, in responses:

BURLINGTON, Vt., Dec. 3 – Vermont’s congressional delegation – Sens. Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch – along with Gov. Peter Shumlin issued the following statement today after the Air Force announced its decision on basing F-35 aircraft at the Vermont Air National Guard:

“The Air Force decision to base its newest generation of planes in Burlington is a tribute to the Vermont Air National Guard, which is the finest in the nation. It reflects the Guard’s dedication to its mission and long record of outstanding performance. The Air Force has made clear that this aircraft, which will anchor our national air defenses, is the Air Force’s future. Now the men and women of Vermont’s Air National Guard have been chosen for a vital role in that future. The decision ensures the Vermont Air Guard’s continuing mission and protects hundreds of jobs and educational opportunities for Vermonters while securing its significant contribution to the local economy. We appreciate the Guard’s commitment to continue working with its airport neighbors to address legitimate concerns about noise and other environmental concerns.”
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/delegation-statement-on-f-35s


Bernie Sanders Doubles Down on F-35 Support Days After Runway Explosion

Me: “You mentioned wasteful military spending. The other day ... I’m sure you’ve heard about the F-35 catching fire on the runway. The estimated lifetime expense of the F-35 is $1.2 trillion. When you talk about cutting wasteful military spending, does that include the F-35 program?”

Bernie Sanders: “No, and I’ll tell you why – it is essentially built. It is the airplane of the United States Air Force, Navy, and of NATO. It was a very controversial issue in Vermont. And my view was that given the fact that the F-35, which, by the way, has been incredibly wasteful, that’s a good question. But for better or worse, that is the plane of record right now, and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.”

That was the exchange I had with US senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a town hall in Warner, New Hampshire, this past weekend (skip to the 45:30 mark of this video to hear my question). Sanders came to New Hampshire to gauge the local response to his economic justice-powered platform for a presumed 2016 presidential campaign. While his rabid defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and takedown of big money running politics was well-received, he contradicted his position of eliminating wasteful military spending while defending the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 is the epitome of Pentagon waste. The program has already cost taxpayers roughly half a trillion dollars, with $700 billion or more to come during the program’s lifetime. During an interview, Pierre Sprey, a co-designer of the F-16, went into great detail about how the F-35 was a lemon aircraft. Sprey explained that the fighter is an excessively heavy gas guzzler with small wings, a low bomb-carry capacity, low loiter time, is incapable of slow flight, is detectable to World War II-era low-frequency radar, and costs $200 million apiece. And just a little over a week ago, the F-35 caught fire on a runway at Eglin Air Force Base.

To his credit, Sanders acknowledged that the program was “wasteful” in his defense of it. The contention over the F-35 in his home state of Vermont is that the program is now responsible for jobs in his hometown of Burlington, where he served as mayor before running for Congress. Some front doors of homes in the Burlington area are adorned with green ribbons, signifying support for the F-35. Sanders, like his colleagues in 45 states around the country, doesn’t want to risk the wrath of voters angry about job losses related to F-35 manufacturing, assembly, and training if the program were to be cut. And that’s where Lockheed Martin’s political savvy comes into play.
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/24583-bernie-sanders-doubles-down-on-f-35-support-days-after-runway-explosion


from the Atlantic:

Whatever its technical challenges, the F-35 is a triumph of political engineering, and on a global scale. For a piquant illustration of the difference that political engineering can make, consider the case of Bernie Sanders—former Socialist mayor of Burlington, current Independent senator from Vermont, possible candidate from the left in the next presidential race. In principle, he thinks the F-35 is a bad choice. After one of the planes caught fire last summer on a runway in Florida, Sanders told a reporter that the program had been “incredibly wasteful.” Yet Sanders, with the rest of Vermont’s mainly left-leaning political establishment, has fought hard to get an F-35 unit assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard in Burlington, and to dissuade neighborhood groups there who think the planes will be too noisy and dangerous. “For better or worse, the F-35 is the plane of record right now,” Sanders told a local reporter after the runway fire last year, “and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.” It’s going to be somewhere, so why not here? As Vermont goes, so goes the nation.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/


At times, Sanders has even showed a willingness to compromise that's disappointed longtime ideological allies. He has supported the F-35, Lockheed Martin's problem-plagued fighter jet that has led to hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns, which just so happens to be manufactured in Vermont. "He became what we call up here a 'Vermont Exceptionalist,'" Guma says, of the candidate's pragmatic streak.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/young-bernie-sanders-liberty-union-vermont

what it is the issue I'm trying to figure. A runway show? It seems to be requesting a F-35 unit in Burlington, if the plane is already made might as well for one, I don't know better than selling it to the House of Saud.

We are well into the "just buy me a time-machine" phase of throwing good money after bad.

Hillary said yesterday in her campaign kick-off speech that as president she would do "whatever it takes to keep Americans safe."

If by that she means rejecting the influence of the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about and say NO to military solutions that keep the wheel (referred to in the OP) rolling, then I just might break my vow to never support a candidate in a Democratic primary who voted for the IWR in October 2002.

But, sadly, I sincerely doubt that is what president HRC would do.

Yes, there are real "threats" out there -- but they are largely of our own making.

We need a president who will stop making them.

And the American people need to WAKE UP and see this militarism for what it is.

The American people have been programmed to fear bogeymen halfway around the world and to hate each other across the chasm of left/right politics.

All of which keeps attention away from those who are behind the curtain pulling the strings.

War is a Racket.

Thank you William.

I was born in '71, so Vietnam was not part of my memory outside of the Hollywood versions of the war. In the early 80's, as VHS and Betamax brought movies into the home in a big way, I watched 'The Deer Hunter', 'Coming Home', 'Apocalypse Now' and thought the war was the way those films portrayed it - horrific, family- and relationship-rending horrific, a meat grinder for the men who fought and a gut-wrenching experience for those who had loved ones fight and die....then 'First Blood' was made. The first movie with John Rambo's exploits should have hewed to the book it was adapted from...if it had, MILLIONS of lives might not have been lost since then. In the book, Rambo dies in the shootout with law enforcement. The story is a tragedy of how a soldier went to Vietnam and lost everything, only to return home and lose more. Hollywood turned the story into "Rambo: First Blood Part II" and had a lone American Green Beret take out an entire division of the NVA - AND their Soviet "trainers" for good measure.

Along with 'Red Dawn', the Rambo movie version dove-tailed nicely with the fiction of Reagan and the soul of this nation being sold to the highest military bidder. Grenada and Panama were the dress rehearsals...the big one would have to wait until Kuwait...

I remember Gulf War I, and the run-up to that conflict. Asking the question "Didn't we give this Saddam guy all of those weapons in the first place?" was seen as unpatriotic, bordering on treason. I can remember being at student protests on campus in winter 1990 - 1991 and having people screaming "LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT" because we were standing with people who had the temerity to save "Give Peace a Chance". The feeling was one of a war rally surrounding a small group of peace protesters. It was mob rule and it was frightening to actually feel.

Peace lost there, badly.

I also remember bitterly the discussion I had with some people in the aftermath of 9/11/01. "This means war!", they cried on the 13th. To which I asked, "War against who? This was not some country that did this...are you really in favor of a war on an emotion?" They were as nonplussed as you might have imagined or experienced yourselves...naive, bleeding heart liberal, fool....just a few of the words used to describe me. the clearly commie-pinko-pacifist who would pee on the flag if he could...

Peace lost there, worse than the first time...so bad in fact that it never actually stopped this time.
At least after Gulf War I, we DID leave for a time....well, if you don't count the planes and ships and drones and satellites.

It enrages me to know that things could have been so much different. If the money sunk into all this war, death and destruction had been re-tasked into scientific research in energy and constructing a 21st century infrastructure for the United States - instead of destroying a 20th century one in Iraq and a 19th century one in Afghanistan - I literally shake with righteous anger and rage at what has been done to humanity.

In the 6th century AD, following the final collapses of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church had taken control of Europe and plunged Western society into the first Dark Ages in large part to enhance their power base and protect their control of the populace.

Welcome to the second Dark Ages. This time though, through war and weapons and societal stratification, the war machine is the church and NO ONE is safe. Between the mindset that says military might makes right and solves all problems and the obfuscation on what is happening to the climate and why...Dark Ages II is going to be every bit of what a sequel is - more suffering, bigger death tolls, larger explosions, longer in duration.

The wheel goes round and round and the people of conscience and those that desire peace get rolled over again and again and again...

Greetings from an old hippie

I remember the Vietnam war and the protests. Those memories were fresh when the war fever began rising post 9/11. I just wish I had been active in the anti-war movement then.

At least Clinton cut the war machine. Obama is being lead around by the nose by this machine. I thought he would be different, at least on war, but wonder if that was just a facade.

...but a lot of people's employment depends on it.

I was just reading the other day that Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics alone each have around 100,000 employees worldwide. And that's not counting all the other contractors and employees from other firms, big and small.

The majority of these employees are in the US, and strategically spread out over many states and congressional districts. So essentially nobody in Washington wants to touch it.

It's a major force driving growing inequality, and it has a never-satisfied thirst for our tax dollars and the blood of our young people!

and taking America apart piece by piece to do it.

Any war in the Middle East is a war for oil, and what we don't need is oil. It is long passed the time that we start an aggressive program to supplement and eventually supplant fossil fuels as a source of energy with renewable sources. No amount of oil is worth one more drop of a young American fighter's blood.

If ExxonMobil wants to stay in business, then Mr. Tillerson might try adjusting his corporation's business plan to invest in the technology of the future. That's better than investing in something as unprofitable and harmful as fracking, isn't it?

is a good idea.

But, of course, wages are intentionally kept low to keep people in poverty and make the military seem like the only way out. The corporate profiteers need their cannon fodder to make their trillions.

Also, in my opinion oil is just a small part of this endless war mentality. They want to keep making massive profits off all the things that go into sending Americans overseas to maim and slaughter brown people for some fictional goal. It doesn't matter if they make it on oil or cafeteria gruel or a gun -- it's a profit.

It is in theory the lowest wage offered that they can get away with. It all varies on how many competitors, the labor market, bargaining power, etc. Strong unions raise overall wages better than anything else because a strick has an effect of shrinking the labor supply and in situations of excessive demand you raise the price. Excessive supply (labor) you lower the supply.

Free trade has given big business freedom to move around the world to find the cheaper labor killing the bargaining power of the unions. Don't think it was by design for the military but increasing the labor supply is better for them because they can offer lower wages. I've seen corporate reform of the GED which is a significant leap in difficulty with questions written meant to be as confusing as possible. Those without a GED have significantly higher unemployment than GED/High School and make up a large part of the "chronically homeless" (they also can't join the military either). Good for them because even more people in the labor market.

America’s Perpetual Protection Racket in Iraq (Part 1)
October 27, 2014 by Ron Fullwood (bigtree)

America’s Protection Racket In Iraq: We Never Learn (Part 2)

I've always viewed Barack Obama's approach to the Pentagon's prerogatives as naive compromises...that's not to say that he doesn't agree with the initiatives he promotes and employs in his military pursuits, but there's been too much of a deferential response to the wishes and advice from, what has been throughout his presidency, a collection of holdovers and cohorts of the same cabal of military-industrial warriors from the Bush administration. Even his choice of Hagel was a compromise between a liberal perspective and view of military policy and a moderate or conservative one.

Both Bush and Obama made their representations of the threat to the U.S. in a manner which assumed their unilateral authority to use our military forces (at least initially) anyway they see fit, without congressional pre-approval - justified almost entirely in their view by their opportunistic declarations that our security is threatened. It makes no difference at all that one justification for the use of military force abroad was a lie and the other isn't. BOTH distort and misrepresent the actual threat to our national security for the exact same reason.

That was the slippery slope that Bush used to war. That's the slope that Pres. Obama used to escalate Bush's Afghanistan occupation far beyond the former republican presidency's limits - with the catastrophic result of scores more casualties than Bush to our forces during this Democratic administration's first term and scores more innocent Afghans dead, maimed, or uprooted. That's the assumed 'authority' Pres. Obama is insisting he has to redeploy troops to Iraq today without congressional approval.

In pressing forward with a U.S. military response to the latest atrocities committed within Syria and Iraq, this Democratic president conceded almost all of the ground we thought we'd covered in repudiating the opportunistic Bush wars. Bush's were waged, certainly, for oil and other greed; but just as certainly to effect U.S. expansionist ideals involving regime changes and 'dominoes.' The results, worldwide, of contemporary U.S. interventionism, speak for themselves. Pres. Obama believes his new 'pollyandish misadventure' in Iraq says something uniquely democratic and inspiring to countries in that region with his military forces directing attacks in countries which pose no actual threat to our nation. I'm afraid that all any one outside of this country hears is empire.

in defense spending.

for an extended period of time.

And that, in turn, would lead to its own brand of madness, for better or worse. Would it be better to risk it, or continue to allow oligarchs to gain power and rule over us until our country completely regresses to monarchy?

In the meantime, I'll be doing what I can to help folks like Bernie lead us in any political attempt to institute democracy.

Thanks for the fine OP.

and all we can do is inch towards progress. Bernie would be a small start but the best hope we have for now.

... just what is it the defense budget is defending?

doing all of the grunt work, constructions jobs, did convoys with us, etc.

The Intercept pointed out 47 $1.5 million dollar Lockheed Martin bombs were dropped in one day. That was a good day because they'll probably be looking to restock their supply.

I've been to Iraq actually and feel you hit the nail on the head. This is my favorite part

Few things in life drive me farther up the wall than when I hear people, pundits, whoever, describe the Iraq invasion and ongoing war as a "blunder" or a "mistake." Tell your story walking, because I don't want to hear it. It was neither. It was a deliberate and calculated payday, one of many over many years and at the expense of many departed souls, for a war industry that needs to be broken across the knee of this democracy, if this democracy can still be said to exist.

I always think of Bill Hicks and how he compared us to the gunfighter Jack Palance played so well in Shane.
Spitting insults and tossing handguns at the feet of the unarmed sheep ranchers who dared to come to town, cursing them to pick it up, gunning them down and then claiming self-defense.
"You all saw him. He had a gun."