FACEBOOK
TWITTER
It’s Always About The Money So On With This REVOLUTION!
by Eileen Fleming
As the August 2nd deadline fast approaches to raise the government-borrowing limit, President Obama called on Congress two days before this Independence Day to make a deal and announced, “Nothing can be off-limits…We’ve got to cut the deficit.” [1]
Republican Senator Dan Coats responded, “It’s time for bold action and a new plan to address our current crisis” and that it was time for the government to “stop spending money we don’t have and to enact policies that will grow our economy and get Americans back to work.” [Ibid]
Two hundred and thirty five years ago to this 4th of July, America’s Founding Fathers established the following principals and truths to be self-evident: that all PEOPLE are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable RIGHTS; that, among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these RIGHTS, governments are instituted among PEOPLE, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the RIGHT of the people to alter or to abolish it.
The Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776, indicted a government that engaged in barbaric conduct contrary to the laws of Humanity that included “works of death, destruction and tyranny unparalleled in the most barbaric ages” that is until the Age of Now!
Where ever we lay our money down reflects our heart and mind and citizens of conscience comprehend that budgets are moral documents.
Obama’s 2012 budget request to Congress not just adds to our current debt of $14.3 trillion but Obama’s $3.7 Trillion Budget Calls for Military Spending Increases and Deep Cuts to Social Service Programs!
“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.”-Rev. MLK
Obama’s budget adds another $3.075 billion in military aid to Israel although Israel has consistently misused U.S. Made weapons in violation of America’s Arms Export and Control and Foreign Assistance Acts and in spite of the fact that everywhere except in this republic the 44 years of military occupation of Palestine is viewed as a US-Israeli collaboration!
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad involvement in the terror upon America, “By his own account…stemmed from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” [2]
Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day in 2009, was fueled by “his sympathies toward the Palestinians and anger over Israel’s actions in Gaza.” [Ibid]
President ‘Nuclear Free World’ Obama’s FY 2012 for the National Nuclear Security Administration includes 7.6 billion for nuclear weapons research and production, which is 8.4% above his FY 2011 request and 19% above his FY 2010 request.
Funding for a new “Uranium Processing Facility” for production of thermonuclear secondaries at the Y-12 production plant near Oak Park Ridge, TN, is proposed to increase to $160.2 million from $115 million in FY 2011.
Obama’s FY 2012 budget request also creates a new Life Extension Program for the B61 warhead funded at $223.6 million, even though that gravity bomb’s original mission of forward deployment in Europe against a Soviet threat vanished at the end of the Cold War.
Life Extension Programs extend the service lives of existing nuclear weapons for three decades or more, in contradiction to our declared national security goal of a future world free of nuclear weapons, and it also endows them with new military capabilities. [3]
Life Extension Programs also undermine sound national security by introducing major changes to America’s existing nuclear weapons stockpile that had been extensively tested and known to be most reliable weapons of mass destruction.
“The dominant mission of Y-12 today is the production of new and or/refurbished thermonuclear secondaries for existing US nuclear warheads as part of the Stockpile Life Extension Program [LEP]. These include life extension upgrades to the W-76 that will result in the W-76 Modification 1, a warhead with new military capabilities.”-[4]
“All W-76 and W-76-1 thermonuclear secondaries produced at Y-12 are designed and produced to unleash 100 KT of uncontrollable and indiscriminate heat, blast and radiation, six times more than the Hiroshima Bomb.” [5]
On 8 July 1996, the International Court of Justice issued the statement:
“The destructive power of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in either space or time. They have the potential to destroy all civilization and the entire ecosystem of the planet.”
The ICJ also affirmed the “fundamental, cardinal and intransgressible” rule that “States must never make civilians the object of attack and must consequently never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilians and military targets.”
States have obligations. People have rights.
“If it is a basic human right to be free of threat or violence, if the right to life is a basic human right, if the protection of children and future generations is a basic human duty, international law must unhesitatingly recognize that the right to non violent resistance activities for the prevention of such an international crime is basic to human dignity.” [6]
On 1 July 2011, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote:
“Eliminating nuclear weapons is the democratic wish of the world’s people…squandering billions of dollars on modernization of nuclear [weapons, makes] a mockery of United Nations disarmament pledges. If we allow this madness to continue, the eventual use of these instruments of terror seems all but inevitable.
“The nuclear power crisis at Japan’s Fukushima power plant has served as a dreadful reminder that events thought unlikely can and do happen…it must not take another Hiroshima or Nagasaki – or an even greater disaster – before [we] finally wake up and recognize the urgent necessity of nuclear disarmament.
“One standard must apply to all countries: zero.
“Nuclear arms are wicked, regardless of who possesses them. The unspeakable human suffering that they inflict is the same whatever flag they may bear. So long as these weapons exist, the threat of their use – either by accident or through an act of sheer madness – will remain.
“We must not tolerate a system of nuclear apartheid, in which it is considered legitimate for some states to possess nuclear arms but patently unacceptable for others to seek to acquire them. Such a double standard is no basis for peace and security in the world.
“Every dollar invested in bolstering a country’s nuclear arsenal is a diversion of resources from its schools, hospitals, and other social services, and a theft from the millions around the globe who go hungry or are denied access to basic medicines.” [7]
In 1987, Israel’s Nuclear Whistle Blower, Mordechai Vanunu wrote from Ashkelon Prison:
“No government, not even the most democratic, can force us to live under this threat. No state in the world can offer any kind of security against this menace of a nuclear holocaust, or guarantee to prevent it.
“Any country, which manufactures and stocks nuclear weapons, is first of all endangering its own citizens. This is why the citizens must confront their government and warn it that it has no right to expose them to this danger. Because, in effect, the citizens are being held hostage by their own government, just as if they have been hijacked and deprived of their freedom and threatened.
“When governments develop nuclear weapons they are violating the basic rights of their citizens, the basic right not to live under constant threat of annihilation.” [8]
Common Sense comprehends that getting America out of its immoral debt will require more than what Obama admitted in eliminating “tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or for hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners, or for oil and gas companies pulling in huge profits without our help…we’ll have to make even deeper cuts somewhere else.” [9]
The deep cuts that must be made require the revolutionary political will that Thomas Paine, America’s most forward thinking Founding Father comprehended:
“Soon after I had published the pamphlet “Common Sense” [on Feb. 14, 1776] in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion…The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”
We the people are suppose to be the government and thus it is up to US to bring in the Intifada [Arabic for rise up and cast off] against nuclear insanity so that future generations will have their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
- Obama: ” Nothing can be off- limits in budget
- Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2010, page 35
- BudgetRequest.pdf
- Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance [OREPA], November 2009.
- Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March/April 2009.
- Judge Weeramantry, “The Trident and International Law, Scotland’s Obligations” Feb. 3, 2009.
- www.WagingPeace.org
- BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=119093
Posted by Eileen Fleming on Jul 2 2011, With 0 Reads, Filed under WarZone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
COMMENTS
To post, we ask that you login using Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail in the box below.Don't have a social network account? Register and Login direct with VT and post.
Before you post, read our Comment Policy - Feedback
Definitely in the zero nuke camp these days (as I’m sure most people are, whether or not they know it)… Never really thought about them from the psy-op perspective, but I’m sure the brain is always aware at some level that all life on earth could end in a few seconds (more or less, and it kinda makes you wonder what else we can just “put on the back burner”). I wonder what the aggregate psychological toll is on populations with and without them. Finally, it seems to me that the Japanese have taken the brunt of the nuclear age, and I don’t think that’s an accident. It would seem possible for all or most of the major social events at least since the Renaissance to have happened as they have been recorded, however for very different, and probably not obvious, reasons. Either way, as mr. Nichols says, they’re pissing radioactive in Fukushima…
“…that all PEOPLE are created equal…”
unless, of course, you’re attending college in Michigan:
http://www.sacbee/2011/07/01/3742401/appeals-court-rejects-michigan.html
Honestly, I can only think of ONE JUDGE, an Irishman, worthy of sitting on any bench in this country. I hope, to hades, there are more.
Put the following in your favorite “search engine”…:
Court tosses ban on race, gender as factors
EQUITY, my a$$
“The focus is talent and skill sets, not gender” by Lt Maura Garrity:
http://www.ausn.org/NewsPublications/Magazine/tabid/2043/articleId/8581/The-focus-is-talent-and-skill-sets-not-gender.aspx
The article’s in the June 2011 issue…put the title in your “search engine”.
The Iraq War to date has cost the US,according to the National Priorities Project,$ 785,177,874,000,00. Who sent Gen.Powell to the UN with insufficient intelligence? Who wanted ,and went,to war with Iraq with later proven incorrect intelligence? And now the military are going to help pay for that war. That political party does not want to increase the tax of the wealthy even though the Gov of Minnesota stated,”Unto whomsoever much is given,of him shall be nuch required” Whose son fought the Iraq War? Wake up USA!
TRYING to Wake Up the USA has been my mission since my first trip to Israel Palestine in 2005. Three weeks after my first trip I established http://www.wearewideawake.org
My Mission Statement was and remains:
WAWA/WeAreWideAwake is my Public Service to America as a muckracker who has journeyed seven times to Israel Palestine since June 2005. WAWA is dedicated to confronting media and governments that shield the whole truth.
We who Are Wide Awake are compelled by the “fierce urgency of Now” [Rev MLK, Jr.] to raise awareness and promote the human dialogue about many of the crucial issues of our day: the state of our Union and in protection of democracy, what life is like under military occupation in Palestine, the Christian EXODUS from the Holy Land, and spirituality-from a Theologically Liberated Christian Anarchist POV.
All about money. Wonder if raising the debt ceiling is another way to feed the Military Industrial Complex? To feed another endless war, gaining no ground, changing no peoples way of life and doing nothing for America except to make the ‘impossibly rich folks’ richer by taking the other country’s oil and their possessions? How much of each person’s (an average person please) taxes are paying for what we are doing here (the Patriot act) and what we are doing there in wars overseas? Sounds like back in the 30s when the powers that ‘were’ decided to get rid of 80 million or so people and ruin economies for fun and profit.
It is no longer just the Military Industrial Complex that we the people are up against, but The Corporate Media Government Military SECURITY/Surveillance Industrial Complex and Israel:
In 2007, Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, argued that at the height of the 2003-07 economic boom, the military industrial complex was driving Israel’s tremendous economic growth, and Israel had the largest GDP growth of any Western country.
Klein theorized that the source of Israel’s tremendous economic growth in the past five years cannot be attributed simply to its encouragement of high tech entrepreneurship and basic science. Its success must be understood, rather, as a product of its ability to use the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory for defense industry innovation — and to showcase their wares.
“Young Israeli computer scientists and engineers gain their training in the military, and then go on to start the kind of technology companies that have proliferated wildly in Israel and whose products are much sought after abroad. The entire Israeli hi-tech sector and not just military technology per se, is thus an outgrowth of Israel’s hyper militarization. The Israeli economy’s tech sector grew by 20% in 2006 alone, and Israel is now the foreign country with the second most US stock exchange-listed companies. Klein’s point that Israel’s military-derived technologies are an economic growth-driver because they can be tested in situ is correct, but it is insufficient for describing the magnitude of the military’s tremendous penetration of the country’s economy. Palestinians under occupation can indeed be seen as human “guinea pigs” and not just merely military targets, as Klein claims, but the society’s militarization is far more profound than even she suggests.” [1]
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and “suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners…Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom–a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war…Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999…That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world…Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion–an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are …precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror… Israel’s policy of erecting walls and checkpoints to seal off the occupied territories are also “laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested Palestinians–whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling “Hamasistan”–are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs…” [2]
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=860&Itemid=198
END THE WARS…STARVE THE BEAST!
Since the FED owns many U.S. government bonds and treasury bills worth trillions of dollars, many have suggested that it would help the government if it destroyed them so that the government would not owe on them. The same could be said about the big banks that got to borrow money from the FED at close to 0% interest and the big banks then cleverly went and bought U.S. government bonds and treasuries that paid higher interest rates than it cost the big banks to borrow the money so that the banks made big profits on this and made the U.S. government owe the big banks more than the big banks owed the government even though the U.S. government bailed them out with almost free money in the first place. If the U.S. government defaults and declares bankruptcy, the FED and the big banks will move in and take anything and everything such as assets like land and resources that the government has for repayment.
Perhaps this may be more in their interest since government protected hard assets will be sought after.
Came across this article written in 2009- Economic Fascism and the Bailout Economy- Gary North
What can be done about it? Politically, nothing. The American political system has been soft-core fascist for almost a century. Liberals love to call conservatives fascists. The problem is, the liberals are right. Of course, well-informed conservatives like to call liberals fascists, and they are correct, too. Everyone who believes in the efficiency of the so-called government-business alliance is a fascist.
The fascist State was always an attempt to control private industry by means of inflation, taxation, and regulation. Fascism was always a system of keeping the big boys alive and happy at the expense of the taxpayers. Of course, the faces changed. The system was always one gigantic system of cartels, regulation, and fiat money. It was, in short, everything that the critics of modern capitalism say is wrong with capitalism. This is why John Maynard Keynes wrote this in his Foreword to the German edition of his General Theory (1936).
This economy will revive, but it will revive on a new basis. It is no longer possible for someone who understands Austrian School economics to look at this economy as anything remotely resembling a free-market economy. At the very core of the free-market economy, as Mises said in 1912, is the monetary system. That system is now completely and openly run by a cartel that is now trapped by the Federal government. The Federal Reserve System is soon going to have to bail out the Federal government. The Federal government is bailing out the commercial banks, and if the Federal government cannot bail out the banks, the Federal Reserve has got to do it directly. In either case, the banks are busted. The capital is gone: wasted. The money is still in people’s bank accounts, but the fiat-money-funded projects have turned out to be losers. The skyscrapers are empty. The recovery is going to be a nominal recovery, based on the digits known as dollars. These digits are going to be produced in such massive quantities that prices will shoot up as never before in peacetime America. It is going to be the destruction of the dollar.
We are seeing the culmination of a century of bad economic policies. Academic economists never sounded the alarm after 1936. They did not sound the alarm because they are the paid agents of the State, certified by earlier generations of paid agents of the State. The State has paid for the services of these men and women, and they perform accordingly. They understand the fundamental rule: “When you take the king’s shilling, you do the king’s bidding.”
The academic economists never mention the fact it was the expansionary policies of the Federal Reserve during the 1920′s that led to the collapse of the banking system in the early 1930′s. The FED had been set up so as to prevent any such collapse, and yet that collapse was the worst collapse in American history. Then what is the right approach? What do the economists say should be done? Give more power to the Federal Reserve System. That is exactly what has been done over the last five months, and the academic economists cheer.
The academic economists say that things will recover. They tell us that it will again be business as usual. They tell us that once we get through this crisis, the American economy will boom once again. They believe in the fascist economy. They believe that government regulation is better than the free market. They believe the government-run, bankruptcy-protected banks, which we now openly have, are better than private, profit-seeking institutions that are not protected by a government-created cartel called the Federal Reserve System. They believe in fascism, and they are going to tell you that everything is fine as the fascist State extends power over every aspect of our lives.
BROKEN PROMISES, WANING FAITH
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north683.html