National paranoia has produced the most massively inflated military forces the world has ever seen. The Pentagon has quietly encircled the earth with small bases poetically called “lilypads” from which our forces can leapfrog to almost any point in the world on very brief notice. Lilypads have been proliferated while, simultaneously, with much fanfare, shutting down many huge, long-established bases, though far from all. Small lilypad bases can be quickly enlarged at need, whatever that need may be, howsoever determined by whom. We are talking about hundreds of bases, many of them stocked with arms and supplies, ready for increased manning with personel ready for any contingency. One set of bases forms a containment ring around China. [See links.]
To what earthly purpose? Why would Chinese attack us, even were we to default on our vast debt to them? Do we have a great stake in protecting their neighbors on the South China Sea? True, China still has an acquisitive eye on Taiwan and some small islands, maybe part of the Phillipines — for what? Fishing rights and fruit production? Politics inside China to support naval expansion? Arms race with the US and others, just to entertain their populace and (like ourselves) impress the governing class with itself? Vent national tensions and frustrations? Express societal egotism?
The American public knows next to nothing about what is going on. Our army is taking casualties in Somalia, can you believe it? We have small forces seemingly everywhere. I fail to see how this defends our people more than the interests of a Military-Industrial-Complex. Psychologically speaking, our country is in the grip of more than one kind of “complex.” We are on the edge of madness internally and as a whole nation externally in the world scene. Europe is on the verge of collapse and the US is not far behind.
It looks as if we are preparing to fight the whole world at once. I for one fail to see our national security as terribly endangered. My guess is, it is a small class of ultra-rich manipulators who care for nothing but to maintain and secure their status and power at any cost to anything and everyone else on earth. It is that corporate governance including the Military-Industrial-Complex which would set policy and put popular democracy and legislation at naught so as to assert its dictatorial will on the world.
If this is true, it matters not which party wins the next election. The self-serving octopus of corporations will have its way with no approval, oversight or direction by congress. The administration, including the president, will be involuntary puppets whose strings are pulled by aliens in a financial stratosphere who care only for power to suck blood from the whole world and give nothing back but to fake an appearance of generous concern for humanity. Decades ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs portrayed it all in his novel, The Land That Time Forgot, portraying a social class so depraved as beggared all hope.
Here we sit, objecting to sensible gun control. What a bunch of comedians! Can we really suppose our nation motivated by good will to all, rather than an insane avarice for status and dominance within and without? Are we so hardened to corruption of mind and society that we care for peaceful accord only with others just like us? Have we so rotted away that the national unconscious drives us to wholesale destruction? Maybe it’s as my old classmate, poet Diane Wakoski, once wrote, “Justice is reason enough / for everything bad in the world!” After six decades, to this day I can still hear her raging voice! And there is more reason for rage than ever, and less “justice for all.”
<http://www.alternet.org/story/156180/how_the_american_military_machine_endangers_the_whole_world_?page=entire>
<http://www.alternet.org/story/156343/washington%27s_newest_tool_for_global_domination?page=entire>
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