America’s ascendancy to world power status occurred during its period of inter-war isolationism. Its pre-eminence was catapulted further by its involvement in World War Two. The spoils of war and removal of Germany and Japan as major trade competitors seemed to make America’s position unassailable.
This was strengthened further by Britain’s wartime yielding of its Imperial Preference; the surrender of empire assets, and grateful acceptance of a Washington D.C credit card set at ruinous rates to help pay for its war. American hegemony was assured, or was it?
It was a temporary illusion for Germany speedily restored its superiority as a manufacturing nation. Japan, another defeated nation, was soon flooding American markets with better quality less expensive manufactured goods. Both Victory in Europe (VE) and Victory over Japan (VJ) celebrations seemed a little premature; the victor’s cup was empty.
China then emerged to turn the once proud, self-sufficient and independent America into a vast Wal-Mart stretching from Canada to the Mexican border.
Natural Resources Seized
If trade wars were loss-makers perhaps the answer lay in the capture and control of the earth’s natural resources upon which trade competitors are wholly dependent.
It is doubtful if the ordinary American John Doe realises that piratical wars of mineral acquisition are also futile; they are ruinously expensive and inexcusable in terms of human suffering?
American Democratic Congressman, Alan Grayson (Florida) is furious at the White House and Pentagon’s vacuuming up of tens of billions of U.S. dollars to finance wars and military occupations abroad. He says; “War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape; so much so that no one notices it anymore.”
War is Making you Poor
The U.S. parliamentarian is referring directly to America’s occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Far bigger fiscal and security threats are presented by American aid to Israel, belligerency towards Iran and Venezuela; insinuations against Turkey and Brazil, and meddling in the Russian Federation’s zones of self-interest. The Congressman is further outraged by the White House and Pentagon doing ‘business as usual’ behind closed doors of debate and dissent.
Grayson has produced a bill in which the theme is: ‘The War is Making you Poor’ By doing so he hopes to bring home to the American people the cost of American aggression in ways by which they can better understand how it personally effects them. He says: “The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars.”
Tax Free Incomes
He goes on to say: “Next year’s budget allocates $159,000,000,000 to perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s enough money to eliminate federal income taxes for the first $35,000 of every American’s income. Beyond that, (it) leaves only $15 billion to cut the deficit, plus it pays down the national debt.”
The congressman is presuming that the key to opening up a real debate about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is to make real the cost of these occupations to American families.
He concludes by saying: “The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There’s no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder.
“Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war,” explains Grayson, with a reference to the mounting trade deficit with China. “We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don’t even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using ‘emergency supplemental’.
If Americans recognize what they are personally paying to maintain occupations of distant lands, Grayson argues that Americans will tell Congress: “the cost of these wars is too much for us.”
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Sigh…(shades of The forever War)…Lets just put a measily 2 billion into the Mprize/SENS foundations (tax free in the US and UK)…because, Aubre de Grey founded them over 10 years ago and they are working on developing advanced biotech/nanotech to slow and stop the damage of aging (see the 60 min show from 2006, also, the two documentaries comming out this year (2010) are: “To age or not to age” and “The singularity is near”).
Both these documentaries feature Aubre de Grey and a lot of other researchers from big US universities that are working on solving the aging challenge.
Why do we wage wars (actually, there are tons of good books on amazon about that!, look at some, they really do a good job of explaining these issues over the last 2 centuries), but really, do we actually need these constant war mongering status…we really need to push for the application of adanced biotech/nanotech to solve global warming (capturing CO2 from the atmosphere), growing and recycling all our “toys”, gathering sunlight in super efficient plastic solar cell tech etc.
Do we really need to continue spending ourselves into bankruptcy (this is from a US viewpoint), and then lose out to the next nanotech revolution (including the afformentioned life extenstion tech that could take and old person and make them young again), do we need to have countries like China and India (who are now are and turning into the next tech super-powers), who will then implement the next nanotech/biotech life extension brekthroughs and will gladlly sell the treatment back to a now barnkrupted US (if you thougth that the personal computer revolution made Apple and Microsoft and teh US rich and the center of all high-tech, then you have not seen anything when the nanotech/biotech advances bring life-extension tech and where nanotech will “grow” all the items you need, such as cars, computers, buildings etc.
The future awaits them who do not get mired in endless wars, like the US in ww1 and ww2, no bombs or wars fought on its soils, but now who wins from all these current wars, who will be able to afford to develop the next advanced super technolgies??