To Be Honest, I Don't Care
by James Glaser
August 31, 2013

I don't care if I don't keep us with the Joneses. I don't care if you buy a new car or a new boat. I have to worry about my own family and what is right for us to do.

I expect my President and our elected officials to do the same. If Syria wants to have a civil war, I don't care. We, the United States, have stuck our noses in everyone else's business for decades, and now we are in debt up to our ears. Every few years we have to raise our debt ceiling, because we can't seems to stop interfering in other people's problems,

Now, our interference with others has become an addiction. Rich Americans have become addicted to the constant flow of profits they garner from our wars, and so they keep pushing Washington to do "something" with any problem they see on the globe. It starts with talking about American values and moves to offers of help. Then we send in troops to help train the good side, or we send weapons to help the "Freedom Fighters". Sending in troops or arms starts the flow of profits to our Defense Industry, which means rich Americans see their profits flow. Those rich Americans are willing to share a part of those profits with any elected official in Washington who will vote for more military spending or push for us to interfere in another country. And then the cycle starts over someplace else so there is no longer any time that America is at peace, because peace means a reduction in that profit-flow.

Syria is a great example of this. Oh the horror of a civil war. A hundred thousand killed! Of course nobody talks about our civil war with over 600,000 killed. Somehow Syria's civil war is so bad that we must do something, but obviously a civil war is not enough. Ah, they are using chemical weapons, and we all know how horrible chemical weapons are don't we? Of course we do, but nobody wants to talk about our continued use of chemical weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The Associated Press reported that an 8-year-old Afghan girl, Razia, was injured when a white phosphorus shell ripped through her home in the Tagab Valley of Kapisa province in June 2009. When she reached the operating room, white powder covered her skin, the oxygen mask on her face started to melt, and flames appeared when doctors attempted to scrape away the dead tissue."

Just like I can't worry about what my neighbor is doing or buying, our country should be looking around at our own back yard. We have a million, that's right, a million students in school this year who are homeless. We have more people needing food stamps than at any time in our history. And get this, we have a backlog of way more than 600,000 veterans seeking help from the Veterans Administration, and Washington is trying to find new wars, which means more veterans needing help.

Yes, the rich who own the Defense Industry or as President Eisenhower called it, The Military Industrial Complex, want to get richer, and for the last 60+ years that has meant getting us involved in one war after another.

A Washington Post investigation detailed, there are 1,931 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence. Throughout the D.C. area, 33 buildings containing 17 million square feet of office space have been built since 9/11—the equivalent of 22 Capitol buildings.

CNN reports it this way:

The Defense Department's $680 billion budget pays for over 3. 1 million employees, both military and civilian. Another 3 million people are employed by the defense industry both directly, making things like weapons, and indirectly, such as working in local businesses supported by a contractor's location in a town, according to various sources.

All these jobs and all the buildings and equipment, the bombs, the planes, the tanks, and the ships mean a constant flow of profit to the corporations to whom we send our tax money to fight the wars our government starts. It is a cycle that started with WWII and has gone on to this day.

We as a nation worry about the rest of the world while we ignore life here at home. Our problems mount. Bridges do fall into rivers, schools get older and older, more and more Americans slip into poverty, and still we send our troops, our ships, and our young men and women off to fight in foreign lands so that we can use the ships, and fire the bullets, drop the bombs, and use up the equipment, which must all be replaced over and over and over —which means profits for the corporations who have become our Merchants of Death.

So instead of working on our homeland, putting people to work building schools, roads, and yes bridges, we are doing all those things in foreign lands.

Right now President Obama is willing to side with al Qaida in Syria. He doesn't want to help al Qaida, but with Iraq over and Afghanistan slowing down, he has to get something going or those profits flowing to the rich will dwindle, and whichever political party slows down those profits soon finds it hard to get campaign contributions

We need to stop looking afar and start looking at our homeland. We have to break this cycle of war and profit. We have no choice. Our last two wars were done on the credit card, and our debt is going to destroy our children's future. Think about your own household budget, and you will see that we have reached the end of the line as far as borrowing so the rich can get richer. The world knows what we are doing; it is about time that the American people figured it out, too.

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