I haven't posted in here for a long time because I've been busier than a one-legged butt-kicker!
What is on my mind is the continuing polarization of our political and financial sectors. I cannot even listen to the "news" anymore, because for me it is so obviously just propaganda. ABC,CBS, NBC, FOX, NPR, all of these "news" outlets essentially broadcast the same information. Our "news" services are owned and controlled, lock, stock, and barrel, by corporations with agendas.
We are told that our Democratic and Republican representatives in Congress are debating about how to cut 50 or 60 billion dollars from a 3.5 trillion dollar budget. The deficit for 2011 fiscal year is expected to be over a trillion dollars. Yessir, cutting that 50 billion (in domestic spending, of course) will make a real big dent in the deficit!
Meanwhile, the "defense" department of the United States is spending over half a trillion trillion dollars every year. The United States military has bases all over the world. According to Wikipedia, the military of the United States is deployed in more than 150 countries, with more than 369,000 of its 1,580,255 active-duty personnel serving outside the United States and its territories. Many of our troops are still located at installations activated during the Cold War. Since 2001, the US has redeployed some of its forces as part of the "War on Terror."
The U.S. is fighting two pointless wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, yet our representatives and our president cannot rationally answer a simple question like "What are we doing in Afghanistan?" "What are we doing in Iraq?"
A friend of mine asserts that the U.S. military must be present all over the world to "defend our freedoms." Yet in the United States, we have less and less freedom every year, so that can't be the answer.
What is the obvious solution?
We can start by drastically cutting the inflated Defense budget. That is, if we really believe in peace and freedom, and not war. Because our "Defense" Department is actually a Department of War. It's DoubleSpeak, just as George Orwell predicted in his book, 1984. Orwell said, if you'll recall, that "war is peace." How prescient! And while we're at it, let's haul the director of the CIA into Congress and ask him what his agencies are up to and how much money is going in to the "intelligence community." My guess is hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Meanwhile, our infrastructure is falling apart and our economy is struggling.
There's a gigantic dent in our budget deficit.
Of course, chicken-little's in the mainstream media will squawk that the sky will fall if we bring our troops home. "But we can't fight the war on terrorism if we stick our heads in the sand!" they will cry. Well, we simply can't afford our defense budget anymore. We have to live within our means. And the war on terrorism is just an excuse to pass more draconian legislation like the Patriot Acts and the Homegrown Terrorist Protection Act, that further restrict our freedoms. The wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the war on terrorism, keep us in fear and divert our attention away from the gutting of our Constitution and the destruction of our financial sector.
We don't have a budget deficit in the United States. The IRS is set to collect over 2 trillion dollars this year! What we have is insane budget priorities.
The budget of the Unites States is geared toward war, it is as simple as that. And war is insane.
Our defense department does not defend the United States. It is an offensive organization that invades weaker countries and misspends tens of billions every year. Our intelligence community gives bad advice year after year, and is not held accountable. It's budget is not known by anyone in government. Both of these organizations drain hundreds of billions from our budget every year, and are unnecessary for true freedom.
In effect, the government of the people has been taken over by a cancer that has infected every department.
So what can we, the people, do?
The first thing we can do is stop voting Democrat or Republican, except for those Dems and Reps who show true integrity (like congressman Ron Paul). Democrats and Republicans are responsible for the bad decisions that have decimated our economy, our finances, and our politics.
A Congress filled with third-party representatives would certainly be willing to embark on real change! If we want real change we have to actually change, not just give lip-service to change.
The second thing we can do is audit the privately-owned Federal Reserve. Our government pays hundreds of billions of dollars in interest every year to this privately owned organization, for the sole purpose of printing and managing the money supply.
This, of course, is preposterous when the constitution gives the government the right to print and manage money. So the next thing the government can do is to refuse to pay the Fed the interest owing on the money it has lent to the United States. This money isn't real anyway, it's simply an electronic creation of the Fed, and has no real value.
Why should the people of the United States pay interest on worthless money to a bunch of people who have grossly mismanaged the dollar, and inflated it all out of proportion? We could save trillions of dollars right there. In answer to the argument that "you should always pay your debts," I say that we have already paid our debt to the Federal Reserve a hundred times over. No more money to the Fed and it's private owners! Let's institute an honest money system and let the Federal government print and manage our money, not a privately-owned bank. If we are going to have fiscal irresponsibility, let it be done by representatives who are accountable to the people, not unreachable persons like Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernaicke.
But in order to do that, of course, we need new blood in Congress, and that means electing many more third party representatives. It isn't possible to do worse than these two corrupt gangs!
The problems that we have in the United States can be solved by the people taking back their government. We must abolish the Federal Reserve, end the phony war on terrorism, and bring our troops back home to work productively in the United States.
Our brave men and women in the armed forces are trained in leadership and hard work, and would be enormous assets in the domestic economy.
The rest of the world is waiting for us to do this. And the "terrorists" are largely a creation of the intelligence communities of the world, to keep the people fearful and allow them to suck us dry like the parasites they are.
If you had a bunch of blood-sucking leeches on your body, the first thing your doctor would do is remove them!
The third thing we can do is publish the budget of the intelligence services, and find out exactly what these fellows are doing. We need strong Congressional oversight over both the military and the intelligence community, to re-establish civilian control over organizations that have run amok.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it!