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Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Fundamental Issues

Very good present economic downturn 101 summation article from Boyd DeLanzo at ZNET: “Death, Debt, and Taxes”

A few of the facts and figures he presents are:
-Real wages...from 1966 to 2001, the average worker's income (adjusted to inflation) grew just 11 percent.

-...Americans have taken $5.2 trillion dollars of debt since 2001.

-...there are three costs that are bankrupting...(the poor and middle classes)...more than any other: education, healthcare, and military spending.

-...74 percent of American students at the top 146 U.S. colleges have come from the highest socioeconomic group, compared with just three percent from the lowest.

-...if the US had a normal military budget, like any other industrialized state in the world, it could easily pay for both a universal health care and education program with money to spare.
How will it be possible to get the USA to be a regular industrialized nation and have a 'normal sized' military budget.

Do the planners and elite power groups really envision an America in which the resources of the country are ever increasingly poured into military spending. How come only someone like Ralph Nader or Kucinich can come forward as a political figure and say as much.

You can talk about Obama and Clinton all day long. Perhaps they won't have the hardcore neo-cons as their inner advisers but so what, their advisers will still push the military budget. Somebody besides a few progressive candidates have to get this message into their heads and start promoting it to a wider group.

2 comments:

Glynn Kalara said...

Were a "warfare state" now have been since 1950. Pull the plug on the military and what else do we produce anymore? Nothing. Death is our only export product. Even most of our cultural exports are violent.

Jim Sande said...

That is a very sobering thought.

Maybe history will recognize this present period as the time when the USA scientifically and exactingly figured out how to destroy the world better than anyone else, ever.

Is this actually our number one cultural achievement, maybe its an anti-cultural achievement.