Lies Upon Lies: Iraq and Afghanistan

Here's a link to a piece by Nick Turse at TomDispatch.com on the building of military bases in both Iraq and Afghanistan, clear signs that the Pentagon plans even longer occupations of those countries.

We, the American people are paying with our tax dollars the billions being spent on these bases, while whoever is president, of whatever party, lies to us about their plans. Obama is telling us that he will start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan next July, while Gen Petraeus, recently becoming known as St. David, spins his own tale about that, and the Pentagon keeps building bases with money that should be used to repair and rebuild the aging and collapsing infrastructure right here in America.

Talk about jobs being shipped overseas!! Human beings are building these bases, manning the fast food store drive-up windows, working in the Post Exchanges, the Post Offices, the movie theaters, etc. that make these places like Anytown, USA. These are not Potemkin villages, these are towns and small cities designed and built to last for years. Guess why.

It is criminal that our money is being used to pay the wages of these people, not to mention the payroll of the military proper, when this country is suffering so much from the lack of jobs here at home, jobs that would be created by the investment of our taxes to pay for the deferred maintenance of our infrastructure. Deferred maintenance never gets better, only worse, only more costly. If your roof is leaking it has to be fixed. If it's lost a few shingles, it's tempting to wait, but at a huge potential cost.

Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com recently observed that all things, even these seemingly intractable things, must come to an end. It seems it can only end badly.

Sometimes I wonder if our penchant for watching and attending pro football, pro baseball, pro hockey and pro basketball conflicts(euphemistically called games) serves as a way to let out our frustration over the lies we know are being fed to us. Such outlets might be preventing the kind of street outrage and consequent violence we are witnessing in France right now, and have seen recently in Greece.

Our democracy has been bought out. The Neocon/Pentagon/Military Industrial Complex is having its way with us. It is nothing short of rape.

Voting, democracy's tool for fixing what ails us, has come to be only a way to change the actors, not the play. The politicians are owned by the big money which has come to be so obscenely concentrated at the top one tenth of one percent of the population. We have become a plutocracy.

I think it was Jefferson who observed that a revolution is a good thing now and then.

Aux Barricades?

Leanderthal