Spending The Sweat, and The Genius, and The Hopes . . . . and for what?

Good.  It's negligible in the grand scheme of things, but it's a start:

By Ernesto Londoño and Karen DeYoung, Published: January 24

With no perceptible opposition from the Obama administration, Congress has quietly downscaled Washington’s ambitions for the final year of the Afghan war, substantially curtailing development aid and military assistance plans ahead of the U.S. troop pullout.

As congressional appropriators put the final touches on a huge spending bill in recent weeks, they slashed Afghanistan development aid by half and barred U.S. defense officials from embarking on major new infrastructure projects. After making a bid last year for $2.6 billion worth of “critical” capabilities such as mobile strike vehicles for Afghan security forces, the Pentagon agreed it could do with just 40 percent of what it had sought.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/congress-cuts-us-military-and-development-aid-for-afghanistan/2014/01/24/3d4cb818-8531-11e3-bbe5-6a2a3141e3a9_story.html?hpid=z1


While we're at it, let's also begin the process of shutting down and withdrawing our troops from all of these overseas military bases that we have peppered across the various continents, and specifically in stable NATO ally countries such as Germany, France, Spain, the UK, Italy, Turkey, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium.  And that is just the European theater.  The old Soviet Union has dissolved and can barely handle the internal strife from the few remaining satellite regions it controls.  China is too busy becoming the world's most powerful economy to give a shit about invading any one.

Think about this for a moment dear readers -- America still has almost 60,000 American troops stationed at 265 military bases in Germany for holy shit's sake!!  G-E-R-M-A-N-Y!!  Somebody forgot to tell the grand poobahs of our military industrial complex that World War 2 ended almost 70 years ago!  Adolf Hitler is dead and we fucking won man!  Germany is presently the most stable and most wealthy democracy in western Europe and there is no rationale coherent enough that can justify the amount of money that America expends to keep that many military installations open and that many military personnel assigned there.  The same can be said with the UK, France, Spain and Italy -- they are all major economy nations who have their own military infrastructures along with their own sovereign wealth, and collectively they are more than able to defend their own homelands.

Shut those bases down, bring those troops home.  Use the billions, likely trillions, in savings to instead invest in America's own crumbling infrastructure and putting our own citizenry back to work.  Use that money to address the issues of chronic poverty and to improve public education by building newer, modern schools, pay competent educators what they are worth, and to provide more access for the economically disadvantaged to higher education opportunities.  Use that money to institute a national single payer healthcare plan so that a major illness no longer can result in someone being bankrupted and economically crippled for life.  Use that money to shore up the social security and unemployment benefits programs.  Use that money to invest in the alternative energy solutions.  Use that money to invest in medical research and development.  Use that money to improve our nation's border and port security.  Use that money to seriously tackle the deleterious effects of campaign financing, corporate lobbying and our embarrassingly incompetent voting system.

Are you beginning to get The Gadfly's drift here dear readers?  Do you see how simple it would be to address many, if not most, of the major issues facing this country today if we simply performed a serious, honest cost/benefit analysis of the money (OUR tax money) that our obscenely bloated military industrial complex is gluttonously scarfing up, and reapportion those funds more intelligently and equitably?

It is long past time we do so.

President Eisenhower's vision was right back then, and even more so today.


----TFG