America continues to borrow staggering amounts of money just to keep our broken government running. We just borrowed another 900 billion to give to the very rich, thanks to Obama and his close friends, the Republicans. Things seem to be going swimmingly—except for America’s disappearing middle class and poor citizens—the 90% that get little or nothing from Washington.  

Now they want to cut Medicare, cut Social Security and any other government program that benefits ordinary people. Scarcely a word is whispered about cutting the obscenely obese military budget, now bigger than the rest of the world combined! Wouldn’t want to upset Blackwater or Halliburton, GE, or Boeing, or Lockheed Martin, or any of the other corporations that make huge profits from war. The military budget goes up every year and they don’t include the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget. How do they do that? 

The government is all words and no action when it comes to controlling spending. It seems likely that they will continue to mortgage our future to a military dictatorship and some obscenely rich Sheiks, who may or may not be also financing our enemies in the "war on terror." But, as everyone with a credit card, past or present, knows, the day comes when the debtor must pay.  

The interest on the national debt is more than a billion dollars a day and it gets larger daily as does our inability to pay it off. The binge of borrowing has increased the national debt by a third in two years! The day will come when no amount of chicanery or manipulation will put off the debtors any longer. Their banks will close. There will be only one solution: Declare war on China.

Washington has made it obvious that they exist primarily to support big business. The rest of us can go fish as long as the corporations can keep handing out those big bonuses to their execs every year and contributing large campaign "donations" to their whores in D.C. Congress likes war with only a few naysayers. Big business likes war. They can milk the government for big bucks with few questions asked because it’s for the "war effort." Dubya told Hugo Chavez "War is good for business." 

So it’s only a matter of time until we kick off the big one. I’ll bet there’s a secret office where Pentagon Generals are drooling over the plans right now. In the meantime we’ll get by with wars on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine. Let’s include Pakistan too. Maybe we can get some more wars going in Africa while we’re at it. And we’ve still got Columbia down South. We can launch attacks from there on those arrogant indigenous groups that think they have the right to run their own country.  

We’ve still got fifty thousand troops in Japan. The military must think that will provide some defense against a Chinese invasion. Yeah, right! Despite strict population controls, the Chinese add another hundred million citizens every five years or so.  

So a showdown is coming. Bet on it. How violent, destructive or virtual it will be is still the big question. The mightiest military in the world cannot destroy the Chinese army with traditional methods without destroying all of us. And General Buck Turgidson’s fantasies still live in the halls of the five-sided horror house. How many hundred million bodies will the generals consider to be "acceptable casualties?" 

Is there a way out of this mess? Maybe, but it’s very unlikely those in charge will find it. It includes cutting the military budget in half. They can do this by bringing home the troops we have stationed in more than a hundred countries; getting rid of antiquated military hardware and software; changing our attitude about being the police of the world and focusing on the internal problems that are sucking the life out of us. 

We also need to examine carefully the role of intelligence gathering operations by the military and government. The politicians don’t even want to discuss this for some reason. So the budgets for these monstrous beaurocracies remain a secret. I’ll bet if we knew how much they spend; the public would be stirred up plenty. There are hundreds of thousands—maybe millions of bureaucrats doing the James Bond thing all around the world.  

We pay for all this and it’s mostly money down the toilet. Billions of dollars and we get nothing that benefits us. These spooks work for themselves, not us. And they are so big and powerful that no one has the guts to speak out about the misdeeds of the CIA, FBI, NSA or the other intelligence gatherers. They operate with some kind of immunity from the law. They commit murder, larceny, kidnapping and other crimes routinely. Hardly ever is anyone brought to justice. It all just disappears under the blanket of "classified information".