The U.S. is building up missile defense bases in the Pacific to counter the threat of Chinese nuclear missiles. In South Korea, the U.S. is building a naval missile interceptor base on “Peace Island”. This information comes to me second-or-third hand from a peace activist who was speaking on WBAI yesterday around 5pm. These kind of bases and new types of interceptor defense destroyers are built in Maine, in the U.S.A.. I will see if I can find you a link.

Is this rationale? No.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49613

This article explains the “strategic strategy” behind this insanity.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=26986&context=va

When was the last time you heard a Congresscritter locally say that cutting defense spending imperils the US? The defense industry is about subsidized jobs and one of the few export markets that the US is competitive in. Think about the fact that 4 million Americans have top secret clearances (the federal civil service is only 1.8 million workers).

The DoD is a jobs program, the only one that conservatives permit. And still to a great extent, the military is the employer of last resort for a lot of people. Especially young people who haven’t figured out what to do with their lives. Again the only program like this that conservatives will permit.

And it is a huge system of entitlements, with ex-military double- and triple-dipping retirement benefits by working for civilian federal, state and local governments (or more than one of them).

North Korea’s danger is not to the US but to US ally South Korea. Without the US nuclear weapons guarantee, South Korea would be actively seeking its own nuclear weapons.

There are a rat’s nest of issues to get untangled to get out of this.

China may be a lot of things, but their leaders are far from stupid. I think their aim is economic, not military dominance, of the U.S. They have too much at stake to seriously threaten a nuclear conflict. It fits with the national psyche to conquer the U.S. with ‘The Death of a Thousand Cuts’ in an economic sense. Russia? Totally corrupt gangster state. They’re too busy money-grubbing to get back into the arms race game again.

Here’s the boondoggle destroyer ship that is being built for Pacific service:

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/Cutting-edge_Navy_warship_being_built_in_Maine_.html?id=147123645

Since 1946, it’s mostly been about money and the military dole for an ever-more powerful defense industry.

Eisenhower warned us. Heck, the *Founders* warned us. That’s one of the reasons why they wanted the US to have largely militia-based defense, encoded into the 2nd Amendment. That wasn’t about any stupidity about people having any individual “right” to own guns per se, it was about keeping the bulk of our military civilian, for whom military service would always be an interruption in life, a distraction from ‘real life’, rather than a money-making career.

-stewartm

Okay, I’m confused. “North Korea is the sole remaining member of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil”……

Did something significant happen to Iran while I was napping?

Otherwise, I’m in complete agreement that we must…..really must!….reduce our defense budget. It’s insane.

Everyone should look at this pathetic rocket launch and ask themselves …

Is 90 seconds of fun really worth the price?

I served on a destroyer, an old Adams-class, now decommissioned, and I’ve been on a couple Arleigh Burke’s, though I never was deployed on them.

This Zumwalt thing doesn’t even look like a destroyer. More like a submarine on steroids with a superstructure. Looking at the picture, it looks like it wants to submerge.

Since it’s a boondoggle, who knows? Maybe it will.

Jon, what you are talking about is basic fascism in the way old Mussolini described it: the merger of corporate and government power. A few corporations make hundreds of billions off We The People building weapons we don’t need, and they employ fewer and fewer workers due to automation in the classical capitalist paradigm.

Once again, the fundamental problem is capitalism itself, whose ONLY goal is to acquire more capital. Nothing else matters. It’s quite simple.

This is an old story and a sad one. The MIC and the DOD and the CIA have been making up BS about threats for 6 decades and none of them amount to a hill of beans. There is no foreign country that has any interest in marching in or landing troops and subjected the American population.

The MIC is all about making $$ and then threatening the world to accept our domination (economic) and exploitation.

It’s really that simple… and it’s not going to change… because men like guns and the DOD is a big gun for jerks to wave around.

Eisenhower warned us? Hahahaha. “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

Oh, come on, let’s not be such ingrates: we got Tang, Teflon, and Firedoglake from it.

The Soviet Union’s demise was in large part due to it’s inability to keep up with the USA in the arms race. That’s the common “wisdom”. The Soviet Union’s money and resources went into weapons, not the things that make for a continuing robust economy.

We are now the Soviet Union in that respect, except our boogeyman is a mix of ideas. Fear. Terror. There never was any real “Peace dividend”. Any excuse to keep the MIC going — and growing — has been used and will continue to be used. And if it takes cuts in Social Security or other services the public has paid into or receives, so be it.

There are so many parallels between the Soviet Union and the current USA. This is merely one of them.

The US and Russia are gangster states these days.

Well said.

Thank you.

The Military/Industrial Complex are serious folks. They kind of let everybody know that when they took out Kennedy 30 days after he signed an executive order to begin disengagement in Vietnam.

Eisenhower warned us, they assassinated a president, and they’ve been in control ever since. Imagine the power these guys have to create wars, sell weapons, and do it all over again, and again, and again. If they could eliminate a president, they can eliminate anybody who gets in their way. If you don’t see any more posts by me after today, that means they probably got me too.

You have to give them credit for their latest war incarnation: The War on Terror, I can’t even find it on the damn map.

Defense is the only Gov’t function the Fascists / both parties will allow anymore. Soon it will involve defending “them” against the rest of us.

Is there an available copy of the Executive Order Kennedy signed? I’ve always been dubious that he wanted to get out of Vietnam.

Yes, whatever you do, don’t cut off the program in my town. It is not like the others. This one we really gotta have. Besides it hires lots of good people you know.

Don’t need no damn map. We know where it is. Just listen to us and we will keep you safe.

I read recently that the F-35 fighter plane costs $661 million for each airplane and that the Defense Department has ordered over 2,400 of these planes. That comes to about $1.5 TRILLION!!!!

Those planes cannot fly across the oceans, it’s too far. Yes, another country could possible launch missiles that could nuke us, but it would be complete suicide. Other than attack by missiles, there is no way, really, for any country except Mexico and Canada to attack us. I think we are safe from Mexico and Canada.

So there is no threat. We will hear the argument that we need to protect shipping lanes and keep the world safe for our commerce. Globalization and the movement of investment for production in machine tools and other manufacturing equipment has moved all that to China. There are no products to speak of to move from the United States, and no country outside the United States which would want to cut off our markets from their production centers.

The world has changed to such a vast degree that continued emphasis on military has become even greater folly that it ever was.

Instead of 2,400 just think what we could do with all that money! $661 million for each of our largest 2,400 cities to build streetcar systems to save the global climate, for example. The Defense Department is proposing to spend roughly three times as much money on F-35 fighter planes than was spent to construct the entire Interstate Highway System in today’s dollars.

We clearly can in no way afford such folly. There certainly are threats we need to confront, but the military is of no use in those struggles. We must avoid putting any more carbon in the atmosphere, which means a radical reconfiguring of our transportation system. Something has to be done about overpopulation, to mention just two of the most serious threats to our survival here on Planet Earth.

The oceans are still huge. All you have to do is fly across one to realize that. The Long Dong proved impotent, and any country which actually has missiles which could cross the ocean is unlikely to commit suicide by firing them at the United States.

But accidents can occur, so we shouldn’t remain complacent about the destruction of the missiles and the nuclear arsenals that could spell Armageddon any moment.

The United States: the only nation on the planet that has used nuclear weapons on civilian populations. Whom should the people of this planet fear?

If the largest and most expensive military in the world can’t defeat a ragtag bunch of militant patriots, what’s gonna happen when the Martians come in their giant ships?

LOL. I guess the Long Dong needed some Viagra to get it up?

Eh? Call Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Jeff Goldblum, Will Smith, etc, to, er, DO SOMETHING gawddangit! Get her done. Let’s ROLL! Yeeeee HAW!!!!! USA USA USA!!!!!

I’m sure the Martians’ll turn tail an’ RUN! And all bc of the MIC, too. So there!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/oliver-stone/jfk-and-the-unspeakable_b_243924.html

Here’s a link to Oliver Stone’s article on the book I read about Kennedy. The book, called “the unspeakable” details all the documents and events, many of them released in the last few years, about 1/3rd of the book is detailed research references. Douglass quotes the executive order verbatim and refers to its official number. The executive order was reversed by Johnson within a few days of Kennedy’s murder. Also interesting are the minutes of Kennedy’s meetings with the Joint Chiefs, meetings that were actually shouting matches and face offs between Kennedy and the war makers.
James Douglass: the unspeakable / Douglass is a former Jesuit seminarian and historian.

Kennedy of course was always given the blame for Vietnam, after all who better to pin it on than somebody who couldn’t defend himself. In reality Kennedy was putting in place the withdrawal from Vietnam in the months leading up to his death.

And what are we protecting? Our government’s capabilty to detain, torture and murder?