Click on graphic to see larger viewI've been working hard since I got home to build our rally in Maine's state capital on April 4 that will call upon all elected officials (and the public) in the state to make the deadly connections between endless war spending and the fiscal crisis.
This piece of information blows my mind: The total debt of all 50 state governments is now $130 billion. The U.S. will spend $170 billion on our wars in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan this year.
How could anything be more clear than this? You want to solve the fiscal crisis? It's right here before us.
Some activists in Maine and other states are going to go to their Republican controlled state governments and ask for tax increases. Good luck. I'm all for raising taxes on the rich. But a Republican controlled state legislature is not likely to do it. Why not begin to turn the heat up about military spending as well?
One can only begin to speculate about why some good hearted activists in various states are not picking up on this issue. Is it because they don't think we can stop the wars? Is it because we have a Democrat as president and many activists who identify with that party don't want to confront him on the war? Is it because the Dems control the U.S. Senate and activists who are members of that party don't want to challenge their own party? Is it because they are afraid of being called unpatriotic or un-American if they come out publicly against our wars?
It's a confusing thing. Please, someone help me understand the timidity of some activists around this war $$ issue. Please correct me if I am off base.
1 comment:
One possibility is the nature not of the narrator but of the audience, with regards to mindset. Since any discussion has to address the actual hideously monstrously huge immoral nature of killing people in the first place. I have no trouble seeing both problems, we're going broke funding immoral actions. You can see it, and most of the people who have taken to reading our respective blogs and fora can see it as well. Then there are the ones who CAN see it, but choose not to.
Their consciousness and conscientiousness are being raised, slowly, just by their attempts to rail against the truth. They don't like the truth, they want to perhaps literally murder the truth, but they also see it, in all its glory, outliving each of their assaults on it.
There are a lot of similarities between Indian as in Hopi or Cherokee and Indian as in Hindu with regards to how Karma and Dharma are recognized. One thing that's massively frustrating to a more activist social philosophy is that neither can be hurried.
I'm Cherokee enough to see that and Irish enough to resent it. Then there is the occasional person who ties it together so that even the most obtuse can see it... Immoral AND Expensive AND Dangerous. That last only spins the wheels of the previous two even faster.
If we only increase the certainty of further wars in fractals, like, Three wars generate One more (and never resolving the first three) the Beast grows one third stronger each time around.
...and that's where I run the risk of losing even myself trying to explain the math of it.
People who swallowed the Bush theory that their taxes weren't being raised because the wars were originally funded with bond issues, thus kicking the can down the road and with interest payments once you catch up to it...
Would have fits trying to understand the math of compound war, if they can't understand compound interest in money terms.
People whose grasp of metaphysical laws is that a preacher told them that God commands them to destroy twice as many resources in waging a war as they'll gain in a war, it'll be a lot harder to reach them.
Maybe somebody who speaks a lot better than I do can take that ball and run with it.
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