There are no pockets in a shroud

O Americans, ACT UP-stop the Ukraine insanity initiated by diseased BIRD BRAINS

I got listening to some “new” music from long ago reminding myself that once upon a time it was not impossible to have music that did speak deeply and deeper than the latest mind jiggle. I was lucky enough to have listened live in concerts and a couple intimate venues during my college years when I was naive and passionate for peace which more or less was a full time life with very little pay. That I continued this work until age 35 in 1992 in retrospect was economic suicide. I had convinced myself that without a total change away from militarism no money I earned from slavery for the man would be sound money. I honestly thought with Gulf War 1 the proverbial balloon would go up. By late 1992, broke, in too many tight spots, I decided it was not possible to stop the all American blitzkrieg for a New World Order. I fought this Steamroller and to avoid getting paved while trying to understand why so little resistance, so little verbal resistance, so little attention was being paid to Militarism I became a Paralegal for Plaintiff law firms. I was a salesman, an idealist and a fundraiser for Anti-War groups and chose law rather than go mainstream in professional antiwar work (oxymoron) as professionalism I viewed as the problem. I adroitly dodged it. And I was right.

I was right that the paving was indiscriminate and absolutely as indifferent as eternity and necessity. Class mattered not long run. Annie Dillard, born April 30, 1945 talks about growing up in “American peace and plenty” and muses on this foundation for her writing and she is a good writer saying sensible stuff. I am twelve years younger. I grew up at the tag end of that period in US life in an isolated suburban tract home on the outskirts of Sacramento. And funny too as I think about it, as a child of 4 I recall my first Steamroller going over the new tar laid down in front of my Dayton Ohio tract home. Yeah new tar laid down and steamrolled every damn day in the US of A.

When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.

Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.

Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

The bulk of our taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As those companies have profited, the MIC has sowed incomprehensible destruction globally, keeping the United States locked in endless wars that, since 2001, have killed an estimated 4.5 million people, injured tens of millions more, and displaced at least 38 million, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

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