FUNDING FIGHTING DOESN'T FEED PEOPLE

Funding fighting doesn't feed people, but peace does. In the United Gun-toting States of Bombs Bursting in Air America, however, we fund fighting: for the year 2010, at the rate of $2,000,000,000.00 a day. That's two billion dollars a day. And that's just for the Department of Defense. (It used to be called the "War Department"--which at least was honest. Given that our two current wars are--as Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Greneda all were--wars of aggression, not national defense, the present name is an obscene lie.)

Part of the Pentagon's $600,000,000,000.00 budget--$160,000,000,000.00 total or almost $500,000,000.00 a day--will be spent on our two outrageous, illegal wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And nobody will object. We are so committed to violence that to secure passage of a bill to protect homosexuals from hate crimes, the measure had to be attached to a fat military spending bill. (Knowing that the Defense spending bill would pass, twenty-seven Republican senators voted against it just to demonstrate their approval of violence against homosexuals.)

If we spend $2,000,000,000.00 a day rebuilding the Iraq we have destroyed and feeding and housing and educating Afghans, we might actually win peace in both countries. But all that our $2,000,000,000.00 a day for contunued war will win for us is further destruction, more violent deaths, more hatred, more shame.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Baron Acton said that a hundred plus years ago. And here we stand, budget in place, blood on our hands, and bombs away: absolutely guilty.