BANKRUPTCY

The biggest bankrupt in the world's long history is, naturally, the United States of America. But because the United States has thousands of nuclear weapons and a proven readiness to use them, it is allowed to continue borrowing money from the rest of the world.

The United States uses its nuclear weapons to blackmail the rest of the world into continuing to lend it money.

Mr. Obama pretends to want to curb spending to avoid an American implosion. A dollar saved here, two dollars there. If he would (1) END HIS WARS, and (2) disband his military forces and (3)cancel all military spending programs and (4) dissolve the so-called Defense Department, he could not only balance his budget, but even wipe out most of America's debt within ten years.

He could do that, and at the same time provide real jobs for all those in the military, all those civilians who run the military, and all those who would become unemployed by our shutting down the defense industry.

The new jobs those million-plus people would have would be honest, productive jobs: jobs that build homes and schools, grow food and restore land, and learn useful skills and trades. Their labor, in time, would give us clean water and clean air again--as well as clean consciences. Many of those men and women would become teachers, and our disastrous public schools would start educating our children.

We could begin to remake our failed society--and as we did so we would re-learn the civilised, social virtue called freedom, and abandon our stupid, selfish insistence on liberty.

"Liberty" is a word which looks out for self. It has never pretended to be wise. It is a do-your-own-thing word, a word for pursuing individual desires. It's the same word as "libido."

"Freedom" is a very different word. Its close relatives, linguistically, are "free" and "friend." If we are free, we are free together.

If we are truly free, we won't have homeless people, or hungry people. We won't have a dysfunctional school system. If we are free, we will have universal health care.

Pursuing liberty, we pursue profit, and individual wealth. Pursuing freedom, we pursue that other, social ideal called "commonwealth."

"Wealth" is a good word: literally. Its root is in the word "well." It has been in use for more than a thousand years in Germanic and English languages. It means both happy and good--and both "happy" and "good" are social words, too: their roots are in words for gathering.

Maybe Mr. Obama should get a good dictionary. Maybe we should all get good dictionaries, and find out what our founding fathers--humanly and nationally--once proposed to us as a way of life.

And while we are rediscovering what is good, we may also discover something else that we all should know: something that every history lesson teaches us, as soon as our todays turn to yesterdays. Good is good. But war? It isn't only bad; it is worse. War is an early form of the word "worse."

Let's change our world. Let's ask Mr. Obama to start changing it right now, by ending his wars--and making things worse. Then we can start being good instead of greedy, social instead of selfish, and free.

And then--maybe even soon--we won't be bankrupt any more, wither monetarily or morally.