3. ALL VOLUNTARY ARMY---This shift ensures war will be an ongoing operation for Americans as part of our foreign policy. Those whose career is to fight and win battles will find battles to be fought and won all over the globe. The Vietnam War was forced to end because of the draft. It was the draft which produced the street riots and massive demonstrations. The Iraq War continues in large part because there is no draft. Those doing the killing and destruction signed up to do the killing and destruction wherever asked to do so. Military adventures are by far our biggest industry now---the economic engine which drives our prosperity.
Associated quotations:
"An army is a nation within a nation; it is one of the vices of our age" (Alfred Victor)
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.....In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." (Dwight Eisenhower)
"The Master said: 'To lead an uninstructed people to war, is to throw them away". (Confucius)
"The increase of armaments that is intended in each nation to produce consciousness of strength, and a sense of security, does not produce these effects. On the contrary, it produces a consciousness of the strength of other nations and a sense of fear. Fear begets suspicion and distrust and evil imaginings of all sorts." (Sir Edward Grey)
4. THE WAR ON DRUGS---Next to the foreign Wars, this War---equally ill-advised---has become one of the largest and most expensive domestic industries. Treating drug abuse as a criminal problem rather than a medical problem has destroyed large areas of our urban, suburban, and rural communities. It has created a large underworld of criminal activity and gang warfare that has exceeded anything seen during Alcohol Prohibition. The result has been Third World enclaves within our own country, a prison population that far exceeds, on a per capita basis, anything seen anywhere else in the world, all at a cost of $30,000 per year per inmate. Just like the global wars, this War on Drugs is driven by ignorance, political propaganda, prejudice, fear, and a means to get young poorly educated people with no access to jobs off the street. Sustaining this war on drugs requires criminalizing marijuana, the largest cash crop in our own country, let alone the amount imported. Without marijuana as the sustaining profit margin for drug dealing, the vast network of illegal drug sales would dwindle sharply. Without the vast expense (billions) to sustain this war on drugs, there could be money for drug treatment programs all over the country, available to all those in need. Like our foreign wars the results have been an unmitigated disaster in terms of human carnage and community wastelands. And the extent of recreational drug use in this country? No different than other industrialized countries across the globe---a slight dip in the use of marijuana and a rise in the use of alcohol, especially alcohol bingeing. If abuse of recreational drugs is a medical condition one wouldn't expect the prevalence to be altered much by treating it as a criminal offense and the prevalence indeed hasn't been lowered.
5. THE GROWING DISPARITY OF WEALTH BETWEEN THE RICH AND THE POOR, THE FASTEST GROWING DISPARITY OF ANY INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRY---The wealthy are being aided to accumulate more and more of the wealth in this country from every angle. Inheritance taxes, the kind of which were used to breakup the massive fortunes of the early Rockafellers, Vanderbuilts, etc. have virtually been eliminated. This means vast amounts of earned wealth can now be dumped into the hands of the unearned rather than pumped back into the society from which the wealth was derived. Add to this an elaborate maze of tax loop holes. Then add tax breaks for the wealthy. Then add a justice system which barely punishes white collar crimes, even if others are bilked out of millions of dollars. Then add corporate CEO salaries and sport salaries of millions and millions of dollars. When the math is done one can better understand why 1% of the population in this country now own more of the wealth than the bottom 90%. The cliff is in sight now.
Associated Quotations:
"This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living......to provide moderately for the immediate wants of those dependent upon him, and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer....in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community----the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for the poorer brethren." (Andrew Carnegie) Do I hear Christ clapping?
"The greatest wealth is to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied." (Lucretius)
"Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty." (Henry Demarest Lloyd)
"The most dreadful of all wars, the war of the poor against the rich, a war which, however long it may be delayed, will come and come with all its horrors. (Orestes A. Brownson)
"He mocks the people who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich and they in turn will care for the poor." (Grover Cleveland)
"The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale." (Thorstein Veblen)
" So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent." (Henry George)
"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of highest virtues." John Maynard Keynes)
"But to be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible. If we mean by the wealthy those who are accounted so by the vulgar, that is, the exceptional few who own property of great pecuniary value---the very thing a bad man would be likely to own. Now since this is so I can never concede to them that a rich man is truly happy unless he is also a good man, but that one who is exceptionally good should be exceptionally wealthy too is a mere impossibility" (Plato)
"This thing must be put bluntly; every man who has more than is necessary for his livelihood and that of his family, and for the normal development of his intelligence, is a thief and robber. If he has too much, it means that others have too little." (Romain Rolland)
"How unjust it is, that they who have but little should be always adding something to the wealth of the rich!" (Terence)
"No business which depends for existence by paying less than living wages to its workers had any right to continue in this country." (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)
"I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes and....a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate." (Theodore Roosevelt)
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)
"Above all, a nation cannot last in a money-making job; it cannot with impunity,---it cannot with existence---go on despising literature, despising science, despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrate its soul on Pence." (John Ruskin) Remind you of any particular administration?
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of today." (Progressive Party of America)
"We consider capitalism as the exploration of man by capital and Communism the exploitation of the individual by the state." (Juan Peron)
"Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality." (Lord Acton)
"The alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the working masses. It is imperative if he desire to enjoy the full blessings of life, that a check be placed upon unjust accumulation and the power of evil of aggregate wealth." (Knights of Labor)
"Indeed, the religious bodies, as the almoners of the rich, become a sort of auxiliary police, taking off the insurrectionary edge of poverty with coals and blankets, bread and treacle, and soothing and cheering the victims with hopes of immense and inexpensive happiness in another world when the process of working them to premature death in the service of the rich is complete in this." (George Bernard Shaw)
Everywhere and at all times men of commerce have had neither heart nor soul; their cash-box is their God....They traffic in all things, even human flesh....their country? Foutre! Business men have no country." (Jacques Rene Hebert)
"In as much as great wealth is an instrument which is uniformly used to extort from others their property, it ought to be taken away from its possessors on the same principle that sword or a pistol may be wrested from a robber, who undertakes to accomplish the same efffect in a different manner." (Thomas Skidmore)
"One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than property....the neglect of this subject, which in existing states is so common, is a never-failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime....the type of character produced by wealth lies on the surface for all to see. Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing they cannot buy. They are luxurious and ostentatious; ostentatious and vulgar.....in a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool." (Aristotle)
"These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people." (Abraham Lincoln)
"And, inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labor has produced them. But it has so happened in all the ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits (large inheritances come to mind). This is wrong, and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government." (Abraham Lincoln)
"This is a world of compensations, and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it." (Abraham Lincoln) This would likely apply to our current foreign slave labor force and the underground illegal immigrant slave labor force.
"So long as people, being ill-governed, suffer from hunger, criminals will never disappear. It is extremely unkind to punish those who, being sufferers from hunger, are compelled to violate laws." (Kenko Hoshi)
"I know of no country indeed where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property". (Alexis Clerel De Tocqueville)
"Everything owned by those who have more than their individual due of society's goods, is theft and usurpation." (Francois-Noel Baveuf)
"Above all things, good policy is to be used that the treasure and monies in a state be not gathered into few hands....And money is like muck, not good except it be spread." (Francis Bacon)
"As political equality is the remedy for political tyranny, so is economic equality the only way of putting an end to the economic tyranny exercised by the few over the many through the superiority of wealth." (Edward Bellamy)
"Centralize property in the hands of a few and the millions are under bondage to property---a bondage as absolute and deplorable as if their limbs were covered with manacles. (Lewis Henry Morgan)
"Aristrocracy of Feudal Parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing; and now, by a natural course, we arrive at the Aristocracy of the Moneybag.....the basest yet known." (Thomas Carlyle)
"Luxury and avarice---these pests have been the ruin of every state." (Marcus Porcius Cato)
"Every economic system, whether Capitalist or Socialist, degenerates into a system of privilege and exploitation unless it is policed by a social morality, which can only reside in a minority of citizens....Every Church becomes a vested interest without its heretics....Freedom is always in danger, and the majority of mankind will always acquiesce in its loss, unless a minority is willing to challenge the privileges of its few and the apathy of the masses." (Richard Crossman)
"The Pleasures of the Rich are bought with the Tears of the Poor." (Thomas Fuller)
"I don't care how the poor live, my only regret is that they live at all". (George (no not Bush) Moore.
"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of wealth; the tyranny of plutocracy. (J. P. Morgan)
