Too big to not fail

Fights with wife, throws four
young children off bridge to
their deaths, laughs.

Surprise, surprise! In the annual rating of which states have the most influence in Congress, Idaho has come in 50th.

Apparently Canada, like the U.S., has decided to ignore their laws about war crimes and such. Bush managed to go there, speak, and return without being jailed. Maybe next time he travels somewhere.

The American empire has grown too big to not fail, and it is failing. It has become apparent that we can no longer afford our current lifestyle, especially as it relates to our hundreds of overseas bases and our pathologically bloated defense budget. Nor can we afford to keep pouring money into massive corporations that are themselves probably too big not to fail. We also cannot afford the price of the “privatization” of essential services and commodities, things like energy, medical care, prisons, food, and drugs, retirement, employment, and other things essential to basic human welfare. We cannot afford to service our massive debts to China and others, or our completely unnecessary and immoral “wars.” We have allowed ourselves to be exploited by our own short-sighted greedy elected officials and others to the point of potential extinction, certainly to the end of life as we have known it in the past century. I do not believe this is much of an exaggeration. If just China, alone, were to suddenly cash in their “chips,” our nation would be reduced to little more than a shell of its former self.

There is probably still time to prevent the worst of the potential disaster facing us, but I doubt that we have either the intelligence or the political will to save ourselves. There is almost certainly enough wealth in the U.S. to allow us to potentially solve our current insolvency. But first, we will have to give up doing stupid things for the wrong reasons. One of the obvious places to begin would be with the defense budget. As it is now, we produce weapons on a massive scale that we do not need. While it may be true that this production creates jobs, it is not productive. It is not productive because many of these products are not needed in the first place, and many of them just end up as scrap, to be replaced by newer models that we also do not need. It is well known that our defense budget is larger than all the rest of the world combined. For what purpose, who is the enemy against which this overkill is aimed? Related to this unnecessary expense is our maintenance of more than 700 bases all over the world, in some 100 countries, most of these we could easily do without, in some cases because the countries involved are perfectly capable of looking out for themselves, and in other cases the reasons for their existence are merely trivial. As defense eats up somewhere around 50% of our annual budget, imagine how many hundreds of billions could be saved by cutting back drastically on this ongoing stupidity.

Our system of health care is another case of unbridled stupidity. Although we spend much more on health care than other civilized countries, our health care, except for the very wealthy, doesn’t match up very well, and what is worse, about 50 million of our citizens do not even have health care. This is a national disgrace. We know that a single-payer system would be far more efficient and cheaper, but we resist such an obvious choice with a passion exceeded only by the greed of the insurance companies and pharmaceuticals. Why should the insurance companies have anything whatsoever to do with health care? And why should pharmaceutical giants be allowed to game the system so shamelessly for no reason other than their short term profits? Billions more could be saved if we did not insist on maintaining this basically criminal enterprise.

Related to this is our completely failed “war on drugs,” a war so misguided and stupid it boggles the mind of anyone who seriously thinks about it. Starting before him, but given more incentive by Richard Nixon and other like-minded nincompoops, what was always a medical problem became mysteriously converted into a political problem. Physicians and patients no longer have much say about their uses of, or problems with, drugs, as these decisions are now made by politicians and the drug companies. Not only do these ridiculous laws put thousands of otherwise innocent people in jails, they also bring about criminal activities on a massive scale, culminating now in the terrible “drug wars” in Mexico. Billions of dollars could be saved, and most of this violence could be stopped, merely by legalizing drugs and having them regulated by prescription and physicians, and taxed. Most of those who actively and aggressively resist legalization most probably know nothing about drugs except what they gleaned from watching “Reefer Madness.” What have we gained from our years of fighting illegal drugs and the billions we have spent needlessly? Most drugs are now in greater supply than ever, less expensive than ever, and our nearest neighbor in B.C. now lists marijuana as its leading export. Columbia and Afghanistan continue to produce as much or more than ever. Our demand for illegal drugs is the basic problem, and the one problem we seem most uninterested in changing or controlling.

In addition to these obvious sources of money there are other areas that would produce billions for the national budget. Huge subsidies for oil companies and big agriculture, that they don’t even need, come readily to mind. Higher taxes on the obscenely wealthy would also help. No one needs to make 100 million dollars a year, and no one needs to make billions either. These outrageous sums could be taxed at a much higher rate and no one would even know the difference in terms of living their lives in luxury.

President Obama seems to understand most of these problems, and he is making at least some strides in trying to correct some of them, but in my opinion he is, probably by political necessity, going about it too cautiously, and I doubt members of Congress will have much stomach for it, being too much in the tentacles of big business and the wealthy.

LKBIQ:
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say that there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
Frank Zappa

TILT:
The DNA of the Bonobo (Pan paniscus) is known to be more than 98% similar to that of homo sapiens.