@The Wizard "This Changes Everything" by Naomi Klein. After the capitalist crash & the process of cleanup begins we need to focus on System Change Not Climate Change and end global monopoly capitalism's stranglehold on the world & its people and move to ecosocialism.

There is so much waste in this system. The USA spends $1 Trillion on advertising, a waste. Insurance in the area of delivery of health care services is worse than a waste, it's parasitical. We can do better, and much cheaper, with Medicare For All.

Big Finance also produces nothing of value to society and causes bubbles which burst and beggar the wage earners while the arbs go free to cause further havoc.

As you point out, the military & intelligence agencies(all 16 of them) produce nothing and make life abroad and here much worse.

The US economy has reached a point of system instability. The debt-wealt-debt-wealth cycle has reached the point where the rich are sucking way too much income out of the economy and our unsustainable debt burden is their wealth. Hair President is going to accelerate us right over the cliff. He is in the process of cutting useful government spending and increasing useless military spending. No only is military spending inefficient, but its product is useless. Worse, using its products causes unlimited blow-back, in lives, infrastructure and dollars. It looks like we may have destroyed the EU in part because of the refugee issue. So, Mr. President, lets cut spending on social programs and on the environment to spend another $55 billion on the war budget.

My prediction is that our economy does not survive the four years of a Trump Presidency. I think that this community should start to focus on the aftermath. How do we build a nation that believes in social justice and is totally averse to war? We can't get there unless we have an economic collapse. Recent events should make us completely aware that the establishment will never use their powers for the good of the people, and will never step aside, even if they can't win elections. The Democrats have become a permanent, useless, minority party, who refuse to reform and refuse to step aside.

@The Wizard
your statement is so concise and so clearly right. I can only add one thought. I used to think federal bankruptcy would put war out of business. But it hasn't because, as I understand it, the Federal Reserve keeps printing money for it. I may not understand this correctly, but the Federal Reserve prints money and gives it to banks which lend it to our government for deficit spending, which increases our debt. I believe we were at 4 Trillion in debt under George W. Bush and now are at 20 Trillion after Obama. As long as this system is profitable to the weapons industry, the PNAC extractive and murderous industries, and to the banks, which charge us interest on all that debt, this will continue to be done.

We have to begin to file criminal complaints against our government, because as long as it's essentially "legal," because no one stops them, they will continue to do it.

The US economy has reached a point of system instability. The debt-wealt-debt-wealth cycle has reached the point where the rich are sucking way too much income out of the economy and our unsustainable debt burden is their wealth. Hair President is going to accelerate us right over the cliff. He is in the process of cutting useful government spending and increasing useless military spending. No only is military spending inefficient, but its product is useless. Worse, using its products causes unlimited blow-back, in lives, infrastructure and dollars. It looks like we may have destroyed the EU in part because of the refugee issue. So, Mr. President, lets cut spending on social programs and on the environment to spend another $55 billion on the war budget.

My prediction is that our economy does not survive the four years of a Trump Presidency. I think that this community should start to focus on the aftermath. How do we build a nation that believes in social justice and is totally averse to war? We can't get there unless we have an economic collapse. Recent events should make us completely aware that the establishment will never use their powers for the good of the people, and will never step aside, even if they can't win elections. The Democrats have become a permanent, useless, minority party, who refuse to reform and refuse to step aside.

@gulfgal98 @gulfgal98
For what? Oil I guess. 9/11 provided the excuse. I think it all boils down to getting oil out of our lives.

war has not become so sanitized as much as it is out of sight. Most people that I talked with during the four and a half years with the Peace vigil had zero clue that we were bombing in seven countries or that one million civilians have died in Iraq as a result of our attack on that country.

Very few Americans even know someone who has served in combat. War is very remote and foreign to them. It is happening in places overseas with strange names. Very few people even know of the weekly drone strikes or that 90% of the people killed in them were not even the target. Americans are ignorant of these facts because they are not available via the mainstream media. And this is done on purpose.

If nothing else, the sheer cost of these wars is the one thing that does get people's attention. The moral issues much less so. We have lost our moral compass in this country. What goes around comes back around. I dread that day.

@gulfgal98
Our knowledge of war is limited to the stories we are told about it. War is not a real thing for Americans -- it is a movie, or a news headline, or a book, or a television show. We do not feel the slippery blood of war with our fingers, or see the mangled bodies it scatters, or smell the death-stench of it, or hear the screams of the people caught in the middle of it.

Americans know nothing of war. Our total ignorance of it, our innocence and naivete, is a blessed thing, we are told. That we are able to have others killed, and not be killed ourselves, that we need not involve ourselves with the messy business of killing, or even pay much attention to it... these are considered to be a very desirable conditions. They are thought to be consequences of our strength and virtue, consequences of a hard-earned and well-deserved superior status, a status that must be maintained at all costs. So we are told.

And this we believe, by and large. To remain indisputably more powerful than any other nation on earth, has come to be something of a national purpose -- and a prerequisite to anything else we might attempt to do as a People. America and Americans have largely embraced the age-old logic of empire: To survive and prosper is to expand and to dominate. Our objective is to keep the battle lines as far away from home as possible, and always pushing outward.

war has not become so sanitized as much as it is out of sight. Most people that I talked with during the four and a half years with the Peace vigil had zero clue that we were bombing in seven countries or that one million civilians have died in Iraq as a result of our attack on that country.

Very few Americans even know someone who has served in combat. War is very remote and foreign to them. It is happening in places overseas with strange names. Very few people even know of the weekly drone strikes or that 90% of the people killed in them were not even the target. Americans are ignorant of these facts because they are not available via the mainstream media. And this is done on purpose.

If nothing else, the sheer cost of these wars is the one thing that does get people's attention. The moral issues much less so. We have lost our moral compass in this country. What goes around comes back around. I dread that day.

@Big Al way past time.
The utter hypocrisy of the US in the world is unfathomable.

The U.S. is illegally conducting airstrikes in Syria, kills 50 plus Syrians and injures over 100, and tries to say it was a mistake?
How can people believe this at all?
There's no mistaking the fact that Trump and some of his staff are war criminals now. There's no going back which means they must go forward. I think Pluto's right, it might be time for an antiwar movement.

@dance you monster But only if friendly troops are nearby. And it's considered Danger close if troops are within 600 Meters. As in just under 6 football fields away. At that point troops are considered at risk, and any officer who calls down fire support at that distance better be DAMN sure that the risk is worth it.

Sorry, for those who don't know, I served in the Artillery with the 3d Armored Cavalry. There's no excuse for firing that close and claiming that they didn't know damn well that there were going to be a large amount of casualties.

Nothing pisses me off more than those who won't own their violence. I have owned what I did during the war, and have accepted that my actions were the responsibility of the officers placed over me. Passing the buck when YOU GAVE THE ORDER is the height of cowardice.

the meeting was held about 15 metres away from a mosque

Fifteen meters, . . . almost 50 feet. Football players out there, imagine the distance you need to go to get a first down, that's 30 feet. You think you'd be safe from a bomb landing just beyond that?

Everyone else, look at your own homes. Is yours more than fifty feet long? Let's give the military geniuses some credit and assume they used a "smart" bomb for this. You've seen on the news the footage of those homing in on their targets. If the military sent one of their precious (and I mean that in their cost to taxpayers, too) super-accurate bombs in your home's back door, do you think anyone standing near the front door might be injured?

The military knows the stats on their bombs' targeting accuracy and their blast radii. They take those stats into account when they choose targets. The mosque was hit because it was deemed by these military geniuses that it was acceptable to hit it. The dead were intended to die.

@dance you monster Houses in my neighborhood run about 24x36. A bomb centered on my house would take out a sizeable chunk of my two neighbors.

the meeting was held about 15 metres away from a mosque

Fifteen meters, . . . almost 50 feet. Football players out there, imagine the distance you need to go to get a first down, that's 30 feet. You think you'd be safe from a bomb landing just beyond that?

Everyone else, look at your own homes. Is yours more than fifty feet long? Let's give the military geniuses some credit and assume they used a "smart" bomb for this. You've seen on the news the footage of those homing in on their targets. If the military sent one of their precious (and I mean that in their cost to taxpayers, too) super-accurate bombs in your home's back door, do you think anyone standing near the front door might be injured?

The military knows the stats on their bombs' targeting accuracy and their blast radii. They take those stats into account when they choose targets. The mosque was hit because it was deemed by these military geniuses that it was acceptable to hit it. The dead were intended to die.

@Lookout Yes, I'm going to go there.

I'm sick and tired of the MSM deciding that only very specific and narrow interpretations of culture are acceptable. Essentially, if you can sell it and package it, it's acceptable (See: St. Patty's Day. They don't even frickin call it what it is anymore) but if you can't slap a sticker on it, it's racist. (See: Greek Mythology, Norse Mythology (Unless it's MARVEL THOR!), British history, and anything else that doesn't currently bow at the altar of Mammon.)

Yes, I'm annoyed at it, and tired of being told that my interests are "Problematic".

Here's the first paragraph of his recent article:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dance_of_death_20170312
The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminate and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

Pretty accurate description. The whole piece is worth the read. I'm sorry to read your news of our bombing of a mosque....we have become what we say we hate.