@snoopydawg

Thanks for posting this:

https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html#c1

War Is A Racket By Major General Smedley Butler

...To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.

We must take the profit out of war.

We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.

We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

CHAPTER FIVE

To Hell With War!

I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money . . . and Germany won't.

So . . . "

Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."
Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. ...

...If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war -- even the munitions makers.

So...I say,

TO HELL WITH WAR!

Long history of corruption and of insufficient publicity and account given to the essential information revealed by heroic whistleblowers.

Are we really just going to let mindless Greeds destroy civilization and life on the planet? Say it ain't so!

The only one I could answer is that I know who Smedley Butler was. I used to ask that same question about why no one had heard of him and his message but I didn't know about him until someone asked me if I knew about him and his book. That was after I joined DK in 05.

And the numbers for defense and domestic spending is totally f'd up and I am constantly told that there isn't enough money for our social programs and that 'they' need to cut the budget for them and then I hear that the military is going to be getting much more money in order to fight the terrorists and many people are okay with it because our troops are risking their lives for our freedoms. I still don't understand how the terrorists could take our freedoms from us.
Apparently they don't know that many of our freedoms have already been taken away from us because of the war on terror after congress passed the patriot act and the military commission act as well as legalizing the 800 contractors and the NSA to illegally spy on us. I don't care that congress has said that it is legal to spy on us or hold us indefinitely without charges or that Habeous Corpus is still not in effect.

Congress needs to change the constitution to be able to do those things and they haven't done that. Yet.

Here's a link to Smedley's book if anyone hasn't read it yet. It's too bad that our government doesn't go after war profiteers anymore, but if they did there would be a lot of people going to prison, but this country doesn't prosecute the Big wigs anymore
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

@mimi

I had never heard of this project before, but I love it. I'm going to adopt a HeroRat. $7.00 a month to help clear land mines? I'm in! And they are super cute too. : )

PS: the link you posted didn't work for me, I found the organization at https://support.apopo.org/en

Amazing little critters.

Now I'm off to learn more about Smedley Butler.

how about letting all your grandkids know about the real heros, these little
HeroRats. I like 'em.
They are so cute:

You just train them to sniff out all them imperialists and corporate oligarchs and send them to bite them real good in their behinds. Rats will clean out the swamp soon and your grandkids can help with that.

Just kidding a bit, otherwise I dig myself into a depression.

@The Wizard

We have paid an enormous price for the redirection of social capital to military

The endless war is shredding the social fabric. Can the corrupt politicians re-prioritize? Not unless their weaponry is turned around against them, IMO.

We are paying for the ultimate killing machine. We have a government that has proven that it will assert military force as imperialism -- imperialism to enforce our Western model on the rest of the world to make the world "safe" for us. That means that lots of people will die, and chaos will replace orderly civil institutions. We are f'n paying for this. And the blow-back is huge. We are bringing the American hegemony project to an early ending. We cannot ignore the development of our society and economy for the false hope of a pacified, compliant world. We have paid an enormous price for the redirection of social capital to military purposes. Think about what those trillions and trillions of dollars wasted on war could have bought for the development of a sustainable infrastructure, education, health care, technology, etc. Jack Ma is right, we have screwed ourselves, and we are screwing harder.

@RantingRooster on the front page of the NYT, some article about how Trump is acting presidential now and how people are impressed. God help us.

But Karl (George Bush's brain) Roves was right, We're an Empire now and make our own reality. The disinformation campaign(s), evening going back the Wilson's CPI, has created an ignorant population in capable of comprehending anything that doesn't fit in the official narrative.

I quit public school because I knew I was being spoon fed a bunch of horse shit.