None of these weapons sales by the US make the world a safer place. They all, along ever-increasing spending by the US on its own military, and its continuing use of that military to intervene in, invade and threaten other countries, contribute to the hugely costly and harmful effort by other nations to build up their own military in response to the US and its client states.
The losers in this zero-sum game of one-upmanship are the peoples of the world, who are denied good schools, decent health care, sound economies, democratic governments, modern transport systems, and perhaps worst of all, spending on environmentally safe development of energy infrastructure that could prevent the destruction of the entire global ecosystem.
And that includes us, the people of the United States. Deliberately frightened by the amped up propaganda put out by government agencies like the Pentagon, Homeland Security and the Justice Department, we cower and accept having more than 54% of all federal discretionary spending - a sum that has reached over $1.6 trillion this year, equal to all income taxes and corporate profit taxes collected by the IRS - expropriated by the Pentagon and other "national security" agencies. That is money that could be providing us with a first-rate educational system, free college for all who desire and qualify for higher education, a modern transit system, revitalized cities, and a modern energy system based on the non-carbon-based sources like solar power, water power and geo-thermal power that would not contribute to rampaging climate change. Instead we have a school system that makes me cringe whenever I drive past a school building here in Philadelphia (the nation's fifth largest school district) or in New York City, or when I read that only 12 percent of Los Angeles's public school children go on to college.
It is simply madness that has led us to this point. Madness by a ruling elite that only cares about grasping an ever larger share of the national and global wealth, madness by a corporate media that cares only about gaining an ever larger share of readers/viewers even if that is achieved by offering people scare stories about health threats, crime, scary immigrants and terrorism instead of genuinely needed reports on environmental threats, political corruption and America's true role as a rogue nation in the world, and madness among a public that has been led to believe that it has no real ability to change things except to go meekly to the polls once every two or four years to vote for carefully screened candidates of two parties controlled by corporate bribes.
I have traveled to much of the world (so far not yet Africa), and it is an eye-opener to see the incredible advances that have occurred in recent decades in previously backward countries like China, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea. Just take China, where I lived on and off for six years in the '90s. During that time, Shanghai, which had no subway system in 1990, built an underground rail system as large as New York's (400 miles of gleaming subway stations and tunnels), and changed from a sleepy ruin of a colonial-era city of crumbling buildings to a huge metropolis of towering skyscrapers and international commerce, even featuring a maglev airport train that whisks passengers the through 30 miles between the international airport and the city center at almost 200 mph. Many other Chinese cities have undergone similar transformations. I have visited European countries where citizens enjoy tax-funded universal health care at a far lower national and per capita cost than we face here in the US and have well-funded government retirement schemes that allow the elderly to retire without any drop in their living standard, all the while having worked at jobs that paid them better than in the US and gave them six or more weeks a year of paid vacation. Countries that also offer their nation's youth free college education and far greater opportunities for upward social mobility than does the vaunted US with its myth of "anyone can make it here."
Why is this so? Because the US has become essentially a garrison warrior state a kind of modern Sparta, obsessed with concepts like "global dominance," the supposed ability to "fight and win two wars at once" (fully disproven over the past 74 years of lost and stalemated wars), with "force projection" and dreams of achieving "technological superiority." We have become a country that lionizes generals, that applauds uniformed men and women walking through an airport waiting hall, that calls all its problematic police officers "heroes," but that ignores its real heroes: the teachers, nurses, EMT personnel, volunteer firefighters, mail carriers, nursing home aides, artists, highway repair crews and yes, even journalists the lowly folks who really keep the country going and make our lives possible.
If we don't turn this situation around, renounce our obsession with violence and with war as the preferred solution to international disputes, not only will this country go the way of Sparta and Rome, both powerful states that died of self-inflicted wounds, but we will likely drag the rest of the world with us into oblivion.
The latest reports on the climate front are grim. It turns out that the world's oceans have been for decades masking the real heating up of the globe that has been the result of humanity's and especially US Americans' frantic appetite for burning ever more coal, oil and gas in pursuit of goods, comfort, speed, wealth and power, absorbing as much as 93% of all the additional heat trapped by increased greenhouse chemicals in the atmosphere over the last two centuries. Now the seas have taken on about all the extra heat they can, and we are likely to start seeing the atmosphere itself heat up dramatically. The North polar region, we know, is soon to lose its entire ice cap in summer, perhaps in a few years but in any even no later than 2030. No less an agency than the US Navy is saying this, and is being given funds by a hypocritical Congress of climate change deniers to establish a whole new Naval Fleet in the Arctic Ocean to "project power" in that newly navigable seventh of the famed Seven Seas, the better to allow US energy to extract even more dangerous oil and gas reserves from under the newly ice-free sea bed safe from challenges by competing countries with Arctic coastlines like Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark/Greenland. Meanwhile the latest reports on Antarctica, where there is enough stored ice on land to, if it melts, raise the world's seas by almost 200 feet, are that the ice there is melting all over the continent, not just in the western region, and that it is melting some six times faster than scientists had thought until now (even climate change-denying Fox TV is now reporting on this looming catastrophe).
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