The end is not near. The end is here. The graveyard of empires is about to erect a new tombstone, this time for the Exited States of Hysteria. Perhaps mausoleum is a more appropriate word. What with the new $800 million dollar fortress/embassy being built in Kabul. Iraq is a deepening morass with no end in sight.
Here are some quick figures.
Each US soldier in Afghanistan costs $1 million per annum. CIA employs 80,000 mercenaries there, cost unknown. The US spends an astonishing $20.2 billion alone annually air conditioning troop quarters in Afghanistan and Iraq. The war has cost 450 billion so far.
As far as the human cost goes, something like 1750 "allied" dead and 15000 wounded.
In Iraq, we are looking at $1.9 trillion (give or take a couple of billion) or $6300 per US citizen. Total US casualties? A staggering 4477 dead and 31912 wounded. These however, are official totals and the real numbers are almost certainly higher. After all if the government can't tell the public the truth about the Post-Office's budget how the hell can we expect them to be anywhere near accurate about something as sensitive as the number of service men and women sent to their deaths?
In the course of researching this post I discovered that there is no agency responsible for maintaining an accurate count of Iraqi civilian deaths but the best estimates have the total at about 1 455 590. Think about that for a moment. What better way to illustrate the fact that the Iraqis don't count than NOT TO COUNT THEM? The Iraqis don't count. The civilians don't count. The taxpayers don't count. YOU don't count.
The only entities that have any pull in Washington are the big defense contractors and the ones who finance them.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters, bless their little hearts, haven't got a clue or a prayer. Does anyone really believe that the Neros on Capitol Hill are going to let these figurative Christians affect any real change? They are fortunate so far in that they have not had their heads bashed in like so many seal pups in spring. There are signs that the movement has already been infiltrated and that is of course to be expected. The one thing the Exited States truly despises is a real populist movement of the people FOR the people.
The American people don't get it. They really don't. The elections are rigged, the table is tilted, as George Carlin used to say, its a big club and you ain't in it. The money has long since been stolen from them. NOW they are worried about Social Security. It is gone, has been for a while now, Clinton got it. They think they lost their freedoms when the Bush/Cheney cabal rammed through the obscene Patriot Act. Nope Lyndon Johnson began the destruction of the American form of democracy. Not that it ever got to take more than a few wobbly first steps in the first place.
Yeah, Nixon WAS a crook, but so where most of the rest of them. One big criminal gang running the country into the ground to line the pockets of dem bad mutha-fuckas The Harvard/Yale Crew. I should point out just to illustrate how useless partisan politics is that the only two presidents of the current era who were not among the absolute slime of humanity were one of each party. Can you guess? One crisp 44 cent dollar for the first reader to get it right.
Back to the protesters. I do admire the tenacity and the willingness to try to affect some real change but the time for a real genuine full-blown protest movement was around 1967 - hey wait a minute...
Even those opposed to the selling out of America sold-out. Hippies became yuppies bongs to beemers and there you have it. I'll miss America. It really is too bad that in the minds of most of the population, the USA's very raison d'etre was to oppose things. Anti-communism, war on drugs, war on terror blah blah blah. America needs to be FOR something. Something besides shopping. You can't define yourself by what you are opposed to any more than you can describe a cat by talking about what it isn't.
America is lost. the 1% have won. The so-called 99% who are occupying different cities of the USA and the around the world may save their own souls by chanting and waving placards but they cannot save the nation.
Sleep well Apocalyptoids.
