
The 800 pound gorilla
We all appreciate the sacrifice made by our boys in uniform. That’s not the point. The point is that military spending is bankrupting the country. How disappointing to hear President Obama declare a freeze on desperately needed investments into our capital infrastructure but won’t cut back a dime on military spending. This is not the action of a capitalist. It is the action of a fascist. If that doesn’t alarm you, you need a remedial course in history.
I wish our politicians could read a balance sheet and financial statement. A tank is not a capital item by any definition of the word. It is an expense, a night watchman’s expense. Based on the spending for military nonsense the past 50 years one could make the case that we have had a military coup in this country. In fact, we have. It seems everyone welcomes it. Well, not everyone but the military has an 80% approval rating. Compare that to the approval rating of congress.
I’m a factory owner, competing in a market economy. If I had the same night watchman’s expense as the United States I’d have to double the price of everything I sold – which explains our trade deficit. Our military consumes half our total industrial output annually. Is the reason we aren’t told this because we’d instantly see the lunacy of such a policy? This misdirection of our labor, credit and material resource must come to an end. Nothing is more detrimental to commerce than war, invented or real. Unless of course, you own stock in defense contractors.
We’ve been sold protection we didn’t need. We have no enemies with the capacity to do us real harm. We are protected by vast oceans and are individually armed to the teeth, impossible to occupy by foreign invaders. The simple fact is nobody wants our territory, so polluted it is. Our forests are ravaged. Our roads, sewer systems, bridges and cities are crumbling before our eyes. Our farms are sterile and poisoned. And all we do is make weapons. This is a mindset worthy of a true hillbilly.

Second Amendment
Second Amendment: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Having been oppressed by a professional army, the founding fathers of the United States had no use for establishing one of their own. Instead, they decided that an armed citizenry makes the best army of all. George Washington created regulation for the aforementioned “well-regulated militia” which would consist of every able-bodied man in the country.
The reason I’m bringing this up has nothing to do with the National Rifle Association but with the fact that we ARE oppressed by a professional army—our own! I wrote about this a few blogs ago in my 800 pound gorilla piece but nagging is profoundly underrated so here I am again, nagging you to do something about this travesty. Do you really enjoy working six months every year and giving every penny you make to support this expense that gives us nothing in return except the hatred of the world? I’m sick of it.
When I point this out to most people they respond by saying that military spending is only 5% of GDP. Why they would use non-standard accounting to justify this stupidity astounds me. GDP is just everybody’s salary—regardless of what they do. GDP means nothing whatsoever, except as a ruse. Military spending consumes over half of our total industrial output! That’s the real truth. We could cut our work week in HALF with no loss of incomes if the military industrial complex would stop oppressing us.

I was a chief petitioner…
Excerpts from Rolling Stone Magazine, March 2010
…on the Oregon Marijuana Legalization Initiative in 1986. Talk about being ahead of the times. In 1999, when Gary Johnson was still governor of New Mexico, he spent some time examining drug-policy reports, found the evidence for decriminalization compelling and publicly announced his support for legalization — and immediately saw his approval rating plunge from 58 percent to 28 percent, almost overnight.
“I wasn’t blind — I knew that was going to happen,” Johnson says today. “But actually having it happen was something else.” Rather than backtrack or waffle, Johnson took a novel tack: He continued to speak out on the subject. “I vowed to myself to make it to every nook and cranny in New Mexico to explain to people what I was talking about,” he says. “And I ended up leaving office with a 58 percent approval rating. I really see this issue as one of education.” Later, he adds, “There is one segment of the population that is 100 percent against legalizing pot. And that’s elected officials. What I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen is that legalization is a good issue. By good issue, I mean it makes sense. I really believe that, literally, one day all politicians are going to go to bed and get up the next morning and say, ‘Yeah, OK.’ I always say it’s a litmus test for having a brain.”
Repeal of Prohibition is not normally listed as a New Deal jobs program. Still, it happened in 1933, when unemployment had soared to nearly 25 percent, the high point of the Depression. Certainly repeal had some positive economic effects. Alfred Vernon Dalrymple, the National Prohibition Director — the drug czar of his day — predicted in Time magazine that repeal would mean “putting hundreds of thousands of men back to work and…hundreds of thousands of dollars of new business.” And FDR himself — who, in 1937, would be the first president to make marijuana illegal — argued in a 1932 campaign speech in Sea Girt, New Jersey, that “our tax burden would not be so heavy nor the forms that it takes so objectionable if some reasonable proportion of the unaccounted millions now paid to those whose business had been reared upon this stupendous blunder could be made available for the expense of government.”