The following is a section from 13 things you should know!
How to Ensure National Security AND Create a Healthy Economy!
In a world savaged by human-induced climate catastrophes and human-enhanced natural ‘disasters,’ and in the absence of any foreign military threat to the United States, our leaders have proposed to spend our tax dollars (2009) as follows.
Total Outlays (Federal Funds): $2,650 billion
MILITARY: 54% and $1,449 billion
NON-MILITARY: 46% and $1,210 billion [source: http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm]
The United States transformed its economy into a permanent military economy after WWII with a lion’s share of its resources committed to military spending.
Here’s the dilemma: A sane foreign policy would entail avoiding violence, rather than stirring chaos and starting wars so that the US can then intervene to end them. A peaceable United States, however, couldn’t justify an ever-growing military machine if there were no wars.
For the sake of protecting the military machine [and continue with the empire-building,] wars have become a permanent feature of world events.
As the overall size of the political economy grows, so does the need for creating more chaos and starting new wars through political deception and false-flag operations. Instead of ensuring national security and protecting the citizens, the military machine does its utmost to achieve the opposite result by endangering the country through creating wars and provoking violence throughout the world, simply to justify its own existence. Here is the classic example of “tail wagging the dog!”
What to Do!
To decrease the level of violence, the United States must undertake political and military decentralization. “Decentralization of the United States would also add to the security of other nations.” Say Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr. in for the common good: redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future.
“The United States has developed into a highly centralized society that could be virtually halted in its tracks by a few relatively small acts of sabotage. For example, the electrical grid on which the entire nation depends could be put out of commission [easily, by a determined saboteur.] A blackout would not stop the planes in the air or the tanks in the field, but the backup systems of communication, supply, and management would be disastrously disrupted. Yet defense planning pays little attention to these matters.” Say Daly and Cobb.
Aside from rare acts of sabotage, the disastrous impact of hurricane Ike on the power grid last week, which left up to 5 million people without power, should be a stark remainder and a wake-up call to how vulnerable our centralized power grid is to seasonal acts of nature, especially the natural phenomena enhanced by climate change.
Why isn’t decentralization happening? Daly and Cobb identify two major obstacles: “The first is the political power of groups that profit from military spending. The second is extreme difficulty of dealing in a humane way with the rapid shift in the whole economy.”
At least one of the two obstacles could be overcome, however. “If the United States makes a clean environment, human health, and community stability its goals, alone with a commitment to becoming more self-sufficient economically, the transition from a military economy to a civilian one may be affected without enormous pain.”
The key to economic self-sufficiency is decentralized production of renewable energy. We concur with Daly and Cobb who assert, “increasing local dependence on small-scale solar plants [and wind energy] would do far more to reduce real national insecurity than additional billions [trillions] spent on bombs and submarines.”
But how does more economic self-sufficiency help national security?
“… where there is economic self-sufficiency, national security need not involve fighting wars with distant enemies. It does not require the ability to conquer external powers. It requires only the ability to resist aggression against itself. Would the federation all 50 states be a likely victim of conquest? Would these states be in danger from Mexico or Canada?”
How do we protect ourselves and stabilize our world? What would it take to fight a war of aggression waged against us?
In a stable, demilitarized world, we would need only a small civil defense force to protect us against any aggression. Kirkpatrick Sale in Human Scale says: “The long human record suggests that the problem of defense and warfare is exacerbated, not solved, by the large state, and that smaller societies … tend to engage in fighting less and less violent consequences. Indicating that a world of human scale politics would not be a world without its conflicts and disputations, but would likely be a world of comparative stability.”
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