When I joined the military, Vietnam had ended just 2 years prior. So I did not join to fight nor did I join out of some misplaced brainwashed sense of fake patriotism. It was a volunteer force and I needed a job and I needed to learn some life skills. The military back then was a pretty good option for these goals for a young person. Despite the fact that the pay was jokishly low (base pay for an Airman Basic was $420 per month...), I considered it a fair enough deal because it included room and board I had no real work skills at the time. Additionally, military basic training was a good wake up call for someone who grew up without the oversight of a father. It made me understand the power of discipline or perhaps the weakness of not having it.
At that time, military was not very popular because Vietnam was not a popular war. Nor should it have been. This was not national defense. It was empire building. It was war profiteering. A lot of good young men got turned into hamburger for it and many more had to deal with the mental scarring for life. So when I got on a plane, nobody clapped for me in the waiting area of the airport and nobody came up to me asking to shake my hand while thanking me for my service. Nor should they have because I was not a hero and neither was anyone else in the service. It was a job that we agreed to do in exchange for compensation. Period. It was not a very good job but I was not a very skilled person and so it was a fair exchange.
How things since then have changed. As the elite profiteering increased on the back of debt fueled US military expansion within our government, our corporations and the world, the con men running this shit show used the usual emotional tactics in order to hide, obfuscate or justify their corruption. Fools around the country were convinced by these false patriot profiteers to "honor our troops", etc. etc. What they really meant was to deify the military in general and place it on a false worship pedestal in order to keep the ridiculous funding coming. The chart below defines the word "ridiculous". Why do we need to keep this massive spend going? Who is paying for it and what are we really getting? What are we not getting if money is being pissed away down the military rat hole?
The deification of the military was supposed to get sheeple to be afraid/intimidated to ask these basic questions. After all, if you were jealous of military spending then you must not support our troops and therefore you must not be a patriot. It's a great scam and as I have always said, the US has the best con artists in the world.
But none of this could have happened if the workers had been required to pay for it in real time. People would have said, no I do not have the money or no I do not want to pay this month's special assessment for outlandish military expenditures and global military adventurism. And so instead of doing this, the fucking con men just created this fake credit card called treasury debt and they piled the military spending and any other kind of spending they could into it. That way the con men got their cut of these outlandish cash outlays and the population did not have to do less with less in any way because the bill for all this spending was put on the national credit card; consumption today and defer the paying of it. Kicking the debt Ponzi can down the road. Call it what you like.
Unfortunately, at some point the credit card has to be paid off OR defaulted on. Neither is going to be any fun because we have now gotten very used to living off of this credit card and if this lending ever stops then the floor is going to drop out of the liquidity elevator which is the rising tide that floats all boats. Without the ability to take on massive debt, the military spending will have to collapse because the people cannot suddenly begin making the associated payments.
This is really not an "if" question but a "when" question. The only alternative is for the US to try to declare martial law on the entire world. This is what I refer to as the Roman option. Rome got big not by earning what it had but rather by conquering everyone else and stealing their money, their technology and their labor. The go Roman option is, for the US, to simply declare the repayment of US foreign held debt to be contrary to the national interest and thus to the national security of the USA. A heck of a lot of corruption and lies can be justified under the umbrella of national security. All we have to do is demonize anyone who doesn't agree with our theft and then send in our overly capable military to convince those regimes that they need to continue sending tribute to Caesar.
As I was saying, from the 1970s until today the military has just gotten bigger and bigger and in doing so it provided less and less real security to the American people. But at some point, maybe not today but at some point, interest rates will rise dramatically and the US will have to make a decision as to whether to default on our debts OR simply demand under threat of military action that we continue to be "loaned" money forever; gift loans as a tribute to Caesar.
I don't think the USA is big enough to take on the world and China is now beginning to build up its military might. The US cannot take on Russia + China and win. So the "go Roman" option time window is closing fast. Its more likely we will default on our debts and then begin seeing severe austerity measures like other failed nation states.
Perhaps it is a sign from above that this is already happening. Its a bit ironic that the USS Arizona memorial has developed cracks to the point where, exactly on Memorial day, it had to be shut down for repairs "indefinitely". I'm watching this one closely just like I watched the Duck Dynasty vs A+E. If they actually repair this memorial and then re-open it then the military industrial complex might have more room to run. But if they finally decide to simply condemn the monument and close it forever then I think it is a perfect sign that peak liberal militarism is upon us. This is not some kind of prophetic religious statement but rather something quite a bit more obvious. These memorials are there to control people, to get them to shed emotional tears for all the loved ones who died defending our country (even if all modern day versions of such defense were really an offensive military expansion). If the people were swarming the monument each day then you best believe that the powers that be would recognize that the control mechanism was still working and thus a good investment. But if nobody much went there, especially from the new, younger working class, then to Hell with those who died because it was never about them in the first place. It was always about using symbols to control the labor force.
I strongly suspect because of my wave count on peak liberalism that the USS Arizona memorial will never be re-opened.
Happy Memorial Day.
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