Wars abroad leave crumbling US infrastructure at home

While politicians in Washington recklessly call for bombing Syria and Iran, they ignore the economic costs of failed US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It calls into question the competence of leadership elites in the US, not to mention fundamental issues of governance involving the preservation of constitutional democracy. In the past, the US paid […]

Quality of Life under the Obama Republican debt deal

Polluted water, smoggy skies, crumbling bridges, less education funding, more unhealthy Americans: the impact of the debt deal’s massive cuts. The Obama-GOP plan cuts $917 billion in government spending over the next decade. Nearly $570 billion of that would come from what’s called “non-defense discretionary spending.” That’s budget-speak for education and job training, air traffic […]

Why would anyone want to cut the U.S. military budget?

With $549 billion requested for basic military expenditures, and another $159 billion requested for U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the record $708 billion military spending called for by the Obama administration for fiscal 2011 will be nearly equivalent to the military spending of all other nations in the world combined. And when it comes to […]

Voluntarily lowering the flag on the American Empire

An excerpt of an article by Chalmers Johnson [America finds itself in] August of 2010 with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan, even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq. I wish I had a crystal ball to peer into and see what historians will make of August in 2060. Let […]