CAN WE STOP SAYING THIS NOW?

From Democracy Now:

Pentagon Spying Targeted Church Meetings, Veterans Group

Here in the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union has released new documents from a Pentagon database used to spy on groups opposed to military recruitment and the war in Iraq. In one case, defense department officials notified two California recruiting stations after learning activists were planning anti-recruitment protests. A database report also included information on anti-war meetings and non-violence training sessions planned for churches around New York City. Another report warned the group Veterans for Peace: “should be viewed as a possible threat to Army and DoD personnel.” In a statement, Veterans for Peace Executive Director Michael McPhearson said: “It is appalling that the Pentagon would label peace activists – including those of us who put our lives at risk defending this country -- as potential threats. The federal government should not be wasting valuable resources gathering files on peaceful protesters who disagree with the Bush administration’s policies.”

But nobody in government really cares about the enormous resources wasted, for instance, upon the wars the US wages around the world just to keep smaller regimes in line, or about the enormous waste upon nuclear weapons and the "Star Wars" program, or about that portion of the world wasted by depleted uranium weapons, or about the fact that a whole country, Lebanon, was just wasted by US weapons fast-tracked to the Israeli government with the approval of both major political parties.

This is what I mean when I say that the US government is the world's welfare bum. The US government has been given a free ride to appropriate whatever labor it wants , through the exercise of dollar hegemony. As Henry C. K. Liu pointed out: "World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy." The socialist utopia already exists today -- for those branches of the US government which are allowed this free ride, and for the defense corporations which feed off this free ride. For everyone else, it's capitalism as usual.