American Paranoia

Editor

Barring few exceptions, Americans are not only the dumbest but also the most paranoid people on earth. How else does one explain Donald Trump’s occupation of the most powerful office in the world? Trump is a certified moron even though he insists he is a “stable genius”!

Their political imbecility aside, the US has the largest military budget in the world. At $716 billion directly for the military and another $300 billion for intelligence and other coercive agencies, its trillion dollar annual expenditure does not appear to make Americans feel any safer. The list of enemies is long: “terrorism” — that time tested bogeyman — is now giving way to the alleged threat from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, and even Mexican babies that must be incarcerated in animal like cages.

America’s military budget is greater than the next nine countries combined. China’s annual military expenditure at $225 billion is less than one-third of America’s. Russia’s is a puny $65 billion. So what is America so scared of, or is it really? What other factors account for such huge expenditures on weapons, including the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons? Trump has announced a $1 trillion modernization program of America’s nuclear arsenal.

The fact is, when you have so much weaponry, it must be used, hence the need for perpetual wars. This necessitates the creation of enemies, real or imagined, to seek justification for wars. The US is addicted to war; it matters not what party — Republican or Democratic — is in power. The one constant in US policy is war because it is profitable business, far more profitable than any other. Cindy Sheehan, mother of the 24-year-old US soldier Casey who was killed in Iraq in April 2004, says there is only one party in the US: the War Party.

There is a nexus of military, industrial, and banking interests. Dwight Eisenhower, himself a military man who became president, had warned about this before he left office in 1960. Since then, America has been taken over by an even more ruthless bunch of gangsters and mass murderers who run the deep state.

There is another toxic alliance that is dominant in US politics: Talmudic Zionists and evangelical Christians. If racism has been institutionalized internally, wars of aggression are the norm abroad. There are 2.093 million soldiers in the US armed forces (1.281 million regular and 801,200 reserve) that are scattered in more than 900 military bases worldwide. The same number of people (2.3 million) are incarcerated, the largest prison population in the world. New prisons are being built at a faster rate than houses for the needy and poor.

At $17 trillion, the US has the world’s largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but it also has 50 million people living in poverty. And its debt at $20 trillion keeps climbing.

That has not deterred American warlords from pursuing more wars of aggression abroad even though the vaunted US military has little to show by way of prowess if we discount its conquest of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1984, with a total population of 110,000 and no army!

America is an empire — but a fading one. Its massive outlay on weapons will not bring safety or security. Improving its atrocious behavior might.