it's stupid to cut domestic programs in favor of military spending 3/13/2017 0 Comments   A Military Man ? -- A Man in a Military Uniform ? -- President Trump delivered remarks in the hangar bay of the Gerald R. Ford, an aircraft carrier, in Newport News, Va. -- Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times  by E.L. Christianson Jr. Trump proposes to increase military spending by $54 billion and cut nonmilitary programs by the same amount. It is really stupid to cut domestic programs in favor of increased military spending, especially when we already have more military capacity than anyone and everyone else on the planet... and, we still can't win a war against third rate powers.  More money in the military budget will not help us.   We would benefit from a switch away from attempting to dominate the entire world to an intelligent foreign policy guided by international cooperation.  That doesn't seem to be forthcoming.  Our national identity is 'more war'. Instead, against the wishes of the vast majority (non-democracy in action), we will slash programs benefiting the citizens of our country... programs for health-care, education, the environment, and housing, among others. The problem is that we don't want an informed and intelligent electorate.  We have decades of cutting back on education in this country and now we reap the rewards of stupidity... at every level of our culture and in every aspect of our collective being. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know. Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal. The category of what Americans don't know seems limitless.  Americans can't recognize that polls constantly show congress failing to represent the public interest and yet Americans seem to think they live in a democracy. We know that we create terrorists when we attack civilian activities (weddings, funerals, hospitals, etc.) in foreign countries, but we want to spend more money to increase the frequency of an activity that we know is a failure.  It just seems stupid. No only are we stupid, we are completely without morals... imagine carpet bombing a country where people still plowed their fields using water buffalo... imagine all of the death and destruction caused by the carpet bombing... can one then imagine sending that country an invoice for the cost of the bombs that were dropped on them ??? ... and there it is, the truth !!! Cambodia Outraged as US Demands Repayment of 'Blood-Stained' War Debt The US dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia during the Vietnam War from Common Dreams by Nika Knight Cambodians are responding with outrage to the U.S. government's demand that the country repay a nearly 50-year-old loan to Cambodia's brutal Lon Nol government, which came to power through a U.S.-backed coup and spent much of its foreign funds purchasing arms to kill its own citizens, according to Cambodia's current prime minister Hun Sen. While the U.S. was backing the Lon Nol government, it was also strafing the Cambodian countryside with bombs—a carpet-bombing campaign that would eventually see over 500,000 tons of explosives dropped on the small Asian country, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and leaving a legacy of unexploded ordnances. "[The U.S.] dropped bombs on our heads and then they ask us to repay. When we do not repay, they tell the IMF [International Monetary Fund] not to lend us money," Hun Sen said at an Asia-Pacific regional conference earlier this month. "At the same time the U.S. was giving weapons to Lon Nol, it was bombing the Cambodian countryside into oblivion and creating millions of refugees fleeing into Phnom Penh and destroying all political fabric and civil life in the country," former Australian ambassador to Cambodia Tony Kevin told Australia's ABC. "And all of this was simply to stop the supplies coming down to South Vietnam, as it was then, from the north," Kevin added. "So the United States created a desert in Cambodia in those years, and Americans know this." Hun Sen has argued that the U.S. has no right to demand repayment of its "blood-stained" funds. "Cambodia does not owe even a brass farthing to the U.S. for help in destroying its people, its wild animals, its rice fields, and forest cover," wrote former Reuters correspondent James Pringle for The Cambodia Daily. In fact, during his tenure as prime minister Hun Sen has asked the U.S. to drop the "dirty debt" several times, but American leaders have refused. "[The] U.S. would not drop it. It would have been so easy to forgive the repayment, it would have been easy to refinance it for education like they did in Vietnam," the reporter Elizabeth Becker, who covered the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, told Al Jazeera. "The U.S. intervention in Cambodia was easily the most controversial that we had in that era," Becker said. "[The U.S.] dragged Cambodia into the Vietnam War for hopes that by expanding it they could win, the complications now are that even 50 years later, the Khmer Rouge legacy is horrible." ​ "The U.S. owes Cambodia much more in war debts that can be repaid in cash," Becker argued to The Cambodia Daily. U.S. fighter jets and an attack plane drop bombs on Cambodia circa 1973. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/cc)