Progressive/Liberals/Dems are the Original Neocons

I've literally spent years and years pondering "How in the heck did the Republican Party morph into the warmongering, big spending and anti-liberty nightmare that it is today?"

Who got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars? All progressive liberal Democrats - Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Clinton.

How much blood is on the hands of the Democrat warmongers?  A lot and they left a bloody trail of carnage that consumed over 100 million lives.

Let’s Do War by the Numbers Because We Love to Kill

WW I resulted in the deaths of 35,000,000...

Of course, WW I only set the stage for WW II that killed at least another 50,000,000 folks (many historians put the WW II death toll at 60-70 million)....

Wikipedia estimates the deaths from the Korean War at 2,500,000 – 3,500,000 and the deaths from the Vietnam War at 2,500,000-6,000,000...

Since the end of WW II, another 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 folks have died as a direct result of U.S. foreign interventionism.

It was Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats who gave us the Federal Reserve and the 16th Amendment (income tax) in 1913. It was no accident that WW I broke out in 1914 and the details of that sordid 'bailout the rich' scheme are well documented.  Without the Federal Reserve, there would have been no WW I.  Moreover,  the Federal Reserve Act was indeed the enabling legislation that actually birthed the military industrial complex and not by accident.  It was all about war profits for America's wealthiest families and the 1% (the only beneficiaries of any war).

World War I, the Banksters, the Lusitania and Bailing Out America’s Wealthiest Families

Interestingly, I witnessed my own Democratic Irish Catholic family abandon the Democratic Party and become Reagan Republicans, largely because blue collar working class families such as mine were sick and tired of having their kids who were drafted into the US military come home from Vietnam in body bags or badly mangled from combat and war injuries.  They not only feared Democrat foreign policy, they were also extremely fearful of the growth in government power and spending.

When the Republican Party was pro-peace and anti-foreign intervention, it experienced the support of the people. How much support? Reagan's 489 electoral votes to Carter's 49 in 1980 and a 51% to 41% victory speaks volumes!

Source: US Election Atlas

Reagan was viewed as the great hope to restore America to fiscal and foreign policy sanity. Unfortunately, he was a big fail. Few Americans are even aware of the extent to which taxes and the Federal Reserve fund the wars and foreign policy.

Taxes are US. The Biggest Tax Increases in US History

The largest tax increases were imposed by Truman (Revenue Act of 1950, Revenue Act 1951 and Excess Profits Tax of 1950) to fund the Korean War. Johnson's two taxes, the Temporary Surcharge of 1968 and the Tax Increase of 1966, were imposed on the American people to fund the Vietnam War.

Reagan, revered by Republicans for his extensive taxation and spending, piled on 5 new and substantial tax increases and is probably the biggest taxing president in US history.

Reagan taxes:

Tax Increase of 1983

Deficit Reduction Act of 1984

Tax Reform Act of 1986

Budget Reconciliation of 1987

The largest Social Security Tax Hike in US history - the Reagan Social Security Tax of 1983.

While taxes are a direct hit to the American people that comes right out of their paychecks, by far the biggest tax is the hideous, invisible and unnoticed inflation tax that gave us this:

If America is ever going to be restored to peace, liberty and prosperity for the people, we need drastic changes, starting with severely cutting spending, ending the damn wars that are bankrupt us and reducing government power at all levels. Meanwhile, I'll be pondering why the warmongering foreign policy hawk Mitt Romney, who has vowed to spend trillions more on foreign policy, isn't sending his own sons off to die in neocon wars or come home limbless and minus their junk.

The Empire Really Does Strike Back: Americans are Idiots and Will Go Down With the Empire

Yes, the empire really does strike back but ultimately the joke will be on Americans who are slowly being delivered into a totalitarian Nazified hell.

Elections in America are never about foreign policy which, of course, keeps defense contractors and the military industrial complex fat, happy and murderous. In fact, foreign policy is so irrelevant to Americans that politicians can safely ignore the issue.

A recent poll indicated that only 4% of American registered voters even consider foreign policy an election issue, as disclosed in a recent CBS/New York Times poll, here.

Most Important Issue in the Presidential Election (Among registered voters)

Economy and jobs 62%
Federal budget deficit 11
Health care 9
Same-sex marriage 7
Foreign policy 4
Immigration 2

Americans proudly wave the flag and scream from the highest rooftops about American exceptionalism. But what are we exceptional at? Murdering folks all over the planet?

Is America a Nation of Bloodthirsty Warmongering Savages? For Americans, the Wars are Just Another TV Reality Show

For the vast majority of Americans, the damn wars really are nothing more than a murderous TV reality show.  It's entertainment.

That speaks volumes about us as a people in a nation that was founded on the principle of steering clear of foreign wars and interventions.

When one makes the decision to worship the state and all the evil that accompanies it, one tends to acquire the diseases that are spread by the state, notably poverty and oppression.

Americans seem to think that our reality show wars are simple cost free entertainment that is included in our cable TV packages and endorsed by CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC. After all, the media is the government's most powerful and effective propaganda vehicle.  The media and the entertainment industry propel our culture of violence.

Americans and taxable entities are currently paying about $2.2 trillion a year in federal taxes. It's been recently reported that 56 cents out of every tax dollar collected goes to the military and the wars, here.

Last year we taxpayers were charged 56 cents of every dollar we sent to Uncle Sam for military spending.

CNN recently reported that the cost to maintain one US soldier is between $850,000 and $1,400,000 a year (and rising), here.

Keeping one American service member in Afghanistan costs between $850,000 and $1.4 million a year, depending on who you ask. But one matter is clear, that cost is going up.

When Americans can no longer afford the popcorn to go with the cable TV's and visits to the movie theaters to gorge on louder and bigger violence, perhaps they might pause and notice that the military industrial complex has eaten them alive and left them with nothing but acute impoverishment and militarized police state tyranny.

It's practically a law of physics that every empire in human history is destined to bite the dust.  The evil US empire is no different.  When Americans have no jobs, no food on the table to feed their families and no shelter, they can ponder where their prosperity went.

United Bases of America

For America and Americans to be restored to liberty and prosperity, the military industrial complex must die.  

Reflections on Vietnam and its Iconic Napalm Girl 40 Years Later

Americans: We love the smell of napalm in the morning. We love defense contractor profits. We love killing for profit. We pledge allegiance to the military industrial complex and all the evil it represents.

The above photo is suddenly a red hot story this week because Napalm Girl, Kim Phuc, was interviewed 40 years after the famous photo was taken, a photo that managed to go viral at the time the event occurred.  Then, as now, the US media continues to be the propaganda arm of the government.

Thirty percent of Phuc’s tiny body was scorched raw by third-degree burns, though her face somehow remained untouched.

After multiple skin grafts and surgeries, Phuc was finally allowed to leave. For a while, life did go somewhat back to normal. She was accepted into medical school.

But all that ended once the new communist leaders realized the propaganda value of the “napalm girl” in the photo.

Read the rest here

New York Post 

Why is it 'enemy' propaganda for the America people to see the true face of the human agony caused by U.S. foreign policy?

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial lists the names of the 58,261 members of the armed forces who died in that war. During JFK’s presidency, Vietnam combat deaths were 182 (16 in 1961, 53 in 1962 and 118 through 11/22/63). On 10/11/63, JFK issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 making it official that the US would withdraw from Vietnam. On November 21, 1963, JFK was given a list of the recent Vietnam casualties and he told his Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. Vietnam is not worth another American life”. The next day, JFK was dead.

After JFK was murdered by the CIA and military industrial complex for the crime of promoting peace and opposing murderous genocide, the low level, low death Vietnam conflict massively escalated.  LBJ became the obliging Murderer in Chief and drafted young men to march off and die in senseless wars.  Peak Vietnam years for US combat deaths are:

1965   1,863
1966   6,144
1967 11,153
1968 16,589
1969 11,614
1970   6,083
1971   2,357

There were millions of US soldiers who returned home with lifelong debilitating combat injuries (not including Senator John Kerry who was scratched in the ass and demanded medals for his few short weeks of combat duty).

Millions of Asians from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were slaughtered. We bombed these nations into oblivion and doused them with poisonous Agent Orange. None of these poor third world nations posed any threat whatsoever to America.

Why did we do it? We march off to war for one reason and one reason only: defense contractor profits. The military industrial complex rules America, defense contractors own nearly 100% of Congress and the American Sheeple People are notorious for turning a blind eye to the crimes of the government they elect.  They'd rather be waving American flags on Memorial Day and July 4th while wallowing in the delusion that America is a great and free nation that spreads good cheer upon the planet.

Vietnam was a very expensive war.  The Congressional Research Service puts the cost at $686 billion, here.  Other estimates of the cost of the Vietnam War range from $700 to $900 billion.

If suffering Americans are wondering why the American economy lies in ruins, they only need to look at the gargantuan cost of our never ending wars.  In fact, most of our $15 trillion plus mountain of debt is war related.