I recommend reading Rachel Maddow’s new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. It’s not a left-wing or right-wing book. It’s a cause and effect policy book, very unlike most broadcasters’ books. Roger Ailes of Fox News even recommends it. It’s an important analysis of the use of our military, how disconnected from it we have become, and what we might do to reengage civilians. War should not be easy, but it has become too easy.

Most of the wars we fight today are not about our freedom, and we need to stop fighting them. Our armed forces volunteer in case our freedom needs protecting. Even though we don’t have an active draft, all young men and many young women register for the draft at 18. The draft can be activated very quickly if needed.

But for about 40 years, America has sent our military to war. We as a country haven’t gone to war. We the civilian citizenry are too disconnected. We have come to peace with being at war.

I agree with all of your comments on my last post, except on a couple of points.

An all-volunteer military deserve to be thanked just as much as a draft military. Some of these service personnel volunteered prior to 9/11 to get a lot of help paying for college, or because it is a tradition in many families. They didn’t expect a decade long war.

Those who volunteered after 9/11 did so out of patriotism to fight those who attacked us. They didn’t have anything to do with the extremely poor decisions made by their command.

College is nearly unaffordable unless you’re rich, you have lots of scholarships, or the military pays for it. The GI Bill is how my dad went to college back in the 1960′s.

When we had the draft in the past, many who were drafted into the Army volunteered for one of the other 3 branches of service. Many who volunteered and ended up in this mess of wars did not voluntarily reenlist. They were retained against their will under the stop-loss rule. Iraq and Afghanistan effectively had a back-end draft. I know of a few people who have been deployed 7-8 times and are still up for redeployment.

We have to separate our disdain for a war from the soldiers who fight it. The soldiers don’t make the policies and send the troops into battle. They deserve a public thank you, and parades don’t cost that much. The St. Louis parade was set up by a couple of private citizens.

Thanking the troops is a totally different thing than condoning the wars they are ordered to fight. People did protest against Iraq but were stopped. It wasn’t safe to protest without possible severe personal consequences.

War is not the answer most of the time. But times arrive where some destruction needs doing. It was necessary to go into Afghanistan and get Osama bin Laden and his terrorists. That was nearly done in 4 months using mostly special forces when G.W. Bush turned the focus on Iraq.

We let bin Laden slip through our fingers, and we passed the 10-year mark in the Afghanistan war in 2011. The Iraq war went on for over 9 years before we left. President Obama got bin Laden, and is winding down our Afghanistan presence, albeit too slowly.

I pray we don’t start a war with Iran. I don’t think it would help the situation, and it would possibly encourage them to build a nuclear weapon. If we use diplomacy, we just might avoid them seeking nuclear warfare capability.

Technorati Tags: America at peace with war, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, Iraq war, Rachel Maddow, unnecessary war

Read what it says...

This perfectly sums up what the whole problem is with our government today.

We’re at a big turning point in America.

We have plenty of money. America is not broke. It’s how we’ve chosen to spend it that is causing so many problems. We have a big disconnect on what economics works and what fails.

There is the Republican/Tea Party faction that wants spending cuts, no new taxes, lower the taxes we have, and stopping America from doing great things. They don’t even want to put enough into the country to keep it a civilized society.

There are the progressives who are willing to dream big, to win World War II, to put men on the moon, to build an international space station, to rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II, to build the interstate highway system, to create the best public school system in the world, and to build the modern infrastructure we enjoyed for three generations.

Our greatness was hijacked by the Reagan administration, when he refused to continue investing in this country, over-spent on defense, and tripled the national debt.

I want pre-Reagan (Carter) America back. I want our greatness back. I want America to do great things again. We have a choice. We can do better. Let’s choose a greater American future.

Technorati Tags: Lean Forward campaign 2011, MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, TRMS

November 2010 seems like a distant memory. If I recall correctly, the election of Nov. 2010 was supposed to be about jobs and the economy. Remember? Jobs, jobs, jobs?

30 Seconds of Rachel Maddow on the 2010 election:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

After 187 days, 19 hours, (as of this writing) the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has presented absolutely no jobs bills. In fact, they’ve changed the conversation to completely exclude jobs, other than harping that tax increases of any kind will kill jobs growth, and if that happens “so be it”. Oy!

I wrote about tax cuts and the economy previously: If tax cuts work so well, why aren’t we rich? All they want to argue about are a bunch of social and ideological issues, tax cuts, the national debt, the budget deficit and national debt ceiling.

Republicans want us to be afraid of a lot of things that have nothing to do with our own bread and butter issues. They’ve changed the conversation away from jobs, wages, benefits and workers’ rights. Republicans were elected to deal directly with those issues. They have only harmed us. They’ve done nothing to help.

Republicans are succeeding at making us afraid of each other and for our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, which we paid for through payroll taxes. Those programs had nothing to do with our current fiscal disaster and must be left alone.

The only current issues are increasing taxes on the rich and corporations, and increasing the debt ceiling. The House should pass a bill to increase the debt ceiling to a reasonable amount to keep America’s debt obligations paid while allowing for the federal government to spend, create jobs and grow the country out of this recession.

You can’t cut your way out of a recession. When you need more money, more money has to come in. At home, we call that getting a second job. In government, we call that raising tax revenue by several means (increasing taxes, ending subsidies and deductions, etc.). Taxes on millionaires and billionaires should be raised to at least the pre-Bush tax cut rates. They will expire at the end of 2012 anyway, and shouldn’t be renewed under any circumstances.

No deal should have to be struck to raise the debt ceiling. This tactic is holding the middle class, the country, and the world economy hostage so Republicans can get tax cuts for their fat-cat supporters. They are willing to flush the full faith and credit of the United States of America down the toilet for their corporate overlords.

Fortunately, if no reasonable deal can be made in time, the 4th section of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution can be invoked by the president to meet all our debts:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

It shouldn’t take such a measure to get Congress to do its job, but it’s there if we need it.

The debt and deficit are not current issues. They eventually must be dealt with, but right now, today, we need to increase the debt ceiling and work on getting Americans back to work making middle class salaries so we can pay our middle class taxes, grow the economy, and make it possible to reduce the budget deficit and national debt in the near future.

The Democratic Progressive Caucus has the only budget plan that deals with today’s problems and sets the budget up to be balanced in about 7 years, and reduce the national debt from that point onward. I’ll write more about deficits and debt in another post. There is a lot to it.

Subsidies to large corporations need to be cut off completely. That would raise a fair amount of revenue immediately. High profit corporations don’t need the money, and the rest of the economy does. Those subsidies would make some great jobs programs.

It’s time to stop all the arguments about social issues, ideological issues, tax cuts and debt reduction. It’s time to work on jobs, jobs, jobs!!! I implore you, Americans, vote for the country’s fiscal well-being in 2011 and 2012.

I ask you again, Speaker Boehner, where is your jobs bill? Where are the jobs?

Anyone else have a question for Speaker Boehner? Write it here and I’ll forward a message to his office with all your questions and comments.

In the meantime, if you’re American, please write or call your Congressperson: 202-224-3121.

Technorati Tags: employment difficulties, House Republican Majority Leader, jobs, John Boehner, national debt, national debt ceiling, Rachel Maddow, taxes, U.S. economy, wages