PHOTO/THOMAS HAWK
With each passing day lately, humanity moves closer to another world war, and the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy the world is becoming all too real.
The people of the world don’t have anything to gain from world war, and we have everything to lose. This war is about the global elites fighting over markets, resources and territory. The rich are fighting over money, while billions of us are without regular access to food, clean water, housing, healthcare and other necessities.
The American corporate class is driving the world toward war. Capitalism is dying and they hope to save their wealth through war. The US spends nearly $1 trillion a year on the military. Its military budget is larger than that of the next nine countries combined. There are nearly 200,000 American troops in about 1,000 bases outside the US, spread across 177 countries. We have spent some $4.5 trillion on wars since 2001.
We are being bankrupted by military spending. Our military budget accounts for more than half of the discretionary spending in the federal budget. US billionaires and corporations, in pursuit of their mad dreams of global domination, are starving the American people to feed the military budget, and threatening to destroy the world in the process.
And then we are told that spending on things like food stamps, education, Medicaid and Medicare must be cut because the government spends too much. About $5 trillion in cuts in social spending are planned over the next 10 years.
This is insane. It’s estimated that it would cost only about one-fourth of the US military budget to eliminate poverty in the US, and to eliminate poverty and hunger worldwide would cost only about 10 percent of world military spending.
The drive toward war not only threatens to destroy us all, but is taking food out of our mouths. We, the people, have a right to food, water, housing and other necessities, and we and the rest of humanity have a right to be free of the threat of war. We must demand the US government pull back from the brink of war and cut the military budget to pay for human needs.
We, the people of the US, have a particular responsibility to impose peace on the war makers.
