It’s all connected.The wars in the Middle East are just another method to transfer out tax dollars to the 1% — the war profiteers.  Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex still needs to be heeded 50 years later.

I had previously quoted the words of Eisenhower-– the Republican, five-star general.  The words of his 1953 speech The Chance for Peace speech are worth repeating:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?

Throughout the #AfghanstanTuesday campaign, I have been quoting the blog Scarry Thoughts.  He comes through again on the effect of war on our economy.

The fact that Occupy Wall Street bloomed into a global phenomenon in little more than a week, and that it all happened at the beginning of October, 2011 — coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan War — has given tremendous hope to everyone who has been working to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan. People are in the streets, talking to each other, and that is how we’re going to find answers.

Especially important is the fact that the Occupy movement understands the systemic nature of the problems our country is mired in. And they have a determination to go to the root of those systemic problems. That’s essential to the antiwar movement. We don’t just have a war problem … we have a war economy problem!

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