Heads up: While our sons and daughters are dying, losing limbs, and being permanently physically and psychologically wounded in Afghanistan, the Chinese are locking up investments in that country's copper mines, railroads, coal-fired power plants, minerals, oil and gas. Our blood, another country's treasure.
If we have no pride, should we not at least have shame in that it is our nation's children that we are sacrificing to this insanity?
Adding insult to injury, our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with our entire massive defense budget and hundreds of military bases strung around the planet are hemorrhaging our "commonwealth" away like an Alka-Seltzer underneath Niagara Falls. And we are borrowing these funds from the Chinese, the Saudis and others and we get to pay them interest on the loans. Loans we pay to fund wars to protect their interests, not ours.
What sort of madness is this?
This, of course, is nothing new. In 1927, in his still-relevant book "Oil" (the motion picture, "There Will Be Blood" was based upon the book), Upton Sinclair pointed out that even after World War One had ended that our American soldiers remained stationed in Vladivostok guarding J.P. Morgan's property interests (railroads and munitions) all underwritten by the British Government.
Few Americans are aware that our young Americans in uniform have been in Colombia protecting a pipeline owned by the transnational conglomerate Occidental.
From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the United States -- once the international titan in manufacturing and making products the entire world consumed -- is right in front of our very eyes is being reduced to exporting only one single commodity to the rest of the world: our children in dressed in military garb.
Jesse Jackson, in the 1990's, asked an audience to raise their hands if they owned a video recorder or television. Most everyone in the audience raised their hands. Jackson then posed a following question: "How many of you own an MX missile?". No one raised their hand and Jackson pointed out that the U.S. had quit manufacturing video recorders, but we that we made weapons. But, that is even changing.
The Chinese now boast their own home-spun aircraft carrier and jet airliners to compete with Boeing and Airbus. Yes, even that "military-industrial complex" that General and President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about is no longer an American monopoly anymore. U.S. Defense contractors are now facing aggressive competition in their once safe haven market. We are now even losing the weapon market.
And how, pray tell, will this play out? Our nation has no industrial policy and no longer looks out for its own self-interest. Where will this treacherous trend take us? It takes us to where we sell our children as hired guns, as the mercenaries of the world's oligarchs.
We are prostituting our children in wars that benefit other nations and the uber-rich of the world. Only the streets where we pimp our children are far more dangerous than Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevard or Times Square. We pimp our youngest and bravest to the bloody, bullet-strewn, and IED mined streets of Baghdad and Kabul. Now, we don't paint their faces and put them in dresses and make them dance for their john, rather we dress them up in fatigues and have them bleed to death marching tunes, don't we?
Perhaps some of our evangelical, Old-Testament Christian fellow-Americans might want to revisit their Bibles and read about the wicked God of Moloch who required the continual sacrifices of the people's children. Well, we have our own God of Moloch now, don't we?
Our only national commodity export is becoming our precious children, who we sacrifice in wars that benefit other nations and "royal families" who have financial interests that must be protected.
America is not just the world's 911 emergency responder, we have morphed into the world's foreign legion with our young people for hire.
The last manufacturing conveyor belt left in America seems to be a procession to the sacrificial altar of wars without end.
The next time you see a photograph of the caskets coming home draped in the star-spangled banner with our young men and women inside them, consider this: that is quickly becoming the only thing that we can say was "Made in America".
Not one American youngster should give their life so that Hamid Karzai and his drug-dealing brother can live like kings.
Bring our young people home to their families who need them. Let the rich, the oligarchs, the oil cartels, and the transnational corporations fight their own wars with their own children, not ours!