Did he or didn’t he? The mainstream press is all abuzz. Did Ron Paul know about the racist writings that appeared in his newsletters or didn’t he?

Well, at least for now, there doesn’t seem to be much proof one way or the other. People will believe what they want to believe.

No need for speculation though.

On July 3, 2004, Ron Paul gave a speech to Congress about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Here’s a link to the speech so that you can read the whole speech and understand Mr. Paul’s mindset.

Whether he deserves to be labeled a racist or not, I’ll leave for you to decide. In my opinion, the best you can say on his behalf is that his intent, at least in this speech, does not appear to be racist. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he’s such a twisted libertarian that his “businesses should be free to discriminate if they want to” nonsense ultimately is a permission slip for racists to do whatever they want without government intervention. If you are a Ron Paul supporter, do you actually condone this view?

Here is a key excerpt from Mr. Paul’s speech:

Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society. The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties. The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society.

Mr. Paul seems to be more concerned about the liberties of businessmen than about the liberties of minority groups that have suffered at the hands of racism during America’s not-so-egalitarian history.

I, for one, have no interest in living under the anti-societal oppression libertarians offer. I also have no interest in a Ron Paul candidacy. I hope you don’t either.

Our chief weapon is fear… and surprise. Our two chief weapons are fear, surprise… and ruthless efficiency. Our three chief weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency… and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Amongst our four weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope… and our nice red uniforms.

Well, now we have a few new weapons of torture to add to the list.

This is so sick and so perverse that words fail me. Instead, after the following excerpts, I’ve included a humorous scene from Monty Python. Apparently, our First Amendment right to free speech does not include the right to breathe or the right to see. There are some genuinely sick puppies repressing us. Here are some of their latest toys.

Riot shields could scatter crowds with ‘wall of sound’

RIOT shields that project a wall of sound to disperse crowds will reduce violent clashes with police, according to a patent filed by defence firm Raytheon of Waltham, Massachusetts.

(skip)

The new shield described by Raytheon produces a low-frequency sound which resonates with the respiratory tract, making it hard to breathe. According to the patent, the intensity could be increased from causing discomfort to the point where targets become “temporarily incapacitated”.

And, if that doesn’t sell you on the plain and simple respect governments have for peaceful protesters, how about this one?

Over the past few months, a handful of courageous challengers have stepped forward to throw their hats in the ring for next year’s presidential election. One or two have come from inside the Democratic Party; one or two have come from outside the party. Jill Stein will be the nominee for the Green Party; Rocky Anderson will represent the fledgling Justice Party. While I have great admiration for these candidates, sadly, I doubt they will be more than a footnote in history… at least for 2012. Perhaps someday, third parties will find a way to break through the corporate-stranglehold of the Republican-Democrat duopoly. Let’s not deceive ourselves into thinking that opposition candidates and parties are more than they really are. For those invested in such pursuits, I commend you and apologize for my skepticism. Go for it!

So, having said this, who… or rather what, has the potential to take down Obama next year?

The City of Charlotte, more specifically Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, said of a newly proposed ordinance targeting likely OWS protests at next year’s Democratic Convention: “The recent issues related to camping on city property have further amplified the need to review whether the city wants to regulate this activity during the DNC.” A city councilman commenting on current, and presumably future, Occupy Charlotte protests stated: “Once those ordinances go into effect, those overnight stays will end.”

Perhaps, unlike their 1968 predecessors, the Occupy movement will choose to steer clear of the political circus of the Democrat and Republican national conventions. Perhaps they will stage their own conventions at other locations. Don’t count it though. When the national media spotlights are turned on, what better place to get out your message? The conventions are likely to be ground zero for the movement.

Obama and his Democrats have some serious decisions ahead of them. Failure to handle the situation correctly might very well result in a crushing defeat for Democrats across the country. Occupy will be in Charlotte next year in waves whether the City of Charlotte welcomes them or not. Some, I’ve seen, on various pro-Democrat forums, have suggested that Democrats won’t be to blame; the choices are up to the City of Charlotte to determine how to handle the situation. They can’t be serious. Obama and the Democrats will get the blame if there are police and National Guard abuses against peaceful Occupy protesters. If it happens, there will be a bitter, emotional divide among Democrats and, just like 1968, the party will be crushed.

But it’s going to take much more than Obama’s pretty words and much more than tolerance of the street protesters to solve the problem. The reality is that neither the Democrats nor Obama himself is up to the task. At its core, the Occupy message is that they are sick and tired of the ultra-wealthy running the country and being catered to by the Democrat-Republican political class. Is anyone really naive enough to believe that the Democrats will accept the Occupy message and change course, deep in their hearts, before next year’s convention? They might try to show some sympathy in words; these words will be lies. In deeds, the Democrats have no interest in ending the rich-get-richer system of governance. Their token tax cuts will not end the special interest control of our government. Their wars and their endless military spending will do nothing to re-invest in America… and in Americans. Their moving further and further to the right to eat into the Republican share of the “independent vote” will do nothing to redress the desperation most Americans feel about their future. Their pursuit of Wall Street lobbyist loot and campaign cash exposes their lies.

Obama and his Democrats are in very, very serious trouble next year. There’s a challenger out there that they have no idea how to handle. It won’t come from the traditional, electoral model. It will come from the voices of the people assembled, legally or not, in the streets of Charlotte. And, just like in 1968, the whole world will be watching.

The following paragraph is an excerpt from a book by Noam Chomsky called “Understanding Power”:

“There’s a part of the Pentagon Papers which is considered politically incorrect… It’s the part that deals with the time right after the Tet Offensive in 1968, everyone recognized that the Vietnam war was going to take a long time, it wasn’t going to be possible to win it quickly – so major decisions had to be made about strategy and policy. Well, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked by General Westmoreland, the top American commander in Vietnam, to send 200,000 more troops over to the war – and they refused, they didn’t want to do it. And the reason is, they said they were afraid they might have to use the troops here in the United States to put down a civil war: they said they were going to need the troops at home for “civil disorder control,” as they put it, and therefore they didn’t want to send them to Vietnam. These guys thought the society was going to crack up in 1968, because people here were just too opposed to what they were doing.”

When a so-called free society blurs the line between military control of its domestic population and civilian control, when it blurs the line between military “justice” (Groucho Marx quote: “military justice is to justice what military music is to music”) and civilian justice whose courts are designed to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, when it blurs the line between “enemy combatants” and those who speak out and demonstrate against its policies and laws in pursuit of a redress of grievances, it ceases to be a free society.

After decades of sleepwalking through history, the people, or at least some of the people, have awakened. They have raised their voices in protest. They have organized. They have occupied.

Make no mistake about it, “the powers that be” are deeply concerned. No, the little encampments are not sufficient in numbers to pull the whole thing down. No, communications from the camps is far from sufficient to speak loudly and clearly to the American people. It’s not even clear whether a consensus on objectives or even tactics will be achieved anytime soon. I repeat, however, make no mistake about it, the big boys are concerned… very concerned.

For decades now, they have seen their power as absolute. None would dare challenge them. Even when the moral standing was not on their side, they were able to “fix the facts around the policy.” Put another way, they could manufacture their own truths and disseminate them freely through the co-operative, corporatized media. Fear was sold. Patriotism was sold. The protesters were denigrated as Communists or ne’er-do-wells or hippies.

The arrogance of those in power has blinded them to the impact of their over-reactions. Their strong-armed tactics have given everyone a glimpse of tyranny.

Instead of sending a few dozen police, they sent armies of police in full riot gear. They came equipped for war. They came; they pepper-sprayed; they tear gassed; they beat with three-foot long clubs; they maimed peaceful protesters with rubber bullets. The police were not confronted by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Perhaps, if they were badly outnumbered, the modalities of repression they’ve chosen might have been more accepted by some. But in most cases, there were many more police than demonstrators and those demonstrators were peaceful. The Occupiers have been courageous by standing up, peacefully, in the face of such overwhelming and menacing force.

Regardless of what Americans think about the Occupiers themselves, this has given local police forces and the image of American justice or lack thereof a huge black eye. Perhaps there was a time that other countries marveled at the freedoms American citizens had; those days have been buried. Without the moral authority to claim that we are just and that Americans are free to speak against their government with impunity, the US can no longer lay claim to the mantle “leader of the free world”. Like so many dead and buried empires that are now just footnotes in history, the US regime promises freedom on the packaging but the product inside the box is oppression… and the whole world knows it.

Just yesterday, the Senate passed the National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) that includes within it the heinous provision essentially repealing habeas corpus. The executive branch can now direct the military, at its sole discretion, to pull any US citizen off the street and hold them in custody without trial. Put another way, American citizens can be “disappeared” even if they are innocent. You can’t demand a lawyer; you can’t demand a trial of your peers in a civilian court. In fact, you can be hidden away wherever the military wants to hide you. But you’re innocent you say? Not if they say you aren’t.

Too many Americans still don’t believe the threat those in power pose to the core values of the American republic. They see elections still happening and that means we are a “free country”. They hear someone on the news criticizing Obama or making fun of the Republican candidates and they believe freedom in the US is alive and well and will always remain this way. Some argue that they are not concerned with the loss of civil liberties because they have done nothing wrong. One wonders how we’ve failed to teach our fellow citizens about the vigilance required to protect our freedoms.

The collapse of our free society is moving at a rapidly accelerating pace. Our media are, for the most part, both inept and controlled. The internet, that has given us a chance to speak to each other and build little islands of revolutionary thought, is coming under increasingly severe attacks. Our elections, such as they ever were, are controlled by two corporate parties and the corporate money that buys their compliance. Our environmental regulations are being gutted. Our labor protections are being attacked. Our Bill of Rights is being neutered because, they tell us, “terrorists are everywhere”.

With each passing day, more and more of us will come to see the ugliness of tyranny that is hiding just behind the thin facade of democracy. More and more of us will feel the pain of oppression. And those who do not march with us in solidarity at this time will not be immune. Behind all the repression lies an economic inevitability. War is being waged not only against those who rise in protest but against the entire economic system of the country. As wealth becomes more and more concentrated, the victims of wealth’s power, let’s call them the 99%, will grow poorer and poorer until they are ultimately unable to sustain themselves. Sitting on the sidelines will not save anyone from that fate.

After the street protests in Cairo last February and March that toppled the Mubarek regime, the Egyptian revolution seemed to go quiet. The military seized control of the Egyptian government and promised elections would soon be forthcoming. But tensions over Egypt’s future, highlighted by a distrust of the military’s control of the government, have erupted again.

Al Jazeera is reporting that more than 100,000 Egyptians from all walks of life are currently filling Tahrir Square.

The head of Egypt’s military, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, just spoke to the nation. He promised that the military was totally committed to civilian elections. He said that Parliamentary elections will be held starting on November 28 of this year and that presidential elections would be held in July, 2012. He tried to make a case that the country was still too unstable to hold elections now. In spite of the fact that at least 33 protesters have been killed and more than 1700 injured since Saturday, he said that the military “will never kill a single civilian.” Tantawi made absolutely no reference to earlier statements that the military, even after a democratically elected government was put in place, would remain totally independent of any civilian oversight. This issue, perhaps more than any other, coupled with the violence against protesters, has inflamed the current protests.

The speech was broadcast live to the sea of protesters gathered in Tahrir Square. The reaction was overwhelmingly negative. It was characterized by an Al Jazeera reporter on the scene as “deafening”. The protesters shouted over and over and over “Go, go, go” demanding that Tantawi and his military end their control of the Egyptian government. If the intent of the speech was to provide reassurance to the protesters, it failed miserably.

When protesters arrive in such large numbers even in the face of killings by a corrupt regime, it is hard to see how that regime can survive for long.

Comparisons to the fledgling Occupy movement in the US are inevitable. Are we seeing the early stages of a growing revolution in the US? Will Occupy be able to turn out the same numbers with the same “no cost too high” commitment? Will it be harder to replace the corrupt US government with a new regime than it will be to topple Egyptian military rule?

I’m concerned that we Americans have a much more difficult task ahead of us. For Egyptians, the difference between an unelected military dictatorship and a democratically elected government is very clear. In the US, though, the undemocratic corruption is less clear to many citizens. Too many believe we have the freedom to “just vote them out.” Too many still believe that government can adequately regulate corporations even though most elected officials are heavily dependent on corporate cash to retain their positions in office. You can’t just “throw the bumbs out” when only bumbs make it to the ballot.

Other critical differences exist. The US mass media have shown little or no sensitivity to the Occupy movement. Too many Americans get all their news from corporatized media. While opinions vary about Al Jazeera, the network seems to side with those fighting for democracy. In the US, the media focuses on “private property” rights of park owners; they focus on “smells and hygiene”; they focus on “tents”; they focus on one or two violent actors instead of the overall non-violence essence of the movement. In short, they lie. It is no small task to overcome this pervasive system of propaganda. Americans are not stupid but a steady diet of lies, regardless of what TV newscast they tune into, is a highly effective tool to repress revolution.

Many of us are hopeful that Occupy will continue to grow. We are encouraged by the wisdom the movement has exhibited in its infancy. We know that as more and more of us are brought to the brink of economic and social disaster, the movement will grow. But, we stand in opposition to the greatest concentration of wealth and power the world has ever known. We stand in opposition to a system that has indoctrinated the masses with the belief that the US is a democracy controlled by its citizens in the voting booth. We stand in opposition to a system that stifles and distorts our message.

It was inspiring to watch today’s massive street demonstrations in Cairo. They give us hope that ordinary people doing extraordinary things can be replicated here in the US. Occupy is off to a great start. It emerged from a darkness so profound that perhaps, to some, it seemed like even the smallest seeds of protest could never sprout again in the US. Now, the revolutionary energies of the Occupy movement seem like our last real chance for change. For that to become reality, though, many more of us will need to do much more than we’ve done. As we watch the Arab street put it on the line for their beliefs, perhaps we will gain the inspiration to do what is necessary. The alternative is far too dark to contemplate.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended my first Occupy meeting. To be more specific, it was a meeting of a new group formed in the suburbs of Boston to lend support to the Occupy Boston movement. They talked about naming themselves “Occupy the Burbs”. A few people who had spent some time camping at the Occupy Boston site were in attendance but most, like myself, were newcomers.

After we went around the room introducing ourselves to the roughly sixty people who were there, issue discussions ensued. Why were we there? What would we do? What views did we hold on the issues? It got pretty heated pretty quickly because the guy sitting next to me identified himself as a conservative Republican and he was, to say the least, very hostile to what he believed the Occupy movement was all about. His last statement was that if people really wanted to change things, they should get out and vote. He complained that turn-out rates were very low and that non-voters have no one to blame but themselves. The person who organized the meeting, seeking conciliation, said that she was sure everyone there agreed voting was important. “Can I get a show of hands from those who believe the most important thing we can do is vote?” Everyone raised their hand… except me.

I told them that voting was the opiate of the people. I told them that more than 90% of the discretionary budget is spent on the military. “Which party do I vote for to change that?” I told them that the Occupy movement offered the only path to change and that electoral politics has brought us to the brink of destruction no matter which party holds power. I told them that the 99% are clearly in decline while government for the rich, by the rich and of the rich has never held more power. It got very, very quiet until someone changed the subject.

Liberal Democrats probably don’t see themselves as revolutionaries. They see themselves as reformers. They think they can legislate their way out of the problems we face. They think they can control the abuses of wealth with legislation. They think with the right slate of candidates they can impose campaign finance reforms and lobbying reforms. They think they can elect anti-war candidates who will dismantle the military industrial complex. They think they can regulate corporations that are chartered for one purpose and one purpose only: to make money for their shareholders.

Can they not see what’s going on? Do they not understand that military spending now comprises 90% or more of the discretionary budget? Do they not know that in spite of a doubling of worker productivity, real wages for the average American worker have not increased since 1973? Was this any less true when Democrats controlled the White House and the Congress than when Republicans did?

We are mired in a rich-get-richer malaise and these naive liberals comfort themselves fighting for 10 cents an hour more in the minimum wage or celebrating “great” victories over the Family Leave Act while more and more Americans join the ranks of the working poor every year. Corporations and their shareholders hold all the power and workers get weaker and weaker. Liberal Democrats hand out trinkets to the downtrodden instead of attacking the underlying, systemic injustices. Worse, even within their own party, liberal Democrats have absolutely no voice. The party they naively pledge allegiance to knows that it will benefit by moving closer and closer to right-wing positions and further and further from progressive positions. The political logic is that holding on to one of your own voters gets you one vote but winning over one of your opponent’s voters gets you a two vote swing.

I understand the desperation liberal Democrats must feel. I, too, look at the mental dwarfs, the evil mental dwarfs, offered by the Republican Party and realize all too well the incredible damage they will do. But that just isn’t a justification to vote for Democrats who refuse to challenge the utter moral bankruptcy of capitalism and the exploitation it inevitably causes.

With Democrats, the military-industrial complex will remain intact. With Democrats, the rich will continue to get richer and the poor will continue to get poorer… and more in the middle will get poorer too. With Democrats, quality health care will continue to become less and less affordable for most people. With Democrats, the endless wars will continue. With Democrats, the totally corporatized mass media will go unchallenged. It’s all about wealth and power.

Democrats, perhaps, are more compassionate and offer small comforts to those butchered by the abuses of big money; they will do nothing, however, absolutely nothing, to make the real changes we need. When liberal Democrats come to realize this, and as the tragic condition of the American people grows worse and worse they will, perhaps then they will finally awaken and join the revolution.

Each year, the Congress convenes and determines how the Federal revenue pie will be sliced into pieces. Who gets a big share? Who gets the shaft? What are the top priorities? What is less important or even unimportant? The part of the budget over which Congress has control is called the discretionary part of the budget. If the US owes interest on debt it has borrowed from China, for example, it can’t vote to lower the interest rate or to pay China less than it owes. Things like interest on the national debt or things that are currently mandated by law, such as Social Security and Medicare, cannot be allocated a smaller share of the budget. In this sense, the costs are fixed and Congress has no jurisdiction, unless they change the laws, to increase or decrease the budget allocation.

When Congress sat down to slice up the 2012 budgetary pie, one item in the budget walked away with a majority of the discretionary resources. That item was military spending. In 2012, military spending will consume 59% of the discretionary budget. Here is a pie chart supporting this statistic:

And that’s the good news. The real amount of military spending goes well beyond what the budget indicates. You may find this hard to believe, or perhaps not, but political games are played with the budget to make the amount of military spending seem much lower than it actually is.

Consider the following line items (2006 data) that should be part of the military budget but are squirreled away into other budget buckets:

Annual Interest on War Debt: $207 billion
Veterans Affairs: $70 billion
Homeland Security: $69 billion
Military Retirements: $39 billion
Foreign Military Aid: $25 billion
Atomic Weapons: $17 billion

The actual military budget is really about 60% higher than the stated budget because of this budgetary gimmickry. The real military budget is somewhere in excess of $1.2 trillion each and every year.

A less commonly discussed statistic about military spending is the cost of this expense on a per capita basis. If we divide the number of US citizens into the budget allocation, we find that, on average, each and every citizen is now spending about $4,000 a year to pay the military tab. You can see support for that statistic in the following chart:

Four thousand dollars per citizen is a very real burden for most of us. Consider the cost of military spending to an average citizen over a lifetime of roughly eighty years. $4K a year times 80 years shows that the average American citizen will spend about $320,000 on the military over their lifetime. Now extend that to a typical family of four trying to send their kids to college, pay their mortgage, pay for health care and provide a little retirement security. How much does American military spending burden the average family of four over their lifetimes? It’s a staggering $1,280,000 or more. Can this really continue? We are bankrupting the country and bankrupting ourselves.

Some make arguments in support of military spending. “It creates jobs for people. It provides many poor people with training. The internet (ARPANET) was originally a military project. Military research has led to all sorts of technological breakthroughs. The military is making the country safer.”

Military spending is making the US much weaker; not stronger. Instead of investing in America’s future, we are spending 59% of our discretionary budget on things that do not make the country more competitive economically. Instead of upgrading our national infrastructure, we have deployed our military across the globe. Military personnel are now housed in almost 1,000 bases spread across almost every country in the world. What are they doing there? Many are busy, especially in the Middle East and Afghanistan, guarding private oil company pipelines. They are acting as a private security force for multi-national oil companies. US taxpayers foot the bill; big oil and their investors rake in the dough. If we believe it is in the national interest to guard oil pipelines, we should nationalize the oil companies. Let the profits be returned to those who foot the bill.

Some have raised concerns that cutting military spending will cut millions of jobs during a severe recession. The wrong solution is to keep paying people to do things that don’t benefit us as a society. That never makes any sense. There are tons of productive projects that need to be done. We can easily reabsorb military personnel into the civilian economy if we get our priorities straight. They could be put to work rebuilding the interstate highway system and the many decrepit bridges all over the country that have fallen into disrepair. They could be trained and put to work building a globally-competitive national wi-fi system. They could be put to work in our public schools to lower student-teacher ratios. They could be put to work to design better-insulated buildings and to retrofit existing buildings to reduce energy demand. They could be put to work upgrading our national parks. In short, there are a million things, i.e. a million productive things, military personnel could be doing as they transition back into the civilian economy.

Well, that’s all fine, you say, but what’s the deal with cutting the military by 90%? Don’t you think that’s a little irresponsible?

I’m glad you asked.

Let me say at the outset that I am far from a military expert. I am just one citizen who clearly sees that the current military madness cannot continue. It’s literally killing us. The issue is not whether we need to significantly reduce military spending; the issue is whether we can reasonably explore cuts in the 90% range. Here’s my proposal to do just that.

Assuming that we view the purpose of military spending as defensive in nature, and we should, we ask the question “what countries might pose any risk at all to the US based on their history, or their ideology, or their level of military spending and sophistication?”

While answers to this question might vary, my answer is China and Russia. This is not to say that I believe either of these countries is likely to attack the US but rather that they could conceivably, perhaps at some point in the future, have the resources and technological sophistication to do so. How much do these two countries combined currently spend on their military?

The military budget for China and Russia combined is currently about $167 billion per year.

If we were to cut the US military budget by 90%, the US would be spending about $70 billion per year instead of the stated $700 billion line item. Clearly, few would be willing to spend that much less than China and Russia.

But suppose we thought of defense in a more global way? Suppose we thought in terms of a “shared defense” with our allies. Think about organizations like NATO as an example. By cooperating with our global allies, we could spread the costs of military preparedness across many countries. While coordination and defense strategies would become somewhere more complicated, the “shared defense” approach could literally save the US from bankruptcy and it could give the US a real opportunity to invest in more productive resources.

With China and Russia spending around $167 billion on their militaries every year, what kind of budget could a shared defense produce?

Here, based on 2010 data, are the military budgets of just some US allies:

France: $61 billion
UK: $57 billion
Japan: $51 billion
Germany: $47 billion
Italy: $38 billion
Australia: $27 billion
South Korea: $27 billion
Spain: $26 billion
Canada: $22 billion
Israel: $16 billion

Add these budgets to the $70 billion the US would spend after cutting its stated military budget by 90% and you have a combined budget of around $442 billion which is almost triple the combined military budgets of China and Russia.

Are there some problems with a shared defense model? I’m sure there are. Questions will be raised. What if this? What if that? The point is that it’s a starting point for a discussion that has been denied to the American people for far too long. No elected official would dare put this on the table. They are all so afraid of losing their next election that sound policy, especially radically different policy, cannot even be raised for discussion. If just one steps out of line, military spending targeted for their state will likely be reduced. It’s just easier for them to go along with the military-industrial complex than it is to do what’s right for the country.

Is a 90% cut feasible? Is shared defense a viable approach? Can the US continue to spend 59% of its discretionary budget (or more) on the military? Could we return millions of military personnel to our civilian economy and give them critically important, productive things to do? Most Americans believe the great American empire is in a steep, potentially terminal, decline. Most of the budget cutting being proposed targets a desperate, vulnerable population with cuts in public education funding, health care, Social Security and other anti-safety net madness. All this while the largest area of discretionary spending, i.e. military spending, seems politically immune to the kinds of cuts needed to rebuild the country. We’re in big trouble, folks, and the proposed shared defense program might just be a huge step in the right direction.

Is a 90% cut in military spending feasible? Yes, I believe it is.