I’m down here in Los Angeles at the LAX Motel 6, getting ready to take my two-year-old granddaughter off to Disneyland. At least that’s the plan. You never can tell with two-year-olds. According to “The Happiest Toddler on the Block,” they are basically cavemen — unpredictable! But I digress.
Anyway, this Motel 6 has wi-fi so when I checked my FaceBook page this morning, my friend Les Aaron had made the following comment: “During the time that America’s infrastructure has fallen apart and we haven’t been able to find money to fill potholes or rebuild bridges, China went from being a nation of peasants to a country of 121 modern cities with populations of over one million. In ten years, they built a city of skyscrapers in Southern China from nothing — at the same time that we were talking about leasing our roads and our ports to foreign interests. Something has to change.”
Les also stated that, “Over 1,750 out of 1,900 of WalMart’s leading suppliers are based in Asia. This is money flowing out of our country. No big deal, you say? Consider that WalMart is an entire category by itself. Its 400 billion-plus annual sales is more than our entire retailing sector combined. More than the business of Sears, Macys, Target, KMart, and…all other retailers combined!”
And then there’s all the American money that has been sucked up by Wall Street in the past 30 years. And all the American money that has disappeared down the rat-hole of “war”.
And who has benefited from all this — if not us? Lobbyists, politicians, corporatists, weapons manufacturers and a couple handfuls of nefarious faceless billionaires who you and I will never EVER meet face to face.
And who loses? You, me and even the Teabaggers who now seem to be so up in arms about everything except what really counts — outsourcing, Wall Street bailouts and War.
So here I am down in Los Angeles, staying in Inglewood, and steeling myself to spend a day in Disneyland with a two-year-old — when I drive past a campaign poster for a Democratic candidate for Congress, and the poster actually reads, “Jobs not War”. When have I EVER seen anything like that before!
Then I drive a little bit further and there’s another poster. “Homes not Banks”. Get outta town! Who IS this Marcy Winograd? And why aren’t all Americans, even Teabaggers, demanding not only that Winograd get elected but also that someone like her get elected by every Congressional district in America!
Screw warmongers. Screw Wall Street. Screw WalMart. I want my country back. “Jobs not War”!
PS: And while we are happily visiting some home truths here in LaLaLand, let’s also take a closer look at Israel’s recent violent attack on humanitarian aid ships in the Mediterranean. Israel has been trying to justify this brutal and illegal attack due to religious grounds or on the grounds of trying to protect its own safely or because it simply doesn’t like its own creation, Hamas. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-hijacking-of-the-truth-film-evidence-destroyed-1992517.html
But the real motivation of Israel’s attack and, indeed, the whole siege of Gaza itself, seems to be in order to keep things stirred up in the Middle East. Nothing else makes sense. If Israel was acting rationally, the Israel-Palestine problem would have been solved 20 years ago. However, if there is no peace in the Middle East, then there’s no excuse to spend American money on “war”. Your money. MY money. Israel appears to have been used (once again) as a cats-paw by corporatists, war lobbyists and all those money-grubbing billionaires who will NEVER be our friends or ask US over for dinner.
Winograd is right. “Jobs not War”!
PPS: Now we’re off to Disneyland. I’ll let you know how that goes.