We agreed to invest in Renewable Energy.

We agreed to reform our National Healthcare System

We agreed to pursue peace in the Middle East.

We voted out most of G.W. Bush’s band of Cowardly, Right-wing, Elitist, Embezzling Parasites (“CREEPS”) – the men and women who ransacked our economy and put us in nearly 12 trillion dollars of debt.[a]

Malign President Obama with a constant barrage of character assassination

Obstruct Energy, Healthcare and Military reform with block votes and blatant lies.

The CREEPS on network news and right-wing radio fill our ears with fear, claiming:

Our enemies – Iran, North Korea and Islamic Terrorists – grow more evil, insane and powerful every day.

Renewable Energy and Healthcare Reform will wrack our wrecked economy.

Rebuilding your nation means raising your taxes.

Now is not the time to give in to fear. Now is the time to renew our Hope:

America has the money and resources we need to make our economy strong again and keep our people healthy.

We do not need to tax and spend; all we need to do is redeploy military, manufacturing, hu- manpower and money. In doing so, we can:

Retool arms makers to build a renewable energy infrastructure.

Retrain returning soldiers and retiring veterans for jobs in the renewable energy business.

Fund universal health insurance and nationwide healthcare reform.

The United States spends enormous – almost incomprehensible – amounts of money on our military:

The Iraq War will cost $3 trillion dollars – that’s $10,000 for every American man, woman and child.

The “official” budget is “only” $1trillion dollars (“only” $3,333 to you personally).

But that number does not include the long-term cost of replacing destroyed equipment, caring for disabled soldiers, and interest on borrowed money.

In 2009, US military spending will top $1.136 trillion dollars.

We can allocate funds from that bloated budget to rebuild America.

New wind and solar power plants can replace foreign oil imports.

America spends more than $13 million per hour on foreign oil.[b]

These are the largest transfers of wealth in human history.

Much of that money goes toward enriching hostile, militant dictatorships.

Building the new energy infrastructure will cost $ 850 billion. [c]

This is only .14% of the annual military budget over the next six years.

Contracts can be awarded to military manufactures to retool their facilities.

We can provide job training and jobs to returning soldiers and retiring veterans.

Your children will breathe cleaner air as America grows greener and stronger.

Your family faces a clear and present danger of financial disaster.

Unfortuantely, there comes a time in most every family when serious illness strikes.

The enormous  cost of doctor and hospital bills overwhelm the average American family’s income, and deplete their life savings.

Medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in America.

Universal healthcare coverage and overall medical reform will cost

Under 10% of the annual military budget.

No one must die penniless because of medical bills.

No child would be denied healthcare.

There is even more good news:  America will still have plenty of money for all of our realistic– and rational National defense needs

Currently, our military spending defies reason.

U.S. military spending tops all other nations combined.

America outguns Iran and North Korea 265 to 1.

America and our allies outgun Iran and North Korea 530 to 1.

After we reallocate funds to Renewable Energy and Healthcare,

America and our allies will still spend 1000 times more than do Iran and North Korea.

America will still spend more on the military than do Russia, Cuba, China, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, England, Iran and North Korea, combined.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are dedicated to eliminating military waste.

Gate’s most powerful foes are the biggest CREEPS: the Senators and Congressmen most heavily funded and closely tied to munitions manufacturers.

Military spending is spread all over the nation like a thick layer of margarine.

Arms makers put factories in every possible congressional district.

Thousands of disbursed facilities may be wasteful.

But they make each local economy dependent on military spending.

The CREEPS in Washington are hooked on military spending like junkies. They:

Get endorsements from CREEPS in the media.

Get an annual influx of your tax money into their districts.

You need to see the threat posed by the CREEPS to know the challenge faced by your President, Secretary of Defense–and all of us.

“The powers in charge kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency.

Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened; seem never to have been quite real.

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.”

The leader of the Leader of the Free World and Commander in Chief warned us that:

The people with vast “power” live outside the boundaries of the law.

They drum up feelings of fear and national hysteria.

They succeed at scaring us into insane levels of military spending. Irrational fears create irrational actions.

Remember, November 2008, we, the people, voted for Change and won the day.

Now, in 2009, the time has come to renew our Hope to spread the good news.

America does have the money and resources we need to make our economy strong again and keep our people healthy.

“Algeria, Azerbaijan, Russia and Saudi Arabia have been able to increase spending because of increased oil and gas revenue,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

http://yearbook2006.sipri.org/chap8

Max Blumenthal takes us on a hilarious and shocking tour of the College Republican National Convention, where the GOP’s next generation cheer on the war in Iraq, then make sorry excuses for why they can’t serve.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFGit_tZDqs

Who served in the military?

http://awolbush.com/whoserved.html

.  .  .

The Pentagon’s biggest suppliers, including Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co and Northrop Grumman Corp, are looking more and more to overseas markets to offset Pentagon budget belt-tightening.
Andrew Shapiro, an assistant secretary of state responsible for political-military affairs, said Wednesday the State Department had licensed more than $100 billion in direct commercial sales of “defense articles and services” last year, in addition to the government-brokered sales.

.  .  .

In 2008, the United States accounted for a lopsided 70.1% of all arms transfer agreements with developing nations, or $29.6 billion, according to a September 4 report by the nonpartisan U.S. Congressional Research Service.

Way back in second place was Russia with $3.3 billion or 7.8% of such agreements. France was third with $2.5 billion or 5.9%, the report said.

.  .  .

“We also expect that the strong defense trade relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries will continue,” Shapiro said. (Reporting by Jim Wolf; Editing by Richard Chang)

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5895G620090910

The resolution is aimed at ensuring full compliance with international arms agreements from countries like North Korea and Iran, which have either banned inspectors or severely limited their access. Mr. Obama said, though, that the resolution was not about singling out nations, but about ensuring that international agreements have real-world heft. “We must demonstrate that international law is not an empty promise, and that treaties will be enforced,” he said.

.  .  .

[The] special session was only the fifth time that the Security Council had met at the summit level since the United Nations was founded in 1945, the White House said, and Mr. Obama was the first American president to preside over such a session.

[H]e spoke of his vision of “a world without nuclear weapons,” a vision that the resolution reflected. The adopted text, Resolution 1887, “revitalized” the Security Council’s commitment to work toward a world without nuclear weapons, “urging” all states to work toward the establishment of effective measures of nuclear arms reductions and disarmament. We harbor no illusions about the difficulty of achieving such a world,” Mr. Obama said, “but there will also be days like today that push us forward — days that tell a different story.” (By Helene Cooper and Sharon Otterman)

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/world/25prexy.html

Fred Kaplan, who writes the War Stories column for Slate, called the Senate vote to kill the program “a substantial step” for President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other military budget hawks, who had pledged to streamline the military and cut wasteful spending. “The vote might also mark the beginning of a new phase in defense politics, a scaling-back of the influence that defense contractors have over budgets and policies,” Kaplan wrote.

.  .  .

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, thinks canceling the F-22 program is a good sign. “I think for one thing it shows that the military industrial complex can be beaten,” Hartung says. “I also think in Congress it sort of shows that you can do this. Not everyone has to buy the arguments of the industry.”

One of the primary arguments in favor of the F-22 program was that it provided jobs for Americans. Lockheed Martin, the primary defense contractor behind the F-22, values the jobs argument so much that the last page of its brochure reads, “The F-22 industrial base is a national asset of thousands of highly skilled workers and suppliers in 44 states who manufacture parts and subsystems for the Raptor.” A Lockheed Martin representative declined to comment for this story.

The Senate vote shows that the jobs argument has been effective—even some senators who opposed authorizing the war in Iraq voted to keep the program. Political partisanship did not appear to be a significant factor; rather, senators whose states had high Lockheed Martin employment were more likely to vote against eliminating the F-22s.

Plant distribution and state-by-state voting on the F-22.

For instance, both Democratic California senators and both Republican Georgia senators voted against the amendment—and Lockheed Martin has more than three dozen parts plants between Georgia and California alone.

While the job creation argument may have effectively at garnered Senate votes, experts note that defense spending is far from the best way to create jobs. “If you’re going to talk about jobs from government spending, defense is the least efficient way to do it,” says Larry Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who specializes in defense. “The job thing became more salient this year because of the stimulus package.” According to Korb, by using the jobs argument to keep the F-22 alive, Lockheed Martin and other defense lobbyists weakened such arguments for future defense bills.

A good analogy for looking at effective stimulus might be by comparing defense spending to public transit spending. The difference between using defense programs as stimulus and, say, using public transit as stimulus is that defense have an extraneous effect—it doesn’t get any additional people jobs in the process. Transportation, on the other hand, can get riders to places where they might spend money or find work.

.  .  .

The fight to make the American military more efficient is far from over, but at least the F-22 has shown there’s hope that it can be done.

Daniel Strauss is a staff writer for Campus Progress and a senior at the University of Michigan.
Source: http://www.campusprogress.org/fieldreport/4538/what-the-death-of-the-f-22-really-means

Better health care for all, with a public option, is crucial if our country is going to be competitive in this century. Kennedy knew this, and also knew that it was a moral issue, a right that every American should have. He loved this country, and wanted to pass a health care package that would benefit everyone. Such a program must have a strong public option, something like Medicare for All.

Those seniors who say they don’t want government-run health care should understand that Medicare is a government program. I ask all Medicare recipients, how would you fare without it?
This country’s health care lags behind that of all developed nations, and even some developing ones, in positive health outcomes and longevity for its citizenry, while costing twice as much as in other developed countries.

One of the most vociferous arguments against health care is just how we can pay for covering all Americans. There’s a very simple answer, though no one mentions it. Our military budget is the largest in the world, swollen with “pork” for the military-industrial-government complex, about which President Eisenhower complained more than a half century ago. Why does it need to be more than that of all other countries combined? Why do we need so many outposts in so many countries with which we are not at war? Why do we need a civilian military force like Blackwater, which reports to no military commander?
We would not be so much in debt to China and other countries if we were not so wasteful with our military spending, which doesn’t seem to be helping us “win” our current conflict.

Senator Kennedy was one of the few who had the courage to vote against the Iraq War at a time when many were afraid of dissenting for fear of being labeled un-American. In 2007, we spent $463 billion on the military, and another $120 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total military budget for all of our allies was $282 billion; the total for China, Russia, Iran and North Korea was $135 billion. The current budget includes nuclear and other weapons designed to fight the Cold War, which no longer exists.
Some generals and Pentagon officials say that we can safely reduce the budget by 15 percent ($60 billion) per year, paying for health care for all.

Some insurance companies, Big Pharma and unscrupulous U.S. congresspersons want to keep us afraid so that they can continue to line their pockets with what is, in essence, blood money. I am a fortunate Black-American senior citizen with excellent health care, but I have six children, all working professionals, only one of whom has health insurance as good as mine. That is not the way it should be.
We want the next generation to be better off than we are. I should not have to send off to Canada to fill a prescription for one of my children, nor should preexisting conditions prevent another, a practicing Radiologist, from getting adequate health insurance, nor a third, laid off as controller of a failed investment firm, be unable to afford Cobra because he has children in college.

We must have adequate health care for all, with a public option. This does not mean more abortions, rationed care, or pulling the plug on grandma.

I am a 77-year-old great-grandmother, and my Living Will allows me to make the decisions that I feel will be right for me at the end of my life. My children and my physician do not have any authority but that which I have given them.

I am contacting my congresspersons and asking them to pass a health-care bill with a public option. I hope you will do the same. (By Carmen Buford-Paige Dover)

Source: http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090908/GJOPINION_01/709089990/-1/FOSOPINION

PeacePaint compiles important information about the Peace and Green movements and publishes eye-catching articles, slideshows and videos.

PeacePaint people are aggressive at guerrilla marketing non-violence and ecological logic through newsletters, viral videos and merchandising. We are generous, investing all of our resources in pro-social marketing.

PeacePaint is funded by Intelligent Design (ID) apparel, who makes fashionable, cause-driven t-shirts. PeacePaint affiliates make money by placing ID banners on their websites. When anyone from an affiliate website purchases anything from the ID store, ID pays 15% of the total sale directly to their affiliate. Click here to find out more.

About Time

Imagine a global economy offering fair opportunities to everyone and hope of a better future for all of our children. Efforts to attain that dream will do more to stop terrorism and avoid war than would any homeland security system or deadly weapon.