World Peace ... a crazy idea?

"Suck my dick officer!"

Here's an idea!  US elites should stop attacking other countries, and it should especially stop trying to dominate powerful rivals such as Russia and China. (For that to happen though, US elites will have to become former elites, and most of them be thrown into prison to serve as a deterrent for others. Their power must be broken by the democratization of the economy.)

Yes! Democracy!

Instead of an unsustainable world of consumer-capitalism, how about a sustainable world of humanist-environmentalism? An economy in which people matter and in which the realities of the planet take precedent?

While the capitalist economy masks its fragility behind a mask of arrogance and bluster, ... a genuine economy controlled by the people and functioning for the people in the context of the planet's life-sustaining potential.

I'm not going to pretend that Putin and the Chinese Communist Party are angels. Or that the terrorist threat du jour isn't nasty. But the terrorist threat is, for the most part, entirely the fault of US foreign policy (including its friendship with Saudi Arabia).  It's even inarguable that the terrorist threat is at least party a deliberate concoction of western elites, made to scare the impressionable and the stupid into surrendering their civil liberties. ("We have always been at war with ISIS.") And, in any case, the terrorist threat to most of us is miniscule. And, with regards to Russia and China, the fact of the matter is that the leadership of both those countries are sane enough to acknowledge that neither alone, or together, could they solve a war with the United States. (They could obviously do a lot of damage to the United States, but they have absolutely nothing to gain from starting a war with it. Because they would be destroyed. So they won't start a war. Simple as that.)

The United States currently spends more than the combined total of the next eight biggest military spenders. One would think that there's some sort of post-Cold War "peace dividend" still in there. Especially if wars of goddammed choice, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc., are avoided. Washington could cut the military budget in half and still manage to "keep Americans safe."

But keeping Americans safe is not why the US government spends all this money on its military. Besides corruption and waste and pork-barreling, this spending is necessary so that US corporations can DOMINATE the world. Just like our own stephen harper, neither the Democrats nor the Repugnicans give a shit about their own people. We can die in explosions, train-derailments, health insurance industry cruelty, police brutality, as cannon fodder in insane and idiotic wars. The point of US military spending is to make the world safe for Wall Street criminals and all the lower echelons of the US capitalist system.

If democracy ever took over the United States we could have peace and begin to invest in a better world.