Benchmarks - Opinions, Reviews, and Poems

My mother is a WWII atomic veteran. She actually gets sick each year as the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Japan comes in early August. She doesn’t expect your thanks for her service. Would you thank the young women helping refine uranium in the hills of Iran? She has always advised her children and other young people to avoid military service and war industry employment.

WWII is viewed as unavoidable “just war” though my mom has her doubts. “Some of our Wall Street brokers helped Hitler get started,” she tells me. War is neither a ball game nor a car race, though the same voices and mannerisms are used to describe it on TV. Lately we hear on the news about “the benchmarks for success in Iraq.” Mom’s guess is that the profit statements of the war contractors and arms suppliers represent the most important benchmark. This war, like Vietnam, is more profitably dragged on than won. All the beneficiaries knew from the start it could never be won, except financially. Who will care if the Iraqis have no education, no agriculture, no industries and no democracy after the big oil companies control the two major oil fields? It will be good for entrepreneurship because of inflated prices for scarce necessities in a devastated environment. Some of their better educated may have to emigrate here and drive down salaries.

She and I agree the “war on terror” is also a war against our rights and freedoms. For instance, endless war without our consent means endless taxation, and is a greater abuse than the British tax on imports which allegedly sparked the Revolutionary War. Don’t let government officials claim to be powerless as concerns our needs. They are the masters of setting corporate business power over us. That is a worse tyranny than any sent by King George III.

Aren’t you tired of watching our unresponsive government advocate “democracy” by bankrolling capitalist extremist minority parties in weakened countries like Lebanon, Colombia, the former Yugoslavia and especially Israel? In that last case you’d think we were a nation of violent Christian Zionists eager for Armageddon. Human welfare, the environment and fairness always come second to global trade agreements. Any policy model that contradicts the wealthy getting richer at the expense of those who work, and those who can’t, seems intolerable to these Neo-liberals in a New American Century. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Hillary Clinton and Liddy Dole. They feed at the same corporate trough. That’s why we can’t get an efficient single payer healthcare system or have the peace we are demanding. “We the People…” have different benchmarks than the “Big Man.” What did your mama teach you?

Jack W. Martin