Today’s US Contribution toward World Peace

US nears $100bn arms deal for Saudi Arabia in time for Trump's visit.

Well what a wonderful headline, appearing on a weekend as such things do when the attention of the world is elsewhere.

“The official, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity (don’t they all?), said the arms package could end up surpassing more than $300bn over a decade to help Saudi Arabia boost its defensive capabilities while still maintaining US ally Israel’s qualitative military edge over its neighbors.”

Aha! Israel will maintain a ‘qualitative’ edge while all this shit goes down. Well, thank god for that. Not so sure how Saudi will feel about laying out that kind of cash and still finding themselves on the qualitative short end, but that’s what we’re supposed to believe as we fret about paying our mortgage and being stripped of our health care.

I for one am getting tired as hell of Saudi Arabia—their insufferable princely Princes, their Wahabism (a conservative and intolerant form of Islam that is practiced in Saudi Arabia), unrepentant destruction of our World Trade Center on 9-11 and insufferable tendency to fuck up the Middle East and then let others do their fighting.

We don’t need their oil, don’t want their meddling and have had entirely too much of their sex-and-booze fueled trips to the West, all the while pretending that blowing up other people’s stuff is a sure-fire ticket to an eternity among an endless supply of virgins, drugs and superiority over others.

Those ‘others’ include women (without even a shred of rights) and non-believers, which involves three out of every four humans on the planet—including you and me—each of whom they are sworn to kill.

This may sound anti-Islam and it’s not, because I am on record as saying most of the Middle East troubles are American influenced and I support the migrants we have caused to be set adrift in the world.

But it is anti-armaments. I am sick to death that we profit off weaponizing the world and then feign surprise when our customers kill each other. ‘Defensive capabilities’ are the lie that allows us to sleep at night. 52% of our annual budget goes for armaments, sold at enormous profit to the few and huge cost to the rest of us. Endless wars are a reliable American McDrone and McDeath profit structure.

And we accept this nonsense—delivered to us on a Saturday afternoon newspaper headline while our own roads are falling apart, bridges collapsing and social services flushed down the corporate toilet. We accept this, with a stupid look on our faces while the youngest and oldest in our society are reduced to beggary.

And it’s not Donald Trump’s, Mitch McConnell’s or Kevin McCarthy’s fault. Both Republicans and Democrats have dragged us through this shit-pile for forty years. Don’t give us another war we can’t win, give us some goddamn roads and bridges. How about single-payer health care and some universities we can actually afford?

Americans don’t matter anymore. Investors matter, banks matter, corporations matter and the dumb-ass American public that built this country no longer matters to anyone in power. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, another Bush, Obama and Trump all promised a better America and they all lied through their teeth—every single one of them.

They gave us Netflix and android phones and endless pornography so we wouldn’t notice. And you know what? We didn’t notice.

Until now. Until the 2016 presidential election. The two parties that run this political freak show still don’t understand what happened. Hillary thinks it was Jim Comey and a few million emails. The Donald thinks it was his persona, however he chooses to define that.

Both of them are wrong. America took a long time to get here, but the working and out-of-work are fed up with being sliced and diced for the benefit of large corporations. They’re tired of each decade being worse than the one that preceded it. They’re scared to death of retiring penniless. They have no idea why their kids are living with them into their thirties and unable to find satisfying employment.

They don’t believe anymore. And when that many citizens no longer believe in America, the entire country is in deep shit and anything is possible.

Donald Trump is not an anomaly.

Donald Trump is the beginning.