“A budget is a moral document; it talks about where your
values are,” said Representative Rob Woodall, Republican of Georgia and a
member of the Budget Committee earlier this week as reported in the New York Times.
And so the House Republicans propose an increase to
military, cut out the Affordable Care Act, cut food stamps, and more.
The values of the proposal are immoral - against the common
good and the poor.
Not pretty, not moral, not what the US has been about.
The Vatican had a statement several years ago that said,
"Armaments kill the poor by causing them to starve."
A Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower stated:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed."
In the midst of this the Democratic White House want to
send, in the next year, one billion dollars for Honduras, Guatemala, and El
Salvador - supporting the militarization here in Honduras.
But here in Honduras the president seeks to make official a
militarized police. There is already a military police that sometimes assumes
the roles of a civilian police force – or works together with the civilian
police force.
In addition, the budgets for health and education are inadequate.
Many public health centers have hardly any medicine, despite the national
government’s obligation to provide medicine several times a year.
And so I weep for the US, Honduras - and for the world.
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2 comments:
I can't understand what is going on in the U.S. Accepting that our government has been taken over by people who believe that American hegemony everywhere is essential for world happiness, and that any level of violence is acceptable in achieving that, I am still entirely nonplussed.
We are actively engaged in hostilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, and several other nations. Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, and several other nations are suffering violence so serious that we might need to get involved. We are threatening to get involved in Ukraine, if we haven't already done so. Key traditional allies like Mexico are nearing crisis. And we are picking quarrels with countries like Venezuela. About the only de-escalation is with Cuba, maybe.
It's all such a mess, let's start more upheaval!
Lord help us. If we aren't already beyond help.
We really haven't been all that moral in the past, either.
Look at how we backed pretty much everything Indonesia's done for the past fifty-odd years, including the genocides in Indonesia proper and in East Timor. All in the name of anti-Communism. (That, by the way, is one reason why the conservative Islamist groups are flourishing: We and our allies have killed off nearly all the lefty and/or secular groups that would have provided effective counterweights to these groups. But of course that never gets discussed.)
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