If you believe in the President's Super Duper Debt Committee,

[sad sally]

tell him and the committee members that military spending must be cut - drastically and soon.

This article by Chalmers Johnson, posted by Tom Englehardt, is a reminder of why military spending and empire building are not beneficial to America.

Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire
And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
By Chalmers Johnson

However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

-snip

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington D.C., the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "e will maintain America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

-snip

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175427/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_chalmers_johnson%2C_dismantling_the_empire/#more?du

[domonkos]

1. War Is Money

Nobody is going to touch military spending, even though it accounts for more then 25% of our gdp spending. The only one with the cajones to do it is Ron Paul. The war profiteers are far too powerful and dominent over the media to just allow some feeble government employees to cost them billions. We will always be in a War, they may call it an "occupation" or "rebuilding" but thats just a way to distract the simpletons of middle-America into keeping the war machine going. Sad really.

[jaysunb]

2. These are "second term" actions no matter who the POTUS is

plain and simple.

[RC]

3. The world will tire of us, U.S., sooner or later.

It will not be pretty for us, U.S.