More young adults for Afghanistan

What a disgusting picture.  On page 7 of today's Wall Street Journal is a picture of president Obama, hands outstretched amid a crowd of cadets at West Point.  He had just finished his speech and was eager to shake the hands of the cannon fodder he is sending to kill, and be killed, in the predatory war in Afghanistan. The destruction of public education as well as jobs, will make Obama's task easier, young people will have only the military left--------some future.

On the front page an equally sickening picture of these young boys praying before Obama's speech.What a con game religion is.

Meanwhile, Obama's friends in the defense business are ecstatic.  First off, their kids are safe as they have connections and other, more lucrative options.  But they are also licking their chops at the profit potential as Obama sends more working class youth in to the fray.  Defense contractors DynCorp. International and Fluor Corp are looking at contracts worth $7.5 billion each over the next few years.  They get to carve the country up between them with Obama's blessing, with DynCorp getting southern Afghanistan and Fluor the north.  So right there, with the $30 billion cost of the troop surge at $1 million per person, the US taxpayer, the parents of the kids that are going to die, kill other kids, or return permanently scarred, has a new $45 billion bill overnight.

There are more contractors in Afghanistan than US troops according to the WSJ. The security element of these contractors are nothing but mercenaries, paid a lot more than the young unemployed workers that will be joining them.  Between June and September, the number of contractors in Afghanistan increased 40% to 104,000' there are another 113,000 in Iraq.

There is also the cost of building more bases, roads and housing for the increased troops.  When the medical costs of the hundreds of thousand of young US workers that are return injured, mentally and physically, the cost of these imperialist interventions is in the trillions.  When this is added to the trillions given to bankers. speculators and other social wasters, the cost is astronomical, but worth it for the capitalist class that profit from it all. Capitalism allocates resources efficiently for them.

Meanwhile, back home and around the world, students and workers are struggling to fend off the capitalist offensive that is forced to drive us back to the days before the rise of the CIO and factory occupations of the 1930's and the civil rights movements of the 1950's and 1960's.

Today there are protests against the US and NATO's (Afghanistan is a long was from the Atlantic ocean isn't it?) expansion throughout the world just as students are leading the fight to save public eduction.

These two movements must join forces-----the two issues are interlinked as more and more working class youth will have only the military as an option.  The economic draft is being strengthened.

If you are in the SF  Bay Area, come to Powell and Market in SF at 5.00pm.