Image: earth/sky.org

This morning, on my walk with puppy Shadow, we were out early enough to catch the crescent Moon conjunction with Venus in the eastern sky. Breathtaking. And hard to parse this beauty Above, given the horror that still transfuses the human world Below.

For even now, whenever I mention to others that the U.S. has over 1000 military bases across the globe, eyes glaze over.

I don’t understand! Why don’t most of my fellow citizens recognize the deeply corrupted global (dis)order within which we lead our precious, privileged American lives? How could they NOT sense the utterly intimate connection between the massive flows of desperate refuges and “our” Empire’s military/cultural/political interference with any country that transnational corporations deem ripe for the plucking?

And now Julian Assange tells me my estimate was too low.

US Now Has Over 1,400 Foreign Military Bases Spread Over 120 Countries: Assange

The above culled, at least in part, from the RT interview:

BTW: I agree with Chris Hedges concerning Bernie Sanders: unless he takes up the hideous spectre of American militarism directly; unless he recognizes, out loud and with even greater passion than anything else that issues from his beautiful heart, that our entire economy and society are dangerously, if not terminally, impregnated with patriarchal muscle-bound industrial violence on an unimaginably colossal scale, then I see no hope for his or any other “presidential” candidacy — or for any U.S. citizen (read: consumer) who still doesn’t grok what’s going on behind the scenes while the USG, as ever, covers its bloody tracks by fueling mainstream puppet media with sanctimonious palaver mouthing the export of “freedom and democracy” to the rest of the world while viciously destroying whatever good and decent and alive remains there.

The Real Enemy Is Within

“There will be no genuine democratic, social, economic or political reform until we destroy our permanent war machine.”

Caveat: I much prefer to the word “transform” to the word “destroy.” (Very important that we don’t become what we seek to destroy . . .)

In that spirit, I repost here a 2012 article from that immensely sane economist Ellen Brown as to just how we might begin to go about it this grand transformation that will revitalize not only our economy, but our very soul.

Transforming the Military Industrial Complex Economy