Taiwan’s $6.4 billion arms package; Houston, we’ve got a problem…..

Ah Houston, Space Rider here; we’ve got a problem.

Space Rider, this is Houston, go ahead.

Uh, Houston, Space Rider, we’re in the holding pattern just north of Jupiter and our Foreign Policy Extender Probe is jammed and won’t retract, over.

Space Rider, we see the problem and the FPEP engineers are looking at a fix.

Houston, Space Rider, we have run the emergency check list and there is no procedure for reentry with the FPEP jammed and generating all that parasite drag.

Space Rider, Houston, ah yeah, it looks grim; uh it looks…just a minute, Stand by.

OK Space Rider, Houston; we’re back with approval from the over-sight committee to go ahead and jettison the Foreign Policy Extender Probe; do you copy?

Roger Houston, we’ll jettison the probe on the next gravitational turn pattern and loft the whole thing loose of the mother ship. Is that the plan?

Roger Space Rider, go ahead and execute the FPEP disengagement. The FPEP is showing signs of rapid decay and the pentagon’s announcement of another $6.4 billion arms sale to China has lit up the Cut-Loose Warning Panel….all areas of probing are now indicating over-temps and the Low-Fund warning lights are all blinking too. Do you copy?

Houston, Space Rider, yeah on the last pattern over the Taiwan Straits we saw about 7,000,000 Chinese military gathered on the beach there about 100 miles across the Straits from Taiwan ready to take back its little sister so maybe it was time to get rid of the old prober?

Space Rider, Houston, roger your last message. Over-sight is preparing a press release so keep it clean after you land, over. Short and sweet, understand? Over.

Roger Houston, Short and sweet; Space Rider has now completed the toss and is headed home.

Space Rider, Houston; that was a great show; the President says well done and there will be medals for the entire crew. You guys are all heroes! We’ll be talking with you again on final approach.

Houston out.

Fictional exchanges, of course, but remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? Arms sales will always irritate at least 50 percent of all the players in any geographic area. That time it irritated us. Defensive or offensive weapons, they are all designed to kill so it is an inherently evil endeavor. With a single hold-out in a Russian submarine about launch authority, the world came a few moments away from a nuclear holocaust. The failure of American foreign policy in Cuba and the surrounding area can be traced back to Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. Rough-riding on weaker neighbors has a way of coming back to haunt the perpetrators as we have learned, or have we?

Henry Luce and his religion-slanted self-righteous China lobby almost certainly established a policy that assured America’s present irretractable position on Taiwan. Now the military-industrial complex has taken the helm and has been given further authority and confirmation by the Supreme Court’s latest campaign finance ruling for them, the corporate industrial giants, foreign or domestic, to hand-pick congressional Judas suicide-pilots to guide the American public through the Valley of Death. This time it is the Chinese who are irritated. One would think that we could understand.

Congress has 30 days to comment on the arms sale proposal but given the past lackadaisical attitude about selling arms and the obvious excitement of the US arms manufacturers, approval of the package will not be a surprise. Didn’t George Washington warn us about foreign involvement and dangerous treaties?

Since government is unable or unwilling to think rationally, perhaps the only solution is for the American public to come forth with constitutional amendments requiring sanity in government, i.e., balanced budgets, elimination of arms sales/gifts/leases, elimination of all foreign aid except for food, clothing, shelter or medical supplies, restoring the power of war-making to the congress. A smart and simple tax plan; thanks Wm J. Cox:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24117.htm

A sensible and fair agricultural program, sound banking laws, elimination of lobby influence on congress, a workable immigration policy, etc.; what have we missed?

This is a “sustainability” starter list; feel free to add more sanity. Our survival depends on action; not from just a few radicals but from all citizens. Who would have ever thought that survivability was a radical thought anyway?

Your congressmen are just dying to hear from you!

Charles Foerster
31 January 2010