The above was lifted from the website: visualcapitalist.com.
For a long while, I was using this chart from 2012:
However you look at it, fellow taxpayers, we’re paying out about a trillion dollars a year to maintain our colonial holdings. Puerto Rico may be poor and they may be dependent, but they won’t vote to become a state because, friends, they’re a COLONY!! We just go out of our way to call them “a territory.” Yes, they were, like most of our “territories,” “dependencies,” and most of the British Commonwealth, acquired through warfare and never autonomous or unoccupied since then.
West Germany was a colony since World War II and the Soviet government finally allowed us taxpayers to “defend” East Germany as well. We had 47,761 troops stationed in Germany at the end of September, 2012 and this number seems to have shrunk to 34,805 but I imagine that we’ll boost these occupational troops back up to “normal” levels once we release our colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq into disarray and lawlessness now that we’re ruined them sufficiently.
South Korea is booming thanks to us US taxpayers and our 28,500 troops defending them from being reunited with the other half of their country. What makes a colony? Certainly 23,468 occupational troops over 65 years should qualify.
Next Thursday, it will be 74 years since we took over Japan. Today we have 39,345 US troops stationed in their country. Doesn’t this make Japan a colony of the United States? When did their unconditional surrender in August of 1945 end?
Hell, we’ve got quite a few troops in Kuwait and the U.K.
We had a lot of troops in Thailand, but they finally asked us to leave. I don’t understand it. Free “protection,” a gift from the U.S. taxpayers. What’s wrong with that? The Thais found it offensive but were polite in asking us to leave, seeing the fate that befell nearby countries under the influence of one superpower or another.
Vietnam was far more disrespectful in asking us to leave — and we finally did. As soon as we left, they defended themselves against the Communist Chinese colonialists even better than they defended themselves against the Capitalist American colonialists. Why were we there? I keep forgetting the reason for killing 67,000 Americans and about 3,000,000 others some 8,000 miles from our shores. Were they about to cross the Pacific Ocean in sampans?
We’ve got 3,831 troops in Guam, continually supported by a couple generations of hard-working US taxpayers, making sure that nobody else grabs our colony and takes over the costs of its defense and upkeep.
I know why Kuwait needs us. They ARE a colony and the have the highest per capita income in the world! They should be paying mercenary troops to defend their illegal stealing of Iraq’s oil rather than us taxpayers. Well, at least our oil prices are a lot lower than Europe’s. Maybe we get something out of this colony, but it seems unfair to have carved this deep water port on the Persian Gulf out of Iraq at the end of World War I. And shouldn’t everyone be paying a fair market price for the same commodity?
So why can’t Germany, Japan and Korea, at least, get along without this massive expenditure of US taxes on services that don’t benefit the bulk of our population and often lead to conflict with other nations and peoples?
I know we don’t call these places colonies, but why are our troops still there? These countries are prosperous! They can defend themselves. I know why the military leaders think this all is a great idea and absolutely necessary. I know why the industries and investors want our troops to keep a watchful eye on their investments overseas. And I know that while War is a Racket, peacetime occupation also appears to be a racket!
What’s in it for us taxpayers? Why doesn’t this enormous “defense” make us safer and more secure? (Because it does NOT make us safer or more secure!!)
We’re protected by oceans on two sides. We haven’t seen a serious invasion since 1814 except for one really bad day, December 7, 1941, in what was then our colony of Hawaii, being attacked by the country we colonized first in 1853-1854.
When the Republicans ask the Democrats “Where will the money come from for their new domestic programs?” why doesn’t anyone reply, “from the grossly over-inflated military budget, which, the bigger it gets, the more trouble we get into.”
If we want to be safer, we need to get less militant, not more militant. We’ve tried escalation and it worked until some time in the late 1960s when education and communication allowed even small countries like Afghanistan and Vietnam and Iraq and North Korea and Iran and Cuba to stand up to the big bully countries of China and the United States and Russia. Yes, they took huge losses, but the more we (as well as our so-called “enemies”) punished them, the more their will to resist strengthened. North Korea hasn’t cracked in over a half century and three generations of enmity.
Fellow taxpayers, there are better things to do with our money than to invade other countries and then occupy them for decades. There are actually productive, rather than destructive or coercive, uses for our hard-earned taxes. What would you rather do with the $1,000,000,000,000.00 (no, I didn’t make a mistake) we might save each year by just being a nation among equal nations, everyone guaranteeing everyone else’s sovereignty?
Free the Colonies!!
©David N. Dodson, August, 10, 2019
Dave's World 