President Obama and Congress will soon make defining choices about health care and troops for Afghanistan.

These two choices have something in common – each has a bill of around $100 billion per year. So one question is whether we’re better off spending that money blowing up things in Helmand Province or building up things in America.

Nicholas Kristof | The New York Times

The hero’s reception granted Gorbachev when he accompanied the German leader across the Bornholmer Street bridge to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the city’s division was credit long overdue. As The New York Times reported: “More than 1,000 people lined the bridge Monday night under gray skies and a steady drizzle to hear the chancellor speak, but their loudest cheers came when she thanked Mr. Gorbachev for the reforming attitude he brought to the Soviet leadership that helped make the events of that historic night possible.” The crowd, chanting “Gorby, Gorby, Gorby,” understood that he had done something unique for a world leader: He admitted the error of his system’s ways and radically reversed its course.

The surrender of immense political power, personal as well as international in scope, is something we never expect from leaders, but Gorbachev set a model of self-sacrifice for a larger purpose that one wishes others would follow. How rare in history for a leader of such great standing to surrender his position, along with its abundance of personal perquisites, for the larger common good. How unexpected for the leader of a military colossus to turn swords into plowshares.

Robert Scheer | TruthDig

The American military has been largely privatized, although Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has still recommended a 40,000-troop increase. The Army’s basic functions have been outsourced to no-bid contractors. What was once done by the military with concern for tactical and strategic advancement is done by war profiteers concerned solely about profit. The aims of the military and the contractors are in conflict. A scaling down of the war or a withdrawal is viewed by these corporations as bad for business. But expansion of the war, as many veterans will attest, is only making the situation more precarious.

“American and Afghan soldiers are putting their lives at risk, Afghan civilians are dying, and yet there’s this underlying system in place that gains more from keeping all of them in harm’s way rather than taking them out of it,” the officer complained. “If we bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, we may profit morally, we might make gains for humanity, but moral profits and human gains do not contribute to the bottom line. Peace and profit are ultimately contradictory forces at work in Afghanistan.”

Chris Hedges | TruthDig.com

How long are we going to continue to do this?  We invade and occupy a country, and then label as “insurgents” or even ”terrorists” the people in that country who fight against our invasion and occupation.  With the most circular logic imaginable, we then insist that we must remain in order to defeat the “insurgents” and “terrorists” — largely composed of people whose only cause for fighting is our presence in their country.  All the while, we clearly exacerbate the very problem we are allegedly attempting to address — Terrorism — by predictably and inevitably increasing anti-American anger and hatred through our occupation, which, no matter the strategy, inevitably entails our killing innocent civilians.

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

So according to The Washington Post, dropping bombs on, controlling and occupying Afghanistan — all while simultaneously ensuring “effective governance, economic development, education, the elimination of corruption, the protection of womens rights” to Afghan citizens in Afghanistan — is an absolutely vital necessity that must be done no matter the cost.  But providing basic services such as health care to American citizens, in the U.S., is a secondary priority at best, something totally unnecessary that should wait for a few years or a couple decades until we can afford it and until our various wars are finished, if that ever happens.

“U.S. interests in South Asia” are paramount; U.S. interests in the welfare of those in American cities, suburbs and rural areas are an afterthought.As demented as that sounds, isnt that exactly the priority scheme weve adopted as a country?  Were a nation that couldnt even manage to get clean drinking water to our own citizens who were dying in the middle of New Orleans.  We have tens of thousands of people dying every year because they lack basic health care coverage.  The rich-poor gap continues to expand to third-world levels.  And The Post claims that war and “nation-building” in Afghanistan are crucial while health care for Americans is not because “wars, unlike entitlement programs, eventually come to an end.”

Except, as Andrew Bacevich points out, thats false:

Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome.What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that. War has become a permanent condition. –Andrew Bacevic

Beltway elites have health insurance and thus the costs and suffering for those who dont are abstract, distant and irrelevant.  Identically, with very rare exception, they and their families dont fight the wars they cheer on — and dont even pay for them — and thus get to enjoy all the pulsating benefits without any costs whatsoever.

Adam Smith, all the way back in 1776, in An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, described this Beltway attitude exactly:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . .

Lounging around in the editorial offices of the capital of a rapidly decaying empire, urging that more Americans be sent into endless war paid for with endless debt, while yawning and lazily waving away with boredom the hordes outside dying for lack of health care coverage, is one of the most repugnant images one can imagine.  Its exactly what Adam Smith denounced.  And its exactly what our political and media elite are.

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

Imagine if every American spent just a day contemplating how they’d react if some foreign army from a Muslim nation invaded and bombed the U.S., occupied the country for the next several years with 60,000 soldiers, killed tens of thousands of citizens here, set up secret prisons where they disappeared Americans for years without charges or even contact with the outside world, imposed sanctions that blockaded food and medicine and killed countless children, invaded and ransacked our homes at will, abducted Americans and shipped them halfway around the world to island-prisons, instituted a worldwide torture regime, armed their allies for attacks on other Western nations, and threatened still other invasions.

Do you think Americans might be seething with rage about that, wanting to kill as many of the people from that country as possible?  Wouldnt it be rather obvious that the more that was done to Americans, the more filled with hatred and a desire for violence they would be?

Just consider the rage and fury and burning desire for vengeance that was unleashed by a one-day attack on U.S. soil, eight years ago, by a stateless band of extremists, that killed 3,000 people.

Along those lines, a new poll from The Washington Post today reveals that 42% of Americans favor bombing Irans “nuclear development sites” 49% of Republicans; 38% Democrats; 42% Independents, while 33% of Americans favor “invading with U.S. forces to remove the Iranian government from power” 40% Republicans; 32% Democrats; 30% Independents.

Although majorities oppose that, that is a rather substantial group of Americans that favors having us bomb and invade our third Muslim country in less than ten years, not counting the places we bomb covertly or the countries bombed by our main Middle East client state.  And just imagine how much that support among Americans will increase if the U.S. Government ever starts advocating it and, therefore, the U.S. media even more loudly than now beats the drums of war against Iran. In the last ten years, the U.S. and Israel collectively have bombed at least six Muslim countries including Gaza.  Despite that, 40% of Americans want to attack yet another one, and 1/3 want to invade.

Those are the same people who, if there is another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, will be walking around, eyebrows earnestly raised, innocent, self-righteous and confused, and asking:  ”why do they hate us??”  And their friends and neighbors and leaders will assure them:  ”they hate us for our freedoms.”

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

This is what Barack Obama did to “earn” the Nobel Prize. He put the benevolent face back on things. He is a good-looking black law professor with an obvious bent for dialogue and discussion and inclusion. That he hasn’t actually reversed any of Bush’s more notorious policies — hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay, hasn’t ended secret detentions, hasn’t amped down Iraq or Afghanistan — is another matter. What he has done is remove the stink of unilateralism from those policies.

They’re not crazy-ass, blatantly illegal, lunatic rampages anymore, but carefully-considered, collectively-run peacekeeping actions, prosecuted with meaningful input from our allies.

You see the difference? The Nobel committee sure did!

Matt Taibbi  | True/Slant

There is a continued need for effective international police work to thwart the efforts of a widely dispersed al-Qaida network, but putting resources into that effort does not satisfy the need of the military establishment for a conventional field of battle. That is the significance of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s leaked report calling for a massive counterinsurgency campaign to make everything right about life in Afghanistan, down to the governance of the most forlorn village. The general’s report aims not at eliminating al-Qaida, which he concedes is barely existent in the country, but rather at creating an Afghan society that is more to his own liking.

It is a prescription, as the Russians and others before them learned, for war without end. That might satisfy the marketing needs of the defense industry and the career hopes of select military and political aspirants, but it has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. In the end, it would seem that some of our leaders need the Afghanistan battleground more than the terrorists do.

Robert Scheer | HuffPost

Ralph Nader’s new novel, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us,” offers an inspired and practical solution to our national and global problems. The story begins right after Katrina when Warren Buffett goes to New Orleans and spends a chunk of his fortune to help out. Fresh from that experience he convenes a meeting of other progressive-leaning and super-rich folk, including Ted Turner, George Soros, Ross Perot, Yoko Ono, William Gates Sr., Barry Diller, Bill Cosby, and Phil Donahue,  to ”address the enormous mismatch of resources between citizen groups and the corporate supremacists.”

Nader makes his case in the most practical terms: many of the super-rich are decent people who want very much to do the right thing and use their wealth to make a better world. If they were band together, they would not only have enough money to take on huge tasks, they would not have to go through the solution-sapping politics of America’s demented “democratic process.”

But Nader didn’t have to write a whole book; he had me with the title. I’ve long believed that the real power to change our world would not come from the bottom up — though people-power, grassroots movements, and community activism will always be important.

The problem is that when populist movements try to usher in great reforms they invariably take on some of the traits and tactics of the ruling elites. The American revolutionaries create a system of white male privilege that engages in slavery and genocide. The French revolutionaries unleash a wave of terrible violence, worse than the royalty they revolted against. The anti-war movement in the ’60s likewise engages in destructive violence while its leadership turns sexist, racist, and authoritarian.

This is really not the fault of the individuals involved; rather, it is a structural conundrum. In order to beat the elites at their game, the revolutionaries must actually play the game, only better. In the process, they become that which they revolt against.

Violence has always provided the clearest example of this conundrum: if you meet violence with pacifism you are quickly destroyed, but if you meet violence with violence then, win or lose, you become infected with violence.

Which is why only the super-rich can save us: they are able to initiate, embody and model the deep systemic change the world needs and to do so in a way that is truly liberating for all. As I recently wrote:

There are only two ways out of this mess. The best solution is a bit counter-intuitive: Those who are at the top of the power-over pyramid willingly and freely come to their senses and do the right thing. This was (and still is) the great hope with Obama — that he would lead a top-down revolution that would change everything.

Those who rule via power-over must freely choose power-with. In this way, the revolution happens with a minimum of power-over force and violence. And those who are already committed to power-with do not have to sacrifice their principles. –Domination Rules

The answer to Nader’s question is, “Yes they can!”

The more urgent question now: Will they?

World leaders can’t seem to hold an economic summit without security forces at the level of an occupying army running roughshod over the host city. This is both a symptom of what’s wrong with our global economy — predicated on war, domination and scarcity — and a metaphor for how it works.

So as delegates to the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh last week tinkered with environmental issues and Third World lending and took a few marginal but high-profile steps to tame the beast, 4,000 police officers dressed in riot gear, recruited from around the country, demonstrated its fangs. The heart of global economic order — lest we forget — is protecting the interests of the wealthy few.

Robert C. Koehler | CommonDreams.org