PUBLIC SERVICE or MILITARY MIGHT

For more than a month people have asked - “Will the real Donald Trump please stand up?” Well, at least in one aspect, he finally has. One of the most profound questions to plague the general public, concerning the direction of this new administration is: “What will be their priority on the issue of - Public Service, vs. Military Might?” The President’s answer is now clear as the proverbial bell. Our President has now stated that he’ll ask Congress for a 57-billion-dollar (that’s 57,000 millions) expansion to a military service that’s already the most massive in the world, with our troops stationed in more than 100 countries around the world. But this president has also demonstrated himself to be a most practical man - by asserting that he wants that military expansion “to be paid for” - by pulling an equal amount of funding from our Public Services.

The first example is House Bill 610 which he’ll undoubted sign - effectively de-funding major school-system public-services that have been in place for many decades. Not the least damaging of these, will be the loss of fee lunches provided for millions of America’s poor and hungry children - lunches which, for many of these kids, had been the only nutritious food they get in any given day. What a marvelous move for the health and well-being of our future citizens.

Yet it would seem that this move actually serves a dual purpose. By financially strangling the public school system - which has functioned magnificently for more than 150 years - the quality of our educational system can be made to shrivel like a rotting vine. What a perfect excuse to turn the who thing over to the hands of “private business”. The cost of running such businesses will be no less than it was before, although the new system will then be able to realize, through expanded costs, the handsome profits provided to “the highest bidders”. Moreover, those private bidders will suffer no obstacle to “wringing out every penny of profit - education be damned”.

And this is only the beginning, of a system that’s determined to convert all that had once been “Public Services”, into businesses under the control of politically supported profiteers. Public highways may be squeezed of funding to the point of such serious deterioration as to yield a perfect excuse for “toll roads”. We’ve already had a privatized postal service (that took us from 4-cents per letter to 49-cents), private-profit prisons and the employment of tens of thousands of mercenary solders, in the second Iraq war (with the hellish disaster of Blackwater). What’s next? The fire departments?

Beyond the ghoulish consequences of a nation of “for profit” public services, whatever happened to “government of, by and for the people”?

Wake up America, to what you’ll see unfolding, over the next four years!