(http://www.costofwar.com)

The wars of the Empire Builders.

The USA - led NATO army is waging wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S. now maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and its territories.

This year the Obama administration spent billions to invade Haiti while it denied the victims of the deadly earthquake immediate emergency care.

On 13 February 15.000 mostly U.S.A troops were used to flush out and kill 30 Taliban militiamen, killing 13 “collateral damage” human beings along the way. Such disproportionate numbers prove that the real goal of the Empire Builders is to gain control of Afghanistan, strategically located in an area teeming with gas and oil. The reasons for the war are about safeguarding the interests of a few Empire Builders at the expense of everybody else.

Obama remained silent when Israel, the nuclear-armed gendarme of the Empire Builders in the Middle East, invaded Gaza and committed human atrocities. This was only one, although possibly the most blatant, instance when Obama publicly demonstrated his allegiance to Capitalism and its wars.

The U.S. spends $700 billion of taxpayer dollars on the military each year, half the military spending of the entire world – much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and Venezuela combined.

And in addition to the billions of taxpayer dollars used to bail out banks, the US government has so far spent an approximate $985,000,000,000 to wage war on Irak and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile:

• over 2.8 million people have lost their homes to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8000 each day – higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes,

• over 17 million people are jobless, in addition to the millions more who are working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time,

• over 2.3 million people are imprisoned in the U.S.A., the highest percentage of any other country in the world,

• single - payer health care coverage continues to be non-existent and young USA men and women who join the military to escape dire living conditions in the ghettos, to earn college tuition or to become eligible for health care coverage end up getting killed and maimed in wars being fought to make the world safe for the Empire Builders.
  

The deceased Howard Zinn, lifelong peace and anti war activist demonstrated in his book A People's History of the United States that we, as a nation, have always struggled against oppression. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it.

Americans Against the War–France continues the legacies of Martin Luther King and Howard Zinn by denouncing the wars being fought by and against the great majority of people in the interests of a small minority of profiteers.

20 April 2010 Americans Against the War–France. aawfrance.org