Budget Maldistribution

Dear Mr. President,

I know your letter readers in the basement won’t forward this on in time for the debate, but if I could submit one question to you and Mitt for Wednesday night, it would be this: If you’re running a large corporation and there’s a department that isn’t doing its job, wouldn’t you fire the incompetent employees? Maybe even do away with the department? The answer’s pretty obvious to me and in my working life I saw it happen more than once. But here we’ve got a whole bunch of government departments, all lumped under the moniker “defense” that gets 57% of the U.S. budget and has fucked up every war and intervention they’ve been in since 1945 and yet you and the congressional chicken-hawk millionaires keep throwing buckets of money at them and pinning medals on their chests. I mean, the U.S military’s list of fiascos is too long for a letter so why the heck are we giving these incompetent buffoons, liars and braggarts more money to go out and blow stuff up, kill people and put us number one on the list of terrorist nations? They haven’t done any better in Afghanistan than they did in Iraq (or Vietnam or Grenada or Korea or…but I said I wouldn’t list them all) so why are we still killing people in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Honduras, the Philippines, Sudan, and who knows where else? I’d like to know what purpose this serves, Mr. President, besides making some arms merchants rich. And don’t get me started on the CIA, that hapless bunch of thugs and mindless assassins who can turn a pile of gold into a pile of shit quicker than you can say Shazam! Or the Homeland Security bozos: how many bombs have they found in probably 200 million pairs of shoes? They can confiscate almost-empty tubes of toothpaste but have they ever foiled one plot or prevented a single hijacking? I really object to 57 cents of every one of my tax dollars going to war merchants and killers and only 3 cents to Energy and the Environment, a nickel to health and another nickel to Veteran’s Benefits (veterans who can’t get benefits and by the way, the suicide rate of active duty service men and women now exceeds that of combat deaths – 38 in July alone), and 6 cents to Education. You get my drift, Mr. President? Gut the military, the CIA and all those spy agencies, stop the drone wars, declare peace and start paying attention to real problems like global warming, joblessness and the maldistribution of wealth. Tax the rich, restore America. Earn that Nobel Peace Prize.