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The new axis of evil has fully emerged: the George W. Bush Administration, Enron, and the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex. With the generous campaign contributions supplied by Ken Lay and the good ol’ boys at now-defunct Enron, Bush assumed office (as we know, popularly elected can’t describe his ascension) and is now firmly in control of a new budget deficit and the most hegemonic (and growing) military state in modern times; as Robert D. Kaplan states in his book Warrior Politics, a power unrivaled since the days of the Roman Empire.

Bush is on the warpath and there’s no telling where Goliath will strike next. The Commander-in-Chief announced a 15 percent increase in military spending, the biggest in twenty years and “more than double the military spending in all of the European Union,” according to the Observer. “The rise will be $36 billion this year, $48 billion next year and $120 billion over the next five years, rising to a staggering two trillion over the next five years.”

“And what it is spending its money on is mostly irrelevant against the knives used to carry out 11 September,” Dan Plesch, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, recently said in the Observer.

And what could be more counter-productive in the midst of a recession and the beginning of a budget deficit than such an increase in spending for an already bloated military power? Especially when that spending is coupled with tax-breaks for the upper-income levels and cuts to ever-needed social programs. 

According to calculations by Professor Paul Kennedy of Yale, the U.S. single-handedly contributes to roughly 40 percent of worldwide military spending. Yet according to the World Health Organization in its 2000 report, the U.S. ranked a mere 37th in the world for health care.

How long will the world’s largest superpower be able to keep feeding its insatiable hunger for worldwide military domination at the expense of basic infrastructure needs such as health care, education, and services for its citizens?

It won’t be forever without a serious price to the welfare of citizens everywhere. The neglect and ignoring of a world of exploding population and increasing poverty, in the pursuit of economic and military hegemony, will only add to the conditions from which tomorrow’s terrorists will emerge.

Hopefully, democracy and freedom of speech will overcome complacency and blind obedience to the corporate sponsored warriors before the newly emerged axis of evil completely destroys what is left of America. If not, we know what happened to the Romans.