Howdy Neighbor

I was half asleep in the middle of the night, listening to National Public Radio, and I thought I heard somebody say :  "with new leadership in North Korea, there is concern among its neighbors , including South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, and the U.S."

I suddenly awakened. Something wasn't right. The radio lady had definitely said "North Korea's Neighbors."  Not its enemies. Its "neighbors".

But the last one she listed was, definitely, "The U.S."

Why on earth would anybody include the United States in a list of North Korea's "neighbors"? Hell, we're, what, at least 6,000 miles away from North Korea? If the U.S. is a neighbor of North Korea, then so is Australia, or Mars.

But of course the answer finally dawned on me. Why, the United States is EVERYBODY'S neighbor!

The United States is everybody's neighbor because the United States is a juggernaut of a global superpower, the strongest military in the world, and maintaints a global empire, over which it feels it absolutely MUST preside in accordance with its (the US) "national interest", which means, simply, the profit of American corporations.       

And so to North Korea we Americans say "howdy neighbor"!

Just the other day President Obama, in timidly proposing a few token cuts to military spending over the next decade, clearly stated that the United States will be increasig its military presence in Asia. NO one seems to have noticed, because nobody is making a uproar about it. Increased U.S. military presence IN Asia??  How can we plan on doing this, when we can't even figure out how to pay for what we have now? 

The answer, of course, is China, the wealth of Asia, and American corporate control. Our corporate masters simply don't want to be excluded from Asian profit,  nor do they evidently want China to  become, uncontested, the greatest military power on the planet.

If this country (the U.S.) knows what's good for it, it will make every attempt to find a cooperative future with China, our neighbors. China and the U.S. are hopelessly economically entangled.

And for those who thought that President Obama would be totally for the poor and the working poor; he is, to a degree, but he is also very much a servant of the corporate oligarchy which paid for his election, which pays for, and therefore owns, all American elections and Presidents.