The media just seems to be feeding on the story of Nadya Suleman like sharks in frenzy.
For those not aware, Ms. Suleman is the woman who already had six children and went to a fertility clinic and ended up giving birth to eight children.
There has been a slew of comments and accusations of excess.
True, the clinic should never have done what they did.
But doesn’t anyone feel a deep sense of hypocrisy and irony when condemning this woman?
We should. Our culture is known world-wide for its excess.
I also feel uncomfortable with the class warfare going on here. There is considerable more focus on this woman, which follows the class-based notions of welfare queens and so on. You can find plenty of mainstream papers ranting and raving about taxpayers footing the bill for this woman’s children.
But how many of these media outlets decry corporate welfare or how the tax and legal system are biased in favor of the wealthy, property owners and so on?
How many of these media outlets are going nuts and foaming at the mouth over our "defense" spending? I don’t see them having a hissy fit over nearly one thousand foreign military bases and the creation of weapons that we are not using, should not use and would not enhance our safety and security.
Recently Chalmers Johnson wrote:
Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth’s sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.
This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding the Armed Forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.
That’s right. We see many journalists bitching about the possibility of taxpayers paying less than $1.5 million dollars to take care of eight children but are mum on pissing away 1,000 billion dollars on the military industrial complex.
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