Stephan:   I spent a good part of this afternoon talking with two young Marine brothers. One had just returned from his second tour in Afghanistan, and is scheduled to go back in 3 months. His brother has just come back from a tour in Iraq. I am not going to use their names because I don't want them to get into trouble for telling me the truth. The one who had been in Arghanistan confirmed what I have been telling you for several years. 'Afghanistan is completely corrupt. It isn't really a country it's a series of tribal valleys each ruled by a strong man village elder. We are spending billions building them roads, hospitals, schools, and none of it is going to make any difference. As soon as we leave the country will revert back to what it has always been.' He described for me how one of the Afghan soldiers his unit was training, a former Taliban, decided to defect back to the Taliban, so one day he walked up behind two of his Marine trainers and shot them in the back of the head. 'It was his initiation price for the Taliban to take him back,' he said. We can't build schools, roads, and hospitals here at home, but you can look at the little counter on the left side of the SR website to see what we can spend in Afghanistan. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were insane to begin with, the result of the overweaning hubris of the Bush neocons, and a group of corporations that have become obscenely rich servicing this madness. All these wars have done is exploit the honor, sense of duty, and service, of thousands of young American men and women, in many cases costing them there lives, or leaving them suffering with PTSD. Meanwhile as this report makes clear, cities all over the U.S. are literally falling apart because they have no money, and their citizens have no money. And political ideology trumps commonsense. All of this is self-inflicted.