That's how the imbeciles on Capitol Hill, in their usual self aggrandizing and grandiloquent style, have chosen to characterize puny budget cuts of 39 billion dollars when there is a deficit in the trillions. I know that I am, to an extent, comparing apples and oranges, but only just. What an absolute mockery of a sham of a travesty. Imagine paring your total household expenditures so you bought fewer tubes of toothpaste, cheaper light bulbs, and stopped paying the kid down the street to mow your lawn, and you declared such measly reductions in expenses historic.
I suppose they are from the standpoint that such a hopeless accommodation indicates how appallingly fouled up our legislative body's functioning is. After all, it is worthy of a place in the annals when this sort of paltry agreement can be deemed historic and reported as such by a brain dead media. I loathe both parties, but, typically, The Republicans, pandering to some cretinous segment of their rank and file voters, made this tentative accord-the tiny budget cuts still have to be voted on-a tense, touch and go affair as they desperately tried to do away with funding for things like planned parenthood and regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. No one will touch the various political third rails that are the real culprits-entitlements and military expenditures, in sending the U.S. down the path of financial and economic disintegration, so, plan-see the recent, and not so recent, action in precious metals-accordingly.
7 comments:
Right on, Edwardo. They just can't seem to cut defense and entitlements. Yet. Entitlements will get hammered next go-round. Defense? I don't know. That is corporate controlled along with the rest of our so-called government. I doubt we will see any real cutting coming from defense. Which, by the way, they should just rename to "Offense." Or, maybe, "Perpetual War Department."
Your "Offense" comment made me laugh. If ever a department was completely misnamed it would have to be the DOD.
Well, Edwardo, you've been entertaining me for a long time here at your blog - so it is nice to be able to give back just a little.
DoD used to be called the "War Department." I guess that was too obvious.
Edwardo, the saber rattlers are rattling! http://ca.news.yahoo.com/pentagon-warns-big-defense-cuts-20110413-123335-629.html
Unbelievable. So they're gonna do a review and identify further ways in which they might do more with less. Someday, somehow, somebody in the government (with real power) is going to slap his/her forehead and shout, "Eureka! I've got it! Let's mind our own business and quit meddling in the affairs of other nations!"
So I'm a dreamer. Sue me.
Thanks for the link.
Johnny, it's my view that the primary driving force behind U.S. military campaigns in the M.E., for decades now, has been the imperative to maintain the petro dollar regime. The goal of U.S. military actions and foreign aid, i.e. bribery initiatives, in that region has been about keeping oil flowing in the "right" direction and insuring the global settlement of petroleum contracts in dollars.
A quick digression:
Machmoud Ahmadinejad's nuttiness notwithstanding, Iran is painted as a dangerous nexus of terrorism (and nuclear expansion) that must be reigned in primarily because Iran has long been interested in trading for oil in something other than dollars. However, because Iran is a proxy player for Russia and China, with all that implies, the U.S. has been very careful about bullying Iran militarily.
End of digression.
The WOT is pretty much all about oil flow and the petro dollar regime. Terrorism is a concocted sham designed to give cover to an effort to maintain as long as possible, though various types of coercion, a (destined to collapse) set of conditions that suit certain U.S. centric corp/gov interests.
Obviously, a tributary to the dynamic I've just described is the simple and grotesque fact that, as General Smedley Butler observed many generations ago, "War is a racket." There's a lot of money to be made by arms merchants of one variety or another milking the government cash cow through wildly exorbitant charges for war toys. But even so, they are mere leeches riding the back of a long term strategic policy. I dare say that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is about siphoning off profits from the enormously profitable heroin industry and redirecting those profits into major money center banks.
When the many decades long petrodollar regime fails, which despite the military's efforts, it is now in the inexorable, but somewhat drawn out process of doing, the U.S. military's ubiquitous presence in the M.E. will be insupportable. Government would be wise to front run this process, but who knows if they actually will.
Agreed, Edwardo. I'm not sure about the heroin thing. Can you support that with links? But I don't doubt the overall thrust of your informative post - for which I thank you.
I will endeavor to come up with some links, but, in the meantime Google Wachovia/Wells Fargo and reports on the laundering of drug money through the aforesaid bank.
Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert recently reported on conjecture that traces the '08 financial collapse to the removal, or threat of removal, of hundreds of billions of dollars of laundered drug funds from the system when an investigation loomed. When the dogs were called off the funds were put back into circulation.
It is a fact that, before the U.S. drove The Taliban from their dominant position in Afghanistan, the heroin trade was all but shut down in the world's largest heroin producing region. Concurrent with the U.S. and British establishment of some semblance of control in the region, the Heroin trade revived smartly.
Drug trade profits fund a lot of government activities, especially those of the "intelligence" agencies. If banks have two sets of books, the CIA and similar sorts of agencies have several sets of operational reports, only one of which they submit to their Congressional overseers. The unofficial, off book, reports that Congress are not made privy too, and for which no official funding is provided, find the necessary backing via the drug trade. It's not that Congress doesn't know, but they must have what is known as plausible deniability.
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