Most 'Muricans Want Ground War With ISIS - Falling Into the "ISIS Trap"

 " Why of course the people don’t want war...But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” - Hermann Goering, Nuremberg, 1946

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, Americans are full of raging war 'roids and ready to dispatch tens of thousands of ground troops to fight ISIS. Specifically, 62 percent of registered voters - who are supposed to be a tad smarter than rocks - want U.S. ground troops committed to another failed combat effort sure to inflate the ISIS rats and their recruits more than achieve any victory. Elias Isquith, noting the figures in a recent salon.com piece,  actually asked: "Are we insane?" 

Well, yes "we" are -  at least those of us who get the bulk of our "news" from the corporate media and especially from the propagandists at FOX (who can't even 'fess up to Billo O'Reilly's multiple lies - from being in the Falklands war zone, to being present when a key HSCA Kennedy assassination witness was murdered.)

But this is what one can expect when a people are half-educated, ignorant and lack critical thinking skills, in which case they become malleable tools to be molded by the PR and propaganda machines.   And we've seen this dog and pony war beat show before, about a year and a half ago when neocons were clamoring for a Syria intervention.

Most cooler heads at the time were able to see through it and as they saw the polls climb for intervention some even noted a "herd mentality" taking root. One of these was Hillary Mann Leverett, professor at American University, who on one Steve Kornacki 'UP' show, observed we had no business barging into Syria - which effects would arguably be even more catastrophic and dunning than those from barging into Iraq.

Prof. Leverett compared that drumbeat  " to the lead up to the war in Iraq" and she ought to have known as she was in the Bush White House and also dealing with Congressional Democrats, and with members of the media. She went on:

"The herd mentality which took over to buy into the Bush administration's narrative that Saddam had to have chemical weapons of mass destruction and was determined to use them, was something unquestioned. ....it was not only a mistake, it was based on manufactured evidence. "


In  the case of Iraq, too many citizens played along by being cowed, afraid to speak out lest we be deemed "unpatriotic" or  "terrorist sympathizers".  Many of us also allowed ourselves to be too uninformed, even ignorant of the issues, thereby allowing ourselves to be played. Susan Jacoby, for example (in 'The Shock Doctrine'), referenced “two thirds of us can’t find Iraq on a map and many members of Congress don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni”  In a nutshell, too many Americans had “become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions."

 

This is tragic, and what has led to the operative herd mentality that comes up every time our  collective consciousness is hijacked by overwrought emotions.  Because if Americans can’t or won’t exercise their minds to think critically, especially concerning our national history and consequences of our actions, then we stand to be led into more reckless wars.

 

This thing with ISIS is no different, and as a recent (Mar. 9) highly excellent piece in TIME noted (yes, they do have a few) Americans would be making the biggest error ever in falling for the ISIS trap.  As the authors write (p. 31):

 

"ISIS is taunting the world to run the cycle (of war) one more time....As bad as these people are, there is room for things to get much worse. And they will unless the U.S. and its coalition has the discipline at last to think all the way through to the end. The question is not beating ISIS. It's what comes after that. More than ever the question needs an answer."

 

What comes after that? The multiple authors aren't afraid to broach their views, with which I wholeheartedly agree (ibid.):

 

"The U.S. showed in 1991 and again in 2003 that it knows how to take down enemies in Iraq. What it has never shown is an ability to leave something better afterward."

 

But until it does, ever new crops of terrorists will emerge. From the region's overall degradation of civil society, leading to: "mass unemployment, resentment, suspicion and sense of victimhood" .  These are the human factors that need addressing in the Middle East, especially the conflict -torn regions like Iraq, Syria and Libya. Sure, it's easy to treat all inimical problems like a "nail" and wield a "hammer" to solve them  - but that only leads you back to more conflicts, i.e. that require more "hammers".

 

This again takes us back to State Dept. spokesperson Marie Harf's recent comment which I cited yesterday:

"We cannot kill our way out of this war" 

 

Referring to the current conflict with ISIS.  Well, we certainly cannot if that means once more committing tens of thousands of ground troops - especially after we beheld how that worked out before with Iraq- an intervention that laid the path for ISIS.

 

And let's go even further back in the mists of time to how all these terrorists managed to manifest thanks to our stupid manipulations during the Reagan era.  As the TIME authors remind us (ibid.):

 

"It's true that some of the same mujahedin trained and armed by the U.S. to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan went on to be the founding fathers of modern jihadist terrorism - men like bin Laden and Mullah Omar, creator of the Taliban."

 

Ouch! The truth hurts, doesn't it? The authors go on with even more truth:

 

"No thought was given to what would become of these battle -hardened fanatics after the West was done using them."

 

Yes, indeed. We were too smart by half. Believed we could create this 'Frankenstein' monster to sic on the Russkies but never dreamed it would stay alive and come back to wreak havoc....on US! Hubris anyone?

 

Americans, as fearful as they are about ISIS beheadings and having ISIS zombies appear at Malls, need to get a grip and not allow  themselves to be converted to a drooling, mindless herd. This is exactly what the ISIS bugs want, and they're hoping they can taunt us enough to force our weaker politicos and leaders into precipitous action.

 

But if we do we will prove once more we are indeed insane. As Einstein put it: "insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result."

 

 

See also:


http://www.salon.com/2015/03/05/americas_war_fever_is_rising_how_fear_bloodlust_are_bringing_americans_together/

The French Islamic Terrorists: Is Their Aim To Provoke the West Into Over-reaction?

The French terror attacks, which have now left 18 dead, have been summarily described by one French official as "the French being at war". No, I don't think so. That fulsome rhetoric embodies precisely the memetic mistake the U.S. made after 9/11 which enticed us into nearly bankrupting ourselves by two useless 'wars' (I call them occupations) that have merely left us with $4 trillion in debt (when all the medical costs are finally toted up). Rather than treat the al Qaeda imps as what they were - criminals- we inflated them to the level of another superpower just like us, as demonstrated by the military response in Afghanistan (now 13 years and counting) and the debacle in Iraq.

Anyway, Juan Cole has some insightful words on the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. He points out that the shooters were neither "attacking free speech" nor "defending Mohammed"; they were using a time-honored tactic of radical extremists (of all stripes): "sharpening the contradictions," hoping to provoke an overreaction that would lead to repression and persecution of Muslims in general -- thus helping the extremists recruit new members. 

This is similar to  what bin Laden did with such spectacular success with 9/11: provoking an endless global war, with Western "interventions" and "targeted assassinations" and drone strikes that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people -- all of which, as our own security services tell us, have fed the flames of extremism and made the situation worse.

Much of this was highlighted in my blog post of May 4, 2011, referencing Rachel Maddow's excellent analysis from the night before.  Maddow showed, using assorted news releases, past documented video quotations and third party reports how we'd all been had in a classical 'rope a dope'. While we had our eyes and minds focused on the DEATHS brought by Bin Laden from his 9/11 terror attacks, we lost sight of his hidden goal: to bring the whole American Republic to its knees by making it spend itself into oblivion. Which is damned near what we have succeeded in doing, by erecting an entire security -defense establishment (much of it contracted out) in addition to an expanded military -industrial establishment.

In the meantime, most of our civil liberties have been extirpated or at least seriously compromised by the Patriot Act and other provisions exposed by Edward Snowden.

According to Maddow, in her then introductory remarks:

"When we think about Bin Laden we think about murder, mayhem and perverted, pseudo-theology. But Osama Bin Laden himself always thought about money. Money was always how he explained what he was doing, and what al Qaeda was up to. One month after the September 11 attacks, gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he said, quote:

"The losses on Wall Street amounted to 16 percent, and they have said this was a record loss that had never happened in the market's history in 230 years. The capital in circulation in this market amounted to $4 trillion. If we multiply 16 percent by $4 trillion to find out the losses their shares suffered, that is $640 billion. This is what they lost in one hour. The national income in the U.S. is $20 billion.

Bin Laden, in Maddow's quote from Al Jazeera, then goes on to brag about the hidden economic costs latent in the "psychological shock" after the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon.

Maddow then played the infamous Bin Laden video that emerged just on the eve of the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. In this video he's heard to state

"Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the attacks but America in the incident and the aftermath spent more than $500 billion"

So even three years after the horrific 9/11 events, Bin Laden wasn't bragging about the deaths or physical damage inflicted on New York or Washington but the financial costs to the country. Obviously, as Maddow pointed out, that was where his head and major purpose were, though Americans always believed it was about death, destruction.

Juan Cole's insight and suggestion is that, like the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11, the aim of the French terrorists might well have been the same - to provoke France and the West into a disproportionate response that will cost blood and treasure.

Do the French have the good sense not to fall into the trap that we fell into, set by bin Laden? (Who must still be laughing from his watery grave)?  Only time will tell, but when one hears any kind of "war" rhetoric the future doesn't appear very auspicious.

With the Extremes of the "Patriot Act" Coming Home to Roost, We Now Know the Final Victory was Osama bin Laden's

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open."  - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.

"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

- Benjamin Franklin


One of the stock canards (or maybe bromides) spouted all through the 12 years of the 'War on Terror" has been that the "troops are fighting for our freedoms". As we behold the latest leaked (thankfully!) releases that government has an enormous PRISM program raking up all our personal and online info and data (they use the euphemism "metadata") we now know this is so much bullshit. The troops are merely pawns deployed in far off places to justify the ongoing massive security-surveillance network at home - which essentially has tossed all our fourth amendment rights into the dumpster. But this has been long in coming, and to me - the real outrage is those higher ups like Dianne Feinstein now calling for pursuit of the leakers when THEY are the ones ensuring we aren't sent hurling into total tyranny! Because make no mistake - as long as the "patriotic" eavesdroppers know more about us than we do about them and their doings, we are merely consumer-ite tools, hardly citizens in a democracy!

Let's back up some decades to the Church Committee, which under Sen. Frank Church found in the course of its investigations that the NSA  had gotten too big for its breeches and was involved in numerous excesses. Thanks to the Church Committee there was issued Executive Order 12333 launching  'The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978' which mandated several limits, including:


- NSA can intercept any communication - phone call, fax, electronic mail, etc. as long as at least one end is in a foreign country


- NSA cannot target individual Americans, for example, by entering the citizen's name or phone number into a computer that scans calls.


- If NSA accidentally picks up an American during targeting of a foreigner..the American's name must be removed from reports of the call and replaced with the words 'U.S. Person'.


- When NSA (or CIA) eavesdroppers are training or testing equipment they may intercept an American's calls, as long as records are destroyed 'as soon as possible'


Well, all that changed after the  9/11 attacks, when the nation allowed a group of robed lunatics to achieve the leverage of a superpower, as our misguided leaders launched a 12-yr. military buildup and two invasions- "wars" - now bankrupting us - even as they induced us to limit our OWN civil liberties in the name of protecting us from the terrorists. In many ways then, the robed lunatics and OBL got our leaders, so-called reps to do their dirty work for them and thereby emerge victorious. All this horse shit you've heard about they haven't changed our way of life? It's a cock and bull story! Just read the headlines from today's papers if you still think that's true!  The sad fact?  Our lives and every move are fully transparent to the gov't while its sundry machinations are mostly hidden from us- thanks to over-classification of everything. Is this democracy? No freaking way!

Many warnings were sounded, especially after the bogusly named "Patriot" Act emerged in 2002. Alas,  few Senators had read it but most were ready to approve it at the drop of a hat because...oh my.....if they voted against it they'd be deemed UNPATRIOTIC! In fact, the REAL patriots were those like WI Sen. Russ Feingold who rejected it - recognizing it for the Trojan horse it was. Out of the Patriot Act's clauses emerged much of the sinister manuevering, pseudo-legalistic mumbo jumbo justifying the over reach going on now, including the deliberate muzzling of internet companies so they wouldn't inform customers they'd been compromised by backdoor gates- supplied by NSA, FBI etc..

Flash forward to 2005. At least the FISA Act was still protecting us, i.e. our 4th amendment rights. But then the Bushies began taking shortcuts with it, doing their snooping without proper judicial warrants. It violated the heart of the FISA laws but given how many congress critters had been turned into lily-livered punks they didn't halt it, no -- they changed the LAW to make the FISA violations lawful! The chance then came up in 2011 to halt the renewal of this insanity and unconstitutional over reach once and for all, but all our congress whores punked out, and approved it - so here we sit- with the NSA snoops likely watching even as I type this.  Obama could have chucked the unconstitutional FISA law revision-renewal with a veto but he let it pass by signing. Odd, because as a Senator he offered a full throated defense of the Billl of Rights and warned against the very over reach we're now seeing on a mammoth scale.

On May 3, 2011, meanwhile, Gordon Rachman - writing in The Financial Times - advised it was time to declare victory in the "war on terror" and end it.  Of course,  to the hyper-militarists and security mavens this was anathema, since god forbid, they need a driving shtick to keep on pulling in federal dollars. Shut down all their anti-terror toys, surveillance and so on and what's left? Well, nothing to do but play golf every day and what fun is there in that? So, their response naturally kept the fear pipes blaring, warning of this and that or now - after Bin Laden's killing- some kind of obscure retribution from the terror cells. But as Rachman noted, this game could go on forever, because no one is going to kill or eliminate every terrorist on the planet.  Those warnings sounded by the Spy complex two years ago were re-echoed yesterday by the same Complex and its self-righteous bloviators (as well as assholes like Lindsey Graham), who are chagrined that the leaks which informed us of the extent of their snooping will now "not protect us as well".  The question emerges from what?

You're going to turn the whole country into a fascist panopticon out of fear of one or two odd attacks? Evidently yes, and both parties are hostage to this syndrome because neither wants to be known as the party of "terr'ist lovers", anti-Patriots, commies or whatever. But as Rachman noted in his piece: citing a report for the Rand Corporation by Brian Jenkens who makes a similar point:

"The average American has about a 1 in 9,000 chance of dying in an automobile accident and about a one in 18,000 chance of being murdered.".

Meanwhile, in the five years after 9/11 (including the people killed there) "the average American had only a one in 500,000 chance of being killed in a terrorist attack". By way of comparison, the chance of dying in an airline crash is one in 346,000 and the chance of being annihilated by a monster asteroid (> 0.5 km dia.) in its collision with Earth, is the same, according to Sir Martin Rees ('Our Final Hour'). SO in other words, the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is much much less than the chance of being wiped out in an asteroid collision.

So all this hullaballoo about "protecting us" is really about taking away all the basic fourth amendment rights in the interest of trying to halt one or two odd attacks (or even more possibly) which don't even claim as many lives as gun homicides every year - and for which this nation does absolutely squatto. (As we've witnessed after the Newtown massacre). I betcha if Newtown had been a terrorist attack, there'd be no multi-clip magazine weapons left out there!

You do remember those 4th amendment rights, don't you? You're not one of those fool 'Muricans who in a poll taken ca. 2004 couldn't name 3 of the Bill of Rights? Let us recall the words from that once sacred Constitution now treated as toilet paper by most of our aristocrats in the Senate:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”


As noted by blogger Norman Solomon (http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/norman-solomon/49920/the-bill-of-rights-exists-an-open-letter-to-dianne-feinstein):

"One of the most chilling parts of that just-revealed Surveillance Court order can be found at the bottom of the first page, where it says “Declassify on: 12 April 2038.”

Apparently you thought—or at least hoped—that we, the people of the United States, wouldn’t find out for 25 years. And the fact that we learned about this extreme violation of our rights in 2013 instead of 2038 seems to bother you a lot."

Why 2038? Obviously, because the powers-that-be, bless their little hearts, know that most Boomers will all be dead by then. And we are the last generation living that can still trace back historical memory to the era of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 - while for most Gen X'ers and Millennials that is all distant fairy tale stuff so they'd have little interest anyway. (Recall, the JFK file hiders also wanted to keep hidden all the relevant files until 2037, but thanks to Oliver Stone - whose film 'JFK' launched the JFK Records Act, that was shot down)

Solomon goes on, addressing Sen. Dianne Feinstein:

"Rather than call for protection of the Fourth Amendment, you want authorities to catch and punish whoever leaked this secret order. You seem to fear that people can actually discover what their own government is doing to them with vast surveillance."

But in fact, it is the leakers who have ensured a level playing field in the matter of deep politics knowledge, at least keeping the PEOPLE somewhat knowledgeable of what their government is doing, as opposed to the gov't having it all its own way and hiding everything!

Rachman himself warned of the dimensions of the extensive surveillance state - complex barely two years ago, noting that the Washington Post's expose ('Top Secret America') pointed out that:

"In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September, 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons.. Adding - and "that is just the organizations created since 9/11, whle the CIA and NSA were hardly modest or under-resourced operations before the war on terror".

 Indeed now,  at least five counties within 150 miles of D.C. are the richest in the country, in terms of median income, and all are beneficiaries of this monstrous security state. One in which I used to live, Howard County, Maryland, is the 5th wealthiest and features the NSA headquarters, the subject of an extensive investigative piece when I lived in Columbia, MD ('No Such Agency: America's Fortress of Spies', by Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, The Baltimore Sun Special Section (Dec. 3-15, 1995)).

Of course, NSA's complexes have vastly grown since then, with its budget more than quadrupled. Recall also my earlier blog on their new facility in Bluffdale, Utah - designed to approach the state of "total information awareness" that the (Bush)- reconstructed Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter once hoped to implement - and in a way has succeeded, since the reported data scrafing functions approach it.  I noted the extent of this here: http://www.brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-biggest-spy-center-on-earth-lets.html


For example,  the program known as PRISM gives the U.S. government access to email, documents, audio, video, photographs and other data that people entrust to some of the world’s best known companies, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper said it reviewed a confidential roster of companies and services participating in PRISM. The companies included AOL Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Skype, YouTube and Paltalk.

Be alert, be aware. Raise a hue and cry as opposed to remaining merely a passive consumer. Now is the time for all real citizens to come to the aid of the country, if a country of democratic principles we are to still have when it's all over! If not, and the Military-Spy Complex has total control, we will know once and for all (as many of us suspect now) Osama bin Laden - though dead 2 yrs. - will have gotten our own government to do his dirty work for him in taking away our rights!

-------------------

Footnote: I just saw a nice little spiel Obama gave today about how the data collectors are all "professionals" and doing their jobs - also that he will be a private citizen soon and he may be snooped on by an administration after that. My thought? Isn't he the LEAST worried about that? He ought to be! Again, the extent of MASS surveillance - which is what he's trying to defend - is not supported by the explicit wording of the 4th amendment which calls for individual warrants for searches! This is an abomination and no amount of rhetoric can make it right. Not to me, anyway! Either we return to the 1978 FISA law, or admit we're now a lawless nation carrying on unconstitutional searches.

Up to $6 Trillion of the Long Term Deficit- Created by “WARS!”

The news released yesterday that a Harvard group has shown the U.S. “wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq (actually more unpaid for occupations) will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans- ought to surprise no one who’s been paying attention. The real question the citizen needs to ask is: Why are we looking to cut domestic needs to pay for a deficit that has been rung up by wars of choice??  Oh, and tax cuts at the same time!


Let me now clarify before going on to the Harvard study. After 9/11 many of us could see the enormous future deficits that would be created without the need for a crystal ball. The first indicator? The $1.7 trillion Bush tax cuts passed in 2001. Then, as we heard ‘war on terror’ screamed over and over in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we feared the U.S. would react by over reacting. Much like an enraged rich man with enormous mansion – just stung by several wasps – who gets out a blowtorch to take down the wasp’s nest under his eaves, and burns his place down in the process.

Exaggerated? Uh,….no! Rachel Maddow, indeed, was perhaps one of the first to do the ex post facto analysis of the unreal costs of mounting a full scale war and making the point it was exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted! E.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/05/rachel-maddows-analysis-terrifying.html

According to Maddow, in her introductory remarks:


"When we think about Bin Laden we think about murder, mayhem and perverted, pseudo-theology. But Osama Bin Laden himself always thought about money. Money was always how he explained what he was doing, and what al Qaeda was up to. One month after the September 11 attacks he gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he said, quote


'The losses on Wall Street amounted to 16 percent, and they have said this was a record loss that had never happened in the market's history in 230 years. The capital in circulation in this market amounted to $4 trillion. If we multiply 16 percent by $4 trillion to find out the losses their shares suffered, that is $640 billion. This is what they lost in one hour. The national income in the U.S. is $20 billion'

Bin Laden, in Maddow's quote (from Al Jazeera), then went on to brag about the hidden economic costs latent in the "psychological shock" after the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and how many people weren't able to work for a week. He also mentioned layoffs in the airline and hotel industry and the impact these had on the economy.


In the further expatiation of a 2002 interview, Bin Laden didn't brag about the death toll or buildings destroyed but rather that his "great victory in the 9-11 attacks is that they cost the U.S. more than $1 trillion."

As Rachel went on to say:

For us, what looked like nihilism was to Osama Bin Laden economic and economically rational

Bin Laden's own words gave his primary purpose away at the end of his 2004 video, as played by Maddow:


"We are continuing the ploy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy"


Well, now we know it’s a lot more than $1 trillion!

Instead of playing into Bin Laden’s hands with a precipitous over-reaction, the saner and more rational move would have been to mount a lower order police action to take out al Qaeda in a measured fashion, but without squandering trillions. Worse, compounding the original blunder by adding another “war” (occupation) on a nation (Iraq) that had nothing to do with 9/11! Why? Because Bush Jr. had to get back at Saddam for dissing his daddy.

 In the case of the aftermath of 9/11 we, the supposed super power, elevated a gaggle of robed lunatics in al Qaeda to the same level of competing super power, since we mounted so many military resources against them and which may take years to pull out of Afghanistan! Like a big brute human stung by a hornet, we used a blow torch when a rolled up newspaper would have sufficed. It had been as if the surprise and intensity of the attacks dislodged all reason and proportion from our leaders' minds.


We played into Bin Laden’s hands like dummies, even compounding it by launching an unrelated war in 2003, and now can’t even pay the disability benefits for tens of thousands of returned vets still waiting for the VA to make good. The waiting times now are up to 894 days! If we now add another war, say with Iran or Syria, how much longer will that waiting time reach? 894 months? The way the deficit is being ramped up, don’t laugh!

Back to the Harvard study: Linda J. Bilmes, a public policy professor, wrote in the report that was released Thursday-


“As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives,”

The report says

"The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”


Bilmes said the United States has spent almost $2 trillion already for the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those costs, she said, are only a fraction of the ultimate price tag. The biggest ongoing expense will be providing medical care and disability benefits to veterans of the two conflicts.


Well, we already can see that the government can barely cope, what with waiting times for VA disability benefits up to 894 days. Again, this also speaks to the problem of not providing the revenue in the first place. Instead, what did the Bush administration do? It extended tax cuts along with mounting more “wars”! Insanity, as Einstein noted, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In this case, the Bushies didn’t learn a damned thing since the Reagan era- when tax cuts coupled with extravagant defense spending (think $400 hammers and $4,000 toilet seats for the Pentagon) also nearly drove the nation into a ditch!


And then we wonder WHY we have such a massive deficit, and have the chutzpah to even consider reducing it on the backs of seniors, the disabled and returned maimed vets? We are truly insane! Or perhaps, dishonorable and insane!

Bilmes goes on to say:


“Historically, the bill for these costs has come due many decades later. Payments to Vietnam and first Gulf War veterans are still climbing ”

This references that the peak disbursement of disability payments for American vets in the last century came decades after the conflicts ended. Spending borrowed money to pay for the wars has also made them more expensive, the study noted. The conflicts have added $2 trillion to America’s debt, representing roughly 20 percent of the debt incurred between 2001 and 2012. Add to that the deficits from the Bush tax cuts, and we’re already looking at more than a 45% fraction of our current debt created by purely insane policies.


All of which points to the fact that the nation is in prolonged decline. As documented in the book, ‘Arrogant Capital’ by Kevin Phillips, the first ominous signs of an empire in decline include: 1) military overstretch and the inability or lack of will to pay for it, and 2) the domination of the financial system by speculators and speculative capital, as well as the proliferation of financial instruments. (In the latter case, the financial industry subsumes the place of earlier manufacturing and the production of solid, practical products.)


We had our chance as a nation, but a series of wrong, reckless choices has clearly put us on the same downward path as Rome, Spain and Great Britain. Plausibly, when the history texts are finally accurately written, the turning point for the nation will be the insertion of the Bush II regime. They will then be blamed for turning the U.S. into a third world backwater....with skyscrapers.

Look at the artificial DOW rising....then think of the fact we have a crumbling infrastructure that needs $2.2 trillion merely to bring it to adequate serviceability.