There are many reasons for the current parlous state of the USofA. But none are so wasteful and unnecessary as adolescent military adventurism. Ron Paul has consistently opposed this, and for years. Does that not count for something?
Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.
To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied it and a battery of new homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11.
How have we paid for this? Entirely through borrowing. Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. And not only did we fail to pay as we went for the wars, the George W. Bush administration also successfully pushed to cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, which added further to the debt. This toxic combination of lower revenues and higher spending has brought the country to its current political stalemate.
Are these Homeland Security folks nuts? If you harass shoppers, they’ll stop shopping. We don’t want that, do we? Of are they trying to scare us to keep indoors and shop online, where they can watch us 24/7?
Mall of America officials say their security unit stops and questions on average up to 1,200 people each year. With 4.2 million square feet under one roof, the two-decade-old mall is a monument to suburban shopping and entertainment. Nearly 100,000 people from around the world pass through on a given day.
The interviews at the mall are part of a counterterrorism initiative that acts as the private eyes and ears of law enforcement authorities but has often ensnared innocent people, according to an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting and NPR.
“The Founder’s were right: non-intervention, friends and trade with people, more prosperity, and peace.”
Here’s a clip of an interview with Ron Paul on America Live with Megyn Kelly:
He’s trying to change history, and so are we. He gave this interview after he placed well in the Iowa straw poll, but got little notice in the MSM. Starting at about 1:10 into the video, Kelly asks Paul whether or not the media is ignoring him:
Paul: Sure. Yeah they are, and we need to ask them why? What are they afraid of? Well, we’re certainly in the top tier. We did well in Iowa and we have a good organization. We can raise money.
But they don’t want to discuss my views because I think they’re frightened by us challenging the status quo and the establishment. When it comes to foreign policy, monetary policy, the entitlement system, because my views are quite different from the other candidates. They’d just as soon us not get the coverage that the others are getting and they will concentrate on establishment type politicians.
Kelly: There seems to be a narrative emerging that you can’t win and therefore they’re giving you back of the hand treatment. There was an editorial in The Wall Street Journal that said “He has no chance to win.” This despite the fact that you are 152 votes within the top spot in the Iowa straw pole. In fact out of almost 17,000 votes cast you were a 150 votes or so from number one. But The Wall Street Journal and others that you can’t win. Why? Why do they believe that?
Paul: Well they want to believe it and they want to promote an idea. They don’t want to promote information because they’re having a couple poles where I either came in first or second when you match my name up against Obama. Because my votes really compete.
“I’m trying to change the course of history.”
This would be a reason why the Democrats don’t want me to win either. Because I can compete against Obama. His base is very unhappy with his expansion of the war, and his lack of interest in protecting civil liberties. And therefore they don’t want to hear from me either. But I’ve done quite well. I’m quite willing to match my name up against Obama any time of the day.
Kelly: It’s got to be somewhat frustrating for you. I mean to come in second and be as close as you were to winning in Iowa, not to mention the polling that you’ve been doing, which is fairly good. To have this kind of treatment in the media, does this disturb you?
Paul: Well it disturbs me. I don’t use the word ‘frustrating’ because I anticipate and I know how the system works, and I know what I’m trying to do, because not like I’m just trying to win and get elected.
I’m trying to change the course of history and our history in this country hasn’t been good for the last 100 years, whether it’s our drift into managing an empire, the destruction of our currency, the deficits that have been run up, the climax of the dollar reserve standard. This is big stuff and nobody else is addressing this.
So in spite of the shortcomings of the reporting of this I write if off a bit, because they don’t have any idea about the significance of the idea of the monetary system and what’s going on with the Federal Reserve.
“The peace candidate is always a very strong candidate.”
But the people, grass roots America, are startin’ to wake up. Millions of people are reading about the Federal Reserve and understanding how they bail out their friends. Trillions of dollars. Give a third of all that money they used in the bail-out, give it to foreign banks. People realize this even though the media, generally speaking, they don’t understand it, they don’t ask the right questions. And if they do understand it they don’t want to get the secret out of how the system that we have protects the special interests, the big corporations, the corporatism that runs our society. Continue reading →
Control is a crock. The world IS NOT ours to control. Continuing down this path is madness. The effort to control the world is bankrupting us. The harder we try, the more money we throw down the rat-hole of the defense budget. In the end we’ll lose control of our finances and our resources. Stop the madness now.
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has encountered the practical limits of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance. In its story about AirSea Battle and the China Integration Team, Inside the Pentagon revealed an oblique, if profound insight from Andrew Krepinevich, the highly regarded head of Washington’s Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. China, he said, is clearly jousting for control of the Western Pacific and “we have to decide whether we’re going to compete or not. If we’re not, then we have to be willing to accept the shift in the military balance.” Otherwise, “the question is how to compete effectively.”
ComeHomeAmerica.us has a petition going. Please go over there and sign it. As Brother James used to sing, Please, Please, Please.
From the letter/petition:
It is time to end all of these wars. It is time to initiate a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy away from domination of others through military strength and damaging sanctions. As a first step we urge a major withdrawal of soldiers from Afghanistan–as candidate Obama promised in 2008. This withdrawal should be at least as large as the 63,000 troop escalation the President put in place early in his presidency. This withdrawal should be defined as a clear first step to a complete withdrawal of all soldiers and private contractors from Afghanistan by the end of 2011. It is time to return to our Founders’ declared conception of the United States as a democratic Republic and not an Empire.
"In his January 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama also called for
building a new generous of safe, clean nuclear power plants as a vital component
of his national clean energy program."
from Sen. Joe Lieberman's letter to me of April 29th, 2011
wonder how 'generous' came to replace 'generation'
at the center of this lie-packed satanic sentence
what "Union" could we possibly be talking about
what "safe" when any one person
can mortar a nukeplant into powdered poison
can put a garden hose siphon into the fuel pool
can fall asleep at the switch or twist x instead of y
can have sex with a bored co-worker
while the core melts down
or the aging pipes leak more and more
count the human errors that could occur
much more probable than earthquakes
what "clean"
list the half-lives that cut our lives in half
the daily eco-devastation of overheated waters
again the dirty list is long
what "vital" when death dealing radiation
lasts for thousands upon thousands of years
"energy" in this form is pure ENTROPY
destroying the speciation before our eyes
only the complete failure of the US schools
can account for this letter
this death sentence
Chicken-hawkery thrives in a post-universal-draft world where elites and their progeny don’t have to face the prospect of front-line duty.
For years, chickenhawkery’s roots in this culture of unshared sacrifice have been a matter of theory — albeit a logical, well-grounded theory. But now, thanks to a comprehensive new study, we have concrete data underscoring the hypothesis. It suggests that many Americans’ aggressively pro-war ideology may fundamentally rely on their being physically shielded/disconnected from the human cost of war.
To document this connection, Columbia’s Robert Erikson and University of California at Berkeley’s Laura Stoker went back to the Vietnam War — the last time Americans faced wartime conscription. The researchers analyzed data from the Jennings-Niemi Political Socialization Study of college-bound high schoolers and subsequent interviews of those same high-schoolers from 1965 onward. In the process, they discovered that men holding low draft lottery numbers (and therefore more at risk of being drafted into combat) “became more anti-war, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft.” Importantly, for these men “lottery number was a stronger influence on their political outlook than their late-childhood party identification.” …
No doubt, the antiwar voices who have recently argued for the reinstatement of a draft will find fuel in this Berkeley/Columbia report. They argue that viscerally connecting the entire nation to the blood-and-guts consequences of war will make the nation less reflexively supportive of war — and the new data substantively supports that assertion. That’s why in the midst of (at least) three U.S. military occupations, this report is almost sure to be ignored by our chickenhawk-dominated political class — because it too explicitly exposes the selfish, self-centered and abhorrent roots of the chickenhawk ethos that now plays such an integral role in perpetuating a state of Endless War.
Mayors from across the country voted Monday to approve a resolution that calls on the federal government to hasten the end of the wars and to “bring these war dollars home to meet vital human needs, promote job creation, rebuild our infrastructure, aid municipal and state governments, and develop a new economy based upon renewable, sustainable energy and reduce the federal debt.”
In December 2006, Mr. Gates was brought on by President George W. Bush to fix Iraq, and he was kept on by President Obama to solve Afghanistan. Even as a trained historian, he said, he has learned most clearly over the last four and a half years that wars “have taken longer and been more costly in lives and treasure” than anticipated. . . .
“The only thing I guess I would say to that is: I hope I’ve prevented us from doing some dumb things over the past four and a half years — or maybe dumb is not the right word, but things that were not actually in our interest,” Mr. Gates said.
Truth and Traditions 