War as City-State: We Force-feed it, We Pay

This great post from Tomdispatch offers some mind-boggling numbers for materiel involved in the War in Iraq whose "drawdown" is described thusly:

the American drawdown will be the "equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York."

Now there's a thought. It's as if the whole war were a city-state in itself, complete with food, shelter, weapons, infrastructure - and of course, a nice big population.

Whether it’s 3.1 million items of equipment, or 3 million, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million, whether 341 “facilities” (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which will still be operating in 2011 with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them), or more than 350 forward operating facilities, or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.

The conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is unprecented, and yet Americans are mostly oblivious, unaware that we are creating little islands in about the least compatible environments imaginable. What does this mean to the Iraqis and Afghans, to see not only war, but an entire set of city-states forcibly planted in their own beautiful and unrelated culture, shocking them without their participation in it.

In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a “boardwalk” that typically included a “Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet.”

And of course, there's the staggering cost. The cost in lives, American, but far more Iraqis and Afghanis, is something we'll have to live down. And our children will have to live down. And our future generations, if we have any, will have to live down.

This is the second bubble, courtesy of Republican war strategy. "Down with Government, Up with War". As if war was waged by individuals, not a government. As if war led to freedom. As if war liberated people, instead of enslaving them to its consequences. The aftermath, the bloody, destructive aftermath of war is always littered with lies, claims of victory, claims of power, claims of valor.

But as the second bubble, the bubble of war, is already bursting, its inevitable failure becoming clearer even to a propaganda-numbed, not-very-free-minded (Texas schoolbooks, anyone?) American public, as this becomes then another collapse like the economic collapse, the collapse of the war machine will likewise have worldwide implications. That's because it's ultimately another economic collapse.

It's one thing to wage war. Bad enough. But to conduct war by imposing little city-states within sovereign nations is like forcing a rejected transplant without medication. It's unsustainable. Let's hope this drawdown is for real, and that we seriously draw down on ALL fronts, without leaving our unsustainable "islands" behind.

And by the way, thanks to a load of idiots on both the right and left, there's not much chance of that. Look for Collapse II. Doubt it'll be pretty.

While Americans Starve, Burn Furniture, the Pentagon Trashes the Treasury

This incredible article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone exposes what's really happened to the economy: the fallout of Republicanomics, of robbing the poor to feed the rich and their military-expansionist fantasies.

It started with a stark description of individuals' lives as described by Middle Class Vermonters to their Senator Bernie Sanders who asked his constituents how the economic "downturn" was affecting them. Expecting a few letters, he was swamped with over 700, telling of such harrowing experiences as burning furniture to stay warm and property taxes (thanks to RepubliBush Federal Tax Cuts to the Rich) are eating into their food money, not to mention education. Health care and dental care, of course, already are out of question. Welcome to Third World America.

Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating "cereal and toast" for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter -- forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life.

Don't ask me, though, ask a U.S. Senator.

"The middle class is disappearing," says Sanders. "In real ways we're becoming more like a third-world country."

Wow! the Republicans' drained our Treasury, from which they removed their largest contributor, the Superrich, by the most profligate adventurism imaginable in Iraq. Funding for the Pentagon has gutted the American people's public fund into which their lifeblood has been drained via IRS-enforced taxes.

We've all seen the stats -- median income has declined by almost $2,500 over the past seven years, we have a zero personal savings rate in America for the first time since the Great Depression, and 5 million people have slipped below the poverty level since the beginning of the decade.

We have a government that is spending two and a half billion dollars a day in Iraq, essentially subsidizing new swimming pools for the contracting class in northern Virginia, at a time when heating oil and personal transportation are about to join health insurance on the list of middle-class luxuries. Home heating and car ownership are slipping away from the middle class thanks to exploding energy prices -- the hidden cost of the national borrowing policy we call dependency on foreign oil, "foreign" representing those nations, Arab and Chinese, that lend us the money to pay for our wars.

Oh, so now we're a debtor nation. Some "Superpower". We're throwing away democracy and prosperity at home so we can "export democracy" to Iraq and Afghanistan. What a great way to take revenge against the terrorists who caused 9/11! Kill off the American Middle Class! Send their sons to war to get killed or, more likely, maimed for life, and ruin their livelihood and starve their parents! That'll serve those terrorists! And set up a military dictatorship that looks for all the world like a democracy, except that it really isn't!

Security.

And while we've all heard stories about how much waste and inefficiency there is in our military spending, this is always portrayed as either "corruption" or simple inefficiency, and not what it really is -- a profound expression of our national priorities, a means of taking money from ordinary, struggling people and redistributing it not downward but upward, to connected insiders, who turn your tax money into pure profit.

Ooops! I mean, the "Security Industry." Take a look:

You want an example? Sanders has a great one for you. The Senator claims that he has been trying for years to increase funding for the Federally Qualified Health Care (FQHC) program, which finances community health centers across the country that give primary health care access to about 16 million Americans a year. He's seeking an additional $798 million for the program this year, which would bring the total appropriation to $2.9 billion, or about what we spend every two days in Iraq.

"But for five billion a year," Sanders insists, "we could provide basic primary health care for every American. That?s how much it would cost, five billion."

As it is, though, Sanders has struggled to get any additional funding. He managed to get $250 million added to the program in last year's Labor, Health and Human Services bill, but Bush vetoed the legislation, "and we ended up getting a lot less."

Okay, now, hold that thought. While we're unable to find $5 billion for this simple program, and Sanders had to fight and claw to get even $250 million that was eventually slashed, here's something else that's going on. According to a recent report by the GAO, the Department of Defense has already "marked for disposal" hundreds of millions of dollars worth of spare parts -- and not old spare parts, but new ones that are still on order! In fact, the GAO report claims that over half of the spare parts currently on order for the Air Force -- some $235 million worth, or about the same amount Sanders unsuccessfully tried to get for the community health care program last year -- are already marked for disposal! Our government is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Defense Department crap just to throw it away!

Yes, that's where all those IRS payments are going, and aren't you feeling more and more secure??

We are in the midst of a political movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian analysis... well, shit, what can I say? That's what's happening. Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010 would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting "entitlement" programs for cuts while continually funneling an ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North Virginia McMansions -- this is all part of a conversation we should be having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we're not going to have that conversation, because we're going to spend this fall mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about whether or not Michelle Obama's voice is too annoying, about flag lapel pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.

So, let's see, our journalists are whores for the status quo, our people are going belly-up, our businesses and banks are clenching their fiscal teeth, and the war is going to keep going, according to Mr. In-Touch John McCain, for another 100 years.

Right. Democracy. Let's just solve it all and wave some flags, kids! And wave some guns, too - for security, kids, for security. So you can starve securely in a depleted uranium planet.

Most Americans Figured It Out: Why Can't the Politicians...?

...get out of Iraq, that is.

Why are we in a recession? It's the war, stupid.

It's perhaps one of the main reasons Obama is riveting more than solid "party" and "experienced" Hillary & McCain - those two supported this catastrophic, ill-begotten war that has basically gutted the U.S. economy, its moral fiber, its stance as "leader of the world". Obama did not. And he's not on the extremes like Ron Paul, another rare "no" vote for the war in Iraq.

So the polls have it.

The way to get the country out of recession - and most people think we're
in one - is to get the country out of Iraq, according to an Associated
Press-Ipsos poll.
Pulling out of the war ranked first among proposed remedies in the survey, followed by spending more on domestic programs, cutting taxes and, at the bottom end, giving rebates to poor people in hopes they'll spend the economy into recovery.

Too bad we can't govern by referendum. If only they'd listen to the polls when it comes to policy, instead of only when they run for office.

Forty-eight percent said a pullout would help fix the country's economic
problems "a great deal," and an additional 20 percent said it would help at
least somewhat.
... 65 percent of Democrats think it would help the economy a lot,
but only 18 percent of Republicans think so.

Talk about groupthink. Republicans believe what Daddy W sez, and he sez we pay you money, and everything will be all right. What they don't seem to grasp is that Daddy doesn't have any money, yet he's planning to spend 11 billion a month until sometime, maybe 3:30 pm, on the afternoon of Eternity. Or when America bleeds to death, one devalued dollar at a time. Let's get a Democrat in there, before it does.

It's the War Economy, Cupid!

While the candidates duke it out on SuperTuesday, the economy still looms as Issue #1. But we can't ignore the War on Terror as a major source of economic drain. Although it's not the only drain. Perhaps the candidates should bear in mind some advice from a Founding Father, one whose advice seems right on-the-money, yet basically trashed by the Republican/neocon dynasty.

In fact, it's the very sense of this trashing of values and at the same time being sunk in a dynastic chain of unbreakable power that gives Obama the edge, that gives the otherwise golden Hillary that let's-think-twice voter retreat. But all could use a dose of fatherly wisdom:

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of
fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps
the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every
other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and
armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad."

-- James Madison

Here's some opinion on the subject of budget-screwing-n-skewing from DownsizeDC:

It is because the policies of both parties, and all administrations, on both economics and civil liberties, have combined to create a perfect storm that will manifest itself in an economic way. Foremost among the forces in the approaching economic storm will be the unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare.

There will be fewer young people working to create wealth, and more non-working people consuming an increasingly vast portion of what wealth there is. More elderly people also inevitably means there will be more sick people, demanding more health care. As a result . . .The federal government will lack the revenue to keep its Social Security and Medicare promises. The shortfall in funding is estimated variously at between $53 trillion and $80 trillion. We will have much more to say about this in the month's ahead. Suffice it to say that the spending policies of the federal government must change. They must change dramatically, and they must change now.

But they are not changing. President Bush has just proposed America's first $3 trillion budget. This budget projects near record deficits exceeding $400 billion dollars for each of the next two years, adding nearly one trillion dollars to the national debt in just twenty four months. And more debt means that more of your income taxes will go to pay the interest on the debt, instead of current operating expenses. The nature of the President's spending proposals also highlights the intersection between our government's war on our pocketbooks and its on-going war on the Bill of Rights. Our government has . . .

• Spent trillions projecting U.S. power around the globe . . .


• Provoking blowback in the form of terrorism, which . . .


• Has served as an excuse for the war on the Bill of Rights

The President's current budget proposal promises more of the same. It freezes most spending except for national defense, which will rise by 7% for the Pentagon and 11% for Homeland Security. The grand total for the defense budget is a whopping $515 billion, and this does not include spending for Iraq! But . . .

It seems to us that our defense establishment is perfectly tailored to fight enemies we do not have, and to create the conditions of occupation and aggressive forward projection that serve as a recruitment pitch for the enemies we do have. We are paying through the nose to make ourselves less safe, to hasten bankruptcy, and to shred our Constitution. Meanwhile, our economy crumbles.

Worried about the Economy? $11 Billion a Month of Your Tax Dollars Goes for War

Republicans always talk about "fiscal responsibility." They blame Dems for "government spending". Never mind that historically, in the last century or so, Republicans are always gutting the economy and wasting money on profligate wars. Now they've saddled us with a war that is essentially a farce and a lie - written in blood and bleeding dollars - I mean, hemorrhaging dollars - by the hour. Here's a little news to chew on:

The Iraq war may not dominate U.S. news reports as the carnage drops, but a new report underscores the financial burden of persistent combat that is helping run up the government's credit card.

"Funding for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other activities in the war on terrorism expanded significantly in 2007," the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released on Wednesday.

War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008, the nonpartisan office wrote.

"It keeps going up, up and away," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad said of the money spent in Iraq since U.S. troops invaded in 2003.

"We're seeing the war costs continue to spiral upward. It is the additional troops plus additional costs per troop plus the over-reliance on private contractors, which also explodes the costs," said Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who opposed the war.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Congress has written checks for $691 billion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and such related activities as Iraq reconstruction, the CBO said.

There are around 158,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 27,000 in Afghanistan.

$11 Billion a Month

Of the total, the CBO estimated that $440 billion had been spent on fighting in Iraq launched with the goal of ousting President Saddam Hussein from power and securing weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

All of the Iraq and Afghanistan war money - about $11 billion a month - is effectively being put on a government credit card at a time when U.S. government debt has skyrocketed to more than $9 trillion, up from around $5.6 trillion when Bush took office in January 2001.

They say they'll "cut taxes". Does this mean "borrow the money from China instead"?And does anyone give a damn what those taxes are being spent on? On "security" and "anti-terror" done by creating killing fields overseas that will blowback some time soon ... maybe December 21, 2012 or so...

Don't Be Surprised if you Wake Up Poor

Bridgethought of the Day: You can't solve problems by constantly improving your sales pitch. At some point, people are going to have to actually see, and use the product.

This logic seems to have escaped the Bush administration. If you think the Republicans are "fiscal conservatives", think again.

John F. Ince's article on the national debt shows dramatically how the U.S. has become a debtor nation.

With Bush and cronies having added over $3 trillion dollars to the national
debt, the country's credit card tab now stands at $8.8 trillion. This represents
an astounding increase of over 45 percent since Bush came into office in January
of 2001. And all this fiscal profligacy took place during the years when the CBO
originally forecasted record surpluses of approximately $2.5 trillion. And there
is no end in sight to the deficits.
More alarmingly we now rely on foreigners
to finance over 40 percent of this debt with the lion's share coming from the
Asian central banks. In FY 2006 the current account trade deficit is on track to
set yet another record, on the order of $700 billion. To put this in
perspective, billionaire investor Warren Buffet points out that, "15 years ago,
the U.S. had no trade deficit with China. Now, it's 200 billion dollars." He
says if the country does not change course, the rest of the world could end up
owning 15 trillion-dollars worth of the United States. That's equal to the value
of all American stock.

Note that as a "superpower", we are in debt to some of the world's poorest countries where people have a significantly lower standard of living. Note that at any moment some of these countries may be so turned off by our wild and profligate military adventurism that they actually decide to think twice about financing it. Oops! Now where are we going to get the money? From executives at Northrop? No! From John Q. Citizen, that's who! From people who don't control multinational corporations, who don't have influence in PACs, who are not part of the Good ol' Boy System. People who can't say "no" - or "yes", for that matter. People who can vote, but can't put their fingers on the strings that pull the economy together, or apart. People like ... "we the people" kind of people...

In other words, we're going to wake up poor one day. At least, some of us are. And God only knows who. Unless we can do something to convince the string-pullers to act responsibly. Stop spending on Armageddon projects and multi-billion-dollar wars that only further destabilize the world, and start spending more time teaching people the lost art of Diplomacy and communication. Think agriculture, not hunter-gatherer. Stop building bigger sticks, and start planting better crops. Start with a new crop of investment strategies for starters.

Picture a future with children, not corpses.

Graveyards don't make a living. If that's your Gross National Product, you're in trouble. Try investing at home, instead of in foreign wars. Make life more boring for Al-Qaeda - plant wheat.

The Great American Cash Cow Contest

"Bring back John Wayne."

The Neocons

"Bite Me."
The West Coast Independents

Not just a cow... but a bitch
The midwestern/southern right

And the winner of the Talent Contest Is...

The Centrist Right

From the left: "And I can fiddle, too."

And the winner is... the Iraq War Bull

Sorry, cows, there's no place in war for feminine values like nurturing, mothering, caring, beauty, wisdom, diplomacy, etc. But think of it - we have our Bull economy, pictured above.

Milk on, Big Oil, milk on!