No surprise that the bloated military budget was spared.

Tom Englehart discusses the military's profligate use of $400/gallon (and even $800/gallon) gasoline in the Middle East. It's a symptom of a much bigger problem:

So here’s a question at a moment when financial mania has Washington by the throat: How would you define the state of mind of our war-makers, who are carrying on as if trillion-dollar wars were an American birthright, as if the only sensible role for the United States was to eternally police the planet, and as if garrisoning U.S. troops, corporate mercenaries, and special operations forces in scores and scores of countries was the essence of life as it should be lived on this planet?
How many military bases does the United States have, by the way? Gloria Shur Bilchik of Occasional Planet does her best to provide an answer to this straight-forward question:
You can’t get a consistent answer from news stories, that’s for sure. Recent articles, media reports and op-eds peg the number variously at 460, 507, 560, 662 and more than 1,000 . . . According to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report, as of 2009, the US military maintained 662 foreign sites in 38 countries around the world. . . . the official US military tally underreports our presence by nearly 500 bases.
Why not cut the military budget at this time of purported austerity? It's about what you'd expect from a bunch of psychopathic leaders, people not like you and me, people who cease serving as representatives of the People soon after hitting Washington D.C. and getting high on a non-ending hit of campaign cash.

Continue ReadingNo surprise that the bloated military budget was spared.

A Manufactured “Crisis”

The whole debt ceiling “crisis" is the latest battle in The Republican War on Christmas and, as usual, completely manufactured by Republicans for narrow political ends. Since March 1962, the debt ceiling has been raised 74 times, according to the Congressional Research Service. Ten of those times have occurred since 2001. The debt ceiling has been raised all these times without any of the Republican shenanigans now going on. If a default occurs, it will be solely the fault of Republican hyper-partisanship and completely unnecessary. If a default occurs, our nation's economy will go into the tank as immediately billions of dollars will be extracted from the nation's economy crushing any economic recovery and devaluing stocks by at least one third and causing a loss of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of at least 5%. The US economic crash could spiral into a worldwide crash and precipitate another Great Recession or a New Depression. [More . . . ]

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Insider Trading Writ Large

Imagine, if you will, a country in which banking regulations were stripped down so far that worthless paper again becomes a hot commodity. Now consider that this had (as it inevitably must) blown up and caused a crash in the lending market and equities market and thus the economy in general. Further note that a necessary result would be a rapid rise in the price of precious metals, notably gold. After a couple of years, that gold bubble would be ripe. People who had assets remaining when the junk bonds or sub-prime mortgages or whatever collapsed could have conservatively moved their money into gold, further depressing the equities market and inflating the price of gold. But, wait. Because of government investing, the market was recovering too fast! So fast that the wealthy were unable to swap their inflated gold for depressed stocks at the optimum time. What to do? Congress to the rescue! The wholly owned carriers of the banners of freedom and independence could be employed to create a palpably unnecessary crisis with a distinct deadline. Yes! This would quickly depress the markets and allow those holding too much bubble-gold to buy depressed stocks. Meanwhile, those elected to carry the load of screwing the middle class could also jump on the wagon and buy up stocks just before the deadline hits. Then the price of stocks returns to normal levels, and the gold bubble can be allowed to pop. I, for one, would like to see the trading histories of all those involved in the current crisis, and their friends and kin.

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Greece as dress rehearsal for the U.S.?

Michael Hudson, author of a book titled Super Imperialism,  looks to the privatization of Greece as what we should expect in the United States.   In the meantime, the media keep examining the issue from the perspective of speculators rather than ordinary citizens, who are about to be crushed with debt that they did not cause.

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Sacred things are tearing us apart

We human animals are an irrepressibly symbolic species. So much so that any thing can represent almost anything else. A cloth flag, a firecracker or a slogan can represent a social order. A piece of bread or an animal can represent a god. The bottom of a shoe can represent a harsh put-down. We endow some of our things with a special significance, such that we deem them “sacred.” I struggle to define what is sacred, but Jonathan Haidt gives us a big clue: sacred things seem to be the opposite of things that disgust us. But there usually seems to be something more to those thing that are the most sacred; there usually seems to be a public declaration or at least an implicit group acquiescence that the thing is sacred. By recognizing things to be sacred, we seem to endow them with other-worldly significance; with heavenly significant. Once a thing is declared “sacred,” it would be disgusting and, indeed, immoral to consider compromising with regard to that thing. [More . . . ]

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