Two billion dollars per week for 11 years, but our leaders won’t level with us about Afghanistan

The War in Afghanistan. We've spent enormous blood and treasure on this adventure, yet it almost never shows up in most daily papers. The candidates for president almost never discuss it. In eleven years, no one has articulated why it is that we have invested so heavily in being there for eleven years. The official platitudes are based on horrific lies. No politician wants to discuss that our "ally" Pakistan is encouraging the Afghanistan insurgency. What should we say to the families of the soldiers who died there? Your loved ones died for what? "Freedom!" scream the politicians. No politician has discussed all of the things we could have done with that money had we truly invested in something permanent and valuable rather than something wasteful, tribal and destructive. No candidate has stated the obvious: We have been propping up a corrupt regime in Afghanistan. And the media cooperates with all of the above ignorance, making Afghanistan a bloodless, vague, distant thing that we don't know anything about, and we, as a nation, don't care that we know nothing about it. No one in power wants to admit that fighting wars is good insurance for re-election, or that it simply makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful and patriotic to fight a war, even an insane war.

Continue ReadingTwo billion dollars per week for 11 years, but our leaders won’t level with us about Afghanistan

New cute bank trick

About two years ago, I took most of my money out of banks, putting it into a local credit union. I'm extremely happy with my credit union, which explains its procedures simply and doesn't hit you with dozens of tricks and traps. Well, maybe I should move my last account from Commerce Bank, a regional bank in the Midwest. Here's the latest trick/trap offered by Commerce. It offers online banking, but Commerce has decided that it will only let you SEE the past 6 months of your transactions online, unless you pay Commerce an extra fee of $6 or $10. Here's the notice that popped up on the Commerce website. You might be thinking what I'm thinking: They already HAVE all of the customer account data . It's not like it costs them anything more to display it ALL. But they would rather that you pay them something for nothing. After viewing the above page on my browser I took the above screen shot. I then tried to move forward by indicating that I would pay $0 for six months of displayed data. That's when I got the error prompt indicating that I still needed to make a "choice." Apparently, "Free" is not a valid choice. I had to log out and back in to circumvent this deceptive screen.

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How the Presidential Debates became almost useless.

At The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald refers to the work of historian George Farah:

He described how the two political parties in the 1990s joined forces to wrest control over the presidential debates away from the independent League of Women Voters, which had long resisted the parties' efforts to shield their presidential candidates from genuine surprise or challenge. Now run by the party-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates, these rituals are designed to do little more than " eliminate spontaneity" and "exclude all viable third-party voices". Citing a just-leaked 21-page "memorandum of understanding" secretly negotiated by the two campaigns to govern the rules of the debates, Farah recounted: "We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women's organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates had nominated. And instead of making public these contracts and resisting the major-party candidates' manipulations, the commission allows the candidates to negotiate these 21-page contracts that dictate all the fundamental terms of the debates."
What is the result of this behind the scenes usurpation? Greenwald explains:
Here then, within this one process of structuring the presidential debates, we have every active ingredient that typically defines, and degrades, US democracy. The two parties collude in secret. The have the same interests and goals. Everything is done to ensure that the political process is completely scripted and devoid of any spontaneity or reality. All views that reside outside the narrow confines of the two parties are rigidly excluded. Anyone who might challenge or subvert the two-party duopoly is rendered invisible.

Continue ReadingHow the Presidential Debates became almost useless.

Green Party Candidate for President Arrested for Trying to Enter Debate Venue

From Democracy Now: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and vice-presidential candidate Cheri Honkala were arrested Tuesday as they attempted to enter the grounds of the presidential debate site at Hofstra University. Like other third-party candidates, Stein was blocked from participating in the debate by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Republican and Democratic parties. Stein and Honkala were held for eight hours, handcuffed to chairs. As she was being arrested, Stein condemned what she called "this mock debate, this mockery of democracy." I am outraged that "the debates" only invite candidates from the two financially entrenched parties. Given that this election for President is supposedly important, shouldn't we also be hearing from other candidates from other parties? Although the over-restrictive rules of the current debate system bar them from the debate, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has given them the opportunity to weigh in on the questions asked of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Continue ReadingGreen Party Candidate for President Arrested for Trying to Enter Debate Venue

Not extricated from Iraq yet

You'll hear many politicians speak as though the U.S. has concluded it's war in Iraq. Not true:

The post-U.S.-withdrawal history of Iraq has had more than its share of debacles as well, most notably the collapse of the U.S. signature police-training program, a multibillion-dollar program the Iraqis said they didn't want... Meanwhile, despite the roughly $6 billion a year operating cost of the massive and heavily fortified embassy, diplomatic relations with Iraq have suffered as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki consolidates power -- by among other things, exiling the country's vice president to Turkey and sentencing him to death. The State Department is consolidating its operations and reducing the number of people it employs in Iraq -- from 16,000 at the beginning of the year, to about 14,000 now, to less than 11,500 by the end of 2013, a State Department official told HuffPost. But because so many foreign service officers and contractors are falling back to the embassy itself, construction on the $750 million compound actually continues, in order to make room for them and maintain the embassy's self-contained infrastructure.
[Emphasis added]. The next time you are wondering why we can't afford to hire enough teachers for our public schools, consider that $6 Billion per year equates to more than $16 Million dollars per day, which (at $50,000 per teacher) is enough to hire 120,000 teachers.

Continue ReadingNot extricated from Iraq yet