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Friday, April 9, 2010

The U.S. Mythology Trance - Free Wars

I went over the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) website to look at some of the numbers, after a CBO official said that our debt is "unsustainable".

I forgot that the Congress & President do not seem to like to keep in their thinking any notion that wars cost money.

I forgot also that republicans complain about the cost of domestic programs, but never mention that wars are the most costly of all expenditures, beating out even peacetime domestic spending on the weapons of mass destruction.

But since I knew that wars devastate economies, I searched for the words "war" or "wars" wanting to know the cost of the wars, not even beginning to think that they are cost free.

The word "war" only appeared on that page in one sentence about the budgets since the end of World War II.

The utter delusion of thinking that the most costly items of government, the military budget, and the military budget on steroids, the wars, is beyond the pale.

Remember that economyspeak, a subsection of doublespeak, forgets that huge bureaucracies such as Homeland Security are war related ... you know ... "thuh war on turrur".

There is little wonder that since the republicans began to spend the nation's wealth on war almost ten years ago, causing great economic disasters and death everywhere, the congress has dropped to its lowest popularity numbers.

The graph shows military spending activity on a steep climb since MOMCOM got Bush II into office, and a decline in domestic activity during the same time frame.

There is little wonder why the people do not like the congress, and like congressional republicans even less, since they are the ones who began to give unlimited funds to the military and their banks.

They are the ones who at the same time will not even give unemployment benefit extensions to those whose homes and jobs the congress & president have destroyed by supporting the stupid wars.

What a wonderful job you have done Washington, making banks, big oil, and Karzai fat and very sassy, while destroying lives of your own people, those you said under oath you would properly represent.

Anyway, I kept searching, and finally found the "wars" mentioned on the page I was sent to from the "mandatory spending" link, where it said:
In 2002, defense outlays rose by 14 percent ... outlays continued to climb as military operations began in Iraq, with increases of 16 percent and 12.1 percent recorded in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Growth in defense spending ... 2005 to 2009, averaging increases of 8 percent. CBO projects that, under current law, outlays will rise from $656 billion in 2009 to $690 billion in 2010, an increase of 5.2 percent.
(CBO Spending Outlook). Pollsters of MOMCOM likewise have mental warts when they discuss these issues.

One MOMCOM poll, asking about your congressional vote this year, had separate categories for "economy", "unemployment", and "Afghanistan war" (like they are not all economy related).

Even one of the CBO lists had "economy" and "budget" listed as separate items at one location.

If you read Dredd Blog posts brought up by the keyword "economy" you will see that on Dredd Blog "war" is considered a part of the notion of economy, as is unemployment, deficit, and budget.

The MOMCOM war against coherent cognition, being fought word by word by MOMCOM's propaganda masters, has not gone unnoticed by Dredd Blog readers and commenters:
One tell tale sign of dementia is an inability to articulate or speak clearly.
...
This national speech impairment has not gone unnoticed by the scientific community. One professor calls this doublespeak, and has written a book "Why No One Knows What Anyone Is Saying Anymore". He points out:
With doublespeak, banks don't have "bad loans" or "bad debts"; they have "nonperforming assets" or "nonperforming credits" which are "rolled over" or "rescheduled." Corporations never lose money; they just experience "negative cash flow," "deficit enhancement," "net profit revenue deficiencies," or "negative contributions to profits."
(William Lutz, Rutgers University). What is forgotten is that this propaganda is not harmless but is toxic, and those who use it are doomed to eventually become deceived by it.
(Etiology of Social Dementia). The problem with dementia in terms of national dementia, is that the demented one cannot heal themselves.

We must look to the guidance of wise nations as well as our own history when we were quite sane, before we became demented during MOMCOM's spree of the rape of our sanity during the Bush II infestation years.

The reason it continues even to this day is that we cannot trust the sick to heal themselves.

Washington Blog quotes Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who sees the damage war does to the economy:
War is widely thought to be linked to economic good times. The second world war is often said to have brought the world out of depression, and war has since enhanced its reputation as a spur to economic growth. Some even suggest that capitalism needs wars, that without them, recession would always lurk on the horizon.

Today, we know that this is nonsense. The 1990s boom showed that peace is economically far better than war. The Gulf war of 1991 demonstrated that wars can actually be bad for an economy.
(Washington Post Idiocy: Calls For War With Iran). The greastest entitlements go to the military who have gorged themselves to become slovenly fat over the past decade, along with their many mercenary corporate leeches.

5 comments:

  1. I think their rationale is that wars are national security "events" that trump more budgetary concerns. Of course that was before we became an aggressor nation ourselves and started initiating wars just to give the military something to do and defense contractors something else to profit from.

    You had to admire in a backhand sort of way the Bush bunch's off the books means of accounting for war funds by making them supplemental appropriations, thus politicizing the very budget process required to fund them. No thinking Dem wanted to get painted in the corner of refusing budget appropriations for events that were unfolding with or without the money to pay for them. Very nicely played.

    That said, it doesn't seem to have improved much under Obama, has it? There's a lot of lip service being paid to accountability, and of course at least some of the actual costs are being budgeted for in a responsible manner, but having worked in DoD, I can tell you there's still a lot of graft and corruption going on, not the least of which is outright bribery to terrorist organizations (although the definition of the word "terrorist" is now so broad as to be virtually meaningless) to play ball with us, where traditional military firepower has simply failed.

    It's obvious now to me at least, that MOMCOM now acts with almost complete autonomy over her own affairs; and as you rightly point out, where MOMCOM goes, the rest of the nation surely follows. A very messy end to all this now seems unavoidable. One can only hope its primarily economic, but, once again, where economic calamities go, shooting wars usually soon follow.

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  2. disaffected,

    Yes, addicts can do cute things sometimes to support their habit, but they can't balance the check book or change reality the way non-addicts can.

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  3. Interesting reading related to this post
    "What Orwell Didn't Know" The new face of American propaganda.

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  4. Anonymous,

    Here is a link to "What Orwell Didn't Know" for those who are interested.

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  5. There are top-notch economists who know that wars damage economies.

    See Washington's Blog ...

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