BonzaiDuck
Lifer
- Jun 30, 2004
- 16,883
- 2,192
- 126
This is a great thread.
Usually, in the print media letters-to-the-editor and talking-head pundit drivel, you see gross generalizations based on little but "principles" and beliefs.
Here, we have folks analyzing both the source and output of funding. You really have to leave SS out of it, and consider what is done with the receipts of 1040 tax returns.
On the one hand, I've seen Tea Party types like Sarah Palin and [fat-girl] Amy What-ser-name arguing adamantly that we must increase the defense budget and cut everything else. Eisenhower would roll in his grave.
The same people -- including those two -- really chaffed at the notion of "stimulus" during the economic crisis of 2008 and later.
Defense spending IS stimulus!
But look at the history of it since Reagan.
Bush 41 increased the defense budget to something like $350 billion -- as much because of Desert Storm as well as an uncertainty over whether the Cold War was really coming to an end.
Clinton cut the budget by $100 billion, and I think in the year 2000, it was just over $250 billion.
Then we had Bush the Dumber meeting with the Carlisle Group of defense investors, greeting them as " . . my base: the Haves and Have-Mores." He had earlier remarked in public that America is a classless society. The pattern fits your plain-vanilla description of corporatism -- a form of fascism -- in which the politician's job is to provide a "face" to the public saying one thing, while corporations conspire with government to do "other things."
During Bush 43's administration, a budget already adequate for the Cold War was increased to exceed $850 billion, and you could also add in HomeLand Security and other initiatives that would put overall spending above $1 Trillion. If my numbers are inexact, the precise numbers were printed in Newsweek some six years ago.
By comparison -- at that time -- China's military spending barely scraped $60 billion, and the sum of all the foreign military spending in the world was still a drop in the bucket compared to our own.
Stimulus is great. CEO and investor returns -- not so great in their excess. The problem arises -- as Eisenhower predicted it would, that the self-interest of defense corporations and their decision-makers have circled their wagons around the National Security Apparatus. There is a dead certainty that those folks have wielded "unwarranted influence -- sought or unsought." They hobnob with generals and oil-men in the "Center for Strategic and International Studies." And you have to ask how it could come to pass that Halliburton -- Cheney the former CEO and Ray L. Hunt (Hunt Oil) a board member and Bush's largest contributor -- could snag a sole-source contract for literally the entire Iraq War.
That, my friends, is corruption on steroids. And the state in which Halliburton had been incorporated (before fleeing to Dubai to escape federal and state taxes) has given us three presidents, who either promoted or embraced four wars.
What galls me is the public. I had my finger on this as early as 2000, before Bush bombed Iraq over the "no-fly zone" in early 2001. I could tell you then -- and I have witnesses with correspondents in several US states -- what was going to happen over then remainder of Bush's term and the pile of crap left for Obama to either discover or clean up.
Senator Byrd saw it when he filibustered in late 2002 against Bush's war plans. All the other lemmings -- Democrats and REpublicans, old heiresses worried that terrorists would kill their lapdogs, and just about all the other mainstream voters - - YOU JUST WENT ALONG WITH IT!!
SUCKERS!
Usually, in the print media letters-to-the-editor and talking-head pundit drivel, you see gross generalizations based on little but "principles" and beliefs.
Here, we have folks analyzing both the source and output of funding. You really have to leave SS out of it, and consider what is done with the receipts of 1040 tax returns.
On the one hand, I've seen Tea Party types like Sarah Palin and [fat-girl] Amy What-ser-name arguing adamantly that we must increase the defense budget and cut everything else. Eisenhower would roll in his grave.
The same people -- including those two -- really chaffed at the notion of "stimulus" during the economic crisis of 2008 and later.
Defense spending IS stimulus!
But look at the history of it since Reagan.
Bush 41 increased the defense budget to something like $350 billion -- as much because of Desert Storm as well as an uncertainty over whether the Cold War was really coming to an end.
Clinton cut the budget by $100 billion, and I think in the year 2000, it was just over $250 billion.
Then we had Bush the Dumber meeting with the Carlisle Group of defense investors, greeting them as " . . my base: the Haves and Have-Mores." He had earlier remarked in public that America is a classless society. The pattern fits your plain-vanilla description of corporatism -- a form of fascism -- in which the politician's job is to provide a "face" to the public saying one thing, while corporations conspire with government to do "other things."
During Bush 43's administration, a budget already adequate for the Cold War was increased to exceed $850 billion, and you could also add in HomeLand Security and other initiatives that would put overall spending above $1 Trillion. If my numbers are inexact, the precise numbers were printed in Newsweek some six years ago.
By comparison -- at that time -- China's military spending barely scraped $60 billion, and the sum of all the foreign military spending in the world was still a drop in the bucket compared to our own.
Stimulus is great. CEO and investor returns -- not so great in their excess. The problem arises -- as Eisenhower predicted it would, that the self-interest of defense corporations and their decision-makers have circled their wagons around the National Security Apparatus. There is a dead certainty that those folks have wielded "unwarranted influence -- sought or unsought." They hobnob with generals and oil-men in the "Center for Strategic and International Studies." And you have to ask how it could come to pass that Halliburton -- Cheney the former CEO and Ray L. Hunt (Hunt Oil) a board member and Bush's largest contributor -- could snag a sole-source contract for literally the entire Iraq War.
That, my friends, is corruption on steroids. And the state in which Halliburton had been incorporated (before fleeing to Dubai to escape federal and state taxes) has given us three presidents, who either promoted or embraced four wars.
What galls me is the public. I had my finger on this as early as 2000, before Bush bombed Iraq over the "no-fly zone" in early 2001. I could tell you then -- and I have witnesses with correspondents in several US states -- what was going to happen over then remainder of Bush's term and the pile of crap left for Obama to either discover or clean up.
Senator Byrd saw it when he filibustered in late 2002 against Bush's war plans. All the other lemmings -- Democrats and REpublicans, old heiresses worried that terrorists would kill their lapdogs, and just about all the other mainstream voters - - YOU JUST WENT ALONG WITH IT!!
SUCKERS!
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