Saturday, May 24, 2008

MEMORIAL DAY Next Monday is Memorial Day, the holiday that commemorates U.S. men and women who have died in military service. A suitable moment to take stock. AlterNet: "Angry vets testify to horrors of killing innocent people, and the way they came to dehumanize those they were supposedly sent to 'liberate'." ICH: "The US Senate has voted $165 billion to fund Bush's wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq through next spring. As the US is broke and deep in debt, every one of the $165 billion dollars will have to be borrowed. American consumers are also broke and deep in debt. Their zero saving rate means every one of the $165 billion dollars will have to be borrowed from foreigners. The 'world's only superpower' is so broke it can't even finance its own wars. Each additional dollar that the irresponsible Bush Regime has to solicit from foreigners puts more downward pressure on the dollar's value. During the eight wasted and extravagant years of the Bush Regime, the once mighty US dollar has lost about 60% of its value against the euro. The dollar has lost even more of its value against gold and oil. Before Bush began his wars of aggression, oil was $25 a barrel. Today it is $130 a barrel. Some of this rise may result from run-away speculation in the futures market. However, the main cause is the eroding value of the dollar. Oil is real, and unlike paper dollars is limited in supply. With US massive trade and budget deficits, the outpouring of dollar obligations mounts, thus driving down the value of the dollar. Each time the dollar price of oil rises, the US trade deficit rises, requiring more foreign financing of US energy use. Bush has managed to drive the US oil import bill up from $106 billion in 2006 to approximately $500 billion 18 months later - every dollar of which has to be financed by foreigners. Without foreign money, the US 'superpower' cannot finance its imports or its government's operation." HuffingtonPost: "Today, three-quarters of the Senate voted to support a new GI Bill for the troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Following the 256-166 victory in the House last week, the GI Bill has achieved almost unparalleled momentum. A number of Senators actually changed their NO votes to AYE, as it became clear that this vote was going to be a landslide: 75-22. These 75 Senators stood with Senators Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel in favor of a new bipartisan GI Bill that actually covers the cost of college." AlterNet: "John Cusack's new film, War, Inc., is set in a fictionalized Iraq. It's a funny film. It might have been tough to watch if it weren't, given the level of destruction that five years of occupation have wrought on the real country. The film's humor rests on very real and demonstrably disastrous trends in neoconservative foreign policy of recent years - a lethal war of choice and profit, the dismantling of states and plundering of their resources, a profound cultural insensitivity, lack of accountability and reckless disregard for easily-predicted consequences - which are then pushed to the absurd." Guardian: "Sidney Blumenthal, journalist, former Clinton White House aide and senior advisor to Hillary Clinton, today spoke at Third Way to promote his new book 'The Strange Death of Republican America'. He said that the US faces a 'cataclysmic' final few months of the Bush term, and that Bush is determined to leave a lasting mark on the world regardless of who is elected the next president. 'Bush feels unconstrained right now, and a sense of urgency,' Blumenthal said, later referring to a Jerusalem Post story that warns Bush plans to attack Iran before his term ends in January." CampaignForAmerica'sFuture: "War is profitable business - if you're an oil man. But somehow, the public pays the price, at the pump and at the funerals, and the oil companies reap the benefits. It's been a good war for Exxon and friends. Since George Bush began to beat the war-drum for an invasion of Iraq, the value of Exxon's reserves has risen - are you ready for this? - by $2 trillion. Obama's war profiteering tax, or 'oil windfall profits' tax, would equal just 20% of the industry's charges in excess of $80 a barrel. It's embarrassingly small actually, smaller than every windfall tax charged by every other nation. (Ecuador, for example, captures up to 99% of the higher earnings). Nevertheless, oilman George W. Bush opposes it as does Bush's man McCain. At today's prices Obama's windfall tax, teeny as it is, would bring in nearly a billion dollars a day for the US Treasury. Clinton's plan is similar. Yet the press' entire discussion of gas prices is shifted to whether the government should knock some sales tax pennies off the oil companies' pillaging at the pump. More important than even the Democrats' declaring that oil company profits are undeserved, is their implicit understanding that the profits are the spoils of war. And that's another reason to tax the oil industry's ill-gotten gain. Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don't end when the invader can no longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable." Why have we allowed the right to hijack America? 11:00:12 AM

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