Sunday, October 12, 2008

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~ Owen

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Most US Cities, States Virtually Bankrupt

America's latest export: empty municipal coffers

Sunday, October 12, 2008: James Doran of the Guardian (London, UK) reports from New York on how all 50 state treasuries are failing to raise the billions needed just to keep functioning and pay the wages.

But Not to Worry, the “Mad-Hatter’s Ball” Mindlessly Continues for Washington’s Warmongering Military/Political Complex!

$1,000,000,000,000.00

Congress and the Pentagon Collude to Exploit Public’s Distraction with Historic Market Meltdown and Massive Wall Street Bailouts…

“ In a remarkably secret process that concentrated decision-making power in the hands of a few lawmakers" Washington Politicals Pass Historic Trillion Dollars Annual Pentagon “Defense” Budget

September 26, 2008

Original Storylink

September 26: Joshua Hollad reports for AlterNet, “On Wednesday, the House passed a mammoth defense bill by a 392-39 vote. It's expected to clear the Senate with little difficulty next week.

It was part of a trillion-dollar stop-gap measure to keep programs running through next March, allowing lawmakers to skip town without passing a final budget. The Associated Press reports, ‘The legislation came together in a remarkably secret process that concentrated decision-making power in the hands of a few lawmakers.’

In keeping with the tradition of recent years, Bush held a gun to his own head and threatened to pull the trigger if his demands weren't met. According to the AP, ‘To earn President Bush's signature rather than a veto, House and Senate negotiators dropped several provisions he opposed. They include a ban on private interrogators in U.S. military detention facilities and what would have amounted to congressional veto power over a security pact with Iraq.’"

But Wait, $1,000,000,000,000.00 Annually is Still Not Enough for the Washington Military/Political Complex!

Pentagon Attempts Blatant Political Blackmail of Incoming President –“Secret” “Defense” Spending Estimate Demands $450 Billions Additional Increase Over Next Five Years

October 8, 2008

Original Storylink

Josh Rogin, Congressional Quarterly: "Pentagon officials have prepared a new estimate for defense spending that is $450 billion more over the next five years than previously announced figures. The new estimate, which the Pentagon plans to release shortly before President Bush leaves office, would serve as a marker for the new president and is meant to place pressure on him to either drastically increase the size of the defense budget or defend any reluctance to do so, according to several former senior budget officials who are close to the discussions."

Additional Perspective

CENTCOM's Master Plan and U.S. Global Hegemony

by Robert Higgs

Storylink

“Many people deny that the U.S. government presides over a global empire. If you speak of U.S. imperialism, they will fancy that you must be a decrepit Marxist-Leninist who has recently awakened after spending decades in a coma. Yet the facts cannot be denied, however much people's ideology may predispose them to distort or obfuscate those facts.

How can a government that maintains more than 800 military facilities in more than 140 different foreign countries be anything other than an imperial power? The hundreds of thousands of troops who operate those bases and conduct operations from them, not to mention the approximately 125,000 sailors and Marines aboard the U.S. warships that cruise the oceans, are not going door to door selling Girl Scout cookies. United States of America is the name; intimidation is the game.”

Additional Perspective

(Video, Dr. Robert Higgs, Future of Freedom Foundation 2008)

“Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful

and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

~George Orwell~

“STRENGTHENING” and “STABILIZING”

They Make a Wasteland and Call It Peace

Neocons Urge Washington to Grow US Military for "Future Wars"

October 14, 2008: The Christian Science Monitor reports, “Despite warnings against allowing the military to become the face of US foreign policy, more analysts are arguing that the resource and manpower-rich armed forces are in the best position to fulfill any US policy pertaining to ‘strengthening’ and ‘stabilizing’ troubled nations.”

The Pentagon Propaganda Machine

by Senator J. William Fulbright

1971

“A Marine war hero and former Commandant of the Corps, General David M. Shoup, has said, ‘America has become a militaristic and aggressive nation.’ He could be right. Militarism has been creeping up on us during the past thirty years. Prior to World War II, we never maintained more than a token peacetime army. Even in 1940, with Nazi Germany sweeping over Europe, there were fewer than half a million men in all of the armed services. The Army, which then included the Air Corps, had one general and four lieutenant generals. In October I941, six weeks before Pearl Harbor, the extension of the draft law was passed by but a single vote. Many of those who voted no did so for partisan political reasons, but antimilitarism certainly was a consideration for some. Today we have more than 3.5 million men in uniform and nearly 28 million veterans of the armed forces in the civilian population. The Air Force alone has twelve four-star generals and forty-two lieutenant generals. The American public has become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words that there are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening.”

Excerpts

(Vintage Books, 1971, paperback edition)

Reagan Palled Around with Terrorists, Too

Now that McCain and Palin are doing everything they can to wrap themselves in the legacy of Ronald Reagan, it’s worth noting who was “palling around with terrorists” when the Gipper was at the height of his powers after his 1984 reelection and before the Iran-Contra scandal. It was back in 1985 that McCain’s and Palin’s hero hosted Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, then a key Mujahadin leader (and major Islamo-fascist, as some might call him), at the White House. (Hekmatyar is in the foreground on the far left in the photo.)

Hekmatyar, who, among other things, has voiced his admiration for Osama bin Laden, is now one of the trio of key warlords — they also include the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani — who have been named as Public Enemies Number One by the Pentagon in Afghanistan. Here’s how the Los Angeles Times described Reagan’s guest in a recent article:

“Hekmatyar, who is based north of Peshawar in Pakistan, is the most mercurial of the three. As an engineering student at Kabul University in the 1970s, he was accused of throwing acid in the faces of women who did not wear a veil. He became one of the most effective mujahedin leaders in the war against the Soviets during the 1980s, leading a group that received millions in CIA funding.

“The CIA and U.S. special operations teams, hoping to turn him again, have approached Hekmatyar in recent years through intermediaries, according to U.S. sources. Last year, he was also contacted by representatives of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The talks went nowhere, according to Afghan news reports.

“Paul Pillar, former deputy chief of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, described Hekmatyar as a “very ambitious, very strong-willed, vicious sort of guy. Unless he were directly, physically put out of commission, he is going to continue to vie for power.”

“Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami group was accused of an ambush in August near Kabul that killed 10 French paratroopers.”

It’s always useful to recall the Reaganite roots of the “global war on terror,” at least in Southwest Asia, to gain some historical perspective about the “exceptional” nature of U.S. foreign policy and its status as “the greatest force for good in this world,” as Palin put it last weekend at the same California rally where she accused Sen. Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” Different times, different circumstances, of course. But Hekmatyar’s background and viciousness were well known at the time of his White House reception.

McCain, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, was, of course, an enthusiastic supporter of the Afghan “freedom fighters” and the “Reagan Doctrine” that supported them and other insurgent groups in countries Washington considered to be Soviet clients in the 1980s. As reported in a very good article by the Associated Press earlier this week, McCain served on the board of advisers of the U.S. section of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the Phoenix-based U.S. Council for World Freedom, through at least 1984 and, according to his account, asked to have his name removed from the Council’s letterhead in 1986 (presumably just as the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Council’s chief, ret. Gen. John Singlaub, played a key role), was breaking. As noted by AP, States News Service placed McCain at a Washington Council event that honored one of Hekmatyar’s comrades in 1985.

In an excellent 1986 book by Scott and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League, the two brothers report on WACL’s September 1985 meeting in Dallas in which, among many other people with rather questionable backgrounds, participants included:

· Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the head of Guatemala’s long-ruling “party of organized violence” (MLN);

· Yves Gignac, a former chief of the French Secret Army Organizations (OAS) “who spent five years in prison for his role in an assassination plot against Charles de Gaulle;”

· Chirila Ciuntu, an official of the Romania’s Iron Guard during World War II, then being sought for war crimes; and

· “Yaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian who presided over the massacre of 7,000 Jews in the city of Lvov, was represented by his wife, Slava.”

So far as I know, McCain did not attend, and Singlaub told AP the congressman and future senator and presidential candidate was never an active member. At the same time, Singlaub said he had no recollection of McCain ever resigning from the board, and there is no published account that I could find in which McCain expressed regret for his association with the group.