The military adventurers of the George W Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the "smartest guys in the room", the title of Alex Gibney's prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neo-conservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.
As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries.
Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay - or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.
There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on "defense" projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.
Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures - so-called "military Keynesianism", which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.
Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call "opportunity costs", things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world's number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs - an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these.
The current fiscal disaster
It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out of account Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since World War II.
Before we try to break down and analyze this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says, "A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it."
Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defense budget is "black", meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.
There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand - including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defense and the military-industrial complex - but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defense jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense.
In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch somewhat closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security, has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalized either department for ignoring the law. The result is that all numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.
In discussing the fiscal 2008 defense budget, as released to the press on February 7, 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D Hartung of the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative and Fred Kaplan, defense correspondent for Slate.org. They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4 billion for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment.
They also agree on a figure of $141.7 billion for the "supplemental" budget to fight the global "war on terror" - that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4 billion to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional "allowance" (a new term in defense budget documents) of $50 billion to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This comes to a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5 billion.
But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the American military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4 billion for the Department of Energy goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt, and Pakistan).
Another $1.03 billion outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and reenlistment incentives for the overstretched US military itself, up from a mere $174 million in 2003, the year the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7 billion, 50% of which goes for the long-term care of the grievously injured among the at least 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and another 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4 billion goes to the Department of Homeland Security.
Missing as well from this compilation is $1.9 billion to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; $38.5 billion to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6 billion for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200 billion in interest for past debt-financed defense outlays. This brings US spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year (2008), conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.
Military Keynesianism
Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth.
Unfortunately, that statement is no longer true. The world's richest political entity, according to the Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook, is the European Union. The EU's 2006 GDP (gross domestic product - all goods and services produced domestically) was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the US However, China's 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the US, and Japan was the world's fourth-richest nation.
A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we're doing can be found among the "current accounts" of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income.
For example, for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88 billion per year trade surplus with the United States and enjoys the world's second-highest current account balance. (China is number one.) The United States, by contrast, is number 163 - dead last on the list, worse than countries like Australia and the United Kingdom that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5 billion; second worst was Spain at $106.4 billion. This is what is unsustainable.
It's not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On November 7, 2007, the US Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time ever. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the so-called debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures in comparison with the rest of the world.
The world's top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each country currently budgets for its military establishment are:
1. United States (FY08 budget), $623 billion
2. China (2004), $65 billion
3. Russia, $50 billion
4. France (2005), $45 billion
5. Japan (2007), $41.75 billion
6. Germany (2003), $35.1 billion
7. Italy (2003), $28.2 billion
8. South Korea (2003), $21.1 billion
9. India (2005 est.), $19 billion
10. Saudi Arabia (2005 est.), $18 billion
World total military expenditures (2004 est.), $1,100 billion
World total (minus the United States), $500 billion.
Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration's policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology and have now become entrenched in our democratic political system where they are starting to wreak havoc. This ideology I call "military Keynesianism" - the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.
This ideology goes back to the first years of the Cold War. During the late 1940s, the US was haunted by economic anxieties. The Great Depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of World War II. With peace and demobilization, there was a pervasive fear that the Depression would return.
During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union's detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR's European satellites, the US sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging Cold War. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated April 14, 1950, and signed by president Harry S Truman on September 30, 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the United States pursues to the present day.
In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: "One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living."
With this understanding, American strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment as well as ward off a possible return of the Depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what president Dwight D Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of February 6, 1961: "The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience." That is, the military-industrial complex.
By 1990, the value of the weapons, equipment, and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in American manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined US military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, US reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in fact, a form of slow economic suicide.
On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, DC, released a study prepared by the global forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. Needless to say, the US economy has had to cope with growing defense spending for more than 60 years. He found that, after 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a baseline scenario that involved lower defense spending.
Baker concluded:
It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.
These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.
Hollowing out the American economy
It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s, it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation's largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities.
Historian Thomas E Woods Jr observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all American research talent was siphoned off into the military sector. It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.
Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used.
They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America's secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly skilled jobs within the American economy.
The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the American preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the Cold War. Melman wrote (pages. 2-3):
From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000 billion on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations - the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration.
In an important exegesis on Melman's relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes:
According to the US Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation's plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion. In other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.
The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools - an industry on which Melman was an authority - are a particularly important symptom.
In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed (page 186) "that 64% of the metalworking machine tools used in US industry were 10 years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States' machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of World War II. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry.
Nothing has been done in the period since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment - from medical machines like proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany and Japan) to cars and trucks.
Our short tenure as the world's "lone superpower" has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written:
Again and again it has always been the world's leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence, and cultural influence. It's no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over ... the job of being the world's leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world's leading lending country. In fact we are now the world's biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone.
Some of the damage done can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that this country urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States, and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program. If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don't, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.
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http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/50038
What Part of Ron Paul's Platform Is Crazy?
By Greg Albert
January 24, 2008
I seriously want to know which of Ron Paul´s ideas are crazy. I read a lot of empty assertions in the media that Ron Paul´s ideas are fringe, nutty, or kooky. I couldn´t disagree more, but it´s hard to say because those terms don't really mean anything and the press ain´t exactly full of rhetorical geniuses.
To me, it seems that Paul´s platform is the genuine position of anyone who subscribes to an individualist ethos. Sure, plenty of politicians claim to believe in individualism, but they jump into a collectivist perspective as soon as they get a question from the media. In contrast, Paul´s positions strike me as the natural consequence of anyone who believes in the Lockean theory of self-governance upon which our Constitution was more-or-less predicated. From that theory, almost directly, issues libertarianism/conservatism
So here is my simplified breakdown: Individuals have a right to do anything they want so long as they don´t infringe on the rights of others and they keep their agreements (contracts). Through those agreements, they can abrogate their rights to other people and they can create entities like states or corporations. They agree to charters to create states that will abrogate some of their rights for the purpose of protecting civil rights through their legislative and executive functions and enforcing contracts through their judiciary functions. In turn, those states contract to create a Constitution to bind them all.
The problem is that the Federal Government is far removed from the self-governing individual. Worse, democratic decisions by the federal government yield larger groups of disenfranchised minorities (in the numerical sense) than do the states or local governments. This is already abhorrent to the individualist who would prefer the consensual (albeit, impossible) government to the democratic model. So in enforcing the Constitution, the libertarian believes the best way to protect the minority is to limit what the majority can do. Thus, the conservative is born.
The conservative believes in a devolutionary federal system because that submits decisions to abrogate rights back to the states where individuals get more purchase. "Sure" the Conservative says, "the Federal Government can use its power to do good, but the process of removing the power from the states breeds corruption". And he is right. The same type of Constitutional circumvention that gave us the New Deal, now gives us the Iraq War, surreptitious entry into your private business, and commits Americans to years of overwhelming debt. You see, you can give the government power, but you cannot always control who will harness the power. And when the wrong President gets in charge…or a Congress that is spineless in his/her presence, you get a certain kind of runaway government that the people who ratified the Constitution, and thereby created that government, are helpless to control. It's all well-and-good when the left uses it to grant social programs, but now the right has abandoned conservatism in order to harness that power too. Paul´s position, the real conservative position, is that strict adherence to the Constitution, the very contract that creates the government, is the best measure for the government to protect the citizens from itself.
What´s that you say? The Federal Government needs to perform some functions that are not enumerated in the Constitution? The conservative will tell you that you should amend it. "That´s too hard", some say, "we need a supermajority". No, they're being lazy or misdirected. First, the supermajority is required because if you´re going to add to the powers of the Constitution and thereby stymie rights, you had better come correct and get more than a measly fifty percent of the population to agree. Second, that impression doesn´t explain the 18th and 21st Amendments, which were ratified to prohibit alcohol, and then to repeal the prohibition, respectively. Sorry folks, but if the Constitution was that hard to amend, we wouldn´t have amended it to prohibit liquor, of all things.
Most important, it seems that our hesitance about the Constitutional Amendment process stems from conditioning. Senators and Congressmen have no interest in amending the Constitution because Amendments tend to settle disputes, put the people in power, and tell the government what to do. The Congress would prefer that we donate to congressional campaigns and it promises to fight our fights in Washington D.C. But few congressman have any incentive to win! Once they do, the money disappears and they lose a core cause. They´re better off winning battles and losing wars, even if we´re better off winning both.
Among other reasons, that is why Congress refuses to direct citizens toward the Constitutional Amendment process. The founders anticipated this and therefore gave states the right to amend the Constitution by themselves. This is obviously a better system. By disaggregating power away from Washington D.C., special interests can´t get a strong foothold in enough states. Even better, state representatives tend to have term limits and tend to live in close proximity of the citizens that they might enrage with bad or corrupt decisions. In contrast, when we centralize power on Capitol Hill we put all the influence in a nice little box for such organizations as the Military Industrial Complex to unwrap. And that´s where we are today.
Now, Paul´s positions issue directly from the Constitution. He opposes the Federal Reserve because it is secret and unapproachable. Who can blame him? When did we allow our states to allow our government to allow an independent organization to run our economy? And why can´t we audit it? Isn´t that a little too removed from the control of the people? Why do we commit Americans to war without bothering to declare one? Why do we allow Congress to give away $30,000 medals to dead people, purchased with our tax money? Why do we allow the government to sell our Social Security to China or to spy in our computers without warrant? We almost impeached Nixon for less, but now we stand by as the very entity we created runs rough-shot over the orders we gave it. We don´t let corporations operate so far outside of their bylaws or articles of incorporation. We don´t interpret contracts among individuals as 'living documents'. Yet we´ve allow the government to turn the Social Security Trust into the bureaucratic version of the Enron Corporation and interpret its very license to exist however it deems important.
Someone, please write to me and tell me how I am wrong. I will not post your name unless you tell me to. Tell me how Paul is wrong. Of course, I don't expect you to back up such exaggerated terms as 'kooky'. I just need to hear a single coherent rebuttal or explanation. Please ensure you understand Paul´s positions. For example, I don´t want to hear about how Paul wants to return to the gold standard because he doesn´t. Here is the Wikipedia entry for Paul´s platform: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron
_Paul
Finally, in response to a previous readers´ question about why I don´t support Rudolph Giuliani: I don´t support Giuliani because (a) I don´t vote for neo-conservatives who seem more dangerous than Democrats (I´d rather go broke with sweet social programs than go broke with a foreign war) and (b) I am a man, as opposed to a frightened child who needs protection from spooky terrorists.
On February 1, 2008 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is up for renewal and this time they want to make it permanent.
Spies, Lies and FISA
As Democratic lawmakers try to repair a deeply flawed bill on electronic eavesdropping, the White House is pumping out the same fog of fear and disinformation it used to push the bill through Congress this summer. President Bush has been telling Americans that any change would deny the government critical information, make it easier for terrorists to infiltrate, expose state secrets, and make it harder “to save American lives.”
There is no truth to any of those claims. No matter how often Mr. Bush says otherwise, there is also no disagreement from the Democrats about the need to provide adequate tools to fight terrorists. The debate is over whether this should be done constitutionally, or at the whim of the president.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, requires a warrant to intercept international communications involving anyone in the United States. A secret court has granted these warrants quickly nearly every time it has been asked. After 9/11, the Patriot Act made it even easier to conduct surveillance, especially in hot pursuit of terrorists.
But that was not good enough for the Bush team, which was determined to use the nation’s tragedy to grab ever more power for its vision of an imperial presidency. Mr. Bush ignored the FISA law and ordered the National Security Agency to intercept phone calls and e-mail between people abroad and people in the United States without a warrant, as long as “the target” was not in this country.
The president did not announce his decision. He allowed a few lawmakers to be briefed but withheld key documents. The special intelligence court was in the dark until The Times disclosed the spying in December 2005.
Mr. Bush still refused to stop. He claimed that FISA was too limiting for the Internet-speed war against terror. But he never explained those limits and rebuffed lawmakers’ offers to legally accommodate his concerns.
This year, the administration found an actual problem with FISA: It requires a warrant to eavesdrop on communications between foreigners that go through computers in the United States. It was a problem that did not exist in 1978, and it had an easy fix. But Mr. Bush’s lawyers tacked dangerous additions onto a bill being rushed through Congress before the recess. When the smoke cleared, Congress had fixed the real loophole, but also endorsed the idea of spying without court approval. It gave legal cover to more than five years of illegal spying.
Fortunately, the law is to expire in February, and some Democratic legislators are trying to fix it. House members have drafted a bill, which is a big improvement but still needs work. The Senate is working on its bill, and we hope it will show the courage this time to restore the rule of law to American surveillance programs.
There are some red lines, starting with the absolute need for court supervision of any surveillance that can involve American citizens or others in the United States. The bill passed in August allowed the administration to inform the FISA court about its methods and then issue blanket demands for data to communications companies without any further court approval or review.
The House bill would permit the government to conduct surveillance for 45 days before submitting it to court review and approval. (Mr. Bush is wrong when he says the bill would slow down intelligence gathering.) After that, ideally, the law would require a real warrant. If Congress will not do that, at a minimum it must require spying programs to undergo periodic audits by the court and Congress. The administration wants no reviews.
Mr. Bush and his team say they have safeguards to protect civil liberties, meaning surveillance will be reviewed by the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the inspectors general of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. There are two enormous flaws in that. The Constitution is based on the rule of law, not individuals; giving such power to any president would be un-American. And this one long ago showed he cannot be trusted.
Last week, The Times reported that the C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, is investigating the office of his agency’s inspector general after it inquired into policies on detention and interrogation. This improper, perhaps illegal investigation sends a clear message of intimidation. We also know that the F.B.I. has abused expanded powers it was granted after 9/11 and that the former attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, systematically covered up the president’s actions with deliberately misleading testimony.
Mr. Bush says the law should give immunity to communications companies that gave data to the government over the last five years without a court order. He says they should not be punished for helping to protect America, but what Mr. Bush really wants is to avoid lawsuits that could uncover the extent of the illegal spying he authorized after 9/11.
It may be possible to shield these companies from liability, since the government lied to them about the legality of its requests. But the law should allow suits aimed at forcing disclosure of Mr. Bush’s actions. It should also require a full accounting to Congress of all surveillance conducted since 9/11. And it should have an expiration date, which the White House does not want.
Ever since 9/11, we have watched Republican lawmakers help Mr. Bush shred the Constitution in the name of fighting terrorism. We have seen Democrats acquiesce or retreat in fear. It is time for that to stop.
I've posted three blogs in order to introduce and inform people about Ron Paul. I've provided information and links for people to inform themselves about this very honorable candidate.
An individual in this forum has spammed every one of them with untruths. Although I continue to try to inform this person, eventually I had to delete some of his posts because they became never ending slander. His behavior childish in name calling and completely undebatable. To have a debate, one must educate themselves on the subject. This person refuses to, which is his right. But to chase me down for simply wanted to inform people is an embarrassment to himself.
The question all of us should be asking is, why do so many want Ron Paul to go away? Why do so many feel so passionately about shutting him down? If you were to inform yourself about Ron Paul, you'd know why. He wants to sew the whole in our federal governments pocket. He wants to restore our constitution and he wants to get rid of the Federal Reserve. Unlike his fellow candidates, he does not belong to any world organizations. He holds no stock in companies profiteering off this war. He is a strict constitutionalist. He wants less government in our lives. All of the income tax the IRS collects goes to payoff the interest of our national debt. He wants to get rid of the IRS and cut federal spending. In September of 2001 our Pentagon LOST 2.3 trillion dollars. That's $7666.66 each of us lost. And no one did a damn thing about it. There are billions of dollars simply missing from this "war on terror". Contractors over in Iraq, afghanistan and elsewhere (even here in the US) are stealing millions upon millions from the federal government. Money unaccountable.
No washington certainly wouldn't want a man like Ron Paul in office. Neither would the big corporations raking in the money. The banks running our federal reserve issuing non existent loans to our federal government and then demand that we the people pay interest on it. The money train would end and we as individuals would be given back our bill of rights.
If you get your information from mass media, you might want to shut off the TV and take some time to learn what washington has really been up to. That is all I ask. Even if you don't want to vote for Ron Paul, it would be in your best interest and in the best interest of our country to re-introduce ourselves to our federal government.
We're about to become the North American Union. US, Canada and Mexico merging as one. How much has the media explained this to you? No wonder our borders aren't patrolled.
I'm leaving it up to you to make up your own minds. Before the Federal government signs the bill to restrict internet access, you might want to take advantage of all the information that is currently available.
Yes comments are disabled. The anti-Ron Paul media and people have made it so that interested parties like yourself can only rely upon yourselves to truly become educated. I regret this terribly, but I simply do not have the time to entertain these types of people nor do I have the time to chase their bashing around this forum.
Here are some sites for your consideration:Ron Paul's official site which includes where he stands on issues RonPaul2008.comRon Paul's YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=RonPaul2008do
tcomGoogle 2.3 trillion missingGoogle federal reserveGoogle IRSGoogle Income tax
Thank you and God Bless.
