OBAMA DOES A LOUIS XVI by GinoBiffaroni

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

OBAMA DOES A LOUIS XVI

POSTED BY: GINOBIFFARONI
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 1, 2009 07:33
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Monday, November 30, 2009 5:59 PM

OBAMA DOES A LOUIS XVI
NEW YORK November 30, 2009
American would not have won independence from Great Britain without generous military and financial support from France and its monarch, Louis XVI.
But France spent itself into bankruptcy supporting the American colonists. France’s financial ruin was a major cause of the ensuing French Revolution that cost the unfortunate Louis his head.

Wars are hugely expensive. Money plays as great a role in them as soldiers and weapons.

US Congressman David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, has come up with a novel idea: American should pay for the wars they are currently waging.

Obey’s proposal, which is backed by other congressmen of both parties, sounds startling – until one realizes that both the Bush and Obama administrations have never properly financed their foreign wars by forcing Americans to pay for them through higher taxes.

Instead, Washington has deferred the $1 trillion to date costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by simply adding them to the national debt, and paying interest on the balance owing. President Lyndon conducted similar financial slight of hand with the Vietnam War, inflicting serious injury and instability on the US economy.

Few Americans feel the real financial costs of these wars. Future generations will get stuck with the bill.

But this kind of deceptive national accounting is becoming increasingly difficult in the face of President Barack Obama’s $1.4 trillion deficit this year, and his imminent decision to send some 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan.

Each American soldier in Afghanistan costs at least $1 million per annum, according to the US Congress Research Service. Thirty thousand more US troops will thus cost $30 billion in additional war costs on top of the $200 billion annual cost of garrisoning Iraq and Afghanistan – now the second most expensive wars in US history.

Much of this money will have to be borrowed from China and Japan.

Obey and his allies want to impose a graduated surtax on Americans of 1-5%, depending on their income level, to fund the actual costs of what are now Obama’s wars. Otherwise, warns Obey, the huge cost of sending keeping up to 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan will `destroy the other things we are trying to do in our economy.’ Chief among which is health care.

In a clear choice between guns or butter, Obey estimates ten years of war in Afghanistan will cost the same $900 million as providing a comprehensive health plan for all Americans.

Unfortunately, chances of a war surtax passing Congress are nil. While the Afghan and Iraq wars are increasingly unpopular among Americans, a tax increase at a time of over 10% unemployment will ignite the same kind of furious reaction that met President Obama’s proposed national health plan, and endanger Democrats facing midterm elections.

As the Obama administration appears set to escalate the war in Afghanistan, the real costs of Afghanistan and Iraq are still being concealed from the public and Congress.

A billion here; a billion there; suddenly, we are taking about real money.

The $200 billion annual cost for both wars is only a part of the growing expenses faced by Washington.

The annual bill for US intelligence, which employs over 200,000 people, has doubled to $75 billion, in large part to support foreign wars and operations against anti-US Muslim groups.

Costs of occupying Afghanistan rose to $300 billion this year, and will increase sharply next year. Operations in Iraq will total $684 billion in 2009. President Barack Obama’s plans to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by 2011 may encounter serious delays and snags as resistance resumes and the underground Ba’ath Party become more active.

Washington spends $25 billion funding foreign armies, the bulk of which goes to the Mideast, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Aid to Islamabad will rise to $15 billion over the next five years, including secret `black’ payments.

The US supports 168,000 `contractors’ in Iraq, many of them gunmen. CIA runs 74,000 mercenaries in Afghanistan. The new fortified, 104-acre US Embassy in Baghdad will cost $700 million; the new embassy in Islamabad, $800 million. Islamic militants call them `crusader castles.’

Add to these costs the expense of maintaining fleets in the Gulf and Indian Ocean, and military bases in the Gulf and Diego Garcia to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; hugely expensive military airlift; $400 per gallon fuel delivered to US forces in Afghanistan; and, of course, financial inducements to many smaller nations to send handfuls of troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. Also an important part of the annual $93 billion in veterans benefits.

Thus the real cost of Afghanistan and Iraq are much higher than $200 billion annually. Yet President Obama, heedless of such costs, appears determined to expand the Afghan War. It seems clear that Obama has fallen increasingly under the influence of America’s powerful military-industrial-financial complex and neoconservative war party. In short, the same calculus of forces that guided the Bush administration.

Even America’s mighty economy cannot for long support waging wars across the Muslim world. Unaffordable wars have been the ruin of many an empire, and the American Raj seems headed in the same direction as Noble Peace Prize winner Barack Obama plunges ever deeper into the Afghan quagmire.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009

http://www.ericmargolis.com/political_commentaries/obama-does-a-louis-
xvi.aspx

Best start to learn Mandarin and Cantonese now

Either your with the terrorists, or ... your with the terrorists

Lets party like its 1939

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Monday, November 30, 2009 11:34 PM

PIRATENEWS

John Lee, conspiracy therapist at Hollywood award-winner History Channel-mocked SNL-spoofed PirateNew.org wooHOO!!!!!!

I'd pay higher taxes to cut King Obama's head off, after a martial law tribunal at Gitmo and guilty verdict.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 3:13 AM

JONGSSTRAW

The Dems only answer to any problem is to TAX people. They just love taxing Americans, and what better time to do it than in a down and spiraling out economy with 10-15% un-employment? Congress got their raise this year...did you?

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 3:50 AM

AGENTROUKA

Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
The Dems only answer to any problem is to TAX people. They just love taxing Americans, and what better time to do it than in a down and spiraling out economy with 10-15% un-employment? Congress got their raise this year...did you?

You can hardly think that "yay taxes!" was the point of this article.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 4:34 AM

JONGSSTRAW

Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
The Dems only answer to any problem is to TAX people. They just love taxing Americans, and what better time to do it than in a down and spiraling out economy with 10-15% un-employment? Congress got their raise this year...did you?

You can hardly think that "yay taxes!" was the point of this article.

I do know how expensive fighting the wars are. I'm just saying that before working Americans' taxes go up to pay for them, there ought to be other sources for the money. Like cutting down the size of Govt. for starters. Like cutting down on fraud and waste. Like holding off on other programs that cost the country more debt. Most Americans want us out of Afghanistan, yet the Nobel Peace Prize winner is going to escalate this unwinnable war. After 9 years there we cannot find any stable and non-corrupt allies to put into Govt power. We just have to get out of there.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 5:00 AM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by GinoBiffaroni:
...until one realizes that both the Bush and Obama administrations have never properly financed their foreign wars by forcing Americans to pay for them through higher taxes.

Quite an assumption that raising taxes is the "proper" way to pay for a war, considering that it's so seldom done.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 5:09 AM

AGENTROUKA

Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Most Americans want us out of Afghanistan, yet the Nobel Peace Prize winner is going to escalate this unwinnable war. After 9 years there we cannot find any stable and non-corrupt allies to put into Govt power. We just have to get out of there.

Seems to me that was pretty much exactly the point of the article.

I think it's a valid issue to raise that a the financial cost of war being directed away from the immediate population makes that population much less likely to question the validity of certain wars. Money is the one thing that would affect everyone, even more so than a rising number of casualties.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 5:23 AM

BYTEMITE

I definitely agree that cutting the government back to pay off our wars (and other debts) is a very good (and pretty common sensical) idea.

Yet I also like the idea of declaring War having a price tag, it'll make the American public more wary about committing their own troops to a conflict, which will encourage them to lean on all the people in charge of these wars to keep them honest.

On the other hand, maybe this is too little, too late. These guys already seem corrupt and don't appear to care much about the economic troubles of the average citizen.

Ultimately I think our best solution is to dismantle the supports out from under them. Whether or not we foolishly decide to rebuild the power structure afterwards in the exact same way I suppose is not up to me, but I'll fight against the power structure either way.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 5:31 AM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

Quote:
Yet I also like the idea of declaring War having a price tag...

Of course, it also helps to obfuscate that price tag if you never actually DECLARE war. You'll note that there has been no declaration of war by the United States Congress (the only entity empowered by the Constitution to do so) since June 5, 1942.

Mike

Work is the curse of the Drinking Class.
- Oscar Wilde

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 7:07 AM

DREAMTROVE

Mike,

You know the reason for that: It's banned by the United Nations.

Thanks PN for the Jesse Jackson perspective. Moving on..

Obama has agreed to send 30,000 more Americans, and escalate the conflict. The only real world motivation for this can be corruption of the financial military industrial complex, which essentially owns his administration. I'm sorry to disappoint people by saying "okay, i've had it. Sarah Palin 2012, where do I sign up?" Especially after Huckabee's astonishing career suicide. But politics aside, this is just the icing on the apocalypse. I agree it's a Louis XVI move, and that Louis did it for the same reason: His court was filled with corrupt bankers, and he wanted to spite England. The US wants to spite Iran, and maybe Russia, here, and has other corrupt interests, but if anyone is thinking we're "here to help" think again.

A couple other really disturbing trends:

The cops just executed Huckabee's cop-killer. Sure, we understand why, and the media is softpedalling this, but we know the real story here: This is death squad stuff. The guy was unarmed, identified by an officer, and then executed, rather than arrested. That makes it official, we have death squads. Great. This whole "Third world America thing" is really going full tilt.

People are outsourcing to *us*. That should be a sign. Okay, the last adminsitration gets a lot of blame here, but so does the previous.

I want to drag up another very disturbing trend:

I did some digging and I had to conclude that John is right about something:

V, the new series, was pulled because it attacked the govt. From "Healthcare is a distraction so you won't notice the takeover" to "We only take softball interviews here" and "Never paint us in a bad light" to "they're using our own vaccine system to poison us" and "Anyone who opposes us is a terrorist" is, yes, granted, an attack on this current administration right down to "ignore the war, nothing happening here, move it along.

But here's the more bothersome part: The series has been pulled to "rework the storyline" in a way which is "less hostile to the administration."

Now just one second: Did anyone even blink at the overwhelming number of fictional media parallels that were direct or indirect attacks on the *last* administration?

Didn't think so.

Okay, Now rewind a sec. Think about Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. IMHO, okay, not perfect, but a lot better than Dollhouse or Fringe (sorry fans, it's just an opinion)

But seriously, I have to at least examine the possibility that T:SCC was cancelled for political content.

Right now, I'm seeing Obama as a pretty face on a very dangerous administration.

No one commented on my Empire devoting all resources to squashing insignificant rebels on Tataouine comment. As for the fate of Tataouine, it's not just a matter for the Afghans, I suspect they will need help, I just made the rather radical suggestion that they might need technological help from Africa, and perhaps economic. I think that you begin to see a radical shift in the world where instead of thinking "what can we do for africa" we're left thinking someone might need africa's help. But then, this is far from the first radical flip. John Denver was sorry for the way things are in China, they might be sorry for us now. Just five years ago someone posted something about "Koreans making 50 cents an hour, and I had to inform him regrettably that they actually make more than we do, which is why I prefer samsung, to say nothing of India, Japan, etc.

BUT...

It's not the place of the US military and the cartoonishly evil blackwater security or whatever they're calling themselves OR the private militias armed through JSOC who now answer directly to the state dept, yeah, that would be head banshee Hillary, the Al Qaeda types I was referring to earlier.

Oh, and on finance: Technically speaking, no, your tax dollars do not go for the war, the war gets added to the debt, your tax dollars go to interest on the debt. This means that you are not just paying for the war now, but you will be forever.

I say once more, a dollar out of the money you spend every single day goes to the interest on the debt from WWII, which is still owing.

When does this end: When no one in the world credits the US dollar with being worth anything.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 7:33 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
The guy was unarmed, identified by an officer, and then executed, rather than arrested. That makes it official, we have death squads.

Actually, he wasn't unarmed - he had jacked a pistol from one of the cops he did for in the coffee shop, the cops just didn't tell that to the media (it's on the official report) because of liability concerns.

But yes, they were lookin to kill the guy, sure - it's not like everyone in the damn country doesn't know that's how they are, and I fail to see why it surprises you any, I mean we had Death Squads since the late 1800's to early 1900's to deal with those pesky union people, WTF do you think Baldwin-Felts and the goddamn Pinkertons WERE ?

And I note for the record that those murderous Pinkerton bastards essentially became the USDOJ, proving that such apples never do fall far from the tree, do they now ?

Just because they're more obvious about it now doesn't make this crap new, you know.

-F

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