Whispers from the Wild

No matter who wins the US Presidential election, there is a LOT of work for him/her from day one.  In their sheltered, foxnews-fed environment, many Americans don’t realize just how bad things are.  So here are just a few things that need to be urgently addressed the moment the new President is sworn in.

1. How America is seen by the rest of the world.  Now I’ve read the right wing blogsforhat(r)ed site for some time, and the right wing definately believe in their own superiority.  Regularly they scoff at what Europe thinks about them, and they don’t care what the rest of the world thinks either.  They seem to think there is two kinds of human on this planet, Americans and everyone else, and Americans are simply a more advanced kind of human.  Unfortunately, Bushco and the neocon foreign policy have reflected that during this decade, and whenever they’ve wanted something, they’ve taken it, over the dead bodies of anyone who got in their way.  That kind of thing destroys America’s standing in the world.  For America to mean anything other than “those damn trigger happy yanks who love invading other countries in the name of protecting their own country” to much of the rest of the world, the next President has got their work cut out for them undoing close to a decade of Bush and Neocon destruction.
2. Let’s get this straight.  It does matter what other countries think about 9/11.  American honesty is assessed on that.  And the bulk of non-US people I’ve spoken to believe 9/11 was an inside job based on the scientific evidence they’ve seen.  Calum Douglas hasn’t ever been proved wrong in his Flight 77 black box recorder investigation video, the only thing the pro-official story crowd can think to say is that the black box wasn’t the one from Flight 77.  Should it turn out that Bush and Cheney were complicit in 9/11 then this means they have lied to the American people and got away with it, and continue to get away with it.  If they can kill 3,000 US Citizens with impunity, other countries are not going to feel safe about what they could do if they felt like invading someone else.
3. America IS in recession.  The sooner that’s openly admitted, the sooner it can be tackled.  You can’t remove the disease by simply treating the symptoms on their own, and no matter how much President Bush stands up like King Canute and says “There’s no recession” – that doesn’t make it so.  McCain would like to cut taxes, and therefore domestic spending, even further.  The dollar is falling rapidly, and other countries are only going to carry the US so far before they bail.  Having spent years lobbying the government for no interference, the US Banks suddenly are lining up in Washington for government handouts to save them from their irresponsible lending and consumerism.  It’s going to get worse before it gets better, the only question is how much worse.  And that depends on being honest about the situation and working to deal with it realistically.
4. Which brings me nicely to the topic of foreign wars.  Bush and Cheney have had their pride hurt by the mess in Iraq, and now they don’t want to lose face by admitting they were wrong invading.  That’s all it’s about, now, pride.  It’s obvious Iraq isn’t going to just sign over its oil, another amendment to that bill was once again defeated in the Iraqi parliament.  Meanwhile, the war is costing  a fortune.  So far, for a war predicted to cost 60 billion dollars, Bush and Cheney have borrowed from other countries one trillion dollars.  And that’s only so far.  And only the direct monetary cost.  That doesn’t take into account the human cost, which is another 4,000 US soldiers killed and 26,000 wounded, the latter who will be a drain on the economy through healthcare.  The next president has got to stick a plug in this economic hole or any attempts at clearing up the huge recession Bush and Cheney are leaving behind them is screwed from the start.
5. Domestic Spending – You know things are bad when even what Michael Moore says about something is true.  The American healthcare system, in common with many other aspects of domestic spending, is collapsing. The private insurance companies such as Blue Cross are further fleecing the US population to line their own coffers, and dumping anyone who actually needs to claim, and the Republican party seems fine with that, for the sole reason that the government isn’t interfering.  The fact is, the government can’t afford to interfere, it doesn’t have the money to run anything on this scale itself, because it’s spending it on wars and on tax cuts to the rich.
6. Which do you prefer?  Tax and spend, or borrow and spend?  Because Bush is doing the latter.  The money he’s “giving back” in rebates this year isn’t going to save the economy, because – at his urging – we’ve all been borrowing to spend.  Now the housing market is plummeting, and most peoples houses aren’t worth the cost of the mortgages, the banks are still demanding those mortgages be paid.  That’s where the bulk of this “giving back” money will go – to paying debt.  Or to saving, for those in a position to do so.  Average Joe isn’t waiting to rush out and buy new miscellaneous consumer ‘stuff’ when he gets his money, he’s going to be trying to make it last as long as possible, and rightly so.  Since Bush is relying on this money being pumped back into the direct economy, that leaves no plan B when it fails to happen.  Which means the next President is going to have to deal with that mess too.

When you look at it, all things considered, the next President really doesn’t stand a chance.  It will take a miracle to pull America out of the mire Bush is planning to leave it with when he leaves office, and with his foreign policy alienating much of the rest of the world… miracles are going to be harder to come by than Presidential honesty.

You know, all those terrible liberals keep complaining that Mr Bush is consistently failing to look after his people. They want welfare handouts, and lots of them. Well, all you liberals, Mr Bush has heard your pleas and in his budget is to hand out $184.2bn in tax payers money, specifically for welfare.

CORPORATE welfare, that is – not citizen welfare.

From Think Progress:

Last week, President Bush submitted his $515.4 billion defense spending budget for FY ‘09. Contained within that budget is a windfall for defense contractors — “$104.2 billion for weapons procurement and nearly $80 billion for research and development.” This budget is 7.5 percent higher than the current year’s.

Even Defense experts are surprised at how generous the Bush administration is willing to be with the taxpayers’ money, in light of a faltering economy and deep cuts to domestic programs:

“The expectation has been that it can’t continue to increase as it has,” Phil Finnegan, a defense analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, said of defense spending. “But it has surprised everyone to see how long this increase has continued. This budget was a great budget for all defense contractors.” […]

“The fiscal year 2009 budget may be about as good as it gets for defense contractors,” said Steve Kosiak, vice president of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “We have had eight years of quite dramatic growth in [the Defense Department’s] weapons acquisition accounts. Whoever the next president is, it is unlikely that we are going to continue a major buildup.

So there you have it, all these crucial welfare schemes will all come to an end if a dastardly liberal gets in to power. The corporations must be protected from the danger of a Democrat President undoing all the vast profits they’ve been making under the Bush administration.

And if you say anything different, well, some of that money has already gone to building private internment camps. Where, no doubt, Blackwater USA can get a bit of extra practice to perfect their waterboarding techniques…

* But our contractors do. That’s okay, though, because it doesn’t count.

In testimony before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, Director of Central Intelligence Mike Hayden admitted to using contractors for “enhanced interrogation” at the CIA’s secret prisons, the so-called black sites. It was an issue first raised last summer on The Spy Who Billed Me. From Tuesday’s exchange:

FEINSTEIN: I’d like to ask this question: Who carries out these [enhanced interrogation] techniques? Are they government employees or contractors?

HAYDEN: At our facilities during this, we have a mix of both government employees and contractors. Everything is done under, as we’ve talked before, ma’am, under my authority and the authority of the agency. But the people at the locations are frequently a mix of both — we call them blue badgers and green badgers.

FEINSTEIN: And where do you use only contractors?

HAYDEN: I’m not aware of any facility in which there were only contractors. And this came up…

FEINSTEIN: Any facility anywhere in the world?

HAYDEN: Oh, I mean, I’m talking about our detention facilities. I want to make something very clear, because I don’t think it was quite crystal clear in the discussion you had with Attorney General Mukasey.

Read more here

So you see, although the CIA has only ever ever EVER waterboarded three people, and hasn’t done it at all in five years, there are no figures for how many times or whether or not contractors, such as Blackwater, carry out the “enhanced interrogation technique” more properly known as torture.

For all the CIA is willing to say, Blackwater is still regularly waterboarding prisoners. But that’s apparently fine, because Blackwater isn’t the CIA.

Sadly, you couldn’t make this stuff up!

While everybody was focusing on the battle for votes in the so-called “Super Tuesday”, two massively important news items came and went relatively unreported. As an ex-brit I’m used to spotting the tactic which is normally used in the UK of releasing bad or unpopular news on days where something very important is happening, so the media don’t notice it. That’s just what happened on Super Tuesday.

The first thing of importance that didn’t get reported was President Bush’s budget request, and most importantly his budget report – the report that stated how the economy would look if his budget was approved. In it, he once again cuts domestic spending on projects such as healthcare, in favour of more foreign defense spending, particularly in Iraq. However, his budget report pointed out that if this $3.1 trillion budget was approved, the deficit would grow to a massive $400bn in 2009. Let me put that in layman’s terms for a minute – Bush is cutting back on domestic spending, but he’s still spending $400 billion more than he’s got. And yet he has the nerve to say that if this is approved, if his fiscal policies are followed, the budget will balance in 2012. I really can’t see how he can get away with saying that. The 2007 fiscal years deficit was $162bn. The deficit is RISING year on year, he’s spending consistently more than he owns year on year. That’s never going to balance. It will only get worse. The only way to balance that is to reverse some policies and while cuts in healthcare may be necessary, along with cuts in practically every other domestic spending – those cuts are useless while MORE money is being spent in defense and war. They would only work if the massive spending on defense and war was also cut drastically, but that’s not what Republicans intend to do. If McCain gets in, he’s already said the huge hole in finances that is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue. Eventually there will be nothing left to cut in domestic spending, because private companies will be running it all having bought it from a government increasingly desperate to scrape up money from somewhere – and then there will be no money at all to continue the wars, and we’ll have exactly what contributed to the fall of the Roman empire. No money to send the troops because it had all been wasted in the capital. History repeats itself, if you don’t learn lessons from it, and Republican empire building days are numbered. Bush will probably manage to nurse the economy long enough to get out of office before it all collapses, but if a Republican president follows and maintains the same policies, he won’t be able to go another 4 years without the economy imploding.

The other significant event was the admission by CIA chief Michael Hayden that yes, they have used waterboarding (which in non-Republican-speak is called torture, but in Republican-speak is called “an advanced interrogation technique”). The chief was quick to claim, however, that it was only used on a select few, and hasn’t been used since. Let’s have a look at that for a moment. For years the CIA said id didn’t have secret camps. Now it admits it did. For years it said it didn’t use waterboarding. Now it admits it did. Now it’s saying it doesn’t use waterboarding any more. Given the past record of lack of honesty – who really believes this latest claim? Without firm legislation banning waterboarding and similar methods of torture, there is absolutely nothing stopping it from going on.

As a side note to that, I do wonder if that gives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the right to sue the US for abusing his human rights.  I strongly suspect that Republicans would blow a gasket if he did, since they don’t appear to consider him a human being and therefore entitled to human rights.  We’ll have to see what happens there.

So while the politicians dream of their presidential hopes, and the main stream media turn their attention on the next states to vote, these two matters are just a footnote in history to most people.  It’s left to the blogosphere to draw peoples attention to them, important as they are.  And that’s a very sad thing.

If America hopes to restore its position in the world (I note someone who said something similar in a pro-right wing blog was jeered at as “has been[s] in europe” – just the attitude that must be reversed, if America is going to be considered by the rest of the world, europe included, as worthy of respect) then it has to sort out two major things.  The first is its own economy; America can’t continue to live off other nations, in debt to them and consuming all their goods in return for markers for payment at some undisclosed point in the future. (tribute to Rome, anyone?)  The second thing is to restore some form of moral ground, admitting torture where torture happens, and not just saying “It’s only torture when other people do it.”

There’s a long way to go before that starts to happen.  And while bad news keeps getting hidden behind smokescreens, no change actually starts.  Time is running out, and whether it’s Clinton, Obama, McCain, Romney or Huckabee that finally makes it into the White House, these two problems are going to be landing on their doorstep from day 1.  It would be good to know what any of them plan to do about it.

Having been sold to US firm Citigroup (the firm infamous for the 29.9% credit card, and now making a name for themselves unscrupulously buying up US healthcare debt) UK Credit Card company “Egg” have announced they are withdrawing 161,000 credit cards from UK customers who “[they] no longer wish to lend money to”.

Naturally in its press release, people who are obviously bad credit risks – those who have gone over their limit, missed payments regularly or no longer have a substantial income – are the only demographics named as victims of this sudden mass cancellation of cards… but the truth is already coming out.

Gillian Cox, of Farnham, Surrey, said she was “absolutely furious” to learn her credit card had been cancelled in what she described as an “unbelievable arbitrary action”.

Mrs Cox said she and her husband are “retired, no mortgage, no debts” and “always paid the balance off in full each month”.

Source: BBC News

Mrs Cox and her husband are among a new demographic the banks are targetting – those who don’t make the banks money.  What’s the key phrase in what she said?  Retired?  No mortgage?  No debts?  No.  The key phrase is “paid the balance off in full each month.”  That, Mrs Cox, is why Egg don’t want you.  They don’t want to lend you money and have it all paid back promptly.  Oh God no, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.  The way it’s supposed to work is that people like Mrs Cox are supposed to be money batteries for the banks, paying of preferrably 50% of the balance every month, and then paying interest on the remaining amount.  That’s what it’s all about.  Interest.

If you have a card with a $10,000 (or £10,000) limit, the bank or credit card company wants you to do two things.  Stay within that limit, but continue to have enough debt on the card to require paying interest every month.  If you go above the limit, you’re a bad credit risk.  If you pay it off in full each month, although you’re not a bad credit risk you’re a bad credit customer because credit customers pay interest on their credit.

And to companies like Citigroup, bad credit customers are just as unwanted as bad credit risks, because Citigroup is all about making money.  It’s all about the profit at the end of the day.  If you don’t make Citigroup money, they don’t want you, it’s as simple as that.

Egg’s days may be limited.  This is creating an absolutely HUGE backlash, and other credit card companies will be quite happy to poach Egg’s (no pun intended) customers.  More than a few ‘bad credit customers’ will leave Egg for more understanding credit card companies.  And after they’ve scrambled Egg’s (still no pun intended) profits up, there won’t be much left, and Citigroup will be left with Egg on their faces (ok, I intended the pun this time), but not much else.