General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAfter the Syrian debate, DON'T EVER TALK TO ME ABOUT THE US NATIONAL DEBT EVER AGAIN!
Remember how THIS used to be so important:
(US Debt clock)
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Isn't it stunning just how un-important our dreaded DEFICIT has become lately, when war is a possibility?
But don't worry, it will be of paramount importance again, once we get back to discussing healthcare, Social Security, Public Education, or anything that benefits those un-important "Little folks" who comprise most of the American People.
When social programs are on the block, ALL WE HEAR ABOUT IS THE FRIKKING DEFICIT.
But right now, with a juicy war on our representatives' plate, it's just crickets going, "chirp chirp".
I never want to hear pols or their surrogates talking up the debt ever again,
unless it relates to war policy decisions,
as in Syria.
gopiscrap
(23,726 posts)nikto
(3,284 posts)of our political class is stunning.
gopiscrap
(23,726 posts)because the military got it's budget cut?
Blanks
(4,835 posts)Autumn
(44,980 posts)again on cut this, cut that. But damn, we can afford a hot new intervention in another country. It's disgusting.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)bull crap about the free Syrians will pay. Or the Saudi's will pay.
kath
(10,565 posts)Thanx.
Trillo
(9,154 posts)and you just know it's the truth.
K&R
Mercenaries, I believe the story was
Tx4obama
(36,974 posts)bvar22
(39,909 posts)...but YES.
I said the same things,
including concerns about helping The Rebels.
I was right.
Libyans Say Sharia Will Be Law of the Land
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/11/libyans-say-sharia-will-be-law-of-the-land.html
Christians in Libya being rounded up and beaten
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/9927447/Christians-in-Libya-being-rounded-up-and-beaten.html
Can't remember how much I posted about it, but I felt the same way, absolutely.
Snake Plissken
(4,103 posts)Give me a fucking break.
The GOP Welfare Queens only have a problem with debt when the money is used on American citizens who really need it.
tofuandbeer
(1,314 posts)WillyT
(72,631 posts)Catherina
(35,568 posts)Gen. Dempsey: Syria no-fly zone could cost US $1B per month
By Jeremy Herb - 07/22/13 05:27 PM ET
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told lawmakers Monday that a no-fly zone in Syria would cost $500 million initially and as much as $1 billion per month to maintain.
In a letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Dempsey also warned that a no-fly zone risks U.S. forces deploying into Syria if U.S. aircraft are shot down.
...
We must anticipate and be prepared for the unintended consequences of our action, Dempsey wrote. Should the regime's institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.
Dempseys letter comes after he and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) got into a heated dispute over U.S. military intervention in Syria at his confirmation hearing last week.
...
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/312675-gen-dempsey-syria-no-fly-zone-could-cost-1b-per-month
questionseverything
(9,645 posts)In an August 2013 article titled Larry Summers and the Secret End-game Memo, Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally. The vehicle to be used was the Financial Services Agreement of the World Trade Organization.
The end-game would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and usury charging rent for the use of money is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Publicly-owned banks are also a threat to the mushrooming derivatives business, since governments with their own banks dont need interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, or investment-grade ratings by private rating agencies in order to finance their operations.
Bank deregulation proceeded according to plan, and the government-sanctioned and -nurtured derivatives business mushroomed into a $700-plus trillion pyramid scheme. Highly leveraged, completely unregulated, and dangerously unsustainable, it collapsed in 2008 when investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, taking a large segment of the global economy with it. The countries that managed to escape were those sustained by public banking models outside the international banking net.
These countries were not all Islamic. Forty percent of banks globally are publicly-owned. They are largely in the BRIC countriesBrazil, Russia, India and Chinawhich house forty percent of the global population. They also escaped the 2008 credit crisis, but they at least made a show of conforming to Western banking rules. This was not true of the rogue Islamic nations, where usury was forbidden by Islamic teaching. To make the world safe for usury, these rogue states had to be silenced by other means. Having failed to succumb to economic coercion, they wound up in the crosshairs of the powerful US military.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)Suggestion for my country. How about getting back to manufacturing and actually having something behind the dollar instead of forcing other countries at gunpoint to finance our neoliberal parasitic, non-productive ways that only enrich the 1%?
The BRIC countries are so sick of it that, at the G20, they set up the framework to finance a rival bank to the IMF to the tune of $100 Billion for infrastructure development (at non-parasitic rates) in their member states.
Thanks for your post. I'll look for the Greg Palast piece on this.
questionseverything
(9,645 posts)Snake Plissken
(4,103 posts)because the money is going to be used to kill Brown people.
Puzzledtraveller
(5,937 posts)truedelphi
(32,324 posts)In fact, Sen. Rand Paul was quite eloquent in his speech against going out on this particular war limb.
SlimJimmy
(3,180 posts)golfguru
(4,987 posts)So the brown people theory may not apply here.
pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)And $$$ is one of the worst reasons for opposing it.
Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)In the hearings, U.S. officials put the cost "in the tens of millions." Though it now sounds like the original plan is expanding and we may need a new cost estimate.
So the currently projected cost in any case--coming out of the military budget--wouldn't make a blip in the debt clock.
Personally, I think the repurcussions of a strike will only draw the U.S. in further, militarily--with potentially humongous costs.
But money, and U.S. debt, will still be one of the worst reasons for opposing this.
Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)of our preferred missiles for the original strike as it was proposed cost 1.5 mil a pop and they were talking about lobbing them for 60 and even possibly 90 days. I agree with you that such intervention is sure to escalate but I differ in that I believe (possibly due to cynicism) that it will be a massive escalation, more in the trillion range.
I do agree that money is the least noble of arguments to be made against wholesale death, but I also believe lack of it kills people right here at home and is perhaps therefore a more valid argument than you may be considering it to be at first evaluation.
pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)...I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)Bring it on!
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)Last edited Fri Sep 6, 2013, 05:59 PM - Edit history (2)
Help it get repeated."
Why we had that lovely war of short duration in Iraq, commencing in 2003, and that one got paid for by all the gas we shipped over to this country for free! And it only lasted ten days, or was it weeks... Oh, wait, it was TEN YEARS!
Two hard working American authors recently released a book entitled "The Three Billion Dollar War," and the truth is, by the time they got the book written, the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan is estimated to be approximately 6 trillion bucks.
Anyone telling the American people that some military action is only going to cost millions of dollars will also be telling you that they are telling the truth. But I sure can't even remember a war we have fought that was not based on lies, and ended up destroying truth every time any report was issued about what was going on.
pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)We know too well where this can go, and at what cost.
nikto
(3,284 posts)The potentially enormous co$t is a good "add-on" reason, and does reflect on US Morality,
since we have such a stingy streak in areas of human concern like healthcare and many other benefits,
always arguing over cutting/eliminating the $$ spent.
What you spend your money on is an indication of what you value.
Imagine a gang-member with kids, who has no food in the fridge, and nothing but potato chips on the shelf,
goes out and spends a bunch of ca$h
on a shiny new AK47 to get those rival Crips.
I see a parallel here.
Blanks
(4,835 posts)That's what really sold me on the last war.
nikto
(3,284 posts)Once the attacks start, anything can happen, including huge unintended consequences.
Please think it through with this in mind.
Once started, wars like this can quickly take on a life of their own.
History has many examples.
I am old enough to remember the Vietnam era, when that was the case, bigtime.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...is to change the people (not) discussing it.
- It's pretty simple. Follow a party, or follow your conscience.....
K&R
hibbing
(10,094 posts)Always money for war, only when it will actually help the majority of Americans does the deficit become and issue, then it is always programs that help people that get cut. I'm getting sick of it all.
Peace
nikto
(3,284 posts)Thank you.
wandy
(3,539 posts)to wait for the shooting to start.
Yes this is war. THEN threaten to shut the government down.
Not sure they wouldn't get anything they wanted.
They have about five weeks to put this together.
I haven't the slightest doubt that they would do it.
markiv
(1,489 posts)we would be wise to think about that, when we act for our 'credibility'
grilled onions
(1,957 posts)Considering the fact that they seem to be so concerned about spending and saving they should be forced to put a little away here and there(and social programs would not be allowed to be cut for this--that's too easy and far too much of that kind of thinking has been going around lately) and that their war of the month club would not be allowed to start until they completely paid for a good chunk of it.
grahamhgreen
(15,741 posts)MindMover
(5,016 posts)tell us poor folk to save, save, save, BUY BONDS, BUY BONDS, BUY BONDS.....
dickthegrouch
(3,169 posts)Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)treestar
(82,383 posts)Just another distraction. Allowing the use of chemical weapons is a bigger deal than a bigger deficit or the lack of spending on other things.
People don't want to face up to allowing chemical weapons attacks and are thinking of all sorts of distractions.
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)noiretextatique
(27,275 posts)But there is an even more striking instance of the United States ignoring use of the chemical weapons that killed tens of thousands of people -- during the grinding Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. As documented in 2002 by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, the Reagan administration knew full well it was selling materials to Iraq that was being used for the manufacture of chemical weapons, and that Iraq was using such weapons, but U.S. officials were more concerned about whether Iran would win rather than how Iraq might eke out a victory. Dobbs noted that Iraqs chemical weapons use was hardly a secret, with the Iraqi military issuing this warning in February 1984: The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/history-lesson-when-the-united-states-looked-the-other-way-on-chemical-weapons/2013/09/04/0ec828d6-1549-11e3-961c-f22d3aaf19ab_blog.html
any money is always an issue with war.
Logical
(22,457 posts)workinclasszero
(28,270 posts)Trillions and trillions!!!!!! No worries at all!
But..your kid is hungry? You have no job? No healthcare? TOUGH SHIT LOSER!!! We ain't got no money...its...all gone! Yeah, thats it!
n2doc
(47,953 posts)After it is started. Then it will be "We need to cut food stamps and medicaid in order to pay for the Syrian War. We must be responsible!"
LevelB
(194 posts)No one gives a hoot about the debt, except for using it as a cudgel to beat us over the head.
davidn3600
(6,342 posts)We were supposed to end this nation-building bullshit back when we got the GOP out of office. Now we are picking up where the neo-cons left off.
Im sick of sending billions and billions of dollars building up these mid-east countries that hate our guts when we got people here who are starving in the streets of America, people who can't afford healthcare, and a soaring national debt. Yet we have plenty of money to bomb other countries and build multi-billion dollar domestic spy facilities.
City Lights
(25,171 posts)It's infuriating how we never have money for anything but wars.
xfundy
(5,105 posts)nikto
(3,284 posts)tecelote
(5,122 posts)Oh, well, maybe you (the people) don't. But, we (your representatives) do!
So do big business.
War is what makes this country great!