Soldiers of Fortune vs. Food Stamps

Juan Cole; Professor at the University of Michigan states-”Drone strikes, electronic surveillance and stealth engagements by military units such as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), as well as dependence of private corporations, mercenary armies and terrorist groups, are now arguably more common tools of US foreign policy than conventional warfare or diplomacy.”

Jeremy Scahill, interviewing the commander of government forces in Yemen about the devastating attack by militants in 2011, the commander said as the Yemeni military began fighting the militants, the men from Yemen’s Central Security Forces (CSF) fled, abandoning heavy weaponry as they retreated, leaving behind heavy artillery pieces, modern antiaircraft weapons, a number of tanks and armored transports in addition to large quantities of different kinds of ammunition. When the Yemeni forces tried to repel the militants in early June, they were attacked by the militants using artillery seized from the CSF units”. The counter terrorism unit is armed, trained and funded by the United States.

From the AP March 11, 2012-”Officials warn that the group (AQAP) has taken broad advantage of the unrest in Yemen to expand its foothold in the south, capture weapons, ammunition and equipment and score successes against the Yemeni military. “

From the same AP article, “While no agreements have been cemented, U. S. defense officials said the Pentagon and the State Department are putting together as much as $75 million in military assistance which could begin to flow this year.” Oh that’s right, since they have a “new” government, we can start sending them money again, it’s that easy!

An article in the Nation magazine said Ron Paul’s largest donor founded a controversial defense contractor Palantir Technologies. “The company profits from government espionage work for the CIA, the FBI and other agencies. Last year it was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US will supply rebels in Syria with intelligence. Which contractor is going to be gathering the “intelligence” to be supplied?

We have money for contractors and mercenaries, but the GOP wants to cut back on food stamps to prevent cuts to the defense Department. From the AP 4-18-12 “Republicans controlling the House are eyeing big cut to food stamps as they piece together legislation to trim $261 billion from the federal budget over the next decade, hoping to forestall major Pentagon cutbacks.

Government is being privatized but the privateers have convinced everyone that food stamps are a major cause of government deficit. Never mind all the defense, security and “intelligence” gathering contractors behind the curtains, they’re just protecting America. After all, somebody’s gotta supply the enemy, might as well be us, right? And think of all the jobs created for mercenaries, the job market must be tough in this economy.

Blaming Regulations Rings Hollow

I keep hearing that government is incompetent, can’t do anything right and should get out of the way, especially when it comes to financial regulations.
As reported on the PBS NewsHour: “The JOBS Act supporters in Congress argued it will create jobs by helping startup firms raise capital. Under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or JOBS law, such companies have longer exemptions from disclosing financial information and don't have to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission until they have 2,000 shareholders, instead of the current 500. The statute also permits so-called crowd funding, allowing small online sales of stock to a large number of investors.”

John Coffee is a professor of law at Columbia Law School specializing in corporate and securities law. He testified about the new law on Capitol Hill and said, “Congress is in effect saying, welcome back, go and sell stock your old-fashioned way by promoting it with inflated recommendations. That may work for a couple offerings, but that's a short-term perspective. You will lose investor confidence. And when you lose investor confidence, the cost to capital goes up and all companies will be hurt.” Where’s the charges of incompetence in failing to safeguard “business confidence” now?

The administration is eliminating regulations, which according to John Coffey, lessen government oversight creating the same situations which allowed shadow banking of sub prime derivatives sold with triple A ratings. Even when the current administration “gets government out of the way” it’s barley noticed. Yet the charge of too many regulations due to an incompetent government will continue, even though, it may not be true.

This bill curbs SEC authority and says John Coffey “It tells a variety of basically sensible self-regulators, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and other self-regulators, they no longer have any authority over these emerging growth companies.” “But you have written some permanent rules now that allow those companies that want to hide in the dark to do so.”

Letting banks operate in the dark is what led to the global financial meltdown. Where’s the charge of incompetence now? It should be evident that self regulation does not exist in the gargantuan financial industry that has become the US economy. Add to that more opportunities to take advantage of weaker rules, all on line with little supervision.

The complaint of too many regulations isn’t always necessarily true but it does redirect focus away from laws like this that pass without much attention. Maybe that’s the point.

Regression isn't just about receding hairlines

Talking about birth control is regressive. But then again maybe that’s the whole point, to roll back all progressive legislation ever passed from 1900 forward.

Many of the New Deal banking laws have been eliminated or circumvented, and according to Jeff Madrick in his book “The Age of Greed- “during the Reagan years antitrust bashing was fashionable rhetoric through the rest of the 1980,’s” wrote an antitrust lawyer. Funding for the Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Justice Department to investigate the monopolistic implications of mergers were cut in half over the course of the Reagan administration. Large size and market share were no longer standards for judging abusive monopoly power.”

Between regression on banking regulations and corporate consolidation, monopolies have gained the power to control the issues. Controlling a woman’s choice over birth control is an issue, but corporate control of wages and prices resulting in upheaval and a rise in poverty is not an issue. Controlling women’s bodies is in vogue, controlling abusive power isn’t even noticed, and it’s certainly not an issue. Just goes to show how the public aim is directed away from more important in depth issues such as the economy; the housing crisis, and ever-rising gas prices to focus on personal, divisive and hot button issue such as contraception.

We don’t want public money going to pay for anyone’s birth control, nor do we want public money going into regulatory agencies to protect against monopolistic abuses of power either.

Birth control is only a diversion, a misdirected stepping stone to complete regression on all progress made on behalf of all citizens in the past century. This is just a smoke screen to cause emotional distress over already settled personal issues, meanwhile the corporate/banking industry is consolidating it’s power over a country of distracted citizens. The saddest and most disturbing aspect of this is how easily the public is fooled into looking the other way, as if on command. It’s truly a shame how far we’ve fallen; literally to the point where we’re stabbing each other in the back as we cut our own throats. Meanwhile our elected politicians sworn to protect the voters best interests are laughing along with their gift-bearing lobbyists all the way to their banker-backers.

Bilking the Boomers

When President Reagan raised payroll taxes Back in the ‘80’s it was to create a nest egg for Social Security. Now the nest egg is due, but since we skewed the books to cover the banks mistakes and endless wars; bailouts and corrupt payoffs, we talk about dismantling Social Security amid hysterics over baby boomers retiring and getting what‘s owed to them, the pittance that it is. Lost is the fact that millions of these same citizens were drafted to fight in Vietnam. That’s the final insult to our veterans after the way they’ve been treated for the last forty years. There’s plenty of bumper stickers supporting the troops, well, until they retire, then we’re afraid of paying their fair share. If you listen to the bankers and the politicians, now they’re a threat to the financial future of our nation.

Over the decades we’ve been trained to believe that we don’t have to take our obligations to fellow human beings as seriously as we do towards banks. The US government has been bailing out banks since Nixon was president. Once commercial and investment banks were allowed to merge, the banks used taxpayer deposits to make bad bets, and every time we bailed them out with taxpayer money. All administrations said we had to cover these bad bets or it would affect all assets of the economy.

According to the banks, and the politicians who they (own) lobby, these massive bank bad bets aren’t considered a burden on the nation’s debt, only the “boomers” are a burden, the very people who paid into it for ‘security’. and then paid to bail them out. For decades economists told us reducing taxes on the rich and powerful wouldn’t create deficits, it would shrink government, which plainly hasn’t worked, it’s had the opposite effect.
The motto of VEVA (Vietnam Era Veteran’s Association) is: “Never Again Will One Generation of Veterans Abandon Another“. Society should take a lesson from these retiring veterans they so were so willing to first sacrifice, and now blame for the economy.

Corporations Without Conscience

There once was a time in the US, when actions had moral consequences. The book “The Gentle Infantryman” by William Boyd Young is about an American soldier fighting in Germany during World War ll, and while the names are fictitious, the book states the events are real.

The soldier writes of an officer planning the moves of the troops using push pins on a bulletin board without fully realizing that the push pins represented real people. His bulletin board movements are difficult to accomplish on the battlefield and wreak much suffering upon the troops doing the actual fighting. The commanding officer is later encouraged to tour the scene of battle, and after seeing all the carnage resulting from his bulletin board strategy, this officer resigned immediately.

Unlike the General who was willing to observe the consequences of his actions, there is a great disconnect between actions and consequences of global corporations. The leaders of these corporations push us around like we’re pins on a bulletin board. Just as the WWll officer was detached from his actions, so aren’t the CEO’s of banks and mega corporations. They have no clue what their actions inflict upon real people. Furthermore, unlike the officer, they don’t care about the suffering the consequences of their actions bring to millions, as long as they make the most profit possible.

When the Supreme Court said corporations are people, they created a moral inequality based on money, considering the fact that the corporatists (the corporate people) have more money than many citizens will ever earn in a lifetime. They used this wealth to build an industry of financial tactics to dismantle all New Deal banking regulations, bringing millions of Americans into economic hardship and financial insecurity.

After decades of this legal onslaught, it’s now just a handful of men who control giant industries upon which we all depend. And they will have no argument to their decisions, much as the WWll officer heeded no warnings and men died needlessly.

This is why corporations are not people, unlike the officer of a different time, they have no conscience. They exist only to maximize profits at whatever the human cost. They are detached from real human beings and think only of mega profits and who’s “earning” the most.

Conservative Crush

An Iraq War veteran writes in the Nation magazine about one of his missions in Iraq to restore order. As he explains it “you go in with one mentality: crush the other side.”

After attending the Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park, this same veteran said “Of course, if my goal was to crush free speech, I might use a little misdirection too. As in any war, I would dehumanize the enemy: make sure the protesters aren’t perceived as ordinary people with legitimate concerns but rather as hippies and anarchists who force police to work overtime on the tax payer dime. Then I would send far more police than necessary, pre-emptively ordering some troops into riot gear, to stir tension and make escalation inevitable. The singular focus thus becomes the “clashes”: police and protesters absorb one another’s frustrations, and I’ve successfully contained the problem by pitting the 99 percent against itself, while eclipsing the issues that led to the protest in the first place.”

And this from an AP news brief -“Boston spent $1.4 million on police overtime at the Occupy Boston encampment, but overall police overtime was down in 2011 by about 6 percent.“ “A media representative for Occupy Boston tells the Boston Herald there was no need to spend $1.4 million to patrol and dismantle the encampment because protesters were not “an armed gang“. Both of these articles were printed in February 2012. Chilling when read side by side.

The tactics of suppression of free speech are being used at this very moment, but this is being eclipsed by taxpayer funded contraception, and bases on the moon. The Occupy protests did not require restoration of order, because there was no dis-order. They required the rule of law be applied for a redress of grievances, which was denied. The law, our law, is being subverted; but no political party seems to be interested in this assault on freedom and liberty. The “made for TV“ assaults capture all the attention.

And since conservatives admire experience so much, perhaps they could appreciate the experiences of a recent combat veteran who understands when laws are not upheld, suppression will be enforced; with the singular goal of “crushing the other side“, even if it’s the side of our constitutional rights to legally change our laws for the common good. Those in power holding the purse strings will suppress any and all that gets between them and total control. No public outcries of disagreement will be allowed.

Class Envy Doesn't Discriminate

Mitt Romney said he is not going to apologize for being successful, which misses the whole point. Success is not on trial, it’s the less than stellar, and underhanded business/banking practices conducted throughout the past half century that should be on trial.

According to the book “Age of Greed”, by Jeff Madrick, during the seventies when stock prices were low, Wall Street investment banks began looking for other ways to make profits, and created the LBO (leveraged buy out). If a company had low stock prices, they became a potential target for a hostile takeover. To stay in business, many companies began acting like they were being taken over by lowering wages and slashing employees.

Wall Street investment banks started the LBO mania, and investment banks represented both the buyer and the target. This allowed them to have insider information concerning a company which was being targeted or purchased. Knowing both sides of the merger prompted Wall Street bankers to take big risks betting on the new merged companies. This was just one of their “less than stellar” business practices which corrupted the rest of the sectors of the economy to the point of being totally dependent upon the financial engineering of Wall Street to make a profit.

When Wall Street investment banks became public, they could use other people’s money, subsequently they became the innovators in this new world economy of finance where risk was no longer a deterrent to bad business practices.

Hostile takeovers still rage today; Bain Capital is involved and helps fund them. This is why there is discontent and resentment for those who have been successful in the bad business practices banks have brought us. On top of that, the banks get their funds replenished from the Federal Government, and it’s back to business as usual. But for homeowners and taxpayers in general it’s a totally different story. Millions of Americans have lost all financial value in our savings and especially in our property. Our life’s work, gone. But after loosing all that, it’s our taxes that are replenishing the coffers of the banks. We’re not envious at all… we’re angry that we’ve been robbed for following the rules. Look what the banks along with the government’s help has done to us. Mitt Romney calls it class envy. Far from it, it‘s an understanding that banks have wrecked the financial system as we knew it.

Nomi Prins in her book “It Takes a Pillage” said, “on Wall Street it’s not even how much, it’s who is making the most money that counts.” Talk about class envy, it’s everywhere, and especially on Wall Street not just Main Street.