Earthside Comments: One week from today is the time being reported when President Obama will announce his new plan for the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan. Hints are that Obama will escalate.
Furthermore, there are Dimocrat leaders in Congress who want us to pay even more for this war that is already eight years old. Understand that the federal government already spends a trillion dollars a year on the military and military-related agencies. Yet, no one is proposing closing any of our bases in Italy and/or Germany and/or Bulgaria and/or Japan and/or Spain and on and on.
The ditsy and frenetic radical Republicans and their sad Tea Party allies offer no reasonable alternative on war policy (indeed, they are worse in agitating for starting World War III with an attack on Iran). Nevertheless, the descent of Pres. Obama into the pit of the military-industrial-complex swamp of endless war certainly means that our tepid political support for him draws to an end.
What average Americans are to do to resist elected officials that seemingly never heed the will of the people is the question. We want genuine health care insurance reform and we get nothing or what appears to be a huge subsidy to insurance companies; we want U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and we get dithering or escalation; we want an end to corporate welfare for Wall Street and we get trillion dollar bailouts; we want a plan to revitalize American manufacturing and we get even more offshore outsourcing and Wal-Martization; we want campaign finance reform that will end the legal bribery of elected officials and we get absolutely nothing.
The American system of representative democracy is clearly broken ... and the two major political parties, for all their heated rhetoric about each other, are just different sides of the same corporately minted coin (as the eight years of Bush/Cheney definitively proved).
The Tea Party had the germ of a decent idea, that what we need is a grassroots political revolt against the elitists of the Washington-Wall Street Axis, but they let themselves become stooges for radio talk show hucksters, partisan Republicans and the greed of the mega-transnational corporations.
As the 'hope' and 'change' mirage of Obama already may be coming to a whimpering end, perhaps a new grassroots movement will emerge to stand for the Republic and the real will of the people, devoted to real democracy and cutting down the oppression of the corporate state.
That's about all that is left that can save us.
Obama Plans to Send 34,000 More Troops to Afghanistan | McClatchy Newspapers
President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he's called "a war of necessity" in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said. ...
War Surtax: 'Pay As You Fight' | Politico.com
Call it “pay as you fight.”After months of listening to conservatives caterwaul over deficits and health care, senior House Democrats want a graduated surtax on individuals and corporations to pay for another big drain on the treasury: the Afghanistan war.
Three full committee chairmen — including the House’s top tax writer, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) — are backing the initiative together with the chair of the party caucus, Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), and close allies of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. ...
U.S. military spending in Afghanistan had reached $3.6 billion a month this summer — or more than $43 billion a year, according to estimates by the Congressional Research Service. And in the course of meeting with lawmakers, Obama has used a rough measuring stick that every 1,000 troops added will add another $1 billion to this annual basis. ...
Dubbed the “Share the Sacrifice Act,” the six-page bill exempts anyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan since the 2001 terrorist attacks as well as families who have lost an immediate relative in the fighting. But middle-class households earning between $30,000 and $150,000 would be asked to pay 1% on top of their tax liability today — a more sweeping approach than many Democrats have been willing to embrace.
By comparison, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has spoken only of an added tax on the wealthy. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) remains hesitant about any surtax to cover the war: “Someone has to demonstrate how it can be done,” he told POLITICO in a statement Monday.
Watch what they do, not what they say.
The Pentagon Garrisons the Gulf | Nick Turse/TomDispatch.com/CommonDreams.org
... The CIA efforts to topple Iran's government in the 1950s, Washington's support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, the Pentagon's troop presence in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s -- all were considered canny geopolitical moves in their time; all had unforeseen and devastating consequences. The money the Pentagon has recently been pouring into the nations of the Persian Gulf to bulk up base infrastructure has only tied the U.S. ever more tightly to the region's autocratic, often unpopular regimes, while further arming and militarizing an area traditionally considered unstable. The Pentagon's Persian Gulf base build-up has already cost Americans billions in tax dollars. What the costs in "blowback" will be remains the unknown part of the equation.
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