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There have been a lot of conversations regarding the investigation and prosecution of Bush / Cheney & Co. for their criminal destruction of lives and property in pursuit of wealth for themselves and their friends. There are also a lot of questions regarding the TARP money like where is it going and why? Both lines of questioning are vital to our country. Guaranteed that I myself will be sounding the charge on both of these as well as every progressive blog in the country.
I think we’re missing something here. We are all in shock over our economy. There is a desire for us to band together as a nation to pull through this. I agree, but I don’t think we can do that until we really look at how we got here. The simple fact being, that if we don’t really know how we got here, then our solutions will likely be ineffective. We cannot recover our economy or our government, if the people created this disaster are still in power, spinning the recovery plans themselves as either a cover-up to their own guilty deeds or as simply perpetrating even more of the same greedy manuvers
In the 8 years of BushCo gluttony, thievery, murder and lies; our country has spent (lost) trillions of dollars. The US Federal deficit increased. The Federal debt is now at 10 Trillion dollars. Certainly, Bush & Cheney didn’t spend it all, but for the part that they did spend – where did it go? I mean, we borrowed money from China and all over the place so we could spend it on something today. Right here and right now. But…where did we spend it? Whom did we pay it to?
Some things we know about:
- Ungodly amounts of cash gone missing in Iraq: Here, here and here.
- Defense Industries: all hail the king, lord & master of taxpayer money sucking!
- US military spending accounts for 48 percent, or almost half, of the world’s total military spending
- US military spending is more than the next 46 highest spending countries in the world combined
- US military spending is 5.8 times more than China, 10.2 times more than Russia, and 98.6 times more than Iran.
- Companies like Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumann, Boeing, General Dynamics, KBR, Halliburton, Blackwater, etc.
- Since the 1950′s when President Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address, the war profiteers have been waving flags in our faces while they suck most of the money out of every the US taxpayer. More than anything else, really.
Someone mentioned camping at the door of these execs…attractive idea because of the public accountability aspect. Much better to publicize them by name on the Internet and list exactly how much they made. I want to see the faces and know the names of the people that stole America’s future. Over $4 trillion in Defense spending since Bush took office. Checks were written and cashed. Like the FBI says when chasing organized crime…follow the money.
This is not about some Liberal desire for a witch hunt. This is about fixing the problem. The criminals that robbed the American taxpayer of trillions of dollars are exposed to the light of day, the system of corruption will continue. When they invoke ‘national security’ as an argument for their continued secrecy, I will say ‘bullshit’ that’s just a cover up. Besides, our national security, the real national security has gone down the toilet because we allowed these war profiteers to plunder the nation. Their call for secrecy is a manipulation of real concern for our country into a shell game to keep their foul deeds from seeing the light of day.
People with nothing to hide, don’t hide.
These thieves, liars, murderers and despots fear scrutiny. That’s why Net Neutrality is the big deal that it is. It is no coincidence that there is pressure for the Internet to be regulated in ways the allow them to silence dissenters by making the Internet too expensive for them. The war profiteers and resource rapists (oil, coal, mining) reap their insane profits through secret deals made with secretive politicians.
So, today as Barack Obama begins his journey, so do we all. I can tell you now that I am not ‘letting this go’ for ‘the good of the country’ as the all-too-familar chorus sounds from GOP congressmen & women. The country has already ‘let this go’ quite far enough. The way to stop corruption and deceipt is to name them, see them, admit they exist and by what power. It does not end by cleaning up after them in silence. That only sets the stage for the problem to be even worse when it comes back around (and it will come back around).
-gadfly
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on Jan 22nd, 2009 at 04:35
We see how much they spend but what I want to know is How much IS there? How much does the government collect? What is the number we are working with? And what is the point of all of them doing this just to collect money when, when you reach a certain level, money doesn't even matter to people with that kind of power? They're the government, they can print their own money, they can make as much as they want, they haven't held to holding its equivalent in gold in decades. Everybody says it's about the money but it must be something else. It's more about withholding money. There doesn't seem to be any point in following the money back because we're never going to see it again, it's spent – and we'll spend more to find out what we already know – it's gone. Your two key words are “we allowed”. We did. We sat back as a nation for eight years and watched it all play out and nobody stopped it. Every bit of it is on video tape/CNN AS IT HAPPENED and we didn't march, we didn't demand an explanation, we didn't demand that things be undone. I never heard a peep when Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol practically in his first month of office. The nation as a group changed the channel and smoked another cigarette.
The problem is with the psychology of the nation. We need to change the psychology of the nation. Americans have this heroic vision of themselves that they don't live up to at all and we need to be consistent in thought, word and deed. We have been in a state of ethical anarchy. We have all but abandoned the rules of polite society and lord! do we need them. We have laid waste to every last one of each other's boundaries, which has led to everyone feeling unstable and unsafe. We treat each other poorly in day-to-day life and that only magnifies as it filters up the levels of our government system. They're distilled to super-evil and they're a product of us. They are what happens when we don't act properly and fight for what we say we believe in.
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