Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

"I have no debt other than a mortgage on devalued property and student loans for my daughter's college education.  Yet there are millions like me who do not have lobbyists to bail us out."

There are 2 ½ millions homes facing foreclosure and 12 million in troubled circumstances.  30 million U.S. citizens are on food stamps.  Food banks in major U.S. cities are having trouble keeping up with food demand.  In Los Angeles, a line many blocks long, of 10,000 people was lined up at the local food bank.

When President Clinton signed the World Trade Agreement entire factories moved from the U.S. for cheap labor in other nations.  Sure it helped the stock market earnings, but it didn't help the U.S. auto industry.  

Companies like Kellogg's moved its production plant to Mexico while Maytag moved overseas.  With the U.S. manufacturing base moving to obtain cheap labor, naturally the U.S. employee job security vanished to a large degree.  No wonder we have millions unemployed now!

Rome ruled the world for 600 years, Greece 400, while for a long time the sun never set on the British Empire.  After World War Two, England's power declined.  Faraway nations declared their independence.  England called on the U.S.A. for loans to rebuild demolished infrastructure.  The Marshall Plan provided economic help to all of Europe.

At this point in time, following World War Two, the U.S.A., having experienced none of the devastation that World War Two had brought to Europe, was now considered by many the number one world power.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, having seen first hand World War Two devastation, and recognizing that 50 million people had died in World War Two, delivered a prophetic warning.

Eisenhower wisely warned against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.  It was understandable that the U.S. military was proud of its remarkable achievement in bringing World War Two to its conclusion.

The U.S. industrial war machine provided the latest high tech weapons, contributing mightily to ending World War Two.

Eisenhower was aware of the fact that such devastating power now possessed by the U.S. military perhaps could tempt leadership to plunge the nation into a series of wars demonstrating its newly acquired number one world power position.

Unrestrained power became evident, many historians now insist, in the Vietnam War.  A war resulted in over 59,000 U.S. service personnel dead, but combining the total war dead on all sides, including deaths in Vietnam and Cambodia as well, the number was estimated as surpassing 2 ½ million.  

The war machine utilized fears of communism spreading all over Asia.  If Vietnam became a united nation including both north and south, all other Asian nations would fall, it was feared, like a row of dominoes into the hands of communist rule.

The fact that 90% of the Vietnamese favored communism in a poll taken there was ignored.  A democratic vote proved that the majority wanted communism was ignored, when democracy in action didn't favor what the U.S. leadership wanted.

U.S. service personnel were, in effect, forced to fight an un-winnable war, and were killed or wounded -- for what?  They were fighting Vietnam, a nation that had never attacked the U.S.A.

They were fighting a nation whose democratic voice that spoke emphatically to all in the world community that was listening that 90% of the national Vietnamese population wanted to a government led by North Vietnam's current leader Ho Chi Minh.  

Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, in his autobiography revealed that at one strategic point he finally recognized that the Vietnam War was un-winnable.  He resigned, but didn't feel it would be appropriate to express his view at that point.

It is an inconvenient and awkward reality politically to face the fact that the Vietnam War was a tragic and costly mistake.  Some soldiers who fought bravely and loyally are embittered, especially in learning what even Secretary of Defense McNamara has revealed.

Nevertheless, the Vietnam War veterans can rest assured that their service, their loyalty to the U.S., is appreciated by the majority of Americans.

However, they can understand from their personal and often horrifying first-hand war experience that there is nothing more depressingly devastating to all concerned than a needless war.

If those responsible for launching and continuing the Vietnam War had been investigated and brought to justice by being held accountable in U.S. and Geneva courts on the legality of the Vietnam War, others might not have been so quick in launching into the Iraq War.

Why weren't impeachment proceedings brought against George Bush the day after it was discovered that he had launched the U.S. into the Iraq War with a State of the Union fear mongering message about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.  

Bush kept busy pointing fingers at nations he designated were part of an axis of evil.  All this occurred while U.S. service personnel and Iraqis were dying in an unneeded and illegal war, illegal under the U.S. Constitution as well as international law.

Congress displayed great weakness, never once beginning impeachment proceedings on George Bush.  The Iraq War is now the longest conflict in U.S. history, raging pointlessly on at $10 billion a month, with no end in sight.

Iraqis want the U.S. to leave.  They have proven that when 70% of Iraqis were polled they wanted the U.S. to leave.  Riots have followed over one-sided agreements Iraqis don't want to sign.

But Bush continues revving up Air Force One, dashing off to Poland and the Czech Republic, negotiating placing rocket launching pads right on Russian borders, stirring up Russia.  

As if that wasn't enough, for good measure this horror administration, shaking up the Middle East, stirring up fears in Russia, has devastated the U.S. economic system caused by the Republican philosophy of de-regulation of banks and business investing companies.

In the December-January issue of Conde Nast's Portfolio Magazine, Leslie Bennett's article about a Wall Street un-regulated business tycoon is most interesting:

"He was a Wall Street titan on his way up, and so ruthless.  He scared even his fellow tycoons.  If anyone crossed him, he said he would rip the guy's heart out with his bare hands.  The business man across the table blanched.

"Soon, the titan would discard old friends who were not rich or connected enough for the life he coveted.  And he got it all, the top job, the hundreds of billions of dollars, the lavish homes with eight-figure price tags, the museum-worthy art collection.

"Now, his company lies in ruins and his name is synonymous with greed, arrogance and bad judgment.  Yet his enemies couldn't even gloat, the cost of his comeuppance was too great.

"As he and his counterparts drove major institutions into a death spiral, they took much of the world as we knew it down with them.  The entire global culture was instantly transformed."

Republicans voted against the regulatory safeguards that FDR put in place after the Great Depression to insure thieves and crooks never again could control the destiny of the U.S. economy.

But without close supervision, banks began collapsing.  Giving millions of sub-prime mortgage loans, banks sold them as mortgage securities.  Wall Street packaged worthless mortgage securities selling to overseas banks, generating world-wide bank losses in the billions.

Over the top decadence set in.  A hedge-fund operator named Steve Cohen paid, according to a press release, $80 million for an Andy Warhol photo original of Marilyn Monroe.  

Even the New York landmark Hotel Pierre jumped into the real estate bonanza, offering to sell its penthouse suite for $70 million, throwing in the ballroom, along with the penthouse.

Leslie Bennett continued:

"It seemed like the last throes of a doomed empire.  Hedge-fund investors chafed at managers' fees.  Capital's Steve Cohen shocked them all with his 50% performance fee.  The $34,000-a-night hotel rooms, the $175 gold dusted Richard Noveau hamburger at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe, the Algonquin Hotel's $10,000 martini on the rock (the rock in question: a jeweler selected diamonds).  Conspicuous consumption didn't even begin to describe this you're not going to believe life-style -- who were replicating all over the world."

These con artists, business vultures have succeeded in creating a world-wide economic meltdown!  Why aren't these economy destroyers being investigated and properly facing legal prosecution?

Instead the bank and business bailout is costing U.S. taxpayers $700 billion.  Obama's bailout economic stimulus package is $800 billion.  How can the U.S. afford it with an over $10.6 trillion national debt?

We rely on China, Japan and the Saudis to buy U.S. bonds, now that we are a kept nation so deeply in debt.