Saving Corporate Ryan

[Daveparts still]

Saving Corporate Ryan
By David Glenn Cox



While the US Senate and House banter over healthcare reform, it is nice to know that there are at least some things that they can agree on.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved compromise legislation to triple non-military aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for each of the next five years as part of a plan to fight extremism with economic development."

We in America cannot have single payer or the public option in health care because they are too expensive. Or so says the political class. I still remember those thousands of flags waving and the millions of joyous people on the Washington Mall. Change we can believe in! A new day! A new way!

“The bill, approved on a voice vote, had been agreed upon between the Senate and House sponsors of legislation passed separately by each chamber earlier this year. The sponsors are Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar and Representative Howard Berman.

"The measure also had the 'full support' of key members of the Obama administration, Senate aides said. It was expected to come before the House of Representatives soon.

"The aid, which will have to be approved by congressional appropriators each year from 2010 to 2014, is aimed at a wide range of development efforts, from funding Pakistani schools to the judicial system and law enforcement agencies.”

A billion and a half dollars per year to fund schools, the judicial system and law enforcement? Pakistan is a country with 427 billion dollars in purchasing power. A country where unemployment is officially listed at 7.4%. A land where 24% live under the official poverty line while the top 10% control 26% of the income; the bottom 10% has access to only 3.9%.

So as American school districts struggle to make ends meet in the face of budget cutbacks, we are going to help to support education in Pakistan? And I wonder what sort of help Pakistan’s judicial branch is in need of as the country was established in 1947 and its legal system is based on English common law. Why then would they need money for its courts? Or do they mean jails? More cops and more jails?

“We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.” (John Kerry April 1971)

This 7.5 billion dollars, passed on a voice vote, is just more money down a rat hole, doled out to the names that have become so common. The contractors that built the shabby schools in Iraq and Afghanistan will now build shabby schools in Pakistan. The judges' pockets will be lined and protected by more and more policemen whose job is not public order but public repression.

Our intentions are as clear as mountain creek water; we seek to purchase influence rather than Democracy. Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is not a harlot to be bought on the street corner for the price of a Tommy gun.” Can America believe that the amount of money offered can change that basic equation?

“We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.” (John Kerry April 1971)

This same strategy has given us Hamid Karzhi in Afghanistan and Jalal Talabani in Iraq, coin-fed quislings who express outrage when their citizens are killed but shut up on command while continuing to cash the checks. Can America and American politicians still believe in this system after a long and consistent pattern of failure?

“We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime.” (John Kerry April 1971)

Where is our change? The change we were promised? If it were just this one expenditure I wouldn’t even mention it. But this is a pattern not of change but of more of the same. The spending of billions of dollars to achieve blatantly political policy objectives while we tell the folks at home, sorry, we don’t have the money.

Cash for Clunkers spent three billion dollars; two thirds of the money was spent on cars manufactured in Asia. It helped to fuel a 1% rise in September durable goods sales. It all sounded so positive until we remember that two billion American tax dollars left the country. A better name for the program would have been the Asian car assistance act. The majority of the benefit went to mega corporations, not to the economy at large.

The $8,000 tax credit for purchasing new homes has been credited for over 325,000 new home sales, and that’s great! But this subsidizes the home building industry while the banks continue to foreclose on 260,000 homeowners each month. Is that really progress? We are losing on both ends, subsidizing purchases while prices fall due to foreclosure.

“Let us admit frankly that it would be only a stopgap. A real economic cure must go to the killing of bacteria in the system rather than to the treatment of external symptoms.” (Franklin Roosevelt)

The bacteria has become a cancer; it has infected both political parties as well as the corporate entities which rule America. Barack Obama ran as an agent of change and instead become the ticket agent for corporate America.

“Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake.” (John Kerry April 1971)

We have walked down a long hallway, misled by poor leadership and direction. It will be impossible to begin the path back towards the correct direction until we admit the mistakes that we have made.

“We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country”
(John Kerry April 1971)

Thirty-eight years later we are still asking the same questions. Why must our service people die for a mistake in Iraq or Afghanistan and now Pakistan? Why do we always have infinite amounts of money for war and contractors and graft, while we cannot even provide basic health care for our own people? Why do we fight the battles to save Corporate Ryan as we ignore John Public?

[1776Forever]

1. "Why do we always have infinite amounts of money for war and contractors and graft?" Indeed!

Has this "aid" ever stopped this kind of terrorist movements before? I don't know if Bosnia was a case for this but in the end it seems to come down to spending money abroad while the citizens that are paying for this go without jobs and support while loosing their homes and health care! Who is the "victim" here?

:rant:

[silversol]

2. always

on the nose!

[DemReadingDU]

3. It's all about big business, lobbyists, the wealthy

profiteering to the max