Ike, Losing Touch With Reality and Briefs

Cost Of Losing Touch With Reality

$1T (and a lot of soldiers) by the end of May 2010.

As a well-known pre-Rove, pre-Gingrich, pre-GWBush, pre-Cheney, pre-Palin Republican once said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

-Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

• Obama Looks Backward
  In gross violation of his long-standing policy of not looking backward (as, for example, to enforce the law and investigate and prosecute those who committed war crimes, or torture, or enabled torture,or warrantless wiretapping), Pres. Obama, using one of the hoariest old style Washington/Presidential political tricks, has ordered a new Commission for an investigation of "the root causes" of the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon attack on American coastal and food supply security. If spokesperson Robert Gibbs' statements recently are any guide, Gibbs and Obama will attempt to evade and avoid any comment on the disaster for at least the next six months by saying they are waiting for the Commission report. Interestingly, Pres. Obama omitted from the scope of the Commission's work any inquiry into how he and his transition team came to select offshore oil drilling booster Ken Salazar for the position of Interior Secretary.

• Stealing Social Security
  If at the end of a long week spending 45 hours digging ditches for a promised $15 per hour, your employer (backed up by the local sheriff who was bribed by your employer) told you the pay was reduced to $10 per hour, would you think you had been defrauded? Would you have difficulty differentiating between the effect of the action of your employer (backed by the bribed sheriff) and the action of a thief who walked into your home and took $225 out of your walllet?
  
  If at the end of a long work career spending 45 years digging ditches for an expected payment from Social Security (for which you paid with a payroll deduction every week for 45 years), the government told you that your Social Security payments were being reduced and you had to work another five or ten years in order to keep Merrill Lynch supplied with $1 million office renovations for the President of Merrill Lynch and to keep Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citicorp, Wells Fargo and a few other companies supplied with your low cost (or no cost) dollars so they could continue paying billions of dollars in "bonuses" to the people who managed to wreck the American economy, would you think you had been defrauded? Would you have difficulty differentiating between the action of your government and the action of a thief who walked into your home and took money out of your wallet?
  

• Executive Perquisites Increased At Some Government Insured Banks
  "Marie Antoinette could fit into this crowd without missing a beat."
  
  This "illustrates the power of CEOs to dictate every term in their compensation agreement . . . If the CEO wants to go to Aspen, or the South of France for his vacation, and wants to fly on the corporate jet, well then, he should expend the vast sums of compensation shareholders have given him to do that."
  

• Chris Mathews: Is Obama Merely A Vatican Observer?
  Mathews opines Obama does not want to take ownership of the foreign pillaging for profit (by British Petroleum) of America's environment. Obama has ownership of this issue whether he likes it or not. Obama's Interior Secretary approved (or failed to stop) the permit (without a statutorily required environmental impact statement) for British Petroleum to drill in over 5,000 feet of water (at which depth wells had been located only rarely or never before). Obama knew, or in the exercise of reasonable care should have known, that Salazar favored more offshore drilling. Obama knew, or in the exercise of reasonable care should have known, that people supported by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were still present at the agency which supervised the lease, the permit, and the drilling.