USA: Totally Kicking Ass

Holy Christ Almighty, this country is taking a nose dive.  Not to be alarmist or anything, just saying.  DAMN YO.  Dark times for God’s Favorite these days, and the past couple weeks have seen some really disturbing signs.  This article will appear to be many things, so let me start by saying what it’s not.

This is not crowing over the failures of the Bush Administration.  It’s just that any discussion of the problems being faced by the United States winds up being a laundry list of the failures of the Bush Administration.  It’s frankly not my fault that he is a draft-dodging rich frat kid with a disturbingly low IQ who has managed to become the King Midas of pigshit.  We just report the facts—humans do what humans do.

This is not a hand-wringing, “oh my god we’re all gonna die”, invest-in-gold and shoot-your-banker Gloom and Doom routine.  America’s economy has been a collective hallucenation for decades now.  It doesn’t matter if there’s no gold in Fort Knox, our Almighty Dollar is backed up by nuclear f***ing weapons and the US really can do whatever it wants.  ...for now.

And finally, this is not an authoritative, well-written, or exhaustively-researched essay.  This is a damn Brainsturbator post, hopefully you people know better than to just trust me by now.  With all that said: ONWARDS.

It Gets No Clearer Than This

The federal governmentss gross debt in the consolidated financial statements was about $8 trillion as of September 30, 2005. This number excludes such items as the gap between the present value of future promised and funded Social Security and Medicare benefits, veterans’ health care, and a range of other liabilities (e.g., federal employee and veteran benefits payable), commitments, and contingencies that the federal government has pledged to support. Including these items, the federal government’s fiscal exposures now total more than $46 trillion, up from about $20 trillion in 2000.

This translates into a burden of about $156,000 per American or approximately $375,000 per full-time worker, up from $72,000 and $165,000 respectively, in 2000. These amounts do not include future costs resulting from Hurricane Katrina or the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Continuing on this unsustainable path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living, and ultimately our national security.

That’s courtesy of the raging liberals over at the United States Department of the Treasury’s Financial Management Service.  You can read the report right here.

Most important line there, not to insult your intelligence too much, was the one in bold about Iraq and Afghanistan.  The conflict in Iraq, as of this morning, had totaled out at $350 billion.  Katrina was chillax by comparison, costing only around $150 billion, give or take the smashed illusion that your government will protect you.

Bush was in the news today asking for $100 billion more dollars for the war effort.  This is on top of the current 2006 budget, which provides 70 billion dollars to this war effort.  The Pentagon wants even more: they requested $130 billion in “emergency funds”.

This is the same Pentagon that was hit by a plane the day after Donald Rumsfield announced that the Department of Defense had lost track of “$2.3 trillion in transactions” in 2001 alone. 

Hilariously, It Gets Worse

Apparently our Army is broke, too.  Across the country, bases have laid off their janitorial staff—lawns get mowed and toilets get cleaned by officers now. 

Of the $1.9 trillion the U.S. spent on weaponry in that period [from 1990 to 2005], adjusted for inflation, the Air Force received 36 percent and the Navy got 33 percent. The Army took in 16 percent, it says. Despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both dominated by ground forces, the ratio hasn’t changed significantly.

Of course, as Bush’s own Iraq Study Group reported:

“Our ground forces have been stretched nearly to the breaking point. The defense budget as a whole is in danger of disarray.”

Perhaps the most ominous signs are also the most amusing.  Take a look at this recent gem from the AP wire:

WASHINGTON—Given rising metal prices, the pennies and nickels in your pocket are worth more melted down than their face value—and that has the government worried.

U.S. Mint officials said Wednesday they were putting into place rules prohibiting the melting down of 1-cent and 5-cent coins, with a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000 for people convicted of violating the rule.

Because of the prevailing prices of metals, the cost of producing pennies and nickels exceeds the coins’ face value.

A nickel is 25 percent nickel and 75 percent copper. The metal in one coin costs 6.99 cents for each 5-cent coin.

Modern pennies have 2.5 percent copper content with zinc making up the rest of the coin. The current copper and zinc in a penny are worth 1.12 cents.

I am especially impressed with the sleight of hand at the beginning: “Given rising metal prices...” Hilarious.  I wonder if they had discussions about the “rising water level” while the Titanic was going down.  It must have been baffling, watching the water level keep climbing beyond all previous expectations.

How to Get a Job at the World Bank

“There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. On a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years.”

That’s Paul Wolfowitz.  You have to admire someone who can think outside the box like that, and by “box” I mean reality.  Again, the Bush Administration’s worst enemies are their own accountants. The Office of Management and Budget insisted the best possible outcome for a restored Iraq oil industry would be $13 billion a year in revenues.  Even the Bush family buddies at the Council on Foriegn Relations put their most optimistic figure at $12 billion.

There are many things to be grateful for, even in the midst of an ongoing military/crime family coup that turns a great country into the biggest open-air asshole farm on Earth.  One of those things is the endless supply of irony and black humor—for some of us, that shit is like oxygen.  Here’s a prime nugget:

“The problem is this,” L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, asserted at a Senate hearing two weeks ago: “The oil infrastructure was severely run down over the last 20 years, and partly because of sanctions over the last decade.”

--from this NYT article

The sanctions, of course, were the result of the US Government’s economic warfare on Iraq instituted in 1991.  This included a total ban on exports of oil, and the constant veto of any medical aid from the UN or it’s member nations.  As a result, somewhere between 500,000 to 1.5 million kids died over the course of 12 years, languishing in hospitals with no medication.  When most Americans bleat about how “things were worse under Saddam”, this knowledge makes it difficult to restrain yourself. 

Remember Madeline Albright, who was asked, on the TV show 60 Minutes, about the human cost of US sanctions against Iraq:

Lesley Stahl: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.

Saddam was a sick little tyrant who we sold weapons to.  He collected horrible art and tortured people for no reason, he gassed entire villages of people he didn’t like.  He didn’t kill hundreds of thousands of little kids, though, you know?  That was us. Not only “us” as in “The United States”, but “us” as in We the People, still too entertained and overweight to mount a long-overdue revolution and stop this kind of passive genocide. 

But now things have degenerated into mere politics.  (I might be a rather unique specimen, being a Surrealist Anarchist and all, but I’m still just another windbag and hypocrite.) If you are interested in learning more about this, or if you have any doubts—any whatsoever—about the naked facts of which I speak, check these out:

Furter Reading for Curious Primates

Iraq Sanctions

FFF Article

Excellent Quotes Collection

Nation article

Iraq Oil Estimates

Archived NYT story

Archived Financial Times story

Iraq War Cost

Bush asks for $100 billion more - CNN

US Department of Treasury Financial Management Service

Government Accounting Office Statement

Frontline Magazine—Indian Perspective

Cost of War clock—depressing