[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Who Rules America?

[Bill Totten]

by Paul Craig Roberts

VDARE.COM (May 13 2009)


What do you suppose it is like to be elected president of the United
States only to find that your power is restricted to the service of
powerful interest groups?

A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid
off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees,
and a lucrative book contract.  If he is young when he assumes office,
like Bill Clinton and Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure.
Fighting the special interests doesn't pay and doesn't succeed.

On April 30 the primacy of special over public interests was
demonstrated yet again.  The Democrats' bill to prevent 1.7 million
mortgage foreclosures and, thus, preserve $300 billion in home equity by
permitting homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages, was defeated in
the Senate, despite the sixty-vote majority of the Democrats.  The
banksters were able to defeat the bill 51 to 45.

These are the same financial gangsters whose unbridled greed and utter
irresponsibility have wiped out half of Americans' retirement savings,
sent the economy into a deep hole, and threatened the US dollar's
reserve currency role.  It is difficult to imagine an interest group
with a more damaged reputation.  Yet, a majority of "the people's
representatives" voted as the discredited banksters instructed.

Hundreds of billions of public dollars have gone to bail out the
banksters, but when some Democrats tried to get the Senate to do a mite
for homeowners, the US Senate stuck with the banks.  The Senate's motto
is: "Hundreds of billions for the banksters, not a dime for homeowners".

If Obama was naive about well-intentioned change before the vote, he no
longer has this political handicap.

Democratic Majority Whip Dick Durbin acknowledged the voters' defeat by
the discredited banksters.  The banks, Durbin said, "frankly own the place".

It is not difficult to understand why.  Among those who defeated the
homeowners bill are senators Jon Tester (Montana), Max Baucus (Montana),
Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Many Landrieu
(Louisiana), Tim Johnson (South Dakota), and Arlan Specter
(Pennsylvania).  According to reports, the banksters have poured a half
million dollars into Tester's campaign funds. Baucus has received $3.5
million; Lincoln $1.3 million; Nelson $1.4 million; Landrieu $2 million;
Johnson $2.5 million; Specter $4.5 million.

The same Congress that can't find a dime for homeowners or health care
appropriates hundreds of billions of dollars for the military/security
complex.  The week after the Senate foreclosed on American homeowners,
the Obama "change" administration asked Congress for an additional $61
billion dollars for the neoconservatives' war in Iraq and $65 billion
more for the neoconservatives' war in Afghanistan.  Congress greeted
this request with a rousing "Yes we can!"

The additional $126 billion comes on top of the $533.7 billion "defense"
budget for this year. The $660 billion - probably a low-ball number - is
ten times the military spending of China, the second most powerful
country in the world.

How is it possible that "the world's only superpower" is threatened by
the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan?  How can the US be a superpower if it
is threatened by countries that have no military capability other than a
guerilla capability to resist invaders?

These "wars" are a hoax designed to enrich the US armaments industry and
to infuse the "security forces" with police powers over American
citizenry.

Not a dime to prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes, but
hundreds of billions of dollars to murder Muslim women and children and
to create millions of refugees, many of whom will either sign up with
insurgents or end up as the next wave of immigrants into America.

This is the way the American government works.  And it thinks it is a
"city on the hill, a light unto the world".

Americans elected Obama because he said he would end the gratuitous
criminal wars of the Bush brownshirts, wars that have destroyed
America's reputation and financial solvency and serve no public
interest.  But once in office Obama found that he was ruled by the
military/security complex.  War is not being ended, merely transferred
from the unpopular war in Iraq to the more popular war in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Obama, in violation of Pakistan's sovereignty, continues to
attack "targets" in Pakistan.  In place of a war in Iraq, the
military/security complex now has two wars going in much more difficult
circumstances.

Viewing the promotion gravy train that results from decades of warfare,
the US officer corps has responded to the "challenge to American
security" from the Taliban.  "We have to kill them over there before
they come over here".  No member of the US government or its numerous
well-paid agents has ever explained how the Taliban, which is focused on
Afghanistan, could ever get to America.  Yet this hyped fear is
sufficient for the public to support the continuing enrichment of the
military/security complex, while American homes are foreclosed by the
banksters who have destroyed the retirement prospects of the US population.

According to Pentagon budget documents, by next year the cost of the war
against Afghanistan will exceed the cost of the war against Iraq.
According to a Nobel prize-winning economist and a budget expert at
Harvard University, the war against Iraq has cost the American taxpayers
$3 trillion, that is, $3,000 billion in out-of-pocket and already
incurred future costs, such as caring for veterans.

If the Pentagon is correct, then by next year the US government will
have squandered $6 trillion dollars on two wars, the only purpose of
which is to enrich the munitions manufacturers and the "security"
bureaucracy.

The human and social costs are dramatic as well and not only for the
Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani populations ravaged by American bombs.
Dahr Jamail reports that US Army psychiatrists have concluded that by
their third deployment, thirty percent of American troops are mental
wrecks.  Among the costs that reverberate across generations of
Americans are elevated rates of suicide, unemployment, divorce, child
and spousal abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and
incarceration.

In the Afghan "desert of death" the Obama administration is constructing
a giant military base.  Why?  What does the internal politics of
Afghanistan have to do with the US?

What is this enormous waste of resources that America does not have
accomplishing - besides enriching the American munitions industry?

China and to some extent India are the rising powers in the world.
Russia, the largest country on earth, is armed with a nuclear arsenal as
terrifying as the American one.  The US dollar's role as reserve
currency, the most important source of American power, is undermined by
the budget deficits that result from the munitions corporations' wars
and the bankster bailouts.

Why is the US making itself impotent fighting wars that have nothing
whatsoever to do with is security, wars that are, in fact, threatening
its security?

The answer is that the military/security lobby, the financial gangsters,
and AIPAC rule.  The American people be damned.

____

Paul Craig Roberts - paulcraigroberts at yahoo.com - was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan's first term.  He was
Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.  He has held numerous
academic appointments, including the William E Simon Chair, Center for
Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded
the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the
author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking
in Washington (1985);  Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown:
Inside the Soviet Economy (1999), and is the co-author with Lawrence M
Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice
(2008). Click here for Peter Brimelow's Forbes Magazine interview with
Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct:
http://www.vdare.com/pb/death_of_due_process.htm

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