How about some Holiday-week OUTRAGE?!

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

My things seem chill here.   Everybody seems to be in a groovy frame of mind, maybe it’s the holidays, maybe we’re all just high on cold medicines (I know I am, I’ve got a nasty one), maybe it’s just longer nights and the shorter days ….

But too bad.  I’m gonna hit you over the head with an article that will PISS YOU THE HELL OFF.

It’s from one of my new favorite sites, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/:

Guest Post: Instead of Fixing the U.S. Economy or Creating Jobs for AMERICANS, Obama Will Spend The Money in Afghanistan and Iraq

America is in the most severe unemployment crisis since – and perhaps including – the Great Depression.

And yet Obama, like Bush, has done virtually nothing to create more jobs. Instead, they both gave trillions to the biggest banks (who are not loaning it out to the little guy) and for waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama is apparently escalating – not ending – the wars. And its not cheap.

According to the White House, the cost of deploying new soldiers to Afghanistan could be $1 million per soldier. Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that the Iraq war will cost $3-5 trillion dollars.

As I have previously pointed out, protracted war increases unemployment, shrinks the economy, and causes recession. See this, this and this.

But deficits don’t matter, right?  Wrong.

But We Had No Choice … We Had to Fight Those Wars

The article is so chock-full of links I can’t even begin to quote much more of it.  

It goes on to point out all the reasons why none of this money should have ever been spent in the first place, how none of it should be spent NOW, and how screwed we all are because of it, and because Obama has turned out to be just another point man for the Pentagon, Wall Street, and War Profiteers (oops I mean “defense contractors”).

And Raw Story seems to be the first to break the news that Obama has decided to send 34,000 more troops into the empire-crippling theatre known as Afghanistan, or “Lose Your Ass-istan”.  

The White House on Tuesday signaled the end of months of deliberations on US strategy toward Afghanistan, announcing that President Barack Obama would reveal his decision within days.

“After completing a rigorous final meeting, President Obama has the information he wants and needs to make his decision and he will announce that decision within days,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

And that troop increase is likely to be large. According to veteran intelligence reporter Jonathan Landay at McClatchy’s Newspapers, the White House plans to dispatch some 34,000 additional troops — slightly more than half the number requested by Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal.

“President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he’s called ‘a war of necessity’ in Afghanistan,” officials purportedly told the newswire.

“Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire,” Landay adds. “The U.S. officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly and because, one official said, the White House is incensed by leaks on its Afghanistan policy that didn’t originate in the White House.”

He’s gonna give us a nice, cozy, ghost-written speech about how wonderful it is that we “have” to do this.  

Meanwhile, America crumbles, unemployment keeps going up, and they just keep lying to us about everything.    See if you can find any news in the mainstream about the UK’s oh-so-damning inquiry into the conspiracy to start the Iraq invasion.  

So.  Happy Thanksgiving Week.   I just can’t stand to see everybody so mellow here!    

(diabolical laughter)