A MeanMesa "Quickie" - Looking at Obama

Here in the spring of 2010 we have had a chance to take a look at the President we elected.  Although every drawling Southern Senator is still pumping out more "trash talk" in chorus with the high paid, wholly owned fat heads on AM radio and the cable channels, there remains the prospect to size up just what has been accomplished.

A Brief MeanMesa Account of History -- 

Not Opinion, History

To start, try to remember where we were in November of 2008.

Unregulated Wall Street maniacs, often acting in concert with other unregulated banksters, had managed to write up around $60 TRILLION dollars worth of their special financial derivatives, phony securitized mortgage packages and other stinky little scams.  The unelected autocrat was borrowing money from every country stupid enough to loan it to him to pay for war time tax cuts for the richest Americans, a Part D pharmaceutical plan written by Big Pharma lobbyists and hundreds of billions of dollars in tax payer paid subsidies to every big oil company whose CEO could pick up a phone.

Meanwhile, the little draft dodgers in the Oval office were losing a war in Afghanistan and sub-contracting huge amounts of another war in Iraq.  After the Iraqi Hydrocarbon Treaty was signed by that unfortunate country, the autocrat lost interest in anything but contracted oil field service profits and the war profiteering saturating every opportunity Halliburton, the unelected Vice President's corporation, could find there.

The richest 400 Americans saw their net worth mushroom by $630 BILLION dollars during the W's eight year looting festival.

Unemployment had been exploding for seven straight months while the bankers running the Fed and the Treasury Department did nothing, spending their time  instead scheming on how to finally destroy their competition.  The Republicans in the House and Senate, after already scratching every dollar possible from their chicken coop, were turning to their "campaign contributing" friends to elect a war mongering old man to the Presidency.

Who, exactly, was happy in 2008?

Well, the middle class wasn't particularly happy.  Their wages had remained frozen for most of two or three decades since the Reagan Administration.  The cost of living had gone up.  So had middle class tax rates.

On the other hand, Big Pharma was having a wonderful time.  Part D was shoveling tax payer cash into their pockets like the Mississippi River in a spring flood.  There was to be no negotiating.  Just pay the price and shut up.

The health insurance companies were also having a great time.  They found that the monopolies they had set up under cover of the Republicans in Congress could arbitrarily raise premiums as much as they pleased.

As mentioned before, the banksters and their Wall Street cronies were having a good time, too.  They were creating cash out of thin air making phoney financial instruments, having their back room buddies rate them sky high then selling them to every Arab and Chinaman with any money in the bank.

The draft dodging autocrat was flooding more tax dollars into every Cold War weapon system that made it off the drawing boards -- for example, the infamously useless and expensive F-22 fighter bombers.  Total cost?   Initial program estimate $62 Billion.  Original number of aircraft: 750, production beginning in 1994; then, 648 beginning in 1996; then 442 beginning in 2003; then, 277; then 183.  Price per plane?  $361,000,000.

The same ridiculous largesse was going on with new destroyers, new air borne refueling tankers, IED armor for HumVees in Iraq -- you name it.  Halliburton subsidiaries were building showers which electrocuted soldiers and selling bottled water for $8 a pop to our troops in the desert, all the while "landing" one emergency no-bid contract after another, year after year.

The corrupt cronies of the autocracy were soon enjoying a $1.2 Trillion dollar tax cut.  The national debt -- under control at the end of the Clinton Presidency -- was mushrooming at $500,000,000,000 per year or more.  Yet another tax cut followed the first one!  The unelected government borrowed the cash necessary to make good its promises to its "friends" by selling Treasury bonds so fast the ink was still wet when they arrived in Bejing.  BTW, those "friends" were neither nice people nor good citizens.

The stock market tanked along with the rest of the economy.  Terrified bankers stop lending to anyone -- not even other bankers.  Businesses ground to a halt.  Housing prices plummeted into a rancid swill of wounded home-owners and waves of foreclosures.

This systematic looting went on for eight years.

Internationally, the unelected draft dodgers lied their way into the Iraq War, then they began almost daily threats of bombing Iran with nuclear weapons.  When the lies fell apart, they turned the problem over to professional liars like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.  The illiterate "hill billies and bigots" were swayed into supporting them almost immediately.  Any one who hesitated or criticized was castigated by 100,000,000 watts of neo-con broadcast power every day.

Here, MeanMesa will avoid the ulta-shaky 9/11 reports and the unchallenged fear mongering of an unelected President who shamelessly frightened the hell out of the country with tales of being H-bombed by Iraq.

This gut-wrenching tale has a point.

It is now about fifteen months after the Obama Presidency began.  The "hill billies and bigots" have been convinced that all this damage -- and more, the  entirety of the known list is far too long to be included here -- should have been rectified by now.  The Tea Baggers have been saturated with outright lies from the neo-con monkeys secretly pulling the strings on that tiny "puppet" outfit (i.e. Dick Armey of Freedom Works).  The intensely greedy and fickle Independent voters are, allegedly, drifting back to the Republican Party en masse.

Screaming breathlessly with a wounded 401K earnings report in one hand and a foreclosure notice in the other, the citizens still refuse to learn about what actually happened to them...  who actually has all their money...  who are still planning to -- once and for all -- take over the entire country...

Enter Obama

Unemployment has finally decreased for the first time since the plummet began.  The Dow Jones is up 3,000 points.  Housing prices have begun to stabilize.

Many of the 3 billion Muslims in the world no longer think that the US is "waging a war" on Islam.  Our troops are withdrawing from Iraq.  95% of tax payers have had a tax cut.  Goldmann Sachs and other crooks are beginning to be investigated and sued by a restored SEC.

It's beginning to look like Afghanistan won't be another Viet Nam after all.  European leaders are no longer afraid to appear in a photograph with the American President.  Our national GDP is actually showing growth.

The auto giants are paying back their TARP loans -- so are the banks.  Obama says that we should get back almost all the money that the W packed out the door in the last days of the autocracy.

Presidential briefings are conducted in understandable, literate English.

Is he a perfect President?  No.  Has he delivered all his campaign promises?  No. 

Has he interrupted the writing of the last chapter about the American Democracy?

Probably.

MeanMesa's compliments to the President.

As for all you visitors, join me in his defense!

Earmarks and Ear Rings

How to strike a deal with a prostitute.
How to look beyond the insult of the ear marks to the real injuries of the budget. 53

At election time we are usually bombarded with promises to relieve the burden of earmarks. It is a promise made by the man who is not “behind the curtain.”

There are indeed two great currents of our money flowing through the process in Washington. Like a tsunami, there is a small wave traveling along the surface where we can see it, but there is an immense movement below the surface, finally materializing as it ultimately inundates our coastal cities. Concerning the matter of earmarks, the situation is the same. They are little more than insulting distractions, mosquito bites on the tail end of a bull.

A short note on the meaning of term may be in order. In the old days, that is, in the days when people read books, the corner of a page might be turned to assist the reader in returning to some specific material of special interest. Translated to the hundreds of pages of a typical issue of legislation, earmarks , at least in concept, serve the same purpose. Whatever the original focus of the bill in question, earmarks typically appear in some convenient, rarely read section, thus, the name.

To the originator of the earmark, however, a convenient means to locate his “little jewel” among the great body of “other stuff” in his bill, might include folding the corner of the page containing his earmark in his copy.

The exact nature of the earmark, that is, its nature with respect to more normal and transparent congressional decisions, is interesting. The usual process of allocating our tax money through the representative process of our Congress refers, somewhere, to a kind of general (majority) agreement as to the legitimacy of the proposal. In the optimistic idealism of our Constitution, a bill is written proposing an expenditure on a certain project, the Congressional Representatives all read it, argue about it, and perhaps negotiate compromises between differing views of it and, finally, pass it.

The life story of an earmark is somewhat different. Whatever project is proposed in an earmark typically reveals certain other character traits. It is something which will assist its author’s reelection. It is usually presented as something not really meriting the attention of the entire Congress in the sense that more central legislation might. Perhaps the goal of the earmark is presented as a matter of too small a fiscal significance to “tie things up.” More commonly, the benefactors of the earmark are seeking some advantage not particularly appetizing to the taste of the full House, hence the wide variety of the things -- from short expensive bridges to doughnut museums.

One might think that such highly exclusive interests would fail to garner Congressional votes, and if so, one would be partially correct. Happily, at least for the successful ear markers, this dismal possibility is mitigated by other rather arcane traditions in the Congress. Yes, although the bridge earmarked by one voice will hardly serve to interests of a constituency a thousand miles away, there remains the prospect of “mutual back scratching.” Supporting, or at least , failing to oppose, that distant pork will inevitably arise again later as a promise by its sponsor to support something much closer to home, say, so close as to be in one’s very own Congressional district. In that case, a bridge -- no matter how exclusive its benefit -- can often be converted directly into votes in a reelection campaign.

Occasionally, earmarks really do actually serve the interests of the country in some redeeming way. Usually however, this happy exception is little more than a passing dream in a windstorm. Perhaps Mullah Nassr Edin’s political axiom that “all political possibilities can also be political liabilities if they appear at cocktail parties without their lipstick” may be applied just here.

Patience, please. We’re getting to the prostitute part. A tedious context must be presented for my readers who have lives beyond obsessive political wonkerism.

We may need to ask, “What political purposes are served by ranting and railing about earmarks?”

First things first, be advised that all the earmarks (including $350,000,000 for Sara’s on-again off-again “bridge to nowhere”) in aggregate comprise no more than a “gnat’s sneeze” when compared to the massive flow of our money through the Congressional budget process. For example, we allocate around $400,000,000,000 (four hundred billion compared to $350,000,000 -- three hundred fifty million) annually for the visible elements of our defense expenditures.

Obviously, constructive efforts to maximize the effectiveness of the much larger amount would represent a laudable legislative effort on the part of a Senator. Yet, we find him repeatedly hawking one complaint after another about the smaller amount. Earmarks enjoy the unlikely advantage of being “insulting” to voters and taxpayers far away from the bridge. In fact, at least to voters and taxpayers, earmarks can be made far more “insulting” than a couple of “whoops, we missed that one” moments revealed in the review of the incredibly more massive defense allocation, for example. The "insult" is personal! After all, most of those tax payers will never have a chance to drive across that bridge.

Finally, to the matter of the prostitute. Let us imagine a sexually repressed evangelical in a distant city to attend a meeting of, say, a Sunday School Budget Convention. It is the evening after a long day of conferencing. He finds himself in the absolutely worst part of town, piloting his rented car along dark dismal streets lined with, shall we say, “women of the night.”

There they are. Lined up one after another, each competing for his attention. We arrive at the focal question. Will he select his secret evening company based on her ear rings?

Our evangelical might glance at those baubles for an instant, but his more energetic attention will quickly migrate to other features, you know, matters of a more substantial interest.

In our tortured analogy, of course, the ear rings represent the earmarks. But what do those “other matters” represent? The invitation offered to voters by the Senator’s flammable campaign diatribe about earmarks is an invitation to be transfixed on the ear rings, ignoring all the other considerations. Once again, he will say “Those bastards over in Fartandbolt County have a fine new bridge paid for by your tax dollars! Every cent interloped from the General Fund by that crooked Senator of theirs!”

It is, perhaps, a message made all the more poignant when considered in the sight of your own delapidated bridge, that is, the one right here in Boltandfart County. The ambition of this Senator, populist hero that he is -- or claims to be, is to distract us from the fact that the defense allocation contains five hundred “whoops!” items, each with a taxpayer cost ten thousand times larger than the entire cost to replace both bridges. And, that would not be the cost of replacing them with hard bid contracts, either. That would be the cost of replacing them with “brother-in-law,” no-bid babies of the worst variety! (“We simply had to buy a fleet of Bentley convertibles to pull the gravel trailers!”)

So, we have made a comparison between the bridge costs and the Congressional budget’s defense allocation. So what? Defense spending, often, but not always, at least results in something tangible (the Osprey? As in: "It's an Osprey! Don't stand under it when it 'flies' over!") which can appear on a video. The unseen killer traveling below the tsunami’s modest surface wave is comprised of far “stinkier” matters than a wasteful defense budget. In this sense, we once again descend with the evangelical’s eyes as he sizes up those now infamous "other matters" in the process of selecting his prostitute.

Yes, we can be insulted by Fartandbolt’s good fortune at our expense, but that new bridge is little more than a “slap on the cheek” when we consider the "other matters." If that new bridge in the next county is a “slap,” there are other budget drains more akin to having a vampire inserting a permanent blood capture needle in one’s artery. The campaigning Senator works diligently to keep our attention on the slap and off the needle.

Do we really want to conduct our electoral responsibilities based on an ear ring?

What exactly are these vampires extracting from us? In a land with wealth so great that we hardly notice the needle, that is, where we seem to perpetually enjoy the ridiculously false luxury of considering only the ear ring, we can be deceived by immensely over priced “elephants” (not a Freudian slip, usually...) which seem to provide at least a “little something” for a price so outrageous that it would never bear the bright illumination of a sunny day. Examples? Of course.

The pharmaceutical bill written for us by drug company lobbyists is the polar opposite of any imaginable bargain it might promise for the price. Yes, we have a nice discount on our medicine, but the price is unfathomable. Predictably, every economizing advantage is, essentially, illegal. What a coincidence!

The "deregulation of everything" seemed to be a means to eliminate inefficient and over priced government controls. Instead of the promised reduction in our costs for everything from electricity to mortgage loans, we have wound up suffering through the total exploitative vaporization of Enron and the taxpayer bail out of Bear Stearns.

The destruction of unions, for example the air traffic controllers union, was touted as a way to really save some bucks. Now we spend money at an incredibly increased rate to compensate for labor shortages. The workers remaining are fighting to perform their life saving tasks with equipment which belongs in a land fill. The airlines, far from being able to fulfill their promise to pass such savings on to us as consumers, are now raising fares weekly amid a customer population stranded in planes unable to take off where even a bag of peanuts is now offered at a price.

No-bid military contractors performing theoretically necessary tasks of all sorts at costs beyond measure (one bottle of drinking water in Iraq: $8.80?) were proposed as a means to lower the price of war-fighting. Halliburton is no petty crook. Its corporate extraction of tax money will reach toward one half trillion dollars before we finish in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that incredible amount of compensation will be for what we taxpayers might generously consider a few billion dollars worth of honest work.

If current matters are too troubling, reach back in history. The famous Keating Five bail out money is quite possibly still financing some small part of McCain’s campaign or, at least, some of his houses. Enron’s carefully engineered brown out in California, that is, the one which suddenly required out-of-state generated power to be imported at eight times the cost of the local stuff, was not “chump change.”

These are not simple cases of building a bridge for someone else. These are major withdrawals of major amounts of our economic blood. They have been carefully crafted by the most exploitative Congressmen and Senators, executed not as earmarks but as central legislation and protected by the absolute perfidy of other legislative, judicial and executive branch crooks and criminals (Those would be the “hard working” politicians who are now retired into $50 million dollar homes somewhere nice.) who were supposedly responsible for “checks and balances.”

Once these “blood sucking” programs are in place, they can last for decades, every day promoting dynastic fortunes resourced by our tax money. (For example, California is still suffering under the burden of the desperate contracts it got railroaded into to turn the lights back on. This even after the alleged death of Enron!)

So, no matter how appealing it may be to just gaze at the ear rings, keep track of the more important stuff, too. Don’t let them lead you down the path of simply responding to insults about someone else’s bridge while they slip the needle into your artery for a permanent blood draw!

They won’t quit just because you have been manipulated to deliver another election to them. Like the prostitute. They see themselves as the gift that just keeps on giving.

Only after they win their election will they notice that you've pulled out their needle!

Inspector General? Here?

Dreaming of an even bigger government

or

spending our tax money for something we actually need? 54

This election has turned the phrase “Changing Washington” into little more than a mechanical chorus. What exactly are these people talking about when they promise something like that? The more scurrilous of the politicians pound the table, threateningly, warning the “big money boys” in D.C. that “change is coming.” Although a majority of Americans feel strongly that a good number of these leeches belong in a cell right next to Abramhoff or DeLay, we may have to accept the idea that “changes” for these lobbyists and influence peddlers will probably not amount to much more than adjusting a few numbers in their seven digit “take.”

As an ardent Obama supporter, I would love to look my readers in the eye and honestly claim the prospect of a perfect difference, a perfect “change.” That would be fool hardy. We have plenty of Democrats in the Congress who haven’t even so much as lied about wanting a Washington with less corruption since they left their high school civics class.

Shooting a rubber band at a single cock roach might be effective and gratifying, but it hardly represents a serious approach to permanently eliminating the pests from your home.

Among the citizens, cynicism runs rampant. Most of them believe that we can never regain control of our country -- spelled tax dollars -- from these pandering, criminal opportunists. “K Street” has managed to castrate “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” more effectively than the British did in 1812. Its domination of the Congress, both the House and the Senate, has no particular historical precursor. That relatively recent strategic victory for the special interests is more akin to a gay child S and M porn film.

The cynics are definitely right on one count. These high class crooks have abundantly shown that they own any part of the government which can serve them.

Enough ranting. What about a bigger government? That hardly seems like a solution to much of what is vexing us! Egads, shades of Reagan!

Well, that gloomy appraisal might be true. It depends on two questions. First, how, exactly, do we see the correct management of our national descent from a rich superpower to whatever it is we seem destined to become? Second, will we, as citizens, even dare to have the optimism to think we can still create an effective part of our government that will actually function?

What are we talking about here? What new part of government do we need to consider?

Tempting the possibility of my being, righteously, called an elitist, I direct your thoughts to a play by the old French author, Mr. Moliere. The title of the play is “The Inspector General.” It is a period comedy with a fine plot not particularly relevant right here. However, it does have a very relevant context. The basic theme of the play is about an Inspector General, authorized by the King, with the responsibility of inspecting everything all across the country, that is, roads, schools, hospitals, tax collections and essentially anywhere else that the King’s money (The King thought, in those days, that all tax revenues were HIS money. How antiquated compared to our representative form of government!) had any part in financing.

The relevance is clear for the following reason. The horrible looting which is our curse at the present moment has, as its central mechanism, fundamental deceptions with regard to issues such as cost, waste, value and effectivity. We pay monumental amounts of our tax money for things with names which suggest one thing only to get the leftover scraps of something quite completely different, utterly useless to us, after these “K Street” lobbyists have gorged themselves and their host corporations on all the sweetest meat, the freshest fruit and the finest wine in our federal expenditures.

These parasites have mastered every odious technique required to keep us confused about the actual facts concerning these undertakings of theirs. The consequences of this redistribution (a favorite word of their corporate benefactors condemning our resistance to their grotesque and growing wealth...) have grown so large as to represent a threat to national security, that is, a clear and present danger. We have become unable to squeeze enough of our tax resources through the prevailing process in Washington to accomplish things we urgently need (and should, in a more perfect world, be easily able to afford), such as school building repairs, bridges, roads, dams, hospitals and the like.

Interestingly enough, pretty much the exact things that the old French King’s Inspector General was inspecting in his ancient mission!

If our proposed addition to the size of government is to be able to confront and correct this criminal looting, it will first have to elude the inevitable sabotage which routinely perverts any actual democratic proposals from emerging from Congress alive and breathing, that is, functional in a way still consistent with some small remnant of the high ambitions of their origins.

It is no secret that the Republican strangle hold on Congress has, as its greatest ambition, the goal of proving that government will not work. Assisting these knuckle-dragging neo-cons is a convincing crowd of other half-witted reactionaries including, to our great embarrassment, more than a few fully tenured Democratic fixtures in the House and Senate. These “patriots” with such a vicious penchant to redirect honest tax money to their very close friends will clearly do anything (yes, anything...) to get the funds they need to be reelected. Their Congressional jobs are simply too profitable, we are told, to ever expect anything else from them! We regretfully embrace this dismal expectation. These “public servants” have obviously woven positions for themselves with wages so great as to unavoidably create a depressing, self-fulfilling prophecy of outrage and pilfering.

Oh yes, these bottom feeders may drink sparingly of the vast cash river rolling through Washington, just an imperceivable nip here and there when we aren’t watching, but they take enough to undercut our every ambition as taxpayers and citizens.

Can we envision a solution? Yes, we can. (!?!)

Consider the following proposal for a modern day equivalent to that old Inspector General in Moliere’s comedy. No, quite aside from mass lynchings, resurrected guillotines or straightforward wild west style American mob justice, we find these adversaries far too powerful and well entrenched for a head-on approach. Believe me, they enjoy a carefully constructed protective blanket constantly refreshed by their associates in places of great power.

First, the necessity of doing something. As Americans we face a very difficult decade of slowly recovering from the great looting ($10,000,000,000,000) successfully extracted from us by the Bush Government. We can fall blindly into our inevitable role as the weak, bad creditor, pathetically begging our lenders for just a little compassion over and over as we are repeatedly unable to repay, or we can dust off our famous national ability to successfully respond to our precarious position. That latter course will require that we seriously stop wasting money and begin to retire our debt. That is the “happy” story through which we will be able to stand on our own two feet within a mere decade. The “unhappy” version includes stories which either assume a much longer period or plots where we never again stand on those feet of ours.

Naturally, we will have to “make do” with a much cheaper military. Our lenders will, sooner or later, require that of us to free up the money we owe them. Perhaps spending only half of the combined allocation of the rest of the world will be sufficient. We will have to take steps to greatly improve the efficiency of our foreign policy expenditures, eliminating the looters who cling like vampire bats to every act of national altruism. On the other hand, acting reasonably internationally is far more cost effective as an avenue to national security than all those ridiculous and expensive Cold War weapons systems (the X44 Galactic Death Ray? just what we need in Baghdad or Basra...).

The reconstruction of our infrastructure, long a well worn threat to incite our fear during campaigns, will arrive at our door in a far more concrete style, you know, the sort of thing that comes with monthly bills. Big ones. Our government programs will be stripped of our present indulgent excesses either by our new high born ideals or the rather less glorious insistence of those who hold our loans. After all, we can hardly deny that we did, in fact, sign those notes George Bush kept rushing out to the Chinese or the Saudis for more borrowed money.

In the words of that great military genius, Donald Rumsfeld, “Sometimes Democracy can get petty messy.” We have definitely been pretty messy.

Did anyone think we were going to somehow wallow through this debt of ours without some serious belt tightening? It is so immense that we can’t even convince our lenders that we can quietly dump it on our unsuspecting children. Those who have financed this incredible, reckless debt of ours have in mind to start getting their cash back way before that.

What can we add to our government?

An office of schedule and budget. Oh, you say, we already have all sorts of bureaucracies that take care of that job. Really? Have they taken care of it? Does anyone think they can be “fixed” in a way that will cause them to take care of it in the future? Won’t it simply become another expensive layer of the failed system we have now?

Not if we do it right. And, it’s clearly time that we did it right. We elect managers in federal elections, enough of them to represent each district corresponding to the present rate of its consumption of federal money. These people become the staff of the Office of Budget and Schedule. Each successful candidate would win an election in his own region, the place where the most possible voters would be aware of his character. The day after the election, the names of all these winners would be placed in a giant pot. A random drawing would then assign every one of them to someplace else, that is, someplace other than the place where they won their election. Although hardly perfect, such an arrangement would make pre-established cronyism significantly more difficult.

The directors of this new government branch would be recruited from the Justice Department’s career lawyers, the professional, bipartisan staff of the Congressional Committees responsible for “getting our money’s worth,” career procurement staff from the Defense Department, seasoned engineers from the Transportation Department, etc. Every one of these appointees would receive a lifetime wage and benefits package (similar to Supreme Court Justices?) in the hope that many of them would not fall to corrupt motives. Whatever the cost might be, I suspect it would ultimately be an incredibly good investment.

No one could disagree that such a system would not be, theoretically, entirely redundant. Likewise, no one could disagree that such a system would actually be exactly the way to make drastic accountability changes in Washington. Everyone currently in a position to spend our money has trusted advisors. The problem seems to be that, although these money folks trust them, we, as citizens, can’t. We need our own advisors, and we need to place then in positions where no one can get to them for any more of those “special favors.” Let these new federal employees seek after our credibility as taxpayers instead of professing mastery of techniques certain to either confuse us or simply “keep us quietly in the dark.”

Oh my! The government would be paralyzed by the delay of channeling everything through yet another layer of regulation. Well, they, and we, have brought this on ourselves.

Give this new bunch the task of evaluating everything we intend to spend money on. Are the plans complete? Are they simply a place to start, to open the coffers, so subsequent cost overruns, suspicious changes and huge, out-of-scope additive alternatives can “slide through” a little more gracefully later? Does the program accompanying the expenditure actually have a reasonable chance of doing what is intended? Can we reveal exactly who wants it without a Congressional subpoena?

The Office of Budget and Schedule will have no voice whatever with respect to the programs proposed. That is a Congressional task. It will, however, have everything to say about whether or not a program has been accurately represented to the public, whether or not it has been prepared adequately to justify starting the flow of our federal tax dollars into it, whether or not it has been contracted and bid legally, whether or not it has a reasonable chance to succeed and whether or not any alternatives have been explored.

The “Schedule” part of this idea has to do with programs which should, at some point, end, but don’t. Aside from the inevitable excuses for this endless drain on our money, the graft seems to build in intensity the longer these jobs continue. As they extend further and further beyond their original (approved) scope, everything possible is added to them, unexamined, unauthorized and unassociated expenses approved piecemeal, usually offered up as desperate, last gasp chances to somehow salvage a poorly planned program -- or at least create additional excuses or camouflage for its failure.

Usually with only a few hundred million more dollars the sow’s ear at least begins to look like a silk purse. That is, if it doesn’t become top secret. From us.

Enforcing this new inspection regime is simple. Add another required signature to every government payment. It enjoys the full “brutality” of a one size fits all solution. Let these people evaluate everything -- military procurement, transportation expenditures, foreign aid effectiveness, emergency relief programs, every kind of civil works. Allow the evaluations to extend to nonmaterial areas -- educational improvements, crime abatement, climate and energy subsidies, corporate encouragement and assistance, borrowing money, social programs and the rest.

As taxpayers and citizens, these new “eyes” of ours must be empowered to see absolutely everything we are asked to spend our tax money creating. If there were areas where the past record of federal spending justified more of our trust, perhaps they could be excluded. But are there any areas such as those? The parasites have slowly embedded themselves and their interests into every penny we send to the Treasury and every penny which flows out of it.

It is highly unlikely that we would “throw the baby out with the bath water” by simply taking a look at some imaginary expenditure which finds itself somehow exempt from the looters. They are everywhere and in everything. The only arguments we hear are between them as they discuss who will savage our money first!

We really can do this. Register. Vote. Elect Barack Obama. Then,

keep raising hell!

A Big Thank You to the Oil Futures Traders

Passive Aggressive Communication 101
Letting the World Know What We Think Without Saying Anything 37

As we indulge our codependent natures, we gradually appreciate the important work of the oil futures market more and more.

Codependents are very uncomfortable with confrontation of any sort. If one can only extract pleasure from life by controlling others, this trait can be rather cumbersome.

As a nation, we could, of course, comment or complain about every little things that has happened anywhere in the world. Although we would probably enjoy doing this, we are reluctant to just “jump right into it.” We really don’t wish to appear shallow or supercilious as we rant and rave about all these parts of our planetary reality that we just don’t like.

In comes the “blessing” of the oil futures market. When one of these miniscule perturbations crops up, the oil futures traders can answer for us by raising the price of oil! With their help we don’t need to say anything at all, a sort of international or cultural passive aggression.

No matter how inconsequential the subject of our outrage or complaint, we won’t have to speak up, and in doing so, act like whining ninnies! If we don’t approve of some change in diet in Ecuador, if we are frightened by a few gun shots in Nigeria, no problem! We won’t have to make any sort of risky comment. Our oil futures traders will raise prices so these bothersome folks, whom ever they might be, whatever they may have done, can see how upset we are, and all without our saying so much as a word.

If the French are cutting the subsidy for mud baths for the elderly, if Israel conducts military training or if some sheik in Saudi Arabia gets investigated for crooked military procurement, we can simply act as if we couldn’t care less. When the oil futures prices go up, these miscreants will know what we think of them!

When the North Koreans demolish a cooling tower or the Iranians test fire a few of their missiles, our polished passive aggressive communication can just swing into action. If the Indian Embassy in Kabul takes a bomb or the Russians complain about our missiles in Czech Republic, we don’t need to say anything at all. We can just raise oil prices! Then they'll know!

See? Everybody wins!