Mickey Walker

How Borrowing and Spending Destroyed America: The Realities of War, Bidness, and Taxes

By Mickey Walker – April 26, 2009

Setting the Stage

Something just hit me.  Say you wanted to create a world boom economy where arms and bullets flourished and mercenaries were paid 10 times the price of real soldiers and real armies.  What do you do?  First, you start a war.  Scare up the people with visions of mushroom clouds in our cities on national TV.  To increase profits, fuel several wars/insurgencies 'round the world.  Keep the war corporation crony plates spinning.  Scare all nations with suicide bombings here, there, and everywhere.  Scare up the oil-rich Arabs with rumors of terrorists so that they will pay through the nose for intelligence from private sources to keep their oil refineries safe.  Hire a bunch of former intelligence officers from the CIA who know how to steal data and where it is and who has control of it.  Then you play the terrorists against the nations who fear them and are willing to pay for "protection" as in the days of Al Capone.  Business is always good, and you always win.  If a certain area is not paying "protection" bucks what do you do?  Well what did Al Capone do?  Why, a grocery just blew itself up or a hardware store burned down.  Back then, businesses protected themselves by using Al Capone’s protection services when the terrorist was also Al Capone.  He played a double roll and got to double dip.  Great work if you can get it.  

So enter the 21st Century, and bingo, instantly, "protection" (a lucrative offshoot of war against terrorists) is big bidness, worldwide.  Instead of merchants in Chicago, it's become nations of the world who are the customers.  They got more money.  And they pay through the nose for protection, especially the countries with oil.  No wonder Bernie Kerick, ex police chief of NYC and Giuliani's partner, got 10 million dollars in stock warrants from selling tazers to city and state governments all over the world.  Big business, protection.  It rules.  How did Eisenhower foretell such a danger in our government getting into bed with the war corporation contractors?  Chilling.

Then came Blackwater, a finely-tuned, world-class intelligence/protection organization, offering protection, spreading its tentacles to the four corners of the earth.  Wouldn't it make a great spy novel where the terrorists and the heads of state and protection companies were like the wrestling game?  You know, where each opponent conspires to give the crowd an emotional reaction where one wins and the other loses for a while, and then the tables turn suddenly and the other wins?  And the wrestlers go out together for drinks afterwards?  I can just hear the dialogue where a Milo Minderbinder-type character sets the terrorists against a country, say Albania, shooting up the countryside, killing, looting as Milo waits for the phone to ring in his US secret underground corporate headquarters of a company named, say, Muddywater.  It rings.  It's the president of Albania, begging for Muddywater protection services at any cost.  Just so happens that Milo is top-heavy in secret operatives in Rome at the time (what a coincidence to be so close to Albania; give those terrorist bombers who scared up the Albanians a bonus).  So the Muddywater operatives fly their hi-tech 'copters over to Albania and do their thing, the terrorists recede from their Albania rampage, Milo is paid a few hundred million Euro dollars (subtle, ain’t it?), and everybody wins.  The phone rings again.  Milo tells his aide that the King of Saudi reports bombings just miles from the palace.  "What do we have to offer them that's close by?  Nothing?  Then deploy from North Carolina at twice the rate, etc. They can stand it."  You get the dialogue.  So then the aide says they are already committed to Lebanon for the coming quarter.  Milo says to drop Lebanon like a shoe because (drum roll) "Who got de money?  And who don't?"  The aide smiles, knowingly.  "But hire some more CIA rejects off the street and we will do Lebanon, too, just tell them we might be a few days late.  Who else they gonna call?"   Milo shuffles some papers on his desk.  "New subject." he says to his aide.  "We need some pesos.  Who you got in Mexico?  Just some poor rebels who think they got a cause, right?  Send some of our men down with some C4.  Blow up a pyramid or two, you know the old ones, the Mayan ruins.  Make it Chichen Itza, the big pyramid.  Nobody's been scared up enough in Yucatan for too long.......tourists think it's a safe haven there, and we will show them different.  The government of Mexico gets a billion dollars a day from tourists.  Chichen Itza, the big one.  Yeah.  Have them take out a cenote or two, you know, where the tourists swim and play while they're there.  That will get the phones ringing." 

Wow.  Think of the all them protection bucks.  Think of the enormity of such a world scheme.  And if we just remember Rumsfeld's "snow" memos and "Keep the terror alert elevated."  how can we lose?  Nobody can prove that terrorism is a Hollywood-staged production.  It's real.  It lives.  Life is good in the wrestling bidness and even better in the terrorist bidness.  Everybody wins.  Except the American taxpayer.

The Aftermath

The recent “tea party” tax day demonstrations on April 15th are a phenomenon and most perplexing.  Why now, have the taxpayers decided to demonstrate about the trillions and trillions of dollars we have been borrowing and spending (much of it off-budget for Bush’s wars) that has ominous signs of bankrupting the nation’s Treasury for future generations?  Why now?  Why not, 8 years ago when we began to send our troops overseas to occupy two countries?  Didn’t we think that might blow a big hole in our budget and Treasury and put our future financial system in harm’s way?  Why in any one of the eight years of borrowing trillions from the Chinese, the Arabs, and the Japanese to finance our wars didn’t we rise up and protest on tax day of 2002 or 2006 or 2008?  Why now?  When our national debt has run up to (who knows) perhaps 15 Trillion dollars and counting?  How many Americans are willing to acknowledge that Bush and his Neocon Congress hid debt off the books like Andersen Accounting did to accommodate Enron stealing billions from millions of people?  It’s true.  But why attack Obama’s economic policies when he is only trying to clean up the mess left by the Bushites who borrowed and spent America into a place of no return?  Why, all of a sudden, have American taxpayers taken, indignantly to “tax tea parties” to express their disdain for government spending when the Neocon fox (no pun on TV stations intended) has been raiding the government henhouse (US Treasury) for the past 8 years?

So, after 90 days in office as president, now it’s Obama who is the big spender, is it?  Why were there no outrages in Bush’s corrupt financial and spending habits before now? And how much of what he kept off the books (off budget) is still a secret?  And why weren’t we “tea party” enraged when that annual off-budget TAX hit us right in the pocketbook to where it would be inevitable that someday we would have to pay the piper?  I smell a rat.  And he is the same Neocon rat who caused all this financial disaster of debt that grips the whole world like a giant angry squid.  We are the grasshopper who spent all of our money fiddling and dancing when we should have managed our financial house instead of looking the other way, watching football, and CNN while our own government encouraged stealing Treasury dollars we didn’t even have.  We had to borrow from the Chinese to pay the robbers.  What an insult!  Why didn’t Americans do tax revolt “tea parties” about that atrocity?  Obama is in rescue mode.  He is trying to save the American bank with dire and desperate measures (that may not work anyway), but he is trying.  And here come those who started the mess, organizing tax revolt “tea parties” against government spending. Didn’t they know there would be a day of reckoning?  Sure they did.  But pay no mind.  Just project the blame on the liberals (as if the finger-pointers were ever true conservatives). They are outraged by “earmarks” a favorite catch word of the Neocons when trashing the Democrats.  I got one question for them:  How big is the Iraq War “earmark” that lined all the war corporation cronies’ pockets for the past 6 years?!  Maybe 5 Trillion dollars more in the hole and still counting?  You want to compare that ongoing GOP-darling earmark to increasing funding for the SCHIPS program for child healthcare?  Don’t be silly.

We the taxpayers are the big loser.  What do we do now?  Shall we demonstrate and thwart any attempt Obama might have to rescue our financial system from becoming burnt slap up?  Shall we now take to protesting the way our government is spending our dollars when we have looked the other way for 8 years, back to the time of Clinton when we had a government surplus, not a deficit?  Shall we let our sudden self-righteousness over how our government spends our tax dollars strangle us and reason at the same time?  For the past 8 years our government has been steered by monsters who encouraged stealing from the Treasury for no-bid government contracts linked to a war started over lies about weapons of mass destruction that were never found.  They borrowed money, bankrupted our Treasury, bought condos in Dubai, and got filthy rich on ongoing Elephant size earmarks (all legal, too).  So let the light affix its beam on the reality of why our taxes might go up:  to repair, rescue, and salvage our nation and our financial system that was torpedoed by the Neocon hypocrites who now organize the cutesy “tax tea parties” to assuage their own guilt and hand in the destruction of America.   TPJmagazine

print     email article