Misadventures in Money Management & Foreign Policy
September 5, 2007 by demon princess
Ill: The Worried Shrimp
The Bush Plan: Wreck-A-Country, Then Reconstruct It (Badly)
~ So we’ll have to be there forever ~
It continues to boggle your Demon’s mind that Bush gets away with all he does in the prosecution of a misguided & illegitimate war. (Leaving aside, for the moment, that Cheney is in the background agitating for a duplicate scenario in Iran).
I am, in fact, suffering from inane-war-news-& propaganda fatigue, but since I became interested in where the “reconstruction” effort has led us & with what results, every time I turn around I read more articles like this, in the Washington Post.
With an upcoming report to the nation regarding the success of his “surge” in Iraq & the appointment of General Petraeus to oversee it, Bushco has not lost a bit of faith that American voters can be persuaded by means of photo ops & heavily-managed staged shows. Seems Petraeus has designated a market in Dora as a veritable tourist trap where visiting officials & Congresspersons can have a faux (meaning safe) experience in Iraq, undoubtedly aimed at convincing us Doubting Thomases at home that the surge is working.
The WaPo calls it a “Potemkin Village,” made possible by walls & fortifications & government bribes ~ er, *incentives* to induce merchants to open shops again, complete with target numbers, creative accounting (some are “selling dust,” an observer says, but they’re still counted as “open shops”), & other slight-of hand trix to which we’ve become accustomed under Bushco. The WaPo also notes that when Iraqi Shiite police forces appear in the market, merchants close shop & customers melt into invisibility.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090301486.html
Elsewhere in the news, we read reports like these, of a trade school so poorly rebuilt by occupation forces & contractors that it’s impossible to know where the money went:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/24/AR2007082402307.html
Or this, yet another in a long line of reports of waste & fraud, allegedly perpetrated by American military officers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR2007082302158.html
If you’re a real glutton for punishment (seems Demon is), cruise on over to MoronCowboy@blogspot.com for more.
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dp
It really isn’t funny but destroying a country then rebuilding it is exactly what Bush does, he is doing to us too, and he is doing around the world. He has too! It is part of what I call the Russian Doctrine of Destruction he is following. Katrina was allowed to run its course for a reason too. I can’t break away from here without losing this so if you want to read on it, Bush Uncovered is on my main page.
Just another day in Paradise it seems. This is just madness!
Maybe this post will fill in more of what Bush has done:
http://www.pov-mentarch1.blogspot.com
One of the things that constrains card issuers from preying too aggressively on poor credit risks is the knowledge that their victims might go bankrupt and not pay their bills. Banks have very sophisticated models for this kind of thing, and calculating their likely losses makes them think twice about just how hard they pitch their wares to the bottom of the market.
So what happens when you reduce their exposure to bad credit risks by passing a bill that makes it all but impossible for people to declare bankruptcy and stop paying their credit card bills? The answer is obvious: banks start pitching their cards even more aggressively to consumers who are even worse credit risks. This was an easily predictable consequence of tilting the playing field in favor of credit card issuers by passing the egregious 2005 bankruptcy bill, and it’s exactly what’s happened. Thanks, Congress.
There’s considerable commentary that credit card exposure is the next huge financial bomb just waiting to hit after this mortgage blowout. The u.s. economy is built on nothing but cheap credit and all those bills are coming due…
Indeed it is, and the Mother of All Bills, the Iraq War, will be the third wave.
Earl, that went a long way to making me feel better…heh!
Hey Jim, I REALLY don’t think it’s funny at all. I’m just in that state of exhaustion & despair where I’m not believing in the efficacy of rational discourse to affect anything where Bushco is concerned. Barbed wit & ridicule seems to be as effective as anything else when one is dealing with a deluded former frat-boy who somehow muddled his way into the perhaps the most disastrous presidency ever ~ er, that & a lot of dirty political trix. I have no doubt that an eternal vicious cycle of destruction & rebuilding is good for the business interests that really run things since Bushco came to office.
Earl: you’re spot-on with the cheap credit analysis. Unfortunately, bills do become due eventually. Bushco certainly thinks it’s a problem for another day–a bomb that will land in somebody else’s lap, most likely a Democrat’s.
It’s as if the entire country is running on some insane sugar high. I worry that it’s all going to send us back into the age of a Great Depression.
Democrats know that a really unpopular war & out-of-control domestic issues are their tickets to reelection, & therefore (I think) show slight interest in doing anything aggressive about it until elections are nearer, but I think it’s a perilous strategy–they may win the skirmish but lose the war. I’d like to see some immediate action, like impeachment, before Cheney bombs Iran.