I haven’t written in a while but what I want to write about is the problem in conflict between patriotism and greed. The problem is that one of our political parties has seemed to link patriotism with greed together. What I want to do with this piece is to separate the two things once again.
In order for our government to split these two very opposite things our newly elected officials must hold hearings to investigate where the money we citizens have put into Iraq and the forgotten war in Afghanistan has gone. I remember the first inkling that there were real problems of corruption associated with the war in Iraq was when I heard a report that the US military was purchasing its gasoline from a subsidiary of Halliburton for $2.40 a gallon at a time when gasoline was selling in the United States for about a buck ten. Paying a buck 40 over what we were paying in the United States in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, both nation’s sitting over a seas of oil, seemed unseemly. Alarm bells started to go off in my head. I began to wonder what was happening to all the money we were sending overseas for the war. Then there came the reports of no-bid contracts. News reports kept coming with stories of contract truck drivers coming from the United States and getting paid a quarter of a million dollars each. You can’t tell me that there weren’t truck drivers in Iraq that could have done the work for far less. I still don’t understand why, with a full deployment of US troops; we needed to pay millions of dollars for heavily armed contractors. What I felt I was seeing was wholesale corruption aided by an administration that couldn’t shovel the money fast enough to any unscrupulous group or person who was willing to take our money and the money of future generations.
There are two problems I see with what has occurred. The first problem is that our government and in particular the Republican Party has shown itself to be very comfortable with corruption. Their justification is that it is business. Maximizing profits getting the most that a buyer will pay for an item is just business. But that is a false argument. Even in the normal course of business if someone extorts too high a price for anything whether they are legal or not, you the purchaser feels cheated. For example, let’s say you need a small repair on a road trip far from home and the service station charges you way too much and holds your car ransom for the payment. Suddenly all your vacation money has gone into a small repair and you know that you have been ripped off, but you don’t have the time or the resources so far from home to fight them. If this happened close to home you would at know not to patronize that business again, but what choice do you have far from home? The difference between being screwed by the repair shop far from home and being screwed by Halliburton far from home is the intermediary. Bush is happily screwing you. It is hard to realize that we are being screwed since we don’t seem to be feeling it in our wallets. Why aren’t we feeling it? This leads us to the second problem that I mentioned above.
The reason we aren’t feeling the screwing action from this administration in our wallets or anywhere else is because we are barrowing the money rather than raising taxes to cover the expense. If we are taking tax cuts now and spending billions of dollars in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we should be feeling it hard in our wallets and in other places such as in our economy, but we are not. How is this possible? Who is paying for the war if we aren’t? Who is picking up the tab? This is the unethical part of this mess. Go now over to your kids. Look deep into there eyes and thank them because they are the ones who are paying for the debt. The problem with our children and our children’s children and their children’s children paying for our wars is that we are spending their money without asking them permission. They are going to be saddled with having to pay off our debt without ever having been given the choice of how their money was to be spent. I believe that this is the moral equivalent of stealing. Cross generational debt is in a word antidemocratic. It is in essence tyranny of a previous generation and should not be allowed.
Now, let me get back to the subject of corruption. Corruption is not patriotic in any way, shape or form. Corruption is at the very least unethical behavior if not outright criminal behavior. I don’t care that corrupt government officials have removed the laws put in place that makes their behavior legal, it is unethical and in the long run is treasonous in nature. How so? The United States of America is a nation that derives its governmental consent from its people. In the fiduciary duties pressed upon every elected official is a responsibility to work for the public good. Ripping the public off, especially in a situation where the country is at war, is treason. If the elected officials allowed this corruption to happen, even if the did not have a direct hand in what occurred, they do have a role as accomplices. The Bush Administration clearly plays a more direct role as an accomplice. In law the punishment metered out to accomplices is equal to that given to those who have committed the crime because they are equally liable. Period.
In conclusion what has gone on in this administration and the last few congresses has been an abandonment of their responsibilities as government to maintain the public good. Heavy debt is a much more real, and a much grave challenge to the perpetuation of our great nation than all of the terrorists around the world combined. Debt has removed more democracies around the world than any other threat. Terrorist would have to kill nearly all American’s for this democracy not to survive. I have no doubt that there are terrorists who are working towards that end. I simply don’t think that they will be able to kill everyone hopping for freedom and democracy. Terrorism’s real effectiveness is in its ability to act as a leaver to use a few thousands dollars in the form of a terrorist act to affect a completely unreasonable response by our government to spend. If a single days actions and a budget of somewhere around 1/10th of a million dollars could have caused our government to put-on 3.3 trillion dollars of debt, all Alquida has to do is some simple math and realize that they would only need a small number of events to turn the United States into a Weimar Republic, a democracy that collapsed under debt only to be replaced by the horrific dictatorships of Adolph Hitler.
Given the inability of this administration to hear the voice of the people and the administration’s ability to usurp power far beyond that our forefathers intended, while it perpetrated a full-on attack of the Bill of Rights and the Judiciary, leaves me to believe that intensions by this administration were not for the advancement of the public good, nor its expansion of the publics power. This administration’s attempt to render our generation and future generations impotent by locking away the power of the purse through debt, I believe may have been a cynical attempt to limit the citizenry’s power over its government. Whether willful or not, debt lowers our ability to have our government do what we want it to do. It places that power into the holders of the debt. This is very unfortunate because the largest current holder of our debt is now China.
