Former Secretary Of State Colin Powell Issues New Book… Time To Recall The Iraq Lie

“It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership” by Colin Powell Begs Us To Evaluate Truth Of Iraq War

 

The Consequences

•  $3 trillion cost to the U.S. Treasury & Taxpayers, plus massive debt burden on future generations
• 4,487 U.S. service members dead
• 100,000 Innocent Iraqis killed
• 32,226 U.S. service members wounded
• 500,000 US citizens/service members toll from cumulative psychological and physiological damage

 

The Lie

• Bush insisted in his own 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” that the invasion was something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. During his book tour, he even cast himself as “a dissenting voice” in the run-up to war. “I didn’t wanna use force,” he said.

 

The Truth

• In his new book, “It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell provides the most authoritative confirmation yet AND supports the well-documented conclusion that there was actually no decision-making point — or decision-making process — about going to war with Iraq during the events between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation which had nothing to do with those attacks.
• In his own 2007 memoir, former CIA Director George Tenet admitted, “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” Nor “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.
• Downing Street Memos, first published in 2005, document the conclusions of British officials after high-level talks in Washington in July 2002 that, “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
• Indeed, history shows through documents and verified facts that W. Bush had long wanted to strike out at Saddam Hussein and was trying to link Iraq to 9/11 within a day of the terrorist attacks.

 

The Traitors of Truth & Democracy

• George W. Bush
• Dick Cheney
• Condoleezza Rice
• Donald Rumsfeld
• Paul Wolfowitz
• Scooter Libby

 

The Truth Revealers

• Colin Powell
• George Tenet
• Valerie Plame
• Joe Wilson
• Col. Larry Wilkerson

Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent — A Liberal’s Calm Before The Storm

Made glorious summer by this sun of Windy City;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried…

…for how long?

For some of us the inauguration of Barack Obama ushered in the potential for an era of liberal progress, of recovery from the dark clouds of George W. Bush… illegal wars, reactionary social policy, and economic destruction.

The republican party nomination process stimulated my presaging fear of tumult as I witnessed enthusiastic applause for the proposed destruction / elimination of women’s’ rights, civil and marriage rights, health care access, criminalized physical expressions of hate, and responsible stewardship of earth’s resources.

While I know that I am not alone in my liberal desires for a more progressive and better nation, it sure feels a lot lonelier.

As I contemplated my sense of alienation and just how far I am away from the American political norm, a battery of political spectrum tests proved that, indeed, I am a Liberal Elite in a right wing, conservative nation…and it is not a good feeling.

For the Liberal Elite contemplating the national mood, it may soon be another kind of Winter…the end (winter) of our contentment…

I’m A Liberal…

2011-20: Decade Of U.S. Economic Hell

More Bad News For America’s Worst Decade

Adapted From The Commentary By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Next decade? Toxic politics promises to make economic matters much worse than even today.

“The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams,” warned Columbia Prof. Robert Lieberman earlier this year in Foreign Affairs.

Now, over at Foreign Policy magazine, Josh Rogin warns: “This Fight Ain’t Over: Think the debt ceiling gridlock was ugly? Congress is just getting warmed up. Here are eight more foreign-policy battles right around the corner,” when they get back to sinking the economic recovery even deeper this fall.

All this was punctuated last week by the one-day 513-point market drop, S&P’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating on Friday, as well as the 634-point drop in the stock market yesterday, Monday… and all the implications toward a double-dip recession.

Another Foreign Policy expert, James Taub, warns of what the “debt-ceiling deal tells us about the Tea Party’s grim vision of American power.”

There’s a disaster ahead, Taub writes: “All Guns, No Butter … depleting the national treasury to pay for the military … when many Americans want to reduce the role of government at home and especially abroad, the debt deal just concluded is likely to preserve the country’s hypertrophied defense budget, at least if congressional Republicans get their way.”

Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s Darth Vader, is doing just that, doubling down on his vow to make certain Obama is a one-term president, intentionally ignoring the collateral damage, killing economic recovery.

How? Ol’ Mitch is already sabotaging the new congressional debt “super-committee,” vowing to appoint only Republicans who have signed Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge.

Expect more deadlocks as economists warn that recovery is impossible without new revenues.

Beyond toxic nondemocratic pledges on taxation, America really is “coming apart at the seams.”

Both parties are to blame:

• Dems for lack of strong leadership.
• The GOP and the Tea Party with their bizarre Schumpeterian conviction that destroying the economy is the only way to save America and pave the way for a revival of their anarchistic, free-market Reaganomics.

Politics sabotage economy

Yes folks, our politicians really are out of control, utterly unable to manage the economy. They’re irrational, and worse, clueless and myopic in economics.

No surprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI:DJIA) crashed 513 points in one day last week and by 634 points on Monday. Nor a surprise that pundits are pointing to high-tech multiples, warning of a new dot-com crash and double-dip recession, as well as a collapse in commodities, in emerging markets and endless debt problems for Europe.

The WARNING, in short, is that we’re headed into a perfect storm rivaling the disastrous political insanity of the 1930s that prolonged the depression, driving the economy into far reaching global problems that added fuel to an irrational zeitgeist and world war.

Over the past decade we predicted the 2000 crash, the 2008 meltdown and the short-lived 2009 rally, and now it seems quite clear that future historians will indeed look back on the 2011-20 decade as the “Worst Decade in American History.” Worse than the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. Totally predictable, totally denied.

Early this year we made 10 predictions of a chain of events that would reach a critical mass and consume America in a torrent of “creative destruction,” finally crippling • our too-greedy-to-fail monetary/banking system, • our capitalism for the super-rich and • our corrupt political system.

The recent debt-ceiling deal is a wild red flag, warning that it’ll be much worse for a long time.

Dead ahead…

• a protracted new civil war between special interests and the super-rich versus the middle class and disadvantaged,
• a wasteful internecine war that will further downgrade America as the world’s superpower, while enemies cheer loudly.
• So buckle your seat belts folks, it will get uglier and uglier for years.

10 Annual Predictions — a year-by-year look at a decade of economic battles between the haves and have-nots

So here’s an update of my 10 annual predictions, a year-by-year look at a decade of economic battles between the haves and have-nots, with no room for compromise between the three ideologies destroying our nation from within. The “wealth gap,” the greed, the entitlements, the hostilities are now so entrenched, compromise is impossible.

Only a catastrophic 1929-style collapse of capitalism, democracy and a descent into economic hell will force America to restructure.

Here’s how it will unfold in the coming 10 years:

2011: Wall Street’s super-rich control Washington

Thanks to the conservative takeover of America’s so-called democracy over the past three decades, from Reagan to Obama, our activist Supreme Court delivered the coup de grace into America’s psyche last year, overturning long-established precedent giving rich owners of zombie corporations the same rights as live citizens. That decision would have gotten a failing grade in my constitutional-law class back at the University of Virginia.

2012: Super-rich solidify absolute power over our political system

That bizarre Supreme Court decision legalized political bribery. Now, billions pass through lobbyists to politicians with one goal: a promise that every politician vote in line with their ideology. Wealth rules. America is no longer a democracy, not even a plutocracy. Today our middle class is in a rapid trickle down into Third World status, while the rich get richer and the “gap” between the super-rich and the rest steadily widens. It is now irrelevant who wins the 2012 race, because money corrupts and Obama is already a puppet of this system favoring lobbyists and wealthy donors.

2013: Pentagon’s global commodity wars accelerate

During the Bush presidency, Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national-security issues.” Billions of new people spread unrest worldwide as “massive droughts turn farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.” Most disconcerting, from the Pentagon report, “by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening … an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life.” Trapped in denial, political leaders will chose war over cooperation.

2014: Global population exploding, rapidly wasting resources

America’s “conspiracy of the super-rich” drains trillions from middle-class taxpayers. The invested super-rich see global population growth exploding by 100 million annually not as a drain on scarce commodities, but as tool to get richer through free-market globalization, ignoring the tragedies triggered as the population climbs to 10 billion — all demanding more of the world’s limited, nonrenewable resources. In the end, all will be demanding payback for our failures to heed warnings of environmentalists like Bill McKibben: “It might be too late. The science is settled, the damage has already begun.” We can’t save the planet.

2015: ‘Gilded Age’ explodes America’s ‘Global Empire’

Kevin Phillips warned in “Wealth and Democracy” that around the time of the Pentagon’s prediction of WWIII in 2020: “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt and ultimately burning themselves out.”

Similarly, financial historian Niall Ferguson, author of “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire,” warned that we deceive ourselves, thinking “about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms.”

2016: Reaganomics self-destructs; crashes come

“But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic?” asks Ferguson. “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly,” too rapid to respond in time? The new GOP president ignores the lessons of history, like Jared Diamond’s warnings in “Collapse”: “One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak in population, wealth and power.”

2017. Middle-class revolution: Buffett’s ‘rich class’ loses

The seeds were planted years ago. Warren Buffett saw the revolution coming: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” After the 2016 presidential election, political rage explodes into a new civil war. The income “gap” pops a bubble, there’s economic collapse and riots spread against another bailout of our “too-greedy-to-fail” banks. New depression ignites class rebellion.

2018. The Fed and Wall Street collapse, Glass-Steagall reinstated

Diamond says he’s a “cautious optimist:” Leaders need “the courage to practice long-term thinking, make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.” They delay, fail to act boldly. This crisis triggers a cultural revolution. History tells us most leaders act by short-term self-interest, not long-term public interests, especially politicians funded by billionaires who can’t see past quarterly earnings, year-end bonuses, the next election.

2019: Global commodity wars spread, killing millions, wasting trillions

More than half our federal budget goes to the Pentagon’s war machine, limiting America’s fiscal and monetary policies. In this context, new commodity wars are ignited by an accelerating global population against a decline in the world’s scarce resources. That also forces a total rethinking of the balance between spending to protect against external enemies and a rapid deterioration of domestic programs: employment, education, health care, retirement.

2020. America’s first woman president, patriarchal dominance ends

It is clear that patriarchy — male dominance of world culture, politics and economics throughout history — has failed, bringing the world to the brink of total destruction.

Why do male leaders fail? Jeremy Grantham’s firm GMO manages $108 billion. He predicted the 2008 meltdown and now warns: Male leaders are emotional, “impatient … management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget.” Leadership “requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained.” Yet “we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers,” which guarantees that “every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always to miss it,” as in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and in 2020.

In the coming post-capitalism America…

Grantham’s research suggests that women leaders will naturally emerge not just because the male brain is a short-term saboteur. The bigger reason is that women’s brains have evolved naturally as superior long-term thinkers. Brain researchers tell us 75% of men are short-term left-brain thinkers, while 75% of women tend to have strong right-brain traits as forward-thinkers, more aware of the future, the big picture, with a sense of future consequences, peacemakers rather than gamer-players.

Bottom line: These 10 predictions deserve serious consideration, so invest wisely, defensively and never listen to the happy talk from males across Wall Street, Washington or from the super-rich.

– Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Notes On The Debt Ceiling & The Debt Solution

Notes On The Debt Ceiling

• Failure to raise the ceiling does not mean the government defaults on its debt bonds
• The “Public Debt Clause” of the 14th Amendment mandates that all federal government debt be honored and payments to be paid on schedule — always and under all circumstances
• Reaching the debt ceiling requires the government to first pay all debt payments due, with any remaining revenue available for other budgeted expenses
• To fund the “other budget expenses” which the Administration is required by law to spend as directed by Congress, the Treasury will continue to issue Treasury bonds, as these are not issued by Congress and not within their constitutional competencies
• The new bond issues will be paid on schedule: refer to above point, “The 14th Amendment requires all federal government debt payments to be paid on schedule — always and under all circumstances”

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Further Notes On The Debt Ceiling: The President Is A Poor Negotiator

• Last December, Mr. Obama agreed to extend the irresponsible Bush-era tax cuts — a concession of weakness to Republican blackmail — and the deal pointedly did not include an increase in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation.
• The President seemed clueless then, as now. He asserted that, “Nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his, “responsibilities to govern.” Well, how’s that worked out for ya, Mr. President?

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More Notes On A Proper Debt Solution

I like this statement about Obama’s absurd concession on Social Security and Medicare to Republican intransigence:

“driving toward a landmark debt deal that could not pass a bitterly divided Congress”

Clearly, the choice now is to recognize and accept our new world reality of a diminished United States capacity: a need to cut government at every level that does not directly secure the prosperity and safety of the American people: 

• End the senseless wars on all fronts (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya… including the 40 year failed prohibition of drugs)
• Bring our troops home and cut defense that met the needs and capacity of an America that no longer exists: +cut 146 security forces and 16 intel agencies/departments in half or more; +close three-quarters of our 700+ foreign military bases; +cancel ships, planes and weapons that exceed our need and capacity
• Focus on what is mandated in the US Constitution: “common defense,” i.e. NOT policing the world and its oceans (and where in our interests, do so in partnership with our allies, sharing resources and expenses)
• Saving from above: approximately $800 BILLION A YEAR (FY2011 these cost us upwards of $1.5+ TRILLION)… 

The deficit is approx. $1.4 TRILLION a year, so… additional cuts and enhanced revenue need to be approx. $600 Billion a year:

• Start with the Vice-President’s bi-partisan committee’s agreed-to-cuts of around $200 Billion per year
• Include the military savings above of about $800 Billion per year
• Add approx. $400-500 Billion in increased taxes on the wealthy (from the top 5% but the top 1% particularly)
• THE BUDGET IS BALANCED!… and “directly secure[s] the prosperity and safety of the American people

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PROBLEMS SOLVED:

• Debt Ceiling Issue Neutered Appropriately
• Yearly Budgets Balanced Without Undue Hardships

Govt Debt: Not A Big Deal — CBO: If Politicians Do Nothing, The Debt Problem Goes Away

Today the Congressional Budget Office released its latest forecast for the government debt, and yes, it shows a large debt. We all get that fact.

What we don’t get is that… it’s not a big deal!

The following chart graphs two lines: The Extended Baseline Scenario and the Alternative Fiscal Scenario.

In the baseline scenario, politicians literally do nothing about the debt: let the Bush tax cuts expire; keep indexing the Alternative Minimum Tax higher; don’t raise Medicare payments. All of this will take place automatically if politicians do nothing… absolutely nothing!

As a result the debt burden stabilizes, period.

Unfortunately from a debt perspective, it’s the alternative scenario that’s more likely… because politicians will attempt to mollify an unduly alarmed public (whom the politicians have, themselves, worked into a tizzy) over an issue they do not understand.

Thus, the Bush tax cuts probably won’t be killed, and Medicare payments to doctors will be raised.

Still, THE POINT is: if there were no legislative changes whatsoever, the chart delineates what would be our debt future.

If there must be a discussion about long-term budget adjustments, the chart above is where all debt discussions should start.

The Deficit: What’s It All About Alfie?

Still, people will huff and puff about the deficit… as if the federal government’s budget is like a family budget: NOT!

But, let’s look at it.

And, I say… so what?

It’s a big “so what” because we’re not going to allow ourselves to run the same deficits that have been necessary for the last several years… and we simply need to address the matter calmly and SLOWLY.

Check out the graph below:

Hummm… well, let’s see… looks like the deficit situation (not total federal debt [the sum of our outstanding borrowed money owed back to lenders] but the yearly amount spent over revenues received) is about on par with major cataclysmic historic US events such as the Civil War, WWI, and the Depression and WWII.

Is that right? I mean, is that ok?

Let’s see… In this point in time, we are enduring:

• continuing hostilities on three fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya
• the longest running conflict/war in US history
• the greatest economic crash in 80 years
• the greatest contraction in wealth in history

Yet, look at the chart. We’ve never encountered such budgetary stressors and yet, comparatively, it looks like we’re fairly moderate in our deficit burdens.

In fact, had it not been for Bush’s unduly lightening the wealthy-class tax burden, we’d have still been in Clinton’s budget surplus zone when the wars and crash hit us (mumbling “irresponsible Republicans under his breath”).

Now, today, we have an advantage and a tool with which to address some of this deficit spending… we can monetize a great deal of it (which is partially what the Fed’s Quarterly Easing [Fed purchases of long-term government debt bonds] is all about) without significant worry of igniting inflation. Thus, the impact of the deficits becomes one largely of a “paper” matter.

So, let’s chill out, citizens.

And politicians… just “say no” to doing anything. Just do nothing.

And we’ll be just fine, thank you very much.

Now… let’s do another round of stimulus, get a real national health insurance program, and reduce defense spending to… oh, I don’t know… let’s say just twice as much as the rest of the top five industrialized nations combined.

That’ll about do it.

Report: Students Don’t Know US History…

 … Mimicking, It Seems, Their Parents — And Dooming Us To Repeat Economic & Military Mistakes Over and Over

While your children readily know all about playing Xbox360 and Playstation3… U.S. students don’t know much about American history.

• Just 13 percent of high school seniors who took the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, called the Nation’s Report Card, showed a solid grasp of the subject.
• With just 22 percent of fourth-grade students and 18 percent of eighth-graders demonstrating proficiency, the two other grades didn’t perform much better.

The test quizzed students on topics including colonization, the American Revolution and the Civil War, and the contemporary United States.

• For example, one question asked fourth-graders to name an important result of the U.S. building canals in the 1800s.
• Only 44 percent knew that it was increased trade among states.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement,

“The history scores released today show that student performance is still too low. These results tell us that, as a country, we are failing to provide children with a high-quality, well-rounded education.”

Education experts believe a heavy focus on reading and math under the federal No Child Left Behind law in the last decade has led to lagging performance in other subjects such as history and science.

“We need to make sure other subjects like history, science and the arts are not forgotten in our pursuit of the basic skills,” said Diane Ravitch, a research professor at New York University and former U.S. assistant education secretary.

Of the seven subjects on the national test, students performed the worst in U.S. history.

Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

The scores on the history test did not vary remarkably from years past; in 1994, for example, 19 percent of fourth-grade students scored proficient or better in U.S. history.

What it means is that… in what is becoming a more and more global society… American students are more and more at a disadvantage. And, so then, is our nation.

Educators said history is critical to students learning how to become better citizens and understanding how the country’s political and cultural systems work.

Students need to not only recognize leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, but also understand why they were important to the development of the country.

“Overall the quality and success of our lives can only be enhanced by a study of our roots,” said Steven Paine, former state schools superintendent for West Virginia. “If you don’t know your past, you will not have a future.”

• This is why our Founding Fathers are misquoted and misused as examples in our public policy-making.
• This is why heads nod approvingly as Sarah Palin gets Paul Revere’s “Midnight Ride” all wrong.
• This is why we are doomed to make the same mistakes now as were made recovering from the Great Depression: focus moved from stimulus to deficit and debt control.

Soldier Leaves His Baby Daughter A Note Before Going To Afghanistan

Before departing for a tour in Afghanistan, First Lieutenant Todd Weaver left a note to his 9 month old daughter, in case he did not make it back home.

Todd Weaver was killed on September 9, 2010 by an improvised explosive device.

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Army 1st Lt. Todd W. Weaver

Died September 9, 2010 serving during Operation Enduring Freedom

26, of Hampton, Va.; assigned to 1st Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky; died Sept. 9 at COP Stout, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.

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ENOUGH! IT IS TIME TO BRING OUR SERVICE PEOPLE HOME.

Our job is done.

The remaining job is for the Iraqis and Afghanis, themselves, to stand up.

We Interrupt This Broadcast (China’s Urban Boom) With An Important News Development — Bin Laden’s Death & America’s Lost Decade

President Barack Obama smiled announcing Osama bin Laden’s demise. Obama’s was a satisfied smile at a moment during which America was once again confident of our power… a historic image, just like the photos of flag-waving Americans in front of the White House.

Columnist Howard Fineman said it well,

“By calmly and meticulously overseeing the successful targeting of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama just proved himself — vividly, in almost Biblical terms — to be an effective commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.”

True enough, with the death of bin Laden, as written in Die Welt, “America has once again powerfully demonstrated that no one can attack and humiliate the US and go unpunished. America has shown that it does not forget, and that it has the resources, technology, courage and skills to go after its enemies with perseverance and a long reach.”

6,000+ Dead US Soldiers

Indeed, it seems like America truly has finally won the war on terror, ten years on — and nearly a decade after the photo op for the Warlord George W. Bush wearing his bomber jacket in front of the sign, “Mission Accomplished.”

The mission was not accomplished, though, and even the death of Osama bin Laden will not provide a happy ending for America’s continuing tale of woe.

America is no longer the country it was before 9/11.

“We are a beleaguered America,” the columnist Howard Fineman summed up in the Huffington Post after the operation in Abbottabad.

As proof, one needs simply to “review the numbers.” At least 3,000 people died at the direction of mass-murderer bin Laden, and an all-efforts-justified program to find him started. The U.S. didn’t initiate a search for a criminal thug, though.

Instead, we launched the world’s historically largest War Of Retribution. Evolving tally: U.S. and Allies inflicted 100,000+ Innocent Civilian Deaths and Victims.

100,000+ Innocent Civilian Deaths & Victims

On the international side, the US War On Terror / War Of Retribution has created many terrorists, probably more than it eliminated through:

• Guantanamo detentions
• military tribunals
• Abu Ghraib
• torture and prisoner abuse, and
• more than 100,000 innocent Iraqi citizens’ deaths.

Guantanamo Bay "Detentions"

On the American side, we’ve seen:

• 6,000+ dead US soldiers
• more than $1.3 trillion in new federal debt attributed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
• the US accumulating a total debt burden of over $14 trillion, even as we ran budget surpluses 10 years ago
• the seemingly-most-powerful country in the world confronting the prospect of declaring insolvency
• and finally, America’s self-inflicted loss of freedom… think… USA PATRIOT ACT, aka, “The Patriot Act”

The German news source, Süddeutsche Zeitung, writes correctly:

“… America has not been liberated. The United States must engage in critical self-examination to answer the question of whether the fixation on terror and wars has not tended to paralyze the nation and restrict it in its development. In the 10 years (since 9/11), America has surrounded itself with both physical and mental barriers. The ‘Land of the Free’ paid the price for its supposedly increased security in the currency that is most important to it: openness and freedom.”

USA PATRIOT ACT

America is so mired in a culture of fear and anxiety that we spend more on defense than all other nations combined. We’re enmeshed in wars we cannot win and no longer want to fight — according to American opinion polls about the war in Afghanistan.

Of course, security is a country’s most inviolate right, but in searching for it, we have so far overshot the mark that our citizens now maintain a greater fear of debt than of terrorism — à la, the rise of the American Taliban… ah, I mean, the American Tea Party… funded by right-wing opportunist billionaires and oligarchic corporate interests.

And while America’s been busy crippling itself, China accumulated annual economic growth of nearly 10 percent.

According to the IMF, China will become the world’s biggest economy by 2016, much sooner than expected. Beijing has plenty of time to make strategic decisions, such as its new focus on investing in green technologies… while America continues ridiculously debating in Congress whether or not climate change is real or imagined.

During this lost decade of the War On Terror, this is what the US has been reduced to:

McDonalds reported that as part of its employment event to hire 62,000 minimum wage, (mostly) part-time workers, it received a whopping 1 million applications. Alas, the US economy is now so pathetic that the bulk of the population will settle for any job and anything to survive. Literally anything. The saddest part: over 938,000 applicants were turned away to wallow in despair. On an optimistic note, we can hope that Burger King needs a few million janitors in the immediate future, too!

$14 trillion U.S. Debt... Budget Surpluses 10 Years Prior

Yes, aside from reality, things in America are really recovering quite nicely, thank you.

Meanwhile, the US still leads the world for spending on election campaigns — the next US president will spend over $1 billion on advertising spots and smear campaigns against rivals: the 9/11 attacks did not unify the country, but rather further drove us apart.

Concurrently, the U.S. public is entertained by meaningless distraction and debate.

While finalizing the final details of the bin Laden operation, Obama was bullied by a financial Oligarch into publicly releasing his full birth certificate to dispel his detractors’ claims that he is not a real American. Could anyone seem more trivial now than The Donald?

Abu Ghraib-Torture & Abuse

Amid the joyful frenzy in the US, all of this reality will be temporarily forgotten. The president’s triumph will allow him short political respite. Truth is, though, Obama can’t undo our lost American decade.

Perhaps the decade would have gone a little differently if US soldiers had killed bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001, but the prince of terror vanished for 10 years. With his escape, he probably caused America more damage through our own flailing about than through anything else since 9/11.

So go ahead, America, “Party Likes It’s 1999!”… as if it’s still the heyday prior to the 9/11 attacks… while reality screams it’s 2011 and beyond…

$1.3 Trillion Debt From Wars In Afghanistan & Iraq

Mass Deception For Mass Destruction

#SupportJulian – Mass Destruction

The war in Iraq was waged with heavy rhetoric. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ became an integral part of our vocabulary. The one thing that will emerge with some clarity, after activists and media have combed through WikiLeaks’ Iraq and Afghan War logs, is the number of people that have died on all sides. Civilians. Soldiers. Doctors. Journalists. Relief workers. Children. The mass destruction that’s been unleashed in the hope of preventing it.

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‘Curveball’: I lied about WMD to hasten Iraq war

Defector admits he fabricated information to try to bring down Saddam regime

Iraqi defector who went by the codename “Curveball” has publicly admitted for the first time that he made up stories about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret factories to try to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Al-Janabi’s information was used in part by the U.S. as justification for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. More than 100,000 people, most of them Iraqi civilians, have died in the war. The U.S. began to withdraw its troops from Iraq last summer.

Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the CIA in Europe, said Curveball’s admission made him feel better about himself.

Drumheller, who says he warned his superiors at the CIA before the 2003 invasion that Curveball might be a liar, said the confession would be a final wake-up call for those who continue to insist there had been weapons of mass destruction.

“The interesting part for me is that he has recanted what he said, which is fascinating in the sense that I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now,” Drumheller told the Guardian.