Monday, February 11, 2008

After all, he's just an old man ....

A while back in this Blog, I quoted a very old member of the Ojibwa saying briefly in reaction to recent events that

" ... I am sorry for you. You whites have only a short time on top of the world. Your greed is destroying you. Your arrogance will guarantee it ..."

I've brought it up again because of the uneasiness the words cause ... and the doubt that we will choose to do nothing about what he implied in his comment. He was right, you know. He was right...and I fear for what we will finally decide to do as a nation.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Who Can We Trust?

I do wonder who we can trust ~ we seem to float along accepting an unconscionable rate of interest demanded by money lenders without a whimper ~ usury in the worst sense ~ health care costs are ought of sight ~ millions cannot afford health care ~ corporate America controls our government, resulting in massive lay-offs of employees and on and on ... and then there is the war ~ more to the point, the wars. As Frank Rich put it in the New York Times: ' It was always the White House's plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there's no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war ... Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military's holes.'

Since Bush took office, he has doubled the federal debt to more than $ 5 Trillion. According to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That's $3 Trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others. Very recently, King Abdullah's nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government's Investment Authority and others to mainline a $ 12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York Bank while at the same time, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. As it has been said, it was no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah's tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it ..

Who can we trust? In all honesty, I don't know.