This is a rant, but if you read it give us your thoughts.

Half a trillion dollars?

I just don't get it: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gMSVWqL3tikhx7L_ompt0hDXO-5AD9275KG80

If one (or a committee) were to design the worst presidency imaginable, could they do better? I mean, without ushering in the apocalypse, could one imagine a president who is this fucking bad?

Seriously, I have been trying to sort this out for awhile, where is this guy's head coming from besides his asshole?

I believe he has an agenda, or had one, but I cannot figure out what that is. None of it makes sense. It doesn't make sense for the rich, when the economy implodes and the middle class erodes, they'll be fucked as well. It doesn't make sense for the country as our reputation and standing in the world community is piss poor and we are no safer.

I don't see who gains in the long run from any of this. Halliburton? No, this shit merely engenders their own obsolescence. What in the holy fuck has been this administration's plan?

They surely had one, what was it?

I seriously can't figure it out. Every single thing they have done seems to be of the most myopic, short term benefit to only a very select few which simultaneously ensures their inability to stay on top over the long run. Oil is petering the fuck out, the middle class is disappearing and the influence of these men is getting shot to shit as people have finally started to pay more attention to their malfeasance.

Sure, they can get away with it, but the country is getting the shit kicked out it. Their shitting where they eat and they may find they can't come back.

I don't get it, it goes against all notions of self-preservation and long term planning.

Oh, well, they get the Iraqi oil contracts, but the whole country has gotten a major wake up call: oil is too expensive in money and blood, so the Green Movement gets a boost. Overall: bad for the oil companies.

Who is winning here and what are they winning? More money? That's it, this is all about more money?

I don't buy it, I don't. Somehting else is behind this craziness but I can't figure out what the fuck it is.

It's like Caligula is in charge, but a boring version of him. What the fuck is going on here?

I can give you an easy answer and cause to this problem Uber. 2 things have screwed over the WEST.

1. Globalization - moving away from the west and directing more economic and cultural attention to the east.

2. Neo-Fordism - Investing and Moving capital/assets to countries where labor can be facilitated for cheaper prices.

These two trends alone have screwed the mass-consumption and post-Marxist societies that we live in.. Now the East has the population, the technology and the money.. what do we have now? Food and that's it.. and the current trends suggest due to environmental factors that we won't have much of that for much longer.

Essentially Bush has allowed too many bad trends in the world to exist and hasn't done anything to stop them. Maybe its because he's pro-upperclass, so he sees that "fuck anyone that doesn't invest in mega-corporations".

Of course this makes all the more sense when you consider his Grandfather Prescott Bush was apart of a conspiracy back in the 1940s to take over Washington. (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml) I don't know a lot on the topic but it leads me to think that the family has some kind of Vendetta against their own country and are a bunch of fascist bastards. Forgive me if I don't have my facts straight.

It was about securing Iraq as a means of forcing Iran's hand.

It was forcing the base into the hills.

It was about stabilizing a new, static paradigm by attempting to enforce an old but stable one.

It was about keeping an eye on the middle east from within. about the capability to annihilate an enemy from point blank, and rubbing their faces in it.

It was desecration of "holy" ground in order to drive the hornets into a frenzy.

I think it worked fairly well.

To both of you I must ask again: what was the motivation here? What is the ultimate goal?

Having an eye on the middle east? What if Obama wins and we leave?

Fuck everyone who isn't upper class? Then you don't have a country nor the ability to sell Neo-Fords to them.

I'm trying to figure out what the administration and their GOP cronies before them had as the end result of all this.

There was clearly a premeditated goal. What was it?

A large armed force.

The faster you bankrupt a country, the faster education levels fall and the faster you can institutionalize the poor. Our largest and most profitable growth industry has for years been the prison industry, which is quickly moving toward privatization. Second to this, are the armed services, which are being exported as quickly as we can inundate them.

I think the goal was to slow the growth of one by allowing the other to absorb the overflow, culminating in dominion in a region once thought too volatile to dominate.

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t doesn't make sense for the rich, when the economy implodes and the middle class erodes, they'll be fucked as well.

The Bushes are notorious short-sellers. They thrive on bubbles that crash, and love to create them for that purpose.

As for long term, I recall Saul Alinsky saying he was convinced he could sell to a classical greedy capitalist a deal that would make the man rich tomorrow even knowing it would place him in grave danger the day after that.

And Vonnegut summed it up well:

PPP:PasycoPathicPersonality

Just plain nuts.

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I think the goal was to slow the growth of one by allowing the other to absorb the overflow, culminating in dominion in a region once thought too volatile to dominate.

The facts line up but I don't think they necessarily featured, foremost, the prison/volunteer army concept, although they must surely have been aware of the interchange. This may have been a major aspect of their plan when they still believed the neo-con seeds of democracy sown by invasion nonsense, but once that collapsed, the military became not their tool but their enemy.

Soldiers get tired of being shit on, and their commanders are mostly decent fellows who don't like it either.

I think the goal of the people behind Bush (we can all agree that Bush is more The Pawn than the Decider, yes?) is now to start WWIII and be justified in nuking a whole lotta pesky folks claiming title to what the Bushies see as

a) their oil

b) their Xtian Holy Land.

Not that this wasn't part of their plan before, but they hoped they could be conquering heroes spreading 'freedom' rather than losing villains sowing chaos and suffering.

Sort of classic Space Opera, but limited to Terran surface reality with some suborbital thermonuclear extensions.

I think the top Pentagon brass got fed up and simply clammed up things at their end, once the Iraq thing was fucked up so badly that, politically, Bush was forced to remove incompetent freaks and replace them w/ competent fellows like Petraeus --and even Gates, who hasn't been as insane as I suspect the Bushies had hoped he would. Messing with Iran, Russia, China and all isn't the same as fucking over Central American peasants.

I think responsible generals quietly made Cheney an offer he couldn't refuse, particularly after they'd concluded, exhaustively, that messing w/Iran was way too risky.

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Oh, well, they get the Iraqi oil contracts, but the whole country has gotten a major wake up call: oil is too expensive in money and blood, so the Green Movement gets a boost. Overall: bad for the oil companies.

Not if they've been buying up alternate energy patents and monopolizing financing for same for the past decade, it ain't. If anyone knows fossil fuels are a finite source of monopolizable wealth, it's them.

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Originally posted by Boogerhead:
A large armed force.

The faster you bankrupt a country, the faster education levels fall and the faster you can institutionalize the poor. Our largest and most profitable growth industry has for years been the prison industry, which is quickly moving toward privatization. Second to this, are the armed services, which are being exported as quickly as we can inundate them.

I think the goal was to slow the growth of one by allowing the other to absorb the overflow, culminating in dominion in a region once thought too volatile to dominate.

I might buy the dominion part of the argument, the other I don't though.

OK, so you dominate the Middle East... but it hasn't worked out that way, not even a little. You're saying they wanted to dominate the Middle East and secure that oil?

McCain would be the standard bearer for continuing this? We have a go at Iran next and everyone else falls in line?

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Originally posted by kenmeer livermaile:

quote:

Oh, well, they get the Iraqi oil contracts, but the whole country has gotten a major wake up call: oil is too expensive in money and blood, so the Green Movement gets a boost. Overall: bad for the oil companies.

Not if they've been buying up alternate energy patents and monopolizing financing for same for the past decade, it ain't. If anyone knows fossil fuels are a finite source of monopolizable wealth, it's them.

So why bother with all this then?

I disagree with your Duke Nuke Em scenario as well.

Population control.

It will eventually raise the standard of living for everyone, and If we kill more colored folk, the good ol'(white) boys will have recieved even more of a raise when all's said and done.

I never said "Oil" anywhere. They're not white, therefore they're targets.

Long term, yes. Plausable, even...

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So why bother with all this then?

I disagree with your Duke Nuke Em scenario as well.

a) Because they've made a ton of money in the process of their entire adminstration program.

b) Who can say? It just seems crazy enough to make sense.

Robotics are to the point where they can pump oil w/ very few humans involved. Oil'll be clean; it's underground. The surface will be very hot, though, but what do they care? (That's a question, not a rhetorical dig at them. I really don't know how much they care about the people and lands of those regions full of black gold/Texas tea.)

quote:

Originally posted by Boogerhead:
Population control.

It will eventually raise the standard of living for everyone, and If we kill more colored folk, the good ol'(white) boys will have recieved even more of a raise when all's said and done.

I never said "Oil" anywhere. They're not white, therefore they're targets.

Long term, yes. Plausable, even...

That's just silly I think.

This isn't about killing colorful folk.

Certain elements of the GOP have had a plan for years I suspect and have enacted it under Bush.

But what was the goal of the plan?

Not population control, it's not working very well if it is.

Times of turmoil are always the times of greatest profit.

Peace is, quite simply, monetary loss.

An unwinnable war guarantees profits for generations.

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Fuck everyone who isn't upper class? Then you don't have a country nor the ability to sell Neo-Fords to them.

Using Globalization.. or as I call it in this case Global Marxism they can sit back in America with no Lower and Middle Classes, it'd just be the upper class. Meanwhile in China, India and Africa the Lower and Middle exist there with very little upper class. (slavery is what I'm trying to say as these people are paid fuck all for their work) The marxist functionality are thus totally de-centralized fucking everything we've worked so hard to establish in the west. Suddenly its become hyper-capitalism where if you don't have capital you are essentially fucked.

Neo-fordism works if the consumer products are marketed in the countries that are producing them in the first place, this puts the money back into the corporation by taking it back from its employees after pay day. See China for example, they've been buying cars and all sorts of crazy shit because its cheaper over there. The upper class doesn't want these products because they prefer stuff that is more "elitist" leading to Upper-to-Upper class trading (cutting everyone else out). Money isn't circulating properly. The divide between rich and poor in that scenario would be devastating, something to the equivalent of a cyberpunk novel. Why, because technology would be so wide spread, but people's lives would still suck. - High Tech, Low Life.

Plus, don't underestimate two factors - the pandering and the incompetence. Pandering to a base that is very diverse and in many cases beyond batshit is going to warp your actions and goals away from sense. And then being deeply, deeply incompetent is going to mean that what happens is not going to be what you meant to happen. And then pandering means you have to pretend that it was. Rinse and repeat.

THe irony-humor ratio of the next few years should be extremely rewarding.

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Originally posted by Mr_Cyberpunk:

quote:

Fuck everyone who isn't upper class? Then you don't have a country nor the ability to sell Neo-Fords to them.

Using Globalization.. or as I call it in this case Global Marxism they can sit back in America with no Lower and Middle Classes, it'd just be the upper class. Meanwhile in China, India and Africa the Lower and Middle exist there with very little upper class. (slavery is what I'm trying to say as these people are paid fuck all for their work) The marxist functionality are thus totally de-centralized fucking everything we've worked so hard to establish in the west. Suddenly its become hyper-capitalism where if you don't have capital you are essentially fucked.

Neo-fordism works if the consumer products are marketed in the countries that are producing them in the first place, this puts the money back into the corporation by taking it back from its employees after pay day. See China for example, they've been buying cars and all sorts of crazy shit because its cheaper over there. The upper class doesn't want these products because they prefer stuff that is more "elitist" leading to Upper-to-Upper class trading (cutting everyone else out). Money isn't circulating properly. The divide between rich and poor in that scenario would be devastating, something to the equivalent of a cyberpunk novel. Why, because technology would be so wide spread, but people's lives would still suck. - High Tech, Low Life.

None of this seems to relate to Bush's actions that I am trying to understand.

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Originally posted by Bravus:
Plus, don't underestimate two factors - the pandering and the incompetence. Pandering to a base that is very diverse and in many cases beyond batshit is going to warp your actions and goals away from sense. And then being deeply, deeply incompetent is going to mean that what happens is not going to be what you meant to happen. And then pandering means you have to pretend that it was. Rinse and repeat.

This still doesn't explain what the actual goals were. Did they fuck them up? Probably, but what were they to begin with, do you see?

The end results of all this seem to have gotten lost. No one seems to ask: What have we been up to for the last seven years? No one seems to ask: To what end do we go as a country?

No, we have many accusations, of falsifying this and ignoring that but none of it broaches the whys a wherefores.

What did we hope to gain in an invasion? What did we hope to gain by leveraging ourselves out of money? What did we hope to gain by becoming ruinous and implacable?

There was a reason, however convoluted, that the administration went ape shit, they had an end scenario in mind. What the fuck was it?

And I do not believe it's about culling the population or trying to keep the poor man down, those all seem conspiratorial and silly. I believe that many of the people in question are not acting out of personal selfishness but instead out of a hyper-jingoistic sense of nationalism.

But what was it purposed toward? or is the nationalism its own possession of the rational mind, loosed now from all conceits of logic and propelled toward raw reflexivity?

Saying they are incompetent, or foolish or crazy or evil is too easy. it addresses nothing and merely allows them to slip away. We must ask: Why did they do this? It is not enough to simply say: they are stupid and evil, petty little men.

I'm afraid the only thing you'll get from asking those questions are "that's classified" /FBI.

I'd like to know too since all I can give you is theories and convenient facts. I don't think anyone but Bush and his administration can tell us what the hell was going on.

I think we've got another Watergate style thing where you just go "Why?? Why'd you do that?" and then the world forgets about it for the next 30 years till it happens again.

They shut up about Bin Laden quickly didn't they