PJB: Sub-Prime Superpower

By Patrick J. Buchanan

There was a time when events like the collapse of that bridge over the Mississippi would have been taken in stride.

Yes, it was a tragedy, a mature nation would have said, but like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and bolts of lighting hitting folks on picnic grounds, these are “acts of God.” Even in a good life and a great country, bad things happen.

But today, there has be someone to blame, someone to be held accountable, someone who could have prevented it, someone whose head must go on a pike. And it is the job of the journalist to give us the guilty. And the modern journalist relishes nothing more than standing before a TV camera passing moral judgment on failed mortals.

After Katrina, it was President Bush, who neglected to send in the 82nd Airborne at once, and “Brownie,” the FEMA chief. Yet, all concede Brownie had done “a heckuva job” in the Florida hurricane.

We are now told there are 70,000 bridges in this country that are “structurally deficient,” whatever that means, since collapsing bridges are a rarity. One recalls the crumpling of a slab of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco a few years back, but few others. Yet, a clamor has arisen for hundreds of billions of tax dollars to repair our crumbling infrastructure of roads, sewers, bridges and electrical grids.

Fine, but where are we going to get the money?

We are bust. We consume all we earn. We save nothing. We borrow $2 billion a day to finance our trade deficit and buy all those goods and gadgets at the mall. The Chinese save between 35 percent and 50 percent of all they earn.

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Paying the Costs of Zionism

From Xymphora

The war in Iraq is costing the United States more per month than the Vietnam war cost per month on average over its eight-year term. In real dollars, adjusted for inflation. In a country that has recently deindustrialized itself, and has gone from being the world’s biggest creditor nation to being the world’s biggest debtor nation. In a country that borrows money to pay for consumer goods and not for productive equipment that might pay the costs of borrowing. Trillion-dollar bill (on the rosiest assumptions). Mostly to pay the operating costs of the war (wait for when the Pentagon demands that all its worn-out equipment be replaced). A war that increases the costs of fighting Bibi Netanyahu’s ‘war on terror’. The generals can’t say when it will be over, and no prominent politician of either party is prepared to even discuss a meaningful withdrawal. It is bad manners to officially admit that fighting a war for Israel might be dumb, especially a war that is destabilizing the world’s largest source of hydrocarbons. Both likely Presidential candidates are gung-ho for years more of fighting. The big secret about the strange American devotion to paying the costs of Zionism is that the United States simply can’t afford it. Nixon had to end gold backing for the dollar in order to keep the United States from becoming insolvent over the costs of Vietnam. President Giuliani won’t have anywhere near the same bargaining position when he has to try the same sort of trick. Of course, the right-wingers will use the economic crisis as yet another excuse for belt-tightening, i. e., cutting social programs. What happens when there are no programs left to cut?

Article Source: Xymphora