Tallcal
Honestly worrying about what you or someone else has does not put money in my pocket. I mean clearly that the idea that I should care about what some one who has already achieve wealth in life in comparison of what I have is just down right despicable.
I have no control over who pays taxes and neither do the rich. Assaulting a class of people because of their station in life does no one any good and this is more class warfare from the talking points of the fringe left. The sad thing is that most of the people who are doing the talking and assaulting the rich are the ones who can afford to do so because they are part of the same class. They insist on telling us the people who actually work for a living that we must hate some of the rich in this country because they achived wealth. I read a really interesting piece about Stalin and Propaganda and for some reason they cited Stalin’s own notes (he wrote notes in the margins of the books he read) about the emotion of jealousy and how it is used to socially condition people to effect change. Put it into the context of today’s press (the press run by very rich people, isn’t that odd?) with this hate the rich c**p and think about it for a while.
As I said to my father today and may have here – if this country is run by the rich/lobbyist/big business, wouldn’t you think with all this power concentrated in one man (President Bush) that they allegedly selected, they would have an outcome that they would pay no taxes, could tell the congress how to vote at the same time they are on the floor or don’t have to deal with safety/pollution regulations respectively? I would think so but none of this has actually happened, has it? Before you say a word, tax breaks and reduction in taxes are not the same as paying no taxes.
But before I go on, I got to add that I read Daryl Hannah plea to save the south central farm. Yes LA has a farm some where. It really isn’t a farm but rather a bunch of people who plant things. I got to side with the people here (even the invaders who live there) that the LA should not off sold the property to a developer but what I find really insulting is that here is a group of people taking up the cause, Joan Biaz, Daryl Hannah, Ben Harper, Tom Morello and Leonardo DiCaprio among a lot of others. So I have to ask this, the amount of money needed to purchase the land form the developer is $16M, with the combined wealth of these people, this is one house in the Hollywood hills – why don’t they just pay for it themselves? Because they are rich and feel that their money is just that THEIRS. Let the poor working people pay for it, we need to get a new Ferrari this month. Oh I am not jealous of them, I just want them to pay for things that they feel we should.
As for the military budgets, I got to tell you I thought that they were unrealistic but when I was taught about line item accounting, the federal budget and the procurement support system of the US military – it began to make sense.
If you want to see a change in this, there are a few simple things I strongly suggest.
The first is getting an administration in place who will not allow former military officers from being able to work for military suppliers and to become lobbyist. There you eliminated half of the problem. For that matter, make it a law that military supplies can’t lobby at all.
The second is to stop funding R&D projects from concept to demo but instead force proof of concept demonstrations with the suppliers and than fund some of the rest.
The third is force the places of higher learning to get involved, they should be doing most of the R&D anyway. Government dollar for government dollar they are the least effective means of research in the country.
So Ira-contra, who cares? The entire thing could have been prevented if we just went into Iran in the first place but your peanut farmer idiot decided to follow the diplomatic/UN path instead and this has lead us to where we are today. Talk about killing our credibility in the middle east, nothing did more damage to it than the ‘hostage’ situation under the carter administration.
I am with you with the drug thing, it is a shame that the 60’s people demanded the drugs that the US government was forced to sell to fund the war. Talking to someone who was one of the Air America pilots who was over there for a long time (yes I did ask him about the drug connection and he did not admit to flying drugs) he mentioned a few things that were forgotten about the funding of the war, the war protestors and how they were hurting things over there. He also mentioned some of the aide flights they did in Laos - rice drops I think he called them, flying Bob Hope around (which I understand was rather a pain in the a**) and even picking up an elephant that needed to go state side for dental work (got to love the military with all that waste in trying to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese).
