Re: The confluence of recent events (redux). Given the impending failure of the super committee, what will we learn? The primary consequence of that failure is cuts to the military budget (ignoring the catastrophic impacts derived from a credit downgrade which, apparently, doesn’t appear on Washington’s radar, ever.) The primary focus of the “inviolate” Nordquist pledge is to shrink revenues and, by extension, the size of government. The primary sector of growth in the government is military and security spending which has increased 60% in the last ten years (costs of wars EXCLUDED.) The primary focus of the European bailouts is that military contracts to the lending countries (and the US) are honored to the detriment of social programs. Putting all that together could look like this: no member of the government is going to put forward a bill to cut military spending (it would look unpatriotic in our current society) so it is being done, ad hoc, by an “automatic” mechanism. The burden of defense is being shifted, subtly, to individual nations while we simultaneously cut our spending and the net to the untouchable military industrial complex is the same. This is all just my attempt to find the pony at the end of all this horseshit. Years ago, in a philosophy class, a student asked my professor what he thought of a current government conspiracy theory and his response has stayed with me these many years: “Occam’s Razor would suggest that the government appears unorganized because it IS unorganized and the proposal that from this chaos a conspiracy could arise is specious on its face.” Of course, we all laughed, mainly because specious sounds like a dirty word. Good times… Love your show, btw. All the best TVA.
