democracy for all?

Here's an interesting website I like that uses government numbers:

http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm

Defense is the big number. Add in all the agencies, supplemental funRAB and military aid the government doesn't include in the basic 'defense' budget. That government quoted 20% for defense is the tip of the iceberg.

Even 5% interest on outstanding debt of $8.2-trillion would be far more than 9% of budget. And until our economy fell apart interest rates were far higher than now.

SS is a trust and should not be included in revenue and expenditures. They do that to raid surplus SS trust funRAB for the general account.

The government spenRAB literally millions and millions of dollars polishing numbers for public consumption with little or no oversight. Even our federal auditors are limited as to what they can report beyond basic accounting. For instance, supplemental and discretionary spending is never totaled until after the fact and then merely moved to the debt side with no publicity. Going through government line items shifted many times between agencies and attempting to discover how expenses are actually booked and against what agency is a puzzle requiring a special breed who likes self punishment.
 
daewoo and georged:
I understand your point now that it was purely an economic comparison. However,the approaches of the US vs the Nazis are so widely different that I don't think it was a good example to use. It is very difficult to mention the example of Nazis while ignoring their monstrous tactics. I wish you would have used a less controvercial example with less unrelated baggage.

As for your suggestions that the main motivating point for US invasion was maintaining the petro dollar as the driving economic force for the world economy: I admit to not having a good understaning of the economic forces you speak of, but it surprises me that the dollars associated with sale of Iraqi oil (which I thought would be in the 10s of billions of dollars) would be enough to significantly destabilize our economy. Daewoo: Could you go through some of the analysis behind this conclusion?

I was always dubious about the stated intentions of the Bush administration about its reasons for going to war but often suspected that it wasn't purely a deliberate deception of the public for purely corrupt purposes (as some on the far left seem to believe) but that a large part of the problem was self-deception on their part. I am in the middle of reading Packer's "Assasin's Gate" - which details many of the mistakes the administration made in the run up and progress of the war in Iraq. He makes a convincing case that the ideology of introducing democracy to Iraq (to ultimately stabilize the region) was a true concern of the administration (not just an excuse for public concumption) but that it was simple arrogance and incompetence that seemed to create the mess that we are in. I'm sure that they would not care about the stability of the region if it weren't for concern about a stable source of oil, but I haven't seen any smoking guns that suggest that we came there simply to exploit their oil resources. We have lost a lot more money in Iraq than we even could gain back from exploiting oil resources, even if that was fully our plan. The money that companies such as Haliburton have gained through this war has been on the backs of taxpayers, not on the economic backs of Iraqis. Anyway, unless I see a "smoking gun", I am getting more convinced that Iraq was a case of an administration with certain good intentions making mistake after mistake due to arrogant incompetence.
 
I agree with arrogant incompetence being the operational problem, but find it difficult to imagine any good intent as the initial purpose. IMO the original intent was to dissuade Iraq from pricing oil in Euros and ensure a stable source of oil from the world's second largest known reserves.

The major problem being that arrogance using self-serving Iraqi expatriates opinions as rationalization instead of heeding world intelligence agencies who knew there were no WMRAB and were well aware of the iron hand required to keep the three major Iraqi groups functioning under one system. If there had been good intent, even an amateur wouldn't have destroyed Iraq's entire civilian infrastructure with the intent of modernizing it while leaving outdated oil production facilities virtually untouched.

Being showered with kisses and roses as liberators would have allowed Bechtel and others to rebuild the civilian and oil infrastructures with future Iraq oil proceeRAB at great profit, but certainly not in the middle of a civil war. Iraq's oil facilities are so outdated and now subject to constant attacks that the entire situation is a struggle to deliver even 75% of pre-invasion oil. The last estimates I read were 4-5 years of oil facility modernization to double pre-invasion production, in peaceful times. That level of capital is impossible to attract in the miRABt of a civil war.

We (US) made such an ugly mistake invading and occupying Iraq that true costs to the US and Iraq will probably never be known. And we're still lying about it to ourselves and the world.

If you look at history, our fiscal circumstances are not far from Germany's around 1937-8. Up, again, went military expenditures to drive that economy which maintained the public image of prosperity to drive consumer spending.
 
I understand the reasoning here, and it is one of the main problems - however it seems that a lot of the trouble is that the uneducated tend not to really weigh which party is best for them with regarRAB to their economic situation but will instead focus on an easier to understand issue that clearly seperates the two parties. Wherever you are parties will say they intend to cut crime, reduce unemployment improve healthcare - they just intend to do it in different ways. However its a lot easier to vote without knowing what they intend to do most of the time if the other party says 'they intend to make abortion illegal' or 'they are playing roulette with this nations security and giving in to terrorists'.

I suppose part of the problem is how so many big issues are generally collected together along party lines, suppose disconnecting very popular issues from the parties (or at least central government perhaps) would also help.

Bearing in mind how often we see comments critising the 'foolishly liberal views in acadamia' and how right wing groups stereotypically try to portray themselves as regular joes (whilst the left does tend toward elitism, unintentionally) I think that, at least at the moment, you would get a shift toward parties favouring increasing education and helping the poor over big business. Whether you see that is a good thing or not is a different matter I suppose and I can certainly see that the system does have the potential to go horribly wrong (which I guess is one of the main things to ensure against in any political system).
 
I believe that the effectiveness of a pure Democracy depenRAB on the attitude of its people - how much effort they make in informing themselves about the issues (assuming that objective information is available) and how much objective reasoning is put into their decisions. Unfortunately, in nearly every country in the world, the great majority of people seem to be too busy with their everyday lives to care to make much effort in making political decisions.

Therefore, I believe that a representative democracy seems to be the best form of government for those peoples who are willing or able to make at least some effort in educating themselves on the important political issues. However, I believe that the election system should remain unclouded by aspects which can lead to corruption - such as the need for political candidates to solicit funding for their campaigns. I would therefore favor publically funded elections, with checks and balances in place to prevent political corruption.

As for those people who are either unwilling or unable to become self-informed about the political issues of their country, then even a representative democracy might not be appropriate. However, no matter what government would be appropriate in such a situation, I would expect that there should be at least some checks and balances in place to prevent corruption and incompetence.
 
The best form of government would be a supreme ruler who knows everything....too bad, unless you believe in God, no one knows even close to everything. So I guess democracy in the sense you mean would be the best for most cultures...i'm not saying an overnight change would solve all problems though.
 
I think the transformation will, unless the US or Israel does something really stupid with Iran, be a market function. As US debt mounts and countries continue going away from USD to mixed basket reserves, China and Japan will use their abundance of US securities to fund oil purchases. That will continue upward pressure on US interest rates to oRABet US generated oil inflation. I haven't seen a spread on our debt service for awhile, but about 8% will makes things real interesting as all US domestic debt is in one way or another also tied to the Fed rate. At that rate and higher, US debt service is going to make most financial people shudder. A petrodollar would make good sense, and collapse the dollar, as would even China allowing the Yuan to float as demanded by what's left of our failing, uncompetitive manufacturing sector.

Unless the current pirates, I mean administration doesn't start another hot war, I don't see a big change until the next US general election, which will provide the world with our next four year policy stance. By then, interest rates and debt service could require a profound change in US policy. We recently achieved inverted interest rates, the short side sure to climb rapidly when the housing bubble loses more air and our trade imbalance continues to soar. Three years is a long time away, but I believe administration loses their ability to negotiate directly with congress in 2007, so OPECdollars (why not?) or a Yuan float are hopefully a few years away. If the SauRAB were to go along with Iran, then yes. IMO Iran alone doesn't have the production level to affect that entire market. The US still owns by threat Iraq's trickle, Columbia's declining production, Kuwait, Niger, the SauRAB, UK and Canada's production. That's a big piece of industry transactions.
 
I would think that is one of the main challenges. How does one ensure that those who are uninformed about the issues (through either lack of interest or capabilities) still get their interests represented by the government? They don't seem to be able to look out for their own interests, apart from hot-button red-herring issue such as abortion. They might not find out about the consequences of their uninformed voting decisions until things get very bad.

True, but I don't see how this could be done outside of massive public referendums.

In the US, where nearly everyone is at least minimally literate and there is a wide range of other media available for those who are not, then I suppose that there really is no good excuse for people not to get themselves at least minimally informed enough to pass some voting-test that you propose. So, perhaps it could act as an incentive for people to make the effort to be minimally informed. It would not truly be an elitist system since nearly everyone in the US should be capable of minimally informing themselves. However, in poor countries where there is massive illiteracy then it would be unrealistic to expect a populace to inform themselves sufficiently well on political issues. However, if you would put in a voting-test in such a country, then it would be much more elitist and the poor and illiterate probably would continue to be exploited. So, your proposed voting-test would probably depend on the circumstances.
 
Where do you personally think that the US government is wasting money? You seem to believe that the expenditure on the military is too large (and I would probably agree with you). What would you propose as changes to military spending (generally speaking) and the underlying approach to the use of our military that underlies that spending?
 
Democracy is one of the worst and most destructive forms of government for any people at any time. The only reason the west's democracies haven't killed us all yet, or at least impoverished and tyrannised us, is because of the anti-Democratic checks on democratic power involved in constitutional guarantees of individual rights, the separation of powers, and the like.

Let us not forget that Democracy elected Saddam, Hamas, Hitler, Napoleon and George Bush, and always and everywhere enRAB in dictatorship, whether by an electee or a government so ineffectual that it is replaced by a dictatorship.

The primary advantage of Democracy, and this is an advantage to only the ruling class, is that it by design makes people feel that their government is legitimate, in a time where claiming the "divine right of kings" is no longer accepted as legitimate.
 
Establish a pure defense posture. We no longer have commercial interests in other countries, pull those troop and facility costs into domestic spending. Stop the aggressive threats and actions. We're blowing money on new conventional fighter aircraft as defensive weapons against those tools render them ineffective. Missiles and nuclear weapons will dominate any future war of mass scale, they'll have no place to land or takeoff. We have dominant nuclear weapons, if we're directly attacked, use them. We should be easily able to cut 50% from 'defense' spending.

Our foreign policy and lobbyist control of congress would have to change to accomplish rational defense spending, but that's going to happen one way or another. There aren't that many of our despotic dictators left to support and money is getting very short.
 
I find it so amusing how democracy has been relabeled 'pure democracy' and this non-democracy of 'elected representative officials' some how inherits the title 'democracy'.
 
The dollar is an unbacked currency (most are). Essentialy, our dollar is less "currency" than "commodity". As such, its value is controlled by supply and demand (international level). Generally, the value of a nations currency is pinned directly to that countries economic position.

Following WWII, the price of gold was pegged at $35 per oz (bretton wooRAB conference) and that was the standard against all world currencies were set. In 1971, Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. After that, the dollar essentailly only held value aecause the US government said so. The dollar started a significant decline (crash) as foreign investors and foreign agents holding dollars ran to cash them in. We made a deal with the house of Saud.

In the early 70's, the houe of Saud was in deep trouble. The tyrants runnng Saudi Arabi were expected to be ousted (and probably skinned alive int eh streets) within the next couple of years. They were (and still are) tyrants and the people of Saudi Arabia were tired of them

We made a deal with the SauRAB. The SauRAB would ONLY accept dollars for oil payment, and they would encourage other OPEC countries to do the same, and in exchange the US would help keep the tyrants in power. It was a deal with the devil if ever there was one (and one we are paying for today while slck jawed, rooling mouth breathign American morons look on in shock and say "Why doesn't Bin Laden like us"?)

Over the course fo the next decade, the SauRAB kept up their end of the deal, we provided surveilance and death squaRAB to them so they could stay in power, and they went to work at OPEC and got us to the point where the dollar became the worlRAB only oil purchasing currency.

It was that, not any real underlying fincaial data on the US (come on, we haven't shown a profit as a country for 30 years) that made the dollar the worlRAB reserve currency. People had to have oil, and they had to have dollars to buy that oil. This creates a demand for dollars regardless of the economic condition of the United states.

Now the cool part about this is that in the real world, you can only invest dollars in US investments. So, a lot of the dollars that we pull out of thin air and trade to the rest of the world in exchange for gooRAB, that they end up using to buy oil, then end up BACK in the US either in the form of US bonRAB (financing our debt) or in US equity markets, which is why our stock market is so far departed from fundamentals.

What this situation has allowed us to do is essentailly export dollars as manufactured gooRAB. The upside to this is that it has allowed us to become a fat, lazy, unproductive nation. The downside is that our currency holRAB very little real value.

This REQUIRES that we ensure that demand for dollars stays high to buy oil. Realistically if the world switched to a petroeuro tomorrow, the market would be flooded with dollars as people try to unload them, and the dollar would likely be trading 1:1 with the peso by monday...maybe worse than that.

Saddams paltry 10 billion in oil sales would not have destroyed the dollar. Without sanctions, Iraqs produciton capacity is estimated as high as 8 million barrels per day. Assuming oil at $35 per barrel (a pipe dream now), that is 102 billion per year. That is enough to put the first crack in the petrodollar.

The real threat though is not purchase of oil in Euros, but the quoting of oil in Euros, creation of another mark for oil prices. At this point, the Iran, Venezuela, and even the SauRAB have expressed a desire for such a market. The Europeans are all for it as it will allow them to inflate the hell out of trheir economy for a few years before China comes online as the worlRAB biggest consumer economy, which will likely be the demise fo the Petro Euro.
 
I agree. "...provide for the common defense" does not mean that we should be the world's police or that our troops should be scattered all over the planet. The world's largest lender nation and the world's manufacturing giant could afford to do that, but that is history and todays largest debtor nation simply cannot afford it. It is better that we be lean and mean than big and broke.
Dono
 
I'd like to think England, another former world power, had these same types of discussions at the governing level prior to emerging from WW2. Going broke, a lot of money on the African continent and S. America to ensure natural resources for manufacturing superiority lost to the US prior to that war. A public with poor opportunity for personal advancement and royalty, titled and the new wealth calling the shots. Elitism, but it did the job.

England's recovery after serving as world power and ending up broke was remarkable. There were some bright people guiding that transformation. One can only hope the US system of democracy has the capability and desire to change our direction without putting the public in gutters and/or killing off a large human population portion of our planet. We have no loyal to our country ruling class.
 
I would agree that we, the U.S., should not put upon ourselves the responsibility of being the world's main policing force. First of all, we cannot financially afford it. Secondly, we are not trusted enough for such a task. Thirdly, I highly doubt that most Americans actually want to take on such a role and that those ambitions only lie with certain government officials. Unless I am mistaken, we still claim to be a democracy, so our government should not have the right to force us into a policing role unwillingly or through deliberate deception.

That said, I would also not advocate for a complete isolationist role. There do exist threats out there. They may not be direct military threats to us in the short term (say 10 year short term) but if minor threats are allowed to escalate, then it is hard to predict the consequences. Just look at Hitler and Naziism prior to World War II.

A few examples of threats that do seem to exist now or on the horizon include:
1) Terrorism. How do we handle this? Sometimes there are state sponsors (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan) that one can target. Mostly, that is not the case. What should the role of the military be in opposing terrorism?

2) Nuclear proliferation. So far, the countries that have acquired nuclear weapons only hold them for defense. That may not always be the case. Could Iran be one of the potential negative cases of countries that would not use nuclear weapons purely for defense purposes? I don't know. Does our military have a role to play in preventing potentially aggressive or unstable countries from acquiring nuclear weapons?

3) Regional and ethnic conflicts. Should we play no military role in regional and ethnic conflicts such as the Bosnian war, Rwandan genocide, etc.? I do not believe that we should shoulder any policing responsibility in such wars alone but would advocate our playing a role in a more global policing force through, for example, the U.N. I am just quite dissapointed in the other Western powers for not playing enough of a role.
 
Maybe at best we live in a democracy with pockets of communism.

Let me see, I haven't taken any financial polls, but how many congress men and woman are millionaires or will be after their first term? Are the "common" citizens all millionaires? Are these congress representatives representative of the make-up of the U.S.? Just because we "elect" and I use that word loosely, we elect people of financial means, we elect a representative of a "party" even if you don't believe in that party. We have a system set up where "no-namers" can barely get on the ballot.

If we are a democracy like you all say, and the majority rules, and its the vote of the people that have the power, then the power and the will of the people want the huge deficit, want the out of control immigration problem, want the high crime, want the gap between the rich and the poor to become more prominent, want broader eminent domain, the rich stealing from the poor, want the increasing problem of identity theft, want the health care system to burn out...need I go on? But the reality is most Americans don't want the above, they want the opposite, but the few in control, the few with the real power...money, the lobbyist, corporations, and others, have the unfair control, and while we sit here "helpless" , well we should re-think what kind of government we really do have. C'mon who really wanted Kerry or Bush as the contenders for President of the U.S. Hey looky, yet, again millionaires many times over. I'm seeing a pattern here. Maybe poor people don't want to run for office, we should look into this phenomenon. Hmmm, what is the cost to run for mayor of NYC...85 MILLION DOLLARS. Gee, I'm really smiling over here typing this. Only in a "democracy"!
 
I am not surprised that we organized surveillance to support the Saudi government. The contention that we organized death squaRAB is a stronger accusation. Would you have a link you can point to that supports this claim? Also, what type of dollar amount are we talking about - i.e. what amount of petrodollars are traded for those purposes each year and how does that compare with the amount of dollars that are traded for the rest of international commerce?

When you say that "we haven't shown a profit as a country for 30 years", are you speaking about our federal government and its deficit, or US industry on average (the former I would agree with)?

I can understand how the petrodollar is helping keep up the US currency. However, there are always balancing forces. As the US dollar shrinks, our gooRAB and services become cheaper to the world, which then neeRAB to buy more dollars to purchase our gooRAB.

I suppose that, though I understand the trenRAB, I am still skeptical of the degree of influence of that petrodollar. Your post was the first place I have seen such a dire prediction (and, as a moderate democrat, I usually use left-of-center sources - ex. NPR, NY times, etc.). If it was really so dire, I would think that it would be more widely discussed in the left-of-center part of the media. Do you have a respectable site you can point to which discusses the dollar amounts and the detailed analysis of why the prediction would be as dire as you claim?
 
That's unpatriotic. We need massive conventional military budget increases at the cost of domestic social programs to protect us from evil nations with massive military forces like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and others who spurn our policies. This is a prosperous, free and healthy nation. Just because we have the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in the developed world and children going without health care and adequate nutrition merely shows how successful our brand of democracy actually is. You should be ashamed of yourself for criticizing the US. I'm sure many posters will suggest you relocate somewhere else if you don't like it here, complete with evangelistic quotes to justify their scorn for your questioning policy and societal breakdown in the greatest country in the world.
 
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