From Tulsi: On Friday, Senator Rand Paul introduced the #StopArmingTerrorists Act in the U.S. Senate. Beyond the halls of Congress, our bipartisan legislation has the support of Progressive Democrats of America, Veterans For Peace and the U.S. Peace Council. We’ve introduced this bipartisan, bicameral bill to end the use of American taxpayer dollars to provide arms, intelligence, training, and other support to armed militant groups who are allied with and often working under the command of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. This counterproductive regime change war in Syria has caused tremendous suffering, loss of life, and millions of Syrians to flee their homes. It has also resulted in terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda growing stronger. We must end this madness. That's why members of both parties are working to pass this bill and end this destructive policy. Please call your representatives and ask them to support this important, bipartisan legislation (HR 608). If you vote in the us; H.R. 608 in the House, S. 532 in the Senate, ask your Reps and Senators to support these bills, Covertly, our government foments rebellions and arms terrorists. Overtly our government deploys the military to fight those terrorists. Meanwhile millions of people are made to suffer or die. And we, the taxpayers, get stuck with the bill. From the perspective of a citizen not in the loop, it seems that: This is madness. ............................... your thoughts?
The question of madness depends on a question of purpose. If we dig out, for instance, Stephen Ambrose, The Rise to Globalism, is everybody going to pretend they never had any clue under the sun there was some connection between trade and commerce, to the one, and imperial exploratory adventurism, to the other? That is to say, yes, there appears to be some degree of cycle, but the question of madness has much to do with the question of purpose. We are presented, in our time, symptoms of symptoms of symptoms; the underlying malady cannot simply be pulled out.
For political and historical context of this kind of US government behavior, one can read the likes of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman https://www.amazon.com/Washington-Connection-Fascism-Political-Economy/dp/0896080900 It has always been madness, from the outsider's perspective - but the core voting blocs of the American public do not seem to have access to an outsider's perspective. Can't tell 'em nothin'. So - - -
It has to do due with the bureaucracy mentality, which occurs throughout government. The game works like this. It begins with a real world problem. Resources are made available to solve the problem, but the solution does not end the problem, but is designed to amplify the problem, thereby growing the bureaucracy. The military needs wars and/or threat of war to justify resource allocation. To make that resource pot grow, it needs to compound the perception of the problem. The entitlements do the same thing, since they also work under bureaucratic principles. The war against poverty began over 50 years ago, with the percent of poor not changing, yet the budget kept growing. It is not that leadership is incompetent, but rather leadership expertise is geared toward the concept of waste for power. When have new bureaucracies like the EPA, they benefit by the perception of more pollution and violation of pollution, so they can make more and more laws, even when there is marginal return. Trump is looking at this system wide, to change the mission statements, to citizens and tax payer first and bureaucracy second. Trump does support the military, which seems contradictory. The reason is military spending on equipment, leads to innovations that can also benefit the private sector. For example, the GPS system, put in place during the first Gulf war, extrapolated into a lot of civilian business and consumer opportunity, even though it appeared under the bureaucratic principle. You don't normally get private sector return with the EPA, but rather such bureaucracies tend to bleed the private sector. This choice is consistent with the needs of the citizen being first.
I was throwing bureaucracies under the bus. Although some environmentalist have been known to use militant tactics, which is often funded by diverting tax payer money through third party tax exempt groups.
You were blaming bureaucracies, as if they were all the same, and all bad, whatever their purpose. Environmental protection and destabilizing foreign countries, tax collection and Medicaid - all the same. As if administration of any kind could be carried on without them.
That didn't fly when I was younger and any liberal complaint about injustice related to military affairs was denounced as hating the military. Why should it fly now? Because you're a conservative? Because you're Wellwisher? Just because? (Caution: The seemingly obvious zinger of an answer only begs itself as an obvious question.) And you should probably bear in mind that something like a War on Poverty is actually a conservative solution. Yes, really. Consider that we can still hear people today proclaiming the U.S. is some manner of Christian nation. This was more prominent when I was younger, and much more effective. And the War on Poverty, in such a context, comes about as a particular political initiative because this allegedly Christian nation has spent that much effort finding excuses not only to refuse to feed the hungry, but to create as many hungry as they could. Notions like the Founders themselves and the First Amendment aside, the main reason people should avoid the Christian nation argument is that they claim the cruelties of history in a way that others can't. And while it also helps to avoid wasting time dealing with such claims in the first place, they can be illustrative because, well, people did and still occasionally do waste time as such. The problem is that people sulk like they're grounded until they clean their rooms, or some such. And, you know, yes, a bunch of this stuff is kind of annoying, but here's the combination kick in the conscience: (1) The cleanup—i.e., address of certain issues—is necessary, and (2) it would behoove us as a society to not make such messes in the first place. If we feel indentured to the ghosts of history, it is because we are, and we cannot escape that bondage until we forsake the ties that bind. 'Tis an insidious irony that such an historical freeloading demand should be so integral to a cultural sectarian identity including the label, "Party of Accountability". Look: Everybody hates the bureaucracy except for the parts they like. This is human. It is a fact to be recognized and accounted for in general consideration, not a demand to be tendered and insisted upon. You probably do better to exceed the boohbah standard than wallow in it.
Only government ones, that you don't like. The largest and most significant expansion of US government bureaucracy in your lifetime was the Homeland Security and Patriot Act expansion of 2002 - 2004. The government ones you like are fine with you (voter ID, etc), and the ones inevitable with large corporations (private health insurance) are fine with you. You prefer the huge bureaucratic overheads of Blue Cross and United Health to the much slimmer and less bureaucratic Medicare, for example, because they are corporate rather than governmental.
We have little control over native forces who fight for goals we generally support. There may be some overlap with people who have goals we do not support, but mostly they are not the same people. We support rebels in Syria because the president of Syria was horribly suppressing political dissent. The madness would be allowing it to continue. We aren't responsible for the majority of the suffering any more than the allies were responsible for WWII.
Trump is expanding the drone strikes - allowing the CIA to run them again, making them more frequent, etc. The bribe program under W&Cheney, in which Sunni Islamic jihadists were paid and supported in return for desisting in their attacks on US soldiers (the "Surge" program), was and is widely praised by the same people pushing this bill. So the only madness being opposed by this bill's sponsors is the USA doing dubious stuff Russia doesn't like in Syria, maybe Libya. It's selective, in its madness opposition. So no argument with it, as far as it goes.
