Kiss American Security Goodbye

I have mentioned the TomDispatch website a time or two before. As stated in the tag line on their site TomDispatch is “A Regular antidote to the Mainstream Media.” Certainly you will find well researched and documented reporting in articles posted on the site that you will never see in our largely state controlled mainstream media.

Here is a portion of an article that details numbers that should be important to every America living today. Unfortunately, most Americans seem to be too wrapped up in worrying about the American economy’s general malaise brought on in large part by the Bush administration’s reaction to the 9/11 disaster and to the series of self inflicted disasters that the event triggered to be too concerned about very much else. This is understandable as pocketbook issues always move front and center when it is your pocketbook that is being threatened.

Here is a sample of the “insecurity” article:
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15 Numbers That Add Up to an Age of Insecurity
By Tom Engelhardt

In the meantime, consider the following little list — 15 numbers that offer an indication of just what the Tai Chi Principle meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than we were in January 2001, when George W. Bush entered the Oval Office:

536,000,000,000: the number of dollars the Pentagon is requesting for the 2009 military budget. This represents an increase of almost 70% over the Pentagon’s 2001 budget of $316 billion — and that’s without factoring in “supplementary” requests to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the President’s Global War on Terror. Add in those soaring sums and military spending has more than doubled in the Bush era. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since 2001, funding for “defense and related programs… has jumped at an annual average rate of 8%… — four times faster than the average rate of growth for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (2%), and 27 times faster than the average rate for growth for domestic discretionary programs (0.3%).”

1,390,000: the number of subprime foreclosures over the next two years, as estimated by Credit Suisse analysts. They also predict that, by the end of 2012, 12.7% of all residential borrowers may be out of their homes as part of a housing crisis that caught the Bush administration totally off-guard.

1,000,000: the number of “missions” or “sorties” the U.S. Air Force proudly claims to have flown in the Global War on Terror since 9/11, more than one-third of them (about 353,000) in what it still likes to call Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is a good measure of where American energies (and oil purchases) have gone these last years.

509,000: the number of names found in 2007 on a “terrorist watch list” compiled by the FBI. No longer, in George Bush’s America, is a 10 Most Wanted list adequate. According to ABC News, “U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list” and Saddam Hussein was on the list even when in U.S. custody. By February 2008, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the names on the same FBI list had ballooned to 900,000.

300,000: the number of American troops who now suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress, according to a recent RAND study. This represents almost one out of every five soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Even more — approximately 320,000 — “report possible brain injuries from explosions or other head wounds.” This, RAND reports, represents a barely dealt with “major health crisis.” The depression and PTSD alone will, the study reported, “cost the nation as much as $6.2 billion in the two years following deployment.”
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To read the entire well documented article complete with supporting links go to TomDispatch.

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