WE REALLY DON'T NEED TO BE EATEN ALIVE BY PREDATORS

On Thursday the Senate voted to continue funding Bush's occupation of Iraq by an overwhelming majority. There are parts of it Bush doesn't like but the majority is veto-proof. Is that good? Usually when we hear veto-proof, we wag our tails. "Veto-proof" means a thumb in the eye for Bush. Is a quick trial, a final cigarette and a blindfold next? But in this case we're talking about $200 billion mostly to keep his failed Iraq policies moving forward in place. The Senate tried making it more palatable-- and this is the part Bush doesn't like-- by larding it up with lots of domestic pork and by a passing popular amendment to provide benefits for veterans. (They also defeated legislation calling for an end to the occupation.) The Army Times had a clear-eyed look at it on Friday:

[T]he price tag of war and domestic funding portions of the bill top $200 billion, setting up a showdown with President Bush, who has said he will veto any supplemental that features enough domestic spending to drive the overall cost of the measure above his $180 billion request.

“There is a time and place where domestic funding should be debated and considered on its merits, but that is not in a bill focused on the emergency needs of our troops,” the administration said in a May 15 policy statement on the war-funding bill.

Republicans began breaking with the president on inserting domestic spending into the measure May 15 during a Senate Appropriations Committee markup of the panel’s version of the bill, which proposes money for energy assistance for low-income households, a 13-week extension of unemployment insurance, prisons, more money for the Food and Drug Administration and other domestic items. That trend continued as many Republicans helped Democrats approve the domestic funding portion of the bill, 75-22.

But some Republicans objected, charging a war spending bill was the wrong legislative vehicle for pushing through spending for important domestic projects and a major overhaul of the GI Bill.

...Defense Secretary Robert Gates has warned Congress that money in some key accounts, including Army personnel and operations funds, will run out by mid-June.

Gates said the Pentagon could move money between accounts in what he called a “shell game” to prevent severe disruption, but only until some time in July.

Gates on Tuesday said the Army’s military personnel account will run dry June 15 and the Army’s operations and maintenance fund will do the same around July 5.

The Army’s payroll problems can be solved temporarily by shifting money from the personnel accounts of the Navy and Air Force, but there is no easy resolution because all of the services are short in the same budget account.

It seems to be that the neither the Pentagon nor any other arm of the Regime-- can be trusted (not even a little) to "move money between accounts" or play any "shell games." In fact, according to a report in CongressDaily the same day the budget was passed, we are seeing more and more hard evidence that billions of dollars have "gone missing." They're not missing between the cushions of sofas; the billions of dollars have been stolen. (Keep in mind my earlier allusion to last cigarettes and blindfolds because this war has been a giant subterfuge for the transfer of billions of dollars from the taxpayers (present and especially future) to the creation of generational wealth for a new and dangerously powerful American aristocracy. The robber barons never came close to pulling of a heist like these guys.

All those batches of missing ten million here and 5 million there add up to a lot of money. And in a time when no one is quibbling about whether or not there is a Bush Recession-- only how long and how deep and if it will turn into a Depression-- the last thing the economy needs is a massive transfer of wealth from the public sector to the hands of the rich and powerful, long the most consistent hallmark of the Bush Regime.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee used a hearing to publicize a Defense Department inspector general's report, released today, which estimates that of $8.2 billion used to buy commercial goods and services in the war, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service processed $7.8 billion in payments without adequate documentation. For $1.4 billion of payments, the Army lacked the minimum justification required for payment, the report estimates. "We don't know what we paid for," testified Mary Ugone, the Defense Department's deputy inspector general for auditing. The IG made estimates by extrapolating from a sample of 702 commercial payments; a methodology the Army questioned in a written response to the report. Lawmakers highlighted some of the largest single payouts made without adequate paperwork, such as voucher showing an $11.1 million payment in 2005 to contractor IAP Worldwide Services that "was missing both the receiving report and invoice," the report said, and a $5.6 million payment made in 2004 to an Iraqi company without any description of how the money was used.

The report also highlights $135 million in payments made without documentation through the Commander's Emergency Response Program, which was created to give local U.S. military commandeers in Iraq the ability to back small local projects. While the program is generally used to pay Iraqis for supporting U.S. forces, the report notes large lump sum payments of up $8 million made to foreign governments with troops in Iraq. The United Kingdom got $68 million, Poland $45 million and South Korea $21 million. But the IG report says of 22 related vouchers reviewed "none contained sufficient supporting documentation to provide reasonable assurance that these funds were used for their intended purpose." The report says auditors could not identify any reconstruction project resulting from the funds. Ugone denied that war conditions excuse sloppy record keeping. She said auditors used standards significantly less rigorous than those for domestic spending to decide if payments were adequately documented. "There are challenges, but there should be some semblance of accountability," she said. "No documentation, from our perspective, is not acceptable." Ugone noted that from 2003 to 2006, the audit found accounting did not improve.

But it isn't just naked theft from the Iraq morass. The Bush Regime and the Republican Party and Blue Dog enablers have systematically dismantled the entire regulatory structure set up to defend ordinary Americans from powerful and insatiable predators (i.e.- the lobbyists and corporate campaign donors for both political parties). Warren Buffett is pretty rich, maybe the richest man in the world. When endorsing Obama the other day, he sited the dismantling of the regulatory system and the return to an unstable law of the jungle capitalism that is great for the greed-obsessed super-rich and powerful and ruinous for everyone else and for society and the economy as a whole. Yesterday Buffett was in Berlin warning about the impending economic implosion built into the Republican economic policies of the past decade.

"It's not right that hundreds of thousands of jobs are being eliminated, that entire industrial sectors in the real economy are being wiped out by financial bets even though the sectors are actually in good health."

Buffett complained about the lack of effective controls.

"That's the problem," he said. "You can't steer it, you can't regulate it anymore. You can't get the genie back in the bottle."

Nearly 33 million people have watched this video I want you to take a look at-- think about that number for a moment; it's more than the combined population of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, San Francisco and Columbus, the 15 biggest cities in America. In this clip, the predators are the Republican Party serving the interests of their corporate masters. The equally vicious but ineffective crocodile would be the Blue Dogs and DLC wannabe Republicans. The water buffalo are... us-- ordinary Americans-- and our sometimes political protectors, the Democrats. Now watch: