The Real Housewives of Wall Street | Rolling Stone Politics
I don’t know why I even bother posting this stuff. Anybody with half a brain in their head already knows how monumentally crooked the US financial system is, and nobody in a position to do anything about it cares (or reads this blog). Just in case you’re not head-on-fire furious about it already, click the link above and you will be.
Watch this video, then read this article. At this point we are so fucked there is no coming back.
(Source: youtube.com)
I have a pretty strong constitution. Blood and guts, snakes and bugs, human suffering, ABBA - none of these things get to me. But when I saw this grotesque abortion of bureaucracy, I actually recoiled in horror.
This unholy clusterfuck of a powerpoint slide is the “process” the military uses for choosing new equipment. Is it any wonder we end up pissing away more than half our federal budget on the armed forces and still can’t manage to beat a couple hundred jackasses living in caves?
That chart isn’t just unnecessarily convoluted, it’s deliberately convoluted. The only way a process gets to that point is if you’re trying to waste as much resources as possible while accomplishing as little possible. I shudder to think of the man-hours (not to mention tax dollars) spent on just coming up with the process, let alone the hundreds (thousands?) of paper-pushers required to actually follow it for every single piece of equipment used by the military. And this is just one small aspect of the massive armed forces bureaucracy. Can you imagine the process for the rest of it?
Infographic: Where Did the Money to Rebuild Iraq Go?
People complain about corporate bailouts here in the US, but at least we know who got them and what they spent it on. Sure, it’s mostly managerial bonuses, but at least we know. Not so much with the Iraq reconstruction money. Nobody - not even the pentagon - knows what happened to nearly all of it. And that’s just the money earmarked specifically for rebuilding. They also shipped over pallets of cash and essentially handed it out to anybody with an empty duffel bag and a good story. No receipts, nothing.
The bailouts here could have been handled better, but they seem remarkably well planned and managed in comparison to this bullshit.
We’ve spent almost 300 billion dollars waging a war on (at most) 100 terrorists in Afghanistan. We’ve spent more than double that fighting terrorists in Iraq that didn’t even exist until we created them. That’s over a trillion dollars pissed away on practically nothing. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of security theater right here in the US. Fuck it already. Just fuck it. Some planes crashed into some buildings a decade ago. A few common-sense improvements to airline security have long since insured that it can never happen again. Eerybody involved is either dead, captured, or vanished. Get over it. Stop sending good money after bad and move the fuck on.
HuffPo sticks the words of so-called “conservative christians” in jesus paintings and hilarity ensues. I tell ya, republicans say the darndest things.
Happy birthday, Iraq war! Seven great year of waste, fraud and abuse. Sure, we may have pissed away close to a trillion dollars, lost nearly 5k American soldiers, and killed almost 100k civilians, but at least we got rid of all those WMDs, right? I know I feel safer. (via HuffPo)
Following in the grand tradition of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, I was overjoyed to find Sarah Palin Parking Lot. How dumb are people willing to wait in line for 8 hours to meed a vice presidential failure and gubernatorial quitter? This dumb. (via Boingboing)
These are the things that amuse me.
I am easily amused.
