Where's My Flying Tank?

Let me break my response to all who commented into several separate posts.

To FlitCraft: You are partially correct. I will pay a small amount of US federal tax on my government pension – but it’ll be nothing compared to what I pay now (and everyone pays) – car registration, cell phones, highways, tax, tax, tax – which will all go up astronomically in the next 10 years in the US. I will pay the 15.3% into social security and Medicare to keep my wife and me eligible for those but that will be on an amount that I declare to the US government. I will pay zero on money I make from my foreign business (all exempt) and I will also pay zero taxes in the country I’m going to.
Cutting ties with the past is a snap; it’s all about quality of life. I’ll build a 4 bedroom mansion on a rural half acre in an area with a tropical but cooler than Hawaii climate for less than 100K. For @ $1K US per month, I and my wife will live like royalty – full time cook, maid and driver, all household expenses, including utilities, water, sewer, high speed internet and telephone. Pineapple, coffee and coconuts grow freely on our land, haircuts and manicures/pedicures cost about a 2 bucks, a 2 hour professional massage about $25, great beer is less than a buck a bottle, I could go on. You get the idea. We’ll hopefully come back occasionally to visit the US but it’s not a priority.

America has become a land of wage slaves over the past 30 years – work your ass off 40 to 50 hours a week in some stifling bureaucracy, kiss the boss from hell’s ass for a bigger cubicle every 5 years or justify your job in the government to everyone with inflated self-importance (hold on wbinmd, I’ll get to you), get fat and out of shape and contract hypertension, heart disease, high blood pressure, raise kids that won’t have nearly the educational and economic opportunities that the Americans of 2 generations ago had (the WW2/Greatest Generation) and all for 2 weeks in Cancun once a year paying $10 for a lousy drink and $300 for a hotel room – and, most importantly – TELL YOURSELF REPEATEDLY HOW SPECIAL YOU ARE AS AN AMERICAN AND HOW YOU’RE FREE AND CAN VOTE (for the usual, unqualified suspects who want your tax money) AND YOU HAVE 133 CABLE CHANNELS (filled with mostly garbage and government and corporate propaganda and advertisements) -- “LIVING THE DREAM”!! Meanwhile, the politicians and the Military Industrial Complex, bought and paid for by Wall Street and the Fascist Corporations are enriching themselves and gambling with your money – guys like Wolfowitz and Cheney and Bush and Obama and all the think tank experts and arm-chair warriors playing Stratego, the real politique board game, with your money and your children, your blood – except they get rich and move on and you and your family pay the price in blood and treasure. Google Marine General Smedley Butler and his article “War is a Racket” – it’s only gotten worse. Read the article in MJ about Wilkinson – selling the Iraq war, stealing with Paulson and Goldman Sachs and now creating Goebels-like propaganda by telling the comatose masses that everything is OK with the banks and Wall Street and we love you. Really, just a high priced corporate whore. Too many people like Wilkinson rise to the top in America now, selling out the rest of us and we shouldn’t be surprised – for decades our society, culture and media have glorified greed and money and power to the exclusion of everything else. And the greediest sector is now the government itself. It’s all rotting fast in America and from the very top – “it’s all about me” has triumphed and those who do not subscribe to that mantra of greed and selfishness are either co-opted by the need to make money or can’t do anything about it anyway. That, in a nutshell, is why I’m leaving.

To wbinmd: WOW!! What hostility! Attack my intelligence, call me low class, call me “boy”, “don’t let the door hit me in the ass”. OK, 2 part response. Part One – you need to relax, do whatever it takes, beat your wife, screw your dog, get more oral sex, have a few drinks – just take the edge off. Seems like my words hit too close to home, caused some pain – did I crack your rice bowl?. Let’s see – MD? Maryland. Probably a government employee, maybe retired military too, perhaps an amateur historian and national security “expert” (i.e., reads Tom Clancy and hangs out with members of the MIC). I’m guessing you’re “feeding at the trough” with all the other pigs, advocating spending BILLIONS more on missile defense against countries that can’t even feed or govern their own people, scare-mongering, perpetual war, etc. Or you’re just ignorant and believe what the news and the government tells you. (I’ll address the entire “Ballistic Missile Defense” scam later.) Anyway, most importantly, you need to respect other people, not just “yell louder” and levy personal criticisms -- including non-Americans, and their opinions – especially when their backed up by facts. Just because something is “good for you/in your own self-interest” does not make it right or right for the country or anyone else. Like Plato said, “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle”. Again, don’t attack me personally, you don’t know anything about me, as I don’t about you – attack my arguments and opinions. Your post is emblematic of one of the main reasons I’m leaving the country – I don’t want to interact with any more arrogant but intellectually shallow Americans who think the entire planet and its inhabitants revolve around the US and that the history of the world began in 1775 (or maybe, in this case, 1975 and Reagan and missile defense.)

OK, Part 2: What “line” did I cross in comparing the victims of 9/11 to automobile statistics? Although it was a true tragedy, dead is dead, those people weren’t doing anything heroic. And they certainly weren’t “innocent” – in for a penny, in for a pound supporting American hegemonic, imperialist foreign policy, at a minimum with taxes and possibly voting for war freaks and corporate whores who think they’re masters of the universe. We’ve killed a lot of “innocents” in other countries just in the last 50 years alone, and continue to do so as I write this (you don’t have any predators flying over your home looking for “terrorists” do you?) You can educate yourself about true American history (not the rah-rah, jingoistic red, white and blue, thank god for America horseshit propaganda. You just have to do more intellectually rigorous research than listening to FAUX News, Limbaugh and Hannity to find out about the true America – let’s say it’s a little less perfect than “the shining city on the hill, a beacon to all the world’s savages”. The US government has used and is using 9/11 to justify spending billions and billions of dollars on wars in 2 countries (at least 2 that we know of, most likely a few more), massive domestic security and intelligence programs. Thousands of Americans have died, multiple thousands have been wounded, many horribly for life and many more with wounds that can’t be seen nor cured. (But the VA has 1 million cases backlogged because – you guessed it, not enough money. Remember, my original argument was that we spend too much on the national security establishment and that US spending priorities are out of whack.) We’re torturing people, spying on Americans, killing innocent people, creating millions of refugees in Iraq and Pakistan – for what? Because of 9/11? When does it even up? To defend me? My interests? I’ve heard the “fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” mantra from the book National Security For Imbeciles 101 – the “terrorists” don’t want to go to LA or New York and fight, they just want us to stop screwing around in their countries, telling them how to live, killing them, etc. Get your head out of your ass, look around with a critical eye. Read some history – we created the threat that we’re now fighting! I bet you’re all agitated about Iran too – read some history there ( I don’t want to bore the other “boys” reading this forum by going into detail.)

How am I wrong about “measuring the conventionally (sic) threat”? (And you call me “boy “ and question my intelligence.) I love that – the data should not be available to we average boys and peasants but trust us, Iran and North Korea are knocking on our doors with ballistic missiles? SO WHAT! The intell community (the $50 billion plus echo chamber of group think for paychecks and promotions) states that Iran is several years away from developing any kind of nuclear capability. And all the “assessments” of North Korean ballistic missile capability are computer simulations done with zero payloads on the missiles – that way you can tell the public that the missile can hit Hawaii or Seattle – and with zero payload, might take out some yuppies at a Starbucks (true story told to me by a CIA engineer) – this is done to justify continuing to spend BILLIONS on the HUGE SCAM/JOBS PROGRAM of MISSLE DEFENSE. Missile defense is a jobs program for mostly overpaid scientists, engineers and tech people. And so what if they have nuclear weapons – eventually they will have them. And what are they going to do? Hold a gun to their own heads? We have enough nukes to demolish the world several times over. We managed the Soviet and Chinese nuke threats for decades, now we have to manage multiple parties. You also make the mistake of assuming that the government is telling the truth! That’s a huge assumption after you look at recent history. And most of the media is in the tank too, in order to make money so they’re not adding any light to the situation.

As for the larger picture, sbinmd is going to “fight for restoration”. That’s great, write your congress people, they’ll send you an autographed pic and a form letter back thanking you for the “constituent interaction”. And nothing will change. Absolutely nothing. America is a democracy in name only now; in reality it’s a fascist oligarchy (all you boys, look those 2 terms up.) Someone said that democracy will last until everyone figures out how to vote or buy themselves a piece of the Treasury – well America is right there now, has been for a couple of decades now. Look at what happened in the last 25 to 30 years in the US. The majority of Americans are so busy working their asses off to conform and consume, to achieve that magical “middle class” (which Hillary said was up to 250k$ per year, which just shows you how out of touch the entire political elite in DC are with the rest of the country!) that they don’t know and don’t care what’s going on – they’re exhausted just trying to keep up. The public education system is, of course, a huge money pit failure, which suits the ends of the elite because you get a higher percentage of people who are just plain ignorant and with no ability to read, research and think critically. (That’s how the republicans got white lower and middle class America to vote for republicans and against their own economic interests.) The same people who ran the country off the cliff for the last 8 years are still there – if not in charge, they’re burrowed into the bureaucracy or outside lobbying and bribing their buddies in the government. (It just sadly hilarious that the exact same names and faces just rotate in and out – obviously there’s a very small set of people who are qualified?!) Obama will try, is trying but there’s too much money and too many powerful interests on the other side. Watch the fights over health care reform and immigration – the moneyed class, insurance and pharma corporations will water down and defeat the first and the right wing yahoos who blame all our problems on 12 million illegals (I think they probably caused Michael Jackson’s death) will fight and defeat any meaningful immigration reform. By 2010, the financials of the country will still be a mess (remember, nothing has been done about that toxic debt created by the Wall Street geniuses) and we’ll have a huge deficit. And security – well, can’t cut there, we have to have security and buy FXs fighters and nuke subs and missiles and billion dollar ships because Kim and the mullahs are knocking at the door and Al Qaeda will be at the World Series and Super Bowls trying to kill us!! Americans don’t have the stomach or intelligence for any kind of sustained hardship or sacrifice beyond a few months anymore. By 2011, Obama will be a lame duck and the Repugs will be back on the hunt – to get back in power to control the pigs’ trough of tax money to distribute it to their friends as they see fit. Same Old Shit. Both sides are pretty much the same although the Democrats are a bit more compassionate and progressive than the Repugs. The “United” part is a myth. Too many Americans are “what’s in it for me” -- and the moneyed elite are all about that. There’s a huge divide in the US between the top 1 to 5% and the rest and its causing a certain decline in the quality of life and standard of living of each succeeding generation. The government is supposed to do “the greatest good for the greatest number”, not enrich certain elite sectors at the expense of others (like education, health care, infrastructure, etc.) Good luck to all those fighting in the restoration.

PS for Janet: Concerning The Sheeple, that's the product of a failed public education system combined with rampant materialsim/consumerism/greed and the huge "Cultural Myth Production" Industry in America. Every American life has been reduced to a media fueled marketing demographic, every transaction/interaction is for profit, there's nothing that is NOT for sale and no one is accountable. America has become a "theater state" where the "national reality" is staged and reinforced by the media and, of course, corporate advertising. Less and less think critically or make any effort to get "real news" so it really is a mass, national hallucination. "We're the best, most noble, most generous, most powerful, most --- fill in the blank". It's sad