haha i had to come back and change the word resurgence to decline in my second to last paragraph 

@georgeme89 - yes i understand the math of taxation and spending. i’ll come back to that but as for the military gadgetry. what Obama is doing is cutting military expenditure. he has proposed a large military budget cut. i do not know if it has gone through yet. an important aspect of this is his determination to use available technology more cost-effective and so not to have to wage big wars like the Iraq War. i agree it is a travesty that innocent people are killed. i was at work at ground zero on 9/11. i evacuated 3 world financial center which was connected to the north tower and from the Hudson River watched the towers burn and eventually collapse. although it soon became known through the media we were under attack the people like myself who were there didn’t learn of this until hours later when rumors started to spread. in fact the initial reason i waited by the Hudson River was i believed once the all clear was given i would return to the building and to work. i was pissed when the Bush administration invaded Iraq. i was pissed that most Americans swallowed what Bush said, that it was in retaliation for 9/11 not to mention the bogus claim of weapons of mass destruction. 

while going after Al Qaeda leaders (and under the Obama administration Bin Laden and over 20 other top A Qaeda leaders have been killed) Obama is being as careful as can be to not kill innocents. in fact John Brennan who has worked under the Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations and now works under the Obama administration said Obama’s decision to give the go ahead for a Navy Seal team to get Bin Laden was “one of the gutsiest calls by a president in recent history”. the reason it was such a gutsy call is because advisers wanted him to blow up the compound from above using drone missiles. Obama said no to this because there was too great a chance of killing innocents. 

if heaven forbid a Santorum takes the reigns he or anyone like him will wage a crusade even if it means sending in 500,000 troops with sticks and stones. he will more likely use bombing and huge numbers of troops similar to what we saw in Iraq rather than use precision “surgical” strikes to target only military targets. 

again i’ll have to come back to the economic question. i have things that need to get done. 

@georgeme89 - i am well aware of that point of view and of U.S. meddling. we supported Pinochet, the second most brutal dictator of the last century. John McCain once flew to Chile and had lunch with him. we put Saddam Hussein into power. there was Iran-Contra. we put the Shah of Iran into power. we supported the Bin Laden led Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1980s. i was told by someone i personally consider a reliable source we pulled an Iran-Contra in Afghanistan in the 1980s. i’ve never confirmed the story so take it with a grain of salt. the story goes, in order not to have to go through channels to get weapons for Taliban funding from Congress the CIA traded weapons for hashish with the Taliban. the hashish was flown into a base in North Carolina where it then made its way onto U.S. streets. it was at the time the best hash one could get. the money from the sale of the hash was then used to pay for weapons that were then given to the Taliban as payment for the hash. again, i’ve never confirmed this or tried to. i didn’t even own or touch a computer until 1998. in any case i found it interesting to say the least that after the U.S. supported Bin Laden in Afghanistan we became his number one enemy but he had his rationale. let’s not forget many Afghanis did not and do not want to live under Al Qaeda’s Shariah Law. Bin Laden was himself an outsider and was largely there because of the drug money. he used religion as a cover as happens often. the biggest fear among Uzbeks at the time was they were next up to be taken over by Al Qaeda. there was already Al Qaeda drug trading going on there. i do give some credit to Obama for following through on the Bush brokered pullout of troops from Iraq. heaven knows there were many who opposed his doing so on the republican side. if you remember McCain promised if elected he would keep troops there for 20 years. 

people (who hate Obama and would criticize him if he found a cure for cancer) made fun of the fact he was given a Nobel Peace Prize Award. Obama himself said he didn’t deserve it but though it was premature in my opinion the reasoning of the Nobel Committee held some weight. what Obama had already done was to make the world, including the Muslim world begin to feel maybe they could consider the U.S. a friend. he did this through dialog and the effects of his efforts have been playing out. hawks call it appeasement but relentless dialog and diplomacy takes far more courage and intelligence than does always resorting to military force. as far as i’m concerned once war breaks out everyone has already lost. what he did through dialog was the best thing for national security after the Bush/Cheney debacle. 

as to the economic points you brought up earlier i need to be brief. i remember the expressions on the faces of those called into an emergency cabinet meeting after the fall of Lehman Brothers and the stock market. money needed to be infused into the banks. had they been allowed to fail the run on banks to take money out would have been the greatest since the Great Depression and i believe worse. it is not even much of a stretch to imagine we could have headed into a Mad Max situation in this country. most economists agree that while the deficit needs to be taken care of over the long term spending it necessary to get us out of this mess first. this has been a belief long held. the right loves to say Reagan policies led to a swifter recovery but that is not true and he was handed a situation that was not nearly as severe as this economic crash. unemployment was still floundering at the end of his first term. the Reagan administration in fact included the military in the employment statistics to make the statistics look better. it was the first time since employment statistics were tracked that the military was used. Reagan also raised taxes 11 times. Dick Cheney btw said deficits don’t matter when the Bush economic adviser warned him about the economy. 

even after Wall Street and the banks drove the economy off the cliff many still believe there should be no regulation of the financial industry. i find this naive. we would not for example disband Congress in order to allow a President operate without Congressional regulation. the checks and balances created in the Constitution are after all a form of regulation. the naivety of deregulation is in the assumption that leaders of Wall Street and the banks are going to look out for our well being. it should be apparent by now to people this is not the case. in the summer of 2001 the Investment Banking Division of Lehman Brothers held an internal conference in the Winter Garden that was connected to 3 World Financial Center, Lehman’s headquarters before 9/11. during the conference a female executive said, and i’m paraphrasing but these words if not exact are pretty close, “Government is finally leaving us alone and allowing business people to do what business people do”. a little voice in my head said “uh oh. we are in trouble now”. it didn’t take long for Wall Street and the banks to come up with the financial instrument, credit default swaps which in large part led to the economic crash. using other peoples’ money they were bought and sold with no idea as to their actual value. 

btw, i can sympathize with Chalmers Johnson. in the 1980s i predicted the economy would fail because of trickle down economics. i never wrote a book about it and nobody would have listened anyway. a funny (or not) story. soon after trickle down economics went into effect i was walking along First Avenue near the U.N. in NYC when i saw a gigantic private yacht moving slowly southbound on the East River. that night or the next day i heard on the news the yacht belonged to Donald Trump. it was the second largest yacht in the world at the time. he had just purchased it from Adnan Khashoggi, an Arab who was the biggest arms dealer in the world. Khashoggi put the yacht which had been largest private yacht in the world up for sale because he had a larger yacht made for himself. suddenly that yacht seemed like such a metaphor for trickle down economics, a new yacht trickling down the East River. 

@georgeme89 - it is certainly an entangled mess. it’s almost a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Obama does have his finger on the need to reverse the redistribution of wealth we’ve seen over the last 30 years. i am glad he gave GM the loan against opposition from the other side and even from within his own party and administration. most of the loan has been paid back and GM posted a record profit in 2011 also resuming its place as the number one auto manufacturer in the world. on the face it seemed anti-intuitive that while Ford did not ask for a loan it was fully behind the loan to its competitor GM. the reason was Ford understood it shared suppliers with GM and if some of those suppliers were forced out of business Ford would also be in trouble. also supply costs would have gone up. had GM been left to go under the domino effect in this country would have been enormous. Romney still says we should have let GM go into bankruptcy. the biggest problem with that was there was nobody standing online to take GM over. it was too toxic. 

anyone who thought we were going to climb out of the hole we dug we dug ourselves into over the past 30 years in a short time was drinking the kool aid. what is encouraging is last month marked 23 straight months of economic growth and job growth. 

i watched an interview of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that aired on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago. After explaining to Steve Kroft how profits are distributed evenly among the teams Kroft replied, “But isn’t that socialism?” Goodell answered “Yes it is.” and went on to explain the NFL model is a mixture of socialism and capitalism and attributed a large part of the reason the NFL is the most successful professional sports organization in the U.S. to this model.   

have a good night. good chatting with you.