You wanna know where your tax money is going?

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

Here. Here is where it is going. Here is why social services, unemployment, housing programs and so much else is being cut.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE18Aa03.html

This leaves me with the feeling that all the political history of the last 12 years was orchestrated so this would happen. This was the intended effect.

That leaves me very angry and unsettled. I don't like being angry and unsettled. Not one little bit.

[SpiralHawk]

1. Taliban in Texas

The first two paragraphs:

Taliban in Texas: Big Oil hankers for old pals

HOUSTON - The Taliban must have had a ball in this Texas city when they came to visit the control tower of Planet Oil in the late 1990s to negotiate the Trans-Afghan Pipeline (TAP). One can imagine Mullah Omar's finest, in full black-turbaned regalia, at the Houston Galleria - amid all those blond, dermatologically sublime trophy wives credit-carding their way to the Valhalla of conspicuous consumption at Saks, Macy's, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. Not to mention all those steak houses! And all those sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) - not only Kandahar-friendly Toyota Land Cruisers but Durangos, Silverados, Pajeros, Discoveries and even BMWs!

Of course this was ages before the cluster-bombing of the Taliban back to Jurassic Park became the secret casus belli for the "war on terra" after September 11, 2001. And it was before those gas-guzzling SUVs had to deal seriously with soaring oil prices, or at least not to the heights we are seeing now. On Monday a barrel of US light crude hit US$41.65, the highest price since the New York Mercantile Exchange launched its crude-oil contract in 1983.

(snip...)

Rest of story at link given in the original post.

[SpiralHawk]

2. The crux of the matter

from the same article:


But for corporate Houston - where virtually everyone's mood is inextricably related to the price of a barrel - expensive oil is good business...

(snip)

Whatever happens, there is a consensus all over Houston: there will be no new oil shock, at least for the foreseeable future - only what financial circles are calling "Chinese torture" - prices slowly going up.

(snip)

[dweller]

3. and underlying the crux

"It's possible to extract a major conclusion from the Cheney
Report. The White House says that the terrorists want to destroy
the American way of life. But what if the whole thing is upside
down? To preserve an American way of life that guzzles - and
wastes - tremendous amounts of energy, Washington is forced to
go military all the way, under the pretext of the "war on terra".
And the process, on top of it, feeds on itself. Who is the largest
world consumer of energy? It's the US Army. "


dp