Don't Ask For Whom the Drone Flies

... because the Government will not tell us.  Body counts, both as to those targeted and those innocents merely dead by kill zone proximity are top secrets for the "Most Transparent Administration" in all of recorded history, or at least the most since the invention of drones.  Nonetheless, while we, the American people, can't be told who were killed from on-high, our elected reps are finally showing interest in the Constitutional dangers posed by any American President, by himself ordering the killing of other Americans with no legal or political constraints - other than the counsel of his own Executive Branch staff.

Drone Program Mastermind, John Brennen, now stands before the United States Senate awaiting confirmation to be the next CIA Director.  Only when the Intel Committee refused to vote on this nomination did the Administration provide to these Senators a small number of the Justice Department's highly classified legal opinions authorizing Presidential signing of death warrants for American citizens, while affording them no due process rights such as notice or trial, just silent death from above.  Reportedly, Mr. Brennen has refused to answer Senator Paul's straight-forward question - "does the President believe he has the authority to kill an American citizen located in the United States, and not in a war zone?"

Declaring this absolute power to "kill at will" too awesome, even for The One, some Democrats in Congress have advanced a proposal to create a Secret Drone Court.  This group of life-tenured Federal Judges would in secret review the Executive's factual basis for declaring an American to be an Enemy Combatant, and they would all together sign, or not, the death warrant.  Completely constitutionally unacceptable - first, all war powers are given to the Executive, so the Judicial Branch has no constitutional authority to manage the targeting of enemy soldiers, operatives or spies.  Secondly, nothing could more assault the Rule of Law - the entire underpinning of the Constitution - than for the Government to operate a "Star Chamber" in which secret evidence, examined in secret results in the secret murder of an American, either on foreign soil or here at home.  It is obvious that were life-tenured Judges to be told that a death was justified to protect them, their families, their friends and their country, and yet, should that claim turn out to be false, no career adverse consequences would occur, that death warrant will surely issue, okay only every 999 citizens out of a 1000 get Star Chambered.

Instead, we citizens must demand that Congress take this power of Life and Death away from politicians -  intrinsic conflict of interest in need to deter, not combatants, but political enemies, and the Judges - having no legal authority and no means of imposing accountability.  No, only career military officers have the intrinsic expertise and authority to accurately identify enemy combatants, and they are constrained by the Uniform Code of Military Justice to get it right - if negligent or intending to get it wrong ala Lieutenant Calley at Mai Lia in South Vietnam, these military commanders will be held accountable for breaches of lawful Rules of Engagement - careers ending immediately and jail for murders are standard fare for such transgressions in military service.

With Congressional focus on this grave Constitutional challenge now building, we citizens all need to demand Drone Killing transparency and accountability - on my watch, I refuse to be a Silent Bystander, as there is no innocence in acquiesing in either the Executive running "Murder Inc." or the Judiciary doing this dirty wet work in a Secret Star Chamber.  

Why we don't have a Spending Problem

To understand why our Great Nation does not have a spending problem all you have to do is the math. Add up the revenues going into the US Treasury monthly and then compare the amount of dollars flowing out of that same federal institution to calculate a governmental surplus or deficit condition.  Having done so, I have determined that the federal government currently spends several hundreds of billions of dollars a month in excess of what we taxpayers deposit with these same folks.  As this state of affairs has been the norm for most all of the existence of our Constitutional Republic - granted not on the scale of deficit spending this Administration has achieved - it appears that government spending more than its annual revenue is no big deal really.

Of course, the government's revenue shortfalls are fully compensated for by the Treasury borrowing the needed funds from persons, businesses and nations willing to lend dollars to us in return for repayment of the loan principle plus interest.  In the past, I have complained that this mortgaging of America to foreign enemies such as the Saudi's, Chi-Coms and the French gravely jeopardizes our independence.  Should any of these nations threaten to pull the plug on existing or future loans, the government would be in an untenable situation - thus, my concern has been that these creditors can extort foreign policy/national security concessions from the United States by merely starting to close their Central Bank cashier's window when Uncle Sam is standing there with his handout.  So far, however, I have not seen any examples of such extortion having taken place. Of course, such wielding of undue influence will not be trumpeted by press releases or public statements, so we really don't know for sure.

What we do know for sure is that this Administration, clearly cognizant of the danger of having our Great Nation "owned" by foreign enemies, has moved swiftly to rescue deficit borrowing from these unfriendlies. Today, the US Treasury just goes over to the US Federal Reserve to borrow most of the funds needed to cover the government's deficit spending.  Because the Federal Reserve has unlimited money - it actually does go into the basement and print US dollars - the spending "problem" of the US government is neatly solved by this unlimited expansion of the money supply in circulation both domestically and in world markets.  So, who says that there is no such thing as a magic bullet - the Federal Reserve is us; its Board of Governors will never threaten to withhold more credit or pull its existing loans, as all these guys/gals are American Patriots.  So, you ask what could go wrong with this monetization of the government's deficits - only one thing: the Federal Reserve adds absolutely no value to the US economy by expanding the money supply; indeed the only asset owned by the FED is a single printing press that makes dollar bills, out of non-recycled paper I might add.  Accordingly, when an nation's economy is literally flooded with massive amounts of non-assets - new dollars, indeed trillions of dollars annually - that explosion of currency makes each dollar worth less and less in buying power daily, as the same amount of good and services exist in the economy but there exists trillions of additional dollars available for their purchase.

Now, we are not speculating here.  In 1924, the Weimar Republic of Germany sought to print its way to a painless way of paying off the country's WWI reparations/debt.  Soon a loaf of bread at a Berlin grocery store cost more than two millions German marks.  My reminders of this reality, of course, are the photos of the German moms and grandmothers going shopping with wheelbarrows of almost worthless cash, as the nation's economy has devolved into a barter system where bread was the real currency.  So, I say buy wheelbarrows or bread now, as we have no spending problem, just a printing problem.