Graphic: Cost of the Afghanistan War

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www.onlineschooling.net/afghanistan-war-cost

A new graphic compares the cost to previous wars – and to domestic needs that could have been funded instead.

Obama’s 2012 Platform: “They Made Me Do It!” by Sibel Edmonds

by Sibel Edmonds
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
originally published by Boiling Frogs Post
29 October, 2010

The Obama Campaign team has finalized its core message and marketing platform for the 2012 presidential elections. After several months of intense debate and ‘market research,’ the Obama Presidency ‘marketing executives’ have put together yet another simple and short ‘market catch phrase’ which may be proved brilliant, depending upon the degree of IQ decline and level of backbone reduction among its Democratic Base. And, no; the catch phrase is not ‘change.’ The new marketing makeover will be centered on the ‘They made me do it!’ message.

China’s Creative Accounting: How It Buried Its Debt and Forged Ahead with Stimulus by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
October 29, 2010

China may be as heavily in debt as we are. It just has a different way of keeping its books — which makes a high-profile political ad sponsored by Citizens Against Government Waste, a fiscally conservative think tank, particularly ironic. Set in a lecture hall in China in 2030, the controversial ad shows a Chinese professor lecturing on the fall of empires: Greece, Rome, Great Britain, the United States . . . . [See video below.]

“They all make the same mistakes,” he says. “Turning their backs on the principles that made them great. America tried to spend and tax itself out of a great recession. Enormous so-called stimulus spending, massive changes to health care, government takeover of private industries, and crushing debt.”

Time for a New Theory of Money by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
October 29, 2010

The reason our financial system has routinely gotten into trouble, with periodic waves of depression like the one we’re battling now, may be due to a flawed perception not just of the roles of banking and credit but of the nature of money itself. In our economic adolescence, we have regarded money as a “thing”—something independent of the relationship it facilitates. But today there is no gold or silver backing our money. Instead, it’s created by banks when they make loans (that includes Federal Reserve Notes or dollar bills, which are created by the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned banking corporation, and lent into the economy). Virtually all money today originates as credit, or debt, which is simply a legal agreement to pay in the future.

The Empire and the Right to Life of Human Beings by Fidel Castro Ruz

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by Fidel Castro Ruz
Global Research, October 28, 2010

In his latest reflections Fidel Castro refers to fragments of the text “The War Crimes of Stanley McChrystal, U.S. General” which, among other things, “reveals examples of how the Obama Administration continues walking in Bush`s footsteps”.

That’s terrific! So I exclaimed when I read down to the last line about the revelations of the famous journalist Seymour Hersh, printed in Democracy Now! and collected as one of the 25 most censored news items in the United States.

The material is entitled “The War Crimes of Stanley McChrystal, U.S. General” and it was included in Project Censored, put together by a university in California, including the essential paragraphs from those revelations.

B-58′s Are Why I Didn’t Get Laid by Daniel N. White

by Daniel N. White
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
October 29, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

Ran into my friend Robert the other day at the gym.  He and I have been going to this gym or some other most all of our adult lives.  Probably for about the usual reasons–we are both physical, physically active people stuck in desk jobs, neither of us wants to get fat like a third or better of everyone has nowadays, male vanity some no doubt too, and at least for me, Robert in his single days too, it isn’t a bad place to meet women.  Over the last couple of years we’ve gone from conversations at the gym to friendship.  We both read books, damnere a rarity these days, follow current events, both of us are keen on airplanes and aviation–Robert has his pilots license and I never got mine, I went to college instead, and after an epic struggle with indifference and boredom I finally got my problematical liberal arts degree from the big state U downtown–Robert got fed up earlier and harder than I did with the educational process (a cousin to the digestive process, you know) and never got his, which hasn’t stopped him any. 

Killing each Taliban soldier costs $50 Million by Matthew Nasuti

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by Matthew Nasuti
http://www.kabulpress.org
Thursday 30 September 2010

The Pentagon will not tell the public what it costs to locate, target and kill a single Taliban soldier because the price-tag is so scandalously high that it makes the Taliban appear to be Super-Soldiers. As set out in this article, the estimated cost to kill each Taliban is as high as $100 million, with a conservative estimate being $50 million. A public discussion should be taking place in the United States regarding whether the Taliban have become too expensive an enemy to defeat.