Congress passes authority for worldwide war

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Washington, DC: The United States House of Representatives, on May 26th, 2011, passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which includes a provision to authorize worldwide war, which has no expiration date and will allow the current President – and any future President of the Union – to go to war anywhere in the world, at any time, without further congressional authorization.

This new authorization will not even require the President to show any threat to the national security of the United States. The American military could become the world’s cop, and could be sent into harm’s way almost anywhere and everywhere around the globe.

Before the vote, the House debated an amendment that would have struck out the worldwide war provision. That amendment to the bill was introduced by a bipartisan group of representatives: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

Given the enormity of the proposed law, one would have expected that the House would have debated the amendment to strike it extensively, but that’s not what happened.

The amendment was debated for a total of 20 minutes. Yes, you got it right. Twenty minutes to debate whether Congress should hand the executive branch sweeping worldwide war authority.

The vote on the amendment took place earlier that afternoon, and it failed on the House floor by a vote of 187-in favor to 234-opposed.

Now this bill is, obviously, headed for the Senate and the Senate Armed Services Committee is scheduled to begin its markup of the NDAA beginning on June 13. If it passed the Senate also in such an unopposed manner then the US is set to hand the executive branch the powers of a king.

Coming to think of it, in reality, the US President is an elected king bar for the name and with the aid of executive orders he can, in fact, rule as an autocrat if he so wishes.

Most people are totally unaware of that situation and also of the way that the President of the Union is, actually, elected. Americans believe that they directly elect their President but nothing could be further from the truth. It is a conclave, the Electoral Commission, which elects the President in a manner similar to the election of the Pope in the Vatican.

Hmm... who would have thought...

© 2011

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US Congress wastes thousands on bottled water

Congress wasting thousands of dollars in taxpayers' money on bottled water that harms our environment

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

During and after the State of the Union recently, President Obama and Congressional Republicans waxed poetic about the need to cut wasteful spending in Washington. But there is an easy place to start:

According to Corporate Accountability International, Congress spent nearly $200,000 on bottled water in just three months last year. Recent studies estimate that bottled water costs almost 2,000 times more than tap water – even though the two types of water often come from the same sources.

Besides being a waste of money, bottled water is terrible for the environment: The energy needed to produce the plastic consumption is enough to fuel three million cars for a year.

But it is not just the plastic bottled and the fact that most of them never get recycled, for instance, that is the problem; the unnecessary extraction of water, whether from springs or municipal sources, as it the case in 40 percet of all cases, is what is the greatest problem even.

Nearly one million tons of plastic bottles are discarded as litter each year, ending up in landfills, lakes and streams. What's more, public water infrastructure in DC and around the whole country needs all the support it can get – especially from Congress.

And the same is true elsewhere too and while the American citizen can, theoretically, find out all theses things, such as Congress expenditure on bottled water in Britain, for example, that information is, and please don't laugh, covered by the “Official Secrets Act 1911”. Sad, I know. It is, however, the belief of the British government, over the years, that the general public could not understand all those fact and figures. In other words, the Subjects of Her Britannic Majesty are seen as and treated like children, or imbeciles.

American lobby groups are now calling upon Congress to stop wasting our money and end its use of bottled water and to sweeten the deal, DC Water (a local utility) has even offered to provide every member of Congress with a reusable water bottle as well as free water quality testing systems for Congressional office buildings.

When members of Congress complain about wasteful spending, they should curb their own bad habits first.

No doubt the same problems exist in the Houses of Parliament as regards to bottled water usage and other waste too. I could mention the waste of food, for instance, and while government keeps telling us that we must end the practice of food waste the catering establishment within the Palace of Westminster, in the way they operate, waste tons, literally, of food a week. Food that has been cooked but never been eaten.

They, whether in the Palace of Westminster or Whitehall or at Capitol Hill in DC, try to tell the general public how to live and behave but it would seem that it is a definite case of “Do as I tell you not as I do”. Shame they think that different rules apply to them than to the rest of us.

We can see that by the way the British MPs have been milking the expenses system and when they are caught with the hand in the till, so to speak, try to claim parliamentary privilege and thus exception from criminal prosecution. They really think themselves, in the majority, better than those that have put them there. Time for a change, methinks, a serious one.

© 2011

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US Congress wastes thousands on bottled water

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