US AIRWAYS

[Dog Wonder]

And all this has what to do with US Airways?

Sorry,

When that Golf Guy and the self-appointed expert on all things start bashing the mission soldiers died for, fifty years later, for political purposes they need to be reminded everything is not about them or their agenda.

 

[CallawayGolf]

And all this has what to do with US Airways?

The macroeconomic policies of the nation have a direct impact on the microeconomic conditions of the airline industry and the decisions management must make regarding its primary objective to make a profit and return value to the shareholders. If we fail to understand the macroeconomic forces in the economy then we will also fail to understand the reasons behind decisions made by for-profit businesses like US Airways.

The war reference of course has little correlation to any of this which is why seal beater brought it up in the first place. Since he fails to refute any of the facts and logic behind my posts, he throws diversionary references into the conversational thread so as to misdirect attention away from the fact that he is unable to refute the information I presented.

For example, I presented the fact that Congress has created a $15+ trillion debt and that we will continue to add $1.5-1.8 trillion to that debt annually unless Congress makes radical changes to current spending levels. Since we only generate about $2.4 trillion in tax revenues and yet spend roughly $2.4 trillion just on federal entitlement/wealth transfer programs like Social Security ($723B), Welfare ($406B), Medicare ($826B), Federal Pensions ($213B) , and servicing payments on the national debt to pay for all this ($218B), then it doesn't matter how much we spend on military/wars, homeland security, foreign aid, energy, education, and the rest of the non-entitlement government expenditures because cutting expenditures in those areas will not achieve a balanced budget or reduce the debt. Mathematically you could defund every federal expenditure except for these wealth transfer programs and the nation would still be in serious economic trouble with $2.4 trillion in "spending" just to move money from one group of people to another. Even with those "draconian" cuts that leaves nothing left over to actually pay down the $15+ trillion in debt and it does not account for the fact that the baby boomer generation is poised to enter retirement in numbers so large that expenditures on Social Security and Medicare will likely rise by 20% over the next decade, perhaps substantially more. But instead of showing readers of this board that the facts I presented are in error (they aren't), seal beater and dog want to attack me and divert the conversation away from substantive truth. Their paradigm of the world cannot accept plain and simple truths so they prefer to divert and attack rather than have a meaningful dialog.

While I certainly wish all Americans could accept these verifiable truths and demand that our leaders be held accountable for responsible and sound economic policies, I don't put much stock in the baseless opinions of the seal beaters and dogs of the world because they are blindly focused on making people like Doug Parker out to be the villain who is responsible for all of their woes. Of course he's not at all responsible for their financial condition or general state of mind, but they like to think he is so they don't have to look in the mirror and face the cold hard realities of life. I personally think there is a much better way to approach life, but to each his own as they say.

 

[CallawayGolf]

Sorry,

When that Golf Guy and the self-appointed expert on all things start bashing the mission soldiers died for, fifty years later, for political purposes they need to be reminded everything is not about them or their agenda.

I hold our military men and women who serve to protect and defend this great nation in the highest regard. A soldier in uniform does not make political decisions as to where they are asked to serve or whether the Commander in Chief has they constitutional authority to send them on a particular mission. The decision-making function is reserved for Congress alone.

And on that point they have failed in their duties. The Constitution is quite clear. Congress has the sole authority to make a declaration of war and to authorize the Commander in Chief to achieve a predefined victory in defense of the American people. Their role is to asses any threats to US sovereignty and freedom brought on by the actions of other nations and to declare war if such a threat warrants such a response by the USA. Absent such a declaration by Congress, the US has no authority to go into another country using military force of any kind. I therefore find it deplorable that Congress would oversee the deaths of thousands of American lives from Korea to Iraq while cowardly refusing to provide a declaration of war so that the enemy nation can be compelled by force to surrender all aggression against our nation.

Our nation has no right and no authority to tell another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do outside of a formal declaration of war. As Americans we would be appalled if another nation tried to tell us what we can and cannot do inside of our own country but we don't think twice about letting the feds run around and tell Korea, Iran, India, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Panama, and the rest what they can and cannot do. Either declare war and take the nukes out of storage and get down to some serious business of defeating the will and military power of the enemy or do nothing except possibly seeking a bilateral treaty. Those are the constitutional options Congress and the President have to choose from. The men and women in uniform cannot make those decisions so I have nothing but respect for the 99% of them who follow orders and don't take matters into their own hands.

If this were our national policy then we wouldn't need 1.5 million men/women in uniform or to have hundreds of military bases and thousands of military personnel stationed overseas. We wouldn't need to spend $700B or more on the military each year to be just as safe from enemy attack. We could spend $200-400 Billion on military and be ready to act at a moments notice should Congress make a formal declaration of war. Just think about the tens of thousands of American lives that would not have been sacrificed if we didn't continue following Harry Truman's lunacy of using limited warfare to achieve political objectives.

 

[diamondcutter]

What the hell does this have to do with usairways ... Way off topic . Take Ur politics to another forum.

 

[Dog Wonder]

I personally think there is a much better way to approach life, but to each his own as they say.

Take the afternoon off and go play golf.

No one will miss you.

 

[N965VJ]

What the hell does this have to do with usairways ... Way off topic .

Yeah seriously. Has anyone been paying attention the suspicious looking guy sitting in 10C? Oh, noes! 😱 😛

 

[SparrowHawk]

Yeah seriously. Has anyone been paying attention the suspicious looking guy sitting in 10C? Oh, noes! 😱 😛

Not to worry ole Barney One Shot has him in his sights.

View attachment 9261

 

[ChockJockey]

Just think about the tens of thousands of American lives that would not have been sacrificed if we didn't continue following Harry Truman's lunacy of using limited warfare to achieve political objectives.

Formal declarations of war are political anachronisms. The Constitution and the provisions for declaration presume that the party with which the U.S. will engage is another nation-state. The Founding Fathers could have never envisioned things like nuclear weaponry and non-state terrorism. The reason Truman and subsequent administrations sought policies of "limited engagement" was because they'd learned the lesson of what all-out nation vs. nation, total industrial warfare leads to: massive, incomprehensible destruction and the loss of around 50 million lives. The post-WWII world order and the Soviet Union's acquisition of the atom bomb in the late 1940's made outright declarations of war extremely dangerous, especially once the NATO and Warsaw Pact military alliances were in place. Leaders in both the U.S. and USSR were very careful to avoid any direct hostilities and were very careful to keep certain secondary or tertiary conflicts from escalating into an all-out war between the superpowers, which would have almost certainly led to a nuclear exchange.

In lieu of declaring war, the First and Second worlds sought engagements via proxy wars (police actions, interventions etc.): Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and countless Third world insurgencies, revolutions and guerrilla wars. Besides holding off any nuclear warfare, these engagements also proved to be a boon for the U.S. military and defense contractors, helping to give rise to the massive military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned us about. Korea was fought under the auspices of a UN mandate. Declaring war on North Korea would have meant having to eventually declare war on China; declaring war on China would have brought in the Soviet Union, with the result being WW3. Vietnam was quite similar in these respects; a nuclear device dropped on Hanoi would have brought either a swift end to the war or a global conflagration and no one was willing to find out which. A few million lives lost in the course of the Cold War is paltry compared to the billions that would perish in an full scale nuclear war.

The lesson the U.S. was reluctant to learn after WWI and learned well after WWII was that its domestic security in the 20th century was inextricably linked to global security. After WWII the U.S. stood alone as the most powerful economy and least war-damaged of all the powers, her military was in all parts of the globe and she acquired, de facto, the role of policing international tradeways from the exhausted British Empire. The U.S. seized this opportunity and employed global strategies in order to "contain" the Soviet Union. For the 25 years after the war the U.S. was the creditor to the free world; the strategic defense agreements and the Bretton Woods initiatives that created the IMF, World Bank and eventually the WTO eliminated trade barrier and liberated the global market to freer flows of capital, goods, and labor, laying the groundwork for the highly inter-connected, sparsely regulated global economy we have today. In 1970 there were some 7,000 trans-national corporations, in 2000 there were some 50,000. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Chinese Communist Party's acceptance of market reforms further fueled the explosive growth of international markets.

The prosperity that market globalization brought to the West (U.S. and Europe mostly, while exacerbating income inequalities in the Third World) was contingent on global stability. The U.S. military polices the planet and sticks its nose into others' business not because it feels like being a dick, but because its main priority and that of the State Department (and others) is to ensure global and regional markets are not too destabilized. This is done via massive projects of military and political "aid", sanctions, and the strategic movement of military forces around the globe. In this, they serve a direct interest in maintaining the global economic system that the U.S.'s livelihood is now mostly based.

As such, it's impossible and pointless to discuss U.S. foreign and military policy without discussing U.S. global economic interests. Lofty Constitutional disagreements over the President's powers as Commander-in-Chief and Congress' powers of declaring war and funding military operations are secondary to the art and necessity of balancing soft (politico-economic) and hard (military) power in the globalized world. Simply shutting down every base not on U.S. soil and recalling the fleets would throw global markets into chaos as the U.S.-provided insurance of stable market backdrops disappears. This would essentially constitute a surrender of American global dominance and primacy; in this sense, nations such as Russia, China, and Iran would benefit the most from any U.S. libertarian-style foreign policy, if there even is such a thing. The post-war economic prosperity of the U.S. and the high quality of living most of her residents have enjoyed in the past several decades would vanish with the collapse of the global economic framework that subsidized it.

America's global presence isn't going anywhere in the near term, regardless of who the President is, and especially as long as we maintain our addiction to that sweet, sweet Middle Eastern crude...

 

[Iclubbabyseals]

America's global presence isn't going anywhere in the near term, regardless of who the President is, and especially as long as we maintain our addiction for that sweet, sweet Middle Eastern crude...

Bingo! You win.

 

[CallawayGolf]

Formal declarations of war are political anachronisms. The Constitution and the provisions for declaration presume that the party with which the U.S. will engage is another nation-state. The Founding Fathers could have never envisioned things like nuclear weaponry and non-state terrorism. The reason Truman and subsequent administrations sought policies of "limited engagement" was because they'd learned the lesson of what all-out nation vs. nation, total industrial warfare leads to: massive, incomprehensible destruction and the loss of around 50 million lives. The post-WWII world order and the Soviet Union's acquisition of the atom bomb in the late 1940's made outright declarations of war extremely dangerous, especially once the NATO and Warsaw Pact military alliances were in place. Leaders in both the U.S. and USSR were very careful to avoid any direct hostilities and were very careful to keep certain secondary or tertiary conflicts from escalating into an all-out war between the superpowers, which would have almost certainly led to a nuclear exchange.

In lieu of declaring war, the First and Second worlds sought engagements via proxy wars (police actions, interventions etc.): Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and countless Third world insurgencies, revolutions and guerrilla wars. Besides holding off any nuclear warfare, these engagements also proved to be a boon for the U.S. military and defense contractors, helping to give rise to the massive military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned us about. Korea was fought under the auspices of a UN mandate. Declaring war on North Korea would have meant having to eventually declare war on China; declaring war on China would have brought in the Soviet Union, with the result being WW3. Vietnam was quite similar in these respects; a nuclear device dropped on Hanoi would have brought either a swift end to the war or a global conflagration and no one was willing to find out which. A few million lives lost in the course of the Cold War is paltry compared to the billions that would perish in an full scale nuclear war.

The lesson the U.S. was reluctant to learn after WWI and learned well after WWII was that its domestic security in the 20th century was inextricably linked to global security. After WWII the U.S. stood alone as the most powerful economy and least war-damaged of all the powers, her military was in all parts of the globe and she acquired, de facto, the role of policing international tradeways from the exhausted British Empire. The U.S. seized this opportunity and employed global strategies in order to "contain" the Soviet Union. For the 25 years after the war the U.S. was the creditor to the free world; the strategic defense agreements and the Bretton Woods initiatives that created the IMF, World Bank and eventually the WTO eliminated trade barrier and liberated the global market to freer flows of capital, goods, and labor, laying the groundwork for the highly inter-connected, sparsely regulated global economy we have today. In 1970 there were some 7,000 trans-national corporations, in 2000 there were some 50,000. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Chinese Communist Party's acceptance of market reforms further fueled the explosive growth of international markets.

The prosperity that market globalization brought to the West (U.S. and Europe mostly, while exacerbating income inequalities in the Third World) was contingent on global stability. The U.S. military polices the planet and sticks its nose into others' business not because it feels like being a dick, but because its main priority and that of the State Department (and others) is to ensure global and regional markets are not too destabilized. This is done via massive projects of military and political "aid", sanctions, and the strategic movement of military forces around the globe. In this, they serve a direct interest in maintaining the global economic system that the U.S.'s livelihood is now mostly based.

As such, it's impossible and pointless to discuss U.S. foreign and military policy without discussing U.S. global economic interests. Lofty Constitutional disagreements over the President's powers as Commander-in-Chief and Congress' powers of declaring war and funding military operations are secondary to the art and necessity of balancing soft (politico-economic) and hard (military) power in the globalized world. Simply shutting down every base not on U.S. soil and recalling the fleets would throw global markets into chaos as the U.S.-provided insurance of stable market backdrops disappears. This would essentially constitute a surrender of American global dominance and primacy; in this sense, nations such as Russia, China, and Iran would benefit the most from any U.S. libertarian-style foreign policy, if there even is such a thing. The post-war economic prosperity of the U.S. and the high quality of living most of her residents have enjoyed in the past several decades would vanish with the collapse of the global economic framework that subsidized it.

America's global presence isn't going anywhere in the near term, regardless of who the President is, and especially as long as we maintain our addiction to that sweet, sweet Middle Eastern crude...

That's quite an explanation when you could just have easily have said that the Feds are knowingly engaging in unconstitutional acts of foreign policy and they don't care a whit about obeying the supreme law of the land.

Libertarians are about legalizing drugs and I'm not a Libertarian for that very reason.

If a nation or belief system with with 50 million people attacks or takes aggressive action against the US such that Congress declares war against the same, then those 50 million people are all valid targets for the most powerful and destructive weapons the US has in its arsenal. If they don't want to risk the lives of their citizens then don't attack the US. It's not a difficult concept. Peace through strength is a proven strategy. Peace through nation building and interventionism is a proven failure.

America and the allies won WWII and Japan, Germany, Italy and the rest are now our collective friends in the world and intertwined economies. On the other hand Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Iran, and the other unconstitutional limited engagements are just as tenuous today as they were when we first engaged in those battles. We didn't defeat those enemies and they have no respect for the US to follow through and bring military defeat because of our now longstanding limited engagement policies. We are a joke in the world because although we have the power to accomplish and strategic military objective, we never really use it. We just keep creating more enemies that are emboldened to poke us with a stick because they really don't fear retribution.

We can't even run our own economy and you think we should spend billions or trillions to make sure the rest of the world's economies don't go up in flames when we make prudent economic decisions that we can actually afford and are authorized by the Constitution? America is on the precipice of total economic ruin with spending $0.40 more than each dollar we collect with no realistic way of getting spending under control and certainly no way of collecting the money from taxes to cover deficit spending without further damaging all measures of the economy (GDP, employment, inflation, ect.). The house of cards could come down in a single day if confidence in the political shams is lost inside the country or by our global partners. Not obeying the limits established in the Constitution is the primary cause for all of our national economic problems.

 

[Dog Wonder]

A lecture on the Constitution from one who cliaims the Bill of Rights isn't part of it?

No wonder you can't get your sixty million fans.

Stick to golf, at least you will only bore the rest of your foursome.

If you can find one.

 

[ChockJockey]

That's quite an explanation when you could just have easily have said that the Feds are knowingly engaging in unconstitutional acts of foreign policy and they don't care a whit about obeying the supreme law of the land.

It's true, I could have said that, but then I'd be saying something stupid. Whereas the Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war, raise armies, provide for a militia, etc., (Article I, Section 8, Clauses 11-18) nowhere does it stipulate that any such declaration is necessary before U.S. forces can participate in hostilities. The President is the Commander in Chief, period (Article II, Section 2, Clause 1). Likewise, his is the power to negotiate treaties and appoint ambassadors (Article II, Section 2, Clause 2), as well as receive ambassadors from other nations (Article II, Section 3). Article II delegates the powers of military command and foreign policy to the Executive, it doesn't say how those powers are to be exercised. Almost always once U.S. forces are in combat the Congress has provided funding, whether or not they actually declared war. Ergo, there is no such thing as "an unconstitutional act of foreign policy".

Libertarians are about legalizing drugs and I'm not a Libertarian for that very reason.

That's funny. Legalizing drugs is the DEA/FDA's job. "Do" a drug and it's against the law, "take" a drug and it's treatment; which is which is really only a matter of bureaucracy.

If a nation or belief system with with 50 million people attacks or takes aggressive action against the US such that Congress declares war against the same, then those 50 million people are all valid targets for the most powerful and destructive weapons the US has in its arsenal. If they don't want to risk the lives of their citizens then don't attack the US. It's not a difficult concept. Peace through strength is a proven strategy. Peace through nation building and interventionism is a proven failure.

In war and foreign policy there are no such things as "proven strategies" and "proven failures". Again, the declaration of war is mere technicality. Indeed, no nation has directly attacked the U.S. since it went nuclear. And you're right, it's not a difficult concept. But there's a difference between attacking American interests abroad and America proper; right now our government strives to protect both. So long as you have no problem leaving American corporations and citizens to fend for themselves when outside of U.S. territory and airspace the I won't have a problem with it either. How exactly does a Christian justify initiating nuclear genocides on the scale of tens of millions?

America and the allies won WWII and Japan, Germany, Italy and the rest are now our collective friends in the world and intertwined economies. On the other hand Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Iran, and the other unconstitutional limited engagements are just as tenuous today as they were when we first engaged in those battles. We didn't defeat those enemies and they have no respect for the US to follow through and bring military defeat because of our now longstanding limited engagement policies. We are a joke in the world because although we have the power to accomplish and strategic military objective, we never really use it. We just keep creating more enemies that are emboldened to poke us with a stick because they really don't fear retribution.

Were North Korea fighting alone she'd have been handily defeated, in fact she almost was until the Chinese joined the fight. The U.S. was unwilling to escalate the conflict into another world war, especially after the massive investments it was making in rebuilding post-war Europe. Even such an escalation might not have been a problem save if the Soviets hadn't by then developed atomic weapons. There's no arguing that Vietnam was a horrendous mess and a failure. Even if Congress had declared war on North Vietnam it wouldn't have changed any of the dynamics that dissuaded the U.S. from nuking Hanoi; the ever-present risk of nuclear retaliation was too great. The first Iraq war was technically a success, the second not so much. The U.S. has never fought a conflict with Iran, and the Constitution is silent on how the President is supposed to handle embassy hostage situations.

North Korea remains a tenuous situation, and Iran is problematic. Relations with Vietnam are much improved, as is trade. Iraq is fizzled out. There's a lot more to global politics than using nuclear weapons against people that don't show you sufficient "respect" or because you're insecure about being considered a joke.

We can't even run our own economy and you think we should spend billions or trillions to make sure the rest of the world's economies don't go up in flames when we make prudent economic decisions that we can actually afford and are authorized by the Constitution?

I don't recall prescribing any plan of action at all. I was just giving a history refresher. I wasn't talking about direct management of foreign markets or economies, I was talking about the use of soft and hard U.S. power to thwart and suppress conflicts that would otherwise destabilize trade and markets. Most people don't respect how spinning plates the U.S. is balancing at any given time. The very reason the U.S. spends so much in doing this is that it can't afford the shockwaves its absence would cause. Can you imagine what the impact would be to the world economy if China invaded Taiwan? The Korean War reignited? If India and Pakistan went into all-out war? Iran strikes Israel or Saudi Arabia? Asia from Korea to Palestine is one long inter-connected chain of powder kegs.

America is on the precipice of total economic ruin with spending $0.40 more than each dollar we collect with no realistic way of getting spending under control and certainly no way of collecting the money from taxes to cover deficit spending without further damaging all measures of the economy (GDP, employment, inflation, ect.). The house of cards could come down in a single day if confidence in the political shams is lost inside the country or by our global partners.

Brother, you ain't even joking. The free market in all its glory exported most of our manufacturing jobs to the Third World; we don't have the manufacturing base to pay off all our debt if we even wanted to. The free-wheeling days of economic booms furnished by out of control household and government spending are over. Even if you could get the U.S. economy up and running again there's no guarantee that our crumbling infrastructure is going to be able to sustain it without serious investment; and if you're going to insist on privatizing it you might want to insist on limiting that to American firms, otherwise our roads and bridges are going to belong to China and Saudi Arabia.

Beyond this there's an even larger existential threat looming over civilization, and that's the massive ecological damage that some sixteen decades of unmitigated capitalist growth and development has incurred. The population of this planet is rising while availability of energy and fresh water are declining rapidly. Carbon emissions are climbing while deforestation continues unabated. The outsourcing of manufacturing to other countries has made it easier for firms to sweep pollution under the rug and export it to nations that are "business-friendly".

Civilization, especially in its Western incarnation, is simply unsustainable.

Not obeying the limits established in the Constitution is the primary cause for all of our national economic problems.

Sure, why not.

 

[Phoenix]

Talk about thread creep.. since when did this become a place to post doctoral dissertations? 🙄

 

[Phoenix]

Following Student Debacle, TSA Fights to Reestablish Its Relevance

 

[Iclubbabyseals]

Talk about thread creep.. since when did this become a place to post doctoral dissertations? 🙄

Generally, post doctoral dissertations require facts and logic, which would disqualify the originating screed.