Keep in mind...when the rich are facing economic difficulty, the money hose connects to the Treasury hydrant and Bernanke and Paulson crank that pressure up high; money is sprayed with reckless abandon, fiscal responsibility, simply an afterthought in the face of wealthy distress. ...yet, during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, when hundreds of thousands were already slaughtered, lying in the streets of Kigali and littered throughout the countryside, it was the US Government that groveled over the funds for the maintenance of 50 Armored Personnel Carriers, calling them too expensive to deploy; also haggled over and dismissed was using US Military technology to jam the hate radio that was fueling the slaughter; this was a matter of $8500 per hour. Our self-interested frugality led to the immediate and continued slaughter of hundreds of thousands of lives.
As we continue to hose down our wealthy taxpayers and wealthy financial institutions with a seemingly unending supply of taxpayer dollars, lets remember the fickleness of our past, and remind ourselves that the self interests of those in the ruling class of this country so often contradict what is both right, and also in the interest of humanity, and so often, of the masses of our own country.
From PBS Frontline:
Six weeks into the genocide, the U.N. and U.S. finally agree to a version of Gen. Dallaire's plan: nearly 5,000 mainly African U.N. forces will be sent in and the U.N. requests that the U.S. provide 50 armored personnel carriers (APCs).
Bureaucratic paralysis continues. Few African countries offer troops for the mission and the Pentagon and U.N. argue for two weeks over who will pay the costs of the APCs and who will pay for transporting them.
It takes a full month before the U.S. begins sending the APCs to Africa. They don't arrive until July.
(Pentagon memo)
"We have … concluded jamming is an ineffective and expensive mechanism.… International legal conventions complicate airborne or ground based jamming and the mountainous terrain reduces the effectiveness of either option. … It costs approximately $8500 per flight hour … "
