Cheating... Not Godliness

When it comes to foreign aid we are a generous nation. We give up vast swaths of our taxpayer dollars to help nations struggling with disease, hunger, destruction from natural disaster and more. Foreign aid can be controversial and after the recent recession we are still struggling to recover from, we are much more aware of how precious our tax dollars are. A trillion dollars is nothing to sneeze at, and neither is a half a trillion, neither is a billion or a half a billion and so on. Our money became precious to us again. We watched as people hustled, scammed, lied and cheated us in a bid to scare us into believing we were in imminent danger, and that they had the answer to helping us our dire straits. Just give them the money; just give them the money...

















And what came out of that? We were supposed to be doing it with the understanding that the money they would not freeze lending so business could continue and things like interbank lending and payday lending would not have to halt. We had faith. We believed our leaders would not deceive us, not on something so important. Even though they deceived us and lied to us with regards to Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, even though they lied to us regarding a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, even though they lied to us about Bin Laden being the biggest threat to America when they decided less than a year after we went into Afghanistan he was no longer on President Bush's mind and even thought they lied when they said “Mission Accomplished,” we bought it.

Well, we bought it at first, and then we saw they weren't doing any lending with all our cash. To make matters worse, we started hearing that the whole thing had been a scam long in the making, beginning with legislation passed during the Clinton Administration and made worse during the Bush Administration with a failure to enforce regulations and vigorous attempts to rollback all regulations in place. They built up a cyclical hustle, whereby people entered into mortgage agreements that they knew they could not pay, and that the lender knew would eventually go bust. Further, the lenders had been offering up loans with very low payments for a fixed period of time, after which the payments would skyrocket out of the range of what was affordable for most, if not all, of the borrowers.

That meant those involved in the businesses related to these bonds knew this. They knew peoples incomes and obligations when they got into the loans. These “sub-prime” mortgages were packaged into bonds and then sold as bonds and were peddled as if they were a good bet. In fact, the same ratings agencies that downgraded our national credit rating agreed to rate many of the bonds that were the most hazardous as the most secure to keep the scam going as long as possible, to reap as much cash as possible from it as possible before the inevitability of the whole thing coming crashing down occurred.

Of course, then they got to cash in again, and they knew it. They went ahead and leveraged themselves to the hilt on these bonds with no reservations, as they already had the next windfall coming in the form of a guaranteed taxpayer bailout of banks when they faltered by doing so, guaranteed by the FDIC. The third windfall came from the fact that just prior to the collapse they all went and took out bets that the scams they convinced everybody to buy into would fail. Yup, they knew it all along. The bets were so massive, they could not be covered. We had to pay those off also. We further had to cover pensions that could not be paid, and much more.

Oh we learned a lot about where our tax dollars go and to what extent we can be suckered into paying out huge sums of cash, for the benefit of a small percent of Americans, to the detriment of the rest of us. We learned how oppressive it can feel, powerless and helpless to watch how we can be forced to pay that way. We were used to dump our money into the sand for Iraq, we were used to haul our money to Wall Street and we have been used in other ways also we are beginning to learn.

This past Sunday the seventeenth of February, 2013, CBS's 60 minutes did a piece on Israel's Iron Dome project. It is another plan meant to defend against attacks from groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas factions in Palestine. Every nation across the globe should have the right to defend itself against attacks, especially when those attacks target innocent civilians. Israel isn't alone in that.

There are nations all across the globe facing civil war, conflicts with neighboring nations, tribal strife, etc. In almost every way we would like to see an end to the bloodshed and horror, there and all the other places it is happening. In almost every case, we would like to see the conflict come to an end. Regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine this is no less the case today than it has been for decades. We have been trying to get these two sides to come together and work out their differences pretty much since the end of WWII.

Treaties have been drawn up that essentially have said this side is Israeli land and the other Palestinian. Neutral ground was etched out that was not to be touched, and was not to be built upon as part of that agreement.

We have taken sides to help Israel at an increasing cost to ourselves and our national security until some person decided it was in our interest to begin to support both sides, in the desire to see them come together, end their conflict. The longer the conflict went on, the more money we poured into ending it. It is at the point right now, we are funding two separate governments that are basically at war with one another.

Oh sure, they are both claiming that they want things to end, but their actions display anything but. Palestinians keep engaging in terrorist activity, and sending rockets in targeting innocents.

What has made so many enemies for us in this conflict both within Palestine and throughout the Middle East has had a lot to do with Israel's refusal to honor their word and stop building illegal settlements. The they turn around and say, “see they are still committing terrorism. We need more and more American taxpayer money,” but how long can we keep sending it? They are essentially constantly whacking the hornet's nest, and then pointing out all the hornets and crying to us about the danger. It has become an endless cycle, and the American taxpayers are losing.

On one military project alone America is now sending them over $600 million dollars in taxpayer cash a year. That is not including all the other aid money we send them. We also send Palestine huge amounts of money in aid and they also continue their hostility. It has become a dependency upon our money for endless cycles of blood fueled by racial prejudice on both sides. We should not be I that business. We are now enabling their hostility towards one another that they really don't want to stop, and by our pouring money into it, we just feed it. The we get bombed, by people angry over our involvement in the whole thing.

Our agreement with Palestine is we send money if they stop the bombings, and they have not. Our agreement with Israel is we send money as long as they stop building the illegal settlements that cause us so many problems. They refuse and spit in our faces laughing haughtily, saying it's none of our business. It's gone from trying to broker peace, to simple welfare fraud, and we are the losers. Perhaps, if we sent more aid to people dying of disease and malnutrition in other nations where Al Qaeda has taken root, we could get the same level of intelligence support against Al Qaeda, and spread the idea that we are not the enemies, but the good guys.

There comes a time when unhealthy co-dependent relationships must end. Perhaps it's time Israel and Palestine begin to learn to be on their own. Perhaps it's time we try the one thing we have not yet, let's cut all financial and military aid to both, and let them work out their own problems. We had to work out our own during our nation's dawning perhaps it's time both of them did the same.

Many claim we should support them for religious reasons one way or the other. But religious people of good faith don't cheat whole nations out of billions in aid dollars, and lie the whole time while they are doing it. Right now both Israel and Palestine are doing those very things. That is neither the actions of godly folk, not of friends. It's just nations crooked and perverted by the hate conflict gives birth to. We would do well to walk away from that.

To read about my inspiration for this article go to