Funding The Military Plus A Few Other Goodies…
A friend of mine wanted me to check out HB 2346 and urge my Senators and Congressman to vote against it because it has some funding appropriated for the International Monetary Fund (IMF.) Before I sent it out to all of my contacts, I thought I would check out the bill for myself.
The bill is known as the Supplemental War Appropriations bill. A brief summary of the bill quickly showed that it provided funding for the various branches of our military. What could be wrong with that?
I wrote my friend and told her that there must be a mistake. There is no funding for the IMF that I can find. She showed me that I was wrong.
There are other goodies in the bill such as $1,349,000,000 for Foreign Military Financing Programs. So we are cutting back on our own military spending, but good ol’ Uncle Sam has mega bucks to give to foreign governments to maintain and develop their militaries.
The bill says that we cannot release prisoners from Guantanamo Bay into the United States until after October 1, 2009.
It provides $1,000,000,000 for the Cash For Clunkers program. Bring in your old car and you can get up to $4,500 towards the purchase of a new vehicle from the government. The old cars will be destroyed and our environment will be cleaner. Hey, when you are rolling in money like we are in the US, it is hard to hide it!
The bill provides for $1,850,000,000 for an international influenza pandemic like the swine flu.
The legislative branch is budgeting $71,000,000 for new digital radio equipment for the Capitol police.
Now back to the IMF funding. This bill calls for $108,000,000,000 for a loan to the IMF. The IMF operates like the Federal Reserve System. The loan will help the IMF bailout banks and countries all over the world. Once the money is there, we cannot control it. It can go to countries that sponsor terrorism for instance.
There is a call to get Republicans in the House to vote for this bill. This new push suggests that not all Democrats are on board. To sweeten the deal for some of the liberal Democrats, the bill no longer requires the release of photos of captured or detained individuals by US Military Operations overseas to be blocked. This Senate amendment was removed and can endanger citizens of the US and our military serving overseas. With this block, the decision to release these photos will be left to the courts.
What is all of this junk doing in the Military Appropriations bill? Perhaps it is hiding there so that a simply scan of the bill won’t reveal it. (I wonder if our Representatives will read the bill this time.) Perhaps it is in there as a ‘gotcha’. If our elected officials vote against funding the IMF, their opponent can legally say that he or she did not vote to fund the military effort. Bills should be limited to a single topic as per my Wish List For America posting.
Call the House switchboard and tell them to vote NO on HR 2346. The number is 202-224-3121.
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June 17th, 2009 at 5:18 am
This is, I think, one of the primary reasons for the Read the Bills Act. They sneak stuff like this in so that even those who WANT to know what’s happening can easily miss it. I sincerely hope that this can be blocked, if for no other reason than the bailout. I’m sorry, but we bailed out our own banks and we took to the streets in tea parties all over the country, but yet somehow it’s OK to bail out OTHER banks?
Sorry, I just don’t buy it.
June 17th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Bill, Thanks for doing your homework on the legislation. This is their attempt to sell as wolf as a sheep and it makes me sick. I hope everyone with a conscience will call and write ALL of their representatives and pressure them to vote no on this.
June 17th, 2009 at 10:26 am
My mom read the blog and asked why we would give so much money to the IMF. It turns out that Obama promised that money at the G20 when he was rubbing shoulders with the big dogs. That was the time that white people with blue eyes were being blamed for the world economy. Obama was trying to repair the damage that America caused. Good grief!
June 17th, 2009 at 10:57 am
In all fairness though, Obama believes that it was the United States that’s responsible for the world economic crisis and blames banks in particular, despite evidence that shows that the Federal Reserve and Congress are the real culprits. So now, we’re going to bail out banks everywhere, just like we did here, only we don’t even get the oversight for those banks like we do here.
I never thought that nationalizing AIG was going to end up as anything other than one of the worst moves the government could have done. Thanks President Obama for proving me wrong!
June 18th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
You think that one is bad, today, June 18, I happened to flip over to CSPAN to see what was going on and they were voting on a series of amendments to the Commerce and Justice Spending Bill, which is $65 billion dollars. The amendments were proposed by various Republican representatives and were designed to strip out the earmarks. So far none of them have been voted for, meaning the money is allowed to stay in the bill. Among some of the goodies is $300k for a art center in Arkansas, $200K for Maine Natural Resources and a provision to limit the spending to the amount allocated in 2008, which meant a cut of $12.5 BILLION.
Like I said they all failed, there are about 20 more to be voted on but my blood pressure couldn’t take anymore.
Just a few weeks ago the president said we were out of money and still our elected officials are spending like drunken sailors on shore leave. A $12.5 billion budget increase in this time of economic hard times is just unfathomable.
And it was both sides who voted in favor of keeping these earmarks and expenditures in, although the overwhelming majority were from the Democrats.