Chris Kelly: Crouching Fiscal Cliff, Hidden Aircraft Carrier

Over the weekend, a Chinese knock-off of a Russian fighter jet, the J-15, landed on China's used Ukrainian aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, for the first time. Luo Yuan, the senior engineer of China's aircraft carrier program, was there to witness this historic event and subsequently dropped dead. He was 51. Mao tells us that all men must die, but death can vary in significance; to die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather. Given China's new role, as the world's sweatshop, and the symbiotic relationship between its arms spending and ours, it would have been illuminating to know what Luo weighed when he expired.

The Chinese hold over a trillion dollars in American debt. That's less than 9% of what we owe, but it means the Chinese profit, in a very direct and tangible sense, from our obsessive deficit spending on defense. And who are we defending ourselves from? The Chinese.

So Luo was serving the people, while frightening the exploiters, who will borrow more money, to buy weapons, to defended themselves from the people... from the people.

That's some serious weight.

I'm feeling sort of logy myself. I may have to lie down.

How scared should we be, of the Chinese and their nascent ability to put a plane on a boat? Scared shitless, according to the people who sell us our planes and boats. This means that They are catching up.

It feels like barely 101 years ago that the first American landed a plane on a warship, because it was. And now foreigners are doing it too.

The gap is closing. While we slept, the dragon was breathing down our necks, having crossed the Rubicon inside a Trojan horse.

Hauntingly, and there's no such thing as accidents, this new threat is emerging just as America faces the Fiscal Cliff, and spending cuts that could hollow out our defense like a cheap chocolate Easter Bunny.

This is no time for reckless fiscal restraint. I'll let the Heritage Foundation explain:

Chinese Throwing Their Weight Around
For the U.S., the incorporation of the Liaoning into the PLAN (People's Liberation Army Navy) means that the Chinese will be a growing factor in waters that have long been an American preserve... it is possible that the Chinese will choose to dispatch it to the American exclusive economic zone (EEZ) to counter American freedom of navigation activities in what the Chinese claim as their EEZ.

It's also possible that they'll release a Kraken, but unlikely. America has 11 carrier groups. China has one pokey carrier, and a handful of destroyers to support it. Imagining the Liaoning menacing the "freedom of navigation activities" of the nuclear super carrier Abraham Lincoln isn't just disingenuous, it's fantastical. The Foundation is treating you like an asshole. But here's their larger point:

What the U.S. Should Do
Provide more defense resources. Meeting military requirements is likely to mean more defense spending, not less. Already enacted budget cuts, not to mention those demanded by sequestration, cannot be reconciled with meeting ongoing or future defense needs.

Balancing the budget is fine, in theory, if all you're talking about is cutting Medicare, education, Social Security and the EPA. But not defense. Not with the Liaoning out there.

Sequestration - the Fiscal Cliff to its friends - would trigger a 9.4% cut in defense spending. The savings won't come from Afghanistan or Iraq - the White House and Congress agreed a long time ago that wars don't come out of the Pentagon's allowance. The savings also won't come from military personnel or veterans affairs. They're exempt from sequester. That leaves the big-ticket items. Like the aircraft carriers and destroyers, submarines, helicopters and planes, missiles and satellites that we'd need to fight another navy, if anyone had one.

Like for instance China.

Speaking of Kraken, when Zeus beat Echidna, half woman/half snake, he didn't kill her, although he could have. He let her live, and become the mother of all monsters, so the heroes would have something to do.

Because you know Zeus. It was all about jobs.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/crouching-fiscal-cliff-hi_b_2195474.html

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