Stimulus: Create an International Emergency Response Force

President Obama's New Deal has paved the way for a $787 billion economic stimulus package. The goals include: improving infrastructure, investing in energy projects and providing financial relief for families via tax cuts and increased government benefits. These are admirable domestic goals and should be pursued, but there are also international pursuits that would achieve the goal of stimulating the US economy while at the same time saving thousands, if not millions of lives and also demonstrating a true leadership role against protectionism in the process. I am proposing the raising, training and sustaining of a truly international emergency response force, open to citizens of all nations.

The creation and maintenance of such a force is badly needed on both humanitarian and economic grounds in order to provide effective, prevention based response to genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and natural disasters. Such a force, funded principally by the US, might need to operate under the umbrella of the United Nations, but must not be constrained by the existing veto arrangements that prevail in the Security Council and that make that body so ineffectual.

The force would comprise not only military personnel, but also administrators, police and medical teams. With the bulk of funding coming from the US, raising, training and sustaining such a force could achieve similar positive results in terms of stimulating the US economy, as did World War II - which most historians agree had a more concrete impact on the economy than Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the1930s.

Such a force, operating within an appropriately crafted mandate, would not only save countless lives, but according to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, would have saved the international community nearly $130 billion of the $200 billion it spent on managing conflicts in the 1990s by focusing on conflict prevention or early intervention rather than post conflict reconstruction.

US now officially an oligarchy

$1.2 trillion bank bailout. $75 billion mortgage bailout. $787 billion stimulus spending plan. This is classic big government tactics on an unprecedented scale, but those who are putting this plan to bed are experimenting. That's all it is, a grand experiment by a few amateurs. President Obama himself has told us "We've never seen anything like this since the Great Depression." Therefore, nobody in the workforce at the moment has any personal experience of such matters.

If you believe, as most experts do, that the crisis we are experiencing has its roots in irresponsible spending and the unwise creation of debt, then do you really believe that more spending on this scale, with the resultant record level of national debt, can possibly be the answer?

More important than that however, is that these policies are being designed and executed by the very oligarchs that created this problem in the first place. Yes, that's right...I said oligarchs. Oligarchy is that form of government wherein power is exercised not by the people, but a very few powerful individuals who have the wherewithal to control the purse-strings of government and influence the shape of government policy. These spending bills have created a new form of government for the United States of America - an Oligarchy. It may come as a surprise to many however, to know that our powerful new oligarchs aren't politicians; they are the CEO's of the big banks. This is no emotional rhetoric either - it is a fact recognized by Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.

Now lets explore a little deeper. How has it come to pass that these banks have so quickly convinced taxpayers to part with a whopping $1.2 trillion dollars to fix their mistakes and solve their problems? Its not hard to work out when you realize that Geithner's chief of staff was a principal lobbyist of Goldman Sachs, the new deputy secretary of state was a CEO of Citigroup, the new assistant to the President and deputy national security advisor for International Economic Affairs is a former Citigroup CFO, and even one his deputies also came from Citigroup and yet another new member of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board comes from UBS, which is being investigated for shady tax evasion deals on behalf of its wealthier clients. Is it unreasonable to assume that these guys don't have any conflicts of interest??. In fact I'm certain they have only one interest, and it isn't yours or mine. It's the interests of the financial industry.

Oh, and don't expect too much from the overseers at the House Financial Services Committee either. Two weeks ago, eight top bank CEOs were brought in to testify before that committee of Congress, and guess what...it has now been revealed publicly that almost every member of that Committee had received contributions from those banks during the previous year. Now it is clear how those CEO's felt invincible enough and arrogant enough to proceed with massive bonus payments we saw at the end of last year. What a rotten mess...and its got nowhere to go but down.