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The Coming Sell-Out to the Super Rich and What It Means for the Rest of Us
By MICHAEL HUDSON
Counterpunch
Web Censorship Bill Sails Through Senate Committee
Sam Gustin
WIRED
Why Gen Y is Better at Your Job Than You Are
Penelope Trunk
BNET
The Coming Sell-Out to the Super Rich and What It Means for the Rest of Us
By MICHAEL HUDSON
Counterpunch
Web Censorship Bill Sails Through Senate Committee
Sam Gustin
WIRED
Why Gen Y is Better at Your Job Than You Are
Penelope Trunk
BNET
Weekend Edition
November 19 – 21, 2010
Open Letter to Erskine Bowles
By THOMAS CHRISTIE, PIERRE SPREY, FRANKLIN SPINNEY et al.
Counterpunchhttp://www.counterpunch.org/christie11192010.html
The Honorable Erskine Bowles
National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform
1650 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20504
Dear Mr. Bowles:
We are writing to you and other members of the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform as individuals who have worked in national security affairs for decades for the Department of Defense, in the Armed Forces and for Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Our concern is the defense budget.
Similar to what your “Co-Chairs' Proposal” said last week regarding Social Security and other issues, we do not believe that defense spending should be reduced to a bargaining chip in budget negotiations at the Deficit Commission. On the other hand, we do believe that the defense budget is dangerously bloated, giving rise to serious decay in our armed forces.
Weaker forces at higher costs (discussed below) are the result of many years of exploitation of defense spending for political purposes, dereliction of oversight duties, and gross mismanagement by the Pentagon, the White House and the Congress. There has been a fundamental absence of accountability, both that required by the Constitution and that which accompanies sound management.
Read entire very detailed letter of testimony…
Phi Beta Iota: What our distinguished colleagues have not included in this letter is the fact that the US does not have a coherent reality-based strategy within which to evaluate ALL threats and provide a force structure suitable to ALL threats, nor does the US have an intelligence community able to provide any more than 4% (“at best” according to General Tony Zinni) of what we need in the way of intelligence support to policy, acquisition, and operations. At the same time, the Pentagon is committing a major crime against its own humanity by spending less than 1% of its budget on the 4% of the force that takes 80% of the casualties: the infanty, this from General Robert Scales. With all due respect, both Gates and Clapper have presided over the maintenance of the status quo; they have not changed the game for the better; and they have failed to do what needed to be done.
VEGETABLES, ANIMALS AND POLITICS.
At waking up, this morning, the sun almost hitting the solar panels,’
a mandala of a shining star of grass in my third eye.
Happens whenever I pull weeds too.
Or trim the zumac tree.
Or in the old days, when I pulled the mustard after a rain.
Tons of mustard.
Went to mustard heaven at night and flew over fields of mustard.
Happens with grasses too—king’s grass.
Is this vegetable heaven?
Picking grass yesterday, wondering if each bunch of grass connected to its main root was one soul.
So many seasons. So many years. So many souls.
Mountains of souls.
Were there hierarchies of souls?
If there were too many souls for all the bodies extant now, do some of them go into grass?
When you drive all night and lie down to sleep, and see the cars still coming in the mind’s eye, just a repeat of what you saw on the road…
But I see such pure color, vibrant, shining rays of light in the the mind’s grass…
Picking up on collective consciousness of plants? Downloading the day at night with a niche collective consciousness?
I pulled grass out of the pebbled driveway for only twenty minutes yesterday, yet got these bursting green blades of grass shining in my closed eyes…
Am I now just hypersensitive and/or connected to the vegetable and mineral world, now from years of lending my energy to them–rather than reading numbers on papers in a board room? Is that why gurus prefer mountaintops to board rooms?
Downloading… but its not just down loading, its shedding the negative energy that has attached itself to the pure thing itself—when you download, you wash it off, and see it purely, its essence.
Downloaded “bad” experience is accepted as pure experience, and becomes part of the storage of experience to make wisdom… for instinctual right actions to prevail in the present: cognizant but not affected by them..
Also, this morning (somehow related) my old roommate, Thorstein Veblen’s grandson, like Barak Obama, schooled in governance at Harvard–not a co-joined teaching with economics as they do at Oxford—PPE–politics, philosophy and economics… Obama and John Veblen, unlike Thorstein, ignorant of economics and the history of economic theory.
So we get Americans like John Veblen and Barak, brilliant people who understand governing, negotiating, game playing but all within the envelope of politics, as they know it.
When faced with an economic problem of enormity, they turn to the best economists, e.g. Summers, Geitner… “best” being most “successful “in the [old failing ]system..
Just when we needed a President who had clear vision or comprehensive economic understanding of how the system must change in order to work.
We didn’t need Babe Ruth to hit a home run, we needed Abner Doubleday to change the rules of the game!
FDR was not a compromising black/white man intent of binding the nations wounds like Abe; FDR was a pure-bred Harvard philosopher king who reveled in being hated by banks and powerful oligopolies..
Like the undergraduate John Veblen, who made Thorstein turn in his grave, the brilliant Obama could never pick someone as an advisor who was outside the power box—Obama is a schooled power broker and speechifier..
But what was broken, is broken, is the system. Pack the courts, put an army of unemployed to work, tax the rich, redistribute the wealth, you can keep the balanced tension between capitalism and planning, but we need a heavy hand on the planning side of the scale. Like the Chinese or the Finns!
The victims of of the rich getting richer are the underclass who now want a Tea Party to help them commit suicide. Because they know nothing of what Adam Smith preached centuries ago—they have no idea they are a mob of crypto-Smiths.
Karl Marx (most readers will stop reading here) saw how capitalism would destroy itself (or at least 80% of the population)—it has already decimated our living in community with humanistic values. Materialsm has trumped nature and man.
I told my daughter back when Obama (a very smart man) was elected, to make sure she enjoyed her life and didn’t make plans too far in the future, because things will change, not necessarily for the better.
I told her the house was on fire, we need three buckets of water and this new handsome President is trying to compromise between the mercantile republicans who said we need one quarter of one pail (for the banks) and the “liberal” democrats who said we need half a pail (for the banks )–forget Robert Reich and Tom Friedman (“’We need a bigger boat!’ cried Roy Schieder to Richard Dreyfuss when he saw how big the shark was,” said Freidman way back, two years ago).
Top down, not bottom up, say Geitner, Summers and Associates. Where is our political Martin Luther! Post the 95 new rules on the doors of the government-military-industrial complex! The Government of the United States of America is a sales organization that sells indulgences. If not a revolution, we need a Reformation. A new game. Ten strikes and you’re out; two balls and you go to first.
We needed three pails to water the grass roots, not a big splash on the tree tops. And Obama was doomed. A brilliant man but ignorant of the variety of games that can be constructed—couldn’t someone point out that when basketball was getting boring, they added a three-point line!
Obama, like me in the fields of the spirits, is an ignoramus. I pouted on a website called beyondgreedandego.com back then. I also sent out an email to friends, explaining how this will happen, and explaining the way is being paved for a fascist craziness masking as populism.
Below is just one of a number of short (YouTube) videos that are gaining traction as the American people begin to understand the reality of Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve being allowed to blow up the US economy and now the world economy, with the full blessing of President Barack Obama. This is change we can believe in?
Ariel Merari
Useful but Severely Flawed in Context
November 19, 2010
I read a great deal and below offer an alternative recommendation to this book. A careful look through the “Inside the Book” elements, including the Index (Pape is not there) and the Conclusion, confirm that this is a book that seeks to place all the blame on the suicide terrorists without regard to the extreme deprivations being placed upon them by dictators and occupying powers. I give this book a fourth star because it serves a useful purpose–this is a valuable study in and of itself, but it loses a star for failing to be honest about the larger context. Below are a few books that provide that context.
The key conclusion that this book does not do enough to highlight is that there is a direct correlation between suicide terrorism and a specific country being occupied or a specific ethnic groups being severely and harshly repressed. Stop the occupations, genocides, and other attrocities, and most of the suicide terrorism will stop as well.
The primary purpose of this intervention is to point to the below books and my summary reviews of each.
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
See also at Phi Beta Iota under Remixed Reviews:
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative) where 40 lists of reviews are provided sorted under the causative revolution categories of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural geographic, will all links live.
Terrorism is a boil. We choose to lance that boil by shooting it off while driving a car on a winding road. It should not come as a surprise when we drive the car over the cliff as a result of our poor choice of tools and bad decisions.
What drives a person to kill himself for killing others, in the name
of a political or religious cause? This book is the first to report a
series of studies in which failed suicide bombers and organizers of
suicide attacks were subjected to systematic clinical psychological
interviews and tests and were compared to non-suicide terrorists. This direct psychological examination enabled a first-hand assessment of the personality characteristics and motivation of suicide bombers.
Additional interviews conducted by seasoned area specialists provided a comprehensive picture of the ways by which the suicide bombers were recruited, prepared and dispatched to their planned death, as well as how they felt and behaved along this road. This information was supplemented by data derived from interviews with the families of suicide bombers who died carrying out their attacks.
The book describes the first systematic empirical studies of the personality characteristics and motivation of suicide bombers and organizers of suicide attacks. Arrested suicide bombers own accounts of the process of making suicide attacks, as well as their decisions and feelings along this process. On the basis of these findings the book provides a unique comprehensive analysis of suicide attacks, showing how personality characteristics interact with group pressure and public atmosphere. In analyzing suicide attacks around the world, the book relies on the most comprehensive database.
Review: Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (includes links to other books that provide essential context)