The U.S. had its AAA credit rating downgraded for the first time by Standard & Poor’s on concern spending cuts agreed on by lawmakers to raise the nation’s borrowing limit won’t be enough to reduce record deficits.
Koko do math: Cut 1.5 trillion over 10 years; continue to borrow $1 trillion a year, net debt INCREASE $8.5 trillion over ten years. Congress and the White House have known the Republic is insolvent since then Comptroller General David Walker briefed them to that effect in 2007.
Herewith is Stephen Walt's excellent critique of US grand strategy in the Middle East since 1990. My only comment is that he omits the pernicious influences of the arrogance that emerged from our misinterpretation of our “victory” in the Cold War and does not discuss the closely related emergence of Mad Madeline's nutty theory of the unipolar “indispensable power,” coupled to William Perry's fatally-flawed techno-theory of marrying coercive diplomacy to the so-called military revolution in hi-tech precision warfare (the latter explained in my essay here).
Today is the 21st anniversary of a key date in world history. On this date in 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting in motion a train of events that would have fateful consequences for Saddam himself, but also for the United States. Indeed, one could argue that this invasion was the first step in a train of events that did enormous damage to the United States and its position in the world.
EXTRACT:
But no strategy is so bad that somebody else can't make it worse. And that is precisely what George W. Bush did after 9/11. Under the influence of neoconservatives who had opposed dual containment because they thought it didn't go far enough, Bush adopted a new strategy of “regional transformation.”
And in other news….
Think things can't get worse? Check out how the palace parasites are lining up to contain the debt ceiling in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac.
K Street wasted little time putting clients on notice about the next phase of the debt ceiling debate with a simple message: Nobody is safe from the super committee.
For six years Overstock.com has waged a war to expose Wall Street mischief. We did not go looking for a fight, but our company was attacked, and we learned we were not alone: the same manipulation-for-profit tools that Wall Street had deployed against us had also been deployed against many American companies, harming job creation, innovation, and economic growth. We knew that if left unchecked and unexposed, Wall Street's games could ultimately damage U.S. capital markets.
So in 2005 and 2007 we filed two lawsuits. The first case was against a hedge fund (Rocker Partners) and hatchet-job-for-hire research team (Gradient Analytics), both with ties to Jim Cramer. The second case was against a group of eleven Wall Street prime brokers, culminating in Goldman Sachs. The hedge fund in question (Rocker Partners) hired famed lawyer David Boies, and the prime brokers showed up with an army of the most prestigious law firms in America. Our lawyers were Dore Griffinger, Ellen Cirangle, Jonathan Sommer and Catherine Jackson of Stein & Lubin, a small but excellent San Francisco law firm.
We won the hedge fund case against Gradient and Rocker, extracting an apology, a retraction and over $5 million in cash (it felt good to beat David Boies' firm). In our prime broker case, one of the Wall Street banks (Lehman Brothers) has gone under (two, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were sold at fire sale prices), and another seven paid us millions to let them out.
That leads us to the main event this coming December, when Overstock.com will square off against Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch (and Merrill's parent, Bank of America) in a San Francisco courtroom. Recently, in the prosecution of this case, we uncovered evidence of collusive action between Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other Wall Street bad guys, in a scheme designed to fool regulators and profit illegally at the expense of Overstock.com.
As a result of this discovery, in December 2010, we added a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act claim and requested treble damages under this RICO claim. We firmly believe the conduct of Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch were “racketeering” and “corrupt.” We are moving forward: trial is scheduled to commence this year, on December 5, 2011. At trial we will hold Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch accountable and expose a slew of illegal Wall Street practices to the public.
It is now widely accepted – and lamented — that US President Barack Obama failed dismally in attempting to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Defeated by Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, and by Israel’s friends in the U.S. — lobbyists, Congressmen and women, neo-conservatives, Christian Zionists, and assorted Arab-haters both inside and outside the Administration — the President threw in the towel.
What is less well understood is that Obama was also defeated in another major area of foreign policy – relations with Iran. When he came to office he vowed to ‘engage’ with the Islamic Republic, but this admirable objective was soon supplanted by a policy of threats, sanctions and intimidation aimed at isolating Iran, subverting its economy and overthrowing its regime.
Israel and its friends led the campaign against Iran, demonizing it as a threat to all mankind, and forcing the United States to follow suit. Israel has repeatedly, and very publicly, threatened to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, and has done its best to drag the U.S. into war against it, in much the same way as pro-Israeli neo-conservatives – such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon — manipulated intelligence to push America into war against Iraq in 2003, with catastrophic consequences for the United States.
Phi Beta Iota: Brazil and Turkey are depicted as adults, the US as a retarded child misguided by Israel. There is no discernible difference between the Bush-Cheney Administrations and the Obama-Biden Administration with respect to foreign policy and national security, with one signal exception: the National Security Advisor is a Goldman Sachs lobbyist.
Industrialized agriculture, and industrialized corruption in defense. Nobody is serious about creating safe, affordable, sustainable solutions for anything, from agriculture to defense.
Phi Beta Iota: Holistic strategic analytics with embedded full life cycle “true costs” is a non-negotiable first step toward global hybrid governance, with or without governments.
not to be confused with Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog
Ex-CIA official sounds alarm about hackers’ next targets (CNN):
The former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center raised concerns Wednesday about an impending “code war” in which hackers will tamper not just with the Internet but with technology that runs real-world infrastructure.
Somewhat fittingly, Cofer Black’s keynote talk at the Black Hat hacker conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was interrupted by a literal alarm: flashing lights, sirens and the whole bit.
“Attention, please. Attention, please,” a robotic woman’s voice said repeatedly as Black smiled, apparently confused. “We are currently investigating the alarm signal you are hearing. Please remain calm.”
After a pause and some laughs from the audience, Black kept going.
Phi Beta Iota: He does not seem to realize he was put on the program as an inside joke, or that we all knew in 1990-1994 that cyber-space was going to be the next combat zone. What Mr. Black does not appear to understand, is that hackers are the good guys, while politicians, bureaucrats, and vendors who routinely betray the public trust are the bad guys. He is out of touch with both history and reality. He lives in a world of lies, not the world of truth. Only in the world of truth can problems be fully understood and intelligently addressed. Here above the line are one simple graphic and the most recent exposure of the cyber-scam that is on-going between ignorant Contracting Officers and equally ignorant vendors. Below the line are more references.
The government is certain we are stupid. This deal cuts $1.5 trillion over ten years while continuing the practice of borrowing $1 trillion a year. The net increase in debt is roughly $8.5 trillion.
