DailyKos blogger Jesse LaGreca was eloquent and focused on ABC’s This Week this morning. I want to post the conversation about #OccupyWallStreet featuring Jesse, and come back a little later with my own thoughts. To the question, “What is your plan? Are you going to harness this into a political movement?” – a question that keeps coming up, and misses how this movement is different, Jesse responded that OWS is really about “pushing the narrative that working people can no longer be ignored.” They’re not trying to be the politicians – the more important thing is for politicians to come out and listen to the people at OWS.
Phi Beta Iota: Neither the two political parties nor the corporate media get it yet. While Jesse did a fine job, he failed to drive home the key point. This is about dumping the corrupt electoral system and restoring integrity to the Republic beginning with Electoral Reform.
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.
This morning, Mitt Romney used his foreign policy address at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina to criticize what he called the Obama administration's “feckless policies of the last three years.”
“I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world,” Romney said, with an audience of cadets sitting behind him. “Not exceptional, as the president has derisively said, in the way that the British think Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional. In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States.”
Romney criticized the president on cutting the defense budget, as well. “I will reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts,” he said. “I will begin reversing Obama-era cuts to national missile defense and prioritize the full deployment of a multilayered national ballistic missile defense system.”
Using the extra-judicial liquidation of Anwar al-Awlaqi as a point of departure, Patrick Seale provides very useful and important survey of the strategic and grand strategic implications of the expanding U.S. conflict in what now might be called the Yemen Theater of Operations (YTO) in what is rapidly mutating into a U.S. Jihad against the Islamic world. The United States is now in involved militarily in wars encompassing at least six theaters of operations in the Islamic world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, with possible expansions into the Sahel and Nigeria, not to mention Iran and who knows where else.
Chuck Spinney
Badalona, Catalunya (part of Spain according to some)
On Friday, 30 September, Yemen announced that a Hellfire missile fired from a CIA-operated drone had killed Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaqi, in the north of the country. His grief-stricken father, once a minister of agriculture in a Yemeni government, went to the scene to collect and bury the pieces of what remained of Anwar’s body. It was the seventh U.S. strike in Yemen this year.
Anwar al-Awlaqi was a virulent critic of American foreign policy in the Arab world, and a passionate advocate of al-Qaida’s form of Islamic jihad. He was also a U.S. citizen, born in New Mexico, with an engineering degree from Colorado State University. His internet sermons, delivered in fluent English, had a devoted following, especially among young Muslims in the West.
His killing inevitably aroused a storm of controversy in the United States about its legality. In an article in The National Interest, Paul R. Pillar, a former senior CIA officer now a university professor, described it as “essentially a long-range execution without judge, jury or publicly presented evidence.” This is a subject which must be left to the Americans to debate.
What are its probable consequences? The most obvious is that it is likely further to inflame some Muslims against the United States, drawing fresh recruits into the jihadist struggle. “Why kill him in this brutal, ugly way?” a member of his Awalik tribe was quoted as saying. “Killing him will not solve the Americans’ problem with al-Qaida. It will just increase its strength and sympathy in this region.”
A key question, therefore, is whether al-Qaida — including its Yemen-based offshoot, “Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” — is an organisation or a cause.
Let's step a bit outside of the day to day grind. I spent a bit of time watching the Chairman of the Federal Reserve “scold” Congress. This got my brain thinking a bit outside the box. So I'll share with you my thoughts.
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve is part:
Religious figure. The Pope of the Church of Capitalism. The leader of the Church. Final arbiter on the meaning of scripture (arcane economic indicators and economic papers). Is trained in ancient mysteries (economics). Has a council of Cardinals (the Fed board). He also issues indulgences (bailouts and free loans) to banks that he likes.
Royalty. A king of Capitalism. Surrounded by the noble houses of Goldman, JP Morgan, US Bank, and Citibank. Is trotted out to “stabilize” and “orient” government action. Protector of the privileges of nobility (a national/perpetual first night). Be-suited in the garb of royalty. Sometimes (as above) deigns to speak to the assembly of commoners.
Ideologue. General Secretary of the Capitalist Party. When he speaks, the party faithful in the markets listen. He ensures the purity of the ideology (Capitalism). Fights to expand the party's influence around the world. Has analysts devoted to watching/deciphering the actions of his Capitalist Politburo.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Phi Beta Iota: More like the Capo of Government-Sanctioned Financial Terrorism. The Federal Reserve is neither Federal nor a Reserve, but rather a front for the New York banks that are in turn a front for a tiny cabal of financial families that have the full protection (genuflection) of the two political parties that have destroyed democracy to achieve a velvet form of financial facsicm. As the recent audit demonstrates, this organization is out of control.
Now that the labor unions have joined the General Assembly (an amorphous ever changing coalition of the concerned across the Republic), the way is open to begin focusing on what is to be done in the next six months.
My view of the Core Message:
CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.
Merit. Be right. Non-violence and moral conduct at all times is vital UNLESS attacked illegally, at that point you “rush and crush.” Offer Truth & Reconciliation, not revenge and certainly not confiscation of assets outside the rule of law. The point here is to achieve a “cease and desist” on government corruption and financial terrorism.
Message. Electoral Reform
Money. Big Bat for the Republic. 25 million times $10 is $250 million. 50 million times $20 is 1 billion. 100 million times $40 is 4 billion. Wall Street cannot match a public combination of money and mass.
Means. Use mass power on individual Senators and Representatives. Any Senator, any Representative, and any Governor that fails to introduce Electoral Reform Act for national and state passage should be toast–run out of office. Create coalition cabinets and balanced budgets at every level from zip code and municipality to county, state, bio-region, and national.
Phi Beta Iota: This brilliant analysis cuts deeply to two core points: that a tiny handful of banks have been controlling 90% of the debt and manipulating the destruction of economies — shorting the Euro as well as the US dollar — and that governments have not been acting together. He neglects two fundamentals: the lack of integrity in these same government, most in collusion with the banks against the public; and the lack of integrity — the blatant persistent transnational criminal activities of the banks — of the handful of banks that have brought the world to the brink. Electoral reform is needed to cleanse the governments, and the governments should be taking legal action to destroy the banks and recover the criminally-rooted losses. We totally agree that Europe should default in unison, but we also feel that global criminal action against the specified banks and all of their owners, partners, and senior managers should be taken toward the aim of de-privatizing public goods and confiscating assets back toward the public commonwealths. Put bluntly, it is time we melt Goldman Sachs down and deprive the individual financial criminals of 95% of their wealth that is rooted in deliberate criminal activity against people and nations.
260911 1103
Alessandro Politi
Euro crisis and common sense 1
What does this crisis mean?
In times of emergency clarity of analysis and purpose is of paramount importance, especially when public leadership is so mediocre. In this first piece we will look first at the analysis framework at global level.
Forget about the markets. This is just a misleading shorthand expression that obscures a simple fact. The OECD has observed that, after decades of M&A, during this year 9 major economic actors control beyond 90% of the derivatives market (i.e. CDS, CDO, exchange rate swaps). They are:
J.P Morgan, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC USA;
Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse, BNP-Paribas.
This is an oligopolistic market where small stakeholders are just cannon fodder and governments have generally no sufficient financial muscle. These are the entities that make the market and break national financial reputations, economic fundamentals notwithstanding.
