I think the best description of Robert Gates is that he is a very smart bureaucrat who exemplifies the concept of go along to get along. He demonstrated this admirably in his farewell ‘warning’ as reported in the Wall Street Journal. This was a “guns or butter” speech designed to reassure the defense industrial complex that the safety of the U.S. will depend on the continued acquisition of pointless complex and expensive weapons systems.
Rather interestingly in this speech Gates ignored two pieces of information that might have caused him to reconsider his advocacy of super weapons systems.
America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both.
Phi Beta Iota Sidenote: BOTH of the above “choices” are corruption incarnate. The correct choice was articulated by Thomas Jefferson: “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.”
EXTRACT:
In a series of farewell speeches, Mr. Gates has warned against cuts to weapon programs and troop levels that would make America vulnerable in “a complex and unpredictable security environment,” as he said Sunday at Notre Dame. On Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Gates noted that the U.S. went on “a procurement holiday” in the 1990s, when the Clinton Administration decided to cash in the Cold War peace dividend. The past decade showed that history (and war) didn't end in 1989.
Robert Steele Sends. This is personal. In1995, Gates was one of four Americans invited to address the French national conference on “Waging War and Peace in the 21st Century.” He followed me on the schedule, and on hearing my presentation, sashayed up to the stage, sniffed dismissively, and said “I'm not even going to touch that.” As we now know, I nailed it in 1989 for General Al Gray, in 1992 for the Whole Earth Review, again in 1995 for all in France (and separately in USA for COSPO under Joe Markowitz and for US Government as a Whole), and again in 2000 for NATO. And onward to the UN and various multinational audiences who lack a single nation ready to play a leadership role in the M4IS2 arena. Robert Gates was arrogant then, he is ignorant now….and he does “do maintenance,” that is all he has done as a placeholder at Defense. Gate's farewell comments are crap, pure and simple. He has overseen the waste of America's blood, treasure, and spirit with abject amorality that Dick Cheney would be proud of. He has failed to demand what Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) called for–a strategy, a force structure (the four forces after next) suited to the 21st Century, and an acquisition system with integrity.
Anatomy of a Murder: How NATO Killed Qaddafi Family Members
28 May 2011
How many times must a parent bury a child?
Well, in the case of Muammar Qaddafi it's not only twice: once for his daughter, murdered by the United States bombing on his home in 1986, and again on 30 April 2011 when his youngest son, Saif al Arab, but yet again for three young children, grandbabies of Muammar Qaddafi killed along with Saif at the family home.
Now, I watched Cindy Sheehan as she bared her soul before us in her grief; I cried when Cindy cried. Now, how must Qaddafi and his wife feel? And the people of Libya, parents of all the nation's children gone too soon. I don't even want to imagine.
All my mother could say in astonishment was, “They killed the babies, they killed his grandbabies.”
The news reports, however, didn't last more than one half of a news cycle because on 1 May, at a hastily assembled press conference, President Obama announced the murder of Osama bin Laden.
Well, I haven't forgotten my empathy for Cindy Sheehan; I haven't forgotten my concern for the children of Iraq that Madeleine Albright said were OK to kill by U.S. sanctions if U.S. geopolitical goals were achieved. I care about the children of Palestine who throw stones at Israeli soldiers and get laser-guided bullets to their brains in return. I care about the people of North Africa and West Asia who are ready to risk their lives for freedom. In fact, I care about all of the children–from Appalachia to the Cancer Alley, from New York City to San Diego, and everywhere in-between.
On 22 May 2011, I had the opportunity to visit the residence of the Qaddafi family, bombed to smithereens by NATO. For a leader, the house seemed small in comparison, say, to the former Clinton family home in Chappaqua or the Obama family home. It was a small whitewashed suburban type house in a typical residential area in metropolitan Tripoli. It was surrounded by dozens of other family homes.
I spoke with a neighbor who described how three separate smart bombs hit the home and exploded, another one not exploding. According to the BBC, the NATO military operations chief stated that a “command and control center” had been hit. That is a lie. As anyone who visits the home can see, this home had nothing to do with NATO's war. The strike against this home had everything to do with NATO adopting a policy of targeted assassination and extra-judicial killing–clearly illegal.
Natalie, the gems girl, says, “Prostitution and pimping—it’s never going to stop. Tricks—they should start from there. If no one’s buying girls, then the pimps can’t make money.” That, in fact, is exactly the theory behind the Sex Purchase Law in Sweden. As of 1999, johns are punished by up to six months’ imprisonment, traffickers are locked up for 2-to-10-year hits, and prostitutes are offered medical care, education, and housing. As a result, prostitution has been reduced by 50 percent in Sweden, and the purchase of sex, which is understood to be a human-rights abuse, has decreased by 75 percent. In contrast, Europol studies show, nations such as Holland and Australia, where prostitution has been legalized, have become lucrative, low-risk magnets for international sex-slave drivers and organized crime.
Robert M. Gates is one of those people the Beltway Consensus refers to as a “serious adult”: not overtly partisan, measured in his pronouncements, possessed of actual knowledge about the job he has been charged to do. The adulation he has received is certainly understandable if we grade on a curve; his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, established an Olympic record for petty vanity, nasty abrasiveness, and disastrous professional judgment. Such a collective sigh of relief greeted Rumsfeld's departure that his successor was bound to shine in comparison.
But what of Gates's record on his own merits? He is given to making such comments as, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” A normal person would infer that he is opposed to the types of military intervention that have contributed significantly to a near-bankruptcy of the country. Yet in practice he has taken concrete measures to protract the very problem he professes to deplore.
Centre for Research on Globalization, 29 April 2011
EXTRACT:
As Ellen Brown has pointed out, first Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for dollars, shortly before each country was attacked.
So…here's what I wrote. It's missing a handy chart where it depicts the average Wells employee's hourly salary vs. the CEO's salary, but you get the gist.
Full disclosure, I had been working here for a few months and this was to be my last week. I wouldn't recommend anyone else do this, but I gotta admit, it felt damn good and maybe someone will step up and do something about it.
Good Morning All,
Last week a friend of mine was fired for sending an inappropriate email to pretty much the whole building. Despite the fact that it was harmless, accidental, and largely ignored message, she will now join the ranks of the unemployed. If she is your average unemployed Oregonian she will remain unemployed for at least 18 months and when/if she gets rehired somewhere it will be for less money than she was making here.
Now my friend was definitely in the wrong, and I’m not writing this email to argue her situation. However, in an attempt to hold our company to a similar standard consider the following:
We work for one of the largest financial institutions in the world, we are essential to its operations, yet economic security is completely at the mercy of its senior executives. They are squeezing our salaries, reducing our benefits, and lobbying our politicians to make it harder for us to improve our financial positions despite our contributions to Wells Fargo’s successes. It means more profits for them, but less choice, less freedom and more importantly, less money for us.
In 2010, our CEO, John G. Stumpf received $18,973,722 in total compensation. By comparison, the median worker made $33,190 in 2010. John G. Stumpf made 571 times the median worker's pay.
Phi Beta Iota: We note with interest that this executive is only 220th on the Forbes executive pay rankings. We hold the corporations blameless in one sense: they get to do this because the US Government has lost its integrity and has not been in the business of the public for decades, Grover Cleveland may have been the last truly honest holistic President. What that says about the American public is for reflection. At the same time, we point to William Greider's book Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country in which he discusses the documentations on how the financial industry (Mr. Stumpf's industry) inflated by 17 times base value while the “real” asset-based economy inflated by five times. This means that Mr. Stumpf and his colleagues cheated the US and global customers by 12 times….and for this, the government bails them out and nobody goes to jail. See also Matt Taibbi's Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.
