In other words, someone has sold Obama on Pakistaning the Libyan War, i.e., pursuing a military strategy of relying on drone attacks to a destroy an adversary hiding in the environmental background. What is astonishing is that Obama took the cape, despite the fact that only 12 days earlier, a report in the Los Angeles Times by David Cloud illustrated once again the absurdity of Cartwright's and Gates' claims.
In what may be one of the finest five minute presentations by Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX-14), he summarizes how US sanctions are equivalent to a declaration of war, and goes on to review how we are spending one trillion dollars a year (that we borrow) to militarize the world, in the process driving everyone into the hands of the Chinese.
This does not appear to be a prepared speech–it appears to be statesmanlike common-sense. Phenomenal.
Scoop Independent News, Monday, 18 April 2011, 12:22 pm
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari
Kevin Barrett is a renowned American journalist, writer and former university lecturer. He has taught English, French, Arabic, American Civilization, Humanities, African Literature, Folklore, and Islam at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. Being a Muslim convert, Dr. Barrett is a founding member of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance (MUJCA) and member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11 (SPINE).
It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?
To me the moral of this story is that Washington has created a vast immoral hazard. We are all truly in a world of peril when regulators and law enforcers believe our financial institutions are too big to be brought to justice—and when our leadership in Washington is so gutless that its response is to let these same institutions emerge bigger and more beyond challenge than ever.
Tip of the Hat to Lynn Wheeler at LinkedIn for the clean links.
Phi Beta Iota: It is our view that the President, the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, and most Senators and Representatives are immediately impeachable for failing to uphold their oaths to the Constitution and failing to represent the public interest in the face of massive legalized fraud on the part of Wall Street.
What’s the difference between Barry Bonds and Goldman Sachs executives? The later was fortunate enough to be questioned by incompetent lawmakers while Bonds ended up in a courthouse with an actual jury and prosecutors.
. . . . . .
“The Goldman guys may have worse batting average than Barry Bonds but they were better educated by their lawyers about they should shouldn’t say. They also had the benefit of being questioned by incompetent people who had no idea about the financial nomenclature at the heart of their allegations,” Singer says.
It was worth a smile at breakfast that morning in February 2006, a scrap of social currency to take out into the world. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management guru, had grown famous offering competitive strategies to firms, regions, whole nations. Earlier he had taken on the problems of inner cities, health care and climate change. Now he was about to tackle perhaps the hardest problem of all (that is, after the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).
He had become adviser to Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.
Phi Beta Iota: Harvard is now the poster child for all that is wrong with education–no intelligence, no ethics, and grotesquely expensive. Yale can now claim the mantle in the East.
Note: Truthdig server overwhelmed. This is the Common Dreams reprint.
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
