China is now the largest trading nation on Earth, and is on track to be the dominant economy, a trend that holds profound implications for the U.S. Here is a report. Clearly the vampire capitalism that has come to dominate the U.S. is not performing for anyone but the 1%.
Another consequence of climate change. Increased illness due to mosquitoes and ticks will be occurring world wide. We really aren't thinking this through, and our failure to deal rationally with what is happening is going to make us sicker, on top of everything else.
Following from a former Agency officer who blogs on the Internet. For your convenience, in addition to the article, I include in PDF format the IG report on which the press report is based.
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5.) Management: Clearly management has been a problem and will continue to be one of the biggest problems the CIA will face for years to come. The CIA hemorrhages quality talent because management doesn’t know how to adequately manage, support and incentive employees. Los Angeles Times Ken Dilanian’s story explains these issues better than I can.
Dylan Matthews's “Five conservative reforms millennials should be fighting for” isn't just an admirably intricate piece of trolling. It's a perfect illustration of why you can't take Washington's policy debates at face value. You can't understand what's happened to Congress in recent years if you don't understand what Matthews did in that piece.
A bit of background. On Jan. 3, Jesse Myerson published an article in Rolling Stone with the innocuous title “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” Myerson frames his agenda as an effort to do away with unemployment, jobs, landlords, private capital ownership and Wall Street. Those last four, as you might expect, made conservatives' heads explode.
“If you’re a Millennial who loves bread lines, prison camps, forced famines, and abject human misery, then you’ll love the latest offering from Rolling Stone,” wrote the Federalist's Sean Davis.
But the policies Myerson advocates are rather less radical. His agenda, at its core, calls for a work guarantee, a basic minimum income, a land-value tax, a sovereign wealth fund and a public banking option. As Dylan Matthews noticed, all these policies that Republicans were labeling as socialism have been endorsed by major conservatives. So he rewrote Myerson's piece from the conservative point of view, advocating all the same policies but changing those cited as authorities and those blamed for the state of the economy.
All of a sudden, conservatives liked the article, and liberals — well, liberals didn't really like Dylan anymore. And they told him so in pretty offensive terms.
In an interview with the reactionary right-wing Fox News network, former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey said U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden «should be prosecuted for treason.
If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead». Woolsey, a staunch neo-conservative, was fired as CIA director by President Bill Clinton in 1995.
Clinton believed that Woolsey had not been aggressive enough in holding senior CIA officials accountable over the exposure of top CIA officer Aldrich Ames as a longtime agent for Soviet intelligence.
Wayne Madsen
Some CIA insiders believe that Woolsey thought that if the CIA engaged in a massive «mole hunt», other agents, particularly those loyal to Israel, a country with which Woolsey has a suspiciously close relationship, would be uncovered. Woolsey, of course, is the last person in the world whose opinion on Snowden’s fate should be given any credibility.
Gareth Porter and Robert Parry, two of our finest investigating reporter/historians deserve kudos for placing the self-serving nature of the Gates' memoir in a proper perspective.
Readers should bear in mind that the soap-opera-like gaming of Obama into acquiescing to the fatally flawed plan for a surge in Afghanistan surge in 2009, described accurately by Porter and Parry below, was clearly obvious well before Obama made his decision to cave into the pressure exerted by Gates, Clinton, and the Generals and their neo-con allies in Congress. To be sure, Obama was also feebly playing the game by leaking differences of opinion to the press — but his was an amateurish operation by an inexperienced malleable politician and his piss-ant staffers. Those on the other side were pros in manipulating the wholly owned subsidiaries in the press. Predictably, as explained below, the brass hats won in 2009, notwithstanding a well publicized last ditch effort to stop the madness executed by Ambassador (and former General) Karl Eikenberry.
