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Maybe attacking Iran will take these demonstrators' minds off of the NATO Summit in Chicago?
We'll see.
From Puppetgov.com by way of Washington's blog.
Police, Demonstrators Clash at NATO Summit in Chicago
A demonstrator gestures during an anti-NATO protest march in Chicago May 20, 2012. (Reuters/Eric Thayer)
Next Up: Attacking Iran
. . . the criminals in Washington, who control our lives, no longer care about any of their previous propaganda. They now want to attack another country on totally false pretenses, as does the extreme right-wing Israeli government, the cancer of the Middle East.
Some of the Israeli military brass and much of the Israeli security/intelligence brass oppose an attack on Iran as an act of insanity. Yet, little, if any of the Israeli opposition to war has been reported in the US presstitute media. In order to negate internal opposition, the Israeli prime minister has formed a unity government with the main opposition party, as AIPAC stampedes the US Congress into voting for war with Iran ( ref).
If the unaware American population can be programmed to believe that Iran is the 9/11 culprit, then Washington can initiate yet another war that enriches the military/security complex with money and power.
And all the lies necessary to continue the war games.
Ole Brother Midas lookin hungry today_ _ _ _ _ _ _
What he can't buy he'll get some other way
Send in the troopers if the Natives resist
Same old story, boys; that's how ya do it , boys
Look at these people Lord they're on a roll
Got to have it all; gotta have complete control
Want all the resources and all of the land
They break the law over it; blow things up for it
So, did you hear the one about the pardoned (so to say, due to lack of compelling evidence) and let go Lockerbie bomber dying of cancer? They don't call them the lamestream, er, mainstream media (MSM) for nothing. Who really engineered the Lockerbie bombing? More clever cave dwellers? Does anyone remember the facts now? At least one courageous reporter does.
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And speaking of another brave reporter eager to spread the news about the Wall Street takeover of the Congress and Presidency . . .
The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rule-making process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed.You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "It's like a scorched-earth policy," says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. "It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends."Rolling Stone
It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House.
Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history."President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress in 2010. (Rod Lamkey Jr/AFP/Getty Images)This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.Most importantly, even if any of that fiendish crap ever did happen again, Dodd-Frank guaranteed we wouldn't be expected to pay for it. "The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes," Obama promised. "There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period."Two years later, Dodd-Frank is groaning on its deathbed. The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway's Old Man – no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore. In a furious below-the-radar effort at gutting the law – roundly despised by Washington's Wall Street paymasters – a troop of water-carrying Eric Cantor Republicans are speeding nine separate bills through the House, all designed to roll back the few genuinely toothy portions left in Dodd-Frank.With the Quislingian covert assistance of Democrats, both in Congress and in the White House, those bills could pass through the House and the Senate with little or no debate, with simple floor votes – by a process usually reserved for things like the renaming of post offices or a nonbinding resolution celebrating Amelia Earhart's birthday.The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rule-making process.Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "It's like a scorched-earth policy," says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. "It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends."That the banks have just about succeeded in strangling Dodd-Frank is probably not news to most Americans – it's how they succeeded that's the scary part. The banks followed a five-point strategy that offers a dependable blueprint for defeating any regulation – and for guaranteeing that when it comes to the economy, might will always equal right.STEP 1: STRANGLE IT IN THE WOMBThe first advantage the banks had lay in the fact that for all Obama's bluster, Dodd-Frank was never such a badass law to begin with. In fact, Obama's initial response to the devastating financial events of 2008 represented a major departure from the historical precedent his own party had set during the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched an audacious rewrite of the rules governing the American economy following the Great Crash of 1929.
Upon entering office, FDR was in exactly the same position Obama found himself in after his inauguration in 2009. Then, as now, the American economy was in tatters after the bursting of a massive financial bubble, brought on when speculators borrowed huge sums and gambled on unregistered securities in largely unregulated exchanges. This mania for instant riches led to an explosion of Wall Street fraud and manipulation, creating a mountain of illusory growth divorced from the real-world economy: Of the $50 billion in securities sold in America in the 1920s, half turned out to be worthless.Roosevelt's response to all of this was to pass a number of sweeping new laws that focused on a single theme: protecting consumers by forcing the business of Wall Street into the light. The Securities Act of 1933 required all publicly traded companies to register themselves and offer prospectuses to investors; the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 forced publicly traded companies to make regular financial disclosures; and the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 required all commodities and futures to be traded on organized exchanges.FDR also created the FDIC to protect bank depositors (through an insurance fund paid for by the banks themselves) and passed the Glass-Steagall Act to separate insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks. Post-New Deal, if you put money in a bank, you knew it was safe, and if you bought stock, you knew what you were buying.This reform strategy worked for more than half a century – and it offered Obama a clear outline of how to respond to the crash he faced. What made 2008 possible was that Wall Street had moved its speculative frenzy away from the regulated exchange system created by FDR, and into darker, less-regulated markets that had coalesced around brand-new financial innovations like credit default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations. It wasn't that the old system had broken down; Wall Street had just moved the playground.All Obama needed to do to rescue the economy and protect consumers was to make sure that the new playground had some rules. That meant moving swaps and other derivatives onto open exchanges, making sure that federally insured banks that dabbled in those dangerous markets retained more capital, and coming up with some kind of plan to prevent the next AIG or Lehman Brothers disaster – i.e., a plan for unwinding failing companies that wouldn't require federal bailouts.
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Hankering for one more write-off of Tommy Friedman's delusions? After seeing him go down on Jeopardy the other night as he struggled to get even a few answers right (and finishing third, having lost most of his money on the final question, of the three reporters on the show), I don't know how much more proof of his exceptionalism (and obvious schizophrenia) we can stand.
Belén Fernández
Tom Friedman’s War on Humanity
Friedman has done a superb job of delegitimizing himself as a journalist by peddling an array of schizophrenic postulates against a solid backdrop of warmongering apologetics on behalf of empire and capital. It says much about the dismal state of contemporary journalism that his unabashed advocacy for collective punishment, both military and economic, has facilitated rather than jeopardized his prominent perch at the US newspaper of record, his elevation to the rank of Top Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine, and his occasional service as dispenser of personal advice to Barack Obama.
Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, once offered the following insight into his modus operandi: “I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself.”
Some might see this as an unsurprising revelation in light of Edward Said’s appraisal: “It’s as if … what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.”How about one more bit of life affirmation from the new Jacobins?
According to Friedman, the purpose of the auto-interviews is merely to analyze his feelings on certain issues. Given that his feelings tend to undergo drastic inter- and sometimes intra-columnar modifications, one potentially convenient byproduct of such an approach to journalism is the impression that Friedman interviews many more people than he actually does.
For example, while one of Friedman’s alter-egos considered blasphemous the “Saddamist” notion that the Iraq war had anything to do with oil, another was of the opinion that the war was “partly about oil,” and another appeared to be under the impression that it was entirely about oil, assigning the blame for U.S. troop deaths in Fallujah to Hummer proprietors. Despite Friedman’s identification as “a liberal on every issue other than this war,” competing layers of his persona defined said conflict as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” as well as part of a “neocon strategy.”
Other novel interviewing techniques employed by Friedman have meanwhile resulted in anthropological discoveries such as that “[t]he people of Sri Lanka” understand that it is “stupid” to oppose US-directed corporate globalization, which our columnist learns by chatting with the owner of a Victoria’s Secret factory in the village of Pannala in 1999. Friedman testifies that, “in terms of conditions, I would let my own daughters work in” the factory—an offer that is not revisited in 2012 when Friedman produces a glowing report on an Apple factory in China.
The gist of the report is that, because the factory reached a daily output level of over 10,000 iPhones simply by rousing 8,000 workers from their dormitories in the middle of the night and administering them each a biscuit and cup of tea, Americans must understand that “average is officially over.” Friedman’s exuberance at the above-average abilities of the Chinese factory workers is occasioned by a “terrific article in The Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China.”
The fact that the same Duhigg produces another co-authored article four days after the terrific one—in which other aspects of Apple factory life in China are discussed, such as explosions, exposure to poisonous chemicals, and worker internment in overcrowded dormitories surrounded by safety netting to impede suicides—raises questions about what sub-average American laborers will have to do to woo jobs back to the U.S.
This is not to imply that none of Friedman’s personalities harbors any potential sympathy for the concept of workers’ rights. In a 2001 column, for example, he acknowledges that “human beings simply are not designed to be like computer servers. For one thing, they are designed to sleep eight hours a night.” (In the same column, his own above-average qualifications in fields like journalism, technology, and logic are cast into doubt with his reasoning: “I still can’t program my VCR; how am I going to program my toaster?”)
In The World Is Flat, a 660-page treatise on globalization written under the supervision of corporate CEOs, Friedman meanwhile manages a rare favorable citation of someone whose weltanschauung exists in fundamental opposition to his own. Despite such personal convictions as that “[t]he most important thing [Ronald] Reagan did was break the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, which helped break the hold of organized labor over the U.S. economy,” that “the easier it is to fire people, the more willing companies are to hire people,” and—more recently—that “we are entering an era where to be a leader will mean, on balance, to take things away from people,” Friedman writes approvingly:
In her 2004 book, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart, journalist Liza Featherstone followed the huge women’s discrimination suit against Wal-Mart. In an interview about the book with Salon.com (November 22, 2004), she made the following important point: ‘American taxpayers chip in to pay for many full-time Wal-Mart employees because they usually require incremental health insurance, public housing, food stamps — there are so many ways in which Wal-Mart employees are not able to be self-sufficient. This is very ironic, because Sam Walton is embraced as the American symbol of self-sufficiency… If anything, Wal-Mart should be crusading for national health insurance. They should at least be acknowledging that because they are unable to provide these things for their employees, we should have a more general welfare state.’Of course, Friedman’s second-hand ode to workers’ and citizens’ rights occurs approximately 100 pages after his enraptured discussion of “‘the Wal-Mart Symphony’ in multiple movements—with no finale,” which is how he characterizes the company’s perfected cycle of “delivery, sorting, packing, distribution, buying, manufacturing, reordering, delivery, sorting, packing…”
Wal-Mart is furthermore honored in the book as “one of the ten forces that flattened the world,” an honor that appears even more out of place when Friedman pleads that isolation and insularity are in fact the cause of flagrant workers’ rights violations on the part of the world-flattening symbol of global integration:
“It is hard to exaggerate how isolated Bentonville, Arkansas [the location of Wal-Mart HQ], is from the currents of global debate on labor and human rights, and it is easy to see how this insular company, obsessed with lowering prices, could have gone over the edge in some of its practices.”
One example Friedman provides of a possible over-the-edge Wal-Mart practice is that “of locking overnight workers into its stores.” Given his recent elation with regard to midnight practices at the Apple factory in China, however—especially when juxtaposed with his assessment in The World Is Flat according to which “Wal-Mart is the China of companies”—it seems that the Arkansas-based behemoth may have instead been demonstrating a commitment to cutting-edge labor policies.
I meanwhile had the fortune to meet Liza Featherstone in person a few weeks ago and thus did not have to rely on an interview with myself to determine how she felt about her cameo in Friedman’s magnum opus. According to Featherstone, the disproportionate reader response she received after appearing in one paragraph of the tome was a rude awakening as to the extent of Friedman’s reach.
As for other beneficiaries of the Friedmanian reach aside from laborers cavorting to the tune of the Wal-Mart Symphony, these include Afghan civilians who, in exchange for being slaughtered by U.S. weaponry, earn immortalization inside quotation marks on the pages of the New York Times in 2001:
“Think of all the nonsense written in the press—particularly the European and Arab media—about the concern for ‘civilian casualties’ in Afghanistan. It turns out many of those Afghan ‘civilians’ were praying for another dose of B-52’s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not.”
Friedman does not divulge the source of his insights into Afghan prayers, though the tried and true auto-interview is certainly a possibility. Friedman’s foray into Umm Qasr, Iraq, a month after the 2003 invasion meanwhile turns up further evidence of the inadvisability of seeking indigenous opinions on relevant issues: “It would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they felt about politics. They are in a pre-political, primordial state of nature.”
The following month, Friedman appeared on public television, and—despite having recently debunked the notion of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden—proceeded to outline the “real reason” for returning Iraq to the primordial era: Iraqi citizens needed to “Suck. On. This” as punishment for 9/11.
Other popular Friedmanian fatwas issued over the years have ranged from the determination that Palestinians are “gripped by a collective madness” to the idea that Israel’s mass bombing of Lebanese civilians in 2006 “was not pretty, but it was logical” to the notion that Iraqis do not “deserve such good people [i.e. the U.S. military, i.e. the administrators of the ‘Suck. On. This’ directive] if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”
Friedman’s predilection for delivering haughty apocalyptic lectures to the over 1.5 billion Muslims in the world who are not suicide bombers leads to the coinage of such proverbs as: “A civilization that does not delegitimize suicide bombing against any innocent civilian is itself committing suicide.” It is not explained why the—historically more lethal—U.S. tradition of non-suicidal bombing of innocent civilians poses no civilizational risks, or why an American columnist who regularly encourages the killing of Muslims is not thrown into the same category as Muslims who kill other Muslims: “completely disconnected from humanity.”
Friedman has done a superb job of delegitimizing himself as a journalist by peddling an array of schizophrenic postulates against a solid backdrop of warmongering apologetics on behalf of empire and capital. It says much about the dismal state of contemporary journalism that his unabashed advocacy for collective punishment, both military and economic, has facilitated rather than jeopardized his prominent perch at the U.S. newspaper of record, his elevation to the rank of Top Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine, and his occasional service as dispenser of personal advice to Barack Obama.
It is unlikely that Friedman will ever begin a column by interviewing himself about why his expressions of human empathy are reserved for events such as mealtime in the dining hall at the US military base in Kirkuk and the adoption of “proglobalization” strategies by China, India, and Ireland—which, we are told in The World Is Flat, prompts him to “get a little lump in my throat.”
We might thus take the liberty of casting Friedman in the role of “supply chain” in the following scenario, which he offers in response to Featherstone’s critique of Wal-Mart but which is just as applicable to a discussion of the corporate media symphony starring the New York Times: “[W]hen you totally flatten your supply chain, you also take a certain element of humanity out of life.”
Mike Konczal
Against Law, For Order
To see how mass incarceration has reworked our expectations about governance, we need to understand the relationship of policing to the two major political ideologies of the past thirty years and the governance project that came out of it. How did a neoconservative movement that describes itself as being for limited government and liberty become the engine behind a prison state more expansive than that of Russia or Rwanda? And how does the government of the neoliberal imagination, which, by definition, fails at everything it attempts, expand its activities in the one area – imprisonment and the use of force – that has such a high risk of abuse?If you can choke out the adjective "life-affirming."
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