Posts
Sorry, friends, that I got behind in my essay publishing due to trying to scratch a few pennies together to maintain my already meager lifestyle.
Here's one I've been putting together for a few days.
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What most of the educated have to look forward to in the USA! USA! USA!
(H/t to WhoWhatWhy!)
Or not re-hired.
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Terrific history here:
"What We’d Done in Iraq Had Been Fairly Useless" – Ex-Reuters Bureau Chief in Iraq
Remember this wise guy?
I can only assume that no one likes a guy who's always right.
Especially when he's left.
It's a good thing that all the right "lefties" have been left out of the current war decisions (adding another reason for why he was so seriously targeted for defeat in the House - by both parties).
The Real Reason We Are Bombing Syria
By Dennis J. Kucinich, Reader Supported News
25 September 14
he administration's response to the conjunction of this weekend's People's Climate March and the International Day of Peace?
1) Bomb Syria the following day, to wrest control of the oil from ISIS which gained its foothold directly in the region through the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Jordan funding and arming ISIS' predecessors in Syria.
2) Send the president to UN General Assembly, where he will inevitably give a rousing speech about climate and peace, while the destruction of the environment and the shattering of world peace is on full display 5,000 miles away.
Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of the Obama administration's foreign policy than funding groups that turn on the U.S. again and again, a neo-con fueled cycle of profits for war makers and destruction of ever-shifting "enemies."
The fact can't be refuted: ISIS was born of Western intervention in Iraq and covert action in Syria.
This Frankenstein-like experiment of arming the alleged freedom-seeking Syrian opposition created the monster that roams the region. ISIS and the U.S. have a curious relationship -- mortal enemies that, at the same time, benefit from some of the same events:
a) Ousting former Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki for his refusal to consent to the continued presence of U.S. troops in his country.
b) Regime change in Syria.
c) Arming the Kurds so they can separate from Iraq, a preliminary move to partitioning Iraq.
What a coincidence for war-profiteering neo-cons and the war industry, which has seen its stock rise since last week's congressional vote to fund the rapid expansion of war. We have met the enemy and he isn't only ISIS, he is us.
Phase two of the war against Syria is the introduction of 5,000 "moderate" mercenaries (as opposed to immoderate ones), who were trained in Saudi Arabia, the hotbed of Wahhabism, at an initial installment cost of $15 billion. These new "moderates" will replace the old "moderates," who became ISIS, just in time for Halloween.
The administration, in the belief that you can buy, rent, or lease friends where they otherwise do not exist, labor under the vain assumption that our newfound comrades-in-arms will remain in place during their three-year employment period, ignoring the inevitability that those "friends" you hire today could be firing at you tomorrow.
One wonders if Saudi training of these moderate mercenaries will include methods of beheading which were popularized by the Saudi government long before their ISIS progeny took up the grisly practice.
The U.S. is being played.
Qatar and Saudi Arabia can now overtly join with the U.S. in striking Syria, after they have been covertly attempting for years to take down the last secular state in the region. We are now advancing the agenda of the actual Islamic States -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- to fight the ersatz Islamic State of ISIS.
Now U.S. bombs and missiles might inadvertently "make the world safe" for theocracy rather than democracy. Today we read reports that Israel has shot down a Syrian warplane, indicating the terrible possibility of a wider regional conflict.
What does this have to do with the security of the 50 States United? Nothing!
Last week Congress acted prematurely in funding a war without following the proscriptions of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. (The day of the vote, I urged Congress to resist this dangerous and misguided legislation.) But even while the funding was given, the explicit authorization to go to war was not. To authorize a war, Congress must vote for war. It has not done that yet.
To sell its case, the administration is borrowing from the fear mongering tactics of the Bush administration. ISIS poses no direct, immediate threat to the United States -- The White House even said so yesterday, just hours before bombing commenced - yet we are being sold make-believe about ISIS sleeper cells.
This attack on Syria, under the guise of striking ISIS, is by definition, a war of aggression. It is a violation of international law. It could lead to crimes against humanity and the deaths of untold numbers of innocent civilians. No amount of public relations or smooth talking can change that.
And yes, members of this Democratic administration, including the president who executed this policy, must be held accountable by the International Criminal Court and by the American people, who he serves.
But as we know, war is a powerful and cynical PR tactic. I expect the bombing of Syria will momentarily boost the White House's popularity with self-serving heroic accounts of damage inflicted upon ISIS (and the U.S. equipment they use). Stuffing the November ballot box with bombs and missiles may even help the Democratic Party retain the Senate.
But after the election the voters will discover that the president played into the hands of extremists, hurt civilians, and embroiled our country deep into another conflict in the Middle East.
There were alternatives. The U.S. and the international community could have contained and shrunk ISIS by cutting off its funds and its revenue from sale of oil on the black market. We could have looked to strike a deal with Syria and Iran.
In foreign policy, the administration has failed. Congress has failed. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties have passed the national checkbook to their patrons in the war contracting business. And passed the bill to future generations.
The American people, who in 2008 searched for something redemptive after years of George W. Bush's war, realize in 2014 that hope and change was but a clever slogan. It was used to gain power and to keep it through promoting fear, war, the growth of the National Security state, and an autumnal bonfire of countless billions of tax dollars which fall like leaves from money trees on the banks of the Potomac.
Comments:
+14 # 2014-09-25 15:39
The definition of a failed state appears to be one from which we have thus far failed to extract the natural resources. For me, the scales were lifted by Marine Gen. Smedley Butler, who described being hauled from one "failed" banana republic to another in his epic work War if a Racket (free on line). It passed almost unnoticed when just three days ago Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai bitterly described U.S. involvement as advancing corporate rather than democratic goals,( he was immediately denounced as an ingrate by Ambassador Cunningham )but this resource map of the country would seem to shed a new light on the subject: http://thenewslink.com/Afghanistan-Mineral-Map.html
+22 # 2014-09-25 18:42
As far as I know, Dennis has always told the truth. That may be why the Ohio Democrats would not help him. He deserves all of our support.
+2 # 2014-09-25 19:45
I think the real reason we're bombing Syria is ETs have a domicile there. Assad hasn't in any way given permission for this outrage.
ISIS/ISIL is >STAGED< CHAOS. https://public.isishq.com/public/clients/default.aspx . . . ISIS is an American Defense contractor with projects in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, their goals are threefold: 1) profiteering for war industries and 2) installation of martial law and 3) population reduction as per Globalism.
AlQaeda is an NSA database; so the whole scenario is phony as $3 bills.
Something else has to be doing on.
EEWC
+2 # 2014-09-25 20:11
If you can get used to the multi multi-billionai res in your society and not realise that eventually they will have the power to do exactly what they want,then you can easily get used to the abuse awaiting you.Destruction of the poor is IN their poverty.Let's see who can come up with an ACRONYM for wholesale slaughter and genocide.
It's always good to know that many people are aware of how the U.S. is led (over and over again) into war.
Against infidels.
Some 120 Muslim religious scholars this week published an open letter refuting the Islamic State’s claim to be a religious political movement, joining a series of high-profile condemnations of the extremist group by Islamic religious and political leaders.
The letter, signed by current and former grand muftis of Egypt, the former grand mufti of Bosnia, and the Nigerian Sultan of Sokoto, along with many other prominent Muslim leaders from around the world, offered a thorough, 24-point condemnation of the Islamic State’s behavior. But it still left the question of how a group that calls itself the “Islamic State” and uses religious scripture to justify its actions can possibly be described as not Islamic.
The answer is complex, but boils down to the fact that while the Islamic State is superficially and opportunistically Islamic, it owes at least as much to secular revolutionary ideologies as to its claimed religion, and borrows heavily from Western systems of organization and pop culture as well.
How ISIS Actually Works
In their “Open Letter to Baghdadi” the scholars – who hail from the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, Africa as well as North America – provide their own critical examination of the group’s practices from a purely theological standpoint.
According to their view, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is flagrantly un-Islamic in its behavior. ISIS’s treatment of women, religious minorities, non-combatants, as well as its employment of gratuitous violence and aggression, is found by the scholars to be fundamentally out of step with traditional Islamic belief and practice.
In providing a thorough critique of the group’s behavior, the signatories note: “everything said here … reflects the opinions of the overwhelming majority of Sunni scholars over the course of Islamic history.”
This letter is only the latest in a string of ISIS condemnations by Islamic leaders and ordinary Muslims. But to casual observers, it raises the question of what the Islamic State actually is, if not a religiously grounded group earnestly trying to create a new Caliphate.
The answer starts with the fact that ISIS is at least superficially Islamic. Similar to any other belief system, Islam is not a monolith, but rather a discourse subject to interpretation. ISIS was created during the U.S. occupation of Iraq and revived by the brutality of the Assad regime. Unsurprisingly, its religious worldview is a merciless, fanatic and supremacist one.
But while their religious convictions are no doubt sincerely held, like extremists everywhere ISIS inevitably has a utilitarian view of religion which seeks to manipulate the norms of the prevailing society in order to win legitimacy for its actions. In Muslim-majority countries this means employing religious rhetoric and symbolism to help appeal to the local population. Making use of cherished political symbols like the Flag of the Prophet Muhammad and the historic Muslim Caliphate is simply one aspect of this strategy.
The group doesn’t just draw on Islam to win support. Just as ISIS makes use of concepts drawn from Islamic history, it also seeks to employ aspects of Western civilization and pop culture to attract adherents. Video game trailers, sophisticated filmography and glossy financial statements are only the most superficial part of this effort.
The very idea which ISIS embodies – a ruthless revolutionary vanguard using extreme violence to bring about a utopian society – is one drawn directly from 20th century European radical movements like Marxism-Leninism. People like Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi who were the ideological founders of modern-day “radical Islam” were themselves hugely influenced by contemporary Western ideologies. Neither were religious scholars, but both ended up inspiring modern revolutionary movements which drew upon Islamic concepts.
ISIS’s Unlikely Antecedents
The behavior of radical groups such as ISIS therefore tends to have more in common with Mao’s Red Guards or the Khmer Rouge than it does with the Muslim empires of antiquity which they claim to be heirs to. In synthesizing aspects of both Western and Islamic civilization, the group has crafted a radical ideology which is distinctly modern despite its glorification of a pre-modern past. Recognizing this is the first step to negating the clash of civilizations narrative upon which they thrive.
In the eyes of most Muslims the Islamic State is as “Islamic” as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is “Democratic”. The Open Letter to Baghdadi is simply another example of the degree to which this violent, utopian project has been rejected by a broad consensus of Muslims around the world. From a Western perspective, it’s important to not play into ISIS’s hands by giving them the type of religious or political legitimacy they crave but otherwise do not possess.
At the end of the day Islam is what its adherents say it is, and if by and large they deem the “Islamic State” to be outside of the Islamic tradition it would be foolish and counterproductive to argue otherwise. In order to effectively fight this group, it’s important to amplify the voices of the vast majority of Muslims who are condemning them, instead of listening to those on both sides who insist that this is at heart a conflict between Islam and the West.
Lies the Media Repeats About Iraq: Phony Patriotism, Fake Syrian “Moderates” and the Very Real End of Empire
We have made a shocking mess in the Middle East. This new adventure sets America up for incredible decline.
Barack Obama applauds George W. Bush at the dedication ceremony for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, April 25, 2013. (Credit: Reuters/Jason Reed)
In history there are the Punic Wars and the Opium Wars, each a turning point, and now we must talk of our Iraq Wars. As of this week they count three since George Bush the Elder cynically drew Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait 23 years ago.
Some of us may struggle with speechlessness, but there are many things to say about President Obama’s decision to widen his Iraq War with his new bombing campaign in Syria. The most important extends far beyond the shocking mess Washington has done so much to make in the Middle East, and it is this: Our wars deliver us to our turning point. In the blindness of our leaders, we Americans are being set up for an era of tragic, unnecessary decline.
It starts to look angelic, to put this point another way, to suggest that America still has a chance to correct some of its costliest and most destructive errors in the 20th century as it proceeds into the 21st. One guards optimism as a precious gift, but I confess mine now flags.
There is so much wrong with Iraq War III it is hard to know where to begin. The purported strategy, the what of it, will get us going.
There is next to no chance that Washington will “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State, to take Obama’s noted words for the mission. There is next to every chance that, as in Afghanistan and during Iraq Wars I and II, the military presence will win ISIS support because they speak for the perfectly well-grounded anti-Western resentment that spreads wide and deep across the Middle East.
The thought that the American presence in the Islamic world produces diametrically the opposite of the announced intent — the greater the military success, the greater the long-term failure — is not new. Neither is the observation that the “moderate rebels” the White House and Congress will now fund in Syria simply do not exist.
Neither am I alone in noting that the “coalition” Obama claims to draw near is no different from the scanty cover Bush the Younger cited during Iraq War II except in one respect: It is more heavily dependent for its head count on the repressive monarchies that make brutality a Middle Eastern commonplace.
These things cannot be lost on Washington. It therefore becomes more difficult to accept the mission as stated and easier to understand why many Iranians, not all of them far-right Islamists, think the U.S. may have invented ISIS: Is the mission, after all, to reestablish a long-term presence in the region now that Iraq War II is over and the Afghanistan campaign is all but?
Patrick Smith is the author of Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. He was the "International Herald Tribune"’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote “Letter from Tokyo” for the "New Yorker." He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the "New York Times," the "Nation," the "Washington Quarterly," and other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @thefloutist.
More Patrick L. Smith.
Okasis
Too bad we have become such a Grandiose Nation. What appears to be neglect only means the CIA and their clones have a free hand to instigate the next Coup; Change of Government; Make the World Safe for Democracy; or whatever crass phrase they are using today for fomenting chaos. Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and most of Asia are like half broken horses.The carrot and whip wielded by the NGO handlers seems to be as effective as ever.
The Media is as complicit as the lackeys running our Government. As long as the PR, Propaganda, and Money continue to flow, the sheep will remain acquiescent. The lack of any idea how to bring about some common sense among the public, is the usual excuse for inaction..
Watch this space for the joys promised by Presidential-Wannabe Hilary. Perhaps she can figure out how to sodomize yet another 3rd World Leader on Nation-Wide TV. That is much more titillating that be-heading some poor Journalist!
Nicko Thime
It has always been about oil and the profits to be made concerning it.
Every tax dollar spent was wasted. Every single American life lost a murder by the servants of big oil.
Every civil liberty we watched infringed upon or just plain suspended, in the name of "freedom" no less, was stolen for that agenda.
There is plenty of fault to go around.
Ike, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, GHW,Clinton, GW, and Obama have all f**ked this up in one way or another.
But at the bottom of it all you will find the CIA, with much of it coming while Daddy Bush was either part of or in charge of that monstrosity.
Stupid Git
You mean Iraq War IV right? Clinton dropped bombs on them and his sanctions were reported to have been responsible for the death of 500,000 Iraqi children to which Madeline Albright infamously responded the cost of lives was "worth the price".
The Big Switch: Obama Preparing to Bomb His Way to Regime Change in Syria
by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford
“The strategic ‘rebel’ breakthrough is being prepared in the vulnerable southern underbelly of the country.”
The U.S. offensive against ISIS in Syria will very soon revert to its original mission: regime change in Damascus, the strategic objective that unites America’s Euro-Arab-Turkish-Israeli coalition.
Although U.S. military planners insist it will take eight months to a year to fully assemble and train a “moderate” Syrian rebel spearhead to confront government forces, political and military realities dictate that the Americans must move much more quickly to upset the balance of forces on the ground. Otherwise, the whole structure of western dominance in the region could unravel – catastrophically.
The contradiction at the heart of the western crisis in Syria, is the refusal of tens of thousands of jihadists to act as mere foot soldiers for the West and Arab monarchs. The jihadist genie is out of the bottle, and its conjurers and paymasters cannot put it back. The problem is not just Isis. The Islamic State has swelled through absorption of other Islamic fighters pursuing a similar theo-political logic, one that seeks its own version of “liberation” from western shackles and, increasingly, the overthrow of royal regimes allied with the United States.
ISIS has become engorged with defectors from other Islamist organizations more dependent on and obedient to proxy war planners in Riyadh, Doha, Ankara and Washington. Therefore, ISIS must be punished, to reduce its appeal to the jihadist rank and file, who make up the bulk of effective fighters arrayed against the Syrian state. For the same reasons, those jihadists not yet in ISIS’s orbit, who are the West’s only actually existing resources on ground, must be provided a redemptive victory, and quickly, before the whole edifice of proxy war disintegrates.
“The jihadist genie is out of the bottle, and its conjurers and paymasters cannot put it back.”
That’s why President Obama’s response has been to double-down on the military intervention begun more than three years ago, through direct U.S. firepower. Although U.S. bombing has concentrated in the north and west of Syria, where ISIS dominates, the strategic “rebel” breakthrough is being prepared in the vulnerable southern underbelly of the country, in the corridor along the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The Syrian capital of Damascus is just 40 miles away, guarded by two divisions that the Assad government would be hard pressed to reinforce.
The Israeli downing of a Syrian fighter on the Syrian side of the “border,” this week, was no doubt designed to prevent Assad’s air force from disrupting jihadist troop concentrations in the corridor, poised to make a thrust towards Damascus from the south. The Israelis provided the rebels with every accommodation, including medical care for their wounded, when the Islamists routed Syrian soldiers and captured or drove off United Nations peacekeepers, earlier this month The rebels now claim to have seized “80 percent of Quneitra province,” which runs to the outskirts of Damascus.
With the UN peacekeepers no longer watching, and Israel guarding the skies over the three-mile-wide, 40 mile-long corridor, the al-Qaida affiliated and Qatar-funded al-Nusra Front, the Saudi Arabia-financed Islamic Front and the U.S.-backed Syrian Revolutionaries Front are to storm the capital, confident that the U.S. will find a pretext to act as close air support, as it did for the jihadists in Libya.
The jihadists will not just sit there for six or eight months, while Washington trains 5,000 “moderates” with money not yet authorized by Congress. Indeed, if the Americans do not use their airpower to quickly clear the way for the “friendly” jihadists’ entrance to Damascus, the fighters will rapidly turn unfriendly and align even more openly with ISIS, with whom most rebels concluded a non-belligerency agreement, this month.
“The U.S. will find a pretext to act as close air support, as it did for the jihadists in Libya.”
The U.S. claims it struck at least one al-Nusrah unit in the north of the country on Tuesday, but we live in a Misinformation Nation, and no corporate reporter is going to get within snatching distance of “rebels” to verify who is actually being hit.
Washington is betting that, if it inflicts enough damage on ISIS, fighters will defect back to the more malleable jihadists, who will be handed victories over the Syrian government by U.S. airpower, reversing the momentum of battle and, maybe, causing the collapse of the regime – thus salvaging imperial policy in the Middle East.
Washington certainly does have plans to train thousands of Arab troops that it will pass off as Syrian “moderates” in the next eight to twelve months. But first, the U.S. knows that it must give the jihadists still under its control a reason not to join their soul mates in ISIS. American air power is inflicting punishment on the wayward Islamic State, and will soon deliver rewards to those who remain loyal to their handlers in the coalition-of-the-willing.
Craps is a quick game, and Obama has rolled the dice.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Good words for those of us in North Carolina bewailing our fate at the hands of the Koch-funded General Assembly confederates from my buddy, Tom Harper at Who Hijacked Our Country.
Monday, September 29, 2014
“Why Does the State of North Carolina Not Want People To Vote?”
That's the question asked by Judge James Wynn, who might be deciding whether or not to postpone North Carolina's voter suppression law until after the 2014 election.
A federal judge has already given the green light for North Carolina's voter suppression law (aka Jim Crow 2.0) to go into effect before the election. But now the case is being heard by a panel of three judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Hopefully they'll rule that North Carolina has to stay in the 21st century (or 20th anyway) until after the 2014 election.
And now back to the question posed by Judge James Wynn, one of the three judges on the panel: “Why does the state of North Carolina not want people to vote?”
Oh come on now, North Carolina does too want people to vote. Just, you know, [ahem] certain people; the right people. [wink]
From the pen of the superbly talented Dave Lindorff (of This Can't Be Happening!, the only news organization (so far) in the US to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security):
The Wretched Tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder
Going...going...almost gone, but let’s not forget him
Good riddance!
Eric Holder has announced that he is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.
A corporate lawyer with the A-list Washington and Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights, his overseeing. and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation’s police forces, his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them, threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face US treason charges), and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.
But Holder, who came into his position as the nation’s top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation’s biggest so-called "too-big-to-fail" banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the US but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.
Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street’s banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes; he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes -- civil cases that in almost all cases allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks’ stocks and hurt “innocent” shareholders!) Nor was this legal benevalence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions -- even billions -- of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive.
As the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) notes in its response to word that Holder is leaving as AG [1], his Justice Department generally even allowed the Banks that were fined to deduct those fines from their taxes as a business expense - something that ordinary citizens are not allowed to do by the IRS, and which Holder could have barred the banks from doing.
No surprise there. Among the clients of Holder's old law firm are both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. The firm also has since 2010 had a lobbying services contract with Xe Services, the murderous mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide whose bloody abuses in Iraq were so monstrous the company had to change its name (but not its methods) in order to keep obtaining mercenary services contracts from the US government.
It is being suggested that Holder may opt to go back to his old post as a partner at Covington & Burling, which would be the final, though hardly surprising, insult to the American people, providing a particularly galling example of Washington’s revolving door between government regulators and enforcers and the industries that they were supposed to be regulating or keeping honest.
God, how far we have fallen from the days when Ramsey Clark was attorney general, and left to become a leading critic of Washington’s imperial government at home and abroad!
AG Holder going after the To-Big-To-Fail banks (NOT)
At this point the Obama Administration is little more than a place holder until the next presidential election in 2016. President Obama, who campaigned as a fire-breathing liberal who would restore constitutional government, end the Bush/Cheney wars, re-open the government so that transparency instead of secrecy would be the default position, and take decisive action against climate change, has abandoned all those false promises.
The illegal and unconstitutional wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are now being expanded into Africa and Syria and, at least by proxy, but most dangerously, to Ukraine. Civil liberties are under attack at least as severely as they were back in the McCarthy period, with whistleblowers being jailed, with the president asserting the unfettered right to order the killing without trial of American citizens, and with a spying system in place run by the National Security Agency that is monitoring and storing, by its own admission, virtually all electronic communications of the American people.
The government is also as closed and secret in its operation as it has been since 1974, when it was broadened following the Watergate and Cointelpro scandals, and is certainly less transparent and open than it was even under Bush/Cheney. The Obama administration has also done little to nothing about tackling carbon emissions despite the president’s lies to the contrary in his address to the UN.
In all of this extraordinary list of treachery and cowardice, Holder has played his sycophantic role as a defender of corporate America, of white privilege, and of Washington power.
He has been both the John Ashcroft and the Alberto Gonzalez of the Obama administration.
(Actually, that comparison is unfair to John Ashcroft, who at least was a man of conviction -- repellent as some of those convictions may have been. In Holder’s case, we have a man not of principle, but who is simply a corporate lawyer, ready to do his clients’ bidding, however sordid and corrupt.)
Given the depths of unpopularity to which President Obama has sunk after six years of selling out his own electoral base and catering to the interests of the rich and powerful, the military establishment and neo-con right-wing of the Washington policy elite, it is safe to say that Holder’s replacement, still unknown, will be no better, though given Holder’s tenure it’s also hard to imagine his successor being much worse either.
So good riddance to Holder. But it will be worth while, and indeed important, to watch carefully this departing Obama official’s behavior back in the private sector, from under which rock he emerged to be attorney general six years ago.
More Secret Service Bungling By the Day
“President Obama has faced more than three times as many threats as his predecessors, according to people briefed on the Secret Service’s threat assessment.”
Click on the link above for the entire essay.
