1. “Dispatch the War Department
However small or large a government you consider ideal, whether you’re left, right or center, you probably agree that the military is indispensable and legitimate. You may quibble about its size and purpose (defensive versus policing the world), but almost no one wonders whether we need an army.
It’s time we did.
Questioning the military’s necessity puts us in good company, specifically that of the Founders. Many of them vehemently opposed a “standing” army (i.e. one that is professionally, permanently established and remains intact rather than disbanding after beating off an attack. That definition encompasses cops as well: the Founders would never have drawn the artificial distinction we do between a force that fights overseas and one that wars on its own citizens.
…
Government is inherently incompetent, as it obligingly demonstrates every day in everything it does. Whether we’re talking graduates of its schools who can’t read, write, or reason; letters its Post Office takes days to deliver to the next block; or its Ponzi Scheme for retirees’ pensions that keep both the retirees and the scheme on the verge of bankruptcy, government fails everywhere, all the time. Why, then, would we entrust to it a life-and-death matter like defense? Why would we expect it to handle that any more competently than it does its security checkpoints at airports?
…
Militias, i.e., armed citizens, don’t go adventuring. They don’t fight phantoms either, no matter how many “wars” politicians declare on drugs or terror. Instead, they defend their homes and neighborhoods from attack — genuine, physical assault — then return to earning a living.
And that is precisely why politicians and their court historians dislike and disparage armed civilians: militias don’t attract bribes—sorry, campaign contributions from corporations hoping to secure billion-dollar contracts, nor can presidents send the militia overseas to distract us from their adultery or on a vendetta against a dictator Daddy didn’t like. The very few wars militias must fight are always defensive.
I hear the army’s partisans scoffing, “It’s a hostile world out there. Militia only? You’re nuts! It’d never work!”
As if the current arrangement does. “
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/opinion/becky-akers/3484-dispatch-the-war-department
2. Wretched:
“David Petraeus for president? He keeps speculation alive.”
3. “War epics on screen skip mass slaughter of civilians
In what may be added irony, the widely reported premier of “The Pacific” came but four days after the little noticed anniversary of one of the darkest events in American war history — the March 10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo. The two-volume World War II history “Total War,” by Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard, describes the massive napalm attack on Japan’s capital as not only “the greatest air offensive in history” but also “deliberate, indiscriminate mass murder.”
The raid by B-29 bombers probably ranks as history’s largest mass killing of civilians in a short time span. The estimated death toll of 100,000 exceeded the immediate deaths in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or the Dresden firebombing.
…
In the 2003 documentary “Fog of War” Robert McNamara, who served in World War II under the architect of the bombing campaign, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, quoted LeMay’s postwar assessment: “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
McNamara, who later became U.S. Secretary of Defense, added, “I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”
…
In 1945, U.S. Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers described the U.S. air raids over Japanese cities as “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of noncombatants in all history.”
The U.S. — and especially Hollywood’s shapers of national memory — have a special responsibility also to make amends for past omissions and tell the full truth about the past. A more forthright confrontation by Americans with their own war crimes would not only provide a model for other nations with dark pasts but also undermine the ability of America’s present enemies to win recruits for committing similar crimes against the U.S. and its allies.”
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20100507a1.html
4. “
Americans contrived various myths to endow their actions with a convenient moral gloss. The land they claimed was “empty.” Its settlement by true-blue (that is, white Protestant) Americans necessarily advanced the overarching cause of liberty, thereby fulfilling God’s purposes. Any unfortunates found to inhabit this empty land, thus interfering with those purposes, were deemed disposable. So too with regard to those recruited from abroad to exploit the riches of the land. Whites viewed immigrants, especially Asians and Hispanics, as inferior, unworthy and expendable.
These myths provided cover for expansion-minded Americans to do whatever they felt necessary to take whatever it was they happened to covet—always with a clear conscience. A favored technique was to infiltrate new territories under the guise of saving souls or making a few bucks and then to organize a putsch, declare a republic and immediately petition Washington for protection or, preferably, annexation. This approach worked brilliantly in raising the Stars and Stripes above Texas, California and Hawaii, and in carving out the canal zone in Panama.
Then there was Washington’s distinctive way of going to war, still much in evidence in our own day: “behold, an unprovoked attack.” Employed by James K. Polk to create a pretext for dismembering Mexico, by William McKinley to address problems in Cuba and the Philippines, and by any number of other presidents to deal with obstreperous Native Americans, this tactic could be counted on to rouse “a howling throng of outraged congressmen, newspaper pundits, and other demagogues” all demanding that innocent blood be avenged and justice brought to evildoers. In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration resurrected this tradition to justify its misguided global war on terror.”
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=23226
5. “Feds still Granting Environmental Waivers to Big Oil in Gulf after Spill
Since the BP oil leak began on April 20, the Federal government has granted 22 waivers to oil companies allowing them to avoid doing environmental impact studies on their further drilling plans in the Mexican Gulf.
The Department of the Interior’s “Minerals Management Service” has a history of ignoring environmental law. In Congress you have the phenomenon of “legislative capture,” where the corporations get to write the legislation affecting them because they give money to the legislators’ campaigns. But there is also such a thing as “administrative capture,” which is more indirect but has a similar set of motives. Sometimes government regulators actually come out of the corporations they oversee. Or government employees leave the government for lucrative corporate employment and keep their old circle of friends inside. The military-industrial complex and Pentagon contracting depend heavily on such networks.
http://www.juancole.com/
Palast also shows that BP could have easily contained the Gulf oil spill, but was too cheap to do so:
Where was BP’s containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?
Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP’s costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.
According to Greenpeace, BP is just letting the oil break up so that the spill doesn’t look as bad, instead of working to clean it up.
Due to it’s cutting corners, BP has caused many other disasters as well (and see this).
But like the Wall Street giants, BP uses its political muscle to escape regulation. And it looks like nothing is changing.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/05/bp-could-have-easily-contained-gulf-oil.html
On Tuesday, I wrote:
The Fed argues that an audit would interfere with its monetary policy decisions. [But] decisions about what toxic assets should be accepted by the Fed as collateral, how such assets should be valued, and who bailout funds should be given to are wholly separate from the Fed’s core monetary policy decision: raising or lowering interest rates.
[F]unneling hundreds of billions to foreign nations and foreign banks, accepting worthless junk from the too big to fails and marking it at unrealistic valuations, and doing the other things which the Fed has been doing recently are not core monetary functions. Congress never authorized these actions when they passed the Federal Reserve Act.
Therefore, the Fed’s actions must be made transparent and subject to the light of day.
Eliot Spitzer wrote an important essay yesterday explaining that what the Fed is really doing is controlling our country’s fiscal – as well as monetary – policy:
The Fed over the course of this crisis has demonstrated that its influence goes far beyond the issue of monetary policy.
In monetary policy—controlling the supply of money—the Fed is constrained by reasonably well-understood policy levers that have a macro impact, and its decisions are rather evident in short order. Now, in contrast, the Fed is engaging in fiscal policy—spending money—and in fact has become the single largest fiscal actor in the U.S. economy, dispensing hundreds of billions of dollars to private parties. In doing so, the Fed is picking winners and losers. Why Goldman but not Lehman? Why guarantee the debt of some companies but not others?
The Fed has enormous discretion in its decisions. It is entirely appropriate to demand that they be carried out with greater transparency and be subject to greater oversight.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/05/fed-is-only-authorized-to-conduct.html
8. “The latest on Elena Kagan
Perhaps most revealing of all: a new article in The Daily Caller reports on growing criticisms of Kagan among “liberal legal scholars and experts” (with a focus on the work I’ve been doing), and it quotes the progressive legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as follows: ”The reality is that Democrats, including liberals, will accept and push whomever Obama picks.” Yesterday on Twitter, Matt Yglesias supplied the rationale for this mentality: ”Argument will be simple: Clinton & Obama like and trust [Kagan], and most liberals (myself included) like and trust Clinton & Obama.”
Just think about what that means. If the choice is Kagan, you’ll have huge numbers of Democrats and progressives running around saying, in essence: ”I have no idea what Kagan thinks or believes about virtually anything, and it’s quite possible she’ll move the Court to the Right, but I support her nomination and think Obama made a great choice.” In other words, according to Chemerinksy and Yglesias, progressives will view Obama’s choice as a good one by virtue of the fact that it’s Obama choice. Isn’t that a pure embodiment of mindless tribalism and authoritarianism? Democrats love to mock the Right for their propensity to engage in party-line, close-minded adherence to their Leaders, but compare what conservatives did with Bush’s selection of Harriet Miers to what progressives are almost certain to do with Obama’s selection of someone who is, at best, an absolute blank slate. “
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/08/kagan/index.html
9. “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25399.htm
