Great ideas. They sound very much like the ones Newt Gingrich has for dismantling what little is left of a Solonic independent judiciary in the US. Maybe you have read this stuff, which is very much in the wind:
Who will make these momentous decisions about who will sit atop the belief structure, that "rule of law" thing, that cherished chimaerical shibboleth that is one of the few remaining myths that holds our polity together, that keeps us all from going altogether Galt? People need and want some assurance that they are protected against arbitrary power, whether it's Banksters forking the whole economy or doing a Henry "It's A Wonderful Life" Potter and stealing their homes, or "libruls" letting pot-smoking unfortunates out of overcrowded jails to make room for really bad apples.
Consider how it works in Chicago, where the judges are "elected," with periodic "retention ballots" that have removed a tiny number of sitting judges over the years, usually in orchestrated "hits" by the Machine and media, but the jurists are actually appointed by and responsive to the Machine. With advice and comment of the Bar Association, of course, which is such a representative body, isn't it?
That crony corrupt process goes up to the federal level in the 7th Circuit. Look at who appointed the vast majority of the sitting and recent judges -- Reagan, Nixon, the Bush League, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Seventh_Circuit That these people rule in favor of property over persons most of the time seems pretty clear. I was involved in cases (decades ago now) where the political motivations and rulings were disgustingly clear. The state court judges in Chicago got a little corrective from "Operation Greylord " back in the '80s, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greylord, but you can bet it has long since been back to biness as usual there. The courts have been packed with "conservatives," because those folks are organized and have strong pecuniary interests and are wonky enough to figure out how to game the system consistently in their favor.
I don't think there is any easy answer to the problems that were so glaringly apparent to the drafters of the Constitution, looking over at England in its then state. How do you ensure that humans put in positions of great power will "apply the law," particularly common law, and "Constitutional law," that grows and supposedly perfects itself by judge-made extensions, limitations and creations of legal principles and rules? And apply it to the general benefit, instead of protecting power and privilege?
Appointing or electing judges will both still result in a lot of fiscally and socially corrupt judges, whatever your politics say those terms mean. I will insist that putting some super-vetting conclave together to root out "impropriety" and ensure "orthodoxy" in the judiciary will immediately result in capture by the concentrated clout, wealth and efforts of the worst of us. It's what Gingrich and Netanyahu want, to protect their "interests?" No thanks.
Gotta respond to this remark: " There is a case wherein NSA surveillance of private communication is always warranted and should be used."
Be very careful what you wish for.
It's hard to find a non-corrupt agency, entity, individual anywhere in government, a certain amount of that being apparently inevitable, but it sure seems to me the NSA is NOT the entity you want to encourage to examine the federal judiciary. Hoover did it to enhance his power, and the NSA is his heir. The FBI can and could address outrages by the "judges" so carefully packed into the court system by decades of well-planned work by the "wrong-wingers," abetted by our pusillanimous and also largely corrupt Democrats. As an EPA enforcement attorney, I got to see a little of the workings of the US Attorney system, the Department of Justice and a number of federal judges and appellate panels. There's both the old-fashioned kind of bribery-type corruption, and the "social corruption" you refer to.
One example: the US Attorney's office in an Ohio city went after a particularly corrupt chief judge. The FBI investigated, but because the prosecution was kind of half-hearted, the judge was able to hide behind the Black Robe Curtain and his "Constitutional" protection of that Article III language about "good behavior," a pretty amorphous standard, albeit with some subsequent judicial gloss. "If you shoot at the king, be sure to kill him," and since they failed, the judge booted the US Attorney's offices out of the courthouse to a run-down office building about 5 blocks away (in freezing weather, rain and wind, a nasty and lasting vengeance).
Would you really trust the NSA, with its perks and power to protect and grow, to be gathering "intel" on even our most dishonest and corrupt judges? Not that they aren't already, along with the rest of us...
Serious Players say "we need to keep sending weapons and money to the corrupt military of Egypt so we can maintain leverage and wink-wink nudge them toward democracy, and continue our other policies in the ME. And besides, Israel told us to. And after all, it all comes back to US firms who provide jobs and don't pay taxes." Not so long ago, one of our pundits insisted that Obama was cutting off aid to Egypt; that proved to be wrong of course.
That presumes the NeoCons will take a lesson from anything, or have any interest in doing other than what they continue to do. One wonders what the geniuses who make up the NeoCon cognoscenti will be up to in coming months...
The random-idiot violence mostly kills and maims ordinary people and sometimes "the troops," not the kleptocrats with the chests full of self-awarded ribbons and their hands in everyone else's pockets...
Does political diversity equate to the chance that there can be an electoral change of government, and/or redistribution of what the military-"capitalists" have accumulated?
I wonder if "the US" is wise and non-suicidal enough not to take any military "response" or launch overt or covert attacks that might lead to the kind of outcome that occurred in the last big War Game to simulate how our clumsy, massive, un-agile, doctrine-ridden military structure "manages conflict." http://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/01/14/millennium-challenge/ By the same author, here's another speculation on why our enormous and grotesque and massively expensive war machine, with its crappy Return on Investment by "wars won" or "national interests served," should not be turned loose again (barring a major and unlikely doctrinal change and a whole new way of operating) half way around the planet or even closer to home:
As I recall, the Joint Chiefs did not think attacking the Assad thing by blowing up random stuff in Damascus was a wise move, or likely to conserve their huge war machine.
I don't know about you folks, but language like this gives me the old "duck and cover" willies:
The world’s richest, most powerful nation remains locked in fear about tiny numbers of insurgents fighting in the poorest regions of the world. We spend on our military many times the sum of all likely enemy nations combined. We spend on counter-terrorism a fantastic multiple (probably thousands) more than spent by every terrorist group on the planet. Something is wrong with this picture.
This madness suggests the time has come for change. The wheel of history has rolled to a new era in which the US can and should return to its non-interventionist roots, a defensive strategy.
1. We can help allies with money, aid, advice, and other forms of support. Strong governments almost always defeat insurgents (see section 6 below).
2. We can promise State attackers that they will receive devastating retaliatory strikes. Game theory suggests that “tit for tat” is one of the most effective tactics. Assured Destruction, extended over the full range of war, nuclear to conventional, probably will prove to be the winning tactic in the 21st century (as it was in the 20th after WW2).
3. Terrorists without clear State sponsorship — such as the fearsome anarchists, the less effective but still deadly leftists groups of the 1960s and 1970s, and today’s jihadists — provide few targets for retaliation, but can be dealt with by police and security agencies. As all of these groups learned to their sorrow (including the real al Qaeda, not the nationalist insurgencies using that brand name).
Not what I said, of course. My remark was directed to the claim that what happened was, in your words, a "Russian/Syrian capitulation on chemical weapons." As I recall, you were all ready to start throwing Tomahawks at "Syria" not so long ago to avenge the breach, by you were just sure it was Assad, of that universal prohibition on chemical weapons use that the US has actually been pretty invested and involved in at various recent points (e.g., Iraq vs. Iran), and then worked hard to frame it that Obama was actually so smart that his posturing and near-WAR caused the current state of affairs. Are you acknowledging you are inside the Administration, or claiming that you can read the minds of "everybody" inside and out?
Waiting for the responsive and indirect spin, and your next condescending, belittling and occasionally subtle ad hominem...
Many people, outside the Administration of course, have a different view of the pitch that Obama planned the current outcome of the bombing-to-validate-the-universal-horror-of-chemical-warfare operation that so very nearly got triggered, something other than a "Russian/Syrian capitulation on chemical weapons"/Great Victory for Our President:
Glad to know the Administration continues "support" for the "FSA faction of the rebellion." I'm sure that is helping reach Peace In Our Time. Like putting "support" into THIS mix:
Any examples, (maybe the Tamil situation? WW II is a case sui generis), where one side was able to impose its will on the battlefield and make it stick in a way that leads to long-term stability and governance by comity instead of force? Working examples of the suggested approach might be persuasive. All depends, of course, on what all the players in the infinitely complicated Game have in mind as the end point of the round. The Syrian conflict seems to me no more stalemated than the Western Front in 1917. It's attrition, and screw the civilian non-combatants and their puny unaligned lives... And exhaustion of both sides seems to be the catalyst for that tenuous state of "peace" breaking out.
Too bad the ordinary people of the places we insist on personifying as "Turkey" and "Syria" don't have a forum in which to speak, to vent, their thoughts and fears and wishes about the crap their myopic rulers and militaristas and State Security types are bringing down on them...
Oh, look! The US Army/AFRICOM is on the case, in its latest $4 billion-in-changeover costs camouflage uniforms! http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/04/17/army-leadership-set-to-pick-new-cammo-pattern.html What could possibly go wrong with that, as part of the bigger plans the US military has for running everything under the aegis of responding to the "threats" of human-induced climate change? And how about that idea of crop insurance, with attendant fees to the risk-pool managers, to help the Backward get closer to Food Security? That will help ameliorate drought and burgeoning population and adherence to traditional farming and cooking practices, in places where tribal antipathies and survival angst are hot and heavy, just HOW, again?
" Local anger was at its height last July, when The Guardian exposed the C.I.A. connection. It was confirmed by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta in January. Public outrage flared again in May after Dr. Afridi was sentenced. A coalition of aid groups protested to David Petraeus, the director of Central Intelligence.
“There could hardly have been a more stupid venture, and there was bound to be a backlash, especially for polio,” said Dr. Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, a vaccine specialist at Aga Khan University in Pakistan.
Dr. Bhutta, who also heads the government’s research ethics committee, said both Dr. Afridi and the C.I.A. could be “sued or worse.” To establish their credibility, Dr. Afridi’s teams vaccinated whole neighborhoods in Abbottabad without permission.
Yeah, gotta get those plumbers to work plugging those leaks. forget about stupid POLIO, we got a terrorist to get! One has to grimace at the "more stupid" epithet for the CIA and its operatives. Pursuing "the national interest," with all subtlety and guile...
So hard to tell when people are being honest behind their avatars, but here are some very useful hints for parsing the words and syntax for insincerity, etc.:
jeppen may be old enough and comfortable enough and secure enough to want to preserve his/her niche while yet he/she lives, but my grandkids and extended family are already feeling the cold breath of self-gratifying, iFirst consumption. "Apres moi le deluge" ain't a particularly admirable ethos, especially when coupled with smug observations about how the "middle" is closing the gap with the poor (by getting poorer) as proof of "all is well."
And Soros, "the man who broke the Bank of England," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros, who hardly qualifies as a Born Again Liberal, even if he does some bits of anti-tyrannical stuff, is what fraction of the players in the "We OWN the rest of you" crowd? Compared, say, to the Kochs? True alignments and interests begin to appear, as the razor cuts closer to the nociceptors, the place where torture, er, "not-illegal harsh interrogation," does its work... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor
Don't the Security State types wish they could strangle any exposure of what they are so often up to? How's the Syria thing working out?
Among hundreds of other entries documenting a long sordid stupid history of Sneaky-Pete idiocy, right down to dosing Castro's cigars so his beard would fall out, Bay of Pigs, many "democratically elected" and dictators-uncooperative-with-Empire governments overthrown... Was all that "in the national interest?" If so, how is "the national interest" defined? "Whatever we happen to do this week"?
Gotta try to get the last word in. Valerie Plame? And case officers are always in danger of being exposed. Not only by people trying to let the rest of us know what idiocy the CIA and such agencies are up to, but of course by the other Players in SpyVs.Spy, that game they sign up for - for all kinds of reasons. These are not-nice people, and there's more than enough evidence that what they do is often not actually "in the national interest," as ordinary people understand that esoteric phrase, no matter how tightly wrapped in the Flag. There is nothing sacred or ultimately meaningful about what our sneaky-petes do -- it's just part of one of the many bad bits of human behavior.
And the support for "the Left" supposedly "likes themselves a dictator," again? And which dictators do they likes, that "dictates their wishes?" And there apparently is a category in mind of "the liberal left inhabiting blogs such as these" who likes "Left" dictators -- can you name some names of inhabitants, give examples, maybe?
Just almost exactly like the Right, though Right dics tend to be a lot more vicious and murderous. Stalin was not on the Left, by the way, nor Mao, and the Pol Pots are just the most successful of sociopaths and no respecters of political alignment. Basically, humans are stupid creatures, and can be led and bled by pretty much any old Pied Piper. But keep the tribal disdains alive; that's how it works.
"Executive orders are a second-best, temporary solution when you can’t actually win on the issue. " Maybe that's why those Executive Orders and NS Findings and other obscure exercises of Imperial-Presidential authority are used by folks like Nixon and Reagan and the Bush League and now Obama (and even Clinton and Kennedy) to "set policy" and activate agencies in areas where if transparency and critical thinking were present, the Rulers "could not actually win on the issue." And of course given the realities of captive legislature and gridlock and the ignoring of the general welfare by the Imperium, saying the remedy lies in moving an issue through Congress is a little disingenuous. For context:
I bet there are a lot of Executive Orders that Joe and others think are just peachy. Since those orders effectuate unpopular and unlegislatable policies they agree with. Like maybe the New Deal, about the foundations of which some concern was expressed above? Or the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Babblespace and its operations?
If Joe is talking about Wickard v. Filburn, I guess my old legal brain can't quite see the parallel and inference he is trying to make in his just-so-you-know "scare sentence." Is the implication that people who advocate ending the prohibition idiocy on pot are attacking the long-standing reading of the Commerce Clause, the foundation of the federal regulatory apparatus? The pot prohibition, with its rich and corrupt history, is a lot closer to the 18th-21st Amendment set of issues and social disorganization than limiting how many acres of wheat a farmer could plant for home consumption in 1942, in a day of heavy federal price and production controls. And lookie here! Marriage among gays used to be illegal, too! And still is in a lot of places.
I personally am a lot more worried about what our Supremes are doing with their version of judicial activism, telling us that corporations are persons for Bill of Rights purposes. Can't hardly wait for their collective take on the NSA and the 4th and 5th Amendments (they Hoover up trade secrets and business-confidential and intellectual-property stuff too, to do what with, again? Share with corps and foreign governments?)... And a lot of other "reactionary right-winger" stuff.
Sounds like more subtle pitching for leaving the Administration to do whatever it wants. Once again.
Remember, under "rule of law" as practiced in the US Empire, we only look forward. Ask Dick Cheney and George Bush and a lot of others how it works... Pardons and commuted sentences are only for "connected" criminal financiers, like I. Mark Rich, and Good Buddies and CIA-agent-outing political operatives like I. Lewis Libby.
Hmmm -- do any of the persons prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated for producing medical marijuana have "I." for a first name?
Why does that sound so very familiar? Oh yeah, it's just like the Restatement of the Rule of Executive Law in the US Empire, reformulated by a long committee of judicious people like Richard Milhous "I am not a crook" Nixon to Lyndon Baines "I'm the only president you've got" Johnson, to John "the Constitution is a quaint document" Yoo to the people who populate the West Wing in this and prior administrations -- and all the "agencies" that look a lot more like what "the law" calls PRINCIPALS ("als,' not "les"), as in "We are bigger and badder than you, we got the guns and the eyes'n'ears and a steady flood of your wealth to do what we please."
It was only a piece of tape on a door lock at the Watergate Complex, and the persistence of "country lawyers" like Sam Ervin and a few actually decent people in the Imperial capital, that stood in the way of a lot more really rotten crap and crushing of the rights we believe we have.
I was just reminded of how frail the protections we think we have against the 1984 treatment really are, running across this little vignette from the life of a fairly conservative guy, Jack Anderson, who dared to expose some of J. Edgar Hooveritallup's very dirty linen:
"Targeted
In 1972, Anderson was the target of an assassination plot in the White House. Two Nixon administration conspirators admitted under oath they plotted to poison Anderson on orders from senior White House aide Charles Colson.[15] White House "plumbers" G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt met with a CIA operative to discuss the possibilities, including drugging Anderson with LSD, poisoning his aspirin bottle, or staging a fatal mugging.[16] The plot was aborted when the plotters were arrested for the Watergate break-in. Nixon had long been angry with Anderson, blaming Anderson's election eve story about a secret loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother[17] for Nixon's loss of the 1960 presidential election. Anderson remained a target of FBI investigation after his death; in February 2006, the FBI contacted Anderson's family to obtain his files and search for classified documents.[18] The FBI agents claimed to be looking for documents pertaining to American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as part of an espionage investigation. In November 2006, the FBI quietly gave up its pursuit of the archive. The archive, as revealed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, contains Anderson's CIA file, along with information about prominent public figures such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Dodd, and J. Edgar Hoover." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_%28columnist%29
Reassure us. Bill and Joe, about how there's nothing to worry about. Sleep well, Professor -- I hope your friends inside the beast are still looking out for you. And Snowden? Hey, they were only emoting or joking when they were saying they would happily kill him for shaking up their evil, ugly little scam... Right?
When "the military," all medals and ribbons and innate corruption, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/18/us-usa-pentagon-waste-specialreport-idUSBRE9AH0LQ20131118, creates and constitutes itself to run things, holding the weapons and owning the nation's business directly or obscurely, there's plenty of Serious Historical Evidence of terminally idiotic we are. What's shaking in Egypt is just one current example, where the "warriors" grab all the goodies. Another is Myanmar, and North Korea, and looking back, you have the colonization of Australia. Read a little about the New South Wales Corps here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_Wales_Corps. The insinuation of the US military thingie into all those countries, which apologists tell us is mostly just about "training," as in " In most cases, they are on training missions, working with local forces to train them up on techniques [to do WHAT? School of the Americas/WHINSEC 'techniques?', http://www.soaw.org/soaw/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&id=8&Itemid=2 ? ], as well as to establish a degree of interoperability should it be necessary in the future." Read it closely: what does that bland text try to obscure? The US system is sending hundreds of billions in military and "other" monies to, e.g., Egypt, a place under the military-commercial thumb of a modern New South Wales Corps, and to many other out-of-the-way places, "to establish a degree of interoperability should it be necessary in the future." The test of "necessity" being what, again? Keeping the complaining ordinary citizens under control? And under the planning documents the Pentagram is generating, it very clearly is the goal to have "the military" micromanaging social and political activities all over the place, with the usual unaccountable and idiotic outcomes. For a statement of the huge scope of the US military's hubris and ambition, lookie here: http://climateandsecurity.org/2012/01/25/defense-science-board-report-on-climate-change-and-security-list-of-recommendations/
"Shame and danger"? Yeah, there are reasons to be afraid, Egyptian reasons, and American too.
Speaking of honest conservatism, there is this from Carl Schurz, first German-born American senator: "The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, “My country, right or wrong.” In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/15/1216365/--My-Country-Right-or-Wrong Schurz, G_d bless him, was a Republican. Of course only the my-country-r-or-w bit is usually espoused. Another literary observation on the subject: “But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.” http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/maturin
Dare one ask what the national interest is in insinuating the US military presence into pretty much every corner of the planet? Are the threats so immanent and/or imminent, or is this just a bad habit grown very large and expensive? And as with the NSA's justification for mass peeping, are there actual non-secret incidents of success in improving our national and international security by this steady expansion of the military bootprint, in "training those other local forces up on (unspecified) techniques?" Since there is actually some history of blowback and de-stabilization and crushing of rights and suchlike from such involvements? Though one would of course want to argue down their significance, one by one, as an index of a questionable, expensive imperial approach to whatever it is we are supposed to be doing in the Global Interoperable Network-centric Battlespace.
Denial, and/or "studied ignorance." Coupled with deniability. Added to the idiocy that is our electoral system, in our post-even-pretextual-democratic Republic. The Game needs funding and Troops and "support" of other types, all of which depend on looking at everything through a very narrow slit. In politics, facts, writ large, are the enemy of "Victory."
If "Israel" is really concerned about its citizens' safety, a concern that only appears to extend to a fraction of those who are still considered citizens, maybe "Israel" could adopt some different "policies." Or maybe, as with annexation by "settlement," that train, loaded with weapons of all sizes and types, has left the station and driven by Likudniks, on its way to an appointment with a rotted trestle over a very deep gorge...
200-400 nuclear weapons, a long history of obnoxious espionage against the US, to the point that the heads of our intelligence agencies have said Israel is the greatest intelligence threat to the US? Serial and parallel "I don't care" attacks on unarmed ships at sea, on neighboring nations and even US naval ships (remember the USS Liberty?). All that weaponry and bigotry under the control of people who seem to have a death wish to go with unbridled corruption? Not, unfortunately, a "thuggish regime" that can be ignored. Too bad our local politics and religiosity at home seem to make it impossible for our empire to "do the right thing," or even figure out what that is...
And for grand geopolitical reasons, or bureaucratic momentum, or to keep feeding a few nominally US corporations with "contracts," US dollars in the billions continue to go to the military/business elite of Egypt. Oh well...
Thank you, Cagri Bey, for your insights and observations. Can I play off two of them? First, this: "We try too hard to categorize countries and make models out of them." So true, in so many ways. From the apparently necessary reduction, for analysis and debate, of places with millions of citizens, or at least inhabitants, with their infinite institutions and interests and liaisons and histories, to single personified unitary points, as in "Turkey does this" or "Israel does that" or "the US believes..." So nicely hides the complexities, and helps activate and manipulate atavistic and tribal responses.
You also so rightly observe:
"Turkish middle class is under attack by a populist tyrant who will feed the poor with bread, circuses and propaganda while at the same time enriching himself and his ministers."
That does an excellent and appropriate job of modeling not only the current Turkish ruling elite and their behavior and "interests," but that of most nations. Especially the ones that bang drums and blow trumpets and thump their chests shouting that they are "democracies," of ANY kind.
Kleptocracy is the operative model in most of the world, conducted behind and maintained by various overlays. There's a tolerable, maybe even inescapably necessary, amount of baksheesh and "slack" in human cultures, but for some reason those who concentrate on gathering power and ruling have no notion of when to stop filching and stealing and bleeding the rest of us. There is apparently no "enough." Cancer cells have the same properties...
There are words from the US troops that did what was done in Fallujah some 10 years ago. For a larger set, look up "Marines talk about Fallujah. Here's one example, from WJCT, Jacksonville, FL:
"Fallujah Veterans Ask Hard Questions About Their Sacrifices"
"...First, the Iraqis didn't ask to be invaded by us. We invaded and occupied badly," he says. "But on top of that, I'm angry our policy never matched the sacrifice, especially of the Marine Corps."
Weston says there's no clear American solution now, despite real achievement in the past: For a time, Fallujah was stable.
"I don't think it was all in vain," Weston says. "But in the big picture, the American legacy there is now being subsumed by more violence."
Troops who fought there knew Iraq always had a good chance of returning to violence. Former Marine Eliot Ackerman, who received a Silver Star for valor in Fallujah, says his Marines talked about liberating Iraq — but only rarely.
"We were fighting for the same reason guys have always fought: for each other, and for a sense that we were bound to an obligation to serve our country at a time of war," he says.
What a surprise that so many of them are military veterans, hence the VA effort to right some of the shame of the nation for using these people (I have a vested interest, as one of them who got to take part in the 1968 Tet festivities) and kicking them to the curb... Drones and battle robots don't have nightmares. At their current level of intellectual development and autonomy, at least.
On the news shows this morning, the President, in obliquely responding to his "good friend" Gates's book, stated that "we got the policy right" in Afghanistan. http://www.mediaite.com/online/president-obama-responds-to-gates-criticism-we-got-the-policy-right/ And in the departure from Iraq, and of course how that whole exercise was conducted? He's apparently not making that claim. I guess it all depends on how you define the policy and state the goals and define the results, post hoc and after spin.
All the pundits offer, of course, that if their advice had only been followed, All Would Be Well. Looks like Dr. Cole had the right detailed advice. Too bad we have not learned that for all our vaunted military power, the ability to deliver big explosions or lots of boots or special-ops interventions to random parts of the planet, for all the ability to "start something," we have neither the wisdom nor the ability to "finish it." Here's the first problem: "The misuse of American might, and the price it pays -- The United States no longer knows how to win wars, but it continues to start them."
So "Fallujah," and "Wardak," and "I Corps" and other great managed campaigns appear to be nothing but profitable but foolish exercises in futility, arranged by people immune to the consequences on the ground both during the campaign and during the fallout and blowback.
Any thoughts on how "WE" can "protect our political and intellectual classes?" Since there are so many rewards, and punishments, for anyone hewing to, or deviating from, the Line?
This MCHM spill, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-methylcyclohexanemethanol, is an event, one that will fade in our minds pretty quick. Mining has some long-term gifts, beyond the ones the Professor highlights from coal burning.
Those picayune considerations never seemed to bother "the United States" before, when either some scam, strategy of "national interest" seemed to support the notion. Iran-Contra? Angola? how many others?
So, does ANYONE actually act as the Decider? Or does the "complicated nature" let everyone off the hook? It's probably just me, but I can't think of anyone recently in the whole chain of command, especially at the top, that ever says anything other than "If mistakes might have been made it would be regretted..." Seems like the first bullet in the planning document is "Diffuse responsibility, lay groundwork for claiming credit if successful..."
Though I'll give you that given the history of the fate of a lot of CinCs in a lot of other Empires would give a person with a knowledge of that history and stuff like the "Business Plot" some pause in doing any "deciding."
Yah, it had nothing to do with Supreme Court appointments and decisions, or the effect of money and mental manipulations, or vote-stealing, or a bunch of other stuff including, and this is my own observation of course, that Gore just did not really want to be president of all the planet... There's nearly infinity posts and comments on the 'net blaming FLORIDUH, my residence, for the outcome of the election. Nader did not help, of course, a vain sally in several senses, but then neither did Ross Perot from the other side of the Overton Window... Not that we have had an actual "Choice, Not An Echo," for many decades... http://www.amazon.com/Choice-Not-Echo-American-Presidents/dp/0686114868
Is what Nader wrote here in any way wrong? And of course that "split vote" was the WHOLE reason Bush inherited the presidency, right? How well has the two-party (sic) system done in steering the ship of state, in directing the direction of our Empire, again? (And no, I didn't vote for Nader, I felt as you do at the time, or Bush either.)
Extra points for false equivalences and logic-chopping misdirection in such a short post. Any debate that our Empire "intervenes" all over the place? Any proof that those "interventions," from invasion to sneaky-pete destabilization and suborned regime change, have made the net world situation any better over time? Or even advanced "our national interests," other than some careers and the bottom lines of a few smallish sectors of the economy? And yes, I know the argument, often presented by pre-schoolers, that "Everyone else is doing it," and "If we don't do it, somebody else will," and "Igor did it first." And of course the perennial "It's always been this way," coupled to the equally idiotic "That's the way the Game is played." The current state of the world, political, economic and oops! environmental, matched up with "what could be," kind of belies the "virtue" of all those arguments. By the way, "Paws on" by empires and sneaky-petes was what produced "Afghanistan in the 1990s," along with a lot of other "situations." How'd THAT work?
All one usually has to do is wait. And keep the slimy "policy" MIC-SEC paws off. And yes, it will be messy, but as you repeatedly point out about our own nation's messy "democratization", eventually SOMETHING settles out, however meta-stable. It's the muscular Righteous Interventionist Exceptionalists and their covert agendas that get us all into such trouble.
Actually, all I ask is that the "experts" have something more than a store of deep and detailed and "knowledgeable" involvement in prior bad acts, something other than a career-long fundamental world view that's postulated on More Of The Same, and actual evidence of skills at actually making situations calmer, better, safer, healthier, rather than detailed, complex, interlocking abilities for loading up the racks with more weapons, more dogma, more instability in service of short-term gains for one parasitic part of our political economy at the expense of the general welfare and species survival. Our system does not seem to select for those better qualities, for some reason. Excising people with language skills and understanding of the culture "we" were about to invade would be the last thing I would want to do. I still have my little comic book the Army gave me when I got to Tan Son Nhut in 1967, telling me all I supposedly needed to know about the people, culture, customs, history and language of Vietnam. Thanks for the gratuitous and inapposite sneer, however.
"He carried out the instructions of his superiors." Well allrighty then. Eichman carried out the instructions of his superiors. Not exactly a complete defense, hey?
And this kind of ignores and papers over how "policy," meaning the behavior and motions of the acting entity, gets made: "Weasels" and Procurement Commands and other elements of the Imperial structure not only inform the High Command on the way to overt or covert "policy" signoffs, and draft and front-load and log-roll the memos and situation documents and stuff, they often run their own operations that winkwinknudgeknowwhatImean are right in the guts of the whole "plausible deniability" scam. And then, often, like Ollie North and Gates and the folks who ordered the killings at places like My Lai and the fun'n'games at Abu Ghraib, skate off into the sunset, often, one might say Generally, with "careers" and/or at least comfortable retirements intact. Because "legal," or at least whitewasheable, or prosecutorial-discretionable, or "we have to look only forward" escapable.
What are Petraeus and McChrystal doing these days, again?
This Administration, and others of course, along with a whole lot of businesses that saddle themselves with similar creatures, apparently believe that "hiring expertise" is the touchstone for "success" and "victory." "Expert" at what, again? J. Edgar Hoover and Wild Bill Donovan were "experts," and so are Timmy Geithner and Rahm Emanuel (and there are of course a lot more poignant examples that don't leap to mind), and a whole raft of expert-at-Golden-Handshake-and-Parachute-and-Compensation-Committee CEOs, and of course insiders like Gates.
Yah, those former colonial empires are sure sending their militaries to our own Imperial dance-offs. Hundreds of troops, wise enough to get out quick after seeing where the "UN Force" was headed. I like the one piece that lists the last S anish trooper to die. Look forward to the name of "our" terminal casualty, sorrow in advance for his or her loved ones... And what percent of the economies of Spain and Portugal go to their militaries, again? Oh, we must remember that the US provides their "security," right? and arm-twists them into sending troops to legitimate the "UN" activities?
Some people just never met an Empire they could resist apologizing for.
The taxpayers AND RATEPAYERS are not revolting about the current state of drain on national wealth from subsidies to nuclear and carbon-fueled monopolies. Or from losing what, a quarter of the national budget to the entire Global War-Militarize Everything monster. Or all the other subsidies to bidness built into the budget and tax code.
Can we sign you up for a nice 100-kilo package of high level radioactive powerplant waste while we're at it, or is that just FUTURE taxpayers' problem?
In our "capitalist" world, everything is priced, profit must be added, "privatizing" is the idiot theme, and so NOTHING is cost-free. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics adds its costs, along with the inevitable levies of Mr. Murphy. But we know what bidness as usual is doing to the planet and our (among other) species, for the profitable benefit (cost- and consequence-free) of the very few who get to die in lavish comfort before the poop hits the fan.
Seems to me the burden of proof is on those who think Fukushima is just a once-in-a-lifetime aberration, fixable by money and dilution and time, rather than indicative of what high-risk subsidized "engineering" like nuke plants seem inevitably to produce. How many bullets dodged at nuke plants all over the planet, every year?
But I know this is as much a matter of identity and faith as anything, just like which way the toilet paper roll goes on the holder.
So much depends on a red wheelbarrow, and the peripheral vision of a plant operator human, and LUCK...
Good place to be, considering what the Security State considers its most dangerous enemies to be "the middle class," defined to include anyone not in the oligarchy:
Yeah, that's the UK, but how much distance does there appear to be between their Stasi and OURS? Folks who read the "Energy Bulletin" get this advice on the DCDC's publication: "A fascinating 91-page document that probably represents some of the best thinking by the global elite. Below are a few selections that might be of particular interest to Energy Bulletin readers."
Mr. Engelhardt must be getting close to some home truths when Joe and Bill find it advisable to double-team him on behalf of the Empire's forces and attempt to so heartily mis-characterize the import of his writing.
Despite the apologists' straw man, Engelhardt never said the whole out-of-control, over-the-top Church Of The Sacred Security-tization Of Everything is just about "stopping al Quaeda," though he rightly points out that the huge machine that eats ever more of our resources and "rights" can't even manage to do that -- quite the opposite -- or to "win" any 4th Generation conflicts. And points out that the actions of a machine that grinds without any substantial mission except self-extension and self-aggrandizement and self-justification ain't about security (whatever that means), any more, other than job security for its acolytes and high priests and agents of wealth transfer.
Belying the snark from the apologist side, Mr. Engelhardt knows darn well, from years of perusing the budgets and visible documentation of the military-industrial-state-security apparatus, just what (as much as anyone can know, given the fraud and fake bookkeeping and unauditability of the "enterprise") that trillion or more bucks a year goes for, and how many trillions have gone to "wars" and been sunk in materiel and "bases." He knows what carrier groups are tasked to do (other than provide jobs to favored states and contractors and a place for the ever-increasing number of admirals to hang their flags) and that pert of the momentum for funding and fielding such wasting "assets" is very clearly linked by proponents to "fighting al Quaeda." His point is that we the people are getting pretty close to ZERO "security" benefits from our "investment" in not only the holy relics of the Cold War (the ICBMs and subs and "long range bombers" and the elements of our cancerous State Security apparatus) and cohorts of carrier groups and boodles of "bases" that replicate suburbia behind walls and wire, and feckless F-series aircraft whose principal mission, per the pitches made to Congress to continue funding the huge inevitable overruns, is to "provide good middle class jobs," but of the crap we ordinary people are now made to fund in the name of "security." Basically, welfare for a favored and dangerous-to-us caste, from people who happily kill off unemployment compensation and medical care and food stamps to "others," and would default on Social Security obligations and military pensions and VA benefits if they dared.
And to paraphrase Bill's disingenuous put-down, if ordinary people were able to demand an accounting from the Secret Squirrels behind the "Top Secret" stamps, they might reasonably expect he following: " In other words, the US military establishment and Congress would have had to put some thought into matching U.S. military and naval assets with REAL U.S. responsibilities, the ones the Constitution identified and not the "cloud" inflated and floated by the NSS. Judging from this and past fiascoes and current waste and idiocy, and the investments the NSS has in continuing and growing the playing field of the Game, that is something we probably will not see." And maybe the people who pay for it, in so many ways like the drain on the "civilian" economy, might demand some major changes in the Game itself...
OOOOOoohhhhh..... Bewaaaare the Chiiineeeeeese...er, Iraaaaaniaaans... er, Fennnwiiickiaaaaaans...
Hey, Professor, this post sure brought out some apologists and True Believers. Do they monitor the 'net for posts that might threaten their perfect womb? And of course the Obamites, he's naught but a figurehead in any event, over the whole Imperial monster, have done nothing to rein in or convert to plowshares or PV panels all that wealth that's flooding into Contractorland to feed the Great Global IdioticInternetworked Inoperable Battlespace thingie and its actions-without-consequences-or-apparently-much-informed-thought... I like the "what else could he have done?" notion, and the "we have no one to blame but ourselves" talking-point bullet... And don't let us "anger" our wealthy rulers by "pursuing wealth-redistribution policies," obscuring that the whole course of political economics in the US for many decades has been exactly that: redistributing wealth from the poorest and least lobby-protected to the richest and most cancerous... All, of course, "legally," that meaningless fraudulent fig leaf...
The waste can't be safely disposed of, but the few who profit from nuclear utility monopolies and other scams can tie a nice bow on the cannisters and piles and leave them for our offspring to "fix." Just like so many other bags of poop excreted by externality-exempt kleptocrats who have suckered and back-doored us into the current set of messes.
And a whole bunch more at search term "veterans speak about Fallujah". There are also whole rafts of webspaces created by and dedicated to all those men and women who "took the King's shilling" and went off to flatten Fallujah, kick in doors in Kandahar and find themselves hating and killing "hajjis" and "towelheads" because the Brass pushed them into "contact" as invaders, the way cock- and dog-fighters rub the faces of their "champions" together to stir them up for those negative-sum games in "pits" across the planet... See, e.g., Iraq Veterans Against The War/You Are Not Alone, at http://www.ivaw.org/
Doesn't matter. Some here sneer at repetitive references to Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler's statement of the truth: "War is nothing but a racket." He goes on to explain that he speaks of the imperial wars of our great Republic, of which the business is "business." http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html The sneerers appear to be people who profit and gain personally from, and/or have been personally involved in, or glued their identities to, the "business" activities that engender the stuff Butler, as a very experienced practitioner sickened by it, so properly decried. And it is beyond argument that the same crap continues, and because it is so profitable and has such career- and opportunity-generating momentum, it's gaining speed...
It ain't about "protecting the nation" or HAHAHAHA "supporting and defending the Constitution" or "preserving our democracy" much less "our way of life," except in the sense that all those brave and scared Troops are preserving the prerogatives and wealth of a very very few.
I guess the selective bit of text you extract and imbue with the meaning you want it to have is supposed to "prove" your point. Looks like I'm not the only one who read the whole article and gave the lie to your original claim. Also looks like the fundamental "not-nice Joe" is showing through again...
It would be nice if Joe could point to the parts of Munk's article that evidence "people complain[ing] that too much coverage is being given to the deaths" in Syria. And maybe offer something of substance on what he feels the author is "trying to sell."
... Seems to me the lessons Mr. Munk was writing to convey are pretty clear,.
Anyone noticed any long-term parallels between our own Imperial state-security-apparatchiks' behavior and what is scoffed at here? Oh, sorry - we have "First Amendment Zones" and FOXNews, and no one has interrogated Jon Stewart or that other guy yet, or "targeted" any Michigan college professors. Of COURSE there are no Quislings among us, no J. Edgar clones and clowns Hovering up all the moments of our lives, that can and will be used against us in a Kangaroo Court of secret pseudo-law...
Fine, mostly conventional analysis of The Situation, about the many details of which, compared to Prof. Cole, I know a minuscule amount. But despite all the attention given in other articles in this space to the need for Different and Better, it sure seems like the prescriptions here are a lot like what medieval physicians wrote, out of a Pharmacopeia full of toxins and chalk dust and colored powders, for patients suffering from imbalances of their humours and black and yellow bile. They wrote what they knew, often well aware that their dispensations were neither safe nor effective.
Of course, the System, such as it is, is clearly im- and un-balanced, but rather than parsing the Krebs cycle of political economics for encourageable feedback mechanisms (other than solar and wind and tidal and hydropower to maintain as much of business as usual as long as possible), a lot of this is prescribing for more of the metabolic pathways and hormone and enzyme activity that favors the safety and propagation of "institutions" and memes, and whatever, that sure look like pathogens and parasites and ambitious cancers that will happily grow and multiply and eat more of the host's resources until they kill it, often converting a lot of the host's tissues into more of themselves (see, e.g., SARS and other acronymic viruses and bacteria, and so many -omas).
Maybe talking about "the US" as a Promethean personification, still able to move the earth with this or that lever, gets some credibility from the people who can do and shake, in the hope of insinuating some new coding into the institutionalized genetics. The text is a nice main-point outline of policy prescriptions, but so much of what happens is the result, way down in the tiny text of the sub-sub-sub-headings and foot- and afternotes, of greedy and idiotic little souls selling or giving weapons and providing "training" and "incentives" to "gunmen," via the shadow Underground Mart that makes and delivers and gets paid for them with no accounting for the externalities that follow, behind a scam excuse that arming or "projecting power against" this or that group will somehow "advance 'our' interests." Accepting the premise that the modes of "governance" that ARE, will also always BE.
The analysis covers a huge territory in 1400 words. Well done, of course. It would be so nice if there were nostrums and specifics and advanced DNA manipulations that might cure the socioeconopolitical disease states that afflict the species. Assuming that "the species" has any will to be kinder and gentler and likely to endure...
But as I freely acknowledge, these are just generic observations of an outsider outlier, in the awareness that I only see little bits of It All, unblessed and unburdened by the complexities but pretty sure, on some pretty substantive evidence, that "we" are headed for a cliff of our own idiot making, following "leaders" who can hop on private jets and soar off to comfortable old age, consequence-free, as the hordes charge over the 4 or 6 degree hotter, everyone-armed edge.
Hi Bill, Happy New Year!
Do you have any challenge to the substance of what Zbig and Kissinger are reported, here and elsewhere, to have stated? Or is the best you can come up with one of those impeachment-by-reduction drive-bys?
Anyone care to vote on which of the techniques of derailing and impeachment were offered by Bill here? One primer: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/
...and here's some recent thoughts from Kissinger and Brzezinski on what's afoot with Imperial power play in that part of the world where "we" are so idiotically losing our way and our shirts and our sacred Troops:
"Brzezinski: US Warmongers “Infected” By Notion Of Regional Destabilization"
And yes, Bill, COIN and "nation-building" are bad ideas, but as far as I can see they are just arbitrary categorizations of parts of a seamless web of Imperial "behavior" and "policy." All related to "the business of the US is business," carried out by a variety of means overlying the basic nature of us human beasts, too many of whom live for self-gratification and power over others and the thrill, or grim and dogged identity-"validating" self-satisfactions, of the Game...
But, like, that would impact people's CAREERS, and Settled Relationships, man! Not to mention the profitable stuff that flows from having All That Information ready to hand, subject to parsing, and convertible to money'n'power...
Besides, there's NO PRECEDENT FOR IT! or President, either! And where the skulks and sneaks and peeping-Toms play, down in the dark, there's an endless history of interconnection and data-sharing and co-ordinate subGames. Check out the staffing improvements of the CIA after WW II, benefiting from the happily incorporated expertise of all those Nazi SS and Sicherheitspolizei including the Gestapo, and those "engineers" who migrated so happily into what became NASA... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_the_Third_Reich
So "Egyptians want security and prosperity more than liberty"? That's an either-or, or apparently NEITHER based on current conditions? I know I don't know for sure, but it sure seemed to this old guy, growing up Boy Scout when Mao was a Great Boogeyman Over The Horizon and much in the US public mind, that the Chinese under Mao, however many million-billion there were in those years, had neither security nor prosperity (or "rights") (any more than under Generalissimo Chiang kai-Shek and his gang), and at the level of the ordinary person were hardly consulted about their real preferences. Maybe other than by "elections" where there was only one candidate on the ballot and you had to sign yours before casting it...Better wave that Little Red Book with a big enthusiastic toothy smile, or it was off for "re-education." Unless of course they were part of the Party gang, in which case then and there, as well as pretty much always and everywhere including our serial-Gilded-Age Imperial State, the sneakiest, greediest, most manipulative and violent, the happiest to repress and extract all wealth and freedom from others, aka "the hierarchy" or "the Elite" or the "natural aristocracy" or the kleptocracy, other monikers readily accepted, were and are doing just fine. Even the top Nazis knew when to sell out their millenarian fetishes at the top of the market and move to quieter places rather than face consequences like Mussolini or Quaddaffyduck.
Why the slam on "liberal intellectuals who can't win elections?" Is the implication that "liberals" are really not about "freedom," a recurrent slur in this US Imperial space? There's an entrenched ruling elite (military-business, as far as I know) in Egypt and elsewhere, superseding aspirational "legitimacy" with "mechanisms of control" to the point that elections are essentially pointless except to maybe "legitimize" what is.
We all want prosperity and security, especially in gated enclaves and on private islands, not too far from the favelas where the household staff try to live -- seems the big 21st century questions might include whether individual "rights," of the Enlightenment sort, can exist in our grand modern world, alongside whatever is the nature of the cancerous thing we have saddled ourselves with, some self-consumptive apathy with a side of tribalized anomie, or whatever it is, with that self-congratulating set of Elite Tumors and Tapeworms who have figured out how to make suckers of the rest of us, up at the nominal top. Planning to die comfortably, never having to suffer the consequences of their predation.
Where are the models that lead to moderation, comity, and inclusion, that lead to the real legitimacy that, until the sneaks and parasites figure out how to game the system, is the apparently only, if temporary, means and path to the cherished "security" and "prosperity" and also but maybe not necessarily "freedom" and "liberty" and "rule of law" and all that? Rev. King? Gandhi? Mandela? Samuel Doe? Reagan? Obama?
And of course that will scrape up all the mildewed toothpaste and shove it back into the tube, and unring the klanging bells, just like the release of a certain "short-form" birth certificate...
Matters of identity, those notions that so patently animate reactionary minds especially, like "Benghazi" and that guy who killed himself in that park, riiiiight, and the necessity to provoke Holy War and the other bits of Revelation, and "who lost China," and on and on, world without end... well, apparently that notion, at least, is actually "inoperative," it seems.
Anyone wanting to fact-check Joe's cocky assertion need only use "why is the US coal industry declining?" as a search term. One slightly dated entry: "U.S. coal industry would face decline even without Obama’s policies"
Then go see what Lisa Jackson has been up to in her career, and one might also look at the full range of our President's Men's other appointments too, and maybe start a running tally of "policies" that have been "good for the planet" and "good for the average person," versus the other thing...
Maybe Lisa has a stack of penny-on-the-kilodollar "settlements" of environmental enforcement actions nailed to the wall of her den (aptly chosen locus) as well...
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2012/12/29/lisa-jackson-epa-resignation-a-refusal-to-support-keystone-xl/ Says she does not much care for some pretty significant aspects of Obama's "environmental program," like the Keystone XL corruption and smog rules (and she gets credit for probably accelerating the closing of coal-fired power plants, though environmental activists bringing suit for permit violations and of course the cheap "fracked" gas that is going to what, make the Empire energy-independent, have a whole lot more...
"EPA:
'There are significant geographic regions we can no longer cover' -- agency's top cop" (this is about the effects of sequestration among other stuff) http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059980622
What she says about her tenure after 3 of her 4 years: "BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERIOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES
UNITED STATES SENATE
MARCH 16, 2011
The folks I worked with at EPA who were still there when Jackson ran the show have mixed views of her from an actual environmental protection standpoint.
As a former EPA enforcement attorney (13 years, Carter through Reagan), I have to smile just a little at the breathless announcement of "record civil penalties." I don't have access to the consent agreement, but as one who was involved in the negotiation of many of these, I would bet that there are terms that anyone serious or hopeful about the deterrent effect of sanctions EPA dares to impose would have to give a rueful shake of the head at. Not sure about current law, but these used to be tax-deductible, and "mitigation" by "restoring" watercourses and wetlands and such is a shell game of the first order.
Deals like this are nice career builders for the people involved, you get to hang a little (very) scalp on your belt, and put a copy of the memo of payment of the money part in your little file. I am a little surprised, given what I hear of "enforcement" by the current EPA and DOJ, that this went as far as it did, and I expect this is maybe a little pressure-release valve like the one on your water heater, that keeps the tank from exploding but still on the boil.
What really did have an effect on corporate behavior was when under the Carter administration and with a very different DOJ, EPA staff was finally allowed to start using the criminal sanction powers that earlier, less captive Congresses had written into the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, FIFRA and statutes requiring reporting of toxics releases. Silk-stocking lawyers were amazed that we DARED to refer and prosecute criminal actions against their "The business of America is business" executive-suite clients, even holding corporate chiefs liable criminally for failure to meet their very much individual obligations to abide by for laws against "externalization profit-taking" and requiring self-reporting of discharges and emissions under permit requirements and absolute prohibitions. The high-priced legal talent quickly adapted, hiring former prosecutors to teach them how to "mitigate" liability by negotiating plea deals and playing political strings, and (occasionally) having to hire "experts" in massaging the federal corrections system to let their clients do soft time or get "community service" or probation rather than the other thing.
But for a heady while, we line troops in the regional offices got to see stuffed suits with profit motives in place of consciences sometimes actually do "perp walks," and we had some satisfaction that the measurable rate of "deviance," by these charming souls in their power ties, and the corporate structures for which they set the "moral" tone. The people on the neoliberal side have managed to mostly scotch the rules and regulations, and the institutional energies that the tree-huggers that used to staff a lot of EPA enforcement once so vigorously embodied.
Here's a Powerpoint, http://www.ohiochemistry.org/aws/OCTC/asset_manager/get_file/70307, with some salient stuff to remark on, like look at how little change there has been in actual criminal enforcement, Bush to Obama, very little of which is against corporate officers, whose personal fear of prosecution is much of the reason for compliance (with little incentive to just "do the right thing" rather than grab the short-term profit, and huge career and payday disincentives.) The crowing about penny ante penalties ought to be measured against the many HUGE estimates of human health and environmental harm caused by the behaviors that criminal laws are supposed to deter, and the civil penalties are puny a "cost of doing business" joke, laden with "outs" and avoidances and with releases from liability for some serious malefactors, although as noted, they are great career-builders for the staff, especially those on the way toward the cash-out door to working for the Dark Side.
And there is this official pronouncement of text undoubtedly drafted by his staff and vetted all over the place, by Earle Devaney, who has worn several Administration hats over the years, with interesting distinctions -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Devaney :
"This Conference is premised, in part, on a shared recognition that the impact of environmental law on society is largely dependent upon effective enforcement of such law. This, in turn, requires the availability of sanctions that not only recover the economic benefit gained by violating the law, but also serve as a credible deterrent to noncompliance. One of the hard lessons learned in environmental law enforcement is that individuals and companies confronted with only administrative or civil judicial fines often find it advantageous to continue to violate the law and merely absorb such penalties as a cost of doing business. What few individuals making compliance decisions are willing to risk, however, is the prospect of a criminal conviction and imprisonment."
Bear in mind that this document was from a 1994 international conference, which included some pretty good sharing of ideas and inspirations and also some good opportunities to network and figure out how to beat the system. See what's included in the TransPacific Partnership deal and its Atlantic cognate (as far as leaks have let us see what the suits are up to...) We are once again hearing that "dilution is the solution to pollution," e.g. Fukushima, and that the rest of us have to pay the corporatists not to load us with toxins -- the "right" to extract and pollute belongs to Citizens United citizens, not the rest of us...
"One of the largest civil penalties." Big whoop, but would it not be nice if that was just a start, assuming that there is any "rule of law" left?
We should all remember that all this horror and terror and imperial intervention and stuff is actually pretty good for business. Ask Hallliburton, or Bechtel, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechtel, or at a broader scale ask KPMG, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPMG , that blankets the world with guys in suits offering "highest-quality advice and counsel" on how to profit from extractive resources, remodeling of whole governments, and of course "reconstruction" of the land- and city-scapes ravaged by the complicated violence:
Re the "relative openness" of Iranian vs Israeli and Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs, the notion that the latter three were a "surprise to the world" would probably be a huge surprise to the various "intelligence services" who were WELL aware of what each of the sets of people in each of those nations that were dedicated to spreading the nuclear weaponizing disease to their own states, for "power." And ego, and whatever else...
And how is Iran more like North Korea? What is that conjunction supposed to get the rest of us to be thinking? Khameini is just like Kim Dot Dum? Or the Rev Guard is just like the insane NK military rulership? Axis of Evil redivivus?
Kind of fun to sit back and watch our anonymous "possibly insiders" go at each other for a change. Kind of illustrates my basic thesis about the nature of humanity and the likelihood of losing that long-term top-of-the-food-chain status, when Empire-lovers can't even get along...
On a substantive note, there was a little article in the Guardian, which is earning its name in my little opinion, about complexity and its relationship to achieving any kind of sociopolitical homeostasis, almost anywhere on the planet given the scope and nature of human drives, but particularly in South Sudan. The headline, "How Hollywood cloaked South Sudan in celebrity and fell for the 'big lie'," really obscures the important reminder of the details that actually constitute the elements, or dissociating fragments, of a polity, and the difficulty, thanks to Great Game play and the way us geopoliticofixationists want to impose our own "simplifying assumptions", e.g. Shia vs Sunni, "Taliban" vs "UN" vs Karzai et al., on situations, in support of various arguments and strategies and initiatives and profit-making opportunities from continued conflict, in this case in "the world's newest nation" (whatever that means, relative to the ground truths). http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/28/reality-of-south-sudan-and-hollywood-stars
"The war had been brought to life in the US by broadcast evangelicals such as Billy Graham, who cast it as a heroic battle by Christian and African underdogs against a more powerful Muslim and Arab foe. The fact that religious and geographical lines were never remotely this clear and clean-cut was routinely ignored. The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), under the leadership of the charismatic John Garang, was not fighting for an independent south but a democratic "new Sudan". Its forces were drawn from areas far beyond what are now the borders of South Sudan. And its battles were, for the most part, not against the national army, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) but against rival militia groups, often drawn from the same great southern tribes, such as the Dinka and Nuer, that the SPLA leadership came from.
Much of the fighting and dying took place in the south, often with funding and encouragement from the north. This meant that a new country would have to be built in what had been the main theatre of the war, with a nation drawn from opposing sides in much of that conflict. No serious effort was made by any side in the post-2005 cooling-off period to reconcile the north and south. The US, Europe, the UN and the south's near-neighbours, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya, all pushed for the country to be broken up. This effort was formalised in a referendum in 2011.
The pursuit of separation at all costs made it harder to admit certain truths such as ethnic divisions and created the need for the "big lie", as one senior UN official calls it. "The big lie is that there was no ethnic problem in South Sudan. There is a political problem.""
Of course, that's just one little bit of one little article (there's many more, of course, maybe more or less "true" and "accurate" and "complete"), one person's take on a complex situation, one person's attempt to clarify the nature of the complexity for armchair geopoliticians and maybe even Rulers...
Must drive diligent students and explicators like Dr. Cole a little crazy, trying to keep all the bits and friction-generating pieces in mind as he thinks and writes.
Of course there is this report from the WP, and a whole lot more sources if you look:
"The CIA has begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria, ending months of delay in lethal aid that had been promised by the Obama administration, according to U.S. officials and Syrian figures. The shipments began streaming into the country over the past two weeks, along with separate deliveries by the State Department of vehicles and other gear — a flow of material that marks a major escalation of the U.S. role in Syria’s civil war.
The arms shipments, which are limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked, began arriving in Syria at a moment of heightened tensions over threats by President Obama to order missile strikes to punish the regime of Bashar al-Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons in a deadly attack near Damascus last month."
John, thanks for that little vignette, from an apparent insider. Glimpses like this, taken with the stuff that Wikileaks let us mopes get peeks into the world of "serious Players," might get people to think a little more clearly about the kinds of people who "manage the planet" and "set policy" and set up the pungi pits and deadfalls and minefields of Future and Forever Conflict. I guess a sense of the ridiculous and a sense of humor might be helpful to retaining personal (if not "national interest") sanity out there in the Great Game of Risk! (tm).
Hellfires launched from light aircraft with CIA targeting "assistance" are for fighting conventional enemies? Really? Which ones with what capabilities and plans? Or is it just the idiot MIC pitch that you need all the "capability" and attendant fraud, corruption and incentive to idiot mischief your national wealth can pay for?
These observations are togue-in-cheek, right? The whole imperial arrogance and Exceptional Superiority schtick? Since you speak for the Traditional Narrative, I guess maybe not? "You, Maliki, should do what we told you to do"? And that would have "made his government more secure"? Your version of democracy, or more honestly those special "national interests"?
Seems to me that this is not a China shop with signs that say "You break it, you bought it." Moral and legal obligation to do WHAT? There are no tools, no doctrines, no tactics in our Great Game toybox that bear a snowball's chance of
making anything "better" -- it's all about who we arm, who McCain buddies with, who our sneaky-petes figure they can manipulate so the real Players get what THEY want -- a profitable instability, with continued extraction of carbon "wealth" and lots of "chat rooms" wherein to conduct the manifold corrupt ions that seem to be so horribly cynically inevitable. Behind a thin screen of sonorous sound bites, over a flood of BS.
our rulers have neither the incentive or the intelligence to simply "go no harm," and because there is no "morality" in the Game, there's zero pressure to let any daylight or comity into the Playing. The killings will continue until the cows come home, in large part because "geopolitics" profits from a steady diet of conflict. Arming for present idiocy is an investment in the future of the Game...
One might imagine that the mind-linked aliens that arrived to erase all the pesky humans and scoop all the useful resources out of Planet Earth in that wonderful hopeful "Independence Day" movie, also dispensed with any kind of "privacy and freedom" as our "constitutional" mythology would hold them to be. So, too, the Borg, for you Star Trek aficionados.
Of course, you get the "freedom" from thoughtfulness and personal responsibility and morality that comes with enforced and eventually automatic and comforting Groupthink. Ask members of any megachurch or other identity-based affinity group how it works...
So, do sociologists and "political scientists" and historians who study the phenomena of repression and schism and anomic violence and identity-fueled and greed-enhanced idiocy have models that could give the rest of us some hope that there is an "arc of moderation and regularization" in places like Syria and Libya and Somalia and Ireland and Israel/Palestine (as with Hamas) and so on, letting us believe that our children might see a "lessening of conflict?" Or is the reality that the manifold drivers of the many types of violence are such a part of the nature of the beast, US, that is, that all we can expect is more of the same? Facilitated by all the sneaks and "special interests" that arm and equip and train and foster the horror?
You got a single example of that kind of "negotiated settlement" that was not the product of that exhaustion that seems to finally set in to so many "conflicts" after the requisite number of deaths and wailing and vengeance and people getting sick of "leaders" telling them they have to kill all of "them" to be able to keep their stuff and their beliefs and identities? The only tool is once again the same hammer that did the same random idiotic damage the last times it was swung...?
Sounds like those "mortar rounds" were more likely Katyusha-style rockets (of which I have some uncomfortably close personal experience), one of many "random" anomic weapons of idiot destruction, "smart" or not, "guided" or "aimed" or not. Spend any time with syriavideo.net and you will see any number of incidents of that "risible" phrase "insufficient effort to protect non-combatants." In the modern context of global 24/7 warfare, what can that possibly mean? What's up there and in more places in spite (or because?) of the Incomparable Projectable Power of Empire is "Call of Duty" meets "DoomMortalKombatDeathRace" and all these too -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversial_video_games"
There are no rules, and punctilious categorization and tsking from afar don't mean squat. The demon is out of the bottle, bigger and meaner and more voracious than ever. The actions of the guys in "the government" are indistinguishable (except for Narrative convenience) from those "Allahu Akhbar!" enthusiasts so clearly imaged in the "Syria violence" warporn available via youtube.com.
The radio is playing Bing Crosby singing "Chestnuts Roasting O'er An Open Fire." Now THERE is some cognitive dissonance for you...
It's armchair arrogance of the first order to pretend that there are "rules" or "norms" to govern conduct that our and everyone else's Players have connived at invoking out of Chaos over so many years, built into a global cartel of violence that profits from the misery of ordinary people. There must have been a reason they chose to build a pentagram as the seat of Imperial military power...
Yeah, they take care of their own. Like Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, erased from Marine Corps history for telling it like it was AND IS. And even Maj. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who got his knuckles rapped for the simulated sinking of an entire carrier battle group in a simulated war, daring to show how bankrupt(ing) and idiotic our vaunted Battlespace actually is. And how about them dudes and their families at Lejeune, dosed in their drinking water with a nice bouillabaisse of carcinogens for 30 years. http://www.tftptf.com/ And the power of the myth of Marine Corps Esprit and Superiority is such that the loyalty juices continue to flow strong.
Thank you for your service! (sucker...) Please don't bother to thank me for mine.
Gee, Joe, you are so subtle you did not even detect the responsive irony in my response to your ironic snotgram!@
Got any insider info on who those "US Citizens" were that were extracted by those gotta-get-em-into-the-action-to-protect-the-procurement-program V-22s? Not too many tourists from Keokuk in South Sudan, I would venture to guess...
And dare one ask who those endangered US citizens were, to be rescued by the unfortunate Marines in their Battlespace Tilt Rotor V-22s with their minimal armor and armament?
Indigenous coup, or anothern one of those Imperial "We are not amused" "nation building= regime change" flicks of the power-projecting finger? Anyone looked up the amount and form of "aid" to the several parts of Sudan, or the nature of the Africom tendrils/tentacles there?
When is that cherished and comforting faith in the existence of "law," or its equally mythical consort "order," going to finally evaporate in that harsh black light that is starting to illuminate the Covert Imperceptable Inconceivable?
As to those great integrated commands and participation by various services, a cynical observation might be that that was where the money and advancement were flowing -- it's not like the joint operations were actually militarily efficient, let alone "victorious" or "successful," except when it came to advancing careers and setting the stage for a whole lot of subsequent idiocy to follow.
You know, Bill, you kvetch about what you call my "rants." But no matter how long or how often you play your single-note bugle, the whole enterprise has been a fool's errand. Since when did your people "deal with the perpetrators and their enablers militarily?" The troops killed a few of them, Obama was allowed to escape, thanks to the incompetence and venality of our rulers and their generals and the idiocy of our doctrines and tactics. And it went from that not to "nation building," but just more of the same Milo Minderbinder stuff that was Vietnam -- fool's-errand patrols, finding IEDs by driving or walking over them, getting our brave troops' butts kicked because there is no way, including nuclear obliteration, to "win" asymmetric warfare, even with our expensive toys and tools and weapons. The whole notion of the Game is fatally flawed, and the only people who benefit are the SOBs who sell the $400 gasoline and XM-25 "Game Changers" and move those big blocks of greenbacks around, skimming a bit and committing every kind of fraud and corruption. Did you see that 2103 is a bumper-crop year (yet again) for opium production? And what did your Loya Jirga come up with, again? And how does anyone do "counter-terrorism" when the definition of "terrorist" keeps morphing to meet some new doctrine or short-term BS need? You really think that even 100,000 troops and another 100k "contractors" and however many special-ops you want to deploy can stop all the "terrorism," by kidnap and murder and kicking in doors and playing from "intel" that's provided by people who laugh at our idiocy and know that we will soon be slapped on the butts by the gates of the Khyber Pass? You sneer at me, all smug in your deep understanding of Conventional Risk Play, but the emperor pretty clearly is lumbering around buck-naked.
The frame you work from is like some kind of Escher pen-and-ink -- impossible to build in the real world. But it obviously satisfies some need in your soul. And because it's backed by the full faith and credit of the Empire, there's obviously no shaking it. Good on you for at least distinguishing "nation building," bad on you for trying to draw a principled distinction between "counter-insurgency" and "counter-terrorism," and it would make no difference if your distinction had even become "doctrine"-- the creep from A'stan I to A'stan II was as inevitable as nightfall, given what "we" have for a military/industrial/"security"/policy/imperial Great Ape riding our backs.
As the hippies asked about "my" war (you snidely discount my own experience and observations, I know), who's going to be the last GI to die THIS time? Will there be a "Wall" for the troops "long past review" to go and wail at? Way past time, $6 trillion past time (just THIS time), to not just try to get our troops out without too many more dead and dismembered on all sides, and still more compounding of the felonies. Time to change the whole structure of the political military social ecology. But not to worry, of course -- the thunderous, ponderous, mortal inertia and momentum and "national interests" are all aligned with your frame and narrative...
Now pick a phrase out of what I wrote and impeach away. Merry Christmas. Do our troops get cranberry sauce and stuffing with their cooked gooses this year?
There's the myths, and then there's the Deeper reality...
Too bad that when enough finally gets to be enough, the spasm of reaction almost uniformly leads to Really Ugly. With a climbing arc of misery and repression for the Most, and obscene titillation for the Few, right up to that sudden inflection in the social "curve of binding energy," and the nuclear release that follows the breaking of the momentum that holds cultures more or less together.
Billions of us have been carefully taught to be easily distractable, self-satisfying, self-gratifying consumers. Creatures with no conscience and very little consciousness. An intentional act by the Few against the welfare of the many, once again by people who will die comfortably before the crap hits the fan, or at least will live in the remaining "Elysiums" until their numbers are up...
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Great ideas. They sound very much like the ones Newt Gingrich has for dismantling what little is left of a Solonic independent judiciary in the US. Maybe you have read this stuff, which is very much in the wind:
"A Populist Assault on Judicial Independence: Newt Gingrich, Recep Tayyip Edrogan, and Benjamin Netanyahu" -- http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/a-populist-assault-on-judicial-independence-newt-gingrich-recep-tayyip-edrogan-and-benjamin-netanyahu The notion obviously has long legs, showing up not surprisingly in the blather of some less savory heads of state elsewhere. There's a lot more ugly and scary discussion if you search on "gingrich control judiciary appointments."
Who will make these momentous decisions about who will sit atop the belief structure, that "rule of law" thing, that cherished chimaerical shibboleth that is one of the few remaining myths that holds our polity together, that keeps us all from going altogether Galt? People need and want some assurance that they are protected against arbitrary power, whether it's Banksters forking the whole economy or doing a Henry "It's A Wonderful Life" Potter and stealing their homes, or "libruls" letting pot-smoking unfortunates out of overcrowded jails to make room for really bad apples.
Consider how it works in Chicago, where the judges are "elected," with periodic "retention ballots" that have removed a tiny number of sitting judges over the years, usually in orchestrated "hits" by the Machine and media, but the jurists are actually appointed by and responsive to the Machine. With advice and comment of the Bar Association, of course, which is such a representative body, isn't it?
That crony corrupt process goes up to the federal level in the 7th Circuit. Look at who appointed the vast majority of the sitting and recent judges -- Reagan, Nixon, the Bush League, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Seventh_Circuit That these people rule in favor of property over persons most of the time seems pretty clear. I was involved in cases (decades ago now) where the political motivations and rulings were disgustingly clear. The state court judges in Chicago got a little corrective from "Operation Greylord " back in the '80s, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greylord, but you can bet it has long since been back to biness as usual there. The courts have been packed with "conservatives," because those folks are organized and have strong pecuniary interests and are wonky enough to figure out how to game the system consistently in their favor.
I don't think there is any easy answer to the problems that were so glaringly apparent to the drafters of the Constitution, looking over at England in its then state. How do you ensure that humans put in positions of great power will "apply the law," particularly common law, and "Constitutional law," that grows and supposedly perfects itself by judge-made extensions, limitations and creations of legal principles and rules? And apply it to the general benefit, instead of protecting power and privilege?
Appointing or electing judges will both still result in a lot of fiscally and socially corrupt judges, whatever your politics say those terms mean. I will insist that putting some super-vetting conclave together to root out "impropriety" and ensure "orthodoxy" in the judiciary will immediately result in capture by the concentrated clout, wealth and efforts of the worst of us. It's what Gingrich and Netanyahu want, to protect their "interests?" No thanks.
Gotta respond to this remark: " There is a case wherein NSA surveillance of private communication is always warranted and should be used."
Be very careful what you wish for.
It's hard to find a non-corrupt agency, entity, individual anywhere in government, a certain amount of that being apparently inevitable, but it sure seems to me the NSA is NOT the entity you want to encourage to examine the federal judiciary. Hoover did it to enhance his power, and the NSA is his heir. The FBI can and could address outrages by the "judges" so carefully packed into the court system by decades of well-planned work by the "wrong-wingers," abetted by our pusillanimous and also largely corrupt Democrats. As an EPA enforcement attorney, I got to see a little of the workings of the US Attorney system, the Department of Justice and a number of federal judges and appellate panels. There's both the old-fashioned kind of bribery-type corruption, and the "social corruption" you refer to.
One example: the US Attorney's office in an Ohio city went after a particularly corrupt chief judge. The FBI investigated, but because the prosecution was kind of half-hearted, the judge was able to hide behind the Black Robe Curtain and his "Constitutional" protection of that Article III language about "good behavior," a pretty amorphous standard, albeit with some subsequent judicial gloss. "If you shoot at the king, be sure to kill him," and since they failed, the judge booted the US Attorney's offices out of the courthouse to a run-down office building about 5 blocks away (in freezing weather, rain and wind, a nasty and lasting vengeance).
Would you really trust the NSA, with its perks and power to protect and grow, to be gathering "intel" on even our most dishonest and corrupt judges? Not that they aren't already, along with the rest of us...
We don't sell or give weapons and other "aid" to the Ukraine. Do we? http://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/fs/2013/212989.htm (I wonder, what does " increase the Ukrainian military’s interoperability with western forces" mean, again? http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub590.pdf) Our military and State Security seem to get along pretty well with their opposite numbers in Egypt.
Serious Players say "we need to keep sending weapons and money to the corrupt military of Egypt so we can maintain leverage and wink-wink nudge them toward democracy, and continue our other policies in the ME. And besides, Israel told us to. And after all, it all comes back to US firms who provide jobs and don't pay taxes." Not so long ago, one of our pundits insisted that Obama was cutting off aid to Egypt; that proved to be wrong of course.
For context:
On that "interests" thing: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/10/us-egypt-military-aid.html#
From the woodshed: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-egypt-20140103,0,1396978.story#axzz2rXItbOcV
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-bandow/support-for-egypts-new-ph_b_4658639.html
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/egyptsource/congress-and-the-reluctance-to-stop-us-aid-to-egypt
And as to what attentive members of Congress might be thinking: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33003.pdf
This is how you make a better world?
That presumes the NeoCons will take a lesson from anything, or have any interest in doing other than what they continue to do. One wonders what the geniuses who make up the NeoCon cognoscenti will be up to in coming months...
http://crooksandliars.com/jason-sigger/neocon-delights-over-egypt
The random-idiot violence mostly kills and maims ordinary people and sometimes "the troops," not the kleptocrats with the chests full of self-awarded ribbons and their hands in everyone else's pockets...
Let us not forget that the whole thing is perfectly legal. Some say. Effective? Depends on the definition you choose.
Does political diversity equate to the chance that there can be an electoral change of government, and/or redistribution of what the military-"capitalists" have accumulated?
I wonder if "the US" is wise and non-suicidal enough not to take any military "response" or launch overt or covert attacks that might lead to the kind of outcome that occurred in the last big War Game to simulate how our clumsy, massive, un-agile, doctrine-ridden military structure "manages conflict." http://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/01/14/millennium-challenge/ By the same author, here's another speculation on why our enormous and grotesque and massively expensive war machine, with its crappy Return on Investment by "wars won" or "national interests served," should not be turned loose again (barring a major and unlikely doctrinal change and a whole new way of operating) half way around the planet or even closer to home:
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/09/18/4gw-insurgency-55320/
As I recall, the Joint Chiefs did not think attacking the Assad thing by blowing up random stuff in Damascus was a wise move, or likely to conserve their huge war machine.
I don't know about you folks, but language like this gives me the old "duck and cover" willies:
The world’s richest, most powerful nation remains locked in fear about tiny numbers of insurgents fighting in the poorest regions of the world. We spend on our military many times the sum of all likely enemy nations combined. We spend on counter-terrorism a fantastic multiple (probably thousands) more than spent by every terrorist group on the planet. Something is wrong with this picture.
This madness suggests the time has come for change. The wheel of history has rolled to a new era in which the US can and should return to its non-interventionist roots, a defensive strategy.
1. We can help allies with money, aid, advice, and other forms of support. Strong governments almost always defeat insurgents (see section 6 below).
2. We can promise State attackers that they will receive devastating retaliatory strikes. Game theory suggests that “tit for tat” is one of the most effective tactics. Assured Destruction, extended over the full range of war, nuclear to conventional, probably will prove to be the winning tactic in the 21st century (as it was in the 20th after WW2).
3. Terrorists without clear State sponsorship — such as the fearsome anarchists, the less effective but still deadly leftists groups of the 1960s and 1970s, and today’s jihadists — provide few targets for retaliation, but can be dealt with by police and security agencies. As all of these groups learned to their sorrow (including the real al Qaeda, not the nationalist insurgencies using that brand name).
Particularly #2. For the armchair militarists and Serious Players, there's a whole bibliography of Really Smart Speculation And Advice on How To Win. Right here: http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/09/18/4gw-insurgency-55320/
Not what I said, of course. My remark was directed to the claim that what happened was, in your words, a "Russian/Syrian capitulation on chemical weapons." As I recall, you were all ready to start throwing Tomahawks at "Syria" not so long ago to avenge the breach, by you were just sure it was Assad, of that universal prohibition on chemical weapons use that the US has actually been pretty invested and involved in at various recent points (e.g., Iraq vs. Iran), and then worked hard to frame it that Obama was actually so smart that his posturing and near-WAR caused the current state of affairs. Are you acknowledging you are inside the Administration, or claiming that you can read the minds of "everybody" inside and out?
Waiting for the responsive and indirect spin, and your next condescending, belittling and occasionally subtle ad hominem...
Many people, outside the Administration of course, have a different view of the pitch that Obama planned the current outcome of the bombing-to-validate-the-universal-horror-of-chemical-warfare operation that so very nearly got triggered, something other than a "Russian/Syrian capitulation on chemical weapons"/Great Victory for Our President:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/vlad_putin_to_obamas_rescue.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/russia-suggests-syria-surrender-chemical-weapons-avoid-attack-article-1.1449839 and lots more of the same.
Glad to know the Administration continues "support" for the "FSA faction of the rebellion." I'm sure that is helping reach Peace In Our Time. Like putting "support" into THIS mix:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/10/syria-al-nusra-front-jihadi
Any examples, (maybe the Tamil situation? WW II is a case sui generis), where one side was able to impose its will on the battlefield and make it stick in a way that leads to long-term stability and governance by comity instead of force? Working examples of the suggested approach might be persuasive. All depends, of course, on what all the players in the infinitely complicated Game have in mind as the end point of the round. The Syrian conflict seems to me no more stalemated than the Western Front in 1917. It's attrition, and screw the civilian non-combatants and their puny unaligned lives... And exhaustion of both sides seems to be the catalyst for that tenuous state of "peace" breaking out.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Too bad the ordinary people of the places we insist on personifying as "Turkey" and "Syria" don't have a forum in which to speak, to vent, their thoughts and fears and wishes about the crap their myopic rulers and militaristas and State Security types are bringing down on them...
Oh, look! The US Army/AFRICOM is on the case, in its latest $4 billion-in-changeover costs camouflage uniforms! http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/04/17/army-leadership-set-to-pick-new-cammo-pattern.html What could possibly go wrong with that, as part of the bigger plans the US military has for running everything under the aegis of responding to the "threats" of human-induced climate change? And how about that idea of crop insurance, with attendant fees to the risk-pool managers, to help the Backward get closer to Food Security? That will help ameliorate drought and burgeoning population and adherence to traditional farming and cooking practices, in places where tribal antipathies and survival angst are hot and heavy, just HOW, again?
Wikileaks responsible "as well?" Diffusing responsibility for how this ops was planned and conducted?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vaccination-campaign-endangers-us-all/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/cia-vaccine-ruse-in-pakistan-may-have-harmed-polio-fight.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
" Local anger was at its height last July, when The Guardian exposed the C.I.A. connection. It was confirmed by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta in January. Public outrage flared again in May after Dr. Afridi was sentenced. A coalition of aid groups protested to David Petraeus, the director of Central Intelligence.
“There could hardly have been a more stupid venture, and there was bound to be a backlash, especially for polio,” said Dr. Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, a vaccine specialist at Aga Khan University in Pakistan.
Dr. Bhutta, who also heads the government’s research ethics committee, said both Dr. Afridi and the C.I.A. could be “sued or worse.” To establish their credibility, Dr. Afridi’s teams vaccinated whole neighborhoods in Abbottabad without permission.
The setback was just one more in the endless war on polio, which was supposed to have been over by 2000. The fight is against the last 1 percent of cases. Paralysis cases worldwide have shrunk from 350,000 in the 1980s to about 600 now. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/cia-vaccine-ruse-in-pakistan-may-have-harmed-polio-fight.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Yeah, gotta get those plumbers to work plugging those leaks. forget about stupid POLIO, we got a terrorist to get! One has to grimace at the "more stupid" epithet for the CIA and its operatives. Pursuing "the national interest," with all subtlety and guile...
So hard to tell when people are being honest behind their avatars, but here are some very useful hints for parsing the words and syntax for insincerity, etc.:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/13/1223376/-If-you-want-to-remain-blissfully-naive-do-not-read-this-post
Glad jeppen is comfortable with Bidness As Usual. Others running the numbers seriously disagree:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/29/rajendra-pachauri-climate-warning-copenhagen
http://www.context.org/iclib/ic26/burrowes/
jeppen may be old enough and comfortable enough and secure enough to want to preserve his/her niche while yet he/she lives, but my grandkids and extended family are already feeling the cold breath of self-gratifying, iFirst consumption. "Apres moi le deluge" ain't a particularly admirable ethos, especially when coupled with smug observations about how the "middle" is closing the gap with the poor (by getting poorer) as proof of "all is well."
And Soros, "the man who broke the Bank of England," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros, who hardly qualifies as a Born Again Liberal, even if he does some bits of anti-tyrannical stuff, is what fraction of the players in the "We OWN the rest of you" crowd? Compared, say, to the Kochs? True alignments and interests begin to appear, as the razor cuts closer to the nociceptors, the place where torture, er, "not-illegal harsh interrogation," does its work... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor
Is Rob wrong, Bill? Seriously -- that would really seem to be bad policy.
Re CIA misdeeds and your "protecting YOUR Narrative" impeachment of "no evidence," in my little post, for CIA idiocy:
http://pw1.netcom.com/~ncoic/cia_info.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6229750.stm
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2009/04/22/192651/ignatius-we-must-cover-up-cia-misdeeds-to-ensure-the-viability-of-future-misdeeds/
Don't the Security State types wish they could strangle any exposure of what they are so often up to? How's the Syria thing working out?
Among hundreds of other entries documenting a long sordid stupid history of Sneaky-Pete idiocy, right down to dosing Castro's cigars so his beard would fall out, Bay of Pigs, many "democratically elected" and dictators-uncooperative-with-Empire governments overthrown... Was all that "in the national interest?" If so, how is "the national interest" defined? "Whatever we happen to do this week"?
Gotta try to get the last word in. Valerie Plame? And case officers are always in danger of being exposed. Not only by people trying to let the rest of us know what idiocy the CIA and such agencies are up to, but of course by the other Players in SpyVs.Spy, that game they sign up for - for all kinds of reasons. These are not-nice people, and there's more than enough evidence that what they do is often not actually "in the national interest," as ordinary people understand that esoteric phrase, no matter how tightly wrapped in the Flag. There is nothing sacred or ultimately meaningful about what our sneaky-petes do -- it's just part of one of the many bad bits of human behavior.
And the support for "the Left" supposedly "likes themselves a dictator," again? And which dictators do they likes, that "dictates their wishes?" And there apparently is a category in mind of "the liberal left inhabiting blogs such as these" who likes "Left" dictators -- can you name some names of inhabitants, give examples, maybe?
Just almost exactly like the Right, though Right dics tend to be a lot more vicious and murderous. Stalin was not on the Left, by the way, nor Mao, and the Pol Pots are just the most successful of sociopaths and no respecters of political alignment. Basically, humans are stupid creatures, and can be led and bled by pretty much any old Pied Piper. But keep the tribal disdains alive; that's how it works.
"Executive orders are a second-best, temporary solution when you can’t actually win on the issue. " Maybe that's why those Executive Orders and NS Findings and other obscure exercises of Imperial-Presidential authority are used by folks like Nixon and Reagan and the Bush League and now Obama (and even Clinton and Kennedy) to "set policy" and activate agencies in areas where if transparency and critical thinking were present, the Rulers "could not actually win on the issue." And of course given the realities of captive legislature and gridlock and the ignoring of the general welfare by the Imperium, saying the remedy lies in moving an issue through Congress is a little disingenuous. For context:
https://www.votetocracy.com/blog/79/understanding-executive-orders-and-the-powers-they-grant
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2009/01/ten_to_toss.html
http://americanfreepress.net/?p=5745
I bet there are a lot of Executive Orders that Joe and others think are just peachy. Since those orders effectuate unpopular and unlegislatable policies they agree with. Like maybe the New Deal, about the foundations of which some concern was expressed above? Or the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Babblespace and its operations?
If Joe is talking about Wickard v. Filburn, I guess my old legal brain can't quite see the parallel and inference he is trying to make in his just-so-you-know "scare sentence." Is the implication that people who advocate ending the prohibition idiocy on pot are attacking the long-standing reading of the Commerce Clause, the foundation of the federal regulatory apparatus? The pot prohibition, with its rich and corrupt history, is a lot closer to the 18th-21st Amendment set of issues and social disorganization than limiting how many acres of wheat a farmer could plant for home consumption in 1942, in a day of heavy federal price and production controls. And lookie here! Marriage among gays used to be illegal, too! And still is in a lot of places.
I personally am a lot more worried about what our Supremes are doing with their version of judicial activism, telling us that corporations are persons for Bill of Rights purposes. Can't hardly wait for their collective take on the NSA and the 4th and 5th Amendments (they Hoover up trade secrets and business-confidential and intellectual-property stuff too, to do what with, again? Share with corps and foreign governments?)... And a lot of other "reactionary right-winger" stuff.
Sounds like more subtle pitching for leaving the Administration to do whatever it wants. Once again.
Remember, under "rule of law" as practiced in the US Empire, we only look forward. Ask Dick Cheney and George Bush and a lot of others how it works... Pardons and commuted sentences are only for "connected" criminal financiers, like I. Mark Rich, and Good Buddies and CIA-agent-outing political operatives like I. Lewis Libby.
Hmmm -- do any of the persons prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated for producing medical marijuana have "I." for a first name?
Why does that sound so very familiar? Oh yeah, it's just like the Restatement of the Rule of Executive Law in the US Empire, reformulated by a long committee of judicious people like Richard Milhous "I am not a crook" Nixon to Lyndon Baines "I'm the only president you've got" Johnson, to John "the Constitution is a quaint document" Yoo to the people who populate the West Wing in this and prior administrations -- and all the "agencies" that look a lot more like what "the law" calls PRINCIPALS ("als,' not "les"), as in "We are bigger and badder than you, we got the guns and the eyes'n'ears and a steady flood of your wealth to do what we please."
For fun reading, http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/09/16/739/76328/waronterror/John-Yoo-s-Falsehoods
It was only a piece of tape on a door lock at the Watergate Complex, and the persistence of "country lawyers" like Sam Ervin and a few actually decent people in the Imperial capital, that stood in the way of a lot more really rotten crap and crushing of the rights we believe we have.
I was just reminded of how frail the protections we think we have against the 1984 treatment really are, running across this little vignette from the life of a fairly conservative guy, Jack Anderson, who dared to expose some of J. Edgar Hooveritallup's very dirty linen:
"Targeted
In 1972, Anderson was the target of an assassination plot in the White House. Two Nixon administration conspirators admitted under oath they plotted to poison Anderson on orders from senior White House aide Charles Colson.[15] White House "plumbers" G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt met with a CIA operative to discuss the possibilities, including drugging Anderson with LSD, poisoning his aspirin bottle, or staging a fatal mugging.[16] The plot was aborted when the plotters were arrested for the Watergate break-in. Nixon had long been angry with Anderson, blaming Anderson's election eve story about a secret loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother[17] for Nixon's loss of the 1960 presidential election. Anderson remained a target of FBI investigation after his death; in February 2006, the FBI contacted Anderson's family to obtain his files and search for classified documents.[18] The FBI agents claimed to be looking for documents pertaining to American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as part of an espionage investigation. In November 2006, the FBI quietly gave up its pursuit of the archive. The archive, as revealed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, contains Anderson's CIA file, along with information about prominent public figures such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Dodd, and J. Edgar Hoover." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_%28columnist%29
Reassure us. Bill and Joe, about how there's nothing to worry about. Sleep well, Professor -- I hope your friends inside the beast are still looking out for you. And Snowden? Hey, they were only emoting or joking when they were saying they would happily kill him for shaking up their evil, ugly little scam... Right?
When "the military," all medals and ribbons and innate corruption, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/18/us-usa-pentagon-waste-specialreport-idUSBRE9AH0LQ20131118, creates and constitutes itself to run things, holding the weapons and owning the nation's business directly or obscurely, there's plenty of Serious Historical Evidence of terminally idiotic we are. What's shaking in Egypt is just one current example, where the "warriors" grab all the goodies. Another is Myanmar, and North Korea, and looking back, you have the colonization of Australia. Read a little about the New South Wales Corps here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_Wales_Corps. The insinuation of the US military thingie into all those countries, which apologists tell us is mostly just about "training," as in " In most cases, they are on training missions, working with local forces to train them up on techniques [to do WHAT? School of the Americas/WHINSEC 'techniques?', http://www.soaw.org/soaw/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&id=8&Itemid=2 ? ], as well as to establish a degree of interoperability should it be necessary in the future." Read it closely: what does that bland text try to obscure? The US system is sending hundreds of billions in military and "other" monies to, e.g., Egypt, a place under the military-commercial thumb of a modern New South Wales Corps, and to many other out-of-the-way places, "to establish a degree of interoperability should it be necessary in the future." The test of "necessity" being what, again? Keeping the complaining ordinary citizens under control? And under the planning documents the Pentagram is generating, it very clearly is the goal to have "the military" micromanaging social and political activities all over the place, with the usual unaccountable and idiotic outcomes. For a statement of the huge scope of the US military's hubris and ambition, lookie here: http://climateandsecurity.org/2012/01/25/defense-science-board-report-on-climate-change-and-security-list-of-recommendations/
"Shame and danger"? Yeah, there are reasons to be afraid, Egyptian reasons, and American too.
Speaking of honest conservatism, there is this from Carl Schurz, first German-born American senator: "The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, “My country, right or wrong.” In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/15/1216365/--My-Country-Right-or-Wrong Schurz, G_d bless him, was a Republican. Of course only the my-country-r-or-w bit is usually espoused. Another literary observation on the subject: “But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.” http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/maturin
Dare one ask what the national interest is in insinuating the US military presence into pretty much every corner of the planet? Are the threats so immanent and/or imminent, or is this just a bad habit grown very large and expensive? And as with the NSA's justification for mass peeping, are there actual non-secret incidents of success in improving our national and international security by this steady expansion of the military bootprint, in "training those other local forces up on (unspecified) techniques?" Since there is actually some history of blowback and de-stabilization and crushing of rights and suchlike from such involvements? Though one would of course want to argue down their significance, one by one, as an index of a questionable, expensive imperial approach to whatever it is we are supposed to be doing in the Global Interoperable Network-centric Battlespace.
Denial, and/or "studied ignorance." Coupled with deniability. Added to the idiocy that is our electoral system, in our post-even-pretextual-democratic Republic. The Game needs funding and Troops and "support" of other types, all of which depend on looking at everything through a very narrow slit. In politics, facts, writ large, are the enemy of "Victory."
If "Israel" is really concerned about its citizens' safety, a concern that only appears to extend to a fraction of those who are still considered citizens, maybe "Israel" could adopt some different "policies." Or maybe, as with annexation by "settlement," that train, loaded with weapons of all sizes and types, has left the station and driven by Likudniks, on its way to an appointment with a rotted trestle over a very deep gorge...
200-400 nuclear weapons, a long history of obnoxious espionage against the US, to the point that the heads of our intelligence agencies have said Israel is the greatest intelligence threat to the US? Serial and parallel "I don't care" attacks on unarmed ships at sea, on neighboring nations and even US naval ships (remember the USS Liberty?). All that weaponry and bigotry under the control of people who seem to have a death wish to go with unbridled corruption? Not, unfortunately, a "thuggish regime" that can be ignored. Too bad our local politics and religiosity at home seem to make it impossible for our empire to "do the right thing," or even figure out what that is...
And for grand geopolitical reasons, or bureaucratic momentum, or to keep feeding a few nominally US corporations with "contracts," US dollars in the billions continue to go to the military/business elite of Egypt. Oh well...
Treason as a crime in the US is defined at 18 USC Section 2381. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381 The language is a little different than in Article III. Here's a scholarly review on the uses of treason charges: "Treason in the Age of Terrorism: An Explanation and Evaluation of Treason’s Return in Democratic States."
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/jotl/manage/wp-content/uploads/Eichensehr-final-crv2.pdf
But of course that conclusion has nothing to do with why the NSA and its coordinate enterprises are doing what they are doing.
Thank you, Cagri Bey, for your insights and observations. Can I play off two of them? First, this: "We try too hard to categorize countries and make models out of them." So true, in so many ways. From the apparently necessary reduction, for analysis and debate, of places with millions of citizens, or at least inhabitants, with their infinite institutions and interests and liaisons and histories, to single personified unitary points, as in "Turkey does this" or "Israel does that" or "the US believes..." So nicely hides the complexities, and helps activate and manipulate atavistic and tribal responses.
You also so rightly observe:
"Turkish middle class is under attack by a populist tyrant who will feed the poor with bread, circuses and propaganda while at the same time enriching himself and his ministers."
That does an excellent and appropriate job of modeling not only the current Turkish ruling elite and their behavior and "interests," but that of most nations. Especially the ones that bang drums and blow trumpets and thump their chests shouting that they are "democracies," of ANY kind.
Kleptocracy is the operative model in most of the world, conducted behind and maintained by various overlays. There's a tolerable, maybe even inescapably necessary, amount of baksheesh and "slack" in human cultures, but for some reason those who concentrate on gathering power and ruling have no notion of when to stop filching and stealing and bleeding the rest of us. There is apparently no "enough." Cancer cells have the same properties...
There are words from the US troops that did what was done in Fallujah some 10 years ago. For a larger set, look up "Marines talk about Fallujah. Here's one example, from WJCT, Jacksonville, FL:
"Fallujah Veterans Ask Hard Questions About Their Sacrifices"
"...First, the Iraqis didn't ask to be invaded by us. We invaded and occupied badly," he says. "But on top of that, I'm angry our policy never matched the sacrifice, especially of the Marine Corps."
Weston says there's no clear American solution now, despite real achievement in the past: For a time, Fallujah was stable.
"I don't think it was all in vain," Weston says. "But in the big picture, the American legacy there is now being subsumed by more violence."
Troops who fought there knew Iraq always had a good chance of returning to violence. Former Marine Eliot Ackerman, who received a Silver Star for valor in Fallujah, says his Marines talked about liberating Iraq — but only rarely.
"We were fighting for the same reason guys have always fought: for each other, and for a sense that we were bound to an obligation to serve our country at a time of war," he says.
http://news.wjct.org/post/fallujah-veterans-ask-hard-questions-about-their-sacrifices
Also from today's WJCT news, there's this poignant little story:
"Advocates Hope To Identify Jacksonville's Most Vulnerable With Homeless Survey"
http://news.wjct.org/post/advocates-hope-identify-jacksonvilles-most-vulnerable-homeless-survey
What a surprise that so many of them are military veterans, hence the VA effort to right some of the shame of the nation for using these people (I have a vested interest, as one of them who got to take part in the 1968 Tet festivities) and kicking them to the curb... Drones and battle robots don't have nightmares. At their current level of intellectual development and autonomy, at least.
...and in other news, The Surges Worked!
On the news shows this morning, the President, in obliquely responding to his "good friend" Gates's book, stated that "we got the policy right" in Afghanistan. http://www.mediaite.com/online/president-obama-responds-to-gates-criticism-we-got-the-policy-right/ And in the departure from Iraq, and of course how that whole exercise was conducted? He's apparently not making that claim. I guess it all depends on how you define the policy and state the goals and define the results, post hoc and after spin.
All the pundits offer, of course, that if their advice had only been followed, All Would Be Well. Looks like Dr. Cole had the right detailed advice. Too bad we have not learned that for all our vaunted military power, the ability to deliver big explosions or lots of boots or special-ops interventions to random parts of the planet, for all the ability to "start something," we have neither the wisdom nor the ability to "finish it." Here's the first problem: "The misuse of American might, and the price it pays -- The United States no longer knows how to win wars, but it continues to start them."
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bacevich-failed-wars-20140112,0,5920178.story#ixzz2qNXGBJ7u
Another part is this: For all the Smarts applied to the Problem, there may be no way to "win" a 4th generation war. http://navsci.berkeley.edu/ma20/Class%2010/Class%2014.%20%204GW_Primer.pdf
So "Fallujah," and "Wardak," and "I Corps" and other great managed campaigns appear to be nothing but profitable but foolish exercises in futility, arranged by people immune to the consequences on the ground both during the campaign and during the fallout and blowback.
As to the complicated, essentially infinite and unaccountable and unpredictable interactions (even simpler problems have no path to resolution, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem) that result in War, including Iraq, here's some MIT thoughts: http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/
And for fun reading, this is worth a few minutes: https://www.traditionalright.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FMFM-1A-revised-17-Jul-09.pdf
If you look at the details, maybe not so brilliant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War#Egypt.27s_trapped_Third_Army
And in any event, does that give him a pass for the rest of his deeds, misdeeds and nonfeasance?
Any thoughts on how "WE" can "protect our political and intellectual classes?" Since there are so many rewards, and punishments, for anyone hewing to, or deviating from, the Line?
This MCHM spill, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-methylcyclohexanemethanol, is an event, one that will fade in our minds pretty quick. Mining has some long-term gifts, beyond the ones the Professor highlights from coal burning.
Acid mine drainage -- http://energy.usgs.gov/HealthEnvironment/EcosystemsHumanHealth/AcidMineDrainage.aspx
All the stuff that goes with turning mountaintops into Federal Interstates: http://ohvec.org/issues/mountaintop_removal/articles/health/, connected to http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/will-your-tax-dollars-fund-highway-s-mountaintop-removal-coal-mine-disguise.html
Just for starters. or end-ers.
Those picayune considerations never seemed to bother "the United States" before, when either some scam, strategy of "national interest" seemed to support the notion. Iran-Contra? Angola? how many others?
So, is that, by extension, proof of "competence?"
For a little context, there's this on the current US presence in Iraq:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/19/u-s-will-slash-its-presence-in-iraq-by-two-thirds-this-year/
So, does ANYONE actually act as the Decider? Or does the "complicated nature" let everyone off the hook? It's probably just me, but I can't think of anyone recently in the whole chain of command, especially at the top, that ever says anything other than "If mistakes might have been made it would be regretted..." Seems like the first bullet in the planning document is "Diffuse responsibility, lay groundwork for claiming credit if successful..."
Though I'll give you that given the history of the fate of a lot of CinCs in a lot of other Empires would give a person with a knowledge of that history and stuff like the "Business Plot" some pause in doing any "deciding."
Yah, it had nothing to do with Supreme Court appointments and decisions, or the effect of money and mental manipulations, or vote-stealing, or a bunch of other stuff including, and this is my own observation of course, that Gore just did not really want to be president of all the planet... There's nearly infinity posts and comments on the 'net blaming FLORIDUH, my residence, for the outcome of the election. Nader did not help, of course, a vain sally in several senses, but then neither did Ross Perot from the other side of the Overton Window... Not that we have had an actual "Choice, Not An Echo," for many decades... http://www.amazon.com/Choice-Not-Echo-American-Presidents/dp/0686114868
Is what Nader wrote here in any way wrong? And of course that "split vote" was the WHOLE reason Bush inherited the presidency, right? How well has the two-party (sic) system done in steering the ship of state, in directing the direction of our Empire, again? (And no, I didn't vote for Nader, I felt as you do at the time, or Bush either.)
Extra points for false equivalences and logic-chopping misdirection in such a short post. Any debate that our Empire "intervenes" all over the place? Any proof that those "interventions," from invasion to sneaky-pete destabilization and suborned regime change, have made the net world situation any better over time? Or even advanced "our national interests," other than some careers and the bottom lines of a few smallish sectors of the economy? And yes, I know the argument, often presented by pre-schoolers, that "Everyone else is doing it," and "If we don't do it, somebody else will," and "Igor did it first." And of course the perennial "It's always been this way," coupled to the equally idiotic "That's the way the Game is played." The current state of the world, political, economic and oops! environmental, matched up with "what could be," kind of belies the "virtue" of all those arguments. By the way, "Paws on" by empires and sneaky-petes was what produced "Afghanistan in the 1990s," along with a lot of other "situations." How'd THAT work?
All one usually has to do is wait. And keep the slimy "policy" MIC-SEC paws off. And yes, it will be messy, but as you repeatedly point out about our own nation's messy "democratization", eventually SOMETHING settles out, however meta-stable. It's the muscular Righteous Interventionist Exceptionalists and their covert agendas that get us all into such trouble.
Actually, all I ask is that the "experts" have something more than a store of deep and detailed and "knowledgeable" involvement in prior bad acts, something other than a career-long fundamental world view that's postulated on More Of The Same, and actual evidence of skills at actually making situations calmer, better, safer, healthier, rather than detailed, complex, interlocking abilities for loading up the racks with more weapons, more dogma, more instability in service of short-term gains for one parasitic part of our political economy at the expense of the general welfare and species survival. Our system does not seem to select for those better qualities, for some reason. Excising people with language skills and understanding of the culture "we" were about to invade would be the last thing I would want to do. I still have my little comic book the Army gave me when I got to Tan Son Nhut in 1967, telling me all I supposedly needed to know about the people, culture, customs, history and language of Vietnam. Thanks for the gratuitous and inapposite sneer, however.
"He carried out the instructions of his superiors." Well allrighty then. Eichman carried out the instructions of his superiors. Not exactly a complete defense, hey?
And this kind of ignores and papers over how "policy," meaning the behavior and motions of the acting entity, gets made: "Weasels" and Procurement Commands and other elements of the Imperial structure not only inform the High Command on the way to overt or covert "policy" signoffs, and draft and front-load and log-roll the memos and situation documents and stuff, they often run their own operations that winkwinknudgeknowwhatImean are right in the guts of the whole "plausible deniability" scam. And then, often, like Ollie North and Gates and the folks who ordered the killings at places like My Lai and the fun'n'games at Abu Ghraib, skate off into the sunset, often, one might say Generally, with "careers" and/or at least comfortable retirements intact. Because "legal," or at least whitewasheable, or prosecutorial-discretionable, or "we have to look only forward" escapable.
What are Petraeus and McChrystal doing these days, again?
http://swampland.time.com/2013/11/08/the-petraeus-scandal-one-year-later-where-are-they-now/ Nailed for extramarital whooptedoo, not other defalcations.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/07/23/stanley-mcchrystal-todd-bradley/ Whattaguy! (Would anyone recognize the subject of this story as the same person? http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/06/23/us-afghanistan-idUSTRE65K4W220100623 ) And how about the slam-dunk PR job his command did on the idiot death of Pat Tillman? http://www.thenation.com/article/mcchrystals-pat-tillman-connection#
This Administration, and others of course, along with a whole lot of businesses that saddle themselves with similar creatures, apparently believe that "hiring expertise" is the touchstone for "success" and "victory." "Expert" at what, again? J. Edgar Hoover and Wild Bill Donovan were "experts," and so are Timmy Geithner and Rahm Emanuel (and there are of course a lot more poignant examples that don't leap to mind), and a whole raft of expert-at-Golden-Handshake-and-Parachute-and-Compensation-Committee CEOs, and of course insiders like Gates.
Re Joe's supposed point,
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/05/spai-m08.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/spain-rules-out-more-troops-to-afghanistan/10909
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/03/spain-withdraws-troops-from-military-base-in-afghanistan-2589358.html
Same story for Portugal (this is just the first entry from google) http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0311a/copyright/portugaltroopsiraq.html
Yah, those former colonial empires are sure sending their militaries to our own Imperial dance-offs. Hundreds of troops, wise enough to get out quick after seeing where the "UN Force" was headed. I like the one piece that lists the last S anish trooper to die. Look forward to the name of "our" terminal casualty, sorrow in advance for his or her loved ones... And what percent of the economies of Spain and Portugal go to their militaries, again? Oh, we must remember that the US provides their "security," right? and arm-twists them into sending troops to legitimate the "UN" activities?
Some people just never met an Empire they could resist apologizing for.
Context for Spanish electrical generation and consumption:
http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=sp
Some trend info:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/spain/energy-imports-net-percent-of-energy-use-wb-data.html
The taxpayers AND RATEPAYERS are not revolting about the current state of drain on national wealth from subsidies to nuclear and carbon-fueled monopolies. Or from losing what, a quarter of the national budget to the entire Global War-Militarize Everything monster. Or all the other subsidies to bidness built into the budget and tax code.
Can we sign you up for a nice 100-kilo package of high level radioactive powerplant waste while we're at it, or is that just FUTURE taxpayers' problem?
In our "capitalist" world, everything is priced, profit must be added, "privatizing" is the idiot theme, and so NOTHING is cost-free. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics adds its costs, along with the inevitable levies of Mr. Murphy. But we know what bidness as usual is doing to the planet and our (among other) species, for the profitable benefit (cost- and consequence-free) of the very few who get to die in lavish comfort before the poop hits the fan.
Seems to me the burden of proof is on those who think Fukushima is just a once-in-a-lifetime aberration, fixable by money and dilution and time, rather than indicative of what high-risk subsidized "engineering" like nuke plants seem inevitably to produce. How many bullets dodged at nuke plants all over the planet, every year?
But I know this is as much a matter of identity and faith as anything, just like which way the toilet paper roll goes on the holder.
So much depends on a red wheelbarrow, and the peripheral vision of a plant operator human, and LUCK...
To add context to the complexity, here's some advice to Obama to "think strategically" about the monetary benefits of doing KXL:
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/25/canada-keystone/
Keystone's proponents and profiteers have been busy, of course. http://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/senator-obama-stop-stalling-keystone-xl-pipeline Whether or not Obama signs off on KXL, what's he gonna do about the near-apparent-inevitability that MONEY will end up stripping the landscape, cooking that stuff and getting it to "China?"
Good place to be, considering what the Security State considers its most dangerous enemies to be "the middle class," defined to include anyone not in the oligarchy:
"Popular uprisings in the home territories."
http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com/articles/strat_trends_23jan07.pdf
A cynical take on said report, which has US analogues:
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=20454.0
Yeah, that's the UK, but how much distance does there appear to be between their Stasi and OURS? Folks who read the "Energy Bulletin" get this advice on the DCDC's publication: "A fascinating 91-page document that probably represents some of the best thinking by the global elite. Below are a few selections that might be of particular interest to Energy Bulletin readers."
http://www2.energybulletin.net/node/26566
They can see you there, under your bed... There is no place to hide...
Mr. Engelhardt must be getting close to some home truths when Joe and Bill find it advisable to double-team him on behalf of the Empire's forces and attempt to so heartily mis-characterize the import of his writing.
Despite the apologists' straw man, Engelhardt never said the whole out-of-control, over-the-top Church Of The Sacred Security-tization Of Everything is just about "stopping al Quaeda," though he rightly points out that the huge machine that eats ever more of our resources and "rights" can't even manage to do that -- quite the opposite -- or to "win" any 4th Generation conflicts. And points out that the actions of a machine that grinds without any substantial mission except self-extension and self-aggrandizement and self-justification ain't about security (whatever that means), any more, other than job security for its acolytes and high priests and agents of wealth transfer.
Belying the snark from the apologist side, Mr. Engelhardt knows darn well, from years of perusing the budgets and visible documentation of the military-industrial-state-security apparatus, just what (as much as anyone can know, given the fraud and fake bookkeeping and unauditability of the "enterprise") that trillion or more bucks a year goes for, and how many trillions have gone to "wars" and been sunk in materiel and "bases." He knows what carrier groups are tasked to do (other than provide jobs to favored states and contractors and a place for the ever-increasing number of admirals to hang their flags) and that pert of the momentum for funding and fielding such wasting "assets" is very clearly linked by proponents to "fighting al Quaeda." His point is that we the people are getting pretty close to ZERO "security" benefits from our "investment" in not only the holy relics of the Cold War (the ICBMs and subs and "long range bombers" and the elements of our cancerous State Security apparatus) and cohorts of carrier groups and boodles of "bases" that replicate suburbia behind walls and wire, and feckless F-series aircraft whose principal mission, per the pitches made to Congress to continue funding the huge inevitable overruns, is to "provide good middle class jobs," but of the crap we ordinary people are now made to fund in the name of "security." Basically, welfare for a favored and dangerous-to-us caste, from people who happily kill off unemployment compensation and medical care and food stamps to "others," and would default on Social Security obligations and military pensions and VA benefits if they dared.
And to paraphrase Bill's disingenuous put-down, if ordinary people were able to demand an accounting from the Secret Squirrels behind the "Top Secret" stamps, they might reasonably expect he following: " In other words, the US military establishment and Congress would have had to put some thought into matching U.S. military and naval assets with REAL U.S. responsibilities, the ones the Constitution identified and not the "cloud" inflated and floated by the NSS. Judging from this and past fiascoes and current waste and idiocy, and the investments the NSS has in continuing and growing the playing field of the Game, that is something we probably will not see." And maybe the people who pay for it, in so many ways like the drain on the "civilian" economy, might demand some major changes in the Game itself...
OOOOOoohhhhh..... Bewaaaare the Chiiineeeeeese...er, Iraaaaaniaaans... er, Fennnwiiickiaaaaaans...
Hey, Professor, this post sure brought out some apologists and True Believers. Do they monitor the 'net for posts that might threaten their perfect womb? And of course the Obamites, he's naught but a figurehead in any event, over the whole Imperial monster, have done nothing to rein in or convert to plowshares or PV panels all that wealth that's flooding into Contractorland to feed the Great Global IdioticInternetworked Inoperable Battlespace thingie and its actions-without-consequences-or-apparently-much-informed-thought... I like the "what else could he have done?" notion, and the "we have no one to blame but ourselves" talking-point bullet... And don't let us "anger" our wealthy rulers by "pursuing wealth-redistribution policies," obscuring that the whole course of political economics in the US for many decades has been exactly that: redistributing wealth from the poorest and least lobby-protected to the richest and most cancerous... All, of course, "legally," that meaningless fraudulent fig leaf...
The waste can't be safely disposed of, but the few who profit from nuclear utility monopolies and other scams can tie a nice bow on the cannisters and piles and leave them for our offspring to "fix." Just like so many other bags of poop excreted by externality-exempt kleptocrats who have suckered and back-doored us into the current set of messes.
Here's a nice little explication of one ugly phenomenon that is a big part of the reason the Empire gains steam so easily:
"Patriotism: Signs of Saturation"
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/patriotism_signs_of_saturation_20140103
But all of this is just the lower orders grumbling about the natural way of things... Right? Suck it up, Trooper, and keep marching...
If you are really curious, sir, here are some examples:
"I am sorry for the role I played in Fallujah"
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/22/fallujah-us-marine-iraq
"Wall Street's Wars:
Fallujah Veteran: 'I Served The 1%'"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29663.htm
And a whole bunch more at search term "veterans speak about Fallujah". There are also whole rafts of webspaces created by and dedicated to all those men and women who "took the King's shilling" and went off to flatten Fallujah, kick in doors in Kandahar and find themselves hating and killing "hajjis" and "towelheads" because the Brass pushed them into "contact" as invaders, the way cock- and dog-fighters rub the faces of their "champions" together to stir them up for those negative-sum games in "pits" across the planet... See, e.g., Iraq Veterans Against The War/You Are Not Alone, at http://www.ivaw.org/
Doesn't matter. Some here sneer at repetitive references to Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler's statement of the truth: "War is nothing but a racket." He goes on to explain that he speaks of the imperial wars of our great Republic, of which the business is "business." http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html The sneerers appear to be people who profit and gain personally from, and/or have been personally involved in, or glued their identities to, the "business" activities that engender the stuff Butler, as a very experienced practitioner sickened by it, so properly decried. And it is beyond argument that the same crap continues, and because it is so profitable and has such career- and opportunity-generating momentum, it's gaining speed...
It ain't about "protecting the nation" or HAHAHAHA "supporting and defending the Constitution" or "preserving our democracy" much less "our way of life," except in the sense that all those brave and scared Troops are preserving the prerogatives and wealth of a very very few.
I guess the selective bit of text you extract and imbue with the meaning you want it to have is supposed to "prove" your point. Looks like I'm not the only one who read the whole article and gave the lie to your original claim. Also looks like the fundamental "not-nice Joe" is showing through again...
It would be nice if Joe could point to the parts of Munk's article that evidence "people complain[ing] that too much coverage is being given to the deaths" in Syria. And maybe offer something of substance on what he feels the author is "trying to sell."
... Seems to me the lessons Mr. Munk was writing to convey are pretty clear,.
Anyone noticed any long-term parallels between our own Imperial state-security-apparatchiks' behavior and what is scoffed at here? Oh, sorry - we have "First Amendment Zones" and FOXNews, and no one has interrogated Jon Stewart or that other guy yet, or "targeted" any Michigan college professors. Of COURSE there are no Quislings among us, no J. Edgar clones and clowns Hovering up all the moments of our lives, that can and will be used against us in a Kangaroo Court of secret pseudo-law...
Fine, mostly conventional analysis of The Situation, about the many details of which, compared to Prof. Cole, I know a minuscule amount. But despite all the attention given in other articles in this space to the need for Different and Better, it sure seems like the prescriptions here are a lot like what medieval physicians wrote, out of a Pharmacopeia full of toxins and chalk dust and colored powders, for patients suffering from imbalances of their humours and black and yellow bile. They wrote what they knew, often well aware that their dispensations were neither safe nor effective.
Of course, the System, such as it is, is clearly im- and un-balanced, but rather than parsing the Krebs cycle of political economics for encourageable feedback mechanisms (other than solar and wind and tidal and hydropower to maintain as much of business as usual as long as possible), a lot of this is prescribing for more of the metabolic pathways and hormone and enzyme activity that favors the safety and propagation of "institutions" and memes, and whatever, that sure look like pathogens and parasites and ambitious cancers that will happily grow and multiply and eat more of the host's resources until they kill it, often converting a lot of the host's tissues into more of themselves (see, e.g., SARS and other acronymic viruses and bacteria, and so many -omas).
Maybe talking about "the US" as a Promethean personification, still able to move the earth with this or that lever, gets some credibility from the people who can do and shake, in the hope of insinuating some new coding into the institutionalized genetics. The text is a nice main-point outline of policy prescriptions, but so much of what happens is the result, way down in the tiny text of the sub-sub-sub-headings and foot- and afternotes, of greedy and idiotic little souls selling or giving weapons and providing "training" and "incentives" to "gunmen," via the shadow Underground Mart that makes and delivers and gets paid for them with no accounting for the externalities that follow, behind a scam excuse that arming or "projecting power against" this or that group will somehow "advance 'our' interests." Accepting the premise that the modes of "governance" that ARE, will also always BE.
The analysis covers a huge territory in 1400 words. Well done, of course. It would be so nice if there were nostrums and specifics and advanced DNA manipulations that might cure the socioeconopolitical disease states that afflict the species. Assuming that "the species" has any will to be kinder and gentler and likely to endure...
But as I freely acknowledge, these are just generic observations of an outsider outlier, in the awareness that I only see little bits of It All, unblessed and unburdened by the complexities but pretty sure, on some pretty substantive evidence, that "we" are headed for a cliff of our own idiot making, following "leaders" who can hop on private jets and soar off to comfortable old age, consequence-free, as the hordes charge over the 4 or 6 degree hotter, everyone-armed edge.
Hi Bill, Happy New Year!
Do you have any challenge to the substance of what Zbig and Kissinger are reported, here and elsewhere, to have stated? Or is the best you can come up with one of those impeachment-by-reduction drive-bys?
Anyone care to vote on which of the techniques of derailing and impeachment were offered by Bill here? One primer: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/
...and here's some recent thoughts from Kissinger and Brzezinski on what's afoot with Imperial power play in that part of the world where "we" are so idiotically losing our way and our shirts and our sacred Troops:
"Brzezinski: US Warmongers “Infected” By Notion Of Regional Destabilization"
http://explosivereports.com/2013/07/03/brzezinski-us-infected-by-notion-of-regional-destabilization/
And yes, Bill, COIN and "nation-building" are bad ideas, but as far as I can see they are just arbitrary categorizations of parts of a seamless web of Imperial "behavior" and "policy." All related to "the business of the US is business," carried out by a variety of means overlying the basic nature of us human beasts, too many of whom live for self-gratification and power over others and the thrill, or grim and dogged identity-"validating" self-satisfactions, of the Game...
But, like, that would impact people's CAREERS, and Settled Relationships, man! Not to mention the profitable stuff that flows from having All That Information ready to hand, subject to parsing, and convertible to money'n'power...
Besides, there's NO PRECEDENT FOR IT! or President, either! And where the skulks and sneaks and peeping-Toms play, down in the dark, there's an endless history of interconnection and data-sharing and co-ordinate subGames. Check out the staffing improvements of the CIA after WW II, benefiting from the happily incorporated expertise of all those Nazi SS and Sicherheitspolizei including the Gestapo, and those "engineers" who migrated so happily into what became NASA... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_the_Third_Reich
So "Egyptians want security and prosperity more than liberty"? That's an either-or, or apparently NEITHER based on current conditions? I know I don't know for sure, but it sure seemed to this old guy, growing up Boy Scout when Mao was a Great Boogeyman Over The Horizon and much in the US public mind, that the Chinese under Mao, however many million-billion there were in those years, had neither security nor prosperity (or "rights") (any more than under Generalissimo Chiang kai-Shek and his gang), and at the level of the ordinary person were hardly consulted about their real preferences. Maybe other than by "elections" where there was only one candidate on the ballot and you had to sign yours before casting it...Better wave that Little Red Book with a big enthusiastic toothy smile, or it was off for "re-education." Unless of course they were part of the Party gang, in which case then and there, as well as pretty much always and everywhere including our serial-Gilded-Age Imperial State, the sneakiest, greediest, most manipulative and violent, the happiest to repress and extract all wealth and freedom from others, aka "the hierarchy" or "the Elite" or the "natural aristocracy" or the kleptocracy, other monikers readily accepted, were and are doing just fine. Even the top Nazis knew when to sell out their millenarian fetishes at the top of the market and move to quieter places rather than face consequences like Mussolini or Quaddaffyduck.
Why the slam on "liberal intellectuals who can't win elections?" Is the implication that "liberals" are really not about "freedom," a recurrent slur in this US Imperial space? There's an entrenched ruling elite (military-business, as far as I know) in Egypt and elsewhere, superseding aspirational "legitimacy" with "mechanisms of control" to the point that elections are essentially pointless except to maybe "legitimize" what is.
We all want prosperity and security, especially in gated enclaves and on private islands, not too far from the favelas where the household staff try to live -- seems the big 21st century questions might include whether individual "rights," of the Enlightenment sort, can exist in our grand modern world, alongside whatever is the nature of the cancerous thing we have saddled ourselves with, some self-consumptive apathy with a side of tribalized anomie, or whatever it is, with that self-congratulating set of Elite Tumors and Tapeworms who have figured out how to make suckers of the rest of us, up at the nominal top. Planning to die comfortably, never having to suffer the consequences of their predation.
Where are the models that lead to moderation, comity, and inclusion, that lead to the real legitimacy that, until the sneaks and parasites figure out how to game the system, is the apparently only, if temporary, means and path to the cherished "security" and "prosperity" and also but maybe not necessarily "freedom" and "liberty" and "rule of law" and all that? Rev. King? Gandhi? Mandela? Samuel Doe? Reagan? Obama?
And of course that will scrape up all the mildewed toothpaste and shove it back into the tube, and unring the klanging bells, just like the release of a certain "short-form" birth certificate...
Matters of identity, those notions that so patently animate reactionary minds especially, like "Benghazi" and that guy who killed himself in that park, riiiiight, and the necessity to provoke Holy War and the other bits of Revelation, and "who lost China," and on and on, world without end... well, apparently that notion, at least, is actually "inoperative," it seems.
Anyone wanting to fact-check Joe's cocky assertion need only use "why is the US coal industry declining?" as a search term. One slightly dated entry: "U.S. coal industry would face decline even without Obama’s policies"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/10/15/the-coal-industry-would-be-in-decline-even-without-obamas-policies/
Then go see what Lisa Jackson has been up to in her career, and one might also look at the full range of our President's Men's other appointments too, and maybe start a running tally of "policies" that have been "good for the planet" and "good for the average person," versus the other thing...
Maybe Lisa has a stack of penny-on-the-kilodollar "settlements" of environmental enforcement actions nailed to the wall of her den (aptly chosen locus) as well...
Some support for the enthusiasm?
How about a little context?
In Jackson's apparent favor, there's this:
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2012/12/29/lisa-jackson-epa-resignation-a-refusal-to-support-keystone-xl/ Says she does not much care for some pretty significant aspects of Obama's "environmental program," like the Keystone XL corruption and smog rules (and she gets credit for probably accelerating the closing of coal-fired power plants, though environmental activists bringing suit for permit violations and of course the cheap "fracked" gas that is going to what, make the Empire energy-independent, have a whole lot more...
"EPA:
'There are significant geographic regions we can no longer cover' -- agency's top cop" (this is about the effects of sequestration among other stuff) http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059980622
"EPA Deems Fracking Safe as States Debate New Drilling Laws" says Lisa jackson in July 2012 -- http://news.yahoo.com/epa-deems-fracking-safe-states-debate-drilling-laws-223600852.html , and
http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=23eb85dd-802a-23ad-43f9-da281b2cd287
What she says about her tenure after 3 of her 4 years: "BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERIOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES
UNITED STATES SENATE
MARCH 16, 2011
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&ved=0CHIQFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.appropriations.senate.gov%2Fht-interior.cfm%3Fmethod%3Dhearings.download%26id%3Daf9d3841-03ed-40a7-a4e0-67a1e8766d1f&ei=L4C_UuzdGePUsASh14CADw&usg=AFQjCNHvpVX9iOrh_XwTT4MqzNKEqEJxaQ&sig2=FodSm6AEJgXK0FC3-UP7Bw&bvm=bv.58187178,d.cWc
The folks I worked with at EPA who were still there when Jackson ran the show have mixed views of her from an actual environmental protection standpoint.
As a former EPA enforcement attorney (13 years, Carter through Reagan), I have to smile just a little at the breathless announcement of "record civil penalties." I don't have access to the consent agreement, but as one who was involved in the negotiation of many of these, I would bet that there are terms that anyone serious or hopeful about the deterrent effect of sanctions EPA dares to impose would have to give a rueful shake of the head at. Not sure about current law, but these used to be tax-deductible, and "mitigation" by "restoring" watercourses and wetlands and such is a shell game of the first order.
Deals like this are nice career builders for the people involved, you get to hang a little (very) scalp on your belt, and put a copy of the memo of payment of the money part in your little file. I am a little surprised, given what I hear of "enforcement" by the current EPA and DOJ, that this went as far as it did, and I expect this is maybe a little pressure-release valve like the one on your water heater, that keeps the tank from exploding but still on the boil.
What really did have an effect on corporate behavior was when under the Carter administration and with a very different DOJ, EPA staff was finally allowed to start using the criminal sanction powers that earlier, less captive Congresses had written into the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, FIFRA and statutes requiring reporting of toxics releases. Silk-stocking lawyers were amazed that we DARED to refer and prosecute criminal actions against their "The business of America is business" executive-suite clients, even holding corporate chiefs liable criminally for failure to meet their very much individual obligations to abide by for laws against "externalization profit-taking" and requiring self-reporting of discharges and emissions under permit requirements and absolute prohibitions. The high-priced legal talent quickly adapted, hiring former prosecutors to teach them how to "mitigate" liability by negotiating plea deals and playing political strings, and (occasionally) having to hire "experts" in massaging the federal corrections system to let their clients do soft time or get "community service" or probation rather than the other thing.
But for a heady while, we line troops in the regional offices got to see stuffed suits with profit motives in place of consciences sometimes actually do "perp walks," and we had some satisfaction that the measurable rate of "deviance," by these charming souls in their power ties, and the corporate structures for which they set the "moral" tone. The people on the neoliberal side have managed to mostly scotch the rules and regulations, and the institutional energies that the tree-huggers that used to staff a lot of EPA enforcement once so vigorously embodied.
Here's a Powerpoint, http://www.ohiochemistry.org/aws/OCTC/asset_manager/get_file/70307, with some salient stuff to remark on, like look at how little change there has been in actual criminal enforcement, Bush to Obama, very little of which is against corporate officers, whose personal fear of prosecution is much of the reason for compliance (with little incentive to just "do the right thing" rather than grab the short-term profit, and huge career and payday disincentives.) The crowing about penny ante penalties ought to be measured against the many HUGE estimates of human health and environmental harm caused by the behaviors that criminal laws are supposed to deter, and the civil penalties are puny a "cost of doing business" joke, laden with "outs" and avoidances and with releases from liability for some serious malefactors, although as noted, they are great career-builders for the staff, especially those on the way toward the cash-out door to working for the Dark Side.
And there is this official pronouncement of text undoubtedly drafted by his staff and vetted all over the place, by Earle Devaney, who has worn several Administration hats over the years, with interesting distinctions -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Devaney :
"This Conference is premised, in part, on a shared recognition that the impact of environmental law on society is largely dependent upon effective enforcement of such law. This, in turn, requires the availability of sanctions that not only recover the economic benefit gained by violating the law, but also serve as a credible deterrent to noncompliance. One of the hard lessons learned in environmental law enforcement is that individuals and companies confronted with only administrative or civil judicial fines often find it advantageous to continue to violate the law and merely absorb such penalties as a cost of doing business. What few individuals making compliance decisions are willing to risk, however, is the prospect of a criminal conviction and imprisonment."
There's more, for anyone interested, at http://www.inece.org/3rdvol1/pdf/devaney.pdf
Bear in mind that this document was from a 1994 international conference, which included some pretty good sharing of ideas and inspirations and also some good opportunities to network and figure out how to beat the system. See what's included in the TransPacific Partnership deal and its Atlantic cognate (as far as leaks have let us see what the suits are up to...) We are once again hearing that "dilution is the solution to pollution," e.g. Fukushima, and that the rest of us have to pay the corporatists not to load us with toxins -- the "right" to extract and pollute belongs to Citizens United citizens, not the rest of us...
"One of the largest civil penalties." Big whoop, but would it not be nice if that was just a start, assuming that there is any "rule of law" left?
We should all remember that all this horror and terror and imperial intervention and stuff is actually pretty good for business. Ask Hallliburton, or Bechtel, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechtel, or at a broader scale ask KPMG, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPMG , that blankets the world with guys in suits offering "highest-quality advice and counsel" on how to profit from extractive resources, remodeling of whole governments, and of course "reconstruction" of the land- and city-scapes ravaged by the complicated violence:
"KPMG commits to Libya with full-service firm"
http://www.libyaherald.com/2013/12/27/kpmg-commits-to-libya-with-full-service-firm/#axzz2opNVm0QO
An example of that advice:
"Unconventional hydrocarbons [i.e., FRACKING] give more opportunities to mid-sized IOC’s in Libya – KPMG"
Read more: http://www.libyaherald.com/2013/09/19/unconventional-hydrocarbons-give-more-opportunities-to-mid-sized-iocs-in-libya-kpmg/#ixzz2opQOcZkx
Fortune passes everywhere...
Re the "relative openness" of Iranian vs Israeli and Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs, the notion that the latter three were a "surprise to the world" would probably be a huge surprise to the various "intelligence services" who were WELL aware of what each of the sets of people in each of those nations that were dedicated to spreading the nuclear weaponizing disease to their own states, for "power." And ego, and whatever else...
And how is Iran more like North Korea? What is that conjunction supposed to get the rest of us to be thinking? Khameini is just like Kim Dot Dum? Or the Rev Guard is just like the insane NK military rulership? Axis of Evil redivivus?
I know, it's just complicated...
Kind of fun to sit back and watch our anonymous "possibly insiders" go at each other for a change. Kind of illustrates my basic thesis about the nature of humanity and the likelihood of losing that long-term top-of-the-food-chain status, when Empire-lovers can't even get along...
On a substantive note, there was a little article in the Guardian, which is earning its name in my little opinion, about complexity and its relationship to achieving any kind of sociopolitical homeostasis, almost anywhere on the planet given the scope and nature of human drives, but particularly in South Sudan. The headline, "How Hollywood cloaked South Sudan in celebrity and fell for the 'big lie'," really obscures the important reminder of the details that actually constitute the elements, or dissociating fragments, of a polity, and the difficulty, thanks to Great Game play and the way us geopoliticofixationists want to impose our own "simplifying assumptions", e.g. Shia vs Sunni, "Taliban" vs "UN" vs Karzai et al., on situations, in support of various arguments and strategies and initiatives and profit-making opportunities from continued conflict, in this case in "the world's newest nation" (whatever that means, relative to the ground truths). http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/28/reality-of-south-sudan-and-hollywood-stars
"The war had been brought to life in the US by broadcast evangelicals such as Billy Graham, who cast it as a heroic battle by Christian and African underdogs against a more powerful Muslim and Arab foe. The fact that religious and geographical lines were never remotely this clear and clean-cut was routinely ignored. The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), under the leadership of the charismatic John Garang, was not fighting for an independent south but a democratic "new Sudan". Its forces were drawn from areas far beyond what are now the borders of South Sudan. And its battles were, for the most part, not against the national army, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) but against rival militia groups, often drawn from the same great southern tribes, such as the Dinka and Nuer, that the SPLA leadership came from.
Much of the fighting and dying took place in the south, often with funding and encouragement from the north. This meant that a new country would have to be built in what had been the main theatre of the war, with a nation drawn from opposing sides in much of that conflict. No serious effort was made by any side in the post-2005 cooling-off period to reconcile the north and south. The US, Europe, the UN and the south's near-neighbours, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya, all pushed for the country to be broken up. This effort was formalised in a referendum in 2011.
The pursuit of separation at all costs made it harder to admit certain truths such as ethnic divisions and created the need for the "big lie", as one senior UN official calls it. "The big lie is that there was no ethnic problem in South Sudan. There is a political problem.""
Of course, that's just one little bit of one little article (there's many more, of course, maybe more or less "true" and "accurate" and "complete"), one person's take on a complex situation, one person's attempt to clarify the nature of the complexity for armchair geopoliticians and maybe even Rulers...
Must drive diligent students and explicators like Dr. Cole a little crazy, trying to keep all the bits and friction-generating pieces in mind as he thinks and writes.
Of course there is this report from the WP, and a whole lot more sources if you look:
"The CIA has begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria, ending months of delay in lethal aid that had been promised by the Obama administration, according to U.S. officials and Syrian figures. The shipments began streaming into the country over the past two weeks, along with separate deliveries by the State Department of vehicles and other gear — a flow of material that marks a major escalation of the U.S. role in Syria’s civil war.
The arms shipments, which are limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked, began arriving in Syria at a moment of heightened tensions over threats by President Obama to order missile strikes to punish the regime of Bashar al-Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons in a deadly attack near Damascus last month."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-begins-weapons-delivery-to-syrian-rebels/2013/09/11/9fcf2ed8-1b0c-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html
And then there's this, from Admiral Dempsey, a useful caution from the dude who would have to "manage" the blowback:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ded_1377116301
John, thanks for that little vignette, from an apparent insider. Glimpses like this, taken with the stuff that Wikileaks let us mopes get peeks into the world of "serious Players," might get people to think a little more clearly about the kinds of people who "manage the planet" and "set policy" and set up the pungi pits and deadfalls and minefields of Future and Forever Conflict. I guess a sense of the ridiculous and a sense of humor might be helpful to retaining personal (if not "national interest") sanity out there in the Great Game of Risk! (tm).
Hellfires launched from light aircraft with CIA targeting "assistance" are for fighting conventional enemies? Really? Which ones with what capabilities and plans? Or is it just the idiot MIC pitch that you need all the "capability" and attendant fraud, corruption and incentive to idiot mischief your national wealth can pay for?
But only to "moderate rebels," and of the Warriors of Anomie end up with them, that's just "leakage." From what I read...
These observations are togue-in-cheek, right? The whole imperial arrogance and Exceptional Superiority schtick? Since you speak for the Traditional Narrative, I guess maybe not? "You, Maliki, should do what we told you to do"? And that would have "made his government more secure"? Your version of democracy, or more honestly those special "national interests"?
Seems to me that this is not a China shop with signs that say "You break it, you bought it." Moral and legal obligation to do WHAT? There are no tools, no doctrines, no tactics in our Great Game toybox that bear a snowball's chance of
making anything "better" -- it's all about who we arm, who McCain buddies with, who our sneaky-petes figure they can manipulate so the real Players get what THEY want -- a profitable instability, with continued extraction of carbon "wealth" and lots of "chat rooms" wherein to conduct the manifold corrupt ions that seem to be so horribly cynically inevitable. Behind a thin screen of sonorous sound bites, over a flood of BS.
our rulers have neither the incentive or the intelligence to simply "go no harm," and because there is no "morality" in the Game, there's zero pressure to let any daylight or comity into the Playing. The killings will continue until the cows come home, in large part because "geopolitics" profits from a steady diet of conflict. Arming for present idiocy is an investment in the future of the Game...
One might imagine that the mind-linked aliens that arrived to erase all the pesky humans and scoop all the useful resources out of Planet Earth in that wonderful hopeful "Independence Day" movie, also dispensed with any kind of "privacy and freedom" as our "constitutional" mythology would hold them to be. So, too, the Borg, for you Star Trek aficionados.
Of course, you get the "freedom" from thoughtfulness and personal responsibility and morality that comes with enforced and eventually automatic and comforting Groupthink. Ask members of any megachurch or other identity-based affinity group how it works...
So, do sociologists and "political scientists" and historians who study the phenomena of repression and schism and anomic violence and identity-fueled and greed-enhanced idiocy have models that could give the rest of us some hope that there is an "arc of moderation and regularization" in places like Syria and Libya and Somalia and Ireland and Israel/Palestine (as with Hamas) and so on, letting us believe that our children might see a "lessening of conflict?" Or is the reality that the manifold drivers of the many types of violence are such a part of the nature of the beast, US, that is, that all we can expect is more of the same? Facilitated by all the sneaks and "special interests" that arm and equip and train and foster the horror?
I see that Mikhail Kalashnikov has finally died, at age 94, though his "genius" and "inspiration" will plague the world for many generations... http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-mikhail-kalashnikov-20131224,0,474931.story#axzz2oPame7KK
You got a single example of that kind of "negotiated settlement" that was not the product of that exhaustion that seems to finally set in to so many "conflicts" after the requisite number of deaths and wailing and vengeance and people getting sick of "leaders" telling them they have to kill all of "them" to be able to keep their stuff and their beliefs and identities? The only tool is once again the same hammer that did the same random idiotic damage the last times it was swung...?
Sounds like those "mortar rounds" were more likely Katyusha-style rockets (of which I have some uncomfortably close personal experience), one of many "random" anomic weapons of idiot destruction, "smart" or not, "guided" or "aimed" or not. Spend any time with syriavideo.net and you will see any number of incidents of that "risible" phrase "insufficient effort to protect non-combatants." In the modern context of global 24/7 warfare, what can that possibly mean? What's up there and in more places in spite (or because?) of the Incomparable Projectable Power of Empire is "Call of Duty" meets "DoomMortalKombatDeathRace" and all these too -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversial_video_games"
There are no rules, and punctilious categorization and tsking from afar don't mean squat. The demon is out of the bottle, bigger and meaner and more voracious than ever. The actions of the guys in "the government" are indistinguishable (except for Narrative convenience) from those "Allahu Akhbar!" enthusiasts so clearly imaged in the "Syria violence" warporn available via youtube.com.
The radio is playing Bing Crosby singing "Chestnuts Roasting O'er An Open Fire." Now THERE is some cognitive dissonance for you...
It's armchair arrogance of the first order to pretend that there are "rules" or "norms" to govern conduct that our and everyone else's Players have connived at invoking out of Chaos over so many years, built into a global cartel of violence that profits from the misery of ordinary people. There must have been a reason they chose to build a pentagram as the seat of Imperial military power...
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Hm, a fully accredited sophist offering criticism of what he denominates sophistry. Or hypocrisy, take your pick.
Yeah, they take care of their own. Like Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, erased from Marine Corps history for telling it like it was AND IS. And even Maj. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who got his knuckles rapped for the simulated sinking of an entire carrier battle group in a simulated war, daring to show how bankrupt(ing) and idiotic our vaunted Battlespace actually is. And how about them dudes and their families at Lejeune, dosed in their drinking water with a nice bouillabaisse of carcinogens for 30 years. http://www.tftptf.com/ And the power of the myth of Marine Corps Esprit and Superiority is such that the loyalty juices continue to flow strong.
Thank you for your service! (sucker...) Please don't bother to thank me for mine.
Gee, Joe, you are so subtle you did not even detect the responsive irony in my response to your ironic snotgram!@
Got any insider info on who those "US Citizens" were that were extracted by those gotta-get-em-into-the-action-to-protect-the-procurement-program V-22s? Not too many tourists from Keokuk in South Sudan, I would venture to guess...
Really? WOW!
And dare one ask who those endangered US citizens were, to be rescued by the unfortunate Marines in their Battlespace Tilt Rotor V-22s with their minimal armor and armament?
Indigenous coup, or anothern one of those Imperial "We are not amused" "nation building= regime change" flicks of the power-projecting finger? Anyone looked up the amount and form of "aid" to the several parts of Sudan, or the nature of the Africom tendrils/tentacles there?
When is that cherished and comforting faith in the existence of "law," or its equally mythical consort "order," going to finally evaporate in that harsh black light that is starting to illuminate the Covert Imperceptable Inconceivable?
People who would like a more detailed if slightly suspect depiction of the whole A'ghan I thing ought to read a book by Gary Schroen, one of the vaunted Special Activities Division people Bill brags on. It's called
"First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan," https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no4/War_on_Terror_9.htm
And follow that with Jon Krakauer's biography of Pat Tillman, who was macho and sucker enough to want to go "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman," http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/Filkins-t.html?_r=0.
As to those great integrated commands and participation by various services, a cynical observation might be that that was where the money and advancement were flowing -- it's not like the joint operations were actually militarily efficient, let alone "victorious" or "successful," except when it came to advancing careers and setting the stage for a whole lot of subsequent idiocy to follow.
You know, Bill, you kvetch about what you call my "rants." But no matter how long or how often you play your single-note bugle, the whole enterprise has been a fool's errand. Since when did your people "deal with the perpetrators and their enablers militarily?" The troops killed a few of them, Obama was allowed to escape, thanks to the incompetence and venality of our rulers and their generals and the idiocy of our doctrines and tactics. And it went from that not to "nation building," but just more of the same Milo Minderbinder stuff that was Vietnam -- fool's-errand patrols, finding IEDs by driving or walking over them, getting our brave troops' butts kicked because there is no way, including nuclear obliteration, to "win" asymmetric warfare, even with our expensive toys and tools and weapons. The whole notion of the Game is fatally flawed, and the only people who benefit are the SOBs who sell the $400 gasoline and XM-25 "Game Changers" and move those big blocks of greenbacks around, skimming a bit and committing every kind of fraud and corruption. Did you see that 2103 is a bumper-crop year (yet again) for opium production? And what did your Loya Jirga come up with, again? And how does anyone do "counter-terrorism" when the definition of "terrorist" keeps morphing to meet some new doctrine or short-term BS need? You really think that even 100,000 troops and another 100k "contractors" and however many special-ops you want to deploy can stop all the "terrorism," by kidnap and murder and kicking in doors and playing from "intel" that's provided by people who laugh at our idiocy and know that we will soon be slapped on the butts by the gates of the Khyber Pass? You sneer at me, all smug in your deep understanding of Conventional Risk Play, but the emperor pretty clearly is lumbering around buck-naked.
The frame you work from is like some kind of Escher pen-and-ink -- impossible to build in the real world. But it obviously satisfies some need in your soul. And because it's backed by the full faith and credit of the Empire, there's obviously no shaking it. Good on you for at least distinguishing "nation building," bad on you for trying to draw a principled distinction between "counter-insurgency" and "counter-terrorism," and it would make no difference if your distinction had even become "doctrine"-- the creep from A'stan I to A'stan II was as inevitable as nightfall, given what "we" have for a military/industrial/"security"/policy/imperial Great Ape riding our backs.
As the hippies asked about "my" war (you snidely discount my own experience and observations, I know), who's going to be the last GI to die THIS time? Will there be a "Wall" for the troops "long past review" to go and wail at? Way past time, $6 trillion past time (just THIS time), to not just try to get our troops out without too many more dead and dismembered on all sides, and still more compounding of the felonies. Time to change the whole structure of the political military social ecology. But not to worry, of course -- the thunderous, ponderous, mortal inertia and momentum and "national interests" are all aligned with your frame and narrative...
Now pick a phrase out of what I wrote and impeach away. Merry Christmas. Do our troops get cranberry sauce and stuffing with their cooked gooses this year?
There's the myths, and then there's the Deeper reality...
Too bad that when enough finally gets to be enough, the spasm of reaction almost uniformly leads to Really Ugly. With a climbing arc of misery and repression for the Most, and obscene titillation for the Few, right up to that sudden inflection in the social "curve of binding energy," and the nuclear release that follows the breaking of the momentum that holds cultures more or less together.
Billions of us have been carefully taught to be easily distractable, self-satisfying, self-gratifying consumers. Creatures with no conscience and very little consciousness. An intentional act by the Few against the welfare of the many, once again by people who will die comfortably before the crap hits the fan, or at least will live in the remaining "Elysiums" until their numbers are up...