but just like GG he's got a real special gift for cutting through the BS. And Matt does it consistently with a turn of phrase that is unique.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

[snip]

What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumercredit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

doesn't think we can ever provide long-term security and stability in Afghanistan.

In fact at this point, according to Paul R. Pillar, a Georgetown University professor who formerly served as the CIA's chief intelligence analyst for the Middle East, it's pretty clear that the goal of leaving behind a stable, democratic Afghanistan is unattainable.

"With the application of military force, some degree of short-term stability over some portion of Afghanistan is probably achievable," Pillar told me. "That is not to say that we have stabilized Afghanistan or that whenever we get out we'll have established some long-term basis for peace and stability. I don't think we can do that."

[snip]

"If political realities were not a constraint, disengagement from Afghanistan would be the best course of action," Pillar says. "But I accept the political reality that that is off the table. The president would get pilloried as being a softie and as not having the courage and determination supposedly to stand up for U.S. security. I don't buy any of that criticism myself, but that would be the political reality he's facing."

As it happens, in this case political reality actually diverges quite markedly from public opinion. The public overwhelmingly opposes the war -- 57 percent to 39 percent, according to the latest Associated Press poll. And disengagement from Afghanistan -- even though it's not even being discussed as a serious option in political circles -- is considerably more popular with the American public than escalation, which is almost all anyone in Washington can talk about. The latest CNN poll found that 49 percent of Americans favored reducing the number of troops in Afghanistan -- with 28 percent saying they should all be withdrawn immediately -- compared to less than 40 percent who want to send more.

He's just one guy though. Only one opinion. Only the CIA's former chief ME intelligence analyst.

And once again American "policy" is held hostage not to the "political reality" of the people but a few among the idiot media know-nothing gasbags and the fevered hallucinations of the war porn trolls in Congress and the American public.

Nation-building is so "teh awesome, and cheap, and effective." I can't wait. Who's next?

legal system that doesn't wet itself when The Man says "jump".

Another court ruling slapping down of those who would keep Binyam Mohamed's torture secret.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/19/court-rejects-miliband-cia-request

In the sixth in a string of damning rulings, the high court accused Miliband of wanting to suppress information about CIA activities even though details had already been disclosed by the Obama administration. Dismissing Miliband's claims, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones insisted they were not trying to give away "American secrets". They said: "Of itself, the treatment to which Mr Mohamed was subjected could never properly be described in a democracy as 'a secret' or an 'intelligence secret' or 'a summary of classified intelligence'."

Unless that nominal "democracy" is the United States of America.