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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Scorpio69er
Published Letters: 1374 Editor's Choice: 29
In order to understand our present situation, it is instructive to read this article from the WSJ from June 9, 2005:
In Treating U.S. After Bubble, Fed Helped Create New Threats
* Low Rates Bolstered Economy, But Housing, Foreign Debt Appear Out of Balance
* Greenspan's Legacy at Stake
"If I were a biologist I'd call this a perfect example of symbiosis," former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker mused in a February speech at Stanford University. "Contented American consumers matched against delighted foreign producers. Happy borrowers matched against willing lenders. The difficulty is, the seemingly comfortable pattern can't go on indefinitely."
Almost every economist agrees. The debate is over how, not whether, the global economy rebalances: Will it be smooth, through some combination of declining dollar and accelerating foreign demand? Or will it be chaotic, with a dollar collapse, much higher U.S. interest rates and perhaps a global recession?
Mr. Volcker thinks a crisis is likely. Investor confidence could fade "at some point," he said, with "damaging volatility in both exchange markets and interest rates."
http://www.andongkim.com/articles/2005/06/greenspanafterbubble.htm
re: "the lesson of the Bush years is that "not talking" to America's enemies "doesn't work."
It works great for Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, et al.
If we actually started talking to our "enemies" instead of whipping up terror-fever, these guys and the politicians they bankroll (that is to say, 99% of our elected "leaders") would be out of a job.
The America that we all knew and loved effectively ended when the SC appointed Bush back in 2001. THAT is when there should've been riots in the streets. However, with little fuss put up by Gore and the Democrats, the sheeple said "baaah" and quietly went along. Then the PNAC wet dream of a "new Pearl Harbor" somehow magically happened (gee, what a coincidence), and the rest is now history.
We're all screwed and there is no one to blame but ourselves. We failed in our duties as vigilant citizens and we now have exactly the government we deserve.
"America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans' lives. It will be an ever greater and greater overlay on the American system. And before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way. My long experience with human nature - I'm 80 years old now - suggests that it is possible that fascism, not democracy, is the natural state.
Indeed, democracy is the special condition - a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already."
-Norman Mailer,
'Gaining an Empire, Losing Democracy?'
“Hitler’s dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial state in this modern age of technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology as the radio and public address systems [quaint by today’s standards - Scorpio], eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual…The criminal events of those years were not only an outgrowth of Hitler’s personality. The extent of the crimes was also due to the fact that Hitler was the first to be able to employ the implements of technology to multiply crime.”
-Albert Speer,
'Inside The Third Reich'
This war was one of blatant conquest. All the publicly stated reasons (WMDs, al Qaeda, etc.) were/are pure propaganda. The leading Democrats only speak about vague "repositioning" of troops, so don't be fooled by their political posturing, either. Remember: They just gave Bush another $100 Billion.
"We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region. Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress had been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that will change. America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades -- not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water."
-Stephen C. Pelletiere, CIA senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and author of Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
