100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Carry out the argument of the United States’s “war on terrorism” to its logical conclusion and this is what you get.

Why is Ford/GM using gadgetry to try to sell their cars? I don’t care about voice-activated car stereos if my car won’t start.

You want to sell more cars? Do the following: Honda’s engines last longer than their bodies. Make a car that has the interior durability of a Honda engine but come up with a body that can withstand salt and is impervious to rust. And make it run on sunlight.

Better yet, just stop making cars and go back to square one (the square that you bought up and eliminated last century): use whatever lobbying power you have left and convince the government to build robust nation-wide public transportation — then you build the vehicles.

Glenn Greenwald explains why defending human rights and the Constitution wins hearts and minds and is the most American thing you can do.

Dean Baker explains a plan to save jobs that involves the government reimbursing employers so their employees can have more time off. Can’t be done? They already do it in Germany.

Estimated number of Al Qaeda members now operating in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. national security adviser: 100 (one hundred)
(Haper’s Index, December 2009)

General Wesley Clark thinks we should get out of Afghanistan.

“Last week, ExxonMobil became the first U.S. oil company in 35 years to sign an oil-production contract with the government of Iraq,” reports Antonia Juhasz.

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.

The increase, of 13 million Americans, was much larger than even the most pessimistic observers of hunger trends had expected and cast an alarming light on the daily hardships caused by the recession’s punishing effect on jobs and wages.

…

Problems gaining access to food were highest in households with children headed by single mothers. About 37 percent of them reported some form of food insecurity compared with 14 percent of married households with children. About 29 percent of Hispanic households reported food insecurity, compared with 27 percent of black households and 12 percent of white households. Serious problems were most prevalent in the South, followed equally by the West and Midwest.

via Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High – NYTimes.com.

These facts are indeed troubling, but why is the recession the culprit? The additional 13 million people seems to be the hook of the story, which causes shock and awe. But wasn’t it alarming enough that 36 million people were hungry in the United States before the recession; “alarming” meaning this should have been taken care of immediately?

When you look at the breakdown above of problems of gaining access to food, you have to wonder if the reason that this is now an “alarming” story is that “worthy” people are now going hungry instead of just the usual single mothers and non-white people, who I guess we’re just supposed to expect to go hungry.

Here we have another example of how this government does not take care of its own people. It illustrates the success of those who wished to “make government smaller” which has meant stripping away public services while making sure corporate interests, such as bank bailouts, remain sound and intact.

“The lesson is that the federal government needs better tools to deal with the impending failure of a large institution in extraordinary circumstances like those facing us last fall,” a Treasury spokeswoman said. (NY Fed ‘paid AIG banks too much’, BBC News, 11/17/09)

This is an example of what Dean Baker was talking about: It’s not the regulations, it’s the regulators.

The most important regulatory reform is to fire the regulators who were out to lunch – starting with Ben Bernanke – thereby allowing this economic disaster. If we don’t fire the people that blew it, then we give the regulators no incentive to get it right next time. This is what basic economics tells us.

…

We got into this crisis because of a serious failure of the regulators and, more importantly, the economics profession. The failure to come to grips with this reality both means that much of the regulatory reform effort will be misdirected and that we will have done little to prevent the next crisis.

The central problem, which we should force every regulator to say 10,000 times, is that the US had a huge housing bubble. The existence of an $8 trillion bubble guaranteed a severe economic downturn when it burst. This would have been true even if there were no dodgy subprime mortgages, exotic collaterised debt obligations, credit default swaps or over-leveraged investment banks.

- Dean Baker, Regulating the regulators

Here we have yet another example of one of America’s most Serious and respected “experts” advocating various policies while maintaining huge, undisclosed financial and personal interests in his advocacy.

…

As the NYT put it:

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil.

…

“The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

via The sleazy advocacy of a leading “liberal hawk” by Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

But with 237 millionaires still serving in Congress, most of the nation’s leaders are doing fine compared to many of their constituents living paycheck by paycheck, if they’re earning a paycheck at all.

About 1 percent of all Americans are considered millionaires, while more than 44 percent of congressional members claim that distinction. And 50 members of Congress boast estimated wealth of at least $10 million.

via OpenSecrets | Congressmen Lose Big Bucks in 2008, But Still Rank Among Nation’s Richest – Capital Eye.

When you say that, “That’s illegal,”
It doesn’t mean that that’s true
You were put here to protect us
But who protects us from you?

Boogie Down Productions
Ghetto Music: the blueprint of hip hop
Who Protects Us From You

Reading is the process of writing without the middleman known as the writer.

Reading is writing without the writer.

Reading is plagiarism.

Plagiarism is easier than writing.

Therefore, plagiarize.

Top civilian in southern province argues we’re exacerbating the problem we’re supposedly there to solve

Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.