100 Slaves 100 Enemies

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.

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.

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“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.

The Administration still felt itself under pressure to prove its own worth to centrists and conservative Americans, and it believed that liberal-left Americans would simply have to accept the Kennedy proposition that the Administration was by far the best they could hope for.

David Halberstam,The Best and The Brightest