So who is in charge of stopping the oil spill, BP or the federal government?
But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task. The sludge in the gulf is, finally, the product of our own contradictions.
If the big banks and financial institutions are on the verge of being “reined in,” no one is telling them about it. Naturally, Wall Street would prefer to have no regulations imposed on it at all. A close second best, however, is a set of toothless measures such as Obama’s, essentially amounting to more paperwork. Ingenious lawyers and financial experts are already figuring out the best means of navigating through and around the “tough” new regulations. We predict they will find the work relatively unchallenging.
“Despite everything, the Obama administration is saying: ‘You’re doing a heck of a job Brownies!’ It’s disgusting,” said Steiner, invoking the infamous praise given by George W. Bush to his Federal Emergency Management Agency head, Michael Brown, for the government’s catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “This is no different than Bush’s response to Katrina.”
This has become Obama’s standard operating procedure.
The Obama White House represents the interests of American big business as directly, or more directly, as any administration in history. It has helped Wall Street to vast sums from the public treasury, intervened to destroy the living standards of auto workers, escalated the brutal war in Afghanistan and continued the Bush government’s wholesale assault on democratic rights.
Far more significant than the rhetorical tub-thumping against bailouts of Wall Street is the fact that the Senate is adamantly opposed to any new taxes and fees on the financial institutions that less than two years ago triggered a worldwide financial crisis and the deepest slump since the Great Depression.
The Times’ goal is not to clarify the origins and scope of the disaster, but to sedate and confuse its readership.
Whatever the immediate impulse behind the bill in Arizona, there is a logic to the policy of the American ruling class. There are sections of the political establishment that are well aware that their policy of bank bailouts and social austerity will inevitably provoke mass social opposition. The attack on the rights of workers and the turn to authoritarian forms of rule is their response.
These actions, which helped precipitate the global financial collapse, have led to the loss of jobs, homes, and life savings, and resulted in untold misery for masses of people. The criminal practices that transpired at Goldman Sachs were not an aberration, but were repeated in banks and financial firms across the country.
Obama’s remarks make clear that there will be no attempt to hold accountable those responsible for the deaths of the 29 miners, including Massey Energy and its CEO Don Blankenship. The investigation launched by the federal government will merely be another whitewash.
To the extent that the GOP has regained momentum and the tea party movement does get a hearing among ordinary people, it's most of all because Obama and the Democrats have given up so much ground.
As new allegations continue to emerge, it becomes clear that the pattern of evasion, obstruction and cover-up reflects the instructions of the Vatican, and specifically of the Pope. The case against Benedict for collusion in child sex-abuse is much stronger than the case against a number of Irish bishops who have been forced to resign.
In the conservatives' claims that the Civil War was about "independence" or "states' rights," the "rights" they defend are the rights to own other human beings, to torture them into performing labor, and to kill them if they tried to resist or run away.
CEO Lloyd Blanfein and other Goldman executives, as well as John Paulson—who was not named in the SEC indictment—are, in fact, criminals. They should be criminally prosecuted and held legally accountable for their violations of the law and their crimes against society.
...the system of private property is seen as natural under a capitalist society. But in the feudal societies that existed in Europe until a few hundred years ago, it was "natural" that property should be claimed by a hereditary monarch and assorted aristocratic hangers-on. And when explorers from those societies journeyed to the "New World," they encountered Native American societies that couldn't comprehend why control of property should be anything but collective.
The document lays out a rationale that would justify the use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state for the first time since the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iran and North Korea are singled out as potential targets.
The New Yorker posted a piece April 5 by Raffi Khatchadourian which points out that the operation contravened the army’s rules of engagement on at least four grounds: proportionality; positive identification of the targets as combatants; “command culture” (the helicopter crew falsified the situation on the ground, exaggerating or inventing threats, and their commander accepted their claims without question); and the firing on the wounded.
All this may be very well, but the New York Times has other concerns. Its article is headlined, rather ominously, “Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site.” It might be entitled, “New York Times Fingers a Web Site.”
However heavily considered the decision was, the Obama administration has given the go-ahead for what could be a tremendous danger to millions of acres of U.S. coastlines.
But like the other big mining companies, Massey rarely pays the full value of these penalties--if they pay anything at all.
Far from creating jobs, the Obama administration’s program is to foster an economic environment with high unemployment, low social spending, and falling wages. This is done in the direct interest of boosting the profits of corporations.
This suggestion that Bush and Blair were guilty of war crimes, coming from a high-ranking former UN official, would ordinarily be considered major news. The Guardian interview was reported by the main British and French news agencies, Reuters and AFP, but the entire American corporate media gave it zero coverage. Not a single major American newspaper or television network mentioned it.
What did the US president tell Karzai during their discussions Sunday night? Did he remind the Afghan leader that the American government and military had installed him in power in December 2001? Did he point to the billions of dollars in US aid that had flown into Kabul since that time, much of it ending up in the pockets of Karzai’s relatives and cronies? Did he threaten the Afghan president, or even hint that he might end up like Ngo Dinh Diem, the Vietnamese president of South Vietnam, and long-time US asset, assassinated in a CIA-organized coup in 1963?
The big problem with the bill is that so much money and power is being handed to the private health insurance industry, which is the cause of the problem in the first place.
"Fascism" is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is "more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent."
The article thus makes no pretense of objective reporting, but puts the Times in its favorite role, as the mouthpiece for the US military-intelligence apparatus, publishing their “disclosures”—i.e., official Washington propaganda—even while admitting that US officials have “no solid clues” and were simply speculating in the absence of actual knowledge.
