Category: politics

“This study shows that young women veterans have nearly triple the suicide rate of young women who never served in the military,” said Kaplan, co-author of the study. Full article.

Pakistan needs less foreign interference, not more. And that applies to Arab jihadi fanatics as much as it does to imperious Americans. But on current trends the opposite is happening. The clear danger, highlighted by the leaked cables, is that the west’s unwinnable war in Afghanistan is spilling over into its weak, ill-led and much put-upon neighbour – and that Pakistan, too, could become a war zone. Full article.

There is a famous Benjamin Franklin saying that was often quoted when Bush was president that rings ever truer during the Obama regime: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” We are becoming a nation of lemmings running to the sea with the abandon of those that would rather plunge to our deaths than think for ourselves. Full article.

Wikileaks has only posted cables that were reviewed by the news organisations and in some cases redacted. The news organisations showed them to the Pentagon and agreed to some of the government’s suggested redactions. (Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights)

beautiful! “Cabbage and eggplants in winter, and endochriyya [a plant used for making soup] and chili and garlic and onions in summer. And other things that we can sell, like flowers and palm tree seedlings.” Full article.

Zbigniew Brzezisnki:

The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascension of the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power. The American political experience tends to serve as a standard for emulation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together. [We need] to manage the rise of other regional powers in ways that do not threaten America’s global primacy. A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve well both the short-term and the long-term goals of U.S. policy.
Globalization is no more than a mystifying term for imperialism, the unequal spread of capitalism on the planetary scale.

the NYT does another judith miller – this time on iran. hey folks, better read the original documents from the wikileaks website before buying what the media have “gleaned” from the leaks. Listen to full interview here.

from my friend jeff m: “there is no better way to jeopardize one’s own rights than to deny them to others.”

blaming the victims of racism for rising racism – sounds familiar no? “According to the poll, 33 percent of Israeli Jews think Israeli Arabs should be placed in internment camps in the event of a war, and 53 percent voiced support for the state encouraging Arabs to emigrate.” Full article.

The government has exposed detainees “to unacceptably high risks of potentially severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including seizures, intense vertigo, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, aggression, panic, anxiety, severe insomnia, and thoughts of suicide,” said Nevin, who was not speaking in an official capacity, but offering opinions as a board-certified, preventive medicine physician. “These side effects could be as severe as those intended through the application of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.” Full article.

brilliant!!! have been saying that for yrs about muslims in america: we must join together with others in the struggle for civil rights – african americans, latino immigrants, the LGBT community, etc. we only win when everyone wins.

“One year ago, we witnessed – perhaps for the first time ever in Israel – groups of Muslim women from the Negev holding green flags marching alongside groups of gay activists from Tel Aviv with rainbow pride flags. Different flags, different struggles, proclaiming a single message of shared values: all human rights for all people! The Human Rights March is an expression of partnership between multiple groups marching under a host of different banners, finding commonality in their difference and unity in our shared values. These different voices combine and resonate with a message of humanism, pluralism, and democracy – declaring that these are the defining values of our society.” Full article.

“Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas? It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.” (Paul Woolley)

In effect, many of the big banks have turned themselves from businesses whose profits rose and fell with the capital-raising needs of their clients into immense trading houses whose fortunes depend on their ability to exploit day-to-day movements in the markets. Because trading has become so central to their business, the big banks are forever trying to invent new financial products that they can sell but that their competitors, at least for the moment, cannot. Some recent innovations, such as tradable pollution rights and catastrophe bonds, have provided a public benefit. But it’s easy to point to other innovations that serve little purpose or that blew up and caused a lot of collateral damage, such as auction-rate securities and collateralized debt obligations.

[…] Think of all the profits produced by businesses operating in the U.S. as a cake. Twenty-five years ago, the slice taken by financial firms was about a seventh of the whole. Last year, it was more than a quarter. (In 2006, at the peak of the boom, it was about a third.) In other words, during a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot, and Lipitor, the best place to work has been in an industry that doesn’t design, build, or sell a single tangible thing.

[…] From the end of the Second World War until 1980 or thereabouts, people working in finance earned about the same, on average and taking account of their qualifications, as people in other industries. By 2006, wages in the financial sector were about sixty per cent higher than wages elsewhere.

At Goldman, it has been reported, nearly a thousand employees received bonuses of at least a million dollars in 2009.

[…] Rather than seeking the most productive outlet for the money that depositors and investors entrust to them, they may follow trends and surf bubbles. These activities shift capital into projects that have little or no long-term value, such as speculative real-estate developments in the swamps of Florida. Rather than acting in their customers’ best interests, financial institutions may peddle opaque investment products, like collateralized debt obligations. Privy to superior information, banks can charge hefty fees and drive up their own profits at the expense of clients who are induced to take on risks they don’t fully understand—a form of rent seeking.

[…] “The usual economists’ argument for financial innovation is that it adds to the size of the pie,” Gerald Epstein, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, said. “But these types of things don’t add to the pie. They redistribute it—often from taxpayers to banks and other financial institutions.”

[…] Despite all the criticism that President Obama has received lately from Wall Street, the Administration has largely left the great money-making machine intact.

[…] Public antagonism toward bankers and other financiers kept them in check for forty years. Economic historians refer to a period of “financial repression,” during which regulators and policymakers, reflecting public suspicion of Wall Street, restrained the growth of the banking sector. They placed limits on interest rates, prohibited deposit-taking institutions from issuing securities, and, by preventing financial institutions from merging with one another, kept most of them relatively small. During this period, major financial crises were conspicuously absent, while capital investment, productivity, and wages grew at rates that lifted tens of millions of working Americans into the middle class.

[…] Since the early nineteen-eighties, by contrast, financial blowups have proliferated and living standards have stagnated. Is this coincidence? For a long time, economists and policymakers have accepted the financial industry’s appraisal of its own worth, ignoring the market failures and other pathologies that plague it. Even after all that has happened, there is a tendency in Congress and the White House to defer to Wall Street because what happens there, befuddling as it may be to outsiders, is essential to the country’s prosperity. Finally, dissidents like Paul Woolley are questioning this narrative. “There was a presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable,” Woolley said to me. “The first thing I discovered was that it wasn’t backed by any empirical evidence. There’s almost none.”

Full article here.

there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the u.s. (glenn greenwald)