Sweet Lo-retta!

In a TV segment, CNBC panelists candidly debate the decline of the “US empire” without batting an eyelash.  The accompanying article is entitled, “Health Care Law Signals US Empire Decline?”, wherein the guest, a hedge fund manager in “emerging markets” argues that the health care reform is one of many obvious indicators that the lights are blinking red on the US empire, just as national healthcare in Britain signaled its obvious imperial decline.

In their expansionary phase, empires force people to go out, seek risks and fend for themselves, Murrin said, reminding of the dismantling of the British empire after the war, when the National Health Service, which ensures universal health coverage in Britain, was created.

Tired of being exuberant about pregnant mothers being gut-shot in the middle of the night in  Afghanistan?

Fatigued of your joyous tirades when government ships a bazillion more dollars out the door?

Exhausted from infectious laughter about who among you can’t find jobs?

Experiencing burnt-out lassitude from cheerleading massively corrupt malfeasance?

Enervated by enthusiasm?

Fagged out by optimism?

Feeling the oats of listless insignificance?

Pfizer presents Despondex:

Chomsky sed that there is no shame in voting for lesser of two evils.

Yes, there is.  

Yes, there is shame in being part of that system.  

Saying otherwise is like denying that the humiliated are humiliated.  

Military Commissions: Ritualized “justice” to cover-up torture, murder, & innocence.  

Obama’s flip-flopping on the use of military commissions means, apparently, we can never turn the page on BushCo, which permanently broke the Constitution.  The law is still subject to whims of stubborn rulers, justice is arbitrary, and “the days of compromising our values” are definitely not over.

Remember this gem from William Haynes who was over-seeing the rigged Military Commissions at Guantanamo, as related by the Commission’s chief prosecutor Col. Morris Davis?

“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.'”

Col. Davis honorably resigned.

Contrast Hayne’s view of the law with that of Retired Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, who served as a Judge Advocate in the US Navy from 1973 to 2000, and was the Navy’s Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000:

“You can’t have a legitimate court unless you are willing to risk an acquittal. If you aren’t willing to accept the possibility that a jury will acquit the accused based on the evidence fairly presented, then it isn’t really a court. It’s a charade.”

It’s a veritable calliope of tea kettles a-whistling through the tubes.  First, from zerohedge, the Fed has lost its Freedom of Information Act disclosure requirement to Bloomberg news, and now must apparently reveal some bank names and lending practices surrounding the bail-out:

Key selection from the Second Circuit’s Fed FOIA appeal:

The requirement of disclosure under FOIA and its proper limits are matters of congressional policy. The statute as written by Congress sets forth no basis for the exemption the Board asks us to read into it. If the Board believes such an exemption would better serve the national interest, it should ask Congress to amend the statute.

In other words: if the Fed wants to maintain its strict secrecy, it better get Congress to change the laws immediately. Of course, if that happens it will become very clear who controls not just the fiscal and monetary destiny of America, its executive control (via the recently institued bilateral decision making of who apoints who – the President of the United States <-> The President of the FRBNY, and vice versa ), but also the legislative. As for the judicial, we will know definitively when the Supreme Court overturns this decision. In other words, the Federal Reserve is about to become the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court (not to mention Wall Street) all rolled into one.

This could be a terrible blow to secrecy and the shadow banking/government system.

his views…

…it is my view that President Obama has been a nearly flawless foreign policy President.

…with any over-arching foreign policy justifications, like, Why are we there in the first place?  What’s our right?  Why do we persist?  What did they ever do to us?

If one wants to call US foreign policy “flawless,” one needs a half-way decent defense of such questions, no?  Is BTD willing to put his implicit foreign policy theories on paper for the rest of us to read?  (If I am missing such justifications e.g., 9/11, al Qaeda, WMD, New World Order, please let me know.)

I need to hear some specifics on “flawless [interventionist] foreign policy.”  Bring it!  BTD has got a Basketball Jones for interventionist foreign policy, and it’s time to bring the ball to the hoop for a slam dunk, or two!

Update

No one can reasonably dispute that the entire industrialized world is crucially dependent on oil, for better or worse.   If you’ve ever seen a rat during morphine withdrawal, un-groomed, greasy hair standing on end, teeth-chattering, paw tremors, wet-dog shakes, hyper-stress-responsive to the mildest stimuli, metabolically crashing, you can extrapolate the physiological horrors of morphine withdrawal and multiply them billions of times across humanity to get a sense of what sudden oil withdrawal would be like.  There’s nothing pretty about it.

The US has been on escalating doses of oil for a long, long time, feeding our dependency.  Obama certainly didn’t invent our foreign policy.  It has been US policy for a long time, explicitly since the Carter doctrine and in reality well before that, to meddle aggressively, some would say “defend ourselves” in the oily parts of the world.  Given our crucial dependence, it’s not a priori criminally insane.  In a state of nature, it would be no different from defending one’s place at the watering hole.    Indeed, there are no laws in Nature, and no justifications are required.   But we don’t claim to exist in a state of nature.   We humans claim to live in a realm of social contracts.

Our foreign policy of defending ourselves (and perhaps others, as well) at the watering hole, however justifiable that may or may not be in the realm of social contracts, recently appears to have morphed into a flat-out “exterminate the brutes” campaign.  One could vigorously and convincingly argue that our recent aggressive adventures in the oily parts of the world is demonstrably well outside the bounds of any perceived or known social agreements.

I’d just like to see an intelligent, measured response from someone who sees the policy as flawless.

The world’s five biggest AAA-rated states are all at risk of soaring debt costs and will have to implement austerity plans that threaten “social cohesion”, according to a report on sovereign debt by Moody’s. The US rating agency said the US, the UK, Germany, France, and Spain are walking a tightrope as they try to bring public finances under control without nipping recovery in the bud. It warned of “substantial execution risk” in withdrawal of stimulus.

Here’s the sanitary definition of “austerity measure” from the Financial Times:

Austerity measure:

An official action taken by a government in order to reduce the amount of money that it spends or the amount that people spend. [1]

-Financial Times Lexicon

There are many, many valid grievances, but  some issues really stand out:

The world’s five biggest AAA-rated states are all at risk of soaring debt costs and will have to implement austerity plans that threaten “social cohesion”, according to a report on sovereign debt by Moody’s. The US rating agency said the US, the UK, Germany, France, and Spain are walking a tightrope as they try to bring public finances under control without nipping recovery in the bud. It warned of “substantial execution risk” in withdrawal of stimulus.

That would be the tight-rope without a net.  Tanking economies and “social cohesion” swamp all else.