Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

By Rehabilitating Iraq War Boosters, Is the Press Trying to Forgive Itself?
HP | Eric Boehlert | 06/23/14

The bad bout of 2003 déjà vu continued on Sunday when former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on ABC's This Week to lecture President Obama about how his policies had allegedly made a mess out of Iraq, as violence there continues to grip the country and threatens to completely destabilize the nation.

Cheney's appearance continues a maddening, week-long stroll down Baghdad memory lane as media outlets rush to get commentary from the people who, 11 years ago, got everything wrong about the Iraq War: The stunning cost, the causalities, the war planning, the intelligence, the sectarian violence. All of it.

"The neoconservative program cost the United States several trillion dollars and thousands dead and wounded American soldiers, and it sowed carnage and chaos in Iraq and elsewhere," writes Harvard University professor Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. Read more

Andrew Bacevich: The Duplicity of the Ideologues
Bill Moyers | Andrew Bacevich | 06/20/14

"Almost 70 years ago, a new world order was born from the rubble of World War II, built by and around the power of the United States." Yet today, Robert Kagan laments, "that world order shows signs of cracking, and perhaps even collapsing." Wherever he looks, Kagan sees evidence that "something is changing, and perhaps more quickly than we may imagine," he writes in the New Republic ("Superpowers Don't Get to Retire"). Indeed, "the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us."

These changes "signal a transition into a different world order," one bearing troubling similarities to the 1930s. The origins of this prospective calamity are plain to see. Don't bother to look for material explanations. "If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring," Kagan writes, "it is not because America's power is declining." The United States has power to spare, asserts the author of The World America Made. No, what we have here is "an intellectual problem, a question of identity and purpose." Feckless, silly Americans, with weak-willed Barack Obama their enabler, are abdicating their obligation to lead the planet. The abyss beckons. ... Read more

Thanks to WikiLeaks, public can debate alarming new trade deal
Aljazeera | David Cay Johnston | 06/23/14

WikiLeaks last week again pierced the veil of official secrecy that surrounds global trade negotiations. The peek it gave us should alarm everyone.

Big Business and national governments wanted to conceal the terms of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) while keeping consumers, unions, environmentalists and the vast majority of businesses in the dark. Thanks to WikiLeaks, they failed.

The draft agreement WikiLeaks released on June 19 is fresh, written in May. It is a model of secret law, blatant in its disregard for transparency, democratic process and history. Its opening page says the terms are to remain secret for five years after negotiations formally end or the proposed new rules take effect. Talks to refine that agreement were to resume Monday in Geneva. ... Read more, and here

Glenn Greenwald: 'What I Tell People Who Say They Don't Care About Their Privacy'
AlterNet | Alyssa Figueroa | 06/20/14

Since he obtained and published Edward Snowden's leaked National Security Agency documents a little more than a year ago, journalist Glenn Greenwald said people have told him over and over that government surveillance does not concern them.

"Those people don't believe what they're saying," he told a sold-out audience last week at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco.

To illustrate this, every time someone would come up to Greenwald and say they didn't mind people knowing what they were doing because they had nothing to hide, he would proceed with the same two steps: first, by giving them his email address and then by asking them to send him all their email and social media passwords -- just so he could have a look. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, June 24 [11:49]

*The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets
Using Google Street View Time Machine (pictures)
or
The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets (pictures)

TRNN | Michael Hudson: Is Thomas Piketty Right About the Causes of Inequality? (older) [10:15]

No End in Sight Iraq's Descent Into Chaos by Charles Ferguson (2006) [1:41:53]

Inside Job by Charles Ferguson (2009) [1:48:38]

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Dr. Oz and Nutritional Supplements (06/22/14) [16:25]