Saturday, 3 October 2015
Friday, 2 October 2015
It's Not Just VW's Problem Now - EPautos
It's Not Just VW's Problem Now - EPautos
It’s not just VW’s problem now.
The company may go the way of the Dodo because of brutal fines and crippling lawsuits and media demagoguery that’s turning the VW brand into the automotive equivalent of NAMBLA.
But if you think it’ll stop there… .
So, where will it stop?
Putin Calls Out Washington -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org
Putin Calls Out Washington -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org
“We can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world.” President Vladimir Putin
Last Wednesday (28 Sept 2015) the world saw the difference between Russia and Washington. Putin’s approach is truth-based; Obama’s is vain boasts and lies, and Obama is running out of lies.
By telling the truth at a time of universal deceit, Putin committed a revolutionary act. Referring to the slaughter, destruction, and chaos that Washington has brought to the Middle East, North Africa, and Ukraine, and the extreme jihadist forces that have been unleashed, Putin asked Washington: “Do you realize what you have done?”
Putin’s question reminds me of the question Joseph Welch asked witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency?” Welch’s question is attributed with initiating the decline of McCarthy’s career.
Perhaps Putin’s question will have the same impact and bring the reign of “American Exceptionalism” to an end.
If so, Putin has launched a revolution that will overthrow the world’s subservience to Washington.
Putin stresses the legality of Russia’s intervention in Syria, which is at the request of the Syrian government. He contrasts Russia’s respect for international law with the intervention in Syria of Washington and France, governments that are violating Syria’s sovereignty with unrequested and illegal military action.
The world sees that it is Washington and its vassals who “violate international norms” and not Russia.
The sanctimonious self-righteousness, behind which hides Washington’s self-serving unilateral actions, is revealed for all to see.
Washington relies on its arsenal of lies. Washington’s media-based disinformation apparatus was too hot to trot. Just as the BBC’s TV reporter announced the premature destruction of World Trade Center Building 7 with the building clearly still standing in the background, Washington’s lie service announced the first civilian casualties of Russian air strikes “even before our planes got in the air,” noted President Putin in his comments on Washington’s disinformation warfare.
As a consequence of their subservience to Washington, the puppet states of Europe are being overrun by refugees from Washington’s wars that Europe so mindlessly enabled. As the cost of being Washington’s vassals comes home to Europeans, the standings of European political parties will be affected. New parties and ruling coalitions are likely to follow more independent paths in order to protect themselves from the costs of the enormous mistakes that flow from Washington’s arrogance and hubris.
The breakup of the Empire is on the horizon.
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, How Trump Became Trump and What That Means for the Rest of Us | TomDispatch
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, How Trump Became Trump and What That Means for the Rest of Us | TomDispatch
Sometimes when I look at the increasingly bizarre, never-ending campaign for the White House and the staggering fundraising that goes with it, I think to myself: if we were in Kabul, Afghanistan, we would know what this was. We would recognize warlord politics. We would understand that (Bernie Sanders aside) politicians running for the presidency now need patrons -- modern-day Medicis who can fund the super PACs that are increasingly the heart and soul of a process leading to the first $10 billion election. Those billionaire funders are, of course, America’s warlords. In his book No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, reporter Anand Gopal offers a riveting up close and personal look at how the process works far from home. One of the Afghans he follows is a remarkable woman who, under the patronage of just such a warlord, finds herself a senator in the Afghan Parliament.
In our system, the candidates now first test their “electability” not with voters in primaries, but with a tiny coterie of the super-rich. In the case of the Koch brothers, for instance, they literally audition for support. In twenty-first-century America, these should undoubtedly be considered the real primaries and what happens starting in Iowa and New Hampshire early next year should be thought of as the secondaries. The increasingly fierce contests for money are America’s new electoral reality, the one the Supreme Court let loose on the land with its 2010 Citizens United decision that freed the voice of money to overwhelm the many voices of this country. The process of fundraising has only gained momentum since then and yet this new form of electoral politics is a system still in formation, like molten lava only now beginning to cool and settle into its future shape.
To give credit where it’s due, Donald Trump has kept that lava hot in ways that, under other circumstances, would be amusing indeed. After all, he’s the definition of an American warlord -- and he’s also running for the presidency. It’s an unexpected wrinkle in the coalescence of a genuinely plutocratic electoral system. In other words, The Donald would like to send himself and, as TomDispatch regular Nomi Prins points out today, his money directly to the Oval Office in January 2017, while mocking those helpless peons of the political class who need to turn to people like him to be in the big time. Despite some public discussion of Trump's many bankruptcies, Mr. Art of the Deal has had remarkably free sailing when it comes to what it might mean to put a billionaire in the White House. Conflicts of interest? Don’t even think about it! Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power, shifts the focus to where it should be -- on The Donald’s finances and the conflicts that make the man and would be part and parcel of any Trump presidency. Tom
Cont....Trumpocrisy
The Donald’s Finances and the Art of Ignoring Conflicts and Contradictions
By Nomi PrinsThe 2016 election campaign is certainly a billionaire’s playground when it comes to “establishment candidates” like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush who cater to mega-donors and use their money to try to rally party bases. The only genuine exception to the rule this time around has been Bernie Sanders, who has built a solid grassroots following and funding machine, while shunning what he calls “the billionaire class” that fuels the super PACs.Donald Trump, like Ross Perot back in the 1992 and 1996 elections, has played quite a different trick on the money-saturated American political system. He has removed the billionaire as middleman between citizen plebeians and political elites, and created a true .00001% candidate, because he’s... well, a financial elite unto himself, however conveniently posed as the country’s straight-talking “everyman.”
The Mind of Mr. Putin – Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website
The Mind of Mr. Putin - Official Website
By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Do you realize now what you have done?”
So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us.
Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power.
A Petticoat Military: Comedy in Uniform « The Burning Platform
A Petticoat Military: Comedy in Uniform « The Burning Platform
The military, once again, puts women into jobs the cannot do–this time, the Army’s Rangers–to advance the careers of political generals–among others, Maj Gen. Scott Miller, who oversees Ranger School. Or what used to be Ranger School.
Writes Susan Keating in People magazine: “A woman will graduate Ranger School,” a general told shocked subordinates this year while preparing for the first females to attend a “gender integrated assessment” of the grueling combat leadership course starting April 20, sources tell People. “At least one will get through.”
And two did, by being given special treatment. Again, a general’s career takes precedence over the good of his troops. An old story.
The Army cheated, says Keating: lowered standards to be politically correct and keep feminists happy. This, as the Army knows, and everyone who has been in combat knows, as well as most people who have been in the field military, is a terrible idea. But the Army exists to keep feminists happy. The services are in the hands of what Dave Hackworth, whom I knew before his death, called the Perfumed Princes. These are peace-time officers more interested in their own advancement than in their troops. Being politicians, not soldiers, they are afraid of women. They allow the feminists to make fools of their men:
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