dogknob
dogknob's JournalHillary Clinton Is Whitewashing the Financial Catastrophe
She has a plan that she claims will reform Wall Streetbut shes deflecting responsibility from old friends and donors in the industry.
http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-is-whitewashing-the-financial-catastrophe/
The seminal event that sowed financial disaster was the repeal of the New Deals Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated banking into different realms: investment banks, which organize capital investors for risk-taking ventures; and deposit-holding banks, which serve people as borrowers and lenders. That laws repeal, a great victory for Wall Street, was delivered by Bill Clinton in 1999, assisted by the Federal Reserve and the financial sectors armies of lobbyists. The universal banking model was saluted as a modernizing reform that liberated traditional banks to participate directly and indirectly in long-prohibited and vastly more profitable risk-taking.
Exotic financial instruments like derivatives and credit-default swaps flourished, enabling old-line bankers to share in the fun and profit on an awesome scale. The banks invented guarantees against loss and sold them to both companies and market players. The fast-expanding financial sector claimed a larger and larger share of the economy (and still does) at the expense of the real economy of producers and consumers. The interconnectedness across market sectors created the illusion of safety. When illusions failed, these connected guarantees became the dragnet that drove panic in every direction. Ultimately, the federal government had to rescue everyone, foreign and domestic, to stop the bleeding.
Yet Hillary Clinton asserts in her Times op-ed that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with it. She claims that Glass-Steagall would not have limited the reckless behavior of institutions like Lehman Brothers or insurance giant AIG, which were not traditional banks. Her argument amounts to facile evasion that ignores the interconnected exposures. The Federal Reserve spent $180 billion bailing out AIG so AIG could pay back Goldman Sachs and other banks. If the Fed hadnt acted and had allowed AIG to fail, the banks would have gone down too.
More at link: http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-is-whitewashing-the-financial-catastrophe/
Ads are one thing. Ads with autoplay audio have no place on DU.
Is this a "feature" of the new server?
I know it's not Flash because I have my browser set to "always ask" before running any Flash.
If it's going to be a new "thing" around here to allow HTMLS5/JS autoplay audio in ads here, then ceeya!
NYT: How ‘South Park’ Perfectly Captures Our Era of Outrage
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/arts/television/south-park-sketches-grander-satire-themes.htmlAnd where past South Park satires once looked at single issues, this season is sketching something like a grand if messy unified theory of anger, inequality and disillusionment in 2015 America.
Even as the p.c. wars rage, the town of South Park is being gentrified: Its attracted a Whole Foods and built Sodosopa (South of Downtown South Park), an enclave of hipster eateries and condos built literally around the house of the dirt-poor McCormick family. The townspeople are delighted, until they realize many of them cant afford to join the few, the smug, the artisanal. Under the towns chichi new facade is a familiar slurry of resentment (of the privileged, of immigrants, of elites) and fear (of terrorism, of crime, of economically falling).
And all that, in the South Park worldview, drives people to a self-pitying narcissism that extends to politics but also goes beyond it. In the seasons darkest episode, Safe Space, the townspeople assign a single child to filter every negative comment from their social media, to protect their self-esteem from all manner of -shaming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/arts/television/south-park-sketches-grander-satire-themes.html
My widdle snowfwake bwain is melting!
Isis was quick to understand a truth the West must now confront -- EDIT: Now with fun WWI MAP!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-a-borderless-world-the-days-when-we-could-fight-foreign-wars-and-be-safe-at-home-may-be-long-a6741146.htmlThe same night that I saw the early Isis video, I happened to be visiting the Lebanese Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt. The end of Sykes-Picot! he roared at me. Rubbish, I snorted. But of course, I was wrong and Jumblatt was right. He had spotted at once how Isis captured symbolically but with almost breathtaking speed what so many Arabs had sought for almost exactly 100 years: the unravelling of the fake borders with which the victors of the First World War largely the British and the French had divided the Arab people. It was our colonial construction not just the frontiers we imposed upon them, but the administrations and the false democracies that we fraudulently thrust upon them, the mandates and trusteeships which allowed us to rule them that poisoned their lives. Colin Powell claimed just such a trusteeship for Iraq's oil prior to the illegal Anglo-American invasion of 2003.
We foisted kings upon the Arabs we engineered a 96 per cent referendum in favour of the Hashemite King Faisal in Iraq in 1922 and then provided them with generals and dictators. The people of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt which had been invaded by the British in the 19th century were subsequently blessed with mendacious governments, brutal policemen, lying newspapers and fake elections. Mubarak even scored Faisal's epic 96 per cent election victory all over again. For the Arabs, democracy did not mean freedom of speech and freedom to elect their own leaders; it referred to the democratic Western nations that continued to support the cruel dictators who oppressed them.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-a-borderless-world-the-days-when-we-could-fight-foreign-wars-and-be-safe-at-home-may-be-long-a6741146.html
EDIT: Map of Sykes-Picot plan in my comment below (#3).
You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
Excerpt from part 1: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html
There is nothing here that separates Wahhabism from ISIS. The rift would emerge only later: from the subsequent institutionalization of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab's doctrine of "One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque" -- these three pillars being taken respectively to refer to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of official Wahhabism, and its control of "the word" (i.e. the mosque).
It is this rift -- the ISIS denial of these three pillars on which the whole of Sunni authority presently rests -- makes ISIS, which in all other respects conforms to Wahhabism, a deep threat to Saudi Arabia.
Excerpt from part 2: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-aim-saudi-arabia_b_5748744.html
As a result -- from then until now -- British and American policy has been bound to Saudi aims (as tightly as to their own ones), and has been heavily dependent on Saudi Arabia for direction in pursuing its course in the Middle East.
In political and financial terms, the Saud-Philby strategy has been an astonishing success (if taken on its own, cynical, self-serving terms). But it was always rooted in British and American intellectual obtuseness: the refusal to see the dangerous "gene" within the Wahhabist project, its latent potential to mutate, at any time, back into its original a bloody, puritan strain. In any event, this has just happened: ISIS is it.
TONIGHT! Who will be the next...
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Donation Purgatory?
I live in Orange County, CA (near Camp Pendleton/San Onofre) and I've got a twin bed, dresser and office chair (all in good condition) that I am trying (present tense, still searching) to donate, preferably to DAV or an affiliate (screw the Salvation Army, their overpriced thrift shops, and their fundie indoctrination masquerading as drug rehab).
So far I am having trouble even finding anyone to talk to about this. I'm no Google dummy -- there's plenty of websites, but all of the places I have seen thus far don't have an easy way to schedule a pick-up (I don't have a suitable vehicle) or a way to speak with anyone directly.
Anyone with ideas? Experience?
If I have to rent a truck, this stuff's going to the landfill, which would be a shame.
When the only place you can see Gone With the Wind is in some museum in NYC...
... then maybe I will believe that we are actually giving the confederacy an appropriate heave-ho from our culture.
Maybe GWTW can replace Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story at the Paley Center for Media.
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Member since: Tue Jun 16, 2009, 04:09 PMNumber of posts: 2,431