"Last week Thursday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew visited the west coast and had a closed door meeting with key players from Silicon Valley. The meeting was held in Mountain View, California at the headquarters of Facebook. EconomicPolicyJournal.com has obtained the list of attendees. How would you like to be able to make your investment and business decisions after attending a meeting like this?" Continue reading →
"It’s a gold rush. People now come to Washington to get rich. That was never the defining ethic of the town, certainly 30 years ago. There is now so much money. It is now the wealthiest community in the United States. It is home to 7 of the wealthiest 10 counties in the United States. If you can sell yourself as someone who knows how Washington works, someone who has these relationships, someone who can get on the phone and get the president of the United States… that’s a very, very marketable commodity. I mean, if you are seen as someone who knows how this town works, someone who is a usual suspect in this town, you can dine out for years. That’s why no one leaves." Continue reading →
"Bill talks with journalist Mark Leibovich about his latest book, This Town, a city where money rules and status is determined by who you know and what they can do for you." Continue reading →
[February 2013] "Netanyahu won a smaller than expected victory in elections in January. In the run up to the American elections last November, Netanyahu was perceived as favoring Republican nominee Mitt Romney for president. The office of Israeli President Shimon Peres announced Monday that Obama would be presented with the Presidential Medal of Distinction in March, according to the Guardian. It would recognize Obama's 'unique and significant contribution to strengthening the State of Israel and the security of its citizens.' The prime minister's official Facebook page offers these three choices for logos to represent Obama's visit." Continue reading →
"I use the 'War Party' phraseology as shorthand for a number of different groups and individuals, all of whom are linked by an ideological and/or financial interest in promoting a foreign policy of perpetual war. This includes those groups pushing for budget-busting 'defense' outlays, as well as those whose commitment to militarism is more ideological. Then there are the foreign lobbyists who have an interest in maintaining and expanding the American Empire: and while there are a number of foreign interests involved in this vector, the one that stands out on account of the sheer quantity of its resources is the Israel lobby, which combines a rich source of funding with ideologically-based activism." Continue reading →
"In an open letter to President Obama a group of warmongers have urged President Obama to impose 'meaningful consequences on the Assad regime.' 'At a minimum, the United States, along with willing allies and partners, should use standoff weapons and airpower to target the Syrian dictatorship’s military units that were involved in the recent large-scale use of chemical weapons. It should also provide vetted moderate elements of Syria’s armed opposition with the military support required to identify and strike regime units armed with chemical weapons,' says the letter." Continue reading →
"To support the troops is to accept a particular idea of the American role in the world. It also forces us to pretend that it is a country legitimately interested in equality for all its citizens. In reality, the troops are not actually recipients of any meaningful support. That honor is reserved for the government and its elite constituencies. 'Support our troops' entails a tacit injunction that we also support whatever politicians in any given moment deem the national interest. If we understand that 'the national interest' is but a metonym for the aspirations of the ruling class, then supporting the troops becomes a counterintuitive, even harmful, gesture." Continue reading →
"Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days (November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981), after a group of Iranian students supporting the Iranian Revolution took over the American Embassy in Tehran. Gary Sick wrote both an editorial for The New York Times in April of 1990 and a book on the subject: In October 1980 officials in Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign made a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election and in return for this, the U.S. purportedly arranged for Israel to ship weapons to Iran. Sick had interviewed a witness who saw members of the Reagan election team in Paris in negotiations with the Iranian government." Continue reading →
"It’s the most important crime in the second half of the 20th century, it is still unsolved and it marked in a way the end of the American Republic. Since then the financial-military-industrial complex rules and no president after JFK had the balls to challenge that. There is, in the words of Gore Vidal, 'a one-party-system with two right-wings'; there are corporate media brainwashing the population 24/7 and propagating wars for global imperial dominance; there are covert operations all over the world to ensure this dominance – and this will go on and on as long the truth about the covert operation, the coup d’ état, against JFKs presidency is kept hidden." Continue reading →
"If asked why I would want to go slow before dismissing the idea that the federal government murdered Mr. Hastings, I would answer that the power of the examples set by Barack Obama, in his two terms, and by John Brennan, in his work for Clinton and Obama, give me pause. From my perspective, both men consistently have demonstrated themselves to be completely comfortable with creating situations, or permitting situations to exist in which Americans — civilian and military — are killed, in essence, by their own government’s decisions, actions, or inactons. And what would these situations be, one might ask? Well, let me start with the following ten items." Continue reading →