Victory? What exactly does victory look like? Who are the good guys? No matter who we back we piss off an ally and join forces with an enemy. And no matter who we back, eventually they will become our enemy. It’s just an impossible hornet’s nest that we caused and expecting the people who broke it to fix it using the same policies and methods as they did when they broke it is not indicative of sanity.
Except that there aren’t any jobs that can support a family. A minimum wage job without benefits is not an attractive alternative to selling drugs. If our big companies weren’t trying to do everything in their power to hoard profits while spewing nonsense about trickle down theories and how they need tax cuts to create jobs, we might be getting somewhere, but returning to the Gilded Age is not the answer.
The real goal is to goad the US into responding to a criminal act with a military response. It worked like gangbusters with Bush/Cheney and the neocons, getting rid of Iran’s enemy, and fulfilling Bin Laden’s dream of crashing the United States. I don’t think Obama will be as much of a sucker as Bush was (thanks to his response to Bin Laden we now have ISIS and more than a decade of chaos in Iraq), but it’s a slippery slope.
Meanwhile he has been on vacation half as much as Reagan and 1/3 as much as W. Reagan spent a lot more time on the golf links than Obama ever did. I hope you were sufficiently outraged back then.
Why? It’s absolutely right on. Prior to McCutcheon even the appearance of corruption was a concern. Now, there has to be a quid pro quo that can be brought under state or federal bribery charges in order to find corruption. This is insane. Our system is completely corrupted by money and everyone knows it except the SCOTUS. It’s hard to believe they can assert their position with a straight face and it’s a nail in the coffin of the democracy of the United States. Let’s not even get into the fact that McCutcheon now allows people to decide not only who will represent them but who will represent everyone else. It’s an abomination of a decision that hands our political system to the very rich. $≠speech. It’s just money.
Not only pushed the loans, but then turned them into CDOs that were so popular that when it was revealed that the loans were bad, the underpinnings of entire banks folded. Not only is it the job of banks to determine if the borrowers are solvent, it’s also their job not to misrepresent the value of the loans if they choose to sell them. But when Wall St. is all about appearance of wealth and has nothing to do with actual value, what do we expect? Wall St. isn’t even a casino, it’s a confidence scheme.
It should read “So far since the invasion of Iraq….” Or even “Since the overthrow of Mossedeq”