What the big banks have done to this country and world is actually worse than what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You are wrong. People in Iraq and Afghanistan are dying. Iraqi widows, living with their children in sewage in the ruins of Baghdad, are turning to prostitution in order to feed their children. Cancer and infant mortality rates are skyrocketing in Fallujah after we used spent uranium rounds all over the place. The nation's literacy rate has dropped since there's not enough security to send their kids to school. This is all due to the unilateral actions of a nation they have no control over.
In America, we dismantled the regulatory agencies by voting GOP. We spent our money. We bet on housing. We let the financial industry write it's own rules, and expected the magic hand of the market to keep them from fucking everything up with greed. We are reaping what we have sown.
Your attachment to wealth above the injustices of the wars in the Middle East is beyond reprehensible. It's inhuman, and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself.
It should also be noted that said envirowackos did, in fact, sue to stop a solar plant being built in Ca recently over the matter of half a dozen tortoises. It happens.
Yes, and some fringe Republicans wanted nuclear war after 9/11. Does that mean it's a standard Republican viewpoint?
There are nutty "green" activists who literally cry and hug trees and set fire to SUVs. The rest of us know the quickest way to an environmentally conscious society is employment, education, development, and regulation. The measured loss of biodiversity in the Saharan desert is minuscule compared to the damage of fossil fuel usage.
I'd like to see your proof for that universal and categorical negative.
I made the falsifiable assertion. It's up to you to disprove it.
You may or may not agree with the war in Iraq (I certainly don't) but what is occurring cannot compare to what occurred before.
Surely it can. The low estimates of Iraqi casualties in both cases are about 100,000, and at least a few studies (like the Lancet) put direct and indirect deaths in Iraq well above 500,000 since 2003.
Of course, most of the deaths of innocent Iraqis are due to four things:
1) Saddam Hussein from 1980 to 1991 while he was an official ally and client of the United States. 2) The Iran-Iraq War, which was supported by the United States after we removed Iraq from the State Sponsors of Terror list in 1982. 3) Embargoes from the UN from 1991 until 2003 which were pushed and supported by the United States. 4) The invasion of Iraq by the United States from 2003 until the present.
So, that's about thirty years of death and suffering due to our geopolitical chess game. Which doesn't at all compare to any financial shenanigans committed by Americans on other Americans.
Only someone as boringly stupid as you are could come up with such nonsense. The biodiversity of sub-Saharan Africa is spread out over tens of thousands of square miles. As long as the development doesn't impede migratory patterns or survival of some important food chain, no one is going to complain.
"Envirowackos" are trying to make sure that shortsighted development doesn't cause more harm in the long run than it fixes. When you have to spend more money cleaning up a mess than it saved in economic productivity, it's not even economically useful and it's potentially disastrous for humans.
Take your hollow viewpoint back to whatever rotting pundit orifice you dragged it out of.
I think he's assuming that the Western governments don't purposefully impoverish the same nations again by forcing them into contracts that don't allow them any rights or infrastructure to process the finished goods themselves.
There are many ways to utilize it without running transmission lines. One simple idea is fuel cells, which would be best if they could also be manufactured out of mostly silica. If they hold their electric charge with enough efficiency, you could eventually have an all-electric transportation system, including the cargo ships used to deliver them worldwide.
No countries have to agree on how to share power. They can either buy it from African nations or not. Until the United States gets involved, at least.
What the big banks have done to this country and world is actually worse than what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan
No, a hundred thousand people killed by a country with no right to even be in their hemisphere is a million times worse than the loss of economic productivity. Not one single Iraqi ever physically harmed an American outside of their sovereign border. The same goes for the Afghani people.
And you wonder why no one has respect for the American culture anymore? Go fuck yourself.
If you can have sex with two women who will later regret it, can I kill a few hundred thousand Muslims and take a big hairy shit on the Constitution and International Law? Awesome!
Oh, wait, those two things are probably not on par, are they? Tell you what... I'll throw in the complete destruction of your civil liberties, and you can have some self righteous celebrity gossip egged on by the establishment.
You're assuming WikiLeaks is the only place a person can leak information. If I really wanted to get something out, I could send it anywhere: The Nation, Democracy Now, The Guardian. Or Fox News if it was somehow damaging to a democrat.
People have got the entire purpose of the Fourth Estate hugely backwards these days. There can be only one government per nation. There can be thousands of media outlets. WikiLeaks is showing that our Fourth Estates are entirely in the hands of the same people who are breaking the law. The editors care more about keeping corporate advertisers and access to government officials than they do about telling the truth, so the entire system of checks and balances has fallen completely apart.
So yeah, Assange is literally putting his life on the line to get the truth out. He's being sort of a douche about it, but that's the sort of personality that has the balls to get the job done. He has more integrity than any other part of the media has had since the Pentagon papers came out.
Just look at the difference between reporting on the War in Vietnam and the War in Iraq. The fealty is absolutely fucking pathetic.
If the documents are sufficient, I wonder how they will continue to spin corrupt financial industry practices as the fault of Obama without actually doing anything useful to stop them. 9/11 spared them from Enron, and if lightning strikes twice...
Yeah, that's why senior administration officials are calling for Assange's head. Because he made it all up.
It's really pathetic when people consider the truth to be political. I think it's far more likely that you're upset that your worldview has turned out to be a lie.
Yeah, sorry I'm being a dick. It's part of my charm.
WWII provided full employment, which is the only cure for a down economy. Automation has made employment unnecessary, so this round is not even providing increased employment, just increased profits and higher salaries for members of the board. You can look at any statistic you like. I recommend CEO pay compared to worker pay, which has skyrocketed since the 60s. It used to be that the CEO made about 30 times the average worker, now it's well into the 300s.
The effects are already damaging the middle class. Our savings rate has dropped to zero. Our net worth collapsed with the housing bubble, while the top 20% and especially the top 1% of income earners has increased substantially. This is because the wealthy demand protection from market forces in order to keep their money invested, though they want to deny that privilege to everyone else. Again, look at any statistic you like: life expectancy, literacy, and math and science have all fallen, especially compared to other developed nations across the world. We are literally becoming too dumb to be useful producers.
Let's put that 3 trillion into perspective: over the years of it's projected cost, from 2002 to 2017, it could have tripled funding for the Department of Education, from 90 billion to 290 billion. It could entirely pay for the costs of paying for the increased unemployment benefits three times over. It could have built a high-speed national rail network to cover the whole country, while providing employment, or been invested in ditching oil imports by increasing domestic alternative energy sources and subsidizing electric vehicle development.
Instead, it was literally blown up, and did nothing to reduce the threat of terrorism.
The United States has a fabulous amount of national wealth and infrastructure that isn't going away any time soon, but that's only if we keep investing in it. If there's more profit margin in building Predator drones and exotic weaponry than educating future generations, we have seen the decisions that has led to so far. The pussified, pathetic, and treasonous corporate bitches that are running the show do not give two shits about their fellow citizens. If they remain in power, they'll do what they have done since the 1980s: make some stupid bets, take the money, and run away while the middle class is holding the bag.
Sure, the war is simply a larger component of the cluster fuck that is our economy and society, but it's the most heinous. The loss of the thousands of soldiers who signed up to defend the Constitution didn't sign up for that shit. Just ask any one who's made it back alive.
When you are a secretive organization like the US government, the most important phrase is "plausible deniability." Of course the US could fly a satellite guided bomb into Assange's bathroom, but it would be undeniably traced back to the US government. They could also use legal methods, and they are about to, but that doesn't mean that in the interim they will stop harassing Assange or WikiLeaks.
And in the interim, they will use third parties to cover their tracks. Just like they did in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Just like they did throughout all of their criminal behavior dating back to the Spanish American War.
You're missing the point. American politics is still driven by the worldview of the wealthy white establishment. There are no political consequences for killing an Arab, because the establishment does not identify them as a person worthy of the same rights as themselves.
And if the colonialist Australian population isn't largely white, that would indeed be news.
The US government clearly has a motive. The US government clearly has the resources. The US government has clearly committed far worse crimes in order to eliminate enemies of the state. If you have a more likely candidate that has the same amount of resources, motive, and previous activity, I'd be interested to hear about who that is.
This is elementary deduction. It's very likely that this is being done by the US government, even if just as convenient practice for the new Cyber Warrior program.
If he were an Arab Muslim, he would already be dead if they had his location. This is because the largest enemy a government like the US has is it's own population, and the assassination of a white well-to-do activist would be far more alarming than another dead Arab.
They are using their diplomatic contacts to try to force him into hiding. If that doesn't work, you can bet they have plans to take him out with rendition or staging an accident. You can step on toes to a certain extent, but once you start getting in the way of business getting done, you can start counting you life down in hours.
You are routinely full of shit, so I don't waste my time with your arguments. You don't understand the effect of adding more than 25% to our national debt without any return on infrastructure, so I can hardly expect you to understand anything else.
Of course, no one really knows what The Agency is doing right now. What is known is that the secret prisons still exist, and that the legal process of "extraordinary rendition", known to the rest of the world as kidnapping, still occurs. Our terrorism suspects are regularly flown to dictatorships like Egypt and tortured with our approval. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States
The US government has overthrown democratic governments, it's FBI has assassinated American civilians, the CIA is currently torturing someone to death in a secret prison somewhere in the world, and right now it has the right to extra-judiciously assassinate any person, even US citizens, that it believes to be involved in terrorism.
With these facts, I hardly think an orchestrated DDoS attack seems unlikely.
If this was any country on our shit list, NYT and the rest of the fawning idiots would be praising WikiLeaks for being defenders of Western civilization. Everyone up in arms is not upset that secrets were revealed; they are upset that the truth makes America look bad.
Well, sorry it takes a leak and a douchy sort of guy to make America rethink it's position as the totally incapable, laughable, and incompetent unilateral policeman of the world. If we had stuck to American jobs and trade, we wouldn't have just blown three trillion dollars on two bullshit wars that accomplished nothing except for putting Iran in prime position to run the region when we are economically incapable of projecting our influence there. We wouldn't be in deep shit because we no longer have a middle class and our living standards are dropping for the first time in our history.
The sort of hubris that led us to kill hundreds of thousands of muslims and spend trillions in response to an attack that cost us 3,000 lives and a few billion dollars (besides pussy fair weather patriots abandoning the stock market) is exactly the sort you can find in these cables. If they went back further, you'd find us saying "Hey, Saddam is better than Khomeini! Nuclear Pakistan is better than Marxist Afghanistan! The Shah is better than a sovereign Iran! Millions of dead Vietnamese are better than Marxist Vietnam! Pinochet is better than Socialist Allende!"
Our allies and the electorate need to know: there are no principles at work here. Just some people who have confused the word democracy with American Corporate Interests.
Slashdot Mirror
You said:
What the big banks have done to this country and world is actually worse than what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You are wrong. People in Iraq and Afghanistan are dying. Iraqi widows, living with their children in sewage in the ruins of Baghdad, are turning to prostitution in order to feed their children. Cancer and infant mortality rates are skyrocketing in Fallujah after we used spent uranium rounds all over the place. The nation's literacy rate has dropped since there's not enough security to send their kids to school. This is all due to the unilateral actions of a nation they have no control over.
In America, we dismantled the regulatory agencies by voting GOP. We spent our money. We bet on housing. We let the financial industry write it's own rules, and expected the magic hand of the market to keep them from fucking everything up with greed. We are reaping what we have sown.
Your attachment to wealth above the injustices of the wars in the Middle East is beyond reprehensible. It's inhuman, and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself.
WORF: Captain, we cannot do that without severely impairing the ability of this ship to support life.
OPERAGOST: It makes money! JUST DO IT.
There were about 250 combat deaths during the First Gulf War. The vast majority of those were in Iraq.
I did not find any information to support any other deaths caused by Iraqi citizens. Nevertheless, you are correct.
It should also be noted that said envirowackos did, in fact, sue to stop a solar plant being built in Ca recently over the matter of half a dozen tortoises. It happens.
Yes, and some fringe Republicans wanted nuclear war after 9/11. Does that mean it's a standard Republican viewpoint?
There are nutty "green" activists who literally cry and hug trees and set fire to SUVs. The rest of us know the quickest way to an environmentally conscious society is employment, education, development, and regulation. The measured loss of biodiversity in the Saharan desert is minuscule compared to the damage of fossil fuel usage.
I'd like to see your proof for that universal and categorical negative.
I made the falsifiable assertion. It's up to you to disprove it.
You may or may not agree with the war in Iraq (I certainly don't) but what is occurring cannot compare to what occurred before.
Surely it can. The low estimates of Iraqi casualties in both cases are about 100,000, and at least a few studies (like the Lancet) put direct and indirect deaths in Iraq well above 500,000 since 2003.
Of course, most of the deaths of innocent Iraqis are due to four things:
1) Saddam Hussein from 1980 to 1991 while he was an official ally and client of the United States.
2) The Iran-Iraq War, which was supported by the United States after we removed Iraq from the State Sponsors of Terror list in 1982.
3) Embargoes from the UN from 1991 until 2003 which were pushed and supported by the United States.
4) The invasion of Iraq by the United States from 2003 until the present.
So, that's about thirty years of death and suffering due to our geopolitical chess game. Which doesn't at all compare to any financial shenanigans committed by Americans on other Americans.
Only someone as boringly stupid as you are could come up with such nonsense. The biodiversity of sub-Saharan Africa is spread out over tens of thousands of square miles. As long as the development doesn't impede migratory patterns or survival of some important food chain, no one is going to complain.
"Envirowackos" are trying to make sure that shortsighted development doesn't cause more harm in the long run than it fixes. When you have to spend more money cleaning up a mess than it saved in economic productivity, it's not even economically useful and it's potentially disastrous for humans.
Take your hollow viewpoint back to whatever rotting pundit orifice you dragged it out of.
I think he's assuming that the Western governments don't purposefully impoverish the same nations again by forcing them into contracts that don't allow them any rights or infrastructure to process the finished goods themselves.
There are many ways to utilize it without running transmission lines. One simple idea is fuel cells, which would be best if they could also be manufactured out of mostly silica. If they hold their electric charge with enough efficiency, you could eventually have an all-electric transportation system, including the cargo ships used to deliver them worldwide.
No countries have to agree on how to share power. They can either buy it from African nations or not. Until the United States gets involved, at least.
What the big banks have done to this country and world is actually worse than what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan
No, a hundred thousand people killed by a country with no right to even be in their hemisphere is a million times worse than the loss of economic productivity. Not one single Iraqi ever physically harmed an American outside of their sovereign border. The same goes for the Afghani people.
And you wonder why no one has respect for the American culture anymore? Go fuck yourself.
If you can have sex with two women who will later regret it, can I kill a few hundred thousand Muslims and take a big hairy shit on the Constitution and International Law? Awesome!
Oh, wait, those two things are probably not on par, are they? Tell you what... I'll throw in the complete destruction of your civil liberties, and you can have some self righteous celebrity gossip egged on by the establishment.
It's a deal? Awesome!
You're assuming WikiLeaks is the only place a person can leak information. If I really wanted to get something out, I could send it anywhere: The Nation, Democracy Now, The Guardian. Or Fox News if it was somehow damaging to a democrat.
People have got the entire purpose of the Fourth Estate hugely backwards these days. There can be only one government per nation. There can be thousands of media outlets. WikiLeaks is showing that our Fourth Estates are entirely in the hands of the same people who are breaking the law. The editors care more about keeping corporate advertisers and access to government officials than they do about telling the truth, so the entire system of checks and balances has fallen completely apart.
So yeah, Assange is literally putting his life on the line to get the truth out. He's being sort of a douche about it, but that's the sort of personality that has the balls to get the job done. He has more integrity than any other part of the media has had since the Pentagon papers came out.
Just look at the difference between reporting on the War in Vietnam and the War in Iraq. The fealty is absolutely fucking pathetic.
At least I know how to capitalize.
ZING.
If the documents are sufficient, I wonder how they will continue to spin corrupt financial industry practices as the fault of Obama without actually doing anything useful to stop them. 9/11 spared them from Enron, and if lightning strikes twice...
Is that code for cognitive dissonance?
Or are most of the voices in your head blonde news anchors with the same thousand yard stare?
Yeah, that's why senior administration officials are calling for Assange's head. Because he made it all up.
It's really pathetic when people consider the truth to be political. I think it's far more likely that you're upset that your worldview has turned out to be a lie.
Yeah, sorry I'm being a dick. It's part of my charm.
WWII provided full employment, which is the only cure for a down economy. Automation has made employment unnecessary, so this round is not even providing increased employment, just increased profits and higher salaries for members of the board. You can look at any statistic you like. I recommend CEO pay compared to worker pay, which has skyrocketed since the 60s. It used to be that the CEO made about 30 times the average worker, now it's well into the 300s.
The effects are already damaging the middle class. Our savings rate has dropped to zero. Our net worth collapsed with the housing bubble, while the top 20% and especially the top 1% of income earners has increased substantially. This is because the wealthy demand protection from market forces in order to keep their money invested, though they want to deny that privilege to everyone else. Again, look at any statistic you like: life expectancy, literacy, and math and science have all fallen, especially compared to other developed nations across the world. We are literally becoming too dumb to be useful producers.
Let's put that 3 trillion into perspective: over the years of it's projected cost, from 2002 to 2017, it could have tripled funding for the Department of Education, from 90 billion to 290 billion. It could entirely pay for the costs of paying for the increased unemployment benefits three times over. It could have built a high-speed national rail network to cover the whole country, while providing employment, or been invested in ditching oil imports by increasing domestic alternative energy sources and subsidizing electric vehicle development.
Instead, it was literally blown up, and did nothing to reduce the threat of terrorism.
The United States has a fabulous amount of national wealth and infrastructure that isn't going away any time soon, but that's only if we keep investing in it. If there's more profit margin in building Predator drones and exotic weaponry than educating future generations, we have seen the decisions that has led to so far. The pussified, pathetic, and treasonous corporate bitches that are running the show do not give two shits about their fellow citizens. If they remain in power, they'll do what they have done since the 1980s: make some stupid bets, take the money, and run away while the middle class is holding the bag.
Sure, the war is simply a larger component of the cluster fuck that is our economy and society, but it's the most heinous. The loss of the thousands of soldiers who signed up to defend the Constitution didn't sign up for that shit. Just ask any one who's made it back alive.
When you are a secretive organization like the US government, the most important phrase is "plausible deniability." Of course the US could fly a satellite guided bomb into Assange's bathroom, but it would be undeniably traced back to the US government. They could also use legal methods, and they are about to, but that doesn't mean that in the interim they will stop harassing Assange or WikiLeaks.
And in the interim, they will use third parties to cover their tracks. Just like they did in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Just like they did throughout all of their criminal behavior dating back to the Spanish American War.
You're missing the point. American politics is still driven by the worldview of the wealthy white establishment. There are no political consequences for killing an Arab, because the establishment does not identify them as a person worthy of the same rights as themselves.
And if the colonialist Australian population isn't largely white, that would indeed be news.
The US government clearly has a motive. The US government clearly has the resources. The US government has clearly committed far worse crimes in order to eliminate enemies of the state. If you have a more likely candidate that has the same amount of resources, motive, and previous activity, I'd be interested to hear about who that is.
This is elementary deduction. It's very likely that this is being done by the US government, even if just as convenient practice for the new Cyber Warrior program.
If he were an Arab Muslim, he would already be dead if they had his location. This is because the largest enemy a government like the US has is it's own population, and the assassination of a white well-to-do activist would be far more alarming than another dead Arab.
They are using their diplomatic contacts to try to force him into hiding. If that doesn't work, you can bet they have plans to take him out with rendition or staging an accident. You can step on toes to a certain extent, but once you start getting in the way of business getting done, you can start counting you life down in hours.
You are routinely full of shit, so I don't waste my time with your arguments. You don't understand the effect of adding more than 25% to our national debt without any return on infrastructure, so I can hardly expect you to understand anything else.
FBI assassinating American citizens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Deaths due to torture
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/06/30/accountability
Extra-judicial assassinations (not including daily drone bombings)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.html
Of course, no one really knows what The Agency is doing right now. What is known is that the secret prisons still exist, and that the legal process of "extraordinary rendition", known to the rest of the world as kidnapping, still occurs. Our terrorism suspects are regularly flown to dictatorships like Egypt and tortured with our approval.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States
The US government has overthrown democratic governments, it's FBI has assassinated American civilians, the CIA is currently torturing someone to death in a secret prison somewhere in the world, and right now it has the right to extra-judiciously assassinate any person, even US citizens, that it believes to be involved in terrorism.
With these facts, I hardly think an orchestrated DDoS attack seems unlikely.
I looked into it recently
Bullshit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#Gini_index
If this was any country on our shit list, NYT and the rest of the fawning idiots would be praising WikiLeaks for being defenders of Western civilization. Everyone up in arms is not upset that secrets were revealed; they are upset that the truth makes America look bad.
Well, sorry it takes a leak and a douchy sort of guy to make America rethink it's position as the totally incapable, laughable, and incompetent unilateral policeman of the world. If we had stuck to American jobs and trade, we wouldn't have just blown three trillion dollars on two bullshit wars that accomplished nothing except for putting Iran in prime position to run the region when we are economically incapable of projecting our influence there. We wouldn't be in deep shit because we no longer have a middle class and our living standards are dropping for the first time in our history.
The sort of hubris that led us to kill hundreds of thousands of muslims and spend trillions in response to an attack that cost us 3,000 lives and a few billion dollars (besides pussy fair weather patriots abandoning the stock market) is exactly the sort you can find in these cables. If they went back further, you'd find us saying "Hey, Saddam is better than Khomeini! Nuclear Pakistan is better than Marxist Afghanistan! The Shah is better than a sovereign Iran! Millions of dead Vietnamese are better than Marxist Vietnam! Pinochet is better than Socialist Allende!"
Our allies and the electorate need to know: there are no principles at work here. Just some people who have confused the word democracy with American Corporate Interests.