Facing the uncertainty of reelection President Obama became so concerned about the lawlessness of his drone killings he sought hastily to codify the rules governing their use. What began in the Bush era as a means for targeting Al Qaeda leaders hiding in remote areas has become a vast “amorphous” death machine targeting suspected...
Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, sees global climate change as an “engineering” problem to be managed. The guy in charge of a giant fossil fuel conglomerate thinks that human civilization can cope with rising sea levels, extreme weather events, unprecedented droughts, mass extinctions of fish and the choking of the oceans, by just...
Nothing better illustrates the core critique of the Occupy Wall Street movement against the financial sector’s dominance of our political institutions than the spectacle of high-profile Democrats, like former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, fretting over the “tone” of the Obama campaign’s advertisements targeting Mitt Romney’s days as a vulture...
“It makes me ill how callously people still talk about ripping off clients,” the Goldman Sachs whistleblower, Greg Smith, wrote in his March 14th public resignation letter. The 33-year-old executive who quit the company’s London office where he ran its derivatives shop reinforces the public perception of Goldman Sachs less as a venerable Wall...
Despite the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq, during this dismal period of “austerity” the public isn’t likely to see any discernible difference in the government’s misplaced priorities. Our representatives in Washington recently passed a “bipartisan” military budget of $662 billion. That level of “defense” spending, about $7 trillion over 10 years, Congress...
The Wall Street “veteran” Leon Cooperman has written an “Open Letter to President Obama” that provides us with a glimpse into the mindset of our 21st century corporate overlords. He’s upset not with President Obama’s Treasury Department or his Securities and Exchange Commission, or even his Department of Justice or the IRS. No, what’s...
Largely lost in the media din in the closing 48 hours of the debt ceiling “debate” was the fact that the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street high rollers were urging their servants in Congress not to throw the nation into default because it was going to hurt their bottom lines. The last minute...