Thursday, November 19, 2015

SAR #15323


Moral Danger: When ISIS finally gets around to attacking Philadelphia, Houston, or – Heaven forbid – Orlando, what should the US do? Bombing sand hasn't worked. Crippling privacy and destroying the Constitution hasn't worked. Listening to all our phone calls and reading our emails hasn't worked. So (a) what should we do. And (b) what will we do? A: I've no idea. B: Kill people, mostly innocent, and expand the police state.
True, Unfortunately: Former US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson – the guy who made up the $700 billion TARP giveaway – says “We need incentives to save the climate.”
Party Line: State investigators looking into a Minneapolis police shooting have several “partial videos” of the incident, but will not release them until police and city officials get a story cooked up “at this time.” They should have checked with the Tuscaloosa PD, which released body cam video off arrests at UA, with the footage actually showing the arrests redacted. The Pennsylvania House passed a bill that prohibits officials from identifying cops being investigated for shooting or beating civilians. The bill also encourages cops to wear face masks while on duty.
Safe At Home: Barclays has paid $150 million to make NY's investigation into their manipulation of currency markets go away. No one goes to jail.
Protecting And Self-Serving: In NC a 1st grader is being charged with the attempted assault of his teacher. Customs agents at LAX confiscated hundreds of tamales and secured them in the break room.
Memo To Self:Blow jobs are expected to overtake smoking’ as the main cause of mouth cancer.”
Better Late Than... Federal prosecutors have finally gotten around to pursuing criminal cases against executives from RBS and JPMorgan Chase over fraudulent mortgage securities they palmed off on the unsuspecting eight years ago. With luck the statue of limitations will expire before any charges are actually brought.
Asked & Answered: Are successful CEOs just lucky? Pretty much.
Term Papered: As part of a settlement for various frauds and other violations, Education Management Corp, the nation's second largest for-profit education profiteers, will forgive over 80,000 student loans. No one, of course, goes to jail.
Takes One To Know One: At least 73 TSA employees are on the TSA's Terrorist Watch List.

4 comments:

McMike said...

re moral danger. This assumes that there is an incentive to "win" the GWOT and that the goal is to find strategies that work towards that end, or that there's even an incentive to block all attacks on US soil.

The actual incentives, in fact, effectively guarantee an occasional successful attack on US soil - in order to keep the furnace stoked (to keep the gravy train running, to keep the fear factory cranking at full output, to keep the bureaucratic preferences flowing, etc.). It's baked in baby. Google: codependency.

Your scenario item B, also, soft-sells how much deeper into a police state we can go. We have not yet begun to plumb the depths of the marriage between a modern technology-enabled police state, coupled with a good-old-fashioned totalitarian authoritarian oppressive regime.

Thee are so many time-tested brute force and social disruption tricks still available to pull out of the kit. Th instruction manuals from Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Pot have barely gathered dust. Or, we could go back into our own Native America/Slavery archives for lots of nifty ideas.

Who would have guessed how far we could tumble in our freedoms and expectations the last fifteen years. Now take that arc and plot it going forward....

Gegner said...

Sadly, the percentage of the one percent see these steps as necessary to preserve their perilous perch. The world is their oyster (to despoil as they want) so long as the police state keeps the 'riff-raff' quiet and passive. It's more than they can personally consume but that misses the point.

It's long been apparent that the laws are BY them, for US...it's oksy for them to 'bend the rules' but should their 'interests' conflict with your...you lose. Which we all know is not justice but suddenly the 'excuse shirt' comes out and 'justice' becomes empheral, something unachievable.

But I digress. The 'short answer' is exactly as McMike explains, the War on Terra is made up of whole cloth. It serves the purpose of instilling fear in the populous and 'distracting' them from government's true purpose, meting out justice, something you're not going to see from a government that is in the criminal's pocket.

And I humbly concur, we ain't seen nothing yet.

McMike said...

O/T re TPP. The USDA has been lobbying hard for the TPP. They send out puff piece news releases and issue papers about once a week extolling how great TPP is going to be for America's farmers.

Therefore it's safe to assume it will be a disaster for the rest of us. (Along with the few remaining farmers who are actual farmers, versus corporate conglomerate employees).

kwark said...

Should've titled it "Mortal Danger" 'cause lots of dead bodies are what our so-called leaders in DC intend. Actually addressing root causes, heavens no! As the others have said, our friendly corporate overlords in the defense industry (read killing business) simply need to ensure their revenue stream. Eisenhower must be spinning in his grave.