Read this by Greg Palast. It appears that Hillary Clinton‘s old law partner did time for refusing to testify against her . . . and was paid $500K for it by the Little Rock company Entergy and its partners, the Riady family of Indonesia. There is much more to it and it all has to do with Pakistan, which owed great sums of money to the exploitative Entergy. Palast:
And Entergy got its money. On December 22, 1998, Pakistan’s military, at the direction of General Pervez Musharraf, sent thirty thousand troops into the nation’s power stations. At the time, Entergy’s partners told me, “A lot changed since the army moved in. Now we have a situation where we can be paid. They’ve found a way to collect from the man in the street.” Yes: at gunpoint, according to Abdul Latif Nizamani, a labor union leader who spoke with me after Musharraf’s gang had arrested him.
With Pakistan’s army in control of the nation’s infrastructure, and acting as guarantor of payment to the US and UK power giants, General Musharraf’s final takeover of the entire government nine months later – a “surprise” coup to the Western press – was, a forgone conclusion. And the Clintons, complicit, like Bush today, could say little.
Musharraf took over Pakistan via military coup in 1999 and appointed himself President in June, 2001. In late 2001 he was moved to sever ties with the Taliban and become our ally in the War on Terror. George W. Bush ended the sanctions which had been instituted against Pakistan after its 1998 nuclear weapons test and rescheduled its debt.
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Speaking of Hillary: here is some very useful information on her proposed Latin America policies. And I oppose Hillary and Obama because they both are such extreme Whitemen. I will vote for Kucinich if he is still in the race by the time we have our primary but in second choices I am now looking at Edwards. I am not at all convinced.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Tom Barry has been right about Latin American politics for a very long time. As I recall, Clinton (Bill) sold his soul to the Cubans in Miami right before his first election.
I returned the favor, and linked back to you.
I think Kucinich is the worst of all. Whether consciously or not, he perpetuates the myth that the Democratic Party is progressive.
During the last run he did a bait and switch. He claimed to be against the war, then he endorsed John Kerry. He’ll do that again.
The Democrats are like The Whigs. They stand for nothing.
“He claimed to be against the war, then he endorsed John Kerry. He’ll do that again.”
Worrisome. Although: would Kerry have been as destructive as what we got (assuming he had been elected and allowed to take office)? This is not a rhetorical question – I really do not know what to think.
I am constantly voting for third party candidates and being told I am responsible for the presence of the Bushes . . . I say it is those who actually voted for them who are.
I am not one of those who believes things around here should be allowed to get worse and worse so that people will finally see the light.
I am not one of those who believes things around here should be allowed to get worse and worse so that people will finally see the light.
…which would be an excellent philosophy if only humans were about 100 percent rational and didn’t function on the basis of rationalisation and cognitive dissonance.
This guy’s
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Robert_Cohen
dissertation says in part that the reason the rebellions of the 1960s took place was that things were going well economically and so on, not poorly. He was very convincing talking about it. You have to improve things so that they can get still better, not wait for them to deteriorate.
The other person who made an impression on me re these matters was this guy,
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5274
who made the point that in the Depression, the revolution we could have had might well have been to the right, not to the left.
Mike says it this way: Now that we have the Labor government in power in Australia, they have become the new standard for what is the establishment (the new “right”), so we can set up an even further left opposition in relation to this current norm.
Yes. That’s exactly how I look at it.
Meanwhile, my friend says only the Clintons have the ruthlessness, the psychic power and most importantly, the *inside info* necessary to stop the U.S. madness. This may be true but are they interested in stopping it is my question.
I think his point is that the Clintons would at least stop us from entering yet further into true fascism. That would indeed be better than what most Republicans will do but it is so much less than we need. It is also very, very far from being anything one could call ‘left.’
Yeah. Unfortunately a big part of what has opened the floodgates to the fascist madness in the US (and I am surmising based on things I’ve also seen and heard from Australians, rather than just US-asians) has been middle class “common sense”. I mean, isn’t it just “common sense” that men are different from women, and that everyone should pay for their own medical care and not expect the state to do it, and that leftists are basically lunatics, and that reality is as obvious to you as the nose on your face?
I’ll probably have to make a post out of Litwack – my old professor’s – inverview. Specifically this:
“I want my students to consider in a historical context the idea that social inequities are neither inevitable nor accidental but reflect the assumptions, beliefs, and policies of certain people who command enormous power; that there are limits to our power as a nation, that no country is exempt from history; that the indispensable strength of America remains the right of dissent, and that few people have cared more deeply about this nation than some of its severest critics; and that we need to be wary of those who in the name of protecting our freedoms would diminish them. History teaches, after all, that it is not the rebels, the iconoclasts, the curious, the dissidents who endanger a democratic society but rather the accepting, the unthinking, the unquestioning, the docile, the obedient, the silent, and the indifferent.”
Yes indeed. It actually takes a lot of energy and wiles, and determination to be a dissident. It also takes a whole heaping of stoicism, indifference to the ignorant judgments of others, and the uncanny ability to register when a potshot is being taken at one, in order to be able to do something to evade, before it hits.
Yes … ! However, here is a very interesting point on Kucinich and RON PAUL, from Quaker Dave:
http://quakeragitator.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/i-think-they-just-lost-my-vote/