Kasztanka, Polish Marshal Józef Piłsudski's favorite combat mare, was stuffed upon her death in 1927 and after World War II was destroyed, allegedly on the orders of Piłsudski's enemy, Marshal Michał Rola-Żymierski.
Bloomberg reports that Bank of America is dumping derivatives onto a subsidiary which is insured by the government – i.e. taxpayers. Yves Smith notes: If you have any doubt that Bank of America is going down, this development should settle it...
You live inside a plutocrat war—a war being waged by the top one percent. (Well—by the top one-tenth of the top one percent.) This war has been underway for thirty-five years; the plutocrats clearly are winning. In the process, all average people are getting looted—those who voted for Bachmann, those who voted for her opponent. But guess what? The plutocrats will continue to win as long as we slow-witted liberals keep taking the bait from cynics like [Lawrence] O’Donnell—as long as we keep getting conned into heightening our tribal wars.
Privatization of state roads just highlights the inefficiencies and waste of state government. Here in Pennsylvania they debated privatizing the Pennsylvania Turnpike (which they gave up on). If the new owner was going to be able to operate and maintain the roadway AND turn a profit for less than the state is currently paying just to operate and maintain the road (since they don't necessarily have to turn a profit), that just shows how much waste there is in the state system.
Instead of selling off public assets for a one time injection of money, run the state-owned property more efficiently and let the public reap the rewards in lower fees/tolls and/or lower taxes. What is inevitably going to happen when that one time shot of money runs out is that you will end up with no more public assets AND high fees and taxes from the lack of income producing assets. Then what are you going to do?
And yes, it seems we are at war with Libya, Kosovo-intervention style. I want to preface my remarks by noting that I don't for a moment doubt that Khaddafy is indeed brutalizing his people, and that large numbers of them want him gone. All the same I can't help but be reminded of that old photo from the Vietnam conflict of a soldier's helmet that read "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity."
Inevitably, the idea of a 'humanitarian intervention' is attractive to people, the good guys coming to the aid of the virtuous freedom fighters trying to overthrow a brutal oppressor. I imagine the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan also regard themselves as virtuous freedom fighters trying to get rid of an oppressor. I also imagine the protesters in Yemen and Bahrain feel they are being brutally oppressed, what with the massacres and such. So how are all these things different, and why do we not come to the aid of the people of Yemen and Bahrain?
Of course if we did come to the aid of Yemen and Bahrain, we would do it knowing that we weren't going to destabilize the region, and any deaths were modest, acceptable losses. We can know what are 'acceptable' losses in Libya, I guess, because Khaddafy has a long history of dressing up in fanciful garb, so any announcement regarding casualties in Libya is probably a lie that can be dismissed. Khaddafy also nationalized Libya's oil in the 70s, so a mean-spirited person might wonder if a strong man will emerge among the rebels who means to cut a deal to privatize them after the revolution.
CNN is saying that Ecuador's government is "teetering on the edge of collapse" but I wonder if that's premature if Correa is as popular as he seems and the military is on his side, against the rebellious police units.
In his inaugural address on 15 January[2007], Correa stated his belief that part of Ecuador's external debt is illegitimate, because it was contracted by military regimes. He also denounced the "so-called Washington Consensus." Correa threatened to default on Ecuador's foreign debt, and to suspend review of the country's economy by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
As much as Washington may entertain the illusion that it's in command, it's actually Hamid Karzai, the wily Afghan president, who is playing an attacking game in this latest installment of the New Great Game in Eurasia. And, as usual, there's never a mention anywhere of the key Pipelineistan game. [...] As it must be clear by now, Pakistan is essentially an army/intelligence establishment disguised as a country. The army/Inter-Services Intelligence tandem has been and will always be pro-Taliban. Anyone who believes the tandem will "reform" - with or without billions of dollars of US aid - believes in the Easter bunny...
Another video from Russia Today- this time with nice crispy sound that syncs properly, but the video is somewhat washed out. C'est la vie, as Russians no doubt say.
Earlier today CNN posted a poll in which they stated that a majority(71 %) of respondents believe that Iran presently has nuclear weapons.(the poll also says that while a majority of the respondents are presently against military action, it also suggests great malleability in that opinion should the rhetoric heat up, and very little concern about adverse repercussions-- something I partly blame on a childishly jingoistic press. I wonder how many people put 2 and 2 together regarding the US de facto policy of destabilizing Pakistan, the one Islamic country that definitely does possess nuclear weapons and how people feel about that, or if they even give much thought to it.
Repercussions-- like what? Like another massive oil embargo, or the real unification of the Islamic world against the US, or a crumbling of America's capacity for international influence, when Russia and China AND even the EU finally decide that we're a nation of depraved nutballs who can't be trusted. And many thousands killed. Oh yeah, that.
Actually,I don't have a hard time accepting that a majority of Americans do in fact believe this regarding the supposed existence of Iranian nukes, even though the CIA itself apparently doesn't believe this. What I have a harder time understanding, and the poll doesn't address this, is why Americans tend to trust American elites so easily regarding the outside world. So that when a foreign country does something(or appears to do something) that American elites don't approve of and the usual American TV talking heads tell us that country X is defying us because they're irrational or crazy, they just accept this uncritically. And they just accept that country X cannot possibly have sane, legitimate reasons for those contrary policies that don't conform to US government wishes , whether said policies are hypothetical or real.
The thing is, people generally have no problem believing that our elites lie to us and screw us over in virtually all other areas, but apparently regarding foreign policy they just accept that these people who so frequently mislead and even just plain lie to us, nevertheless also know what's best and sincerely mean to protect us. I guess these are two separate questions. Exceptionalism again, at least for part of it. God gave Adam the right to give names to the animals, and to America to determine whether or not foreigners are crazy.
Michel Chossudovsky, above, says that the US has nuclear warheads in Turkey and in Europe that are aimed at Iran. Additionally, most experts agree that Israel has nuclear weapons, even if this is a mostly forbidden topic for discussion in the popular US media. My point is, although I don't think any country that doesn't presently have nukes should decide to get them, it's hardly insane or unreasonable for Iran's elites to want to have nuclear weapons. Given how actively belligerent both the US and Israel have been to various middle eastern and other Islamic countries, it strikes me as pretty understandable that the Iranians should want nukes.
I also question whether the US would in fact be threatened by the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal, assuming we left them alone. Israel might possibly be threatened-- but even that I'm skeptical of. If anything, the likely net effect of a secure Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal might well be a better behaved Israel, one that doesn't threaten her neighbors so readily and is more likely to want to make legitimate concessions towards a real peace with the Palistinians, or-- at the very least-- stops launching so many "you kill one, we kill 500" military operations against her neighbors.
The problem of course, is that it be a secure nuclear arsenal. But who is likely to subvert Iranian nuclear security, besides Israel and the US?
Again, I'm not suggesting that for Iran to acquire nukes is a preferred outcome. As I've said before in comments here and elsewhere, I have often puzzled about why Ahmedinejad has never publicly suggested a linkage between greater co-operation in allowing IAEA oversight, and negotiating to account for and reduce(or even eliminate*) Israel's nukes. Also to clarify, when I say "nukes" I am specifically referring to nuclear weapons, and not simply powerplants, which after all they, along with the Israelis, are allowed by international law.
(*The "eliminate" is probably dreaming, hence in parentheses. Still there's no question to me that for neither Israel nor Iran to have nuclear weapons would be the ideal situation, and I don't see how a US military operation against Iran can do anything but kill more people and make that contingency even less likely to ever happen.)
As first lady Laura Bush looks on, President Bush hugs Candace Pierson of Auburndale, Fla., after her son, Marine Cpl. Jordan S. Pierson, was presented the Purple Heart for injuries suffered while serving in Iraq. The ceremony took place Dec. 21, 2005, at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Also in the room are Cpl. Pierson's fiancee, Kirstin Martin (right), and sister Rachel Pierson. White House photo by Paul Morse
Phan Van Tu was born in October 1989; his injuries, from contact with hitherto unexploded ordinance, occurred in 2003. From Advocacy.net:
Tu was born to poor farmers in the Bo Trach district of Quang Binh Province. Living conditions were difficult for his family so as he got older, Tu helped his parents out by collecting shellfish after school. Then one afternoon when he was thirteen, Tu picked up a bombie* while catching shrimp. By his account, one minute he was in the water and the next he woke up in a hospital, having lost his left arm below the elbow and the lower half of his left leg. Tu also had severe injuries to his intestine that required extensive surgery and a two month stay in the hospital. As his body healed, Tu was able to return home, yet his recollection of that time is not entirely celebratory: “I did not go out of my house because I was so anxious about what people thought about my limb loss. I was scared of their stares and glances, their words and even their sympathy.”
Addendum and correction: When I first came upon the photo of the boy on the right sitting on the sofa, all I knew about the image was that it was from electronicintifada.net and that it came up via an image search for the query "Afghan bombing victim". However he is not from Afghanistan[link]:
Twelve-year-old Mohamed Samer Elhaz Mouss, photographed in October 2006, was injured by Israeli cluster bomblets delivered by Israeli warplanes during the recent Israeli aggression on Lebanon. On 9 August 2006, in the Rashidieh Camp outside of Sour, Mohamed was running from attacking Israeli warplanes and hid behind a tree where he came into contact with unexploded bomblets. (Sam Costanza)
In a sense Mohamed is a victim of the same larger war, that has been waged more or less continuously since 1945 or so, but that is an argument for another day. Here(and here) are images of Afghan children victimized by the Af-Pak conflict.(Some are pretty graphic. Note that the second group of images are related to one specific airstrike that took place in May of 2009.)
additional photo credits: B-52 from Brittanica.com, B-1B from Wired.com, BHO with legless lady from AFP, GWB with soldier's family from Whitehouse.gov, Iraqi Vet playing Gameboy from Life.com, LBJ and McNamara from University of Kansas History Archive(UPI), BHO and Robert Gates from Reuters, cartoon from Thoughts on the Eve of the Apocalypse. Flags of South Vietnam, etc are public domain.
The last G20 meeting was in April, when CBS breathlessly reported that Obama persuaded the G20 leaders to "set their personal differences aside and listen to reason," whatever that means.
In comments at Rob's post below I suggested that the noise we're hearing about the US threatening Iran is partly a tactic related to this week's G20 summit, where various countries are likely to pressure Obama to enact all sorts of austerity measures(e.g. substantial tax hikes) in order to shore up the dollar, and US noisemaking about Iran is a response, essentially saying to the Europeans, "don't press us on the dollar or we'll do more crazy shit."
I also look at recent arrests of young Middle-easterners here, in Dallas and Denver, as being intended to say that, yes, there really is a war on terror, and the US needs to keep spending massively, the various G20 countries need to keep us afloat, and "none of you blankedy-blank Europeans better say a peep about your lack of confidence in the dollar if you know what's good for you."
The arrest here in Dallas looks particularly suspect to me. The 19 year old kid, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was tricked, according to the Ft Worth Star-Telegram,
into thinking he was detonating a bomb placed in an SUV parked under the skyscraper before they arrested him, according to court documents.
But the entire case appears to exist due to an entrapment scheme hatched by the FBI, and it seems questionable that this kid would have done anything unlawful without government agents goading him into it.
Federal agents said that they discovered Smadi within a group of online terrorists and that he stood out because of his willingness to conduct terrorist attacks.
"This is not related to any other investigation," said Mark White, an FBI spokesman. "This is a stand-alone terrorist."
One person's 'group of online terrorists' is another's chatroom of hotheaded morons blowing off steam. Meanwhile there is an online poll on Facebook now asking if Obama should be killed. Why doesn't the government take an interest in things like that?
Additionally, if Smadi was a 'stand-alone terrorist' and the government's entire case is based on how FBI agents decided to prod and coax him into co-operating with their frame, one has to assume that some serious funding and manpower hours were requisitioned into making this sting happen, and you don't advance careers, whether in law-enforcement or any other realm, by putting together a plan that won't fly.(The article also says they tried to talk him out of it, to persuade him that there were non-violent alternate paths to jihad. In other words, the FBI agents alternately tried to talk him into it and talk him out of it...) If this kind of thing is what the FBI is devoting resources for nowadays, then we are in pretty big trouble, and not because of terrorists.
(CNN's subsequent item indicating that their in-house expert was certain that the Dallas and Denver arrests were simply coincidental only re-enforces my mistrust. Taken all together, it all sounds like the 'terrorism theater' that Naomi Klein talks about in the Shock Doctrine.)
As I've said elsewhere, the mainstream left's failure to take Obama to task for escalating the Af-Pak war is to me the most disgusting aspect(of many) to the left's timidity and fear of rocking the corporate democratic boat the in which party leadership is blissfully sailing, under the supposition that the rest of us at least get a berth in steerage. I doubt ordinary people get even that, except in some isolated instances, but that's a discussion for another day.
As you probably know more and more people are calling it the Af-Pak war, partly because many of the fighters battling US forces in Afghanistan are believed to have bases along the Af-Pak(Pakistan) border, often on both sides, and to be receiving aid from persons in Pakistan-- but also because the US forces have increasingly started to make incursions past that border, and of course when they've killed people in airstrikes, noncombatants usually end up among the dead-- some believe they are the majority, and US airstrikes are no more than collective punishment.
It's also called the Af-Pak war because many experts feel that it is serving to destabilize Pakistan, the world's only predominantly Muslim country with nuclear weapons, and already a place with a tenuous political fabric. I'm really curious about any recent polling regarding America's involvement in Af-Pak mayhem, since the mainstream press seems mostly silent about this, as if people can only have opinions about one big issue at a time, or as if Af-Pak warring isn't in fact a big issue. (To give some credit where it's due, Lara Logan on CBS News had a report on the conflict last night when they noted that US casualties were up substantially, both compared to earlier this spring and summer '08. It would be nice if they also talked about the civilian toll, which would at the very least make people over here question why we're even over there and if they even want us over there, but something is better than nothing.)
I'll admit I haven't followed the Af-Pak conflict particularly closely, certainly not as closely as Rob and some other bloggers have, but I was surprised when I saw this article at Rahul Mahajan's Empire Notes recently:
In discussing Peter Bergen's essay "Winning the Good War" in the Washington Monthly, Mahajan writes,
Most of his facts are accurate and some of the arguments he tries to refute are really silly -- if only I had a dime for every idiot column claiming that Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires for 2500 years and that it will wreck the United States too.It's also true that poll results show a significant majority of Afghans in support of the presence of U.S. and NATO forces. And that Afghanistan is nothing like Vietnam. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see that Bergen is caught up in the same blindness as say Thomas Friedman in 2005 regarding Iraq -- and untold liberal intellectuals in every counterinsurgency since the beginning of recorded history.
Here's a different reading of some of the same facts. The fact that in a recent ABC poll, 63% of Afghan respondents supported the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan while only 8% supported that of the neo-Taliban is a welcome indication that the 8-year occupation has not yet done irreparable damage -- and indicates an opportunity to move the policy in a very different direction than that of counterinsurgency. That lack of irreparable damage does not mean that the United States has done much good -- indeed, 63% thought the US had done a "fair" or "poor" job and a slight majority has an unfavorable opinion of the US.
Furthermore, 18% favored escalation with 44% opposing, and an overwhelming 77% said the use of air strikes was "unacceptable." Hamid Karzai has also repeatedly gone on record opposing U.S. escalation and favoring attempts at a negotiated settlement.
I don't understand Mahajan's assertion that if only he had a dime for "every idiot column" claiming that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires and will the wreck the US too. Maybe he looks at the recent uptick in the stock market and has concluded that our long-term economic prospects are good, case closed. The "graveyard of empires" truism may be just that, a truism, but that doesn't mean it isn't applicable to the US, as one straw of many on the camel's back, even if it isn't necessarily the definitive straw-- at least not yet.
As far as his assertion that we haven't yet done "irreparable damage", that seems like just one person's opinion, even if it's that of a highly educated fellow(Mahajan is an NYU prof.). Speaking of truisms, the enemy of my enemy might be my friend in an Erroll Flynn movie, but just because the Afghans don't necessarily care for the Taliban doesn't mean they also want the US there. Even if they do, clearly they just want the US to keep the peace, without the airstrikes. But seven years' worth of airstrikes is a lot of civilian killings, and it seems awfully unlikely that ordinary Afghans brush off periodic news of deaths of relatives and neighbors as just some bothersome annoyance. I also would want to know more about the methodology of the ABC poll, and whether the respondents may have felt that they needed to fear reprisals from US forces. I'm not saying they had reason to, but I imagine if you lived for seven years in a war zone you'd be skeptical of somebody purporting to be a pollster and prefer to err on the side of excess caution.
Finally, regarding the Vietnam analogy:
(1) Peter Bergen notes that from 2002 to 2009 US public disapproval of the Afghanistan war has gone from 6 percent to 42 percent(earlier this spring), which suggests that given enough time, Afghanistan could well become Obama's Vietnam.
(2) While Mahajan acknowledges that any US military strategy going forward in Afghanistan is likely to involve substantial reliance on continued airstrikes, he closes-- apparently without irony-- with a variation on the classic excuse people made for the Vietnam debacle- instead of "the US could win, but we lack the will to see it through", it's we could secure a lasting peace, but lack the will to seek a political solution.
Xenophile 08/04/2009 08:47 AM That sounds like PressTV's revenge for Western coverage/promotion of the astroturf revolution in Teheran.
Lemme see if I get it: a Saudi dissident quoted from the Arabic-language Iranian channel by the Iranian official press is the source. À consommer avec moderation
Iranian media reported a failed coup attempt in Saudi Arabia on Sept. 3, citing an Arab publication. The details of the reports suggest, however, that they are unfounded. Tehran’s move to pick up the story is likely Iranian psyops against Saudi Arabia, designed to undermine global confidence in the stability of the world’s largest oil producer.
I gather that some Arabic language radio channels have been discussing a possible failed coup this past weekend in Saudi Arabia, possibly led by Prince Bandar.
Have you heard of E.I.R. Gmbh, aka Eirna.com? I know nothing about E.I.R. GmbH, so I'm not really in a good position to assess their veracity. I found this(dated July 16th) at their site in looking for info about the possible failed Saudi coup:
In the U.S., newly declassified documents from the files of the official investigatory Commission on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, give further evidence of the direct role of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services. One key document, a “Memorandum for the Record” dated April 23, 2004, confirms that a known Saudi intelligence officer, Omar al-Bayoumi, was working closely with two of the hijackers based on the West Coast, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.
This document summarizes an interview that Commission staffers Quinn John Tamm Jr. and Dietrich Snell had with an unnamed source, who was an FBI informant in the San Diego area, and who rented a room in his home to two hijackers during much of 2000. In the interview, the FBI informant confirmed the relationship between al-Bayoumi and the two hijackers.
However, the document omits one highly interesting piece of information, that is included in other 9/11 Commission documents, as well as in a 28-page synopsis suppressed by the Bush White House, on the role of al-Bayoumi and Osama Basnan (another identified Saudi intelligence officer) in funding the two West Coast hijackers. That is, that Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, then Saudi Ambassador to the United States, and his wife, Princess Haifa, paid between $50,000 and $72,000 to al-Bayoumi who, in turn, passed on some of the money to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, to finance their rent, and their flight school attendance, previous to the 9/11 attacks. Note that Princess Haifa is the sister of Prince Turki bin-Faisal, who was the head of Saudi Arabian intelligence at the time of the 9/11 attacks – and resigned, suddenly, shortly thereafter.
The article goes on to mention that former FBI director Louis Freeh is now Prince Bandar's attorney, representing him in the BAE bribery case.(2003 Guardian link) Meanwhile this is the only link I found discussing a possible failed coup in Saudi this past weekend:
William Engdahl discusses his book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. In spite of his invoking the bugbear of the "new world order", this seems like a surprisingly sober argument, at least based on this interview clip.
Green may be the current cool color in Western pop culture, but it seems the Mousavi-ites dubbed their movement the green revolution because green is the color is of Islam(!). Or maybe that's just an explanation for global public consumption, so that we don't get too suspicious of all those Iranian young people holding up signs in English. Members of the Anglo press are always flattered when people in foreign countries wave signs in English that speak of freedom, even those TV-types who until very recently had been advocating bombing the crap out of Iran, as Glenn Greenwald has recently pointed out.
(Perhaps especially the ones who had been calling for bombing you.) We don't care about you, just what you stand for, so be a dear and stand for something we understand...
To be honest, I find it awfully difficult to evaluate the current goings-on in Iran. Was the election stolen? I no longer assume that the talking heads on TV care about telling me the unvarnished truth, and given how many decades US elites have invested in meddling in the middle east, it's hard not to be skeptical. On one hand we're told that opposition candidate Mousavi held a narrow lead in Iranian election polling just before the vote. On the other hand, it's hard to know how reliable polling methods are in Iran, and the gap in access to technology between country and rural folk may be substantial. Remember the famous story of how the Literary Digest predicted that FDR would lose reelection in '36 because they relied on polls of persons with telephones, which skewed their results to the republicans? On the other, other hand, as it were, just because a phenomenon plays out the way foreign elites(with a history of meddling in Iran's internal affairs) might have desired, doesn't mean it's bogus.
I note that Xymphora is suspicious that Israel and the US have interfered with the events in Iran, spurring the protests on. Even though Xymphora is prone to see a Zionist conspiracy behind every bush, this strikes me as plausible.
We're getting lots of images of rioting, but in a country of 70 plus million, about 20 million of whom live in the Tehran metro area, the only images we're getting are from the capitol, as opposed to from where the other 50 million live. Pepe Escobar has recently noted [video link]that Ahmedinejad's strongest constituency has always been among the rural poor, i.e., people who are less likely to have internet access. Call them, pace Nixon, Ahmedinejad's "silent majority."
Obviously we don't really know if their election was stolen, and we don't know if it wasn't. Apparently the Iranian government will do a recount of some disputed votes, but one assumes this is more about preserving order and shoring up its legitimacy than intrinsic concern.
I'll admit I wonder, as Xymphora and others do, if outside forces are egging on the disorder. But I also wonder if Americans could be moved to stand up for their rights in a similarly bold way without it being borne out of manipulation by elites.(I suppose I'm over-using that word at this point.)
Maybe, in our post McLuhan, insufferably postmodern, SMS/RSS/Social networking age, it's both easier for authentic grassroots phenomena to catch fire-- and easier than ever to manufacture them. Good luck Iran, even when the West has lost interest in your green revolution, so-called or otherwise, and moved on.
NATO commemorated their 60th anniversary this past Saturday, April 4th. I'm not clear what purpose they serve in the post-Soviet era, let alone why they are fighting in Afghanistan, which isn't exactly a particularly North or particularly Atlantic part of the world. Ironically or not, April 4th is also the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination.
For some time me brain been percolating a post about American decline, and given this background preoccupation, inevitably I find myself thinking about how these three person's lives illustrate various perspectives on that topic.
Nizar Rayyan was by no means a choir boy, but he was the closest thing Gaza had to a secretary of defense, and in some ways his death and the stolid, "nothing-to-see-here" way the US press has dealt with it helps illustrate one aspect of US decline, as we juxtapose the IDF airstrikes against Hamas with the EU's condemnation and the US's official impassivity, as Bush, jnr insists he won't break off his last Christmas vacation as president to address the Israeli violence. and our new talk-show-culture president elect insists on framing the conflict in terms of how he thinks he would react if he was an Israeli parent, discussing hypothetical danger to his daughters whom we should see as people, unlike, say, your average no-good Palistinian kid. Americans have traditionally flattered themselves that their government leads the world, but the EU shows leadership while the US establishment, the Congress having voted to supply the bombs that destroy Gazan lives, hide behind the moral indolence of their shrub-clearing lame-duck president.
Claiborne Pell's death reminds me of how forward-thinking the US welfare state once was with respect to financing higher education, as we juxtapose the 1960s and the era of the Pell Grant, still around but endangered , with the current state of financial aid and higher education, as state and federal budgets put the squeeze on working-class and lower-middle class aspirants to a better life.
Helen Suzman was a civil rights pioneer-- from South Africa. She was one of Nelson Mandela's few white friends who visited him in jail and agitated for his release, years before hip Western kids identified him as a signifier of coolness, like the Dalai Lama or Coldplay or yes, Barack Obama. Her life, and those (several) dark chapters in South Africa's history remind me of how, here in the US, we once had a functioning left, one that successfully shamed many American institutions into divesting themselves of their South African holdings, something that might be impossible today, when so many people seemingly settle for voting as absolution in which a vaguely religious political leader forgives you for your civic laziness because you voted for him. And don't forget to help him pay off Hillary Clinton's debt to pollster Mark Penn. I hear he doesn't really need the money, but hey, a contract is a contract. Yes you can.
