A stinging indictment of Wall Street and the Justice Department

I have written repeatedly about how the Obama administration has treated with kid gloves the top executives of the big financial institutions even though they were responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 that ruined the lives of so many people. Now the office of US senator Elizabeth Warren has issued a short (8-pages plus three pages of endnotes) but biting report titled Rigged Justice: 2016 How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy that hits hard at the fact of wrongdoing by several major corporate entities, the major banks and investment houses among them, and that the Justice Department has not taken meaningful action against any of them.
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Lies, truth, what does it matter?

At the last Republican debate, both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were shown clips of their previous statements that directly contradicted their claims about their stances on immigration. Were they fazed by this? Not at all. Republicans have learned that these days, all that matters is the ability to look directly at the camera and say whatever the hell you want with a straight face. If you can do that, your fans will stay with you. ‘Never back down, never apologize’ has become their mantra.
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The establishment attack on Sanders intensifies

Just as the Republican party establishment tries to bring down both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz from their perches at the top of polls, so has Bernie Sanders’s rise led to similar attacks on the Democratic side, with the media leading the way. With the Iowa caucus imminent, the beltway insider mouthpiece that is the Washington Post editorial department launched an attack on him by accusing him of “peddling fiction” to the voters. Sanders responded by asking them to “check out where all the geniuses on the editorial page were with regard to the invasion of Iraq”, a deft counter-attack since that newspaper was one of the leaders in peddling all the fiction that was used to sell that illegal and immoral war to the American public. Lee Fang discusses how the New York Times misleads in its claims that Sanders is the main beneficiary of outside funds.
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How can people behave this way?

The brutal truth about foreign troops occupying a country is that they almost always result in horrific abuses of the local population, even if the troops are there not to invade but as peacekeepers. There seems to be something in the dynamic of a powerful occupying force facing a defenseless local population that brings out the worst in some members of the former.
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Republican debate review

I watched last night’s seventh debate and it did not contain anything new in terms of what each candidate said about their policies. It consisted of the usual bashing of president Obama and the claim that he has brought the nation to the edge of ruin and that a Hillary Clinton presidency will tip it into the abyss. Oh, and Bernie Sanders is a socialist, yuk, yuk. Each of them adopted the mantle of the One True Conservative who is strong enough to rescue the country and home and bring its enemies abroad to their knees thus ushering in a golden age of prosperity, while the others were merely poseurs.
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The odd nature of the Republican presidential primaries

Today is the day of the last Republican debate before the Iowa caucuses. Donald Trump has again managed to draw all the attention to himself by announcing that he is skipping the event. There are mixed views on whether this will hurt or help him. Some observers are saying that he has finally made a move that will hurt him, that his absence will enable the other candidates to beat up on him without any pushback and that Iowa voters will feel insulted by his absence and switch their votes. But such predictions of Trump missteps have come and gone without being realized before.
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Diplomacy as a path to war, not as an alternative to it

Glenn Greenwald writes that the US is preparing a new bombing campaign in Libya to deal with the mess it created by its first bombing campaign. It must be recalled that Hillary Clinton was one of the leading architects and advocates of that disastrous policy during her tenure as secretary of state and gloated about the brutal death of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at the hands of a mob, even joking and chuckling about it, saying “We came, we saw, he died”.
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