Two Practices Symbolize President Obamas Plutocratic Big Brother View of Government — Refusing to Name the Enemies that American Secret Operations Are Fighting — and Considering Putting Pocket-Lining Larry Summers in Charge of the Federal Reserve Board

30 July 2013

If you think about these two examples, you really do have to wonder whether America’s gone completely nuts

(1) The Obama Administration has refused to disclose the names of many of the allegedly “terrorist” entities that American forces are fighting.

Who the United States is fighting is a secret, and it is none of the public’s business. And that’s true even if it’s your own kids who are sent into the fracases.

(2) The president is reportedly considering putting the economy-destroying King of Avariciousness — Larry Summers — in charge of the Federal Reserve Board.

Presumably indicating that our One Percent-favoring president thinks that recreating the conditions that led to our current economic crisis would be a great idea.

Secret wars

From Pro Publica’s investigative reporting:

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

“Because elements that might be considered ‘associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory.

“We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”

Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law who served as a legal counsel during the Bush administration and has written on this question at length, told ProPublica that the Pentagon’s reasoning for keeping the affiliates secret seems weak.

“If the organizations are ‘inflated’ enough to be targeted with military force, why cannot they be mentioned publicly?” Goldsmith said.

He added that there is “a countervailing very important interest in the public knowing who the government is fighting against in its name."

Exactly.

The Administration’s logic is figuratively similar to that which might have occurred had World War II era President Franklin Roosevelt told us that he could not tell us who the member of the Axis Powers were — for fear that publicizing the reasons for the combat would cause large groups of people to support Axis ideologies.

Larry Summers — and the President’s penchant for nominating plutocrats to deregulate other plutocrats

TruthDig’s editor in chief, Robert Scheer, put this one well:

The idea that Barack Obama would still consider appointing Lawrence Summers to head the Federal Reserve rather than order an investigation into this former White House official’s Wall Street payments, reported Friday by The Wall Street Journal, mocks the president’s claimed concern for the disappearing middle class.

Summers is in large measure responsible for that dismal outcome, and twice now, after top level economic postings in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, he has returned to gorge himself at the Wall Street trough.

As [President Bill] Clinton’s Treasury secretary,

he pushed for radical deregulation allowing investment bankers to take wild risks with the federally insured deposits of ordinary folks,

a disastrous move compounded when he successfully urged Congress to pass legislation banning the effective regulation of the tens of trillions in derivatives that often proved to be toxic.

Obama, following Summers’ advice, adopted the save-the-bankers-first philosophy . . . with outrageous publicly funded bailouts of the same financial conglomerates that had put the economy into a deep tailspin.

It is a policy that continues to this day, with an outlay of $85 billion a month by the Federal Reserve to purchase toxic assets from the banks’ books in the hopes that they will reinvest that largess. But as the president’s jobs critique noted, they haven’t.

Yup, that’s right.

President Obama (apparently) will consider reappointing this architect of American disaster because the President is either:

too stupid

(b) too much of a plutocrat himself, to see the anti-American foolishness of such a nomination.

The moral? — It is increasingly difficult to respect President Obama’s leadership worth

President Obama now represents most of what is wrong with the United States’ current political and military course.

PeteFree.com

Two Practices Symbolize President Obamas Plutocratic Big Brother View of Government — Refusing to Name the Enemies that American Secret Operations Are Fighting — and Considering Putting Pocket-Lining Larry Summers in Charge of the Federal Reserve Board