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Monday, September 15, 2008
Socialists want to run this country!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Who said this?
“We are going to reform the way Wall Street does business and put an end to the greed that has driven our markets into chaos. We will stop multimillion-dollar payouts to CEOs who have broken the public trust. We will put an end to running Wall Street like a casino. We will make businesses work for the benefit of their shareholders and employees.”
That was John McCain, Republican candidate for president. The times, they are a’changin’…
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Another Black Monday on Wall Street
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The closing bell has sounded on Wall Street. It was not a pretty day. The Dow fell 300 points early, stabilized, and then plummeted again in the last 30 minutes. That was hardly a sign of investor confidence. Panic was more like it.
By closing, the total loss topped 500 points, roughly 4.4 percent of the Dow’s value.
The worst may not be over. The prospect of a possible collapse by insurance giant AIG — the world’s largest insurance company — could make today’s crisis seem almost tame.
The scale of the problem — $75 billion in private money needed to save AIG alone — has shaken even the most sober and experienced of Street investors.
Economic data beyond the financial world was hardly encouraging. According to the Federal Reserve, “industrial production decreased 1.1 percent in August and was revised down in June and July …. factory output was down 1.0 percent in August, in part because of a drop of 11.9 percent in the production of motor vehicles and parts. Excluding motor vehicles and parts, the index for manufacturing decreased 0.3 percent.”
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McCain is smearing himself
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For years, Sen. John McCain has opposed the Army’s Future Combat Systems, an effort to equip individual infantry soldiers with a full panoply of high-tech equipment — broadband capability, sensors, satellite digital communications, infrared vision, etc. If successful, it would in effect turn a soldier into a fighting cyborg.
I wrote about the FCS myself years ago, when I was doing a technology column for the AJC titled “Next”. At the time the project struck me as both extremely ambitious and extremely expensive, not to mention pretty damn cool.
I don’t know whether McCain was right to oppose the project, because I hadn’t followed it closely in recent years. But his opposition was consistent with other stances he had taken to expose Pentagon waste, such as his opposition to an in-flight refueling tanker contract with Boeing that later turned out to be corrupt. That’s the John McCain who actually deserved his image as maverick.
But this is what it has come to. As the Army Times points out, McCain’s position on the Future Combat Systems has taken a sudden and expedient turn:
“Has Sen. John McCain renounced his longtime antagonism toward the Army’s Future Combat Systems?
On Sept. 8, the Republican presidential candidate told a rally crowd in Lee’s Summit, Mo., about an Obama video message to a liberal advocacy group.
“He promised them he would, quote, ‘slow our development of Future Combat Systems,’” McCain said, according to wire reports. “This is not a time to slow our development of Future Combat Systems.”
Flashback to July, however, when his campaign furnished McCain’s economic plan to The Washington Post, declaring that “there are lots of procurements — Airborne Laser, [C-17] Globemaster, Future Combat System [sic] — that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed.”
In fact, McCain has long criticized the over-budget, behind-schedule FCS program. In 2005, he blasted the Army for allowing the program to balloon to $161 billion, and forced the service to rewrite the main FCS contract.”
The old McCain, McCain the maverick, believed the FCS is fatally flawed and tried to kill it. But when Obama took the identical position, McCain the corporate cow pony took over, citing Obama’s position as evidence that he is weak on defense and won’t protect America.
Imagine yourself as McCain, attacking Obama for taking the very same position that you yourself had taken. Do you simply turn your conscience off as you make such statements? Do you render yourself incapable of feeling shame?
McCain is asking the American people for their trust. He is trying to earn that trust through a conscious, calculated, shameless strategy of deceit. He is pioneering a Future Combat Systems for politicians, in which truth is an old-dated concept.
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Russia beaten by little Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Vladimir Putin all but conceded defeat last week in Russia’s war with Georgia, acknowledging that his country had been whipped by Georgia’s better-prepared high-tech forces.
Really, he did.
In traditional military terms, of course, Russia won that war easily, rolling over the Georgian army and seizing territory.
But as Putin now realizes, his country has come out of the war far more damaged than Georgia did.
That’s because it got outfought on the battlefield on which most modern wars are now decided, in the media.
“I am surprised at how powerful the propaganda machine of the so-called West is,” Putin admitted, calling it “awesome” and “amazing.”
More specifically, Putin said he had been struck by the media’s silence when Georgia’s military started the war by trying to retake two rebellious provinces by force.
There was “absolute silence, as if nothing was happening, as if this was commanded,” he said. “I congratulate you. I congratulate those who were involved in this.”
Russia’s defeat in the information war has cost it considerably. Its global strategic situation has declined, its enemies are more firmly united, its friends aren’t quite so friendly and its economy has suffered.
Up to $35 billion in foreign capital has fled Russia since the war, which in turn has sent Russia’s stock market spiraling.
The recent war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon offers another example of the media as the deciding battlefield.
By traditional standards, the war was an overwhelming Israeli victory. The Israeli Defense Force moved deep into Lebanon, inflicting many more casualties on Hezbollah than it took in return and destroying civilian and military infrastructure.
But as even Israeli officials acknowledge, they lost the war.
International opinion swung so hard against them that they were forced to abandon the fight before achieving their goals, leaving Hezbollah to claim victory.
In the Georgia-Russia war, public-relations and public-diplomacy experts marvel at the preparation and effectiveness of Georgia’s media “blitzkrieg.”
As soon as Russia counterattacked with tanks and troops, Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili went on the media offensive, logging five hours of airtime on global news stations in just a few days.
Journalists around the world were flooded with e-mails explaining Georgia’s situation, and pro-Georgian Web sites were advertised in major newspapers.
Darren Spinck, a principal with Global Strategic Communications Group, points out that Georgia even reached into “new media.”
“One Facebook group, ‘Stop Russian Aggression against Georgia,’ has 22,000 subscribers, more than the registered subscribers for both the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin groups,” writes Spinck. “Many of these young and educated Facebook subscribers supporting Georgia have turned the blogosphere against Russia, whipping up Russophobic sentiments not seen in such abundance since the Cold War.”
“It seems to me that the price Russia will pay for its minuscule territorial gains will be global and long-lasting,” writes Ira Strauss, the U.S. coordinator on NATO’s Committee on Russia. “And this has nothing to do with media bias; it is the bitter reality of a logical and unavoidable consequence of what was done.”
There are lessons in Russia’s experience for U.S. policymakers and citizens, lessons involving the limits of pure military power and the importance of what might be called a nation’s “brand.”
“Countries … lucky or virtuous enough to have acquired a positive reputation find that everything they or their citizens wish to do on the global stage is easier,” according to Simon Anholt, a British expert on the marketing of nations.
“Their brand goes before them like a calling card that opens doors, creates trust and respect.
“The only sort of government that can afford to ignore the impact of its national reputation is one that has no interest in participating in the global community,” he says.
And these days, not even insular Russia fits that bill.
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