Yves said:
My 2007 post on that tussle was “The Pentagon as Financial Regulator.” Maybe that’s an idea we need to entertain more seriously. It seems to be the only body with the authority and firepower to take on the mortgage industrial complex.
Any image of U.S. military competence is an illusion, an illusion created quite deliberately, but nevertheless an illusion.
Andrew Bacevich, in his two books The New American Militarism and The Limits of Power, goes to great lengths to debunk the illusion of military competence.
“American generalship since the end of the Cold War has seldom risen above the mediocre,” Bacevich writes in The Limits of Power:
[S]enior officials operate on the implicit assumption that they are immunized from accountability. In May 2007, in a stinging critique of post-9/ll military leadership, Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling wrote in “Armed Forces Journal” that “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”
In The New American Militarism Bacevich explores in great detail why the false illusion is created. It is all part and parcel of the well-oiled sales pitch [well maybe not so well-oiled, thanks to Bradley Manning and Wikileaks] for the all-consuming security state:
In war-as-spectacle, appearance could be more important than reality, because appearance often ended up determining reality… To use force was to strike a posture, to manipulate perceptions, or to send a message…
This image of war transformed derived from—-but also meshed with and seemed to validate—-the technology-hyped mood prevailing during the final decade of the twentieth century.
[….]
In short, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the reigning postulates of technology-as-panacea had knocked away much of the accumulated blood-rust sullying war’s reputation. Thus reimagined—-and amidst widespread assurances that the United States could be expected to retain a monopoly of this new way of war—-armed conflict regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all. In the right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an attractive option—-cost-effective, humane, even thrilling. Indeed, as the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively demonstrated in the spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once again become a grand pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary diversion from the ennui and boring routine of everyday life.
[….]
This new aesthetic has contributed, in turn, to an appreciable boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves, a fourth manifestation of the new American militarism.
Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public attitudes toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed services first. While confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, the media, and even organized religion is diminishing, confidence in the military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Americans fearful that the rest of society may be teetering on the brink of moral collapse console themselves with the thought that the armed services remain a repository of traditional values and old-fashioned virtue. With Americans becoming ever “more individualistic, more self-absorbed, more whiney, in a sense, more of a crybaby nation,” the columnist George Will told midshipmen in the U.S. Naval Academy, it is all the more important for the military to server as a model for the rest of society, preserving values that others might deem “anachronistic.” According to Will, “it is a function of the military to be exemplars.”
Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and women of the armed services, gushed “Newsweek” in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, “looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with pose and élan.” A writer for “Rolling Stone” reported after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that “the Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had imagined”; it was instead “the sort of America he always pictured when he explained…his best hopes for the country.” According to the old post-Vietnam-era political correctness, the armed services had been a refuge for louts and mediocrities who probably couldn’t make it in the real world. Now the United States military was “a place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody…looked out for each other. A place where people—-intelligent, talented people—-said honestly that money wasn’t what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings.” Soldiers, it turned out, were not only more virtuous than the rest of us, but also more sensitive and even happier. Contemplating the GIs advancing on Baghdad in March 2003, the classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson saw something more than soldiers in battle. He ascertained “transcendence at work.” According to Hanson, the armed services had “somehow distilled from the rest of us an elite cohort” in which virtues cherished by earlier generations of Americans continued to flourish.
Soldiers have tended to concur with this evaluation of their own moral superiority. In a 2003 survey of military personnel, “two-thirds [of those polled] said they think military members have higher moral standards than the nation they serve… Once in the military, many said, members are wrapped in a culture that values honor and morality.” Such attitudes leave even some senior officers more than a little uncomfortable. Noting with regret that “the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve,” retired admiral Stanley Arthur has expressed concern that “more and more, enlisted as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve.” Such tendencies, concluded Arthur, are “not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy.”
In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become obligatory and the one unforgiveable sin is to be found guilty of failing to “support the troops.” In the realm of partisan politics, the political Right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this dynamic, shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension to those members of the public laboring under the misconception, a residue from Vietnam, that the armed services are under siege from a rabidly anti-military Left.
In The Limits of Power Bacevich concludes:
The exercise of military power will not enable the United States to evade the predicament to which the crisis of profligacy has given rise. To persist in following that path is to invite inevitable overextension, bankruptcy, and ruin.
"No TKO's will be accepted"
~
Check out this letter sent from "Foreclosure Stoppage" Attorney George Babcock to opposing counsel Mark Harmon...
Dear Mr. Harmon,
Please
be advised that I have been retained by Mr. Conley regarding the
notice of illegal foreclosure you mailed to him on February 4, 2011.
The chain of title to this properly and the note is like a walk down
the yellow brick road. Is Harmon Law the Wizard of Title? You
display extreme indifference to the law by noticing a foreclosure on
this property. As you know, I take great pride in defending my
clients against the evil forces that guide your actions. Mr. Conley
is a personal friend. It is my intention to be even more pugilistic in
this matter. It is disgusting and I will make sure that whoever
violates his property rights is knocked out of the ring. No TKO's will
be accepted. A full fledged, right cross to the chin of the beast.
I
look forward to a response although I am quite certain you will not
engage me as is your habit. Send your minions that I may lay waste
to them before me.
I hope that this letter is circulated as
has been your habit in the past. I like my enemy to know that I am at
its doorstep.
Very truly yours,
George E. Babcock, Esquire
Actual letter below...
But first, some background on Mark Harman...
AG investigating Newton law firm's foreclosure work
Harmon
Law Offices, a Newton firm that specializes in foreclosures, is being
investigated by the state attorney general's office for allegedly
unlawfully evicting residents from bank-owned properties.
State
officials want to determine whether Harmon Law failed to comply with a
new Massachusetts law that protects tenants living in foreclosed homes
from eviction, a spokesman for Attorney General Martha Coakley said
today. more here...
Plantation foreclosure company's director quits amid investigation ...
Mark
P. Harmon has resigned as a director at the Plantation foreclosure
processing company with ties to David J. Stern's law practice, as the
Massachusetts Attorney General said it is investigating whether
Harmon's firm illegally evicted tenants from repossessed homes in that
state.
Harmon's resignation, announced by DJSP Enterprises Inc.
on Monday, comes as the beleagured company said it is laying off
another 198 employees, bringing the total to 300 within the past two
weeks. more here...
For more on "Foreclosure Stoppage" attorney George Babcock click here...
4closureFraud.org
Foreclosure Fight Club Lawyer Letter
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