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Wed 15 Oct, 2008 09:12 pm
Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack during peacetime. The United States was not at war with Japan. Several ships were sent to the bottom, some damaged and the aircrafts sitting by the airbase were destroyed. However, the damage around several hundred million dollars, was repairable and brought the United States into the war to end all wars i.e. World War II.
But there was another sneak attack in peace time against the financial system of the United States by a Texas Senator with a Ph.D. in Economics. Here is an excerpt from Mother Jones website:
It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead"even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.
It's not exactly like Gramm hid his handiwork"far from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act's inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps"and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."
This wanton act has put the the US economy and that of the world on the brink of another great depression with nearly $65 trillion dollars of debt.
I suggest that Congress should forward a bill with the provision that any bill that is signed off with portions of it snuck in without anyone’s knowledge be made null and void even if signed. There should be an addendum to the bill with the signors of the act to weed out portions that were added without anyone’s knowledge or discussion. The perpetrator should be forced to resign and charged criminally.
@talk72000,
My second ex was born on Dec 7th...so there are actually 2 reasons that day will live in infamy....
@talk72000,
What's the date of the Gramm bill? Surely, not December 7th. LOL
@cicerone imposter,
Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out what the Gramm-Lugar bill has to do with Pearl Harbor. The two are roughly a half a century apart.
(Only thing I can think of, c.i., is that by putting Pearl Harbor in the headline, Talk tricked you and me into reading his post.
)
@talk72000,
Yeah, one by an enemy, and the other by an American. Which one is more dangerous to our security?
@cicerone imposter,
One by a traitor is more dangerous as your guard is down and s/he has all kinds of information an enemy would not have. In this case we have an ideological traitor. He would endanger every American's welfare to prove his point with no regard for economic safety.
You might say 9-11 but the hell of it is that the Japanese had the decency to have their own insignia on their aircraft at the time and any American pol or military commander who did not realize we were at war with Japan prior to Dec. 7 would have been a mental defective. 9-11 Was MUCH worse than Pearl Harbor.
@gungasnake,
W took advantage of it and made the situation worse. However, it is American foreign policy gone wrong. CIA trained Osama bin Laden and taught him all the tricks of the trade. CIA funded religious fanatics and they are the main source of global turmoil.
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