"Even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated – not in one case, or a thousand, or a million...If their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable. I may have found myself on the wrong side of the government on torture. But I'm on the right side of history ... there are things we should not do, even in the name of national security. One of them, I now firmly believe, is torture." -- John Kiriakou, CIA torture whistle-blower who was just sentenced to 30 months in prison effectively for telling the truth.
“[John Kiriakou] is an anti-torture whistleblower who spoke out against torture because he believed it violated his oath to the Constitution. He never tortured anyone, yet he is the only individual to be prosecuted in relation to the torture program of the past decade.
“The interrogators who tortured prisoners, the officials who gave the orders, the attorneys who authored the torture memos, and the CIA officers who destroyed the interrogation tapes have not been held professionally accountable."
Please, Mr. President, do not allow your legacy to be one where only the whistleblower goes to prison.
-- from letters to President Obama from high profile Kiriakou defenders
"We are never going to have a full understanding of what bad behavior bankers conducted in the years leading up to the financial crisis. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have failed to hold big wrongdoers to account....
Hundreds of pages of internal Morgan Stanley documents, released publicly last week, shed much new light on what bankers knew at the height of the housing bubble and what they did with that secret knowledge.The lawsuit concerns a $500 million collateralized debt obligation called Stack 2006-1, created in the first half of 2006. Collections of mortgage-backed securities, C.D.O.'s were at the heart of the financial crisis.But the documents suggest a pattern of behavior larger than this one deal: People across the bank understood that the American housing market was in trouble. They took advantage of that knowledge to create and then bet against securities and then also to unload garbage investments on unsuspecting buyers." -- Jesse Eisinger (ProPublica)
"It is a dark day for the rule of law. Federal and state authorities have chosen not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system. They also have not charged any top HSBC banker in the case, though it boggles the mind that a bank could launder money as HSBC did without anyone in a position of authority making culpable decisions.Clearly, the government has bought into the notion that too big to fail is too big to jail. "
Dear Mr. President,
You take office for the second time at a critical moment. As you may know, the U.S. has just recorded the hottest year in its history, beating the old mark by a full degree; the same year that saw the deep Midwest drought, and the fury of Hurricane Sandy, also witnessed the rapid and unprecedented melt of the Arctic ice pack.
If we are to restrain the rise in the planet's temperature, it will require strong action from, among others, the planet's sole superpower. Some of that work will be difficult, requiring the cooperation of Congress. But other steps are relatively easy.
Eighteen months ago some of us wrote you about the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, explaining why in our opinion its construction ran counter to both national and planetary interests. Nothing that has happened since has changed that evaluation; indeed, the year of review that you asked for on the project made it clear exactly how pressing the climate issue really is.
We hope, as scientists, that you will demonstrate the seriousness of your climate convictions by refusing to permit Keystone XL; to do otherwise would be to undermine your legacy.
Thank you,
Even leaving aside uncertainty about the net climate effect of black carbon mitigation (e.g. cooling effect of organic aerosols vs. warming effect of absorbing aerosols over high albedo surfaces), controlling black carbon, or any other short lived forcing agent, should not be viewed in any way as substituting for CO2 reduction. You can defer controls on black carbon for decades and still get the climate benefit once you implement them, but CO2 is forever, so action on CO2 is not deferrable. If black carbon reductions are justified on health grounds, do it for that reason, but don't pretend that doing it now is an important contribution so solving our climate problems.
*"Post-Conventional level" in Lawrence Kohlberg's "stages of moral development"
"The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come" -- Matt Taibbi
