Why did he have to die now? What purpose was served?
Just kids. You step into the barracks thinking big, burly and deep-voiced. And what you get are chubby faces and halfhearted mustaches and voices still cracking, boys hurried into uniforms and handed heavy guns. Sept. 11 was junior high, fifth grade even, a half a lifetime ago. Megan Fox is everywhere, plastered above the bunks, the best that Maxim can offer. Junk food, too, sent A.P.O. (Army Post Office) from home: powdered Gatorade and M&M’s and teriyaki jerky. Underwear and socks. “Love you, bro,” scrawled a sister from California on a care package to Ramadi, Iraq. “Muwah!”
Forty cigarettes and a 10-mile run. Ice cream and cake and 25 pull-ups. Who but a kid can punish himself like that? They go on patrol and search a string of houses, then lift weights to heavy metal and sleep away the heat in the afternoon. Their bodies are hard and soft at once, like youth.
Adulthood’s a switch. The kids climb into their Humvees and close the clanging doors. They push the clips into their M-4’s, pull back the bolts. Safeties off. Only code words and swear words now, no joshing around. Voices drop and eyes go hard. “Movement to contact,” someone says. It won’t be long now.
Death rides along. In the back seat, in the Humvee, on the bouncing road, in the dark. No one mentions the possibility of death. No one talks about the ambush coming. Nor the bomb in the road ahead, buried under the pile of trash, the one that will explode upward, through the seats.
“What’s that up there?” the driver said.
“Hell if I know, move your head,” said the other.
“It’s nothing,” the driver said.
In Helmand Province, in Afghanistan, the bombs were so big that one guy disappeared. He’d been on a foot patrol in a field. After a while they found his leg in a tree; they had to go up and pull it down. The rest of him didn’t turn up, so they spent the night in the same place and woke up the next morning and started searching again. He’d floated down a canal.
Sometimes, right after a guy is killed, you feel as if you are in possession of a terrible secret. He’s there on the ground, alive only a minute ago, and the only people who know he’s dead are standing right there by him. The rest of the world thinks he’s alive, as alive as he was when he climbed out of bed that same morning, only a few hours before.
And at that moment, you think about how the word of his death will travel; how it will depart Iraq or Afghanistan and move across the ocean and into the United States and into the town where he lives, Corinth, Miss., say, or Benwood, W.Va., and into the houses and the hearts of the people who love him most in the world. And at that moment, standing there, looking down on the dead man, you can wonder only what the family will do when the terrible news finally arrives, how they will resist it and wrestle with it and suffer from it, and how they will cope and how they will remember.
The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."Judging from this writeup in Wikipedia, Perry may actually know something of the matter.
It may sound cruel but this bill is really more important than the health bill, but it's been relegated to the shadows by the health bill. Will our leaders pass it or any bill which limits the power of the financial industry?Consumer Protections with Authority and Independence: Creates a new independent watchdog, housed at the Federal Reserve, with the authority to ensure American consumers get the clear, accurate information they need to shop for mortgages, credit cards, and other financial products, and protect them from hidden fees, abusive terms, and deceptive practices.
Ends Too Big to Fail: Ends the possibility that taxpayers will be asked to write a check to bail out financial firms that threaten the economy by: creating a safe way to liquidate failed financial firms; imposing tough new capital and leverage requirements that make it undesirable to get too big; updating the Fed’s authority to allow system-wide support but no longer prop up individual firms; and establishing rigorous standards and supervision to protect the economy and American consumers, investors and businesses.
Advanced Warning System: Creates a council to identify and address systemic risks posed by large, complex companies, products, and activities before they threaten the stability of the economy.
Transparency & Accountability for Exotic Instruments: Eliminates loopholes that allow risky and abusive practices to go on unnoticed and unregulated - including loopholes for over-the-counter derivatives, asset-backed securities, hedge funds, mortgage brokers and payday lenders.
Federal Bank Supervision: Streamlines bank supervision to create clarity and accountability. Protects the dual banking system that supports community banks.
Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance: Provides shareholders with a say on pay and corporate affairs with a non-binding vote on executive compensation.
Protects Investors: Provides tough new rules for transparency and accountability for credit rating agencies to protect investors and businesses.
Enforces Regulations on the Books: Strengthens oversight and empowers regulators to aggressively pursue financial fraud, conflicts of interest and manipulation of the system that benefit special interests at the expense of American families and businesses.
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"Lehman’s financial plight, and the consequences to Lehman’s creditors and shareholders, was exacerbated by Lehman executives, whose conduct ranged from serious but non‐culpable errors of business judgment to actionable balance sheet manipulation; by the investment bank business model, which rewarded excessive risk taking and leverage; and by Government agencies, who by their own admission might better have anticipated or mitigated the outcome."Lehman played a dangerous game in its battle to be considered one of the big boys. They violated their own risk protocol. They got themselves into a situation where the long-term assets were funded with short-term money. They claimed some transactions as sales although all they did was arbitrarily move assets - significant assets in the $50 billion range - back and forth from the balance sheet so that their publicly reported numbers would look good. They hid all this from the board of directors. And their auditors, Ernst & Young, accepted all this chicanery.
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We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly. (2) If present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time. (3) The growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it. (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral‐rich as well as mineral‐poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below‐ or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave tradeMy emphases.
