Barack Obama is meeting Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, today in Washington. According to the official Iraqi story, they are to discuss Maliki's plea to train and equip Iraqi forces with advanced weapons to fight terrorism.

If this is heeded, it will add to the crimes committed by the US against Iraqis since the invasion of 2003, as weapons and equipment made available to the regime have, to date, been used only against Iraqi people.

The Maliki regime blames all terrorist acts (frequent car explosions, often in markets, cafes and mosques) on al-Qaida, selectively choosing not to mention the regime's own militias: Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, Iraqi Hezbollah, factions of the Mahdi army, the Badr brigades and the Mokhtar army.

A common belief among Iraqis is that only agents connected to the nearly 1 million strong army and security forces, and especially to the Special Forces (inherited from the occupation, trained by the US and now attached directly to Maliki's office) could carry out such sustained and widespread campaign of terror.

I have long argued that U.S. decline as a hegemonic power began circa 1970 and that a slow decline became a precipitate one during the presidency of George W. Bush. I first started writing about this in 1980 or so.

At that time the reaction to this argument, from all political camps, was to reject it as absurd. In the 1990s, quite to the contrary, it was widely believed, again on all sides of the political spectrum, that the United States had reached the height of unipolar dominance.

However, after the burst bubble of 2008, opinion of politicians, pundits, and the general public began to change. Today, a large percentage of people (albeit not everyone) accepts the reality of at least some relative decline of U.S. power, prestige, and influence.

In the United States this is accepted quite reluctantly. Politicians and pundits rival each other in recommending how this decline can still be reversed. I believe it is irreversible.

The real question is what the consequences of this decline are. The first is the manifest reduction of U.S. ability to control the world situation, and in particular the loss of trust by the erstwhile closest allies of the United States in its behavior.

In the last month, because of the evidence released by Edward Snowden, it has become public knowledge that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been directly spying on the top political leadership of Germany, France, Mexico, and Brazil among others (as well, of course, on countless citizens of these countries).

Poland has asked the European Court of Human Rights to bar media and public presence during an upcoming hearing on Poland's complicity with the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program that delivered terror suspects to secret prisons around the world.

The public hearing in Strasbourg, France, scheduled for Dec. 3, will be the first arguments testing allegations that the Polish government allowed the CIA to operate a jail for supposed Al-Qaeda fighters in Poland.

The request for a private hearing "will be examined by the court shortly," a court spokesperson told Reuters.

Major issues or trends do not change on a daily or even monthly basis. A trend may take a few years to run its course and unless there is a major factor that may affect the trend, there is hardly any need to comment any further on the trend or outcomes.

The events unraveling post Bernanke's decision not to taper QE is most significant because it confirms our analysis that the banking crisis has not been resolved in any significant way after five years of money printing and massive asset inflation. The fiat money system has but one outcome - total collapse. It will also mean the demise of the global US dollar reserve currency.

There are no solutions at hand.


Last week the business press reported that the U.S. Department of Justice may assert charges against JPMorgan Chase for its role in perpetuating the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme which defrauded investors out of $17 billion in actual funds and $64 billion in paper losses based on the falsified values shown on client statements. Unnamed sources said the Justice Department may agree to a deferred prosecution agreement in exchange for an outside monitor or, in the alternative, charge JPMorgan's banking division with violations of the Bank Secrecy Act for failing to report its Madoff suspicions to Federal authorities. Interestingly, JPMorgan did report its suspicions to a government regulator - in the United Kingdom, not in the U.S.

Such a development would also raise serious new questions about how the Board of Trustees of NYU handles conflicts of interest. The Board is already under withering criticism from a group of 400 faculty members. In July, the faculty group issued a letter demanding that Martin Lipton, Chairman of the Board for the past 15 consecutive years, step down over a raft of conflicted actions which came to a head when Ariel Kaminer of the New York Times reported in June in a front page article that NYU, a taxpayer subsidized nonprofit, was doling out forgivable mortgage loans on vacation homes to an elite group of faculty and administrators.

Lipton is a founding partner of the Wall Street law firm, Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, which served as legal counsel to JPMorgan to fight a lawsuit brought by the Madoff Trustee assigned to secure funds for defrauded investors. This was at a time when both Lipton and top executives of JPMorgan served on the Board of NYU units that had themselves been defrauded and could have benefited from monetary clawbacks from JPMorgan.

Nothing reveals the incestuous, one-percent-mindset that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly have with Wall Street than the next to last photo at this link. The photo shows an employee of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's number one target for financial fraud investigations, JPMorgan Chase, working inside a high security spy center in Lower Manhattan to - wait for it - help the New York City Police Department catch crooks.

While most law enforcement bodies around the U.S. would instantly weed out serial wrongdoers as job hires, Bloomberg and Kelly have created an art form out of joint policing ventures with Wall Street, operating both a rent-a-cop program with Wall Street as well as pumping at least $150 million of taxpayer money into the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center where Wall Street employees sit elbow to elbow with NYPD officers.

Under some Orwellian concept of citizen surveillance, the very Wall Street banks that proved they were a far greater threat to the United States than any foreign terrorist when they collapsed the Nation's financial system in 2008, are part of a joint venture with the NYPD to use high-tech spy equipment to monitor the comings and goings of citizens in the streets of Manhattan - the majority of which, unlike Wall Street, are law abiding citizens.

Ignore, for a moment, the pea soup. Forget the head swivel, the crucifix, those 75 stone steps that tumble from Prospect to M Street. Forget that demonic voice and what your mother may or may not be doing in Hell. The creator of the scariest movie of all time would like very much if you'd remember that he wrote the Peter Sellers caper "A Shot in the Dark," that his early collaborator in Hollywood was the comedy director Blake Edwards, that an esteemed book critic once wrote that "Nobody can write funnier lines than William Peter Blatty."

This career in punch lines was hurled out the window when Blatty started clacking away on his green IBM Selectric in a cabin near Lake Tahoe during the summer of 1969. For nine months, starting around 11 each night and working through darkness, the unemployed screenwriter wrote in seclusion about the demonic possession of a girl, the troubled priest from Georgetown University who is assigned to her case and the brooding brick Colonial on Prospect Street NW where the nightmare unfolds. Even as he typed out the vilest of passages, Blatty never thought his novel would frighten anyone, or that it would become and remain (adjusting for inflation) the top-grossing ­R-rated movie in history.

The comic writer's legacy is a horror film.

No one can reasonably deny that the major Insurance Companies were the driving force behind the writing of the Affordable Care Act legislation. "The health care industry spent nearly $500 million lobbying for health care issues in 2012, and $243 million so far in 2013." Obamacare or Corporate-care: The Writing of the Affordable Care Act, sums up the process.

"Essentially, the ACA was designed to write the for-profit health care system into law, increase corporate profits, and to discourage people from demanding a health care system that would actually provide real health care coverage for all. The ACA wasn't written to fix a broken system - it was written to ensure that the broken system would be kept in place. After all, from the standpoint of the health care industry, the system is working just fine for their profits."

Since the public insurance providers are enjoying a jump in their stock values and a protected rise in premiums, the normal conclusion is that Obamacare is the big winner in the socialization of medicine. Before going any further, The Health Care Blog raises a curious issues regarding Obamacare in the article, Does Obamacare Limit Profits for Health Insurance Companies in Your State?

An independent report has charged that medical personnel, working under the direction of the Department of Defense and CIA in military defense facilities, violated medical ethics by participating in the torture of detainees.

The services provided by American doctors and psychologists included "designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment" of detainees, according to the report.

The 19-member task force concluded that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA ordered medical professionals to assist in intelligence gathering, as well as forced-feeding of hunger strikers, in a way that inflicted "severe harm" on detainees in US custody.

The authors of the 269-page report, entitled Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the 'War on Terror' is based on information from unclassified, publicly available information.

The task force revealed that a "theory of interrogation" emerged in US detention facilities, including Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that was based on "personality disintegration" as a means of breaking down the resistance of the detainees in an effort to extract confessions and information.

Over time, new interrogation methods were developed by interrogators and psychologists from techniques used in the pre-9/11 Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program that was designed for training US troops to withstand interrogation and mistreatment techniques in the event they were captured.

The interrogators and medical professionals transformed torture-resistant tactics into abusive methods of interrogation, which they employed on detainees. This included so-called 'enhanced interrogation' techniques, such as waterboarding, which involves covering a restrained detainee's face with a towel and then soaking it with water. The technique is said to induce a feeling of drowning and complete helplessness.

This will not go over well for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

According to the new book Double Down, in which journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama told his aides that he's "really good at killing people" while discussing drone strikes.

Peter Hamby of The Washington Post noted the moment in his review of the book.

The reported claim by the commander-in-chief is as indisputable as it is grim.

Obama oversaw the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, 145 Predator drone strikes in NATO's 2011 Libya operations, the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and drone strikes that killed the Pakistani Taliban leader and a senior member of the Somali-based militant group al-Shabab this week.

His administration also expanded the drone war: There have been 326 drone strikes in Pakistan, 93 in Yemen, and several in Somalia under Obama, compared to a total of 52 under George Bush.

In 2011 two of those strikes killed American-born al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and his American-born, 16-year-old son within two weeks.