Hot on the heels of the news that a Joint Chiefs of Staff report from September of 2002, lately fully-declassified, suggests that several high Bush Mobb officials already knew that their knowledge of Iraq's alleged WMD program didn't match the rhetorical fervor of their case for war, Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to demand that the New York Times investigate what senior Bush Administration officials knew and when they knew it. I know, asking the Times, which also botched its early reporting on the war, is a bit dicey, but I presume they want to continue being the "paper of record" in America, and any such investigation would shed considerable light, considering that so many Bush Mobbers are now advising current Republican Presidential candidates, and that the Democratic front-runner for President, former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, supported Tha Bush Mobb's case for war and famously never renounced that support, even "given what we know now" as of 2008, which I knew in 2002.
Meanwhile, in the wake of this lengthy exposé of racist and predatory lending practices at Clayton Homes, Inc. -- owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway corporation for almost a dozen years, and now the biggest player in the mobile home business in America -- CREDO helps you tell the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to investigate these allegations. The charges detailed by Seattle Times reporters Mike Baker and Daniel Wagner really run the gamut, from harassing black co-workers to illegally telling folks their in-house lending corporation is the only one operating in a particular area to pushing minority home-buyers into far higher interest rates than they give their white home-buyers. And Mr. Buffett may be everyone's favorite billionaire, but that's not such a high bar to clear after all, particularly when Clayton's market share has exploded under his ownership, and when his corporation's response to the original report is so full of let's-see-what-sticks.
Finally, we learn that President Obama is actually contemplating issuing that Executive Order we've been demanding since the Supreme Court's nefarious Citizens United v. FEC decision -- the Order that would require federal contractors to disclose their political campaign contributions -- so the Peace Team still helps you tell President Obama to make federal contractor political spending transparent. Don't believe the hype that this Order would amount to Big Brother injuring the "free speech" of federal contractors -- federal contractors take taxpayer money, which is our money, and we deserve to know if they're using our money to buy themselves some lawmakers who'll represent their interests ahead of our interests, and we also deserve to know if they're using our money to buy lawmakers who'll funnel yet more of our money to their coffers so their executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Personal to those who'd object to my use of the Italics Hammer above: just be happy I never liked shouty caps.
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