Edwards has, as far as I know, no federal criminal experience, either as prosecutor or defense attorney. Senator Obama apparently has none, either. Federal criminal law is not the only business of the U.S. Department of Justice. But it is DOJ’s main business, and it is different from anything that Edwards knows.

Experience in civil litigation is not enough. For nearly a decade I did civil enforcement litigation. It never occurred to me until I moved into federal criminal law that many of the civil violations with which my former office dealt were also federal felonies. Federal criminal law is a different world. We need an AG who is not starting from scratch with it.

Even state criminal law experience is not enough. Janet Reno had been a distinguished state prosecutor and did a lot of good as AG. Among some in DOJ, after the lethal fiasco at Waco, however, it was understood that part of why Reno failed to insist on a non-violent solution was her inexperience in dealing with the FBI.

So, assuming an Obama victory, we could have both our chief executive and his chief enforcement attorney with no federal criminal law experience.

Federal criminal law is a massive subject. An AG who must be briefed from scratch on every criminal law issue is on shaky ground.

The DOJ is also in great need of reform. Yet it is now larded with neocon permanent employees who may try to sabotage reform efforts. Edwards has apparently NO experience with the highly specialized world that is DOJ.

We need an AG who knows what s/he’s doing from Day 1.

Class struggle is the elephant in the room that few wish to notice or speak about. Well Marx did, but he’s not around anymore.

American capitalism is sold as a system where you are rewarded for hard work in proportion to your effort, smarts and entrepreneurial skills. Clearly this leaves out a lot of people who cannot play. Worker don’t have the opportunity to be entrepreneurial, and at best can be productive hard workers and agitate for better wages and working conditions and this goes against capital’s need and desires to maximize profits.

Second, everyone cannot get ahead, because to be ahead, others must be left behind. Those are the underclass / workers / slackers / leeches that are either not spoken about or when they are they are disdained as drags on the system. Fine to exploit them for profit, but convenient to blame everything on them as well.

Third, when you expose capitalism as the classist and racist economic system it is, with all its equities it’s impossible to square that with “democracy” which purports to value people “equally” in terms of rights and opportunities.

America has a huge intellectual disconnect between the economic class system of free enterprise / free market capitalism and democracy. Since people don’t care to have their heads spin, they simply don’t want to face these blaring contradictions.

Why must every transaction include PROFIT?

Who gets the profit? Not the workers who might be distributing the oil, but shareholders who do NOTHING and in this case deserve nothing.

The right likes to tie the notion of profit to risking their capital and so they should be able to benefit from this risk taking.

In the case you are citing about taking the reserves and introducing them to americans… who have already paid for this oil INCLUDING profit to the oil companies at the time of sale… why should they be entitled to MORE profit when there is little of any risk involved?

what we need to do is release those assets for american consumption only and since we’ve already payed for it we should pay only the price of distribution with a fair mark up so the local distributers can enjoy some profit at as well

Releasing Crude Oil From the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

But that’s because it is a business and profit driven. Truth, justice and journalism are only words. It’s the money that matters.

It’s a class thing and they don’t need coaching to know what best for those with dough. When you have wealth or are trying to acquire it or protect it you tow the republican line.

The wealthy who don’t are philanthropic and live modestly and try to use their wealth to help others. The phones give to charity as a tax write off (probably 95% of them do this).

The struggle in America is all about class and race and how the resources are owned, controlled, shared, used and so forth.

The media bobbleheads are in it for themselves so what would you expect?