WhoWhatWhy’s Libya Primer: The (Still) Untold Back Story to Qaddafi’s Demise

And so begins the deluge of “coverage” on the end of Muammar Qaddafi. But will you learn anything substantive about how and why he met his end? Don’t bet on it. However, at WhoWhatWhy, we’ve been providing fresh and unique reporting and analysis about Libya and the West’s murky role over there, from the beginning. If you haven’t been reading us, here’s your chance to catch up. And feel free to share with others.

The Libya Secret: How West Cooked Up “People’s Uprising”

Forget the “humanitarian crisis” that justified the NATO bombing that helped destroy Qaddafi’s regime. It was always about oil and other strategic issues. And the rebels were a wholly owned subsidiary of West, Inc. Here’s the evidence.

Libya: Connect the Dots-You Get a Giant Dollar Sign

Finally, if you look hard enough, you can start seeing the back story to the urgency to remove Qaddafi. It’s an ugly story—and all the ugliness is not on Qaddafi’s side, not by a long shot.

The Blue Dogs: Best Friends of Big Business

[Updates below – Ed.] As the Obama administration attempts to overhaul the nation’s health care, energy, and financial sectors, it faces the growing leverage of the Blue Dog Coalition—the conservative, fifty-two-member faction of the House’s Democratic caucus—to moderate, or obstruct, its...

Did Goldman Sachs Manipulate Markets?

[Update below – Ed.] Over Independence Day weekend, Sergey Aleynikov, a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, was arrested by the FBI for allegedly stealing the firm’s high-speed stock- and commodities-trading programming code and uploading it to an unidentified Web server in Germany. At...

Goldman Sachs Record Bonuses: Where’s the Investigation?

Goldman Sachs is on pace to make record bonus payouts after a robust first half, the Guardian newspaper reported on Sunday. Goldman staff in London were briefed on the outlook and told they could look forward to the bonus hikes if the company registers, as predicted, its most profitable year ever, the report...

$2 Trillion > $700 Billion

We’ve heard a lot rumbling from the banks in the past several weeks about how committed they are to repaying the TARP money they have received at the soonest opportunity. The motive of such talk is clear: Paying back TARP money would clearly be seen as a sign of strength,” Douglas Elliott, fellow at...

The Noblest and Best

The Wall Street Journal published a stunning report yesterday on how New York Federal Reserve Chairman Stephen Friedman enriched himself by purchasing Goldman Sachs stock while the Federal Reserve was propping up the investment bank: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York shaped Washington’s response to...