Ralph Nader is brilliant! ~ Lo
Taken at the end of a rally in Santa Cruz, CA
Day: October 9, 2008
Rachel Maddow: Palin’s Secessionist Connection + Palin’s radical right-wing mentors
Rachel talks to Max Blumenthal about his article which will go up at Salon tonight written with Dave Neiwart that breaks the Palin-secessionist connection wide open.
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Sarah Palin’s radical right-wing mentors
By Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert
Salon News
Oct. 10, 2008
PALMER, Alaska
On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the “traditional family” and secede from the United States.
So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. “This here is my attack dog,” he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. “Her name is Suzy.” Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” he said, clutching the gun in his palm. “Then again, so do most Alaskans.” But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call “the 48.” “We want to go our separate ways,” he said, “but we are not going to kill you.”
[…]
***
Video: Interview with former Alaskan Independence Party chairman Mark Chryson
Salon News
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Three Way Vice Presidential Debate: Palin, Biden, Gonzalez
McCain-Palin campaign’s attacks on Obama: a whiff of fascism
Rape as a Tool of War by Jennifer Fenton
by Jennifer Fenton
featured writer
Dandelion Salad
Justice and Peace
Oct 9, 2008
The use of rape as a tool of war is not a modern occurrence. Rape during wartime is a well-documented phenomenon that has occurred since writers and philosophers have recognized its existence. Gottschall notes, “historical and anthropological evidence suggests that rape in the context of war is an ancient human practice, and that this practice has stubbornly prevailed across a stunningly diverse concatenation of societies and historical epochs.” This claim, supported by APAP (2002), “In primitive warfare, women were targeted as a means to avoid facing the enemy again by eliminating the source of manpower for future supply,” shows the deliberate means in which a society may suffer through the use of rape as a tool of war. Wartime rape does not indicate solitary examples of rape by individuals but rather a pattern “of rape by soldiers at rates that are much increased over rates of rape that prevail in peacetime.” (Gottschall, 2004). Human Rights Watch claims:
Continue reading
Dr. Jeff Kassel: You can’t borrow your way into prosperity
You Need Somebody Like Me .. to tell you how to manage your money
Dr. Jeff Kassel tells Joe Briggs how bad the debt crisis is on PolicyWatch. MCAM-TV23 Manchester NH
Mosaic News – 10/8/08: World News from the Middle East
Warning
.
This video may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
Mosaic needs your help! Donate here: http://linktv.org/contribute
“Asian Stock Markets Cause Panic,” Dubai TV, UAE
“Saudi Arabia Assures Nervous Depositors ,” Al Arabiya TV, UAE
“Investors Pay for the Mistakes of Bankers,” Press TV, Iran
“Hamas Agrees to Meet with Fateh in Cairo,” Abu Dhabi TV, UAE
“New Israeli Plan Against Hezbollah,” LBC TV, Lebanon
“Iran Denies Any Formal Relations with U.S.,” Al-Alam TV, Iran
“Peace Building in North Sudan,” Sudan TV, Sudan
“Fighting the Taliban in Pakistan,” Al Jazeera English, Qatar
Produced for Link TV by Jamal Dajani.
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Bush The Liar: NSA Spying on Soldiers’ Phone Calls
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Major shock: Eavesdropping powers abused without oversight
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
Thursday Oct. 9, 2008 09:36 EDT
(updated below – Update II – Update III)
In the most unsurprising revelation imaginable, two former Army Reserve Arab linguists for the National Security Agency have said that they routinely eavesdropped on — “and recorded and transcribed” — the private telephone calls of American citizens who had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. The two former NSA employees, who came forward as part of journalist James Bamford’s forthcoming book on the NSA, intercepted calls as part of the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” whereby George Bush ordered the NSA in 2001 to eavesdrop on Americans’ calls in secret, without first obtaining judicial approval as required by the law (FISA). That illegal eavesdropping continued for at least six years — through 2007.
[…]
via Major shock: Eavesdropping powers abused without oversight – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com
see
The Trojan Horses of Our Demise; Reconnecting to the Moral Sense By Gary Corseri
By Gary Corseri
featured writer
Dandelion Salad
Oct. 9, 2008
Equo ne credite, Teucri. / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
(“Do not trust the Horse, Trojans. / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.”)–Virgil, The Aeneid
The Trojan horses of our demise: ignorance, arrogance, violence and greed. If we seek analogies for our financial collapse, Trojan horses are more instructive than horsemen of the apocalypse. The latter may be useful to the Fundies with their tiresome end-time fantasies. The horsemen externalize evil; they are children’s boogeymen, writ large in adult type, to frighten adult minds that should know better but cling to victimhood. Trojan horses, instead, internalize dangers—from the assassins crouching within their wooden hulls; to the gullible celebrants taking them into their fortress-city. In our blame-game culture, where and how we affix blame now is crucial to any possible restitution, let alone redemption. The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty; it is a looking-glass through which we may know ourselves.
“A deadly fraud is this,” Laocoon warned his fellow Trojans, “devised by the Achaean chiefs.” For “Achaean [Greek] chiefs” read: banksters, Wall Street, K-Street, mealy-mouthed politicoes, media and academic pundits. And the “fraud” is our credit-based economy. Laocoon was a prophet cursed to be heard but ignored; his reward for prescience was strangulation by two of Minerva’s serpents. (And have we not had our Laocoons? Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; John Lennon and Richard Wright; Paine and Thoreau? Artists like Jeffers, Patchen, Millay and London—ignored, dismissed or reviled.)
Ignorance. In 1987 Allan Bloom kicked up dust with The Closing of the American Mind. It wasn’t just our schools that were failing, but our culture. Not simply that Johnny couldn’t read, but that whatever Johnny and Jean saw on TV or heard from their elders—and the music and songs they listened to—lacked context, depth and framing. Not that they didn’t know who had fought the Civil War or what the First Amendment guaranteed, but that they saw no reason to care. In fast-food America it was about getting the next burger-fix, shot of Coke (-a-Cola!); passing quizzes, padding resumes, screwing cheerleaders or jocks– and the hell with the world. When Clinton signed the repeal of Glass Steagall, annulling the reforms that had kept our banks solvent since the 30’s—what did it mean? Who knew? Who cared? When the progeny of Reagan railed against government, we howled with the wolves till our house crashed down. Instead of conceiving government as the intermediary between ourselves and the financial institutions that have dominated human affairs since the Industrial Revolution, instead of sharpening our tools to build a sturdier government attuned to the bottom 90%, we sang the siren song of de-regulation; we transfixed ourselves in our shattered shelters.
Arrogance. Married to arrogance, ignorance can kill. After World War II, we out-produced the world. American “know-how” we said. We forgot we had conquered a continent, committed our own holocaust/genocide, robbed the natives and generations of Blacks. The Brits collapsed in the Middle East and the French pulled out of Indochina and we said, We are “can-do” people; we’ll do it! Nixon went off the gold standard and abrogated the Bretton Woods agreements that had knitted the economic fabric of the post-war world. God’s chosen people, we destroyed Vietnam to save it. Calvin’s God had made us wealthy and Wilson had bequeathed his mission to make the world safe for democracy. We slaughtered a coupla million “gooks,” fertilized the “killing fields” of Kampuchea. We crushed rebellions in Central America and Chile. We killed a million in Iraq and stomped on Palestine. And when the blowback came and the twin towers crumbled like Samson’s pillars, the boy-emperor stood on the rubble and said we would make them pay. And the men who had lost friends and brothers chanted like a deranged Greek chorus: “USA! USA! USA!”
Violence. We drink it with morning coffee. Wedding party bombed in Afghanistan. IED kills two Americans. 1500 killed by Katrina (Cuba lost 4 to Ike!). 100,000 die in our hospitals every year from hospital infections or neglect. 20,000 die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Our kids inhabit a stroboscopic world of high school bullies, gory video games, TV cop shows of rapes, torture, murder. Kids kill kids. TV, that came humbly into our living rooms, now fragments the family, holds each member hostage in his/her room. Pop-tarts for dessert.
Greed. It’s good, Gecko said in “Wall Street.” Greed for knowledge, wealth, power. How easily we were seduced, judgment suspended. Isn’t it hunger for knowledge? And how much wealth do we need, how much power?
In Tolstoy’s story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?,” a peasant is allowed to claim as much land as he can circumambulate in a day. He must return to his starting point by sunset. He starts out measuring his paces, but soon realizes he has tried to cover too much ground. He runs at the end to reach his starting point again; then drops dead from exhaustion. He’s buried in a six-foot long grave.
How much do we need? Isn’t that the moral question? Do we really want a world of billionaires and paupers? Is there no ceiling to our lusts? Must we celebrate these killer-thieves, earth-rapists? We devised a system of checks and balances to rein in political power and the foxes raided the henhouse and stole the golden eggs. We must realize now: we cannot separate political and economic power. We have a moral imperative to make judgments; we evince our humanity according to the judgments we make.
What is a fair differential between the “average” worker and his/her “boss”? Can we replace “bosses” with “facilitators”? If $40,000 a year is average, isn’t $400,000 enough? (That’s what we pay the president we vote for!)
Ignorance, arrogance, violence, greed—we opened the gates, let them into our minds, our hearts, our children’s dreams. Is it too late to heed Laocoon? The snakes are coiling around our legs.
(Gary Corseri has posted/published his work at hundreds of venues, including Dandelion Salad, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The New York Times. He has taught in universities and prisons, published novels and poetry collections, performed at the Carter Presidential Library; and his dramas have been presented on Atlanta-PBS, etc. He can be contacted at Gary_Corseri@comcast.net.)
see
The Biggest Bank Heist in History (Interview with Richard C. Cook)
http://www.radiodujour.com/index.html
This is not really a financial crisis
October 7, 2008
Alex Jones talks to former NASA analyst and author Richard C. Cook about the unfolding global financial collapse which he describes as the biggest bank heist in history.
http://www.radiodujour.com/people/cook_richard_c/mp3/20081007_alexjones_richardcook.mp3
28:58 4.97MB
see
Renewed Interest: Analyst Ties Monetary Reform To Social Credit Movement (2007; Richard C. Cook)
Does the Bailout Bill Mark the End of America as We Know It? by Richard C. Cook
The Iraq war hits Wall Street + The financial crisis at the local level
The Fed Now Owns The World’s Largest Insurance Company – But Who Owns The Fed? by Dr. Ellen Brown
“To the Bunkers!”: Central banks slash rates in emergency “midnight” meeting By Mike Whitney
Economic Globlization and Speculation Coming Home to Roost By Rowan Wolf
Reality Report: Chris Martenson on the current financial crisis
Ground Noise and Static
31 min – Oct 7, 2008
SubMedia.TV and PepperSpray Productions.
submedia.tv/stimulator/2008/10/06/ground-noise-and-static/
A video report on the protests that occurred in connection with the Democrat and Republican National Conventions, Ground Noise & Static is a manifesto. We went to Denver and St. Paul to take the pulse of the movement. Corporate media would cover the platitudes and posturing of the politicians, we were interested in something else, a story hidden in plain sight, captured in the now-classic street chant, “This is what democracy looks like.”
Deconstructing The Power of the Global Elite: Brute Force, The Power to Hurt, and Psychological Control
by Judith H. Young
Global Research, October 9, 2008
In the aftermath of Congressional approval of bailout legislation granting sweeping powers to the financial elite, the body politic appears to be helplessly mired in the relentless unfolding of classical fascism before its very eyes.
Coming to terms with this terrifying predicament can benefit from a primer that renders naked the forms of raw power used by the global elite in advancing its agenda for full spectrum dominance. This will enable us to determine if we are in fact helpless and to use care and deliberation in finding the means to take our power back.
Time To Face The Facts On Afghanistan By Eric S. Margolis
By Eric S. Margolis
ICH
10/08/08
Toronto October 06, 2008
For those who savor historical irony, the Soviet Empire collapsed in the years 1989-1991 because of an implosion of its economy brought on by a ruinous arms race with the United States and the heavy costs of occupying Afghanistan.
Seventeen years later came the turn of the world’s other great imperial power, the United States. Lethally bloated by runaway debt, and burdened by 50% of the world’s military spending, the house of cards known as the US economy finally collapsed.
The doomsday news from New York and Washington has obscured most other world affairs. This is unfortunate because for the first time there is a flicker – and I mean only a flicker – of light at the end of the Afghanistan tunnel. It may only be an oncoming truck bomb.
The US-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, revealed last week he had asked Saudi Arabia to broker peace talks with the alliance of tribal and political groups resisting Western occupation collectively known as Taliban. Saudi Arabia had been one of the few nations to recognize the Taliban government and retains considerable influence in Afghanistan and remains a loyal friend of Pakistan.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar quickly rejected Karzai’s offer, and claimed the US was heading toward the same kind of catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union had met. The ongoing financial panic in North America lent substance to his words.
The US economy is in grave peril and its big three automakers may soon face bankruptcy. In a crazy sidebar, as Wall Street and the Us banking system faced meltdown, the insouciant Pentagon just announced it would spend $300 million with American `contractors’ to spread pro-US propaganda in Iraq. This remarkable idiocy notwithstanding, Washington could soon run out of money necessary to keep paying for operations in Iraq, and bribing Pakistan with $250-300 million a month to wage war against its own rebellious Pashtun tribes people along the Afghanistan border.
The able and forthright US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, urgently called for at least 10,000 more troops. US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are increasingly on the defensive, hard pressed to defend vulnerable supply lines in spite of massive fire power and total control of the air.
Attacks on US and NATO convoys are even beginning at the port of Karachi. The prospect of the US spreading a war it can’t win in Afghanistan into Pakistan is military and political madness.
Startlingly, Gen. McKiernan appeared to break with Bush administration policy by proposing political talks with Taliban and admitting the war had to be ended by diplomacy. The military men know this war cannot be won on the battlefield. McKiernan’s predecessor told Congress that 400,000 US troops would be needed to pacify Afghanistan. There are currently 80,000 western troops in Afghanistan, many of them unwilling to enter combat.
By sharp contrast, I recently asked Karl Rove, President Bush’s former senior advisor, how the US could ever hope to win the war in Afghanistan. His eyes dancing with imperial hubris, Rove brightly replied, `More Predators (missile armed drones) and helicopters! Then we’ll go into Pakistan.’
Which reminded me of poet Hilaire Beloc’s wonderful line about 19th century British imperialism that I use in my new book, `American Raj:’ `Whatever happens/we have got/the Maxim gun* /and they have not.’
*Maxim gun – early machine gun
Though Karzai’s olive branch was rejected, the fact he made it public is very important. By doing so, both he and Gen. McKiernan broke the simple-minded Western taboo against negotiations with Taliban and its allies.
Let us remember that Taliban is not a `terrorist movement,’ as claimed by western war propaganda, but was founded as an Islamic religious movement dedicated to fighting Communism and the drug trade.
Taliban received US funding until May, 2001. In fact, CIA keep close contacts with Taliban, many of whose members were US-backed mujahidin from the anti-Soviet war of the 1980’s, for possible future use against the Communist regimes of Central Asia and against China. The 9/11 attacks made CIA immediately cut its links to Taliban and burn the associated files.
In recent years, Western war propaganda has so demonized Taliban that few politicians have the courage to propose the obvious and inevitable: a negotiated settlement to this pointless seven-year war. A noteworthy exception came last April when NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who admitted the war could only be ended by negotiations, not military means.
The Karzai government cannot extend its authority beyond Kabul because that would mean overthrowing the very same Uzbek and Tajik drug-dealing warlords and Communists chiefs that are its base of power. There is no real Afghan national army, just a bunch of unenthusiastic mercenaries who pretend to fight.
The current war in Afghanistan is not really about al-Qaida and `terrorism,’ but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin of Central Asia to the West. The US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are essentially pipeline protection troops fighting off the hostile natives..
Both Barack Obama and John McCain are wrong about Afghanistan. It is not a `good’ fight against `terrorism,’ but a classic, 19th century colonial war to advance western geopolitical power into resource-rich Central Asia. The Pashtun Afghans who live there are ready to fight for another 100 years. The western powers certainly are not.
As that great American founding father Benjamin Franklin said, `there is no good war, and no bad peace.’ Time for the West to face reality in Afghanistan.
Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles appear in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times and Dawn. Visit his blog – http://www.ericmargolis.com/
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
I Survived the Georgian War. Here’s What I Saw. I blame Georgia’s leaders.
By Lira Tskhovrebova
ICH
10/08/08 “CSM”
Tskhinvali, South Ossetia
In a speech before the United Nations last month, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili implored world leaders to set up an international investigation to find out the truth about the war in South Ossetia.
I couldn’t agree more. But I think the results of an honest investigation would reveal a very different “truth” than what President Saakashvili claims.
I know this because I was in Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on Aug. 7 when Georgian troops marched into the city and killed my friends and neighbors. I huddled with my family in terror for three nights while Saakashvili’s tanks and rockets destroyed hundreds of our homes, desecrated cemeteries, gutted schools and hospitals.
I also have good reason not to trust what Saakashvili says. For three days before the attack I had been getting calls from many Georgian friends warning me to get out. They said Saakashvili was planning an attack. Most of the Georgians living in South Ossetia left because they knew what was coming.
[…]
via I Survived the Georgian War. Here’s What I Saw. : Information Clearing House – ICH.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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On the U.S. Financial Crisis by Michael Faulkner
by Michael Faulkner
TPJ
October 05, 2008
Like the great majority of my fellow human beings, I am not, nor have I ever been an investment banker, a mortgage broker or a hedge fund manager. And, I suspect like them also, I find the arcane world to which the masters of the financial universe belong, bewildering in the extreme. In attempting to understand what has happened during recent months, we come up against an unfamiliar jargon. For example, with deregulation the market took over from banks which had acted as intermediaries between savers and borrowers, in a process known as disintermediation. When investment banks took on excessive amounts of debt far beyond their capital base, they were said to become highly leveraged. When banks issue loans and then sell these assets into secondary loan markets, this process is known as securitization. The obfuscating jargon served to persuade the uninformed that the system worked rationally and in everyone’s best interests. If one protested that it was driven by greed, then we were told that private greed translated into public good. But now this myth is no longer widely believed. J K Galbraith once remarked that “as the speculative waters subside, all manner of crimes are revealed to an astonished public view.”
Criminal enquiries have been launched in the U.S. but do not expect many prosecutions. Such enquiries will leave completely untouched such noble champions of the public good as Alan Fishman, chief executive of Washington Mutual. WaMu, which has just been bought by JP Morgan for $1.9bn, had a stockpile of dubious mortgages which led to the bank’s seizure by the authorities. When Fishman joined WaMu three weeks ago he got a signing on bonus of $7.5m. Just three weeks later he is likely to receive a severance payment of $11.6m. Not bad for a three week stint.
The accelerating pace at which the sub-prime mortgage crisis developed into the credit crunch and progressed from a few bank failures into a full-scale financial melt-down, has been a roller-coaster so breathtaking as to make Harold Wilson’s famous much quoted dictum that “a week is a long time in politics” seem like an understatement.
On both sides of the Atlantic the politicians have been forced to confront a crisis that just a few weeks ago would have been unimaginable to them. Indeed, less than a week ago, John McCain was still saying that the U.S. economy was “fundamentally sound”. Gordon Brown has spent the best part of his eleven years in office, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and more recently as prime minister, telling us that the British economy was strong and stable and that under his stewardship the country would never return to “boom and bust.” He now claims that his government bears no responsibility for the crisis engulfing the financial system. He “feels the pain”, he says, of those who are unable to meet the astronomic rise in the cost of fuel and those who cannot meet their mortgage repayments and face the prospect of re-possession of their homes. He is deeply concerned about rising food prices and rising inflation. But, despite widespread popular revulsion at the unprecedented profits made by the privatised energy companies who have made a killing from the huge rise in oil prices, he has refused popular demands to impose a windfall tax on them. At the time of writing (28.09.08) he is in Washington to assure George Bush that “whatever the details” in U.S. treasury secretary Paulson’s planned $700bn bail-out of the financial markets, he will support it.
As champions of the neo-liberal “free market”, the U.S. and British governments have promoted de-regulation in all spheres of economic life, including the financial system. Both governments have refused to acknowledge that Chicago school unconstrained free-market capitalism has played any part in creating the present crisis. In the haggling that has been going on between congressional leaders, perhaps most amusing is the split in Republican ranks between those, including Bush (who, with his customary elegance told the group that unless the deal is accepted “this sucker could go down”), and those like John Boehmer, who appear to regard any intervention by the federal government as tantamount to socialism or communism. Such, during the past 35 years, has been the ideological backlash against Keyensian interventionism in the operation of the free market, that even when faced with the imminent breakdown of the whole financial system and the long-term consequences that would follow from this, governments have been most reluctant to intervene. Only when major mortgage and investment banks such as Northern Rock in Britain and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and AIG in the U.S. faced imminent collapse was the last resort of nationalization contemplated, and then every effort was made to avoid using the term because of its socialistic connotations.
No-one appears to have any idea of the scale of the operation that may be necessary to prevent the present crisis sliding into a full-blown slump. In the U.S. no-one seems to know exactly how much “bad debt” the banks have accumulated through years of more or less unregulated operations, so one can only guess at the final figure that may be needed to bail them out. It could be anything from $700bn to $1 trillion. This would have to be added to the federal government’s existing debt of $5.4 trillion. Working people in the U.S. and in Britain have reason to be concerned about the impact on their lives of the cost of salvaging a financial system that is responsible for creating the crisis. Public spending to bail out the banks will appear to most people like theft of their money to pay for the greed of those who have become billionaires at their expense. The argument that this is necessary in order to prevent an apocalyptic collapse of the financial system and a return to the mass unemployment and impoverishment of the 1930s will be treated with the contempt and cynicism it deserves. Expect drastic cut-backs in welfare spending, public health care and environmental programmes. Expect very hard times. And also, those responsible for creating this crisis should not be surprised if the harsh times that surely lie ahead bring widespread anger and resistance by those who will be expected to pay the price for the salvage operation.
Likely Political Consequences in the U.S. and Britain
In the United States it seems that there is widespread and growing public anger that those hardest hit by this crisis will be the ones who will be made to pay for it. Whoever becomes president in November will face some very hard choices. There are signs that support for Obama is increasing, though things could easily go the other way. Those who have been mobilised in the Democratic campaign, particularly the younger generation and large numbers of African Americans who have been inspired by Obama, expect change. They have pinned all their hopes on him as the antithesis of everything that the Bush administration represents. Should he be elected he will need to fulfil the promises he has made and meet the expectations his rhetoric has inspired. He will be operating in the most difficult of circumstances and the demands on him will be great. It is no exaggeration to say that there are clear similarities with the Crash of 1929. In 1929 Republican president Hoover, another champion of the unrestrained free market, had only been elected one year earlier at the height of the boom. It took another three years before F.D. Roosevelt came on the scene, and, under considerable pressure from a militant labour movement, brought in the New Deal. Obama, should he be elected, will need all the skills and determination of FDR and more. He will need to take immediate action to end the disastrous wars into which Bush took the U.S. If Europeans had a vote in the presidential election, Obama would win by a landslide. It is not only Americans whose expectations of Obama are high.
In Britain the crisis has not yet struck home with the intensity it has in the U.S. But it will. Only this morning (29.09.08) it was announced that the government is to nationalise the stricken mortgage bank, Bradford and Bingley, to save it from a panic run to withdraw savings. This follows the earlier nationalization of Northern Rock and, just few weeks ago the, the forced buy-out of HBOS by Lloyd’s TSB., creating a mega Bank.
Since15.September $550bn have been injected into the money markets. The housing market is in free fall and unemployment is rising. In terms of solutions to the problems faced by the hard-hit people of Britain, the mainstream political parties have nothing worthwhile to say. They are as bankrupt as the financial system. It is likely that there will be an autumn and winter of bitter discontent and I hope and expect it will take the form of increased militancy and resistance by those hardest hit by the crisis.
see
European, Asian Markets Plunge as Recession Fears Spread Worldwide
The Iraq war hits Wall Street + The financial crisis at the local level
The Fed Now Owns The World’s Largest Insurance Company – But Who Owns The Fed? by Dr. Ellen Brown
“To the Bunkers!”: Central banks slash rates in emergency “midnight” meeting By Mike Whitney
Economic Globlization and Speculation Coming Home to Roost By Rowan Wolf
Reality Report: Chris Martenson on the current financial crisis
Renewed Interest: Analyst Ties Monetary Reform To Social Credit Movement (2007; Richard C. Cook)
Sent to me by Richard C. Cook
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
By Nathan Diebenow, Associate Editor
http://lonestaricon.com
Interview With
Richard C. Cook
Former Government Analyst
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — One may know Richard C. Cook from such moments in American history as the Challenger shuttle disaster of Jan. 28, 1986.
The NASA analyst testified after the tragedy before the Presidential Commission on the solid rocket booster O-ring seals that led to the demise of space shuttle crew.
Cook’s first person account of his experiences at NASA can be found in his book Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.
But he has worn other hats over his years in government.
His career included stints with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, and NASA, followed by 21 years with the U.S. Treasury Department.
Now retired from government work, Cook has decided to delve back to an interest that has been on his mind since his college days — monetary system reform.
His book on monetary reform We Hold These Truths will be published later this year.
[I] recently caught up with Cook to discuss his thoughts on monetary reform, the social credit movement, and the effects of current U.S. monetary policy on the world stage.
Here is that interview:
Daily Show: 6 Degrees of Desperation + Back in Black
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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Back in Black – Negative Advertising
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Dandelion Salad 