Today's Stories

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernacke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Steven Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

September 13 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Panic!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Dirk Kempthorne's Closet

Wajahat Ali
Playing with the Constitution

Robert Fantina
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy

Marcus Rediker
Notes on a Visit to the Favelas of Medellín, Colombia

Richard Neville
The Baby Killers

Ed Gaffney
Breaking the Siege of Gaza

Carla Blank
Neglecting a Grand Old Lady

P. Sainath
The Almighty and the U.S. Elections

Lee Sustar
Working Harder; Falling Further Behind

Joshua Frank
Liberalism and Its Bounds

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Guantanamoized Age

Dennis Loo
Shock and Awe Comes Home to Roost

Zach Zill
Squeezed Out in New York City

Omar Barghouti
So You Think You Can Dance? Israeli Profiling of African-American Dancers

Bill Quigley
Social Justice Quiz, 2008

Andy Worthington
Bush's Bitter Legacy

Stephen Dunifer
Free Radio: Liberating the Commons

Seth Sandronsky
Bailing Out Big Auto

David Yearsley
Portabella's Bach: Grim, Trite and Incredibly Boring

Patrick B. Barr
Obama's Punchless Campaign

Rannie Amiri
Tasting Ramadan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Flight Not Taken

Richard Rhames
What, Me Reason?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Large Hadron Collider Powers Up

Poets' Basement
Deer Cloud and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Wasilla Valley PTA?

September 12, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Next Cuban Missile Crisis?

Michael Hudson
More Dangerous Than the A-Bomb? The Chicago School's Record of Infamy

Lloyd Miller
Palin and Alaskan Native and Tribal Rights: a Dismal Record

Steve Breyman
Georgia in NATO?

Maria Rivera
Cuba After Gustav and Ike: an Eyewitness Account

Jonathan Cook
Israel and the Dark Arts

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
U.S. Designs on Pakistan

M. Shahid Alam
The Mendacity of Missed Opportunities

Robert Weissman
Executive Pay and the "Market Economy"

Tanya Golash-Boza / David Brunsma
Immigration Raids Must Be Stopped

Website of the Day
Know Your Rights

September 11, 2008

Noam Chomsky
Towards a Second Cold War?

Sharon Smith
Afghanistan: You Call This a Good War?

Ron Jacobs
Palinomics: She Ain't No Working Class Hero

Marjorie Cohn
God, Guns and Oil: A Palin Theocracy?

Mike Whitney
Cheney in the Caucasus

Jeffery R. Webber
Bolivia: a Coup in the Making?

Paul Cantor
The Other 9/11

Peter Morici
The Surging Trade Deficit

Ray McGovern
Iran's Road Less Traveled to Nukes

Linn Washington, Jr.
Screening Mumia: The Suppression of Dissent in America

Website of the Day
Palin (Michael) for President!

September 10, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Temporary Respite from Permanent Decline

Conn Hallinan
The Return of U.S. Death Squads

Ralph Nader
Who Needs Regulations When You've Got a Golden Parachute?

Peter Morici
Can the Bailout Work?

Joanne Mariner
The Horrendous Case of Aafia Siddiqui

Laura Tate Kagel /
Jen Marlowe
The Pending Execution of Troy Davis: a Case for Clemency

Chuck Spinney
Incestuous Amplification and the Madness of King George

Dave Lindorff
Lazy Thinking and Prejudice

Scott Campbell
Where Now for Oaxaca's Social Movement?

Paul Farmer
Haiti and the Hurricanes

Anne Kilkenny
Letters from Wasilla: the Sarah Palin I Know

Website of the Day
Democrats and Zombies

September 9, 2008

Michael Colby
The Obama Poll Drop

Chellis Glendinning
Retorno a 1968: From Berkeley to Mexico City

Vijay Prashad
Losing Game

Jeffery R. Webber/
George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela From Below

David Michael Green
Country Last

Brian J. Foley
The New Face of Republican Power

John Ross
Mexican Flag Wrap

Pierre M. Sprey /
Winslow T. Wheeler
Joint Strike Fighter: Another Defense Acquisition Disaster

Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Long Road to Freedom

Marc Gardner
California's Anti-Homosexual Laws are Alive and Unwell

William S. Lind
The Baltic States and Russia: Toy Armies or Accomodation?

Website of the Day
All Hope Rests with Piper Palin

September 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
An Interview with Michael Hudson on the Worsening Debt Crisis

Tariq Ali
The Godfather as President

Pam Martens
The Man Who Vetted Palin

Bill Quigley
The Weary Road Home: Displaced Poor Continue to Return to New Orleans

Malini Johar Schueller /
Ed White
Not About Me: Obamamania, Racial Porn-fest and Palinama

Robert Jensen
Pop Music and 9/11

Uri Avnery
Lonely Rider

Win McCormack
Palin Family Values

Howard Lisnoff
How Far From a Police State?

Maria C. Khoury
Taybeh Oktoberfest in Palestine

Website of the Day
Scaring Students from Voting in Virginia

September 6 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Sarah Palin and the Good Book

Jeffrey St. Clair
That Dam Senator: A River Ran Through Him

Linn Washington, Jr.
The GOP Excluded Black-Owned Businesses from Contracts at St. Paul Convention

Patrick Cockburn
Did Bush Spies Monitor Iraqi Allies?

Gary Leupp
The September 3 Attack on Pakistan: a Precursor to More War Crimes?

Nancy Kurshan
CHI-town Lowdown: Memories of 1968

William Blum
Has Obama Already Lost?

Michael Winship
The St. Paul Police vs. the Independent Media

Fred Gardner
Joe Biden, Drug Warrior

Nikolas Kozloff
Sarah Palin and the Wal-Mart Moms: the Cultural Packaging of VP Candidates

Wajahat Ali
The Cryptkeeper and His Pitbull: the Past and Future of the GOP

Robert Fantina
Change Agents?

Karyn Strickler
Palin by Comparison: Sarah and the Hillary Voters

David Yearsley
What Their Fanfares Told Us About the Candidates

Richard Rhames
Bad Campaign Moon Rising

James L. Secor
Bandwagon Politics

Missy Beattie
Missy for Vice POTUS

Eric Patton
Baseless in Obamaland

Ben Terrall
Haiti and the Washington Consensus

Thom Rutledge
Mr. Magoo and the Kind Stranger: a Serious Political Problem

Dan Bacher
Arnold and the Manufactured Drought

David Macaray
Is Union Democracy at Risk?

Jane Stillwater
The Admiral's Child: a Psychological Reason for McCain's Flip Flops

Grady Harper
Should Hunting Really be High on Our Priority List?

Poets' Basement
Wolff, Payne and Holt

Website of the Weekend
We'll See Your Sarah Palin and Raise You With Maria McKee

September 5, 2008

Elizabeth Walters
Old Fears, New Worries in Louisiana

Bill Quigley
Gustav's Path of Destruction

Alan Farago
Nothing Means Anything: The Fantasy of John and Sarah

Dave Lindorff
The Things They Left Behind (Including McCain's First Wife)

Ira Glunts
A Lesson Before Lying: How Republicans Solved Sarah Palin's Jewish Problem

Peter Morici
The Big Slump

Deepak Tripathi
Politics, Morality and the GOP: John McCain as John Major?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Energy of a Hurricane

Michael Donnelly
Change. God. POW.: a Summary of McCain's Big Speech

Martha Rosenberg
Free to Good Home, SUVs

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Air War: On Wolves and Bears

September 4, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Real McCain

Paul Craig Roberts
Who is Wrecking America?

Ron Jacobs
The Perishing Republicans, the RNC 9 and the Twin Cities Cops

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Soft Surge

Andy Worthington
Rendered to Egypt for Torture

Osama Dawoud
How I Lost My Fulbright Scholarship

Stephen Lendman
Katrina Redux: the Militarization of New Orleans

Fidel Castro
Hurricane as Nuclear Strike

Website of the Day
Is McCain Palin's Bitch?

September 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

Sen. Mike Gravel
Good Luck, Sarah!

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Left and the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin, Hunting and the American Psyche

Ralph Nader
Repeal Taft-Hartley

Howard Lisnoff
Forty Years in the Streets (And They're Still Beating Up Journalists)

Steve Early / Cal Winslow
Can SEIU Members Exorcize the Purple Shades of Jackie Presser?

Shepherd Bliss
A Field Report From Slow Food Nation

Bill Quigley
Living in the Car After Gustav

Website of the Day
Growing Up Okie: an Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

September 2, 2008

Marjorie Cohn
Raiding Democracy in St. Paul

Jonathan Cook
Palestinian Village Faces Army Reign of Terror

Robert Weitzel
Biden and Israel

Corey D. B. Walker
Where Do We Go From Here?

John Ross
The Kidnapping Boom in Mexico

Eric Walberg
Wag the Dog in Georgia

Judith Scherr
No Day in Court for Ronald Dauphin

Richard Morse
Haiti, 2008

B. R. Gowani
What If the Israel Lobby was the African-American Lobby?

Michael Greenberg
Loofah Day in Cleveland

Website of the Day
Thanks for the Memories!

September 1, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Making a Killing in Iraq: McCain and the Telecoms

C. G. Estabrook
The War Will Go On

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Will a Russo-American Nuclear War Happen (Soon)?

David Macaray
An Elegy for Labor Day

B. R. Gowani
The Lobby as Juggernaut

Saul Landau
Real Gold Winners

Charles Orloski
Going Down to Hell's Cul-de-Sac

Gloria La Riva
Profit and Disaster in New Orleans

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Factory

August 30 / 31, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Speech; McCain's Palinomy

Bill Quigley
Gustav is Coming

Jeffrey St. Clair
Valley Boy: The Rise and Fall of Richard Pombo

Andy Worthington
Shining a Light on the Dark Prison

Deepak Tripathi
The Race for the White House: Notes From a European Observer

Stanley Howard
A Prisoner's Tale of Abuse

Dave Lindorff
Troopergate in Alaska

Wajahat Ali
Palin on the Prowl: a Cougar for the PUMAs?

Robert Fantina
McCain and Palin

Josh Schlossberg
A Bias for Life: the Role of the Environmentalist

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Voting

Missy Beattie
Stars, Stripes, War and Shame

Howard Lisnoff
Better Cuba Than Florida?

Suzan Mazur
Rethinking Evolution with Stuart Newman

Rev. Jim Rigby
What Would Jesus Ride to the Conventions?

David Yearsely
Katy Perry Meets Mozart

Serge Quadruppani
Italy's Years of Lead

B.R. Gowani
What If the Israeli Lobby Was the Islamic Lobby?

Richard Rhames
Empty Political Calories

Poets' Basement
Holt, Davies, Corsale and Landau

Website of the Day
Return of the Druids

August 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

Brian Cloughley
Resurgent Russia

David Ker Thomson
Jacko and Me: Dispatches From Fifty

Joanne Mariner
A UK Window on CIA Abuses

Neve Gordon
The Ordeal of Sahar Vardi, Refusenik

Chris Genovali
Of Whales and Off-Shore Drilling

Ron Jacobs
What's a Godfearing Country to Do?

Michael Donnelly
Honest Abe in Denver?

August 28, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
The Battle of Chicago

Paul Cantor
Who Killed Victor Jara?

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassen
Axis of Evil Defeats Neocons

Andy Worthington
Clearing Out Guantánamo

Ben Terrall
Return to Port-au-Prince

Leonard Peltier
Message to Obama: Symbolism Alone Will Not Bring Change

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Miasma of Bi-Partisanship

Donna J. Volatile
The Obama Construct

Website of the Day
Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou on the Meaning of Obama

August 27, 2008

Anthony DiMaggio
The Myths of Joe Biden

Jordan Flaherty
Three Years After Katrina

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Avoidance

Melissa Checker
Carbon Offsets, More Harm Than Good?

Bob Sommer
Blaming the Sixties

Cynthia McKinney
How the Democrats Helped Bush Hijack the Country

Ali Khan
Pakistan's Flawed Presidency

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Only Good Muslim is the Anti-Muslim

Dave Lindorff
Strip-Search Nation

David Macaray
Labor's Hard Lessons

Website of the Day
Stagnant Income in an Eroding Economy

August 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Big Questions About Iraq

Michael D. Yates
Obama and the Working Class

Paul Craig Roberts
Is War With Russia on the Agenda?

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicide Report

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson
Obama's Promised Land?

Huwaida Arraf
Sailing into Gaza

Joseph Grosso
Back to the Future: New York's Housing Crisis

Sheldon Richman
What About the Ossetians?

Binoy Kampmark
Impasse at Singur

Website of the Day
Taser Bait in Denver

August 25, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
US Out of Iraq by "2011"

Bill Quigley
Katrina, the Pain Index

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State

James McEnteer
Death by Paranoia

Uri Avnery
The Devil's Hoof

Will Potter
The State Deparment's Green Scare Wing

Robert Jensen
Technological Fundamentalism

Stephen Lendman
Reinventing the Evil Empire

Wajahat Ali
Biden His Time

Carl Finamore
The Future of Trade Unions in China

Website of the Day
Don't Blow Up the Mountain, Boys

August 23 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
"Change," "Hope"...Why They Must be Talking About Joe Biden!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Killing Salmon with Paul O'Neill: Power, Profits and the Future of the Columbia River

Patty O'Grady
John McCain in a New Context: Why the Senator is No War Hero

Nicole Colson
Obama and Big Corn

Steve Conn
Obama and the Mining Cartel

Deepak Trapathi
Pakistan in Uncertain Times

Robert Fantina
Once Upon a Time in America: a McCain Administration

Jonathan M. Feldman
Obamanomics: Does the Left Have Anything to Say?

Joshua Frank
Targeting Pelosi (and the War Machine): an Interview with Cindy Sheehan

Osama Qashoo
Sailing to Gaza

Howard Lisnoff
The Long Silence: American Jews and the Palestinians

David Michael Green
Sen. McShame and the Wreckage: John McCain Discovers America

Dave Lindorff
Why Not Let the Republicans Deal With This Mess?

Christopher Brauchli
A Banner Month for Passports

Alan Farago
Who Crippled the Government?

Michael Winship
Cash Register Conventions

Richard Rhames
Vlad the Derailer: Can Putin Save America From Itself?

David Rosen
The Culture Wars Are Over: But Culture Warriors Are Still Terrorizing America

Patrick B. Barr
Don't Try to Tame the Lightning Bolt

Jamie Newlin
Western Turf Wars: the Politics of Public Lands Ranching

Poets' Basement
Glendinning, McEnteer and Bonner

Website of the Weekend
Cafe Reconcile, New Orleans

August 22, 2008

Boris Kagarlitsky
Fallout from the Georgian War

Laura Carlsen
Obama and Latin America: Change or Continuity?

Bob Barr
No War for Georgia

Marwan Bishara
From Russia with Love: Putin Hits Georgia, Bloodies Bush

Peter Morici
Is the Fed Still a Central Bank?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Big Heat

Charles Mostoller
The Battle for the Amazon

Sumbul Ali-Karamali
Obama is Not a Muslim: But Would It Be So Terrible If He Were?

Keith Rosenthal
Standing Up to Union-Bashing

John F. Miglio
The Devolution of the Baby Boom Generation

Website of the Day
Fire Sale in the Markets!

August 21, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
Is Georgia 2008 a Repeat of Hungary 1956?

Dave Lindorff Loserville: How Obama Blew It

Ralph Nader
The Problem with Problem Banks

Joanne Mariner
The Military Commissions, So Far

Wajahat Ali
Descent Into Chaos: an Interview with Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban

Ron Jacobs
Georgia and Historical Farce

Rostam Purzal
The Left and Iran

Anthony Papa
Unlocking the Power of Art to Counter Injustice

Website of the Day
Rocky Mountain Way

August 20, 2008

Michael Neumann
Russia and Georgia: Proportion and Distortion

Ray McGovern
Musharraf Out Like Nixon

Eric Walberg
Georgia's Ossetian Debacle

Fidaa Abed
Blocking a Gazan's Path to San Diego

Daniel Haack
The Pentagon's Most Prolific Pundit

Mike Whitney
Greenback Surges, Euro Shrivels

Website of the Day
Hands Off South Africa's Centre for Civil Society

August 19, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for Nuclear War?

Deepak Tripathi
A New Age of Torture

Marwan Bishara
The Politics of Evil in the US Elections

Saul Landau
Baseball Diplomacy or Just Baseball?

William S. Lind
Leave Georgia Alone, George

Martha Rosenberg
Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders

James Brittain
The Road to Tyranny in Colombia

Pratyush Chandra
Krugman's Great Illusion

David Macaray
AFSCME's Strike Against the University of California

Website of the Day
McCain Plagiarizing Solzhenitsyn

September 22, 2008

South Africa and Zimbabwe Politicos Join Global Financiers in Self-Destruction

On the Bellies of the Filth

By PATRICK BOND

The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride in and out of Southern African ruling-party politics, down the troughs of world capitalism, and up the peaks of radical social activism. Glancing around the region and world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual.

Looking first to South Africa, Saturday's dumping of president Thabo Mbeki by Jacob Zuma - president of the African National Congress - and his temporary replacement (until next April's election) by ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe, was an excellent reflection of ruling elite fragility in neoliberal regimes. Some of Mbeki's main supporters, including Mbhazima Shilowa, the former trade union leader and now provincial government leader in the economic heartland of Johannesburg - are apparently considering the launch of a competing party.

Likewise, the inability to cement a working power-sharing deal across the river in Zimbabwe confirms how hard elite factions will fight over the crumbs of even a quick-shrinking state. These are interconnected problems, and should make world elites rather nervous.

Their favorite Zimbabwean, Morgan Tsvangirai, may feel the need to follow their austerity instructions. But to get the billions of dollars promised in coming months from Western powers and Pretoria, Tsvangirai must tighten the belts of his already starving compatriots, a task requiring far more control of the Zimbabwe state than the patronage-addicted cronies of Robert Mugabe will allow.

On Friday, negotiations over the new cabinet’s composition broke down because Mugabe’s Zanu(PF) colleagues were dissatisfied over getting only 15 of the 31 seats in a deal done the prior week with Mbeki acting as facilitator. Mugabe’s men are, without question, the most exploitative, parasitical force in Harare today, but imperialism (London mining houses) and South African subimperialism (Johannesburg mining, banking, retail, transport, tourism) look on greedily – in part for platinum reserves as rich as any outside South Africa.

The outsiders have hoped that Zimbabwe’s ongoing economic implosion – a 20 million+ percent inflation rate and persistent shortages of nearly all basics (hence last week requiring permission for many shops to trade in dollars and rands instead of the debased Zim currency) – compels Mugabe to give up power, though Mbeki’s aim has all along been to shoe-horn Tsvangirai into a junior partnership, which he agreed to in spite of widespread dissent that the concessions were too great.

Unfortunately, against this lot, Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party and its progressive allies in the trade unions and social movements simply could not generate a “Plan B” - popular insurgency or active civil disobedience – in the face of Mugabe’s repressive police, army and paramilitaries.

So all Tsvangirai has left for countervailing power is his moral claim to a March electoral victory (he withdrew from a June run-off when 100 supporters were killed by Mugabe’s thugs) - worth nearly nothing in Harare power politics - and the hope he can attract a vast reconstruction fund from London, Washington and Brussels.

Such funds will be much harder to mobilize now, after Monday's stock market crash in New York and the crashes of investment banks, mortgage guarantors, insurance companies and in coming days, money market funds and commercial banks, for whom bail-outs will require upwards of a trillion US$ before all is said and done.

Fourteen years ago, these same New York financiers put extreme pressure on Nelson Mandela’s new government, when I worked in his reconstruction and development program ministry and saw first hand the defeatist philosophies of ‘Freedom next Time’ and ‘Shock Doctrine’, that John Pilger and Naomi Klein later described so accurately in their books.

At the time, deputy president Mbeki ordered state officials to ‘Send the signals to the markets’. Rising unemployment and inequality were the logical result, as Mbeki’s team made SA much more vulnerable to international finance than ever in its history. (The most aggressive neoliberal amongst them, finance minister Trevor Manue - whose first job in 1996 was imposition of structural adjustment program and who in 2000 chaired board of the World Bank and IMF - was asked to stay on for another term by Zuma and apparently has agreed.)

In the same spirit, just under a year ago, Merrill Lynch held what amounted to a job interview for Zuma, as Mbeki’s apparent successor gave a speech “aimed at reassuring them that there was no need for the market to be 'jittery'” according to a Zuma aide.

Mbeki was fired by the ANC national executive committee in the wake of a high court judgment a week earlier. That ruling temporarily threw out corruption charges against Zuma, in part because the judge disapproved of Mbeki’s conspiratorial handling of his competitor’s career, starting in 2001. (Zuma was SA deputy president from 1999 until 2005, when his financial manager Shabir Shaik’s bribe-taking attracted a jail sentence – but Mbeki’s mistake was to hope Zuma would fade away, especially after a rape accusation later that year.)

Inept procedure was the technical problem that dislodged Mbeki and freed Zuma, although the National Prosecuting Authority said it would appeal the corruption case. More importantly, the coalition of forces – led by SA trade unionists and the Communist Party - which have backed the allegedly corrupt and sometimes feudal Zuma, did so for explicitly political reasons.

As a Machiavellian back-stabber, Mbeki simply made too many enemies - including trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi, Communist Party secretary Blade Nzimande, ANC youth league president Julius Malema, and businessmen Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa and Matthews Phosa. But as a hardcore neoliberal economist, he was doomed in any case. Treatment Action Campaign leader Zackie Achmat accused Mbeki of murderous AIDS policies and also celebrated his departure.

And ironically, simultaneous to Mbeki's downfall, the economic altar on which so many South Africans were sacrificed – appeasing the financial markets – has also tumbled. Gambling in real estate, the arrogant czars of Merrill Lynch lost 82 per cent of the firm’s share value since early 2007, before last week’s $50 billion desperation rescue by the Bank of America.

Look north-west now to Nigeria for more insights into world chaos. Thanks to US fossil fuel addiction, the leading NGO Environmental Rights Action (ERA) in Port Harcourt worries about the revival of a war harking back more than 15 years, when Ken Saro-Wiwa's Ogoni survival movement intensified its non-violent efforts to rid the Niger Delta of the super-exploitive Shell Oil.

Saro-Wiwa faced a repressive state whose army was called in by Shell to execute him on a frame-up charge in 1995, in spite of appeals by Mandela.

Last week, the powerful guerrilla-based Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta forced Shell to evacuate 100 employees from an installation and demanded that all foreign firms leave the area.

Meanwhile, ERA director Nimmo Bassey spent the week with dozens of African environmentalists here in Durban. The OilWatch activists were hosted by the Pietermaritzburg NGO groundWork, ERA’s partner in the Friends of the Earth network.

Bassey's strategy is to “keep the oil in the soil”. To pay for needed development and environmental clean-up, ERA demands ecological debt repayment by the north to the south, much as Accion Ecologica has insisted on in Ecuador, even moving Rafael Correa's government to endorse the concept.

The OilWatch network ventured on Durban’s famous Toxic Tour by the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance, which stops in on leaky refineries and other pollution hot spots that give the area its world-leading leukemia and asthma rates. That alliance will soon file an environmental impact assessment complaint to halt the parastatal firm Transnet's proposed $7 billion pipeline, aimed to soon double petrol flows to Johannesburg.

Aside from environmental racism (the pipeline takes a 200km southerly detour to avoid white-dominated areas) several other reasons have emerged to rethink the pipeline: climate change, refining problems, Johannesburg auto congestion and the lack so far of political will to build an alternative mass public transport system.

South Durban activists reckon it would be better to blow up the Johannesburg petrol pipeline before it is built, through legal, nonviolent means, than to contend with Niger Delta-type disasters such as the series of major tank fires at installations in South Durban that began exactly a year ago. Then and now, municipal officials failed south Durban residents, by keeping secret the evacuation plan.

If we look a bit further south, to the famous Wild Coast on the Transkei coast a few hours drive from Durban, we find a similar confrontation between communities and an unresponsive, crony-capitalist state. And again, bottom-up struggle has generated a formidable backlash against Mbeki’s minerals minister and the multinational corporation she has been wooing.

After receiving a stern lecture by community and indigenous leaders in the Xolobeni community last Friday, minister Buyelwa Sonjica conceded that a multibillion-rand titanium sands project suffered from flawed consultation. Activists insisted she withdraw a license to mine the sand dunes, which she had secretly granted Australia's Mineral Resource Commodities a few weeks ago.

Sonjica confessed, "I am disappointed because most of the things said here today, I did not know". Like so many officials, she had not listened to civil society, especially the Amadiba Crisis Committee and Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa. The community group’s superb lawyer, Richard Spoor (ridiculed by Sonjica two weeks’ earlier), must now painstakingly undo the damage she has done.

To return where we began, in wretched Zimbabwe, what can progressive forces do to regroup in this context of national, regional and global chaos? Pretoria power-brokers are vanishing, New York financiers are buckling, Washington/London king-makers are scrambling for cash, mining houses are putting investment plans on hold, and orthodox World Bank and United Nations Development Program strategies are not going to satisfy the Zimbabwean masses.

The organizations that best represent those masses had demanded a neutral transitional authority and socio-economic interventions, which Mbeki ignored, even though the National People's Convention made these demands clearly in February.

As Zimbabwean activist Elinor Sisulu put it last week, "If I was sitting in Mbeki's powerful position, I know that I would have conducted myself very differently. I would never ever have pulled out all stops and used my power and influence to keep a ruthless and ageing dictator in power. I would never have turned a blind eye to the violence meted out to citizens in Zimbabwe. I would never have sat on a report by my own generals, not only failing to act on that report, but doing everything in my power to stave off pressure on the perpetrators."

Zimbabwean elites are getting this advice from Johannesburg, specifically from Investec's Roelof Horne: "austerity from within". South Africa’s powerful Independent newspaper group editorialized that Mugabe/Tsvangirai government should " introduce drastic policies, including slashing government spending and freeing up price, currency and other controls” as “conditions for receiving foreign aid.”

Mbeki just canceled his trip to the United Nations, but Mugabe will try to claim legitimacy as Zimbabwe's head of state. To counteract their nonsense, a Zimbabwean-born South African who will also be there on Tuesday night, at the Brecht Forum, performing “Marx in Soweto”, Howard Zinn’s play (http://brechtforum.org/node/2033). No one knows more than Dennis Brutus, the 83 year-old poet and anti-apartheid activist, about Southern African resistance to elite oppression. Go see Dennis if you are in NYC.

In Brutus’ footsteps, Tinashe Chimedza, a great Zimbabwean student activist, last week penned this about Zimbabwe, an appropriate note to close on when thinking of world financial and regional political celebrations gone sour:

pass me the cognac

the elites scramble for power and profit
the poor become footnotes
we write epitaphs 'rest in peace Cde Tonde'
the bubbly flows
pass me the Borboun
am tired of the imported Cognac
more drivers, another motorcade
four more motorcades
another charade
dish me my share of toil
'ndakadashurwa' - any questions?
the rubble will eat tomorrow
who wants to jump with them anyway,
the commoners, teach them culture first
am waiting for my OBE
they are fodder, my cdes remind me
lets dance ball room tonite
on the bellies of the filth

Patrick Bond is the director of the UKZN Centre for Civil Society: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs.  He can be reached at pbond@mail.ngo.za

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