Today's Stories

October 17 / 20, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Blow Ups and Bombers

Pam Martens
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout

Paul Craig Roberts
Government of Thieves

Suzanne Smith
The Energy-War Connection: McCain Said It, Why Don't We?

Carl Boggs
Prosecuting Bush

Ralph Nader
Closing the Courthouse Doors

Fidel Castro
The Global Crash

Jo Guldi
The Floods of Heaven

Kevin Zeese
Now the Cost of War Really Matters

Larry Everest
Afghanistan, Not a Good War Gone Bad

Steve Early
Stop, in the Name of Joe!

David Macaray
Hey, Joe

Missy Beattie
Palin and God's Children

Don Monkerud
America Exceptionalism

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision: Canals and Dams to Bail Out Big Ag

Wajahat Ali
Bush Gets Stoned

Vladimir Frolov
Medvedev to Obama: We Come Not to Bury America, But to Buy It

Website of the Day
The Real Sarah Palin?

October 16, 2008

Mike Whitney
The End of Friedmanite Economics: an Interview with Robert Pollin

Jonathan Cook
The Acre Riots

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Is Obama Playing to the Gallery? Or Has He Lost the Plot in South Asia?

Alan Maass
A Supreme Injustice: the Death Penalty Case of Troy Davis

Chuck O'Connell
Our Needs Do Not Fit on Their Ballots

Mary Lynn Cramer
Krugman's Prize: Iconoclast, Apologist or Propagandist?

P. Sainath
The Race May be Over, But Race Isn't

Andy Worthington
The Shrinking Case Against Binyam Mohamed: Justice Department Drops "Dirty Bomb Plot" Allegation

Peter Gelderloos
Enric Duran, the Good Thief?

Stephen Martin
The Nourishment of Idleness: Where Has All the Money Gone?

Douglas Valentine
Why I'm Voting for Obama

Website of the Day
The Mormon Worker

October 15, 2008

Steve Conn
The Real Story of Troopergate

William P. O'Connor
The Legend of John McCain

Robert Weissman
The Partial Nationalization of US Banks: Public Ownership, But No Public Control

Jonathan M. Feldman
Before the Second Wave of Crisis: an Alternative to the Triple Failure

Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Race in America: Is a Vote For Obama a Vote Against Racism?

Conn Hallinan
Targeting Unions in Colombia

Justin Podur
The Financial Economy and Real Economy

Karl Grossman
The New Nuclear Navy

Dave Lindorff
Is the Government Really Turning Socialist?

Eric Walberg
The Quiet Russian

Martha Rosenberg
Of Blood and Eggs

Uri Avnery
A Fairy Tale

Monica Benderman
No More

Website of the Day
Contractor Misconduct Database

October 14, 2008

Robert Richter
McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bailout and the Smell Test

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Wall Street Coup and the Bailout Scam

Steve Conn
Made in Alaska: Fear of the Fringe

P. Sainath
The Race Could be Over, But Race Isn't

Gregory Elich
How the Nobel Peace Prize Was Won

Stephen Martin
A Tectonic Shift in Hegemony at the G7

Rev. William Alberts
Don't Blink Twice

Laura Carlsen
The Fall of the Bush Dynasty Plan

Joanne Mariner
The Uighurs Come to Washington

Howard Lisnoff
Left Behind: a Biden Fundraiser and the Children of Holyoke

David Macaray
A Tale of Two Unions

Website of the Day
Six Degrees of Hank Paulson

October 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Farewell to Daniel Cassidy

Michael Hudson
Rescue for the Few, Debt Slavery for the Many

Patrick Cockburn
Pogrom Against Mosul's Christians

Chris Floyd
The God That Failed: the 30-Year Lie of the Market Cult

Fidel Castro
The Law of the Jungle: Racism, Obama and the Fall of the American Economy

Robert Weitzel
Olmert's Depths of Reality

Derek Wright
How Chrysler Killed My Uncle

Stephen Soldz
Guantánamo's SERE Standard Operating Procedures

David Michael Green
Greed is Not Good

Norman Solomon
Requiem for the Bailout: a Storyline

Charles R. Larson
Toni Morrison on Her Own Terms

Lisa Massaciuccoli
The Shoplifting Association of the Americas

Website of the Day
Arlo Guthrie: "I'm Changing My Name to Fannie Mae"

October 10 / 12, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is McCain a Lot Sicker Than We Know?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Obama's Nuclear Ambition

Douglas Valentine
Mission CREEP: From John Mitchell to John McCain

Noam Chomsky
Exposing the Un-Democratic Face of Capitalism

Ralph Nader
The Derivatives Game

Syed Saleem Shahzad
Why the Neo-Taliban is Winning

Patrick Cockburn
War in the Time of Cholera

Paul Craig Roberts
A Possible Solution to the Economic Crisis

Mike Whitney
Run on the System

Peter Morici
The Deficit and the Damage Done

Christopher Ketcham
The End of the Economy

Stephen Martin
Shock and Awe in Economic Warfare

Chellis Glendinning
Wireless Mind, Gullible Mind

Saul Landau
All Guns, No Butter

Ahmad Faruqui
21 Days to Baghdad

Adam Turl
Sheriff Tom Dart vs. the Banksters

Serge Halimi
The Battle for the West

Anthony DiMaggio
Making a Killing: the Business of Elections

John Ross
The Sky is Falling on Mexico, Too

José M. Tirado
Meltdown in Iceland

Paul Krassner
Beat the Crowd in Denver: Cops and T-Shirts

David Macaray
Adventures in Unionism

Robert Fantina
Bankrupt and Belligerent

David Yearsley
The Playlist for Election 2008

Julian Clec'h
The Soap Washing Through Saudi Arabia

Adam Engel
Sexual Healing ... for the Planet

Phyllis Pollack
The Rolling Stones Go Home, Again

Missy Beattie
Going North: the Coming Nation of Alaska

Poets' Basement
Landau, Moser and Henson

Website of the Day
Sarah as Esther? New Video From Inside Palin's Church

October 9, 2008

Robert Bryce
From Enron to the Current Meltdown

David Vest
The Great Rescue of 2008: Could Whatever Follows Bush Be Even Worse?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Meltdown at the Pentagon

Andy Worthington
The Ordeal of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama the Subhuman

Helga Serrano /
Hector Tamayo
Ecuador Charts the Way

Dave Lindorff
When Money Flies

Mats Svensson
At the Checkpoint on the Day of Atonement

Rannie Amiri
The Time for Mordechai Vanunu is Now

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs (and Deserves) Your Support

October 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Imbecilic Tedium

Linn Washington, Jr.
Palin's Racist Remark

Mike Whitney
To the Bunkers!

Deepak Tripathi
The West is Broke

George C. Wilson
Butter Over Guns? McCain and Obama on Defense Issues

Andy Worthington
Seized in Pakistan

Charles R. Larson
"I'm John McCain and I Approved This Lie"

Patrick Irelan
Ecuador's Choice

Matthew Koehler
Log, Baby, Log: Bailing Out the Timber Industry

Stanley Heller
Time to Design a New Economy

Daniel Gross
Working Class Hero: Alexandra Svoboda

Kimberly Hartke
Raw Milk and Civil Liberties

Website of the Day
Olivia Wilde Does It Early

October 7, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Obama and McCain's Goofy Afghan Bluster

Gary Leupp
Seven Years in Afghanistan:
From "War on Terror" to
"War of Terror"

Uri Avnery
Olmert's Final Divorce
From "All of Eretz Israel"

P. Sainath
The Cop-Out Election
Major Candidates, Congress, Press, All Fail in the Big Crisis

Peter Morici
The Dow Tanks as Bank Bailout Fails to Restore Confidence

Conn Hallinan
The Great Game in the Caucasus:
Bad Moves by Uncle Sam

Martha Rosenberg
Training America's Youth
Today a Pheasant, Tomorrow Osama

Binoy Kampmark
Let's Talk About Extinction:
CERN and Halo

October 6, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Futile Bailout as Darkness Falls on America

Mike Whitney
Still on the Edge of the Abyss

Tariq Ali
Goodbye to Grosvenor Square

Emily Horowitz
How People Tell Cops They're Guilty Even When They Aren't

Michael Hudson
What Did Jesus Say?
A Christian Perspective on the Paulson Bank Bailout

Ron Jacobs
Winter Soldiers and Washington's Wars

October 3 - 5, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Creatures of Capital

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

Saul Landau
The Chutzpah of Hank Paulson

Jonathan Cook
The Souring of a West Bank Romance: Israel's Army and Settlers Fall Out

Andy Worthington
The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials

Dave Marsh
Bono (Himself) Challenges Me to a Debate

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Using the IAEA to Spy on Iran

John Ross
Massacre in Morelia

Brian Cloughley
The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism

Wajahat Ali
Dueling Partners: an Interview with Tariq Ali on Pakistan

Robert Schwartz
A Serious Blow to the Rights of U.S. Workers: NLRB Limits Political Strikes

Alan Nasser
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him: a Paradigm for Today's Democrats?

David Ker Thomson
The Case for Drunk Driving

Peter Morici
Gone in 30 Days: U.S. Loses 159,000 Jobs in September

William Blum
When is a Holocaust Not a Holocaust?

William S. Lind
War on Two Fronts: Without Railroads

Michael Donnelly
The Ghost of Gen. McClellan

Thom Rutledge
On Presidential "Rule"

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Science and the 2008 Presidential Elections: a Survey of the Candidates

Dave Lindorff
Calling the Problem Early

Cindy Ellen Hill
Waging a Sustainable Peace?

Paul Krassner
Dying to Get High: the Side Effects of Medical Marijuana

Daniel White
Vietnam's Masterspy

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Absher, Gibbons and Jenkins

Website of the Weekend
How We Lost Glen Canyon: a Legal Chronology

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

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

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

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

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

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

Weekend Edition
October 17 / 20, 2008

CounterPunch Diary

Blow Ups and Bombers

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Talk about falling to the occasion! You would not have an inkling from the candidates’ third and final debate at Hofstra University on Long Island that Wednesday had been a day of fearful carnage on Wall Street, throwing into question the desperate efforts of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve to stabilize the situation.

You would not have known that across the last month the Dow Jones industrial index has lost 25 per cent of its value. You would not have known that in the considered estimation of many economists the United States could well be entering a prolonged recession.

You would not have known that every assertion about the merits of deregulation and about the primacy of market forces is now dead, skinned and nailed to the wall like a moose hide in the Palins’ garage.

Listening to both candidates in that last debate made me think of one of those reverses of the earth’s electro-magnetic field that occurs every 100,000 years or so. The last month has seen the sweeping away of all the shopworn economic coordinates by which conventional politicians set their course. Gone are the hallowed landmarks. Yet here were McCain and Obama trudging on, sighting their compasses on bearings that no longer exist.

There were, to be sure, dutiful references by both Obama and McCain to the economic crisis, but mostly it was as though they were talking about a minor traffic accident a couple of blocks away.  McCain flourished a proposal to bail out homeowners. Obama claimed that the bankers’ bailout bill for which they had both voted contained exactly such provisions.   Then the two retreated to mechanical reiteration of their tax plans, their health plans, their plans for Energy Independence, all of them topics interminably raked over in the earlier debates.

There’s a reason why McCain graduated from Annapolis sixth from the bottom of his class. After that promising opening about bailing out homeowners he got lost, like an elderly, half-blind dog getting off the path in the woods. He stopped and started barking at Obama’s tax plan.

I thought he looked really terrible. Here in the CounterPunch newsletter and on this site we’ve raised the possibility that his melanoma problems may be a lot worse than he lets on. Lori Klaidman, a medical researcher, sends us this bleak assessment:

Thank you for your recent article raising questions re: McCain's health prognosis. I am a medical researcher and have a great deal of experience with melanoma having recently just lost a brother to it. What people don't seem to get about this cancer that at stage IIa, his chances of surviving to 10 years at stage IIa WERE 64 per cent. But nearly 10 years have past since the year 2000 since that diagnosis. It is MUCH lower now. Might it be more like 50 per cent survival to the end of his first potential term? This is an optimistic view, and a strong possibility because no one believes those cells have gone away or that he is in permanent remission. Further, the minute those melanoma cells migrate to a lymph node, his chances for survival are anywhere from 15-63 per cent. Note that his doctors were surprised that they had not already metastisized to the nearest lymph node in 2000, when it was investigated.

Despite the rosy picture that McCain's doctor's paint, they fully admit that melanoma cells are freely migrating throughout his blood stream and body. Because cancer cells lose their ability to slow down in a G1 phase during cell division, they are unable to rest and repair faithfully DNA strands during replication without error. Therefore it is only a matter of time before you get one cell that that has lost all control and becomes extremely aggressive with tumors doubling in size about every 45 days. In fact, the purpose of melanocytes, from which melanomas were derived from, means that they are already super hardy, whose main purpose is to protect oneself from the sun, and only a few minor mutations will create a deadly aggressive unstoppable cancer.

Furthermore, what little treatment there is for melanoma, such as interferon, relies on pumping up the immune system, which might give an extra 5 per cent to the statistics at best (melanoma is known for being chemo and radio insensitive). However, it is well known that anger and stress can dampen the immune system response. Can there be any doubt even among his supporters that McCain has a few "anger management" issues? Therefore what all of this could do is put his survival statistics at, perhaps 45 per cent to survive his first term as president? Fortunately, unlike most of us, he does have the best health care that money can buy. However, this time, even that is not likely to save him when it comes to melanoma, the deadliest, most untreatable cancer that exists.

Lori Klaidman

When he quit barking about taxes and Joe the Plumber McCain finally remembered his briefing script and brought up Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers, the former Weatherman.

I strongly advise the Obama campaign, not to mention all those readers of this site who do not yet read our newsletter, to subscribe without delay. Our latest issue, just released, discloses that when it comes to complicity with the Weathermen and specifically Ayers, one of the present chairmen of the McCain campaign played a far more supportive role to Ayers, at a time when Ayers was combating the war by  all means necessary and when his ears were still ringing from the detonations of Weathermunitions. Get the full story here.

And when it comes to the new economic coordinates, the new edition of our newsletter writes a powerful obituary for the neoliberal Washington Consensus that has dominated the economic affairs of the planet since the early 1970s.

“Wall Street’s financial meltdown ,” write Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers, “marks the end of an era. What has ended is the credibility of the Washington Consensus – open markets to foreign investors and tight money austerity programs (high interest rates and credit cutbacks) to “cure” balance-of-payments deficits, domestic budget deficits and price inflation.

“Washington’s idealized picture of how “free markets” operate (as if such a thing ever existed) promised that countries outside the United States would get rich faster, approaching U.S.-style living standards if they let global investors buy their key industries and basic infrastructure. For half a century, this neoliberal model has been a hypocritical exercise in poor policy at best, and deception at worst, to convince other economies to impose self-destructive financial and tax policies, enabling U.S. investors to swoop in and buy their key assets at distress prices.”

This era is now over. Around the world, and here at home, this is as ripe an opportunity for the left as we will ever encounter in our lifetimes. As Robert Pollin told Mike Whitney on this site last week (whitney10162008.html) "We are in the midst of a major historic turning point, equivalent to the emergence of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan", only this time the signposts point the other way. As Pollin said, “The big money flowing into Obama, and to Democrats more generally, certainly will make it more difficult for our elected officials to do the work of the people.  But here again, Wall Street has now been discredited to a degree unprecedented since the 1930s. That should give the left serious political leverage…he real issue — whether it be through public or private ownership or some mix — is to move financial institutions and markets in the direction of egalitarianism.” 

It’s a time for new maps, aided by such old guides as those drawn up by the peppery German in the British Museum. You should certainly have our latest newsletter in your backpack. You get Hudson and Sommers;  you get Cockburn and St Clair on the McCain campagn chairman  who sheltered Ayers, and our take on  Election Campaign 2008. You get David Bonner’s marvelous, funny  portrait of an FBI informer, the late George Demmerle. 

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Coda: Is This Man Ever Wrong?  (Maybe once in a blue moon.)

I give you some paragraphs I write on this site back on 
November 10 2006, right after the mid-term elections.

Now, Can We Talk About Something Serious?

Now that the biennial democratic pretense here in the U.S.A. has run its course, can we talk about something serious? We can? Good. Hmmm. Ha! Here's a good one we can sink our teeth into for a few paragraphs: the distinct possibility that the world economic system could soon blow up in our faces. You say nobody mentioned this in Campaign 2006? Of course they didn't. Who said political campaigns have anything to do with reality?

Let me direct you to a recent series of polite coughs, reminiscent of a sheep quietly clearing its throat somewhere on a fog-bound hillside in the north of England. Aforementioned coughs emanated at the start of this week from the Financial Services Authority, (FSA), a body set up under the purview of the British Treasury a few years ago to monitor financial markets and protect the public interest by raising the alarm about shady practices and any dangerous slides towards instability.
In a briefing paper under the chaste title, "Private Equity: A Discussion of Risk and Regulatory Engagement", the FSA raises the alarm.
"Excessive leverage: The amount of credit that lenders are willing to extend on private equity transactions has risen substantially. This lending may not, in some circumstances, be entirely prudent. Given current leverage levels and recent developments in the economic/credit cycle, the default of a large private equity backed company or a cluster of smaller private equity backed companies seems inevitable. This has negative implications for lenders, purchasers of the debt, orderly markets and conceivably, in extreme circumstances, financial stability and elements of the UK economy."
Translation: It's about to blow!

"The duration and potential impact of any credit event may be exacerbated by operational issues which make it difficult to identify who ultimately owns the economic risk associated with a leveraged buy out and how these owners will react in a crisis. These operational issues arise out of the extensive use of opaque, complex and time consuming risk transfer practices such as assignment and sub-participation, together with the increased use of credit derivatives. These credit derivatives may not be confirmed in a timely manner and the amount traded may substantially exceed the amount of the underlying assets."

Translation: The world's credit system is a vast recycling bin of untraceable transactions of wildly inflated value.

"The significant flow of price sensitive information in relation to private equity transactions creates considerable potential for market abuse Although transparency to existing investors is extensive, transparency to the wider market is limited and is subject to significant variation in methodology (e.g. with respect to valuation, fee disclosure etc) and format.The duration and potential impact of any credit event may be exacerbated by operational issues which make it difficult to identify who ultimately owns the economic risk associated with a leveraged buy out and how these owners will react in a crisis."

Translation: Crooks could blow us all up any minute now and we don't even know who's holding the detonator. And you thought Osama was a problem!

The problem is that the oversight and stability of the world credit system is no longer within the purview of familiar international institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the Bank of International Settlements. Private traders are now installed at all the strategic nodes, gambling with stratospheric sums in such speculative pyramids as the credit derivative market which was almost nonexistent in 2001, yet which reached $17.3 trillion by the end of 2005. Warren Buffett, America's most famous investor, has called credit derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction."

As the great American historian Gabriel Kolko remarked in a detailed run-down on the crisis in CounterPunch at the end of July:

"Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing consensus now exists between those who endorse it and those, like myself, who believe the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, and we should, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises."

Translation: Capitalism has its downsides, and right now we're at the edge of the precipice.

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