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Today's Stories October 17, 2007 Steve Niva Counter-Insurgency American-Style October 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize Paul Findley Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby Robert Bryce Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts Uri Avnery The Mother of All Pretexts Paul Craig Roberts The Iraqi Genocide Ray McGovern What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It? Norman Solomon The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal Martha Rosenberg The Curse of Cymbalta William S. Lind Out of the Frying Pan Joel S. Hirschborn Time to Boycott Voting Website of the Day Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play   October 15, 2007 Gary Leupp Response to an Angry Marine Andy Worthington A Gitmo Detainee Finally Gets a Break Heather Gray Al Krebs, a Fighter for Family Farmers John Walsh Blacks Turn Against the War: Why Won't Liberals Join Them? Joshua Frank Nobel Gore? Dave Lindorff Slaughter of the Innocents in Iraq Matt Vidal Squaring the Circle on Children and Health Care Ali Khan Pakistan's Constitutional Mess Sen. Russ Feingold The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program Johnny Barber The Balm of a Peace Process Infuses the War on Terror Website of the Day The Real Gore October 13 / 14, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Al Gore's Peace Prize Wajahat Ali Privatizing Terror, Outsourcing Diplomacy: an Interview with P. W. Singer Jeffrey St. Clair A Half Mile of Hell Ralph Nader Impeachment, Cowardice and the Democrats David Heleniak Gitmo at Home Laura Carlsen Plan Mexico and the Billion Dollar Drug Deal Brian Cloughley The Flat Drug World Richard Rhames Here Come the "Bankrupted Social Security" Scamsters, Again Ron Jacobs For the Sake of a Future Fred Gardner The Overrated Importance of Being "On Message" John Ross The Betray Us Flap Russell Hoffman Another Pro Nuker Wins the Peace Prize Missy Beattie Will Someone Please Give Lou Dobbs a Lobotomy? Poets' Basement Gibbons, Buknatski and Ford Website of the Day "Psychokiller", the Blackwater Version October 12, 2007 Cindy Sheehan Leadership Void Brendan Cooney Washington's Holocaust Deniers Alan Farago Gore Still Lost Florida Jan Oberg Gore's Peace Prize, a Grand Misjudgment M. Shahid Alam The Mercenary State: Pakistan's Killer Elites David Macaray Lies About Teachers and Unions Julia Kendlbacher Urban Legend, We Love Our Forest People Peter Rost, MD Drug Money and the Clinton Campaign Website of the Day Nader Live: "Things are a Lot Worse Than We Thought" October 11, 2007 Al Giordano Bill Clinton as Ambassador to the World? Saul Landau Killing for Profit: Blackwater in Iraq Jacob G. Hornberger The Failed Legacy of Interventionism William S. Lind The Iraq Mirage Joshua Frank Big Sky Rebels Josh Mahan Colorado River Blues Pat Williams Where Are You, Paul Wellstone?     October 10, 2007 Michael Yates Travels Across Greenspan's America Gary Leupp Spreading Awareness or Smearing a Religion? David Macaray How Wal-Mart Can be Beaten Alan Farago Corruption and the Law of Intended Consequences Tom Clifford Homeless in Their Own Land: Iraq's Deepening Refugee Crisis Col. Douglas MacGregor Washington's War Sunsara Taylor Nooses at Columbia George Wuerthner Behind the Bovine Curtain Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Indigenous Peoples' Day Michael Dickinson Forgetting Lennon's Birthday Website of the Day Paying for War   October 9, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Blinded by Ideology: Cato, Trade and Outsourcing Andy Worthington Fourth Whistleblower Rocks Guantánamo Alan Farago The Fall of Florida's Largest Land Developer Brian Eno Exporting Democracy with Missiles David Rovics The RIAA vs. the World Farzana Versey Two Lovers and the Funeral of Secularism Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich Musharraf's Landslide Website of the Day Romney and the Wheelchair Bound Medical Marijuana Patient   October 8, 2007 David Macaray Lesbians for Hillary? or Teamsters for Hillary? Jeff Ballinger Nike, Steroids and Marion Jones Brian Eno This Ban Won't Stop Us Christopher Brauchli Translating Bush Louay Safi End the Disgrace of Guantánamo Matt Reichel Homocide by Cops at the Phoenix Airport Dave Lindorff Finally, A Good Day for the Constitution Thomas P. Healy The Politics of Mercury Pollution Martha Rosenberg E. Coli Spreading Slaughter Allowed to Stay Open Richard Rhames A Democrat's Lament Website of the Day Not All Italians Love Columbus   October 6 / 7, 2007 Alexander Cockburn A Rainbow Over a Graveyard Norman Finkelstein Jeffrey Goldberg's Prison James Bovard Are Presidents Entitled to Kill Foreigners? Patrick Cockburn The Invasion of Afghanistan, Six Years Later Jeffrey St. Clair At Disaster Falls Ralph Nader Where Are the Lawyers of America? Ray McGovern So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby? Saul Landau A River Runs Through It Ben Tripp Bring on the Next War! Terry Lodge The Grateful Dead Body Parts Delivered to Your Door Reform Act Seth Sandronsky Market Mystification and the Liberal Virus Kevin Funk / Steve Fake Divestment and Darfur Missy Beattie In the Custody of Bush and Cheney Website of the Weekend Snoop Dogg vs. Bill O'Reilly   October 5, 2007 Andy Worthington The Anonymous Victims of Guantánamo David Macaray De-Skilling America's Labor Force Lee Sustar The Democrats and Iran: Can They Sink Any Lower? Dan La Botz Cincinnati Six Years After the Killings and the Riots Aaron Hess Hate Week Comes to Campus William A. Cook Unmasking AIPAC Website of the Day Range of Memory   October 4, 2007 Uri Avnery The Power of the Israel Lobby Dave Marsh Dick Cheney, a Eulogy Valerio Volpi How Italy Became a Launching Pad for the US Military Cecilie Surasky Dissenting at Your Own Risk Dave Lindorff Remaking Iraq, as Vietnam Norman Solomon Sputnik, 50 Years Later Laura Carlsen Costa Rica and CAFTA: Memo Reveals Manipulation Scheme Walter Brasch When Compassion Fails: Bush and the Children's Health Act Ben Terrall Haitian Human Rights Advocate Kidnapped William S. Lind Beyond the OODA Loop Website of the Day Musicians in Handcuffs   October 3, 2007 Vijay Prashad Gang of Four Anita Sinha Black Ties and Bulldozers in New Orleans Winslow T. Wheeler Posturing at the Petraeus Hearings: Where was the Oversight? Sharon Smith The Kucinich Quandary Jeff Leys Our Bonhoeffer Moment Sen. Russ Feingold We Must End This Tragedy Mohamad Bazzi Playing Into the Hands of Ahmadinejad Brenda Norrell A Cry from the Top of the World Robert Weissman No Sex, Still a Scandal at the IMF Website of the Day Jena by Mellencamp   October 2, 2007 Ibrahim Warde Logical Lies About Bin Laden's Wealth Gary Leupp "I Hate All Iranians": Frank Talk from a Defense Dept. Official David Macaray The Hunt for a Blue November: In Pursuit of the Labor Vote Conn Hallinan Religion and Foreign Policy John Ross The Great American Chess Match Alan Farago Ripping Off Miami's Poor Sonja Karkar The Right to Exist: States or People? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Meteor and the Mahatma Website of the Day Grandin on Che's Legacy   October 1, 2007 Al Giordano The Clinton Campaign's Reckless Race for Big Money Donors Paul Craig Roberts From Burma to Iraq: Hypocrisy Rules the West Moshe Adler The Crimes of Microsoft Ingmar Lee My Kayak Journey Down the Wild Pacific Coast John V. Walsh Ahmadinejad is Not My Enemy Norman Solomon Political Science and Truth of Consequences Roger Burbach Historic Victory in Ecuador for the Left Ramzy Baroud The Politics of Assassination Stephen Lendman The Maestro of Misery: Greenspan's Dark Legacy Susie Day Honey, I Shrank the Military! Website of the Day Letters from Fort Lewis Brig   September 29 / 30, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Clinton Time: Do We Set Our Clocks Forward or Back? Uri Avnery So What About Iran? Andrew Cockburn Iraq's WMD Myth: Why Clinton is Culpable Jeffrey St. Clair Through the Gates of Lodore Wajahat Ali The Good, the Bad and the Iraqi Andy Worthington The Curse of the Military Commissions Don Santina Ethnic Cleansing in San Francisco Ralph Nader Free Lunches, for Corporations! Fred Gardner The Man Behind the MoveOn Ad Seth Sandronsky The US Economy Since 1980 Gideon Levy The Children of 5767 William S. Lind A Ticking Bomb Reza Fiyouzat An Anti-Imperialist Case Against a Nuclear Iran Richard Rhames Wag the Tail, Frag the Dog David Michael Green Buyer's Remorse: Their Purchase, Our Regret Zach Mason Hate and Hope in Herndon Poets' Basement Gibbons, Ali, Davies and Suss Website of the Weekend Domestic Crusaders     September 28, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison The Teflon Alliance with Israel Roberto J. González / David H. Price When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents Saul Landau September, the Cruelest Month in Chile Tom Clifford Burma by the Numbers Christopher Brauchli Of Toxic Almonds and Bad Beef Martha Rosenberg Spinning Suicide Statistics Dave Zirin Soldier in Winter: John Carlos Speaks Out on the Jena 6 Laray Polk Bush Library or Lockbox? Binoy Kampmark When Reagan Turned Brown James McEnteer Hell, Columbia: an Academic Hotshot Introduces a Petty Tyrant Website of the Day Concerned Anthropologists   September 27, 2007 Alan Farago Housing Market Crashes and Burns Andy Worthington A Bad Week at Guantánamo Jonathan Cook Why Did Israel Attack Syria? William Hughes Billy Graham, a Prince of War Exposed Ray McGovern Bush, Oil and Moral Bankruptcy Ron Jacobs Joe Biden's Plan to Chop Up Iraq Dave Lindorff Quit the Party! Join the Mass Resignation Movement! Joshua Frank Pruning the Green Party Anne Dachel The CDC, Vaccines and Autism Website of the Day The God-O-Meter   September 26, 2007 Bill Quigley HUD's Home Wreckers Paul Craig Roberts A Pandemic of Police Brutality Jeff Kisseloff Still Smearing Alger Hiss China Hand Is China the True Target of Financial Sanctions Against Iran? Behzad Yaghmaian At the Gates of Paradise Sonja Karkar The Quality of Mercy in Gaza Mike Ferner Interrupting the Empire, 30 Seconds at a Time Col. Dan Smith Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Learn Clifton Ross Bollinger's Barbarous and Ignorant Speech Brenda Norrell A Meeting of Indigenous Peoples in Caracas Website of the Day The Smearing of Jean Maria Arrigo, a Psychologist Opposed to Torture   September 25, 2007 Nicole Colson On the March Against Racism Uri Avnery Foam on the Water Brendan Cooney Ahmadinejad on Broadway: Free Speech? Arrest Him! Harry Browne Bruce Springsteen Comes Home ... to Hell Marjorie Cohn The Drift Toward War with Iran David Macaray The UAW-GM Strike: the Long Knives are Already Out Ralph Nader Hypocrisy and Inverted Priorities in Congress Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger, the Climate Change Hypocrite Anthony Papa Perverted Justice & America's Drug Laws Christopher Ketcham All Politicos Now Classed as Sexual Deviants Website of the Day John Waters on Free Speech   September 24, 2007 George Ciccariello-Maher Racist Violence from Jena to Oakland Saree Makdisi The War on Gaza's Children David Keen Action-as-Propaganda: Learning About the Iraq War from Hannah Arendt Sherwood Ross Just How Powerful is the Israel Lobby? Only Cheney Knows for Sure Ron Jacobs Greenspan's Open Secret Donna Saggia The Cult of the Military and the Decline of Democratic Values Mike Ferner Free Speech Takes a Capitol Beating Malini Johar Schueller Norman Hsu is a Model Minority Monique Dols and Dylan Stillwood Ahmadinejad and Columbia Website of the Day The Promotion September 22 / 23, 2007 Alexander Cockburn On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" Jennifer Loewenstein Beneath the Hideous Veneer of Security Linn Washington, Jr. The Injustice in Jena: Prosecutorial Misconduct More Dangerous Than Racism Jeffrey St. Clair Going Down in Dinosaur: Oil, Dams and Whitewater (Part One) Alan Farago Genuflecting to China Brian Cloughley Of Hate, Hubris and Atrocities Robert Fantina The Deadly Pattern of US Imperialism Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Land Tenure and Resistance in New Mexico Jason Hribal Fear of an Animal Planet David Rosen Slugger Sex: Athletes, Violence and Male Sexuality Mike Whitney The Era of Global Financial Instability John V. Walsh Who Will Lead a Filibuster of the Iraq War Spending Bill? Dave Lindorff Why Aren't We Banning Blackwater Here? David Michael Green Hiding Behind a Camouflage Skirt Fred Gardner Claudia Jensen (Look Back in Anger) Cassandra Jones Support Our Mercenaries Roger van Zwanenberg Pluto Press Under Attack by Israel Lobby Poets' Basement Buknatski, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend "For the Bible Tells Me So"   September 21, 2007 Karim Makdisi Letter from Lebanon M. Shahid Alam A History of Violence Alan Farago Who Will Buy My House? Joshua Frank The Demise of the Congressional Black Caucus Dave Zirin Notre Dame and the Economy of Sports Kenneth Couesbouc A Short History of Lending and Borrowing Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein Mass Health Care Failure Ben Terrall The Streets of San Francisco: Where Impeachment is Taken Seriously--By Everyone But Pelosi Steve Fournier Ex-Dems, Sign Up Here Frederico Fuentes, et al Voices in Defense of Bolivia Website of the Day Sabra and Shatila, Remembered   September 20, 2007 Kathleen Christison Whatever Happened to Palestine? Zoltan Grossman An Endless Occupation? Paul Craig Roberts As the Empire Slips: Greenspan and the Economy of Greed Stan Cox and Wes Jackson Carbon-Free and Still Wrecking the Planet Russell Mokhiber AARP to Kucinich: Drop Dead Charles Modiano Jim Crow's Children: the Jena 6, Shaquanda Cotton and Blog Power Raymond J. Lawrence Bush's Worrisome Use of Religion Brendan Cooney Body-Snatched Nation Website of the Day Mind Control for Breakfast   September 19, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By? Paul Krassner The Power of Laughter Sgt. Martin Smith The New Private Warriors: Blackwater in Iraq Seth Sandronsky Living in a Dilapidated Market: To Rent or Own? Claud Cockburn Looking back at the Great Crash Victoria Buch Israel's Agenda for Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer Robert Weissman Oil Warriors: From Greenspan to Kissinger Mike Ferner Can We Talk? Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger's $9 Billion Boondoggle for Big Water Website of the Day Housing Cost Calculator   September 18, 2007 Mike Whitney U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel Alan Farago Interviewing Alan Greenspan: How 60 Minutes Blew It John Ross America's Great Wall: Where Will the Workers Go When They Finish It? Ron Jacobs Nooses Hung From Jena, La. to College Park, Md. Alex Doherty Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement": Who's Responsible? September 17, 2007 Marjorie Cohn Erwin Chemerinsky and the Post-9/11 Attack on Academic Freedom Paul Craig Roberts Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be Ricardo Alarcón The Return of C. Wright Mills Amid the Dawn of a New Era Marc Levy Fake Vets Chasing Fame Eva Liddell In 1969 We Already Knew What 2007 Would Look Like Website of the Day Propaganda: Your Job in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra, and written by Theodor Geisel Sept. 15-16, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The General Came to Washington Vicente Navarro How the U.S. Schemed Against Spain's Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy Mike Whitney Plummeting Dollar, Credit Crunch Herman Mindshaftgap Has There Ever Been a Surge? If so, Has it a Future? Ellen Cantarow Girls! Music! Palestine! Jordan Flaherty K-Ville: Fox's New Paean to the N.O.P.D. Zachary Hurwitz Julio Cusurichi on Amazonian Development September 14, 2007 Debbie Nathan New York Times reporter was a member of an illegal underage porn site, claims he was only "posing as online predator" Franklin Lamb Sabra-Shatilla, 25 Years Later Patrick Cockburn Greet Bush and Die: The Killing of Abu Risha Farzana Versey The World's Richest Muslim Tycoon Alan Farago This is Florida, Epicenter of the Housing Bust and of Public Corruption Hank Edson Bill's New Book is Giving Me a Headache September 13, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Petraeus Confided Presidential Ambitions to Iraqi Official Scott Vest, former Air Force Captain at Minot The Barksdale Nukes Andy Worthington Guantánamo: "Ghost" Prisoners Speak At Last Michael Baney Mr. Fixit of Quake-Stricken Peru Has Death Squad Past Dr. Susan Block Is U.S. Run by Secret Homintern? September 12, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts American Economy: RIP Stan Goff The Petraeus Report William Blum When Soldiers Mutiny...Only Those Fighting the War Can End It. Manuel Garcia Forgetting 9/11 Debbie Nathan Why One Sex Survey Didn't Make the Big Time               Subscribe Online

October 17, 2007 "Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction" The Credit Shock By ALAN FARAGO The New York Times reports that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will speak tomorrow about the intervention of the US government in crumbling credit markets. According to the Times, Mr. Paulson will say, "This is not about finger-pointing, it is about putting an aggressive plan together and moving forward." What was the first plan? An ill-founded scheme to demonstrate how mercenaries supporting aspirants to the Junior Chamber of Commerce could secure a US beachhead in the Middle East? Or, how historic low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve coupled with the crippling of regulatory authority for land use and natural resource decisions could trigger vast societal benefits through a boom in housing markets? In any case, we are nearing the end of the Bush presidency whose legacy is as described in a 2002 conversation between a senior administration official, probably Karl Rove, with Times' writer Ron Suskind: "We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Please, God, that we should be left only with that. Three weeks ago major US banking institutions, represented by Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., began meeting with the former Goldman Sachs chief, now Treasury Secretary. The topic of conversation: a plan to revive the asset-backed commercial paper market. In so far as the "reality-based community" is concerned, people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality", investors aren't wasting time cogitating: they're well along the process of turning the US dollar into garden mulch. In an exceedingly carefully phrased roll-out in major newspapers, details are beginning to emerge of the new discernable reality: its essential features are bribery papering over fraud. The fraud, as defined by cratering secondary markets for mortgage backed securities, is exactly as Warren Buffett predicted of financial derivatives: they are proving to be "weapons of mass financial destruction." The bribery appears to be in the creation of a new, multi hundred billion dollar fund--the result of the meeting between the big banks and the US Treasury-- for which fees will be paid to Wall Street executives and lawyers in order to dispose in "an orderly way" off-book assets that are worth far less than banks have told their investors. Cynics, gather 'round: it's nearly fascinating as watching the Greenland ice sheet melt. Both are happening slowly but with a fair degree of certainty that the end of the day is a big stinking mess we lack tools to clean up. The reality-based community of investors are not going to take this well. This is not how disaster capitalism is supposed to work (read Naomi Klein's, 'Shock Doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism'), but it does appear to be the new Manifest Destiny. In so far as immediate finger pointing is concerned, this past July Wall Street executives told the public that problem in debt markets were contained to the subprime sector for mortgage backed securities. In other words, poor homeowners in Dearborn and Detroit. That little fiction didn't sell through. Throughout the late summer and fall, banking committees in Congress have been spinning themselves into a fine fettle, mixing Democrats and Republican indistinguishably, seeking solutions to the millions of homeowners at risk of foreclosure. The main event appears to be simply loosening the bridle that had been put on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for financial misdeeds. Let them loan more. Let them loan more freely. Having finished, apparently, the finger pointing at the greed that had marred Fannie Mae and its quasi-public mission only a few years ago. As much as network news likes to feature stories of foreclosed homeowners, the real meat is Wall Street whose executives became addicted to the profits from financial derivatives. Now, the banks themselves have to be rescued to restore "free markets" to normal operation. In 1998, it only took four billion and the cooperation of the Treasury Department with the big banks to bail out the private hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management. Today the mainstream media shies from reporting the extent of what is unfolding: a few hundred billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the total market for of asset backed securities at risk that underwrote the late, great building boom. There are two reasons the mainstream media has lagged behind the story. First, the blizzard of profits from the housing boom obliterated depth perception as it might be applied by a critical analysis of how corporate America and government is organized: to keep consumers passive, dumb, and happy. Second, the proliferation of financial derivatives-intended to diversify risk-has the collateral benefit of distributing the fantasy of asset values in slow motion. Trillions of asset-backed securities are floating around the globe on digital pulses through fiber optic cables, but no major financial institution wants to be the first to re-price assets to market. They will hold these on the books or off the books as long as possible, at inflated values that don't connect in any appreciable way to reality. How odd that Wall Street lives and dies by quarterly profit reports from publicly traded corporations yet have been sitting on a toxic financial dump in credit markets for years with not even a whisper of complaint. In the New York Times, Paulson's efforts are described as "a delicate balancing act between two very different goals." Those goals are: maintaining the confidence in financial markets and also, keep the game going for the housing industry and mortgage bankers who chafe at the notion of additional regulation. Today, there is no will on the part of Congress to put the regulatory harnesses to a source of campaign cash that derives from a market that is essentially unregulated: financial derivatives. Wall Street doesn't want it. The home builders don't want it. Why tamper with what your biggest campaign donors want? On the other hand, the version of disaster capitalism that is emerging is what only the short-sellers want. The creators of asset backed mortgages take ordinary mortgages and package them into pools. The derivatives created from these packages of mortgages are sold to investors: they are sliced, diced, and reformulated in many different ways-but each time they are slightly changed, they create a rain of bonuses, fees, and commissions. In recent years, mortgage backed sercurities were generated in the hundreds of billions by persuading consumers to take on more debt than they could reasonably afford. It was almost like spontaneous generation. Take your ordinary suburban tract housing in Florida, for instance. In the past decade, production home building on cheap outlying land metastasized throughout the state of Florida. During this time, environmentalists chewed mostly on each other over compromises to slow the pace of housing and commercial development in former wetlands and wildlife habitat. While most environmental organizations were distracted by divide and conquer and diversionary tactics, the building lobby converted the purposes of local government to zoning and permitting-doing battle with local regulations against the nation's premier environmental laws meant to protect the air and water and natural resources we share. In some cases, these were outright assaults that ended up in federal court challenges. But the worst damage, during this time of ascendancy in real estate speculation, was the domination of and appointment by local elected officials of lobbyists to local boards charged with "protecting the environment". In Florida, for instance, these environmental review boards worked with state agencies, like the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, to control water quality issues that had been abandoned by the federal EPA under duress of scientists. The legal term is "delegation". Once upon a time, suburban sprawl and all its accoutrements-from hollowed out urban cores to scary strip mall culture-were sold to the public as what the market wants. Every single day, that myth is played out in the halls of local government as though the crisis in the greater world of debt has no bearing whatsoever on reality. The very nature of derivatives is meant to disperse risk: what they really disperse is accountability. The delegation of accountability so that it disappears is an essential feature of disaster capitalism. Its manifest destiny has defined the problem as government itself-leading in the direction of divesting authority from federal to state, and from state to locally elected officials who live, virtually, in the pocket of the growth machine. Its result is exactly the sprawl-ridden, unsustainable landscape of Florida. Today owners of asset backed securities are in the dark about the value of their investments. It is so distressing that hundreds of billions of asset backed securities cannot find buyers in the secondary markets, or, only at distressed prices. That is what happens to junk when it is fairly valued. Bloomberg reports, "Nothing in free-market theology says markets always work properly,'' said J.D. Foster, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington and former Bush administration official. ``If there's something that can be done of a temporary nature to help markets, then that seems perfectly appropriate.'' What nonsense: a fairy tale from the party of "fiscal conservatives." Mispricing the true costs and accounting for growth is another way that asset back mortgages were able to deliver higher rates of return than baseline government debt. To be purposeful and clear, means having a vision to protect and conserve-using regulations as a way to guide investment. It means wringing the speculators from the housing markets and from land development. The solution is reformulating the system of packaging mortgages and their ratings. The new formula needs to be based on a clear and rational way to allocate development rights at the local level; in other words, integrating community design with long-term financing from private investors. Intrusive? No more intrusive than disaster capitalism as it now exists for Americans, who appear to live on a giant set of a colossal Budweiser TV commercial, from sea to shining sea filled with intelligent Clydesdale horses, talking frogs and happy dumb us. Alan Farago of Coral Gables, who writes about the environment and the politics of South Florida, can be reached at alanfarago@yahoo.com.

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