Today's Stories

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?

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

September 25, 2008

Russian Nuclear-Powered Cruiser Sets Sail to Bolster Venezuela's Chavez

The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

By NIKOLAS KOZLOFF

On Monday, a squadron from the Russian Navy’s North Sea Fleet sailed for Venezuela in an effort to bolster military links with Latin America.  In November, the convoy will take part in joint maneuvers with the Venezuelan Navy.  The Russian fleet includes the nuclear-powered cruiser Peter the Great.  First laid down in St. Petersburg in April, 1986 the Russian cruiser was launched three years later and named the Yuri Andropov. When the Soviet Union broke up, the ship was renamed Peter the Great and was commissioned in 1995. The cruiser forms part of the Russian Navy’s so-called “Kirov Class” designed to engage large surface ships and defend the fleet against air and submarine attack.

An imposing ship, Peter the Great is a full six decks tall, measures almost 900 feet in length and weighs 28,000 tons. The ship accommodates 610 sailors including 82 officers. Peter the Great is armed with a massive amount of missiles, guns, torpedoes, antisubmarine mortars and electronic countermeasures. The ship’s artillery system is based on a computer-based control system with a multi-band radar, television and optical target sighting. The ship has three helicopters.

Peter the Great’s propulsion system is based on a combination of nuclear power and steam turbine with four nuclear reactors and two auxiliary boilers. In Kursk Down! , Clyde Burleson writes, “The first nuclear Russian surface warship, Peter the Great utilizes an odd auxiliary oil-fueled system to superheat steam from the reactors to produce added propulsion. In an emergency reactor shutdown, the vessel could continue to maneuver, using this secondary, nonatomic power resource.”

Despite its daunting profile, Peter the Great has been plagued with technical problems from the outset. The Bellona Foundation, an environmental organization based in Oslo, Norway monitors the Russian Navy and has long been concerned with the nuclear-powered cruiser. According to the group, Peter the Great experienced a horrible accident in October 1996. While cruising in the Baltic Sea an explosion in a turbine pipe outside the ship’s reactor killed five sailors. It was hardly an auspicious beginning for Peter the Great.

According to Bellona, the ship’s 1960s reactor technology was outdated and “a number of defects” had been detected. In March 2004, The Guardian of London reported that Admiral Vladimir Kuyoyedov, the head of the Russian navy, announced that Peter the Great would be withdrawn from service because of fears that the ship “could explode at any moment.” Kuroyedov told Russian news agencies: “The ship is in such poor condition that it could explode at any moment. The situation is especially dangerous because the ship is powered by a nuclear power plant.” It was unclear whether the admiral was suggesting that there could be a nuclear explosion.

Kuroyedov’s open admission of military incompetence aroused acute embarrassment within government circles. “To acknowledge that the flagship of the fleet is incapable of carrying out combat duties is a scandal,” said the official Rossiskaya Gazeta newspaper. Some analysts dismissed the admiral's comments as “overly dramatic,” interpreting them as a possible bid for more government funding. Whatever the case, a great cloud of doubt hangs over Peter the Great and the Russian navy to this day.  Despite its long history of problems however, the cruiser has an enormous amount of firepower at its disposal.

Peter the Great will be patrolling Caribbean waters at the same time that the United States has decided to revive its Fourth Fleet (for more on the history of the Fourth Fleet, see my earlier article “World War II To The Present: U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters,” May 24/25, 2008).  Venezuelan Defense Minister Gustavo Rangel has said the military cooperation with Russia would prepare Venezuela to confront possible US “threats,” such as the reactivation of the U.S. Fourth Fleet.  A resurgent Russia, stung by U.S. political and diplomatic support for the Republic of Georgia, is happy to oblige Chávez.  Peter the Great’s deployment follows the arrival of two Russian Tu-160 nuclear bombers in Venezuela earlier this month.

If John McCain actually agrees, the first presidential debate will take place on Friday.  If he is shrewd, Obama might seek to portray his Republican opponent as reckless.  The American public has no stomach for another Cold War in the Caribbean, and yet McCain has contributed mightily to bringing such a scenario about.  For years, the Arizona Senator has advocated a hawkish foreign policy which has sought to isolate both Venezuela and Russia.  Predictably, this has resulted in bringing the two oil-producing nations together. 

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008)

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