Today's Stories

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

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

September 30, 2008

Economics, Symbiosis and Parasitoids

A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

By STEPHEN MARTIN

It will be a great mistake for the community to shoot the millionaires, for they are the Bees that make the most honey, and contribute most to the hive even after they have gorged themselves full.

So wrote Andrew Carnegie.

Of course, Carnegie was more of a Main Street millionaire than a Wall Street millionaire. His wealth came through actual Industry, the production of steel used in construction and transport. But the comparison of millionaires with the biology of bees and the making of honey can set thought along certain lines, particularly given the bloodbath in progress on Wall St and the remarkable transformation in process; from free market economy to Socialist State. (Socialism for the wealthy, that is, the poor can still have the free market and the rugged individualism of fending for self /dependants in form of debt peonage.)

As POTUS 43 put it ‘If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down’

When it comes to knowing suckers, my money is on George W.  He undoubtedly knows lots of them - especially the ones who believe him President.

There are numerous relationships which species can exist within in terms of biological interaction, and much to be learned from applying the concept of Symbiosis when looking at Wall Street.

The symbiotic relationship assumes a number of forms. There is, for example, the nice variety, or mutualism, where both parties derive benefit.

Evidence, for example the Goby Fish and the shrimp, who often live together in a little burrow in the sand, which the shrimp digs. In return, the Goby fish alerts the shrimp, which is almost blind, to danger - by touching it with its tail. It is plainly this kind of mutualism which Carnegie had in mind when writing of the millionaire; even after having gorged there is still enough left for others on which to feed.

Where only one party derives benefit, but does not harm the other party in so doing, this is known as Commensalism.

Spiders which take advantage of trees to spin their webs are an example.

Then of course there is Parasitism; the success of which form of life is evidenced in the fact that almost all free living animals are host to at least one variety, or taxa, of parasite.

When it comes to parasites, given the success of this form of life, there are two further classifications, which I like to think of as ‘nasty’, and ‘really nasty’. 

The merely nasty ones are ‘biotrophic’. For example, headlice, which are ectoparasites.  Headlice on their own will not kill you, but they will feed on your blood and cause significant irritation of your scalp. The Hookworm is an example of a biotrophic endoparasite; unlike the louse it lives inside the host.

The really nasty ones are the Parasitoids, or necrotrophs as they are more rarely referred to. Unlike biotrophs, parasitoids actually kill the host. An example is the Moth family Epipyropidae, which is an ectoparasitiod of the Planthopper insect. In fiction, the “Shit-weasels” from Stephen King’s novel ‘Dreamcatcher’ exemplify – though probably the best known is the ‘Xenomorph’; the parasitiod in the film ‘Alien’. Best known because of the spectacular bloodbath in which it first reveals itself.

Now what has all this to do with the Economy you may be wondering?

Well it goes back to the remark made by Carnegie.

Most people see the Capitalist Economy as mutualist. The entrepreneur invests and creates employment, distributing fair wage and providing livelihoods in such process, and can look around the community with a measure of pride commensurate.

The sad thing is that competitive advantage can be gained by a shift in symbiosis from such mutualism towards parasitism, a shift motivated by search for the holy grail of  profit maximisation. The maximum return on the minimum investment; the minimising of cost and the maximising of revenue, is not seen as arising from mutualism, but rather from parasitism. To such parasitism, every cost is an erosion of profit, and any costs which can be cut are fair game. Practices such as utilisation of immigrant labour, outsourcing of production facilities to minimise wage cost, through use of children, or slaves, or foreign labour, ( please note, categories are not mutually exclusive), or of minimising anti pollution measures as  reduction of production costs, or fixing prices through operation of cartel, or minimising legislation through  bribery and corruption,  are all parasitical in respect of symbiosis.

In the short term they may give good return to the parasite, as indeed they may bring cheaper goods to the market, but the host undoubtedly suffers. Similarly we can see the case on Wall St.

Honesty is a constraint upon profit. Selling people houses at inflated prices they cannot afford, and then selling on those debts, representing them as sound obligations with collateral, and taking commission, is dishonest, despite the amount of short term gain to be made.

The ‘difficulty’ is that parasitoid behaviour is unsustainable despite short term gain.

When there are no suckers left to buy the trash marketed as mortgage, when all the commissions as good money have been taken; when there are no more trusting dupes,  and only toxic waste is left; the game is up.

The pump is burst, and the dumps are closed for business.

Unless….

Wall Street today, with the collapse of Freddie Mac, Fanny Mae, AIG, Lehmann Brothers, Washington Mutual and the rest as to come, is highly reminiscent of that scene in ‘Alien’ where the parasite begins to burst out.  The host is the free market, the parasitoid about to burst through to blood sprayed on face of those observing with horror. (The haemorrhage of cash so bad, the books so fucked up, that even the perpetrators can’t put a figure on it)

Feeding the parasitoid more, in sense of allowing it to nourish on public funds as new host, will have  the same denouement, only this time the host will not just be a particular market, but the whole market, and the society reliant upon it.

The last sucker, the biggest sucker still standing, will have been brought down, as George W could put it.

Welcome to the third world.

Still, from perspective of the parasite, there are other societies- if just enough more can be gained to allow freedom from this society as ‘soon to die’ sucker.

As in the film ‘Alien’ where there was reverence (albeit militarily motivated) for this new form of life, no matter how degenerate, what such attempt to keep it alive would result in would be continuation of the same behaviour; the bailout money taken - and invested elsewhere!

Parasitoids are not loyal to their hosts, they kill them. Free market profit maximisation is not beholden to state, or country, or taxpayer, but only to profit maximisation; it is not committed to sharing as mutualism or to long term perspective, it is pure in the way that the parasitoid is pure.

Parasitoids evidence their purity in killing. It is what they do. Other than gorging themselves, and surviving, it is all they do.
This particular taxa  is not new; it has been around before.
Roosevelt managed to keep it at bay  - and the host alive.
He didn’t do it by focusing on the needs of the parasite, but on the needs of mutualism across all sectors of the Economy;  that is,  by focus on the needs of the host. Nor did he do so unopposed. The parasitoid was defeated by legislation, the enforcement of rules which supported mutualism as symbiosis, and recognition of the rights of the worker as taxpayer and citizen.

It can be done.

The real issue is whether this time around, biologically speaking, there is the purity within host requisite for the nemesis to arise.

The words of Brecht find chilling resonance considering the victory of Roosevelt in overcoming parasitoid:

‘Do not rejoice in his defeat you men, for though the bastard is dead, the bitch that bore him is again in heat’

Stephen Martin can be reached at: stephenmarti@yahoo.com

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