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

Notes from the Inside

South Ossetia and Abkhazia

By LARAY POLK

“Moscow waited for almost 24 hours, during which Georgian artillery and planes were sending the capital of South Ossetia to ruins. Almost 1600 people were killed in the shelling. Now it is being presented by the mainstream media exclusively as Russia's intervention and expansionist policy.”

--Centre for Humanitarian Programmes, Republic of Abkhazia

American news coverage of the US-Georgia-Russia conflict continues to be appalling--blindingly biased and simplistic, and yet my knowledge of the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is scant.
On August 12, I received an e-mail from a humanitarian organization in Abkhazia describing events as they had unfolded on the ground in South Ossetia. I wrote directly to them. What is below is the e-mail response I received from Liana Kvarchelia. She has kindly given me permission to post it.

September 2, 2008

Dear Laray,

I am glad that there are people who are interested to hear the other side of the story. Indeed I was told by friends in the US that the coverage there is extremely one-sided. I do not know if you read Russian. If so, I can recommend you a website www.apsny.com. Apart from that you can find some information on our country and the situation in www.circassianworld.com. There are some articles there including mine. I have also written about the conflict for the Accord series published by "Conciliation Resources", based in London.

On the whole I must say that we have found ourselves (not without some doze of surprise) in the epicenter of global conflict. It is clear to many people that there is power struggle going on between the US and Russia, with EU trying to accommodate their own interests, that not always compliment each member states' vision. However our conflict with Georgia has a much longer history that the EU, and definitely longer than Georgia's plans for NATO accession.

When at the end of the 19th century many Abkhazians having lost to the Russian Empire fled to Turkey and further, other ethnic groups were competing in resettling the vacated territories. Later when the Bolsheviks came, Abkhazia as well as Georgia became union states with an equal status within the USSR. But Jozef Stalin, Georgian by origin, reduced the status of Abkhazia to an autonomy within Georgia in 1931.

The Abkhazian language was banned, it was substituted by Georgian. Since the '30-40s the second wave of Georgian settlers came to Abkhazia. This process continued throughout our existence in the USSR as a Georgian autonomy. That's how we ended up a minority on our land. The 1990s was the time when Georgian nationalism was at its peak. "Georgia for Georgians" was a popular slogan. All non-Georgians were announced to be "hosts on Georgian land." Not many people even in the USSR knew that Abkhazians protested against being within Georgia even in the Soviet times, every decade. But in the '90s these protests became known to the world.

On 14 August 1992 when the Abkhazian Parliament was discussing a draft proposal for a Federation with Georgia, the Georgian bombs started falling on our heads, and the Georgian tanks attacked our towns and villages. It was a bloody war, with crimes committed first by Georgians and then by Abkhazians. The Georgians purposefully burnt down our State Archives and our Institute of Literature, History and Culture. It was quite symbolic. You can read about all this in the UNPO report that organized a fact finding mission to Abkhazia in 1992.

You can also read about it in Tom de Waal's article specifically devoted to the State Archives. Georgia lost the war, but tried to use its anti-Russian position to mobilize (quite successfully) Western support for its so-called "territorial integrity."

I respect the people of Georgia, and I respect their desire to be independent, but I also want them to respect my people's desire to be independent too. I hope people in the US will be questioning what they hear from the mainstream media. There are some people in Georgia whom I know personally, and who are questioning the policy of their leaders. I hope that their number increases.

All the best,

Liana Kvarchelia
Centre for Humanitarian Programmes
Sukhum, Republic of Abkhazia

Further reading:

Julian E. Barnes and Paul Richter, “NATO rapid-response unit proposed to address fears about Russia,” LA Times, 19 September 2008

Noam Chomsky, “Toward a Second Cold War?,” CounterPunch, 11 September 2008

Michel Chossudovsky, “The Militarisation of the Eastern Mediterranean: Israel's Stake in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline,” Global Research, 23 May 2006

Vladimir Radyuhin, "Georgia a base for Iran attack: Russia," The Hindu, 19 September 2008

Laray Polk lives in Dallas, Texas. She can be contacted at laraypolk@earthlink.net

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