Today's Stories

June 10, 2008

James G. Abourezk
Deadly Fallout From Obama's Groveling Before Israel Lobby

Saree Makdisi
Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)

June 9, 2008

Uri Avnery
No, I Can't: Obama, Israel and AIPAC

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

Allan Nairn
Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry

Dennis Loo
Threats on Iran and the "Batterer's Defense"

Harry Browne
Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

C. Hand
U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

Peter Morici
An Unsustainable Trade Deficit

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Ripe Time for Inflation

Martha Rosenberg
The Inconvenient Senator Grassley

James L. Secor
Chinese Superstition or Unconscious Oracle?

Website of the Day
Pay Bo Diddley!

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

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Fifty Million Go to Bed Hungry

Killing Foods, Killing People

By JOHN ROSS

"Orlando" (not his real name) eats after everyone else has eaten - if there's enough left over to eat.  All day, he scavenges in the garbage cans outside of the three MacDonald's outlets here in the old quarter of the city with an occasional stop-off at KTC.  He shows a neighbor his catch of the day: two mostly-eaten Big Macs, a gnawed chicken leg, a handful of stiff, ketchup-flecked French fries, and rubs his greasy belly in delight.  Orlando has a hard time pronouncing words in the way others can understand. Most passer-bys studiously step around the filthy, crippled man as he sprawls on the public sidewalk.

Because Orlando has no fixed address, he is not counted on Mexico's official census of the hungry -- and, in fact, he isn't hungry today.  As long as more affluent Mexicans continue to supersize themselves at the fast food franchises in the neighborhood, he isn't going to go hungry.

How many Mexicans are going hungry in these days of soaring food prices and diminishing reserves as food crisis sweeps what used to be called the Third World?  The rightist government of Felipe Calderon counts 14,000,000 Mexicans living in extreme poverty who are enrolled in its ironically entitled "Oportunidades" (Opportunities) program. Another 12,000,000 at-risk citizens are counted in the administration's equally euphemistic "Vivir Mejor" ("Live Better") bureaucracy - both programs are designed to feed an electoral clientele and do not reflect actual hunger.  

On the other hand, social economist Julio Boltvitnik, author of the "Moral Economy" column in the left daily La Jornada, figures the numbers of the hungry are more like 40,000.000, 40 per cent  of the population - the stats square with a study done some years ago by Dr. Hector Borges at the National Nutrition Institute that calculated 42 per cent of the population suffers some degree of malnutrition.  But the database is not current.  Boltvitnik estimates that the current wave of price hikes incited by the global food panic is driving 10,000,000 more Mexicans into hunger.  That's half the population.

According to the National Association of Self-Service Stores (ANTAD), led by Wal-Mart, the nation's number one food retailer and tortilla purveyor, food sales are down 5 per cent in the first three months of 2008.  This doesn't signal that Wal-Mart customers have lost their appetites or have suddenly decided to go on a diet.  Chicken part prices are up 11 per cent since the first of the year, milk 69 per cent, cooking oil 78 per cent, beans 93 per cent, not to mention lentils at 105 per cent, and eggs at 113 per cent.  In January, packaged bread cost 13 pesos, in April 24 pesos. 

The aisles at La Merced, the oldest produce market in the Americas, are just as packed as ever but more customers are buying less, reflects Jose Cuevas behind the counter of his chicken stand.  Out on the market's back patio where sellers dump their rotting merchandise, a lot more people are scavenging for leftovers, scraping the bruised tomatoes and blotched potatoes into their pails and cans, since the last time this reporter looked in.

Mexico's poor are hardly the only Latin Americans going hungry these days.  With income divides that resemble Africa (dixit the World Bank), Mexico and Brazil, the continent's two most successful republics, are scurrying to feed their least privileged citizens.  CEPAL, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, estimates 50,000,000 residents of the region are going to bed hungry tonight.  9,000,000 extreme poor in South America and 2,100,000 in Central America and the Caribbean are on the brink of starvation.  Bread in Bolivia has quintupled since the first of January and a loaf in Chile now costs two bucks Americano.  A third of all Paraguayans, South America's most impoverished nation, have had to give up milk, and in Haiti, the basket case of the Americas, where the poor literally dine on mud cakes, people are so pissed off that President Rene Preval fired his prime minister after mobs stormed the congress. 

Back in January 2007, Mexicans poured into the streets to protest the jump in tortilla prices from six pesos to upwards of 18 - the tortilla is the basic food unit here.  Fearing riots, Calderon, who had just been awarded the presidency in egregiously fraudulent elections, moved swiftly to knock the hikes back to eight.  But in the 18 months he has occupied the Mexican White House, 16 items in the basic food basket have risen 57 per cent - 63 per cent since January.  73 per cent of the daily minimum wage is dedicated to buying food here (in the U.S. it’s 15 per cent) and the Calderon administration sees trouble brewing on the horizon.  Battered by a bloody narco war that has turned cities into killing floors and with his political credibility seriously challenged by the Left, the President and his associates have sought to retake the initiative. 

This past May 25, Calderon and his finance minister, the 350 pound no-neck August Carstens, a former World Bank official, took to national television to outline a $200 million USD tariff-free emergency food import program - actually, all tariffs on 200 agricultural products were eliminated January 1 under provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

Notwithstanding, food imports in the first three months of 2008 cost Mexico $5 billion USD more than they did in 2007. 14,000,000 extremely poor enrollees in the Opportunities program would now receive an extra 120 pesos ($12 USD) a month to cover soaring food costs, the officials affirmed.  The Cargill Corporation, which dominates the Mexican grain distribution system, would also get an extra $12 on every ton of imported corn to cover increased transportation costs - the subsidy is in addition to a 525 peso per ton bonus Cargill now receives.  Cargill, the world's largest privately held corporation, has garnered 1.2 billion pesos in subsidies from the Mexican government in the past six months, according to figures released by the Agriculture Secretariat. 

Then, satisfied with their largesse, Calderon and Carstens went out to lunch.

The United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization (FAO) reports that the world food crisis has now touched 37 countries - 22 suffered food riots in 2007-08, not all of them in sub-Saharan Africa.  Mexico's tortilla war was followed by Italy's spaghetti war when the price of pasta zoomed due to record increases in wheat prices.  From then on, the rioting spread like the black plague to Mozambique, Mauritania, Morocco, Dakar, and Ouagadougou.  The Horn of Africa is on the verge of famine despite the billions Bush pours in to fan the flames of his terror war in the region.  The Philippines is running out of rice and Indonesians can't afford soy for tempah cakes, their kind of tortilla.  Bread riots have become national security issues.

Riots are an effective way of getting governments' attentions, says Nicholas Minot, speaking for the International Food Policy Institute in Washington D.C.  Poor people tend to be strategically concentrated at the heart of Third World cities.  "If all these people were to rise, then the government will have to take care of it," Raisa Fikray told the New York Times while shopping in a Cairo market.  "But everyone has to rise up together."

Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubharick smelled the coffee and dispatched the army to bake bread for the masses.  Heavily armed troops guard trains and trucks transporting wheat in Pakistan.  All over Asia where a kilo of rice costs 150 per cent more than it did two years ago, militaries are on alert.

40 years ago this spring, the world was caught up in a rolling youth rebellion that spread like wildfire from the streets of Paris to Prague to Mexico City and even to the U.S. Today, global rebellion threatens all over again - only the flashpoint has moved from the head to the pit of the belly as rioters demand bread in Tajikistan, Yemen, Bangladesh, and Cameroon.

At the annual spring meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, a smiling bank president Robert Zoellick posed for a photo op with a loaf of bread in one hand and a bag of rice in the other.  Hikes that have priced the poor out of the food market should level off in two years, Zoellick, once a key NAFTA negotiator, beamed.  How many desperately hungry people might die in the interval was not discussed.  The crisis had a silver lining, Wolfowitz's successor suggested - high commodity prices are ballooning farmers' incomes but he didn't mean Mexican farmers, 6,000,000 of whom NAFTA imports have displaced from their corn plots, or the farmers of Burkina Faso. 

It should be remembered that Zoellick is the president of an institution that imposed export agriculture models on needy countries, wiping out native crops and nutritional self-sufficiency, by encouraging the poor, three quarters of whom live off the land, to grow flowers and broccoli for First World tables. 

There should be enough food to go around.  World agricultural production increased 2.6 per cent last year yet more people went to sleep with an empty belly.  The problem is not production but access to a globalized food system.  Latin America, with its 50,000,000-strong hungry masses, produces 27 per cent of the world's fish supply and a third of its pork.  World corn production was a record 764 million tons in 2007.  The U.S. produced its biggest yields ever: 332 million tons but 81 million of them went into ethanol production to feed cars not people. 

The experts attribute food panic to a confluence of "temporary" factors.  A third of the price surge is blamed on diversion of basic grains to biofuels production.  Calderon and other world leaders point fingers at the Chinese and Indians, a third of the planet's population, for wanting to eat three meals a day.  Shortages of chemical fertilizers, a corporate industrial product, is where the oil crisis meets the food crisis, diminishing yields.  Many consider global warming to be the devil - drought in southern Australia has wiped out rice production that once fed 20,000,000 Asians.  Instead Australian farmers are substituting wine grapes.  Great!  Now Orlando can have a glass of Chardonnay with his scraps. 

A billion human beings barely survive on $1 dollar a day - now with sky-high food costs that dollar is worth even less in terms of caloric intake.  Every five seconds, a child under ten dies of hunger-related causes.  You know the litany.  Fidel Castro predicts a billion people will die of hunger because of how the First World uses food. 

First Worlders don't eat well but they eat a lot.  The Big Macs Orlando covets suck up ten kilos of grain for every ten quarter-pounders.  Morbid obesity is epidemic in North America. 

All this gorging means fat profits for U.S. farmers. Anything they plant this year will bring them the maximum price.  Of course they farm for profit and not to feed the people. U.S. food exports to the Third World topped $101 billion last year, doled out to governments who comply with Bush's terror war dictates. 

Fat farmers are fattened up by fat government subsidies.  This year's Farm bill, colluded upon by Democrats and Republicans together, includes $4.6 billion USD in direct payments.  Iowa's Tom Harkin complains that corporate farmers use the boodle to buy even more land, which, of course, generates even more subsidies.  "It's a black hole."

Fat food groups from MacDonald's to Cargill  (which controls 80 per cent of the earth's grain stocks) are snorkeling it up at the trough - Cargill's profits were up 87 per cent in 2007, Archer Daniel Midlands a mere 67 per cent.  Ten leading food corporations are making a killing on the hunger of the people.

The floor of Chicago's Commodity Exchange is livelier than ever these days as traders snap up the future of food.  "Everyone wants to eat like an American" consultant Dan Basse gloats to the New York Times.  Hedge funds, which had the air knocked out of them in the mortgage fiasco, are in heavy, controlling 40 per cent of the futures.

"Orlando" doesn't know much about hedge funds. Lodged at the bottom of the global food chain, he is literally scraping by.

John Ross will rapsodize between bands (Celtic hiphoppers "Beltaine's Fire"; "Countless Others", manic garage punk) at El Balazo 2183 Mission in San Francisco Friday June 13 at 8 PM.  "Rebels Rock On For Iraqi Refugees" is a benefit for the Collateral Repair Project produced by Mission district troubadour Tommy Strange.  For further info check out www.collateralrepairproject.org

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