Today's Stories

October 10 / 12, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is McCain a Lot Sicker Than We Know?

Syed Saleem Shahzad
Why the Neo-Taliban is Winning

Patrick Cockburn
War in the Time of Cholera

Paul Craig Roberts
A Possible Solution to the Economic Crisis

Mike Whitney
Run on the System

Peter Morici
The Deficit and the Damage Done

Christopher Ketcham
The End of the Economy

Stephen Martin
Shock and Awe in Economic Warfare

Chellis Glendinning
Wireless Mind, Gullible Mind

Saul Landau
All Guns, No Butter

Ahmad Faruqui
21 Days to Baghdad

Serge Halimi
The Battle for the West

Anthony DiMaggio
Making a Killing: the Business of Elections

José M. Tirado
Meltdown in Iceland

David Macaray
Adventures in Unionism

Robert Fantina
Bankrupt and Belligerent

October 9, 2008

Robert Bryce
From Enron to the Current Meltdown

David Vest
The Great Rescue of 2008: Could Whatever Follows Bush Be Even Worse?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Meltdown at the Pentagon

Andy Worthington
The Ordeal of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama the Subhuman

Helga Serrano /
Hector Tamayo
Ecuador Charts the Way

Dave Lindorff
When Money Flies

Mats Svensson
At the Checkpoint on the Day of Atonement

Rannie Amiri
The Time for Mordechai Vanunu is Now

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs (and Deserves) Your Support

October 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Imbecilic Tedium

Linn Washington, Jr.
Palin's Racist Remark

Mike Whitney
To the Bunkers!

Deepak Tripathi
The West is Broke

George C. Wilson
Butter Over Guns? McCain and Obama on Defense Issues

Andy Worthington
Seized in Pakistan

Charles R. Larson
"I'm John McCain and I Approved This Lie"

Patrick Irelan
Ecuador's Choice

Matthew Koehler
Log, Baby, Log: Bailing Out the Timber Industry

Stanley Heller
Time to Design a New Economy

Daniel Gross
Working Class Hero: Alexandra Svoboda

Kimberly Hartke
Raw Milk and Civil Liberties

Website of the Day
Olivia Wilde Does It Early

October 7, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Obama and McCain's Goofy Afghan Bluster

Gary Leupp
Seven Years in Afghanistan:
From "War on Terror" to
"War of Terror"

Uri Avnery
Olmert's Final Divorce
From "All of Eretz Israel"

P. Sainath
The Cop-Out Election
Major Candidates, Congress, Press, All Fail in the Big Crisis

Peter Morici
The Dow Tanks as Bank Bailout Fails to Restore Confidence

Conn Hallinan
The Great Game in the Caucasus:
Bad Moves by Uncle Sam

Martha Rosenberg
Training America's Youth
Today a Pheasant, Tomorrow Osama

Binoy Kampmark
Let's Talk About Extinction:
CERN and Halo

October 6, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Futile Bailout as Darkness Falls on America

Mike Whitney
Still on the Edge of the Abyss

Tariq Ali
Goodbye to Grosvenor Square

Emily Horowitz
How People Tell Cops They're Guilty Even When They Aren't

Michael Hudson
What Did Jesus Say?
A Christian Perspective on the Paulson Bank Bailout

Ron Jacobs
Winter Soldiers and Washington's Wars

October 3 - 5, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Creatures of Capital

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

Saul Landau
The Chutzpah of Hank Paulson

Jonathan Cook
The Souring of a West Bank Romance: Israel's Army and Settlers Fall Out

Andy Worthington
The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials

Dave Marsh
Bono (Himself) Challenges Me to a Debate

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Using the IAEA to Spy on Iran

John Ross
Massacre in Morelia

Brian Cloughley
The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism

Wajahat Ali
Dueling Partners: an Interview with Tariq Ali on Pakistan

Robert Schwartz
A Serious Blow to the Rights of U.S. Workers: NLRB Limits Political Strikes

Alan Nasser
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him: a Paradigm for Today's Democrats?

David Ker Thomson
The Case for Drunk Driving

Peter Morici
Gone in 30 Days: U.S. Loses 159,000 Jobs in September

William Blum
When is a Holocaust Not a Holocaust?

William S. Lind
War on Two Fronts: Without Railroads

Michael Donnelly
The Ghost of Gen. McClellan

Thom Rutledge
On Presidential "Rule"

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Science and the 2008 Presidential Elections: a Survey of the Candidates

Dave Lindorff
Calling the Problem Early

Cindy Ellen Hill
Waging a Sustainable Peace?

Paul Krassner
Dying to Get High: the Side Effects of Medical Marijuana

Daniel White
Vietnam's Masterspy

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Absher, Gibbons and Jenkins

Website of the Weekend
How We Lost Glen Canyon: a Legal Chronology

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

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

Weekend Edition
October 10 / 12, 2008

The Long-Running Mexican Meltdown

The Sky is Falling on Mexico, Too

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

Fury at the billionaire bail-out of the criminal class that has driven Wall Street into a disaster of 9/11 dimensions festers down at the bottom of the economic food chain on Main Street USA. It is a familiar syndrome south of the border. Bailing out the super rich on the backs of the rest of us has had Mexicans seething since the great FOBAPROA scam of the mid-1990s.

The Mexican Meltdown kicked in in late 1994. The outgoing president, the reviled Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had borrowed $33 billion USD in short-term loans to keep his house of cards from crashing down before he left office. Worried about his legacy, Salinas refused to devaluate a chronically over-valued peso, leaving the dirty work to his inept successor Ernesto Zedillo. When on December 20th, the new president was forced to devalue, the peso sank from three to ten to a dollar overnight. Panicked investors pulled their money out of the country to the tune of $1.5 billion a day. Capital flight emptied out the nation's once-healthy reserves. With payback on Salinas's short-term "tesobonos" coming due daily, Mexico was staring down default by January 1995.

Meanwhile, Mexican banks, which were re-privatized just two years previous, had been stripped back to the bone. The only liquidity left in the vaults was said to be $26 billion in narco-money that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration claims is washed through the Mexican banking system annually. Interest rates were ratcheted up to 100% plus and debtors were crucified.

Encouraged by the banks, farmers had borrowed beyond their means to position themselves for the never-materialized bonanza of the North American Free Trade Agreement (TLCAN are its Spanish initials) and couldn't pay up. The banks foreclosed on family farms, ranches, machinery, and herds of livestock.

Urban borrowers, squeezed by the soaring rates, lost taxis and taco stands, their furniture and their apartments. The banks hired armed, off-duty cops who broke down the doors of the debtors, terrorizing their families. Over a thousand citizens were unlawfully jailed and charged with theft.

By February 1995, Mexico had lurched into its deepest economic slide since the Great Depression. Indeed, depression was the mood of the day. Farmers drank pesticide to end it all or poured gasoline over their bodies and immolated themselves in despair. 33 citizens leaped to their deaths before onrushing trains down in the Mexico City Metro in 1996, a record.

But other debtors organized and fought back. El Barzon which took its name from a popular depression-era tune (the "barzon" was the strap that fastened the plough to the mule team) mobilized farmers and cityslickers alike. Bank officials were tarred and feathered, highway tollbooths burnt to the ground. In Mexico City, the Barzonistas sealed bank doors shut with superglue and marched through the streets in their underwear or less or clothed only in barrels in classic Great Depression style. One day, El Barzon paraded a circus the banks had foreclosed on to the great doors of the Bank of Mexico where the elephants took dumps on the marble steps, a steaming souvenir for the hated bankers.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency told the daily business journal El Financiero that the Barzon movement was even more subversive than the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the Indian rebels in Chiapas whom Zedillo was falsely blaming for destabilizing Mexico and triggering the collapse.

Like the Cassandras of Wall Street today, the bankers cried Armageddon and the president, Zedillo, much as George Bush in the current imbroglio, stampeded congress into a monumental bail-out. FOBAPROA ("Banking Fund for the Protection of Savings") dumped $120 billion USD in bad debt on the backs of Mexican taxpayers, 20% of the nation's gross domestic product - Bush's monstrous bail-out only accounts for 7% of U.S. GDP.

Unlike the U.S. Congress's testy reaction to what is being dubbed "GRINGOPROA" here, the Mexican legislature, then dominated by the long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in connivance with the right-wing PAN, signed off on FOBAPROA without missing a beat. Only the left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) raised its voice in protest. A referendum on the bail-out organized by Lopez Obrador drummed up 2,000,000 votes against Zedillo's skam.

The cost of FOBAPROA has been incalculable. With the Mexican government obligated to shell out $8 to 10 billion USD of Mexican taxpayers hard-earned money each year to pay off the debts of deadbeat banks, social budgets have shrunk, schools and hospitals do not get built, and the nation's highway system, also privatized under Salinas and Zedillo, has fallen into dangerous disrepair.

Once the banks had been reasonably sanitized, the Zedillo government sold them off to international financial combines - Citigroup, Santander, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Spanish BBVA, and the Hong Kong-based HSBC dominate the Mexican banking industry, 90% of which is in non-Mexican hands. Now the globalization of the Mexican banking system has left it vulnerable to contagion from the collapse of Wall Street.

In fact, the gringo credit crunch has already spread south of the border. Battered by spiraling interest rates, Mexican borrowers are defaulting big time on their loans - 6.9% of all bank loans are unrecoverable. Spurred by unconscionable hand-outs of credit cards to the middle and underclasses, 8.9% of all plastic is contaminating credit markets. Constricting credit threatens 2,000,000 small businesses and doomsayers speculate that fresh crisis and a new FOBAPROA are on Mexico's plate for 2009.

The U.S. debacle, tagged the "Jazz Effect" by Argentinean president Cristina Fernandez at the United Nations General Assembly conclave last week (an insult to a uniquely American art form), has infected Mexico's economic bloodstream and the nation's well-being seems beyond recovery for the foreseeable future.

Whereas President Felipe Calderon and his 350-pound finance minister Agustin Carstens once assured suspicious investors of 3% growth in 2008, the lowest on the Latin American totem pole trailing even basket case countries like Honduras and Haiti, Merrill Lynch, itself a flattened former powerhouse just spun off to the Bank of America, has recalibrated that anemic forecast to a sickly 1.9% in light of the fall-out from the downturn in El Norte.

Sinking oil prices as energy demand tails off into a deflationary spiral will cripple investment in PEMEX, the national oil consortium Calderon so ardently wants to sell off to Big Oil - PEMEX accounts for 40% of the nation's budget. Even more ominous is the nosedive in "remesas", remittances sent south by Mexican workers in the U.S. that is the only sustenance for whole rural regions and which constitute Mexico's poverty program - one out of every four Mexican families now subsist on the remesas. Remittances are Mexico's second source of dollars, right behind petroleum.

This August, the flow of greenbacks from the north diminished by a shocking 12% and total remesas have sunk 4.4% in the first five months of 2008. Prospects for relief are dim. Mexicans working in the U.S. are the last hired and the first fired. With U.S. national unemployment topping 6% - California where more Mexicans work than any other state registered 7.9% unemployment last month and the construction industry which employs many Mexican workers is off 14% - workers are beginning to return home even though unemployment and inflation here are hitting highs not seen since the Meltdown of the 1990s.

Although the Calderon administration minimalizes the return migration, estimating that no more than 200,000 workers will come home to Mexico in coming months, many immigration watchers are calculating that the numbers could stretch into the millions. Despite labor secretary Javiar Lozano's happy face forecast that Mexico will be able to provide jobs for the returnees, it should be remembered that these workers fled to the U.S. precisely because they could not find work here.

Moreover, Mexico, which runs a serious trade deficit with the U.S., will see exports and the jobs they generate dry up in 2009. Automobile and auto parts orders, a big chunk of Mexico's export basket, have been cancelled due to sagging sales up north and workers are being laid off on both sides of the border. Manufacturing orders for border-based maquiladoras are plummeting and hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost to even lower wage countries like China in recent years.

The news gets worse. Workers' pension funds, privatized under Zedillo to allow for investment in money markets, have lost 62.5 billion pesos since the first of the year. The credit collapse has gutted the Mexican stock market as sorely as it has eviscerated U.S., European, and Asian exchanges - the Bolsa de Valores has lost over a thousand points just in the last month, panicking the nation's top Forbes list billionaires.

Carlos Slim, the world's first, second, third, or fourth richest man depending on how one measures fortunes, claims to have lost half of his in recent weeks - Slim, owner of many telephone companies in Latin America, is heavily invested in both Wall Street and the Mexican stock market where his corporations account for a third of the trading volume. The despondent Slim recently summoned the press to hear out his doom and gloom prognosis, describing the current credit crisis as far more dangerous than 1929 and anticipating deep and prolonged world recession if not Great Depression.

While the sky falls in on Mexico's future, President Felipe Calderon appears astoundingly blasé, echoing John McCain's misguided appraisal of his own economy by declaring Mexico's "fundamentally sound", an opinion he shared with brokers last week at the reeling New York Stock Exchange where he was invited to open trading by clanging the traditional bell.

Calderon's optimism was echoed by his super-sized finance minister Carstens who assures investors that "this is one crisis Mexico is prepared for." The old maxim that when Wall Street gets the sniffles, Mexico comes down with pneumonia is no longer operative, the former World Bank behemoth counsels. "Now Wall Street has pneumonia and we will only get a little cough." Such delusional reasoning invoked a chorus of coughing when Carstens went before congress recently to insist that Mexico would resist the gringo disease without resorting to cutting budgets.

Dubious observers like La Jornada financial columnist Carlos Fernandez Vega suggests that a good place to initiate cuts might be Carstens himself. Imagine how much Mexico could save in spiraling food costs if the corpulent finance secretary's intake was slashed 10% in the next budget cycle.

John Ross is wrestling with "El Monstruo" in the maw of Mexico City.  These dispatches will continue at 10-day intervals until the draft is done.  If you have further information visit www.johnross-rebeljournalist.com or johnross@igc.org

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