Today's Stories

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

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

October 2, 2008

A Message to India

Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

By P. SAINATH

"Before you do anything with your portfolio, ask yourself this: Do you still believe in capitalism?"

From The New York Times, September 20, 2008.

Nope. That's no flaming radical capturing space in The Times, but a free market believer sounding off on the front page of the  Business Section. The writer is simply making this pitch to his readers: either you believe in capitalism or you don't. And there is a rationale to his posing the question. At this point, a large number of Americans are pretty unsure what they believe in.

 Finally, it's taken the biggest crisis since the Great Depression to put the economy on the agenda of the presidential polls. Till that point, it was about who looked "more presidential."  Or John McCain's war record. Or who would wage the war in Afghanistan more aggressively. Hours went in debating who was more experienced or Sarah Palin's "energizing the base" of the Republican Party. Media analysts spewed micro details of the daily "strategizing" of the rivals. There was also endless twaddle on "change we can believe in."

 It took Wall Street's bid for collective harakiri to alter all that. Giants who advise governments across the globe on how to modernize their economy find they can't manage their own. One of the largest insurers the world has ever seen was begging for insurance for itself. Suddenly the whiz kids who had been running the world spoke up to say "Hey, you know what, we really don't know how. And could you lend us a trillion dollars to bailout? Parachutes are expensive."

 There is an element of the tragic-comic to the media trotting out "experts" to explain to their viewers and readers "how to look after your money." Who are they but  the very same deadbeats who left them clueless of any crisis through all these years; the same experts who gained from their financial links to the very institutions now going under; Wall Street insiders who still speak with the assurance and arrogance they always did about things they did nothing to warn their audiences of; editors from Forbes and the Wall Street Journal there each hour to tell you "exactly what is going on."

 Similar experts on the government-approved credit rating agencies had bestowed 'AAA' ratings on most of those companies whose last rites are now underway. The 'experts' never questioned these Triple A ratings. Maybe these now stand for Alarm, Assault & Agony. Sure, they were all rapidly downgraded to BB ratings (Better beware?). It calls for a good look at the rent-a-rating racket that now prevails. Many of those companies got their 'rating' by paying a huge fee for it.

The "$700 billion dollar 'bailout' is just the beginning. The final bill could touch one and a half trillion dollars to just clear up the mess and plug other breaches in the dyke. And so a nation with a $10 trillion debt  that could not find millions of dollars for improving education or billions of dollars for healthcare  -  now forks out close to a trillion to rescue the authors of the mess. And does that with the money of those ripped off by them. Epithets like "financial socialism" and "privatising profits, socializing losses" can now be heard even on the floor of Congress.

 It's also fascinating from the point of view of India  -  where a forced killing of public sector banks has long been on. Where the government aims to privatize those banks, among many other things. In fact, the Indian government seeks to enshrine the right of private corporations to do in India the very things that have led to the mess here in America.

 Remember the cries of rage over the "historic farm loan waiver?" How that was "fiscal imprudence"   --   at public expense? Well that at least was, in the government's own words, for hundreds of millions of distressed farmers. The $ 700 billion here is for some of Wall Street's most bloated profiteers. It is also at public expense, and is more than 43 times as large as the $16 billion bailout for millions of poor Indian farmers.

Finally, Bush reappeared in the public eye. Not in decades has a presidential address to the nation featured so many terms like "panic… depressing scenario… serious financial crisis… a long and painful recession…(and more) potential bank failures." Worse, "foreclosures (could) rise dramatically, …millions of Americans could lose their jobs." The smuggest president in U.S. history even warned that the "entire economy is in danger."

 The message was simple enough: fork out your funds for the financial barons  or face a disaster far worse than the one they've just inflicted on you. Another variant of this logic is: "Too big to fail."  The behemoths of Wall Street are so large that the earth shakes when they fall. The damage from the demise of anything their size would extract a horrible toll. So pay up to save them. The truth is that so many of them are too big to exist. They should never have been allowed to bloat to the bulk they did  -  where they now drag down the entire economy. Yet, there they are: being bailed out with the money of those they may have ruined. Those who gained from the awful growth model of the past two decades are the ones to benefit again from its downfall.

 Also fascinating from an Indian point of view: there is a clamor here now for limiting CEO compensation. Some senators threaten to make an issue of it in legislation. Remember India barely two years ago? When the CEO bloat reached such levels that even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh felt compelled to click a timid tongue in protest against 'conspicuous consumption' etc.? Remember the rage of anger in the media? For once, the media's favorite Prime Minister came in for a lashing. Curb CEO salaries -  how dare he even talk of it? These people were the risk takers and deserved their rewards and more.

Precisely the same argument was used these past years to pay unheard of salaries on Wall Street. "These people" were the true risk-takers and experts at allocating capital in ways that made life better for everyone. Now it turns out they were pretty good at transferring risk while bettering their own lives. The executives of Bear Stearns  gave themselves bonuses worth billions of dollars just weeks before the crash of their bank, which they knew was coming. So they timed their bonuses in a way that they would not be required to return them. They acted as though all was well  -   and the captive financial media asked no questions, did nothing to disturb that illusion. Just as earlier, top columnists of some of the world's most venerable financial publications were speechwriters for Enron's CEO.

The invisible hand of the market is an increasingly visible bunch of grubby paws grasping at public money. Remember the leave-it-to-the-market crowd? They're mostly occupied screaming for state intervention and public money now. The boot is on the other foot. As one famous financial daily says with obvious disgust, the present mess gives new life to  "the capitalism-is-dying-crowd."

 Never, though, underestimate the arrogance of the true Market Fundamentalist. The silence on these failures amongst great Indian devotees of that faith is striking. Criticism of any policies of the kind now bringing the chickens home to roost was for long met with contempt and derision, even at the height of the soaring food price crisis. As one editorial put it at that time: leaving the markets to do their thing would be the best way of ending hunger. But alas, governments were denying markets and free trade their life-saving role.

 However, the Prime Minister's Office, it is reported, has asked the Finance Ministry for its take on the "state of investments in Indian retail and real estate companies following the recent triple-decker crisis."  That is, the meltdown involving Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and AIG. If true, that's fascinating. What will they come up with?

But back to the polls. Both Obama and McCain support the bailout. It's as the business writer in the New York Times suggests: either you believe in capitalism or you don't.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece appears, and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. This fall he is giving a course at UC Berkeley. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com.

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