posted October 07, 2008 10:36 am

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, The Ultimate Election

Here we are, with ringside seats -- far too close for comfort -- at the Great Global Crash of '08. Nobody's quite calling it that yet, but what else could it be? All over the world yesterday stocks plummeted; the Russian and Brazilian stock indexes went down so precipitously -- 19% and 13% -- that exchanges in both countries were closed for parts of the day; the Indonesian index tumbled an unprecedented 10%; the Paris bourse, 9%; the London FTSE 100, a historic 8%; and the main German index 7%; while, at the New York Stock Exchange, the Dow Jones dipped under 10,000 on its wild ride toward the depths.

In moments like this, if you're an American, you look for ironies. And here's one appropriate to Chalmers Johnson's dispatch below. In the last year, the Bush administration's top officials have sunk much of their increasingly lame-duck energy into pacifying Iraq, and so getting it out of the news and the spotlight at least long enough for election '08 to happen (and undoubtedly long enough as well for them to get out of town in January). And then what happens? The administration is ambushed, not by Sunni militants or Shiite radicals but by its own people: investment bankers, lenders, hedge-fund managers, financial management types -- the very people for whom they organized the world and who had long been playing fast and loose (and profitably) with our economic system. The ambush, of course, took the form of a financial meltdown of massive proportions for which, as in Iraq in 2003, the administration had clearly done no significant preplanning or war-gaming. And, as with the insurgency then, so now they operated by the increasingly worn seats of their pants. Their attempted $700 billion "surge," as stock exchanges around the world indicated yesterday, wasn't likely to pacify a global financial system near cardiac arrest.

And I'm getting to that irony, if you'll just hang on. But first recall the administration's dreams only five years ago. Then, they were convinced that they would create a Pax Americana globally and a Pax Republicana domestically that would last generations. Now, "Bush's brain" Karl Rove is talking about an Obama November victory, while what Iraq started, the economic meltdown looks to be ending.

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Star-crossed bankers: The European Central Bank played a shockingly destructive role Photo: REUTERS

Investors will learn today whether the Paulson bail-out - fattened to $850bn (£480bn) by Congress - can begin to halt the death spiral in the credit system. So far, the response looks terrible.

Germany is now in the hot seat. The collapse of a rescue deal for Hypo Real Estate on Saturday threatens a €400bn (£311bn) bankruptcy that nearly matches the Lehman Brothers debacle for sheer scale.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to pull her head out of the sand, guaranteeing all German savings, a day after she rebuked Ireland for doing much the same thing. Reality intrudes.

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Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: October 06. 2008 10:38PM UAE / October 6. 2008 6:38PM GMT

TEL AVIV // No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel’s biggest taboo.

By Fahim A. Knight

This writer has done a number of similar articles pertaining to the Bilderbergers, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome, the House of Rothschild, the Federal Reserve System, etc, and how these entitles secretly rule over humanity and is covertly involved in shaping the political, economic and social dynamics of all past and present societies.

This writer had an eight grade middle school teacher at Hudson Street School in Newark, New Jersey named Ms. Kornegay and part of her teaching method was redounded teaching. It appears she was teaching the same lesson plan over and over again. So one day, I mustered up enough nerve to question my teacher about this and she simply stated repetitive instruction is one of the best methods for students to retain and learn. This writer has been using this technique ever since.

This article was written as an analysis and evaluation of the recent corporate bailout, but all knowledge is relative and interrelated and there will be some similarities to a few recent articles that this writer has recently written such as "The Pawns in the Game" and "None Dare Call it Conspiracy" and of course, all this ties into the so-called bailout. Just remember what my middle school teacher said.

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• Tracy McVeigh
• The Observer,
• Sunday October 5 2008
  

Lie back and think of an economic upturn...bathers take to the Blue Lagoon, near Reykjavik. Photograph: Bruno Morandi/Getty

The snow has arrived early in Reykjavik after an unusually long and warm summer. The freeze has brought out the ghostly green haze of the aurora borealis - the Northern Lights - the shape of which shifts dramatically across the tiny city's black skies.

The bars and restaurants of Iceland's capital are packed, the Range Rovers and BMWs are parked nose to tail all along the streets of the central 101 district, and music is pumping from a black stretch Hummer limousine cruising by.

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War Is A Racket, by Major General Smedley Butler, 1935

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In the heartland, anger that borders on rage

October 4, 2008 · 22 Comments

Letter from Michael Moore

The richest 400 Americans — that’s right, just four hundred people — own MORE than the bottom 150 million Americans combined. 400 rich Americans have got more stashed away than half the entire country! Their combined net worth is $1.6 trillion. During the eight years of the Bush Administration, their wealth has increased by nearly $700 billion — the same amount that they are now demanding we give to them for the “bailout.” Why don’t they just spend the money they made under Bush to bail themselves out? They’d still have nearly a trillion dollars left over to spread amongst themselves!

Michael Moore is right on target with his message below about what it would REALLY take to fix the economy. Unfortunately he’s missing the point.

The point of the bailout is not to rescue the U.S. economy. The point is to “make the economy scream” and take the whole world down with it, starting with us uppity Americans. The overarching objective of this takedown by the Overclass is to create a global underclass so desperate that it will beg for any slavery imposed upon it, all for the sake of a warm meal and a safe place to sleep.

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October 6, 2008

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

America has become a pretty discouraging place.  Americans, for the most part, will never know what happened to them, because they no longer have a free and responsible press.  They have Big Brother’s press.  For example, on September 28, 2008, a New York Times editorial blamed the current financial crisis on “antiregulation disciples of the Reagan Revolution.”  

What utter nonsense.  Every example of deregulation that the New York Times editorial provides is located in the Clinton Administration and the George W. Bush administration.  I was a member of the Reagan administration.  We most certainly did not deregulate the financial system.

The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking, was the achievement of the Democratic Clinton Administration. It happened in 1999, over a decade after Reagan left office.

By James Grant
Sunday, October 5, 2008; B07

Low interest rates, easy money and malleable accounting rules are what plunged Wall Street into crisis. Yet it is low interest rates, easy money and malleable accounting rules that top the list of federal fixes. The unifying theme of the new bailout bill, all 451 pages of it, is the hair of the dog that bit you.

The unblinkable fact is that Americans own too much house. We overpaid and overborrowed, and many of us are "upside down," as the car dealers say. What to do? Recognize the losses and write them off. What not to do? Inflate the currency and debase accounting standards.

But inflation and debasement are the very policies being put in place. The Federal Reserve, not waiting for Congress, embarked last month on a radical program of money-printing. Reserve Bank credit -- the raw material of bank lending -- is growing at the year-over-year rate of 61 percent.

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