contributions

Rarely in American elections are we afforded the opportunity to choose a leader who will reach beyond the limitations of party politics. By the latter I do not refer to the usual condemnations of partisanship. If anything, in the post 9-11 world we have seen too little partisanship. As a result, the titular party of opposition, even with control of both houses of Congress, has become a party of complicity.
Rather, it is the influence born of corporate sponsorship controlling both major (…)

* This Editorial from El Libertario (#54, September-October 2008, Venezuela) examines – from the current Venezuelan perspective – how authoritarian power builds its own security upon the destruction of collective security.
Civil insecurity is a problem that has certainly been inherited by the so-called Bolivarian government, the product of, among other things, an immense social debt with large sectors of the population, getting worse to the point of being considered the mayor problem (…)

International Trade Seizing Up Due to Banking Crisis (Updated)
I have been more than a tad concerned about near-paralysis in the money markets and imploding equity prices. But this e-mail, from a well connected international investor not prone to alarm or (normally) the use of capital letters says that the banking crisis is staring to bring international shipping to a halt.
By way of background, letters of credit of various sorts are essential for trade. For instance, imagine the (…)

Rome, 8 Oct. (AKI) - An American veteran of the first Gulf War in Iraq claims that the United States dropped a five-kilotonne nuclear bomb in 1991 in a deserted area outside the southern city of Basra on the Iranian border. The claim by US war veteran
A US war veteran has accused the Pentagon of launching a nuclear attack on southern Iraq in the final day of the first Persian Gulf War.
Jim Brown, a mechanic in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division at the time, told Italian state news channel (…)

Who am I to declare a panic? Don’t worry about that yet; just stock up on a little cash and canned goods. When everything the feds do JUST MAKES THINGS WORSE — we are in a panic. Not just grandpa’s Depression, but a good old-fashioned running-scared panic when the shelves go bare (you can see it sporadically in some Targets now) because the stores or their venders run short on ready cash. A panic is a time when people hoard things and wait to be rewarded with lower prices, which of (…)

Pimping Palin By Peter Fredson October 9, 2008
When worried about dropping polls how do you create a powerful distraction? Well, basically, you resort to the oldest trick in the book of humanity. You use sex. After all, billions are spent on merchandising cigarettes, cars, boats, anything... by posing a pretty model next to the goods for sale.
Thus McCain has gambled, in his unpredictable way, that sex will sell his spoiled ideology. To make people forget about losing homes, (…)

By David Glenn Cox
When 90-year-old Addie Polk put the gun to her chest and pulled the trigger she was seeking an escape from foreclosure. The first shot failed to do the job so the elderly widow pulled the trigger a second time as Sheriff’s deputies waited on the porch to serve her with an eviction notice. She was rescued by her neighbor, Robert Dillion, who grabbed a ladder and climbed in a back window. Sheriff’s deputies were kind enough to radio for paramedics.
Mrs. Addie Polk and (…)

Marines with long beards and without uniforms
Posted on October 8, 2008 by Moin Ansari
There have been reports of US incursions into Pakistan. This report clearly discusses the good, the bad and the ugly
JALALABAD, Afghanistan – U.S. military officials don’t talk about our secret war in Pakistan.
Don’t even ask, I was told, on U.S. military bases in Afghanistan at Bagram and Jalalabad.
Don’t ask about the remotely-controlled American drones armed with missiles that are now (…)

http://internationalnews.over-blog.com/article-22718571.html

by Peter Whoriskey
Less than a week after the federal government offered an $85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company held a week-long retreat for its executives at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., running up a tab of $440,000, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said today at the the opening of a House committee hearing about the near-failure of the insurance giant.
Showing a photograph of the resort, Waxman said the executives spent $200,000 for rooms, (…)