Snow job
The bail out bill worked: it passed, and investors are bailing out.
--Stirling Newberry
So, our first snow came Friday, pretty steadily for awhile though nothing stuck on pavement, in my area anyway. A little potluck last night to kind of celebrate the summer hiking. Pretty good turnout, though the weather might have kept some people away. As far as the election goes, Al Giordano predicts a big win for Obama. Looks like Giordano was tracking things correctly. I have to hand it to him, even if I don't share his enthusiasm for Obama. I guess Tarpley has to be credited a bit, too, as there is a realignment going on, at least for this election. Will it last, and will it matter?
Calamitous as the current economic crisis is, it was both predictable and predicted. History as they say is prologue.
--Geraldine Perry
The United States has lost its pointless war against the people of Afghanistan. Yet both the "progressive" standard-bearer and the "conservative" stalwart have sworn to expand the conflict. Both have internalized the rhetoric and beliefs of a violent imperial project. Both men have shown themselves too weak in truth to escape the fear of appearing weak in the false light of militarism.
--Chris Floyd
Frankly if I was a Republican at this point I would be satisfied in passing my agenda through the Democrats, having them get blamed for it, and then running against them at a future date.
--It's Over--We Lost
The roots of the economic crisis tap directly into a movement within American fundamentalism. Much has been made of Palin's Pentecostalism but her links to The Family go unnoticed.
--Jeff Sharlet
With every panic-filled day, it becomes clearer that the American people are on their own--uniquely so in the industrialized world. As the financial shocks emanating from Wall Street circle the globe, extinguishing trillions in paper values with every circumnavigation, citizens of other developed, western nations can take comfort in their national social safety nets--for the time being--and in the less tangible but far more crucial social compact among citizens, that springs from the struggles that built those safety nets. European social democracy, despite its vast failings, nevertheless exists as an ideology and history that is an elemental property of western European societies. "Labor" and "workers" parties at least pretend to serve their nominal constituencies. In whatever way European working people and progressives decide to confront the global meltdown, they are fortunate to have rudimentary tools at hand.
--Glen Ford
Cunliffe’s history of Europe is not a history of the emergence of nation states. He has no desire to trace the history of this or that nation, or to find in the movements of population which he traces some legitimising deep history of the nation state as an institution. He never falls into the anachronism of projecting nation states backwards in time and inscribing them on the geography of Europe. His Europe, from 9000 BC to AD 1000, is a Europe without nation states, which is as it should be.
--Ann Talbot
[They] call me ‘the socialist painter.’ I accept that title with pleasure. I am not only a socialist but a democrat and a Republican as well--in a word, a partisan of all the revolution and above all a Realist ... for ‘Realist’ means a sincere lover of the honest truth.
--Gustave Courbet (quoted by Clare Hurley)
Faced with dwindling poll numbers and an increasingly hostile political environment created by the economy’s dizzying downward spiral, the Republican campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin has responded with a virulently right-wing appeal directed to the most politically backward layers in America.
--Bill Van Auken
What has emerged are the outlines of two opposite approaches to the unfolding crisis. The Paulson plan is now clearly part of a project to create three colossal global financial giants--Citigroup, JP MorganChase and, of course, Paulson’s own Goldman Sachs, now conveniently enough a bank. Having used fear and panic to wrestle a $700 billion bailout from the US taxpayers, now the big three will try to use their unprecedented muscle to ravage European banks in the years ahead. So long as the world’s largest financial credit rating agencies--Moody’s and Standard & Poors--are untouched by the scandals and congressional hearings, the reorganized US financial power of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase could regroup and advance their global agenda over the coming several years, walking over the ashes of a bankrupt American economy made bankrupt by their follies.
--F. William Engdahl
The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [profit takers], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
--Adam Smith (quoted by Eric Walberg)
--Stirling Newberry
So, our first snow came Friday, pretty steadily for awhile though nothing stuck on pavement, in my area anyway. A little potluck last night to kind of celebrate the summer hiking. Pretty good turnout, though the weather might have kept some people away. As far as the election goes, Al Giordano predicts a big win for Obama. Looks like Giordano was tracking things correctly. I have to hand it to him, even if I don't share his enthusiasm for Obama. I guess Tarpley has to be credited a bit, too, as there is a realignment going on, at least for this election. Will it last, and will it matter?
Calamitous as the current economic crisis is, it was both predictable and predicted. History as they say is prologue.
--Geraldine Perry
The United States has lost its pointless war against the people of Afghanistan. Yet both the "progressive" standard-bearer and the "conservative" stalwart have sworn to expand the conflict. Both have internalized the rhetoric and beliefs of a violent imperial project. Both men have shown themselves too weak in truth to escape the fear of appearing weak in the false light of militarism.
--Chris Floyd
Frankly if I was a Republican at this point I would be satisfied in passing my agenda through the Democrats, having them get blamed for it, and then running against them at a future date.
--It's Over--We Lost
The roots of the economic crisis tap directly into a movement within American fundamentalism. Much has been made of Palin's Pentecostalism but her links to The Family go unnoticed.
--Jeff Sharlet
With every panic-filled day, it becomes clearer that the American people are on their own--uniquely so in the industrialized world. As the financial shocks emanating from Wall Street circle the globe, extinguishing trillions in paper values with every circumnavigation, citizens of other developed, western nations can take comfort in their national social safety nets--for the time being--and in the less tangible but far more crucial social compact among citizens, that springs from the struggles that built those safety nets. European social democracy, despite its vast failings, nevertheless exists as an ideology and history that is an elemental property of western European societies. "Labor" and "workers" parties at least pretend to serve their nominal constituencies. In whatever way European working people and progressives decide to confront the global meltdown, they are fortunate to have rudimentary tools at hand.
--Glen Ford
Cunliffe’s history of Europe is not a history of the emergence of nation states. He has no desire to trace the history of this or that nation, or to find in the movements of population which he traces some legitimising deep history of the nation state as an institution. He never falls into the anachronism of projecting nation states backwards in time and inscribing them on the geography of Europe. His Europe, from 9000 BC to AD 1000, is a Europe without nation states, which is as it should be.
--Ann Talbot
[They] call me ‘the socialist painter.’ I accept that title with pleasure. I am not only a socialist but a democrat and a Republican as well--in a word, a partisan of all the revolution and above all a Realist ... for ‘Realist’ means a sincere lover of the honest truth.
--Gustave Courbet (quoted by Clare Hurley)
Faced with dwindling poll numbers and an increasingly hostile political environment created by the economy’s dizzying downward spiral, the Republican campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin has responded with a virulently right-wing appeal directed to the most politically backward layers in America.
--Bill Van Auken
What has emerged are the outlines of two opposite approaches to the unfolding crisis. The Paulson plan is now clearly part of a project to create three colossal global financial giants--Citigroup, JP MorganChase and, of course, Paulson’s own Goldman Sachs, now conveniently enough a bank. Having used fear and panic to wrestle a $700 billion bailout from the US taxpayers, now the big three will try to use their unprecedented muscle to ravage European banks in the years ahead. So long as the world’s largest financial credit rating agencies--Moody’s and Standard & Poors--are untouched by the scandals and congressional hearings, the reorganized US financial power of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase could regroup and advance their global agenda over the coming several years, walking over the ashes of a bankrupt American economy made bankrupt by their follies.
--F. William Engdahl
The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [profit takers], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
--Adam Smith (quoted by Eric Walberg)