Upcoming Iraq Election Seen as Key to Promote Investments in Oil Sector

With a general election in Iraq scheduled for January 2010, the U.S. is encouraging the Iraqi legislature to pass the requisite election law, while international oil corporations continue to compete for contracts to exploit Iraq’s natural energy resources. After a meeting at the White House on Tuesday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Obama said, “We are very interested, both of us, in making sure that Iraq has an election law that is completed on time so that elections can take place on time in January.” The... Read article

U.S. Filling Up With Dumb People: Chaos of Illiteracy

Part 2: Ethnic division, welfare, balkanization, clashing cultures. Over 18 million human beings starve to death in third world countries around the world annually. According to the World Health Organization,10 million of them are children that die of starvation or related conditions yearly. When you watch religious channels featuring appeals to “Save the Children” in Africa, South America and Asia, what constitutes the driving condition of their plight? Illiteracy! Culture! Profligate fecundity! At the same time,... Read article

Housing Rebound? “Not so fast”

Senate Democrats are a dogged bunch. And they’re not easily deterred from their primary duty of kowtowing the big banks. Case in point, the first-time home-buyer tax credit, the controversial bill which provides an $8,000 tax credit (re: subsidy) for new home buyers. Changes in the bill, will provide a $6,500 credit to homeowners “earning up to $250,000 for couples” if they have lived in their home for five years. The Senate is pressing ahead with the bill despite overwhelming disapproval from liberal and... Read article

Is Capitalism on the Ropes?

Interview with Michael D. Yates and Fred Magdoff… 1. Mike Whitney—In your new book, “The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know”, you allude to right wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, which promote a “free market” ideology. How successful have these organizations been in shaping public attitudes about capitalism? Do you think that attitudes are beginning to change now that people understand the role that Wall Street... Read article

Nuke Gaza: A World Gone Mad

Israeli officials are right to worry. Gazans too. Yet Americans should worry even more. Israel’s “legitimacy” will not last. Of course, that assumes its legitimacy was deserved. That issue also is now called into question in light of the consistency of Israeli behavior over the past six decades. The emerging issues are these: When and how will the recognition of Israel’s nation-state status be withdrawn? How will Tel Aviv behave in the interim? Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada... Read article

The Political Christian

“We live in a world captured, rooted and upturned by the titanic economic and techno-scientific process of the development of capitalism, which has dominated for the past two or three centuries. We know that it cannot go on ad infinitum. The future cannot be a continuation of the past, and there are signs that we have reached a point of historic crisis. The forces generated by the techno-scientific economy are enough to destroy the environment, that is to say, the material foundations of human life… Our world risks... Read article

Black Tuesday and a Return to Big Government

October 29, marks the 80th anniversary of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the event which most historians point to as the beginning of the Great Depression. On Black Tuesday, traders dumped 16 million shares in one day sending the markets into freefall. In the months that followed, stocks rallied–sometimes for long periods at a time–but the underlying economy continued to deteriorate as consumers curtailed spending and cut back sharply on credit. As a result, hundreds of banks were shuddered, thousands of businesses... Read article

After all I am a Proper Zionist Jew

I am a Holocaust survivor… Yes, I am a survivor, for I have managed to survive all the scary accounts of the Holocaust: the one about the soap (1), the one about the lamp shades, the one about the camps, the mass shooting, the one about the gas (2) and the one about the death march (3). I just managed to survive them all. In spite of all these fear inflicting stories, that were purposely installed in my soul since I opened my eyes for the first time, I have become a functional and even a successful human being. I somehow... Read article

Racism, Prejudice, Intolerance

As American As Apple Pie… Religious authorities utilized the word ‘heretic’ in the 16th century to silence or ‘slap down’ anyone that brought facts, figures and new concepts to the public. If a new scientific concept contradicted the Catholic Church, they placed the scoundrel under house arrest—such as Galileo for proving the Earth revolved around the sun. In the 50s, Joe McCarthy used the word, “He’s a communist….” to blackmail anyone that moved against his policies. Today, in the 21st century,... Read article

The Run Away Balloon – Centennial For American Ingenuity

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Falcon Heene did not ride the winds in a balloon, soaring to over 10,000 feet. The six year old was never in danger, the staged event costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, stealing the time and abusing the trust of millions of Americans. But one century ago a man was carried off in a run away balloon, his death reported in the afternoon newspapers in San Francisco. His wife was besieged by reporters eager for the sensational story and were disappointed when he walked in, covered with... Read article

Backstroking the Jewish Tomorrow

Earlier today in a conference in Jerusalem titled “Facing Tomorrow”, Israel’s leading politicians shared their vision of Israel’s future. Following the recent agreement announced by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, Mohammad ElBaradei regarding Iranian Uranium enrichment, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak called on the international community “to give Iran a deadline for halting its nuclear program and impose additional sanctions against Tehran”. For some reason the Israelis are convinced... Read article

Russia’s Daring Vote

Russia’s vote to endorse the Goldstone Gaza report in the United Nations Human Rights Council last Friday was an important, milestone event both for Palestine and for Russia. For Palestine, this vote opened a way to try and sentence Israeli mass-murderers, and thus ushered Israel into a new era of responsibility after a long period of Wild West-style, Colt-45 justice. For Russia, this vote has proved to its own country and to the world that it is free from American and Zionist diktat and able to navigate its own policy. This... Read article

Dollar Collapse Update: “Obama Demands Pay in Euros!”

The “dollar debate” on the Internet has been ferocious and emotionally-charged, but sadly lacking in logic. To oppose the “dollar will crash” theorists is like arguing a woman’s right to choose with the fist-waving throng assembled outside an abortion clinic. The results are equally disappointing. To say that “minds are already made up and the issue is settled”, is an understatement. For many, the dollar’s transition from the world’s reserve currency to a Wiemar era Deutschemark... Read article

U.S. Filling Up With Dumb People: Immigration’s Ultimate Dilemma

“Transforming the American dream into the American tragedy.” Part 1: Illiteracy leads to shoplifting, babies, crime, gangs… As an educator in Colorado through the 70s, 80s and 90s, I watched academic standards and expectations drop like a brick in a bucket of water, like a jet fighter plane auguring into the ground, like water cascading over Niagara Falls. As if guided by an invisible hand nationwide, administrators forced teachers to dumb down the academic requirements.  Teachers passed kids to the next... Read article

Dollar Trouble

The dollar is not going to crash. In fact, many economists believe that the dollar will rally when the Fed ends its quantitative easing program (QE) sometime in early 2010. The Fed is on track to buy nearly $2 trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities, US Treasuries and agency debt. In other words, the Fed is printing money and pumping it into the housing market to keep the market from collapsing. This keeps interest rates low, but it also weakens the dollar. When the program ends, long-term interest rates will rise... Read article

What Big Teeth You Have!

All The Better To Eat You With… You Tube has a video of David Rothkopf speaking a few months ago about his book, “The Superclass” at Middlebury College in Vermont.  Chris Ortiz picked it up on the Chalcedon Blog (View it here.) and Covenant News as well.  It is an interesting video that provides lots of startling statistics on the huge and growing disparity of wealth in the world. Unfortunately Rothkopf is an insider who is urging the formation of world government as a solution to the massive and growing... Read article

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