By:
Mike Finnigan on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 8:00 AM - PST
DownWithTyranny! A crime of epic proportions
The Largest Minority: Occupied Gaza’s only power plant has been shut down due to a fuel shortage on the third day of the Israeli blockade.
p m carpenter’s commentary: Pondering last weekend’s triumph of conservatism
The Existentialist Cowboy: Economic tsunami…
Corrente: Triangulation: The next generation
The Opinion Mill: Bookchat
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Stock Markets Plunge in Asia and Europe
New York Times, United States - 35 minutes ago
Not good.
We’re Lucky Wall Street is closed today.
This could get ugly.
If Gaza’s “occupied” it’s by the “Palestinians”!
They are getting plenty of fuel, and have days’ worth stored. The “Palestinians” are just good whiners. Too bad no one mentions the hundreds of rockets landing in Israel that caused this. We know where you’re coming from. You are buying the “palestinians” PR.
The crash is here-
http://www.marketwatch.com/
Hope y’all enjoy Black Tuesday, ‘thank I’m a gonna go cut some brush …hehehe
— Your Presididn’t,
George.
This is going to be a rough week. Fastening your seat belts may not be enough for this ride. Better superglue yourselves to the floorboards and pray for God’s mercy.
While bush’s personal war has been raging in Iraq, being fought solely to feed the Military Industrial Complex, the same one that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about, the other war, The War Against the American People has continued to rage on. All the while with the bush’s looking at it with the same Barbara bush Eye’s that saw the people of NOLA “better off, since they lived so lowly anyway”.
Hopefully America has awakened from it’s long slumber and, finding their Wallets Empty and food prices skyrocketing, their home worth less than ever and the Economy in general sliding into a bottomless pit where only the wealthiest top 2% can survive, …….. maybe, just maybe they will find their ways to the Voting Places and empty (The Whitehouse) which has become a great garbage pail that is stinking up not only our country, but now the rest of the world.
Congratulations everyone outside the Gulf Coast!
Katrinafication has enveloped you.
And there will be no rescue.
This is not good.
L.A. Confidential @ 9:
It appears bush’s Legacy is Disaster’s, one after the other.
The power guys in the U.S. and elsewhere don’t want an economic collapse.
They’ll engineer a bailout.
The best bailout of all is a BF war. Look at what WWII did for a U.S. econmy in funk.
The arms merchants can make money selling weapons to the “other side,” whoever that may be. Think Prescott Bush.
I feel a BF war coming on.
Well, guess theres no Capitalism like Disaster Capitalism …
L.A. Confidential @ 9:
Agreed. As they always said in “Star Wars”:
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
I filed for bankruptcy just before the laws changed in ‘05, due to an ugly divorce from a substance abusing spouse. I had tried to pay off the 30K credit debt for seven years and ended up with basically the same balances. The banks were charging me 24%+ interest rates and wouldn’t even talk to me (Hey Suze Ormann - Go f**k yourself!). I felt giving them back three times what I borrowed was quite enough. I haven’t used a credit card in a decade.
As one poster at another site once said, “If I can’t afford it, I don’t need it.”
But that may be changing.
Che’s Lounge @ 13:
It could get extremely ugly in the United States of America once everyone realizes that all of their dreams are destroyed and they can only expect the bleakness of perpetual poverty and scarcity in their future.
Hey, what is one person’s disaster is another’s opportunity.
Think positive.
VietVet8666 @ 15:
There is no shortage of opportunity’s. Only the capital-support-backing to bring them to market.
And by opportunity I do not mean the next latest and greatest microwave pepperoni hot pocket or plasma TV.
MLK Day
January 21, 2008
Obama Was Fortunate He Wasn’t Busted During Bill Clinton’s Administration …
Playing the Race Card
By KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY
Counterpunch.org
I hesitantly step into the Hillary Clinton - Barack Obama family scuffle over South Carolina’s black vote. Both candidates are products of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton is a DLC star, chair of its American Dream Initiative touting free markets, balanced budgets and middle-class know-how, while Obama’s political action committee, the Hope Fund, has raised money for half of the DLC’s representatives in the Senate. This is how America measures progress: the DLC, founded as a vehicle for pro-business Southern white men, is now the arena advancing a black man and a white woman who talk as if the more populist Southern white man in the race were invisible.
The “controversy” over Clinton’s Martin Luther King comment (”it took a president to make the dream a reality”) was, if anything, a set up to push Obama to talk race, something he has taken pains to avoid beyond the occasional King quote he tosses into the mix. Talking race in a white media echo chamber works to Clinton’s advantage. First, it is a subtle nod to subconscious and not so subconscious racism. Secondly, it gives her the chance to expound upon the Clintons’ fictional race history with blacks.
What Bill knows, Hill knows. And Southern politician Bill Clinton has always played race politics to perfection. Many have perhaps forgotten about Bill, speaking in the last pulpit King stood in, telling blacks in 1993 how disappointed “Dr. King would be [in them] if he were alive today”, because of black on black crime. “Crime” has long been a white politician’s code to signal, “I can stick it to blacks.” In his first presidential race Governor Clinton supported the death penalty at a time when the country was split almost down the middle on the issue. For good measure, he made sure to oversee the execution of convicted killer Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man, in the heat of the primaries…Then right in time for the Southern primaries in 1992 he posed with Georgia Senator Sam Nunn in front of a phalanx of black inmates in white prison suits at Stone Mountain, Georgia, second home of the Ku Klux Klan. That picture appeared in newspapers across the South the day people went to the polls. It was Clinton’s way to reassure racists.
Now, I have no expectations of Obama taking up race issues or attacking policies that have disparate negative racial implications. I have no expectation of him highlighting his blackness. He isn’t running to be “president of black America” (at least not yet). His message is of the elusive and metaphoric “one America” as opposed to John Edwards’ “two Americas” divided between the “haves and have-nots.” Yet, as Clinton discovered before she started appealing to women and ripping off some of Edwards’ with-the-people rhetoric, looking ahead and tryin g to run a general election campaign in the midst of primary battles can bring problems. For Obama, it has meant ignoring what should be his natural base black voters. That is, until he needed them….In politics you start with a base. Yet either the Obama campaign is attempting to reverse the process, or he doesn’t see black voters as his base, or he thinks the majority of blacks will vote race without courting. Of course he can’t openly appeal to black people to vote for him solely on race, although several of his supporters on black talk radio have demanded that blacks do just that. The irony is that Hillary Clinton is openly appealing to blacks to vote for her solely on Bill. One of the reasons the battle between Clinton and Obama seems so personal at times is that Clinton considers black voters her natural base, and Obama the upstart usurper who didn’t wait his turn. It’s almost as if, like a disappointed patrician, she were saying, “After all we’ve done for you people” Meanwhile, neither she nor Obama is taking on the weighty substance of our issues….It would be perilous for Obama to respond to “Friend of Bill” Bob Johnson, founder of BET, on yet another insinuation about his past drug use. It only keeps the drug-using (and, implied, dealing) black guy stereotype alive. Johnson’s comments were deplorable — especially coming from a person who made his money on the exploitation of rump shaking and rap music while simultaneously removing news and public affairs from BET…
Read the entire article @:
http://www.counterpunch.org/gray01212008.html
I’m buying cardboard now. Condos,sleep mats,rain shelter.
you know if the gop
christianreichwingnuts wants to take over America, then they need to agree to one little bitty exception in the bible to be administered by all the other political parties. instead of letting the other parties use god’s plague and instead of killing the first born of the gop families, the other political parties get to eliminate ALL the spawn legal and illegal of the gopchristianreichwingnuts. fair is fair.sandra rosenthal @ 3:
aren’t you the most
sensitivefuckingchristianwhore for god.wisedup @ 18:
just think of how better off wed be if clinton never got nafta passed if bush had died at birth if thierd never been an iraq war you forgot cardboards great for building coffins for the palpers burials, and after bush and clinton they will be filling cardboard boxes faster then the wrappup lines at maytag!
opps forgot thiers no more maytag !never mind!
A big crash is probably the only thing that will wake Americans up.
Were right on the precipice.
In less then 24 hours the shit could hit the fan.
L.A. Confidential @ 23:
dont worry i still got my ak and colt!
We are poised for a MAJOR market crash tomorrow morning.
The God Damn Feds and Bush Co better have a GOD DAMNED plan before that opening bell tomorrow morning.
L.A. Confidential @ 25:
thier options are still on the table!paraguay or any country they dont allow hangings!
tyree @ 26:
Exactly.
Market woes? Time for the Bush/Obama tax cuts!
but , but shouldnt we be more worried that israels under attack from the people they stole thier prommised land from? after all it is a democracy er maby not!
The Existentialist Cowboy post is a must read
Summary
““It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Johan Stein, who helps manage the equivalent of about $14 billion at Nordea Asset Management in Stockholm. “The financial system is in terrible shape, and no one knows where this will end.”
`This is a stock-market crisis,” said Alberto Roldan, head of research at Inverseguros SVB in Madrid. “Investors believe that neither a government package nor a huge rate cut is going to help evade a recession in the U.S.”
Wall Street has a plan to keep Free Market Capitalism from freefalling.
When the market falls to a certain percentage of total value(not assets), the market just simply shuts down.
The amazing thing to me is that in one day $ billions in value will simply vaporize as if hit by a Neutron Bomb.
All of this speculation on the future value of stock is what has been keeping the markets up the last few years.
Price to earnings ratios and liquid assets were once the darlings of investors, now it is promises of rosy future valuation of stock prices.
Personally I do not want the Federal Government to piss away the future of my children by throwing more money at this self inflicted problem.
It may take austere measures to correct this giant mess that was created by Greenspan/Reagan,Cinton/Bush,and a complicit Congress, but a little good old fashioned adult sucking it up may have to take place.
sandra rosenthal @ 3:
How backwards is this? Constant airstrikes against Palestinians in Gaza that ARE KILLING PEOPLE(as if every hamas militant has a T-shirt that says “I’m part of Hamas), complete destruction of their economy- and Gaza IS SUPPOSED TO BE OCCUPIED By the palestinians. You just bought into the Israeli PR by saying that its the cheap rockets hitting an actual target once every 2 years that is causing the oppression.
Mr. XXXX @ 17:
I would like to know what this stupid story has to do with what we are talking about HERE?
Re Carpenter’s post: Lots of knowledgeable folks have said that Clinton won in Nevada because her ground forces were better organized and did a better job of getting their supporters to the caucuses. Carpenter says that Clinton won because Democratic voters went with the most conservative option.
In a situation like this we would all do well to remind ourselves about the phenomenon of the “confirmation bias”–that is, the unconscious inclination to notice and heed information that supports what we already believe… and simultaneously to fail to notice and heed information what would undermine what we already believe.
For example, it could be that a majority of Nevada’s Dems actually support Edwards’ populist platform, but that Edwards’ people did an inadequate job of getting those Dems to the ballot box. And, simultaneously, that a minority of Nevada Dems support Clinton’s DLC, right-of-center, business as usual platform, but her people did an excellent job of getting those conservatives actually to vote. You know, 10% of 100 voters will always lose to 40% of 50 voters.
I’m not arguing that that’s what happened, mind you. How would I know? I’m just saying that any trustworthy analysis has to balance the weight of ideology etc. against the weight of old-fashioned feet-on-the-ground, voices-on-the-phone, emails-in-the-box, we’ll-provide-transportation organizing. Focus on either to the exclusion of the other, and your argument lacks full credibility.
♥♂ Angry Guy @ 7:
fat chance! there’s still Diebold.
Scarabus @ 35:
In a word: DIEBOLD!
Che’s Lounge @ 13:
I’ve been there, too!
L.A. Confidential @ 25:
you don’t really EXPECT them to offer anything other than more money for the rich, do you?
The Market Crash Today: What You’re Not Being Reminded Of
To “dadam”: Make sense. I don’t understand anything you said. Please elaborate
To “Shoalb Qadri”: The “Palestinians” are victims of their own corrupt regime. If they had any guts they would fight it. They are perennial and professional “victims” and always will be. They will always be a basket case to be propped up by the rest of the world.
sandra rosenthal @ 41:
No they are victims of Israeli occupation. What a complete insult- have you ever seen Gaza with your own eyes? They do have guts which is why they fight against the occupation all the time. Israel likes to act as if everything is at peace until the “evil palestinians” fire a rocket into Israel proper. But they ignore the constant murders, deprivation of trade and everyday life they force into the palestinian lives. Murderers and thugs on both sides should not be exalted, but to say that the collective punishment and suffering of the palestinians is all a clever “act” is exactly why this problem will continue.