Dissent Mag

Roubini’s Nightmare Scenario

by Mike Whitney

Global Research, March 13, 2008

“It’s another round of the credit crisis. Some markets are getting worse than January this time. There is fear that something dramatic will happen and that fear is feeding itself,” Jesper Fischer-Nielsen, interest rate strategist at Danske Bank, Copenhagen, Reuters)

Yesterday’s action by the Federal Reserve proves that the banking system is insolvent. It also shows that the Fed is willing to intervene directly in the stock market if it keeps equities propped up. This is clearly a violation of its mandate and runs contrary to the basic tenets of a free market. Investors who shorted the market yesterday, got clobbered by the not so invisible hand of the Fed chief.

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By Robert Fisk

19 March, 2008
The Independent

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell-disaster”.

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By Mary Louise

The CIA’s secret activities, covert missions, and connections of control are all done under the pretense and protection of national security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds. Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think, say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture. The CIA is the President’s secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.

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By Jim Lobe, IPS News. Posted March 19, 2008.

The official reasons haven’t held up.

So why, exactly, did the U.S. invade Iraq five years ago this week?

The official reasons — the threat posed to the U.S. and its allies by Saddam Hussein’s alleged programs of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the possibility that he would pass along those arms to al Qaeda — have long since been discarded by the overwhelming weight of the evidence, or, more precisely, the lack of evidence that such a threat ever existed.

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