Dissent Mag

Joanna Walters
The Observer,
Sunday April 20 2008

With news last week of a Wall Street trader earning $3.7bn from the mortgage crisis, even the wealthy are starting to question the morals of money, reports Joanna Walters in New York

The ‘American dream’ of unashamed wealth and the opportunity for all to acquire it has reached a crisis point before: in the Depression, the oil shock, in the ‘greed is good’ Eighties and the madness of the dotcom bubble.

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Stratcom is the Main Threat to Peace on the Korea Peninsula

By KO YOUNG-DAE

After the September 11 attacks, by the Bush administration’s decision, the USSTRATCOM began to develop a close relationship with the Korean Peninsula. On December 31, 2001, Bush submitted the Nuclear Posture Review, which defined Russia, China, and the so-called “rogue states”–North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya–as potential targets of pre-emptive nuclear strikes. Moreover, North Korea and Iraq, unlike the other three nations, were singled out as “chronic military concerns.” Since Iraq is under US occupation, only North Korea remains as a “chronic military concern.”

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CounterPunch Diary

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

John McCain’s been getting kid-glove treatment from the press for years, ever since he wriggled free of the Keating scandal and his profitable association – another collaboration, you might say — with the nation’s top bank swindler in the 1980s. But nothing equals the astounding tact with which his claque on the press bus avoids the topic of McCain’s collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he’d been shot down.

Note - video “POW’s Say John McCain Is A Lying Skunk !!!!!”  and “Vietnam Veterans Against McCain” below the article

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By William Bowles

19/04/08 “Creative-i ” — –Using food as a weapon is as old as the siege but today’s barbarians have upped the anté by several orders of magnitude.

“…There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly. Or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way. There are, of course, many ways in which the death rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, war can accomplish it very quickly and decisively.

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by Jerry D. Rose / April 20th, 2008

Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News have rightly been criticized for focussing on “gotcha” type questions in the presidential “debate” of April 16. Whether asking about Clinton’s misrepresentation of her experience in war-torn Bosnia or Obama’s relation to pastor Jeremiah Wright, the questions served the prurient interests of viewers about alleged personal weaknesses of the candidates, leaving little time, as Obama complained, for them to talk about substantive policy issues. With this in mind, I offer a few questions that were not asked but which are the “tough” questions that American voters need to have asked on their behalf. Each one is “confrontational,” and would probably have made both candidates uncomfortable, but for a good public benefit.

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By Aseem Shrivastava

12 February, 2008
Countercurrents.org

“I would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.”
- John Maynard Keynes

“London is the whole world in one city.”
- London Mayor Ken Livingstone, July 2005

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Thoughts on Holocaust Memorial Day.

by Felicity Arbuthnot

Global Research, January 28, 2008

It is seventeen years since America and Britain embarked on their ‘Final Solution’ for the population of Iraq.

The forty two day carpet bombing, enjoined by thirty two other countries, against a country of just twenty five million souls, with a youthful, conscript army, with broadly half the population under sixteen, and no air force, was just the beginning of a United Nations led, global siege of near mediaeval ferocity.

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April 20, 2008 By Carl Bloice
Source: The Black Commentator

Carl Bloice’s ZSpace Pag

Don’t take it from me. The august Financial Times said it last Saturday: ‘It is not just the credit crisis. Popular fears of globalization, discontent with high oil and food prices, rising income inequality within nations - all have contributed to an uncertain time for capitalism. The capitalists have certainly not helped.’

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