Dissent Mag

By ANDREW COCKBURN

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, “unprecedented in its scope.”

(more…)

Posted on May 2, 2008

By Jeff Madrick

It would be a pity if Peter Gosselin’s new book, “High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families,” gets lost in the current turmoil over subprime mortgages and deepening recession. He has done the most convincing job I’ve seen in capturing the failures of America to deal with a changing, complex and far less generous economy than it has known in the past. That economy, despite cyclically painful periods, was so generous compared to the rest of the world over its 200-year history in terms of the rate at which it expanded the typical American’s standard of living that the country’s national character was formed by it. The resulting tendency in America, though thankfully violated from time to time, is decidedly toward a laissez faire philosophy of government.

(more…)

By Clayton Dach, Adbusters. Posted May 3, 2008.

Armed with potent drugs and new technology, a dangerous breed of soldiers are being trained to fight America’s future wars.

Amphetamines and the military first met somewhere in the fog of WWII, when axis and allied forces alike were issued speed tablets to head off fatigue on the battlefield.

More than 60 years later, the U.S. Air Force still doles out dextro-amphetamine to pilots whose duties do not afford them the luxury of sleep.

(more…)

By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com. Posted April 28, 2008.

Why don’t Americans rise up against the kleptocracy like they did in the late nineteenth century?

Note: Steve Fraser’s book on our financial “masters of the universe” from the eighteenth century to the present, Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, has just been published.

Google “second Gilded Age” and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: it’s a matter of déjà vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened “gilded” in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?

(more…)

Posted: 2008/05/02

Brown
(Bloomberg)

Gulf states are considering dropping their pegs to the dollar after the U.S. currency’s decline stoked inflation across the region, Kuwaiti Finance Minister Mustafa al- Shimali said.

“Yes, there are some” Gulf Cooperation Council states considering dropping their pegs to the dollar, which has fallen 13 percent against the euro in the last 12 months, al-Shimali said in an interview in Kuwait late yesterday without naming the countries. “Some countries will do what we are doing.”

(more…)

Posted: 2008/04/27

by Arianna Huffington
(LA Times)

The heart of the problem is not the bias of Fox News or the blowhards on AM talk radio but a mainstream media that has completely internalized how the right frames all political debate. The right-wing message has become a part of the news media’s DNA.

(more…)

By Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky’s ZSpace Page

Not long ago, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the presidential campaign, as it was in the mid-term election of 2006. But it has virtually disappeared, eliciting some puzzlement. There should be none.

(more…)

Global Research, May 2, 2008

by Michel Chossudovsky

Humanity is undergoing in the post-Cold War era an economic and social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the World population. National economies are collapsing, unemployment is rampant. Local level famines have erupted in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America. This “globalization of poverty” –which has largely reversed the achievements of post-war decolonization– was initiated in the Third World coinciding with the debt crisis of the early 1980s and the imposition of the IMF’s deadly economic reforms.

(more…)