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Sunday, September 21, 2008 |
JustWorldNews: "The eventual size of the US taxpayers' bailout to the troubled financial sector is unknown, but it is bound to be gargantuan. This morning, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee said it could go as high as a trillion dollars. Actually, it could go considerably higher than that.
You thought the Iraq war was expensive? The latest cost estimate I heard for that was $859 billion. But that was a week ago.
If there is a silver lining in the still unfolding financial crisis, it is that it gives all of us who are US citizens the chance to re-imagine at a fairly deep level what our country might become in the years ahead. This, for two reasons:
1. The market-fundamentalist approach that has dominated economic policy in the country since at least the Reagan era has proven itself destabilizing, anti-humane, and structurally broken. We have a great opportunity to imagine - and to work to bring into being - something fundamentally different.
2. The fact that the US's citizenry will all become co-equal 'owners' of a huge chunk of the country's financial infrastructure means that we are all stakeholders in how its should be rebuilt. We should take this responsibility quite seriously and ensure that no groups of citizens are marginalized from having their voice heard and or from having their numbers-proportionate say in what should be done. This is certainly not a matter only for the (previous or current) owners of corporate and financial wealth, or the technocrats and economic 'whizz-kids' who have largely dominated public discussions of these matters until now. It is all of our responsibility.
So now we, our legislators, and our next president will all have to suddenly think very 'large' about what to do with these big new commitments Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke have bequeathed us with. So let's think just a little larger still. Let's think about what the point of all this 'wealth' and all this stuff is. Is it to enable a few superstars of the stage, screen, ballpark, or news-anchor's desk to become even more unimaginably wealthy that before? Or is it to start over at trying to build a national community that values everyone, and that supports everyone to live up to her or his maximum human potential?"
11:06:40 AM 
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Guardian: "On September 10 President Evo Morales of Bolivia declared the US ambassador persona non grata. On September 11 (the 35th anniversary of the military overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile) the president of Venezuela asked the US ambassador there to leave the country. President Hugo Chávez believed he was facing the possibility of an imminent coup d'etat in which he said the US administration were involved. President Morales believed that his government was facing serious destabilisation which was also being fomented by the US. A third country, Paraguay, announced 10 days previously that it had detected a conspiracy involving military officers and opposition politicians.
Latin America now faces its most serious crisis since the reintroduction of democracy at the end of the 20th century. The plot against democracy in Venezuela centred on a conspiracy, revealed in telephone conversations between senior military officers broadcast on national television, to assassinate the democratically elected head of state. In Bolivia, the separatist prefects of the five eastern and southern departments have begun a campaign of violence and economic sabotage designed to destabilise the democratic regime.
These events show unequivocally who defends democracy and who threatens it today. We are appalled by the failure of much of the international media to provide accurate and proportionate coverage of these events. All democrats throughout should rally to defend democracy in Latin America.
Harold Pinter, John Pilger, Tony Benn, Ken Loach, Jean Lambert MEP, Ian Gibson MP, Kelvin Hopkins MP, Billy Hayes, General secretary, CWU, Bill Greenshields, President, NUT, and 23 others."
11:02:19 AM
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Independent: "An Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear installations would destabilise the region and open a new battlefront which could have a damaging effect on Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior American army commander said yesterday."
11:00:04 AM
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Newsweek: "GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made news when she confirmed her belief that Georgia belonged in NATO, even if it meant that 'perhaps' the United States would have to go to war with Russia.
But things are viewed differently beyond the Beltway. The NGO Freedom House puts the country in the same category as Venezuela and Nigeria in its most recent study, rating Georgia less free and democratic than Moldova, Ukraine and every EU and NATO membership candidate. Lincoln Mitchell, a Georgia expert and Columbia University professor, says Georgian democracy suffers from having no real line between state and party, and while it has made great economic strides under President Mikheil Saakashvili, he has never created a meaningful judiciary, has weakened the legislature and has centralized executive power. If anything, the country is becoming less democratic, according to Freedom House. In November 2007, Saakashvili cracked down on antigovernment demonstrators in front of Parliament, declared martial law and shut down a private television network.
Europeans have never subscribed to this black-and-white narrative, a fact that would suggest another possibility about Georgia and NATO: it's just not ready."
Civil: "President Saakashvili said it was 'a gross misinterpretation' when alleging that Georgia miscalculated in its actions in South Ossetia this August.
When asked at BBC's HARDtalk if his administration's 'enormous miscalculation' was in the heart of what had happened, Saakashvili responded: 'I think it's a gross misinterpretation to call it miscalculation.'
Speaking at a U.S. foreign relations committee hearing, William Burns, the under-secretary of state for political affairs, said on September 17 that a 'serious [Georgian] miscalculation' was also partly to blame for the August war."
TheAmericanConservative: "Georgian 'democracy' owes more to Josef Stalin than Thomas Jefferson.
Ordinary Georgians live without electricity or heating for most of the day, in conditions of unimaginable poverty. Yet the country counts as pro-Western because it has been the focus for Western expansionism ever since the end of the Soviet Union, supported to the hilt by Republicans and Democrats alike.
... Georgia had ... received countless millions in aid for these refugees and for democracy-building and civil-society projects. But the aid had been stolen and the refugees were left to rot.
Yet Georgia is not only the country that gave the world Stalin and his most violent henchmen, notably Lavrenti Beria and Grigory Ordzhonokidze. It is a country whose current first lady proclaimed that her husband was a worthy inheritor of those brutes. In 2004, Sandra Roeloffs, the Dutch wife of pro-American president Mikheil Saakashvili, told a newspaper in her home country, 'Georgia has produced strong leaders: Stalin, Beria, Gamsakhurdia [the post-Soviet leader], even Shevardnadze before he became addicted to power. They looked further than Georgia alone. My husband does the same. He fits in the tradition. This country needs a strong hand. It is extremely important that respect for authority returns. I think my husband is the right person to frighten people.'
Georgia certainly has a reputation for brutality. Following Russia's descent into anarchy under Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s, Russian mafia godfathers typically used thugs from the Caucasus for their protection rackets and as business partners.
As soon as he seized power, Saakashvili's regime unleashed an orgy of arrests of officials.
It did not take long for the political situation in the country to spiral out of control. Okruashvili's arrest caused large demonstrations against the Saakashvili government in early November. Vast numbers of heavily armed police were deployed to crush the revolt, and the demonstrators were severely beaten.
It was against this background of rising political instability and plummeting political fortunes that Mikheil Saakashvili launched his midnight onslaught on South Ossetia on Aug. 7. He evidently thought, like the Argentine generals who invaded the Falkland Islands in 1983, that a short war of national liberation would boost his flagging support. He miscalculated. Dick Cheney may have flown to Tbilisi to promise again that Georgia will soon join NATO in spite of the defeat and to commit forces to restoring Georgia's territorial integrity, but Cheney will be out of a job by next January and so his promises are not worth much. And judging by the swiftness with which political justice is executed in Georgia, Saakashvili - who has probably now caused Georgia to lose her two secessionist regions forever - may soon follow him into early retirement, or worse."
10:57:50 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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