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Sunday, October 19, 2008 |
NYTimes: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country's economic crisis, according to current and former bureau officials.
The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. Current and former officials say the cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance in recent weeks because of the nation's economic woes.
So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.'s white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau's attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars.
In addition to the investigations into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the F.B.I. is carrying out investigations of American International Group and Lehman Brothers, and it has opened more than 1,500 other mortgage-related investigations. Some F.B.I. officials worry privately that the trillion-dollar federal bailout of the financial industry may itself become a problem because it contains inadequate controls to deter fraud."
CorporateWatch: "This crisis of capitalism, as with previous crises, has been caused by its own internal dynamic of inexorable expansion. To keep people spending but wages low, capitalism had to turn turbo. Spending levels increased, not primarily due to actual increased buying power, but by virtue of cheap credit. Aided by the neoliberal regime of financial deregulation, spearheaded by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations, the economic boom since the early 1990s has been based on massively increased levels of debt, incurred by corporations, banks, financial institutions, governments and consumers. To make things worse, these debts have been traded and speculated upon, ensuring a boom in property and finance, rather than in the growth of material production. But this is like a house of cards: the proliferation of new forms of profiting from purely financial transactions, short selling, derivatives, credit default swaps and so on, meant this phase of financial capitalism was particularly unsustainable.
The 'solutions' posed to the situation we now find ourselves in, as a result of the reckless behaviour of a minority, are all geared around maintaining capitalism. Capitalist expansion, sanitised as 'economic growth', has to continue if capitalism is going to. The underlying crisis is about where to find the next bubble, now that the credit-fuelled financial speculation bubble, enabled by decades of neoliberal governance, has burst. But currently the capitalist elites are in panic-mode, and most are reaching for the quick-state-fix option: state bail-outs of banks and legislation to sanction the contravention of competition laws to facilitate bank mergers, in the hope that this will make cheap credit available again. This policy boils down to governments gambling unprecedented amounts of public money to sustain the irresponsible credit policies of the banks. It is a desperate attempt by the capitalist establishment to save the current economic order and its increasingly unequal distribution of power and resources.
It is now even more clear that what the government is prepared to run up a huge national debt for are: the military and financial institutions. While being sold as anomalous behaviour from neoliberal governments, it is, in fact, business as usual: the state and the market are working together to ensure that the costs of capitalism are transferred onto the majority, whose economic and political power is kept low by a privileged elite, which claims to act in the interests of this majority.
It is vital to remember that this should only be a crisis for those who defend and profit from capitalism, yet the costs are being transferred to those with less material power: the most vulnerable will pay as a result of house repossessions, high inflation, loss of jobs and pensions. It is important that real solutions to the problem of capitalism are found, which is just as important now in this 'crisis' as it always has been. We have already seen demonstrations against the bail-outs in some of the global financial centres, including London and New York. Hopefully better alternatives will emerge from this crisis."
BBC: "Supporters of Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr have staged a mass demonstration in Baghdad in protest against plans to extend the US mandate in Iraq.
An estimated 50,000 protesters chanted slogans such as 'Get out occupier!'.
The age of unbridled American imperialism and mob rule is over. It is now important to organise this world according to democratic, fair and just principles and laws. The neocon globalisation, privatisation and deregulation have failed.
11:58:01 AM 
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© Copyright 2008.
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