From Global Research
By Michel Chossudovsky

The market is heavily manipulated. The driving force behind the meltdown is speculative trade. The system of “private regulation” serves the interests of the speculators.

While most individual investors loose when the market falls, the institutional speculator makes money when there is a financial collapse.

In fact, triggering market collapse can be a very profitable undertaking.

There are indications that the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) regulators have created an environment which supports speculative transactions.

There are several instruments including futures, options, index funds, derivative securities, etc. used to make money when the stock market crumbles.

The more it falls, the greater the gains.

Those who make it fall are also speculating on its decline.

With foreknowledge and inside information, a collapse in market values constitutes a lucrative and money-spinning opportunity, for a select category of powerful speculators who have the ability to manipulate the market in the appropriate direction at the appropriate time.

Read more Meltdown

From TruthDig
By Robert Fisk

All kinds of horrors flop on to my Beirut doormat. There’s The Independent’s mobile phone bill, a slew of blood-soaked local Lebanese newspapers – “Saleh Aridi’s blood consolidates [Druze] reconciliation”, was among the goriest of the past few days – and then there are files from the dark memory lane through which all Middle East history has to pass.

The repulsive Baath party archives of Saddam Hussein are the latest to find a place on my coffee table, all marked “Secret”, unpublished – though they formed the basis for the old man’s trial and for his depraved hanging by the Iraqi government more than two years ago. I reprint them now without excuse, for they have a bitter taste in the “new” Iraq and in the “new” Afghanistan about which we still fantasise as we send more Nato troops into Asia’s greatest military graveyard.

The documentary evidence of Saddam’s brutal inquiry into the killings at the Shia Muslim village of Dujail in 1982 provides frightening, fearful testament to the earnestness and cruelty of totalitarianism, the original files of Saddam’s mukhabarat security services in their hunt for the men who tried to assassinate the Iraqi dictator more than a quarter of a century ago. Saddam was then the all-powerful leader of a nation at war with Iran – an eight-year conflict that would cost the lives of more than a million Muslims on both sides – and whose most ruthless enemies were members of the Iranian-supported Al-Dawa Party (including a certain Nouri al-Maliki). Saddam’s closest allies at this time were the Gulf oil sheikhdoms – and the United States, which was sending military supplies, chemical precursors and satellite reconnaissance photographs to Baghdad to assist Saddam in his war against Iran, a nation he had invaded two years earlier.

On his passage through Dujail, Saddam’s heavily armed convoy was attacked by 10 villagers armed with Kalashnikov rifles. All were killed at the time or hunted down and murdered later. In their subsequent investigations, however, the mukhabarat – in this case operating under the ominous title of the “Regime Crimes Liaison office” – were able to use the system of tribe and sub-tribe in Dujail to tease out the names of everyone associated with the attackers.

Read more Collateral Damage

From The LA Times
By Dana D. Nelson

In answering Gwen Ifill’s question about vice presidential powers at last week’s debate, Joe Biden redirected attention to the still not very well known concept of the “unitary executive.”

Biden charged that Dick Cheney had become “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history” because of his attempts to create a super-powerful unitary executive. Biden didn’t take time to explain exactly what he meant, but it’s an extremely important, poorly understood subject, and it’s time to question the presidential candidates — closely — about it.

Plenty of presidents have worked to increase presidential power over the years, but the theory of the unitary executive, first proposed under President Reagan, has been expanded since then by every president, Democrat and Republican alike. Reagan’s notion was that only a strong president would be able to dramatically limit big government. Perhaps drawing on a model for unitary corporate leadership in which the CEO also serves as chairman of the board, the so-called unitary executive promised undivided presidential control of the executive branch and its agencies, expanded unilateral powers and avowedly adversarial relations with Congress.

In the years that followed, Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society conservatives worked to provide a constitutional cover for this theory, producing thousands of pages in the 1990s claiming — often erroneously and misleadingly — that the framers themselves had intended this model for the office of the presidency.

Read more Unitary Executive

From True Blue Liberal
By T. Anthony Michael

WHAT: A pre-planned collapse of the US (and global) financial and economic
systems.

WHO: The same characters who perpetrated the original 911.

WHERE: New York City & DC, of course. Plus a sideshow in Washington state.

WHEN: The days surrounding September 11, naturally.

HOW: Instead of painted drones, missiles with wings, and fake airplanes, they
used the much more stealthy ‘naked short seller’.

WHY: To remake the economic/financial order of the world into a “PPP”.

WHY Really: Think about it ! And then ask yourself, “Cui bono?”

The 911 blueprint worked so magically for the world controllers that they
were compelled to use virtually the same playbook. “If it ain’t broke, why
fix it?

So, what’s the real deal here?

By analogy, let’s take a quick look at the 911 timeline and stack it up against the new 2008 Financial “911”, as it began to unfold earlier this year. Read the rest of this entry »

From Common Wonders
By Noam Chomsky

The Simultaneous unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close”, as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Read more US Capitalism

From Tom Dispatch
By Anand Gopal

A bit past midnight on a balmy night in late August, Hedayatullah awoke to a deafening blast. He stumbled out of bed and heard angry voices drawing closer. Suddenly, his bedroom doors banged open and dozens of silhouetted figures burst in, some shouting in a strange language.

The intruders blindfolded Hedayatullah and, screaming with fury, forced him to the ground. An Afghan voice told him not to move or speak, or he would be killed. He listened for sounds from the next room, where his brother Noorullah slept with his family. He could hear his nephew, eight months old, crying hysterically. Then came the sound of an automatic rifle, after which his nephew fell silent.

The rest of the family — 18 people in all, including aunts, uncles, and cousins — was herded outside into the darkness. The Afghan voice explained to Hedayatullah’s terrified mother, “We are the Afghan National Army, here to accompany the American military. The Americans have killed one of your sons and his two children. They also shot his wife and they’re taking her to the hospital.”

“Why?” Hedayatullah’s mother stammered.

“There is no why,” the soldier replied. When she heard this, she started screaming, slamming her fists into her chest in anguish. The Afghan soldiers left her and loaded Hedayatullah and his cousin into the back of a military van, after which they drove off with an American convoy into the black of night.

Read more Afghanistan

From Common Dreams
By Tara Mahtafar

For weeks now the liberal media has been waxing incredulous at John McCain’s stunt of a running mate. Righteously they decry her unpreparedness for potentially holding the most powerful office on earth; aghast, they witness the irony that such a specter should act as a tonic on the Republican ticket.

More astonishing, though, is this incredulity itself.

The good senator’s choice forthrightly assumes what the world already knew about the majority of American hearts and minds — that they are apolitical, uninformed, and all too easily image-driven. A Sarah Palin would never go over in France, Israel, China — or even Pakistan. She wouldn’t be nominated to begin with. Just a few decades ago, she arguably wouldn’t have stood a chance here at home either.

The US presidential race today resembles not so much the nation exercising its constitutional right to elect competent leadership as an arena for Odysseus-like campaign strategists battling to conquer, as an astute comedian recently put it, “The United Stupid of America.” According to The Economist.com’s Global Electoral College, which polls the hypothetical US president if world citizenry were to vote, “Barack Obama would stroll into the White House.” Nearly everywhere on the planet -excepting Georgia, the sole pro-McCain country — the Democratic contender is favored by a landslide. Yet those privileged to actually put their name to the American ballot may very well allow Ms. Palin to wink her way to the doorstep of that White House.

Let’s take a moment to imagine the Palin Presidency scenario: would shortcomings in foreign policy experience truly undermine her capability as Commander-in-Chief? She will be surrounded by an army of advisors and can appoint a foreign-relations-savvy deputy at her side. Foreign policy wasn’t the incumbent president’s strongest suite, and he managed to install two whole new governments in the turbulent Middle East. And to give credit where it’s due, Sarah Palin has shown extraordinary poise in face of the weighty rôle thrust upon her thus far. Who’s to say President Palin can’t just as unblinkingly stare down Putin if he “rears” too close? Zardari already loves her — other pivotal allies will rally around. If anyone is worried about her gift for speech, again, by the benchmark of the last eight years, she will positively breeze through international summits and public addresses.

Read more Confederacy of Dunces

From The Financial Times
By Demetri Sevastopulo

The Pentagon will not have to release a group of Chinese Uighurs from Guantanámo Bay on Friday after an appeals court blocked an order to bring the men to the US.

The appeals court halted the potentially dramatic scene of Guantanámo detainees arriving on American soil for the first time since the start of the ”war on terror”. The decision followed an emergency US government appeal after a district court on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon to bring 17 Uighurs before the court on Friday.

In the landmark district court ruling on Tuesday, Judge Ricardo Urbina said the men – members of the Uighur ethnic group from China’s far-western region of Xinjiang – did not pose a security risk. He said the US constitution barred the indefinite detention of the men, who have languished in the Cuba-based detention camp since 2002.

Pakistan handed the Uighurs over to US forces in 2002 after they fled a camp in Afghanistan following the US invasion of that country. The Pentagon cleared them for release in 2004, but the US has refused to return them to China out of concern they might be tortured.

China on Thursday repeated its demand that they be repatriated to be dealt with ”according to law” as members of terrorist organisations.

Read more Guantanamo

From The Dissident Voice
By Mike Whitney

Stocks fell sharply across Europe and Asia on Wednesday following another down day on Wall Street where the Dow Jones lost 508 points and the S&P 500 slipped below the 1,000 mark for the first time since 2003. Japan’s benchmark index, the Nikkei, lost nearly 10 percent while shares in London at one point slumped more than 7 percent. Trading was suspended in Indonesia and Russia where stocks fell 10 percent each on opening.

According to Bloomberg News: “The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England, Bank of Canada and Sweden’s Riksbank cut interest rates in an emergency coordinated bid to ease the economic effects of the financial crisis.”

The move by the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) brings the Fed’s Fund rate down to 1.5 percent, 500 basis points below the current rate of inflation.

Following yesterday’s 508 point bloodbath, President George Bush tried to calm jittery investors about the turmoil in the markets. He said, “I know that the days are dim right now for a lot of folks. But I firmly believe tomorrow is going to be brighter.”

Just hang in there.

The present crisis, which has its roots in the unsupervised expansion of credit in the United States, has spread from subprime mortgages and toxic securities, to the entire global financial system, where it has roiled equities markets and is now threatening to do incalculable damage to the US and European banking systems.

Read more Bunkers

From The Asia Times
By Julian Delasantellis

A well-worn bit of wisdom from rural America advises one that it is pointless to “close the barn door after the cows have escaped”. By participating in yesterday’s global round of short-term interest rate cuts, US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke cannot be said to have been guilty of this offense. Instead, what he has done is to close the barn door after the cows have escaped, been captured down the road by cattle rustlers, then sold, slaughtered and ground up into dog food chunks.

For the 10th time since August, 2007, the Federal Reserve has engineered an interest rate cut in order to counter the spreading effects of the now global financial and credit crisis. With twin 50 basis point cuts in both the Discount Rate, to 1.75%, and the Federal Funds Target Rate, to 1.5%, the Fed has now just about emptied its magazine of possible interest rate cuts.

Yesterday’s cuts, coordinated across the globe with the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Swiss Central Bank, and the Riksbank of Sweden, with the Bank of China participating independently with cuts of its own, are the latest policy initiatives employed by desperate and besieged world economic officials to contain a truly awesome fire-breathing ogre that goes by the name of deleveraging, a monster that seems to get worse, and more importantly, laugh away all attempts to contain it, with every passing day.

It’s only natural to characterize the world financial crisis by what’s happening in the world’s stockmarkets. Wednesday was one of those days, when from the moment the sun burst across the horizon in the Western Pacific until it waned in New York about 21 hours later, there was nothing but pain and sorrow for those learning the painful lesson that yet another mortal deity constructed of man, in this case the religion of the God of Money, had failed.

Stocks opened in Tokyo, proceeded to fall by the greatest amount since the crash of 1987 and stock trading was halted in Indonesia (as it was in Russia, Ukraine, and Romania) after its benchmark stock index, the Jakarta Composite, dropped 10% early in the trading day. Most major European indices, even after the news of the coordinated rate cuts were announced, fell by between 4% and 7%.

Read more Bernanke