Vampire Bush's smells blood in Medicare

Vampire Bush smells fresh blood in Medicare. He's talking about cutting back on America's weak national health programme for seniors, to balance a US budget out of whack, thanks to his war in Iraq, his regime's corruption and incompetence, and his featherbedding the rotten, stinking class of capitalists. The humbugging nature of his policies are more pernicious than even, owing to the economic crisis which is eroding the financial ground on which his vermin class stands on. So once again to favour them, he's willing to attack the poor and the elderly, the hardworking poor and the savaged middle classes, to maintain these bloodsuckers in a style of life they think is theirs by divine right. But the mood in the land is changing, and mini mouse Bush is a lame duck, although like a wounded bull elephant he remains dangerous till he's booted out of the White House in January 2009. Sucking the strength out of Medicare is tantamount to declaring war on the Baby Boomers who are edging very quickly over 65. His 8 years in office meet the condemnation with apologies to W.H. Auden for they are the 'lowest dishonest 8 years' of any sitting president. A pox on his house! Cursing this dry drunk won't do, but organised dissent and action will stop this martinet in his tracks!

Vinograd report on Israel's Lebanon war in 2006

As expected the Vinograd panel's final report on Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon importantly pronounced that the war's disastrous result for the Jewish state lay on the shoulders of the military. It further said that the war was 'almost inevitable', thereby partly excusing the Olmert Kadima led government in waging a failed war. There was nothing 'inevitable' about the war. Olmert took a decision to strike at Hizbullah when they had caputre two Israeli soldiers. He seized the moment to bring Hizbullah to its knees, thereby striking pre emptively into south Lebanon the 'Party of God's' stronghold. This gang of muderous ruffians, thought he, would in one fell swoop be stilled, but Olmert and his defence minister misjudged. Israel waged a brutual war enflamming Lebanon from one end to another and brought down on its head hundreds of katusha rockets and earned the moral opprobrium worldwide even from a steadfast, uncritical ally like Bush's US. In the end the Israeli army had to withdraw, and Hizbullah became a standard of hope for resisting the Israeli's. In brief, Hizbullah delievered Tel Aviv a boiling defeat. Yet, the Olmert government didn't fall. If you look at the demise of Golda Meir after the 1973 Yom Kippur war where Israel was caught napping and suffered severe embarrassment, forcing Meir's resignation, Olmert has escaped such a fate. The Vinograd findings though sharp absolve Olmert but not his defence minister from a tongue lashing. Olmert won't go for were he to step down, the right wing fanatic Likud will come back to power. So
a stalemate prevails. Yet one thing is sure, Israel has suffered a burning defeat at the hands of Hizbullah, and it knows it although Vinograd might wish to excuse the full import of Olmert's failed war. Israel's loss of face encourage Teheran to taunt Tel Aviv with impunity the more especially since the lame duck mini mouse Bush has no excuse to bomb the hell out of Iran which he branded an axis of evil. Israel's defeat in Lebanon in 2006 is even more searing than when it had to evacuate southern Lebanon--Hizbullah's territory--after the super hawk Sharon invaded it in 1982. It long occupation was eroding the guts of Israeli society from within. The Arab streett has much to yell and shout about it for Israel is no longer the invincible balance of the region's fate. Israel is at a crossroad but it is veering more and more towards war than coming to terms with the Palestinians and its neighbours. The judgment of the prophets of the Torah weigh heavily on its head!

Bloomsbury Press' list on books on Asia or on an Asian theme

18Brumaire encourages readers to google Bloomsbury Press' website for its lists of very good titles on Asia or on a theme with an Asian connexion. The list is impressive and though written by scholars, the books are accessible to all and in a language devoid of jargon and cant. Especially recommended is the Cambridge University economist Ha Joon Chang's 'Bad Samarita[i]ns'which challenges the cast in bronze school of neo liberalism. His book is most welcome because it is in a way a polemical essay on political economy from the 18 century to today, using Korea as a foil to challenge neo liberal economic progress. Timothy Brook's 'Vermeer's Hat: the 17 century and the dawn of the Global World' is equally of interest. For this Canadian professor who holds the chair of Chinese studies at Oxford, looks for historical details in Vermeer's paintings of his native Delft to tease out unseen connexions with the golden age of the Dutch Republics' far flung trade. We are reminded the works of the economic Carlo Cipolla who is hardly read anymore in the US at least. 18Brumaire suggests Cipolla's 'Clocks & Culture', which might surprise readers that England once was the home of knockoffs before it found its prominence as a world and economic power, and which follows the clocks and dawning manufacturing revolution to the Chinese empire and Japan, and the different adoption of time pieces as either a play thing or a instrument to improve agriculture. Two cheers for Bloomsbury Press!

Florida clears the battlefield

McCain's victory in Florida clears the battlefield more or less for the Republicans. Guiliani who put all his golden goose eggs in the Florida basket, went down to defeat. Although it is said that he is going to throw his support to McCain, his leaving the joust is welcome, for he opportunistically was counting on the Jewish and the Cuban vote in southern Florida. His gamble proved wrong. Out, too, went his team of right wing hawks. He was damaged goods, and that may have accounted for his defeat. Who would go for a man whose own children wouldn't cast a ballot for? Mitt Romney is there to fight another day, but his chances are less than favourable. So it looks as though McCain whom no one would give a plug nickel to a few months ago, is cock of the walk! McCain is Bush lite. His ideas on the economy sound addled brained. His boyish boosterism for the old virtues and values are out of step with the times. Billy Crystal called him 'Victorian', and had him quoting from 'Invictus' which is a poem hardly any halfway educated American remembers today.
Whoever is the Democrats' candidate will face a strong candidate. And suddenly you begin to hear the groans of defeatist talk among the Democrats that McCain is our next president. But that ain't written in the stars, dear summer soldiers. Still, whoever is running on the Democratic ticket for the White House will have to prove flexible and wily as the proverbial fox to withstand the nastiness which will undoubtedly rain down on him or her from the Republicans who though they speak of civility and the good old values play dirty pool.

Bush's snake oil doesn't sell well.

Mini mouse Bush has delivered his last State of the Union to the assembled Houses of Congress. This popinjay sought once again to justify a war he hoodwinked his people to fight on false premices, and extolled the virtures of an economy that has gone south. Herr Bush peppered his sibling sounds with trite phrases which brought the clowns in Congress roaring to their flat feet. His message never varies. It is always the same but his words cannot hide a US which has grown poorer since he's been in office; he has enriched his class of rich and super rich, of his cronies, and of his cheer leaders whilst the burden of taxes has fallen on the poor [but they don't count], but also the middle and even the six figured income upper middle classes. The US has allowed its infrastructure to rust and decay; it has neglected its children in education, in healthcare, and it has continued to have a very high rate of infant mortality for the world's only superpower [sic]!
He has nothing to say to the pensioner who digs in trash bins for food; nor for the poor and middle class families who work long and hard hours to make ends meet if they can; he calls for permanent tax cuts which his vermin of rich and super rich who pay less than their fair share and believe they're the salt of the earth and god's anointed leaders. Dolthead Bush has betrayed the American dream for his class' own self ends. His long years of nightmare are slowly coming to an end, but he leaves the US deeper in debt, with a gnawing, eroding recession eating at its bowels, and a war which had one object in mind, the control of oil and stationing of permanent military bases in Iraq, the better to control the Middle East. He proffers anothe false hope, he will broker a permanent peace between his client Israel which the US has funded unreservedly with us$bn a year in economic and military aid, without collecting a single dollar lent, and the Palestinians. He should talk! He's dishonest in the spirt and letter of his words. He continues to branish the sword the better to keep America unbalanced so that he can spread fear and carry out policies which benefit his bloodsuckers of a rotting class in which he was born, and for which he rewards for incompetence, dumbness, and encourages them in a radicalism which breeds contempt, war, and thuggery. It would be a stretch of the imagination to note that he spoke two days before the 75 anniversary of Hilter's coming to power in 1933. Still his policies have an imprint of policies and attitudes which Herr Hitler & co. wouldn't sneer at. Good bye mini mouse and a good year to you!

Israel's soufflet falls in the face of Hamas bold moves

The world media, with some exceptions, simply report that the Olmert government will now supply Gaza with fuel, food, medicine, so on and on. But they play down the boldness of Hamas' blowing up the Israel wall in the Sinai which along with its closing of Israeli's border with Gaza, turned it into a ghetto not unlike Warsaw. Yes, Warsaw...Olmert's policy aimed at starving the Palestinians in Gaza into starvation and submission in the pursuit of a policy of collective guilt because of Hamas' steadfast refusal to recognize the suzerainty of Tel Aviv over the life and death of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Olmert met defeat again by Hamas' action, but with less loss of life than Israel did in Olmert's mad war against Hizbollah and ultimately all of Lebanon two years ago. But all this is swept under the carpet owing to a collectively shared bias against Palestinians and Arabs.

The JFK myth

Caroline Kennedy who wears the mantle of her father and now her uncle Edward Kennedy have put money on Barak Obama. He, they say, has the same magnetism her father and his brother had in running for the presidency. He has awakened the youth who steadfastly embraced a political quietism, he has brought them back to the polls; he has aroused from a stupo[u]r a demoralised electorate long dissatified with the right wing drift of Bush & his cronies. He has become a cheer leader of 'yes we can' , 'race doesn't matter', a bringing together of Americans and a healer of the politically sick. 18Brumaire does not dispute Obama's appeal, but prick the bubbles of soundbytes, and what do you find...air, hot air. Some may say well FDR appealed to the American electorate in the same way. That, we fear, is a misreading of history. FDR had ideas to right the wrongs of a depression; he had a programme, but what has Obama?
He has positions, and say on healthcare he's very cautious in the face of a horrendous private healthcare system which favours the insurance industry who take your money in premiums but won't pay when you're ill, or short changes you every time they can, and almost with impunity. He has praise for the 'sainted' Ronald Reagan though he doesn't agree with his politics, yet we wonder why he does praise FDR? Let's face it, Obama like JFK rode in on his high horse of much promise, and like JFK will prove a timid leader and very conservative in his politics. He is relatively wet behind the ears, were he more bold than we think he is, that wouldn't matter much. He's not. Like JFK, he will have to bomb out his chest to prove in war and peace he's a macho man. And we all know how forceful JFK was when it came to Bull O'Conner--you had to drag him into the fight for civil rights. We all know how he let the CIA loose and fed the war in Vietnam, and what the tragic results of his 'new politics'.

Crumbling markets, very deep recession in the US, failure of Bushonomics

The Fed's lowering of 75bsp last week gave world markets a breather. Asian markets and European bourses regained in a day or two of trading lost ground. Herr Bush spoke glowingly of a debt relief package for the US, and the wonderous effect of the Fed's panicked decision to cut the prime lending rate so dramatically. Well, it didn't world. World markets are crumbling as we speak out of fear for a very deep recession in the US. Dolthead Bushonomics have failed all but the super rich, his cronies, and his vermin. His acolytes at the Treasury and the Fed have come up with the same old nostrums which won't do a tinker's damn for the economy in the US nor the markets abroad. Mini mouse Bush's surrogates and even he will tell you the fundamentals are basically good, but that's hawking snake oil. They won't attack the problem at its root, so the crisis will go from bad to worse, one day after the other. The subprime scam triggered off the scrambling for a safe economic port in a raging storm. As such the mighty US has had to put into hock or sell off its prime economic and financial jewels. Herr Bush remains unperturbed, believing in the long run history will prove him right. He talks endlessly of the example of Truman, but no Truman ain't he. He and his neo conservative agenda in war and peace is a disaster, and for that he will go down in history. He's a failure, and ain't that the truth!

Guess who's playing in London in February?

America's media have made much of the New York Philharmic's going to Pyongyang. They have waxed eloquent about the programme which will include Gershwin's 'American in Paris', as a way of showing the naughty North Koreans about freedom of expression and choice. They do not speak of the long negotiations as to the visit and to the programme selections. The very same media are silent so far about the visit of the North Korean National Orchestra's playing in early February in the United Kingdom. Our British ally whose relationship in this looking glass world of politics is a living embodiment of what Deng Xiao ping called China's relationship with North Korea, lips to teeth, and this is surely true for Blair's uncritical support in mini mouse Bush's war in Iraq. Still, London has welcomed delegations from North Korea before, and during the 1966 World Cup games during which the North Korean soccer team eliminated in the first run powerful Italy, a town in England adopted these footballers as though they were of the British soil born. So the parallel visits of orchestras have a meaning. They would have had greater impact had the US welcomed the orchestra from Pyongyang to play in New York.

Blame it on the French

This weekend's edition of 'The Financial Times of London' [26-27 January 2008] has a telling Pym cartoon: An avalache Recession in a billowing cloud of gathering snow is descending menacingly on the annual confab of makers and shakers and blowhards of the world's business, financial, and political community who haven't the slightest klew as to what disaster is awaiting them. Since they are at 6's & 7's to explain the wild roller coaster ride of ups and downs this past week in the world markets, many find an easy excuse by blaming the banal French trader Gerviel at Societe Generale for the percipitious downturn in bourses around the globe! Oh Lord, save us from the damn French! Bless the Yanks for boldly trimming the US prime rate by 75 basis points who rode as they did in the Great War and the second world war to our rescue!
Eyewash! The fault as we in the English speaking world never cease to hear is a line from Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar'--'the fault dear Brutus lies not in the stars but in us', or for the more religiously minded--'you can see the speck of dirt in your neighbour's eye but not the mote in your own'.
Easy money and the scam game of sophist financial instruments known in this world of acronyms as CD's, ABS's, CMBS have come to call for payment. And no one can really meet what's due but central banks who cannot nor won't allow economies to krash. The pain is in the relaxation and frivilous application of regulations and surveillance of the markets, or as in the case of the US, under the stewardship of Robert Rubin now at the troubled CitiGroup of separation of what banks and financial institutions can and cannot do--otherwise known as the Glass Segall[sic] Act, a cornerstone of FDR's New Deal to avoid the pitfalls and traps of the tripwire of a world depression that the Austiran KreditAnstalt tiggered. So although no one is whispering low depression, the naming of recession is coming more and more to the ears of the ordinary rate or taxpayer who for the past 8 years has never had it bad...in the US at least.
The devil may care insouciance of bankers, industrialists, the super rich, the coupon clippers, the venal politicians, the warmongers and rapists of the poor and yes the middling classes has much to own up to. Since this class of vermin is threatened to its foundations, they react in panic [vide Herr Bush's bathroom attendant Bernanke at the Fed!], and crown themselves with laurels of leadership and decisiveness, but they are doing this not for you nor for me but to save their miserable class of bloodsuckers...and in tow, they've a gutless press who entertain but never inform the public at large. And why should they? The media is corporately and oligarchily controlled, and so why should a Murdoch or a General Electric tell us the truth? Yet the man and woman on the street know the score but are so demoralised or lack the will to form political parties and pressure groups to impose their demands. But the coming storm may chasten the rotten stinking fish of the ruling classes! And ain't that a kick in the head?

A bipartisan breakthrough

Popping of corks...flutes of bubbly champagne of hope. Congress and mini mouse Bush have agreed on a bailout package for the ailing US economy. The benefits are for those who are not in dire need? Has anyone thought of slags in ghettos, the large pockets of urban and rural poverty, the rust belts, the growing army of the unemployed? Apparently not. Look at Davos where the powerbrokers of industry and government, the sychophants of the chattering classes and the usual flotsam and jettisam of the coupon clippers, are holding an annual confab. The mood there is hardly joyous. It is more awaiting for the other shoe to drop...the fear of economic uncertainty in the eye of an economic downturn and recession...And they don't know what to do these shakers and makers of industry and government and moulders of received wisdom!
Still Herr Bush and Congress think of but one thing, encouraging more the US consumer's thirst for acquiring things. Yes the American consumer is pulling the engine of growth worldwide; he's in deep debt, and yet he is told to buy more and go deeper in debt. He saves less than his vis a vis anywhere else in Europe or Asia. That how dolthead Bush sees economics...he learnt well at Harvard Business School and his track record of failures in the private sector says much about his acumen! Cuts in the in the prime interest rate may buy time, but it won't keep away the storm...nor will it save these rich vermin from their true reckoning.

Wolfowitz is baaaaaaccccccck!

Disgraced Paul Wolfowitz has a new job in the US government. Heaven help us! He's been appointed chairman of an blue ribbon panel advising the US government on arms control. His credential: architect of a phony war in Iraq which is costing the ordinary American slag to dig very deep into empty pockets, and a high death rate among his sons and daughters. He's was pushed out of the presidency of the World Bank for nepotism. He fought hard to leave with a good conduct pass, but he got less than a general discharge. Still, as a pooh bah of America's neo cons, he quickly found a cushy post as a 'scholar' at the American Enterprise Institute, a very conservative think tank if you didn't know that before. And there he molted until his new high salary post as weigher of sensitive issues--nuclear deals with India and Pakistan. Ain't that a kick in the head. The designer of a phony war in Iraq is now a thinker of arms control. You've to be very dense to not see the supreme irony in such an appointment. It simply proves the right wing mini mouse Bush administration never lets its cronies down. Remember, 'you're doing a heck of a good job, Brownie' at the time of the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Well, you've have done a great job at the Pentagon in engineering a war in Iraq; you're a great guy who knows how to feather the bed of his squeeze at the World Bank, for which he got his pink slip!
Yesterday 18Brumaire commented on Condy Rice's putting Jay Lefkowitz, the Bush hitman on human rights in North Korea, in his place. She caught him poaching on the state department's turf on negotiations with Pyongyang on a nuclear deal. Now Wolfowitz who wrestled with her when she was national security advisor and then secretary of state, is in a good position to pillory her for a breakthrough with Kim Jong il. The tiresome right wing never gives up, in spite of the complete bankruptcy of their 7 year record in Herr Bush's regime. So, venal, corrupt, dishonest Paul Wolfowitz will push the envelope on North Korea and smooth the way for a deal with India even though it is rough going for the Singh government about the deal with the US.
Who's going to turn thumbs down on his criminal's appointment?

Exodus Gaza style!

Every year for 8 days, Jews worldwide celebrate Passover, commerating the Hebrews' trials and tribulation in the land of the Pharoahs, and their exodus out of the land of Egypt to the promised land led by Moses. Today the Palestinians in Gaza have much cause for celebration, for Hamas has not only blown up the thick concrete slabs of a wall denying them access to Egypt, but also dynamited the harsh, deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing directed against them by Israel. In other words, Hamas like Joshuah made the walls of their Israeli imposed ghetto fall down. In the media, pictures still or on video of the hundreds of thousands of Gazans pouring into the bordering towns of Egypt scurrying for the necessities of live which the Israeli had been denying them for even the merest of substance for survival. the outpouring of Palestinians through these concrete walls recalls the determination of displaced European Jews who evaded the embargo the British mandate authority imposed on any Jews wanting to reach Eretz Israel. And Hamas' actions belong to that catagory of will and exercise of self determination to a land which is rightfully theirs! Thus, Gazans have much cause for joy and for celebration and mark on calendars this red letter day of freedom and liberation.
Israel's ally Hosni Mubarek bowed to the inevitable, despite the heavy pressure from Tel Aviv and Washington to put away again a wall, and has allowed with a minimum of Egyptian police or military, Palestinians to buy food, medicine, and clothing, and fuel oil, and other necessities for life. In this way, he has tempered the anger of his own people against the harsh, vindictive policies of Tel Aviv against the Hamas elected government and the Gazans.
Israel through the tired voice of the arch Zionist Shimon Peres, sourly put the onus on Cairo; Gaza is now an Egyptian problem, not an Israeli concern. He thinks that Israel is above the law; it can pick and chose laws which favour its policies and dismiss other when they do not accord with Israel designs to chase Palestinians off land of theirs or reduce them to state of helots. He's wrong. Israel is not sui generis. It is a state like any other. If can hide behind the curtain of ha Shoah but its very machinations against the Palestians simply serve to show the world at large that it has learnt much from its Nazi masters who sought to clear eastern Europe of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, socialists, communists, gays, the mentally and physically handicapped, etc etc etc. This wholesale clearance of land they called 'Lebensraum', living space, which was to be settled by Aryans...and the cleansing of the land be in the west bank is of the same kind...it is for Jewish settlers...but instead of concentration camps and ovens...Israel will provide bantustans for a subject people, whilst the best land and its fruit go to Israeli Jews, much in the same way American settlers stole the land of Indian tribes.
It is obvious that the status quo ante is not possible. Herr Bush who has steadfastly backed Israel is not happy, nor are the Israeli at the turn of events. Too bad, boys! Hamas' forcefully opening up the Israeli built wall in the Sinai has once again thrown plans out of kilter. The struggle is not in the least over. Yet, Hamas has re affirmed in its own way that nothing is more precious than freedom and independence. Does this not sound familiar? It should! These are the very words that Ho Chi Minh used to defeat the Japanese, the French, and the Americans. Hamas is following in his footsteps.

Bush's bathroom attendant at the head of the Fed

Bathroom attendant Ben Bernanke as an economic scholar is known for his forcefulness in his ideas, but you won't find anything but a limp wrist of his at the Fed. He follows his master mini mouse Bush's orders. Till panic took hold of the stock exchanges around the world, he saw only strength in the market place and no need to take vigorous action. All that's changed...panic forced him to lower the prime lending bank by 75 basic point, and rumour has it it is going to compel him to another cut when the gouvenors of the Fed meet next week. The trick world, calming Asian markets but not European bourses, and worked on the NYSE today [23 January 2008]. Yet the volitility has played itself out...the public is fed spin pablum by the banks and the US government who are 6's & 7's as what to do...if they follow Herr Bush's advice, they'd rescue the rich and famous, the crony capitalists and vermin coupon clippers who have no idea as to how the turmoil is affecting yes the tax or ratepayer who is going to have to bail these greedy bastards out of the hole they've dug. It is a question of political will to change, but the will is not there...it's a 'save who can' and let the little people drown in the mire.
Who needs such sychophants? Certainly the American people deserve better. Well it's about time the American tax or ratepayer go boiling mad...and rose up and kicked these bloodsuckers out of office. And what's more looked to send Bush & his slimy, rotting fish to prison where they deservedly belong.

Israel & Gaza, the elephant & the ant

America's National Public Radio had a teary story on the effects of rockets launched from Gaza by Hamas on the samll Israeli town 2km away. A sad story no doubt. A mother on valium; her children frightened, suffering mildly by the fear that a rocket may blow them up. A human interest story. But where is the human interest story about the Israeli airforce's bombs that blow up innocent Palestians in Gaza; or children shot by an invading army; or the economic blockade which is reducing the population to a starvation level; or the sealing of borders denying fuel for heating and electricity...so on and on and on...? Well you just won't get it on NPR. The American mantra is Hamas is evil, so those living under its governance are by extension guility...and thus Israel violates international agreements it signed by enforcing collective guilt. And the US hardly breathes a word unless Israel is condemned by the UN and then Washington will either exercise its veto which it has done many times in the past to save it's client's arse...or will twist arms to water down any harsh criticism of Israel.
Gold Meir the tough broad who was Labour's prime minister famously quipped, the Palestinian people, there is no such thing. And every government left, centre, and especially the right is guided by a Zionist ideology drived by racism and nationalism, not unlike the fascists in Europe of 80 years ago. Israel can not apply a final solution to what they call Judea & Samaria or the west bank or Palestine let alone Gaza, but by gosh they're going to try to turn them into a servile helot population, and the world can like it or not. Well, Olmert & co who are direct descendents of Beta the Zionist fascist movement of the 30's, you simply forget a simple lesson which the Vietnames taught the American. Oppression breeds resistance, and which is poetically put in the tale of the elephant and the ant to celebrate the defeat of the mighty Ming emperor at the hands of the peasant Vietnames.

Condy Rice swats a White House North Korean gnat

Jay Lefkowitz mini mouse Bush's hit man on human rights in North Korea buzzed an ill tempered tune in Condy Rice's ear. You're policy of negotiations with Pyongyong on dismantling North Korea's nuclear programme has failed. Hold Kim Jong il's feet to the fire on his regime's horrific record on human rights to get results. Rice told him to bugger off. Lefkowitz is but the front man for the right wing best exemplified by the late, but unlamented man at the UN John Bolton who wanted as Lefkowitz does, an in your face approach to North Korea. It didn't work then...if anything it pushed Kim & co. to go on and build a nuclear bomb.
North Korea is late in turning over a full laundry list of its nuclear plans and projects as it said it would by 31 December 2007, but Rice and Chris Hill her chief negotiator with Pyongyang says that in the spirit of the agreement North Korea has complied with its promises. Still, Pyongyang is dragging its feet on meeting its full obligations. No one really asks why. The standard, ordinary, ho hum explanation is that North Korea is like that...No one tries looking at it from Pyongyang's eyes: direct negotiations which Washington denies it has with Pyongyang has brought much success, and as a result North Korea has shut down its nuclear enriching plant[s], but as a collilary to that, the US assumed other obligations which it has not lived up to. Add to that, the election of a hard liner new president in South Korea: Lee Hyung bek who is scrapping the Sunshine policy which has lessened tensions on a divided Korean peninsula, opened wider doors of trade, and other joint projections. So, confronted with a new right thrust against it, North Korea is stalling...yet all hope is not lost. Remember the New York Philharmonic is coming to play in Pyongyang in 3 weeks, so a breakthrough is possible. Otherwise Kim & co. will play for time which raises other questions since they may be hoping a new president in the White House in 2008 might usher in a new spring of understanding. Maybe yes; maybe no. By then the American economy may very well be in a more hopeless state than it is today. Nonetheless the US has had 15 years of negotiating with Pyongyang; it surely learnt something about the ins and outs of its style. If it has not...well so much the sadder. Rice & Hill are exhibiting patience and calm which is saying something. Lefkowitz although rebuked isn't chastened, and so the shadow play that the right in the White House will play itself out behind the scenes.

The economy -- Bush, no, Hillary & Edwards si, & Obama hedges his bets

Volitility in the world's financial markets. Turmoil in the capital markets. A growing recession in the US. A cutback by American consumers on bad habits which pulled the economic growth here and there and especially in emerging markets. A desperate and almost unheard of 0,75 per cent cut in the Fed prime rate to buoy up the NYSE, so that the tumbling Asian and European markets rebound, and also to give some weight to mini mouse Bush's anemic influsion of us$170bn into the US economy.
Utter confusion. Panic, you might say. David Frum, the former dolthead Bush speech writer, the man who gave him the facile 'axis of evil' hook, Frank Rich in his Sunday 'New York Times' op ed musings, cited this passage from Frum's new book 'Comeback' that the rich kid Bush 'had led his party to the brink of disaster; and cost it 'a generation of young Americans'. Well, Herr Bush has led his country to the end of the rope, and sacrificed almost 4000 Americans on the battlefields of his lying war in Iraq. He has not a whit of feeling for his suffering citizens unless they belong to his class and caste of bloodsuckers, coupon clippers, the vermin of his clique of cronies...in brief, the super rich. He has no remedy short of the same old, same old to rescue them...permanent tax cuts, lowering capital gains and abolishing inheritance taxes, etc. etc. etc. If you look at Hillary Clinton and John Edwards they want to use the government as a prod for fairer income distribution, for putting the mass of the un and under employed back to work, for rescuing homeowners who are going to be thrown out on the street owing to the subprime scam practised on them, for tilting towards taxing the rich, which include Clinton and Edwards, so that they pay their fair share, and establishing a crash course of new and fair deal like programmes to jumpstart an economy which has run into a brick wall. In a word, to undo the great harm the sainted Ronald Reagan has caused by favouring the rich and starving the rate payers so that roads buckle, bridges collapse, crime soars, education dumbs down, puts the burden of eke ing out a living by two parents causing untold harm on family life, so on and on and on. The grey old lady of journalism 'the New York Times' ironises on Clinton's and by extension Edward's appel of popularism which makes it sound bad. The newspaper of note is a multimillion dollar corporation whose interests lie in Bush's camp. [And lest we forget, young Salzburger the publisher met with Bush before the 2004 elections and promised to hold back info which would affect Bush's 'landslide' victory!]As a company run on capitalist interest, don't tell 18Brumaire that Salzburger & his swine do not understand that the US government favours the capitalists by either subsidising or giving them whopping tax cuts. So, if Clinton and Edwards want to right Bush's wrongs, what's so funny about using the government to make the rich and the corporations with fat earnings cough up what they really owe the American people? And now to Obama who is smarting because he praised the ogre Ronald Reagan. Every Republican candidate is trying to distance himself from the hated Bush, so he is looking to don the mantle of a second rate actor and president. Obama tries to wear that cloak even though he says that he disagrees with the nefarious policies of that man. Shame! In his fervour to include everyone Obama has to move to the right, and his platform on issues like healthcare are resounding proof of his conservative nature. As the heat of losses in primaries mount, the junior senator from Illinois is beginning to show a nasty side and his melliflous flow of sweet words has turned brackish and very sour. So it is not with an ounce of exaggeration that 18Brumaire says, he is playing two sides of the street. He wears proudly the armband of business as usual.

Obama cast as Ronald Reagan

Barak Obama spoke glowingly of the sainted Ronald Reagan who saw the signs of the times, offered hope, and went on to drive the US into stagflation, illegal arms dealing with Iran to fund a secret war in Nicaragua, and live to see the 1987 krash of the stock market. A fund and fun loving man who took government off our backs, but turned America more into a welfare pool for the rich, whilst the rate or taxpayer shelled out more money and saw the rusting of his town's industry, the collapse of his roads and the deteroriation of his schools, and the sharpening of ethnic and racial strife, and push the country into further militarisation.
Obama spoke highly of Reagan because he offered hope! Obama suffers from the American disdain for history or for delving deeply into the policies of Herr Reagan, who after he left the White House didn't think it unethical to accept a us$3m bribe by Sankai a right wing Japanese media conglomerate with interests in the US. Is Obama that naive? It seems so. He likes to think of himself as a uniter. Although he may bring people from all walks of life together, in political terms to keep them together he has to favour the more conservative element. And reading his speeches and his campaign literature, this concern bears itself out. Leahy from Vermont called him a second Bobby Kennedy...that's wrong...Obama has the aura of a JFK who as the record shows was a weak president who was forced to the wall to act. And that is how Obama will govern if elected president.

CDO's, ABS, CDS and the fine ponzi scheme of investment banking

For the listners of the BBC, they have heard an unpleasant 20 minutes of 3 investment bankers' idle chatter on SDC [securitised debt colleratal], which is the big killer in the ponzi scheme which the collapsing housing market has brought down on our heads, and threatens the US and to a less extent the UK banking systems. BBC listeners would hear of 'shadow banking'-- unregulated banking practices which the toilet bowl cleaner Alan Greenspan and the venal US Congress and White House allowed to flourish and thrive and rake in very, very handsome profits. The BBC questioner hardly got more than a plummy opinion of the tailor made suited, manicured bankers who engaged in aery persiflage and the wooden language of business schools. Listeners had an earful of theoretical models well which ultimately didn't work in practice. Nonetheless listeners got the idea: they got the drift of the huge scam that the banks and negligent government regulators permitted to be played on even the high rollers of private wealth. Dodging questions these bloodsuckers of finance capital admitted no wrong, deep concern, and one even went so far as to boast that his firm had made money off the subprime meltdown which these so called sophisticated instruments encouraged. They all denied that they had fingers in the fraud, with all sorts of caveats as to how the situation is not that bad; that even the bad debts can turn a dollar or a euro in profit, so on, and on, and on...till you want to vomit. What it boils down to is the old banker's complaint: when business is good we get our dollar, but when it's bad, we hold out our tin cup for the exchequer to fill and rescue us from our own sins. Of course these financial wizards of fraud won't ever admit this...they see a rose sky at night...they will continue to see snake oil, but the damage is done...and ultimately the regulators will be forced to tighten the noose around these vermin.

A shot in the arm

The world's press show the same picture: Mini mouse George Bush with gloomy, mean spirited Cheney and mournful Paulson behind him, at a press conference announcing a shot in the arm of us$145bn to stave off recession. They all look as though they are sitting shiva'h at neoliberal capitalism wake. Tomorrow's Sunday 'New York Times' magazine has a picture of the bathroom attendant Bernanke chief chimney sweeper at the US Fed, in a statesman like pose and under him a capition, 'can he keep us from recession'. What a meaningless string of words, for the US is in recession and the end is hardly in sight. It's a downwards business cycle which neither the puny measures of doltish Bush and his hired hands of Wall Street can do much for, the more especially they have favoured policies and measures which have bred the current crisis. Will a tax cut of us$600 this year help the poor sod who is losing his house? or his job? or paying off a mountain of consumer debt?
If wooden head Bush had any courage he would have put America's capitalism on life support and ballooned the debt to the roundly sum of us$2 trillion, get out of Iraq, and push for the ending of deep tax welfare cheques for his super rich class. Well he won't, and since he's hardly an ounce of brains of his blood sucking class the economy is going to spin out of control and the country will go deeper into recession.
Yes, Bush & his acolytes have much to worry about, to save the privileges of the super rich whom they favour. They do not care a whit for the 99 per cent of Americans who in varying degrees sweat to survive. America's capitalism is at a turning point, but which way it is going to go is a matter much in doubt...probably to further militarisation internally to keep the restive natives in line.

Would you buy a house or a used car from Bush or Bernanke?

No, 18Brumaire definitely wouldn't. The economic downturn in the US has reached a point where government statics which can be twisted and turned to prove falsely that we're having two chickens in our pot, are showing that the economy is in recession--how deep? is another matter, and that the subprime mortgage ponzi scheme has collapsed and that debacle is hurting the super rich which Herr Bush and his toilet bowl cleaner Alan Greenspan favoured, and to whom the men's bathroom attendant Benanke does too. Mini mouse Bush and non chalent Benanke who till a day or two ago sold the snake oil of economic recovery, are now forced by the laws of capitalism to ride to the rescue of the uber rich whose wealth and interests the downward business cycle threaten. Don't expect the likes of a Donald Trump or a member of the Walton family or a George Steinbrenner to jump from a tall building as the plutocrats did in 1929...no Herr Bush is riding on his old, tired nag of croney capitalism to the rescue. He's willing to for[e]go his tax cuts which have filled the deep pockets of the rich with filthy ill gotten gains, and throw some crumbs to the small people who are being thrown out of work, house, and home; who are tightening belts tighter to survive; who have no healthcare, no funds to pay for children's education, no nothing in a country with fabulous wealth. Why? Bush has thrown all his weight to his class and dismissed with his sickening accent any concern for those not to the manor born or who have money. Fifty million Americans have no healthcare, because the laws favour a greedy health insurance industry; cannot pay university fees because government money goes to college endownments; no parks, no day care centres, why? for the simple reason dumb officials whom we put in office get big kickbacks from corporations and to whom they give tax money free. No real jobs. They're outsourced, and by outsourced, 118Brumaire means white and blue collar jobs. With a weak dollar and we've not seen this in the press yet, outsourcing is turning into a nightmare for the companies who kicked Americans out of work, for higher profits in lands where you pay the locals a pittance. Why? outsourcing has increased costs by 50 per cent...And on and on it goes...So gentle readers, it's a 'sauve qui peut'! or a scramble for the rich to have their creatures in government like dolthead Bush and broomsweeper Benanke to throw them a life line. And for the 150 other million Americans...from the poor to the middle class and to the upper middle class...well we will get a pittance at that and bromides to be strong and face the hard times on our own without the relief of our taxes which go to the super rich who never play their full share. Let the wrath of the people fall on the head of the verim like Bush & his rotten barrel of big fish!

More bad news for banks

Me oh my the financiers in the US are deeper and deeper in the fecal matter they hawked as subprime mortgage instruments. CitiGroup wrote off at year's end for the final quarter us$20m; Merrill with write off almost as much; JP Morgan slightly less...and so it goes. UBS the Swiss bank has shut down its private investment arm for rich Americans who wanted to place their ill gotten gains somewhere which would bring in high returns say 20 to 30 per cent, and are now hollering foul because they lost a sizeable but hardly a death knell bundle on subprime mortgages.
And as 18Brumaire wrote, which is only saying the obvious, these slick bankers are selling their souls and their power to foreign states and banks in straightforwardly manner in exchange of billions in liquidity. Commonly stated in the press, the foreigners have non voting shares. Let's call a spade of spade here! Non voting rights means if these sovereign funds and banks think that the Americans are not tending their money well, they're going to turn the screws on them till the bankers act in the way the foreigners want.
Thursday is the day in the American press for real estate news. Today [17 January 2008]the financial pullout of the New York Times was usually thick. Fat yes, but thin on news and pregnant with full page ads for commercial real estate which is looking sad these days. And along with attractive eye candy for buying commerical space is a book weighing a kilo hawking wonderful buys in the homes, which despite New York's privileged niche, are sagging in price...not only is liquidity drying up, but so is the cash to plonk down on a new house or condo or co op the more especially the banks are not giving easy loans or mortgages. Gone are the days of a quick buck, a quick sales, and a quick profit.

A leveraged buyout king for president

Mitt Romney won in the state of Michigan where his father onced ruled over the American Motor Corporation which made the famous jeep, and was governor. Mitt spent millions to win the primary there Tuesday 14 January 2007 which threw the Republicans running for the nod to replace mini mouse Bush, into more turmoil. He won thanks to the millions of his own wealth and the strength of his dad's name and not the least being a native son. Yet listening to his tortured syntax, he denies the simplest of truth. Michigan with the highest employment officially pegged at 7,5 per cent in the land is in deep recession. McCain who came in second in the primary spoke truth to power. He told the voters of Michigan the jobs they lost in the mono industry of the automobile which dominated Michigan's economy, are gone for ever. Romney the demogogue begged to differ but was short of specifics on how to turn things around. Judging by his skill as a purveyor of Leveraged Buyouts, he would downsize everything in sight, slash budgets, benefits, and the like for all but his capitalist class. Look at his record at Bain if you need examples. Do we need a man that sells flimflan, who flip flops on issues, and will cut his cloth to the fashion that will win him votes? Mitt might head his party in the presidential race but heaven help us all should this bubblehead win. His victory would mean more of Bush and would even out Bush Bush if that were possible.

Free Enterprise for the poor, Socialism for the rich

As the US slouches deeper and deeper into recession, the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has finally awakened to the seriousness of bad times ahead for the ordinary American. And members of Congress, too. America has been living in a happy state of assuming that get harm would come to them. And if perchance it did, the God up high would take care of them. Well, the deity isn't nor the ruling clique for that matter. A rescue package that eventually will come out of the houses of Congress, will look first to rescue the ineffecient corporations and the fat smelly bankers and the oil lobbists who look for nothing but a good feathering of their bed. There is little joy awaiting the ordinary working sod, but more unemployment, more jobs being shipped overseas, growing impoverishment, and no safety net for healthcare, pensions, and savings for old age.
It is the same old sorry story in the heat of the cancerous subprime mortgage meltdown. It is more and more of the same old tried and true baloney which Americans are served up on stale rye bread smeared with a good dose of rancid butter. Do not be surprised if they are called spendthrift, they're damned for living beyonds their meagre means, they're stupid or ignorant, they live for today but are improvident when it comes to tomorrow...and so go the old refrains. They are urged to tighten more and more a worn belt, because they do not know how to manage income, are lacking in the simplest of the abc's of the capitalist system, and on and on and on and on it goes the pointed finger of the scold.
On the other hand, it is the ruling classes and hanger ons who fit the bill nicely of what the poor, average working stiff is blamed for. Yet, they deserve our sympathy, our pity, and the largesse of the working stiff's taxes; they are spared the burden of paying taxes for the wealth they have. Let's call them what they are--blood suckers who have fed and are feeding on a bloated American economy, and who think feces of theirs smell with the sweetness of rose attar! They have no more wisdom in the current state of the economy than Dean Swift's philosophers on the island of Laputo who fail in turning their shit into gold. However our plutocrats have performed that miracle...they've managed to turn fecal matter in gold and huge incomes.
It's time that the Democratic candidates for the presidency come up with good plans for dealing with the deep recession they're going to inherit from the mini mouse Bush & his croney capitalists. FDR came into office with 'there is nothing to fear but fear itself', and then proceeded to betray his class, equalise income distribution among Americans, and bring about fundamental changes. These changes since the days of the satanic Ronald Reagan have been rolled back. It is time to push the rich theives back to the wall, and cry, open your wallets and pay your fair share...and what's more throw them in gaol for the crimes and misdeme[a]nors of economic murder on the American body politic.

Executive compensation...will the big rotting CEO corporate fish take a pay hike?

Suddenly in the op ed page of the 'Financial Times of London' there is worry as capital market grind to a screeching halt, about the astronomical compensation CEO's pay themselves. Will they take pay cuts like the Japanese? Or will they renogiate the terms of golden parachutes? Or will they carry on as usual with hardly a care in the world but their own selfish class interests? This question is forever absent from the pages of the world's financial journals or business sections of the international press. Instead we hear about the outrageous demands of workers. As Gore Vidal famously said, 'free enterprise is for the worker, socialism for the rich'. The cancer spread of revolution will usher in more uncertainty, it is obvious to say, but where are the pols with backbones and the popular movements to demands great change and more sharing of the filthy lucre the CEO's have amassed?

South Korea's new president talks the talk, walks the walk

Lee Myung-bek has done what he said that he would during his run for Seoul's Blue House. He wasn't going to give North Korea a free pass. Now he has done away with the Ministry of Unification which he says is too easy and cosy with Kim Jong il's regime, and put dealings with North Korea under the strong arm of the Ministry of Foregin Affairs. Bye Bye Sundshine policy. This should bring a ray of home to Washington's and Seoul's hardliners. The shift in attitude puts off to the Greek kalends the desire to lessen tensions on the broken Korean peninsula, and to shunt Pyongyang to the rank of a foreign country. Which runs against the grain of the ubiquitous Korean desire for eventual re unification of a divided homeland. This raises the question of what is Mr. Lee's attitude to Kaesong, the economic free zone, which his old company Hyundai is footing the bill? What about the 45 accords signed by Roh Moo hyo and Kim Jong il during the second inter Korean summit [October 2007]? Will he with a stroke of pen abrogate them? Swaggering and posturing will not bring Pyongyang to its knees. As a Korean, Mr. Lee should know that North Korea digs in its heels when faced with adversity. And this mini mouse Bush who blew hot and cold learnt at his own peril. What's more Mr. Lee is slightly younger than Chairman Kim Jong il, and his attitude towards an elder brother does not augur well in a traditional cultural sense. So Mr. Lee's bold stroke will in the short run is nothing but a Pyhrric victory.

US banking pregnant with crisis

It ain't just another crisis, nor has the US banking industry turned a corner on the subprime mortgage meltdown. The easy explanations no longer hold. America's big banks are in turmoil. The market feel almost 278 points yesterday [15 January 2007] as CitiGroup announced a us$9bn loss in 4q07 earnings, and a write off of close to us$20bn. And that's only the beginning, folks! Today Bank of America who just picked up the failing mortgage lender Countrywide, announced a cut back in investment banking activities and a further layoff of staff. Markets have tightened, credit is scare. So these titans of America's banking go like scurrying country mice in search of money outside the US. And there they find it for a price in very fat sovereign funds and countries living high on the hog on Petro dollars or Euros. Even the Japanese banks who have lived in the shadow of a zero sum growth economy for the last 15 years, have the wherewithal to become a purveyor of funds for a stake in Merrill Lynch.
Saying this, it is more than interesting to note that neither the IMF nor the World Bank have pointed a school ma'amish finger at the US for living beyond its means. It is even more curious that no economist has thought it necessary to make a parallel between the crising in American banking and the 1998 Asian crisis. The Asians learnt a sad and sorry lesson and the fat purses of theirs is proof positive that have renovated and primed their economies which are humming with energy and vigour and what's more have swelled exchequers or treasuries. Meanwhilst the US falls deeper into recession, as the national debt balloons into the stratosphere of us$trillions, the country's infrastructure is failing, impoverishment of the populations spreads and deepens, and foreign wars have become a way of life.
In the end, the knell has rung on America's unilateralism, and the country is sinking to a bleak future.

Sarkozy, the Middle East, nuclear energy, and Israel

Nicolas Sarkozy does not do things halfway. He is presently visiting Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. He is doing this to renew France's traditional ties with the Arab world which go back to the days of Napoleon. One way to look at his thrust into the Middle East is to cynically remark that he is chasing Petro dollars or Euros for France's industries. But that is obvious and to be expected. On the other hand, he is offering France's know how in building nuclear plants for the peaceful use of atomic energy. Who says peaceful use might leap to the conclusion that such knowledge will lead to the military use of the atomic. Which should give Israel much cotton to thread, since it is the only nuclear military power in the region which it denies. And it has twice bombed its neighbours ventures into nuclear energy--first in Iraq in 1982 and in 2007 in Syria whom it suspected without a shard of truth of building a nuclear plant for military purposes.
18Brumaire can play the devil's advocate in saying that it was the French Socialist Guy Mollet who first gave Israel the abc's of making nuclear weapons at the time of the pre emptive strike by Israel, France, and the United Kingdom against Nasser's Egypt for his daring to daring to nationalise the Suez Canal. France took Israel's side for she saw Nasser's hand in the raging war in Algeria the origins of which were homegrown and the result of Paris' colonial policies there. So in an ironic turn, Sarkozy is righting a political wrong by offering Qatar and the UAE means to use atomic energy for peaceful use. Saying this, it should strike terror in the hearts of the Israeli who act with impunity in the region to scare its neighbours and crow like the cock of the walk. But already the knell is tolling for Tel Aviv.
And such is the thrust of Nicolas Sarkozy's walk among the gulf states.

Another word on recession

Sunday's New York Times [13 January 2007] had a headline that America's economists thought that it was too late to do anything but let the recession that the country has fallen into, ride out the cycle. This from a nation whose economists win Nobel prizes in economics! Now CitiGroup is going to write off more billions in bad loans, as is Merrill Lynch, and soon many others. They look not to Washington for help but to Arab emirates awash in Petro dollars and very fat sovereign funds, as they do to Asia for bail out. Credit has so shrunk that these desperate men will sell what little black souls that they have, to save themselves, their class, their comfort, and their privileges. In doing so, they are selling their place in the economic sun for a mess of potage like Easu did his birthright in the bible.
Which ever you slice the story, the US establishment is guilty of betraying the American people for the interest of a few, for the rich, the dumb, the famous, and the incompetent. So now we're hearing the wailing and gnashing of teeth of those who a year ago would think nothing of stepping hard on the poor and the outcast to firm up their vapid, vicious, vacuous class rule of capital! May they all burn in hell!

The British plot to overthrow Italy's elected government had the Communist won in the 1970's

An Italian researcher discovered among recently declassified papers in London that in the 1970's the British government actively sought to stage a putsch in Italy had the Italian Communist Party, that country's second largest party, won the elections. They did, and so the plans were scrapped.
For readers with a longer memory or a finer sense of history, in Europe, and certainly in Italy, it was widely feared that the CIA, MI6, and members of the Italian right-wing, including the resurrected Fascist party, were plotting to overthrow the elected government, even were it the corrupt Christian Democratic led team in office. It also was a time when the Red Brigade flourished fighting a dirty war against the establishment, partly fearing the return of a Mussolini styled fascist rule. It was a time that the Italian cineaste Pasolini made his cinematographic, difficult masterpiece, 'Salo or the 100 days of Salo'. [Salo was the fascist republic that the Germans set up in northern Italy after Mussolini fled when the Americans were fighting up the Italian peninsula. And for 100 days, this phantom fascist joke reigned till the Nazis were defeated. Mussolini and his mistress were killed and then hung up on lamp posts.] It was the time Aldo Moro was kidnapped but the government refused to rescue him, and as a result his body was found in a boot of an automobile. Overriding this confusion and spectre of a putsch from the right, the sad events of Italy in the 1970's played out. What was so fearful about the CPI, a party whose great man Palmiro Togliatti [whose great admirer was the aristocratic Luchino Visconti] made the historic compromise with the bourgeois party, and had toned down the message of war and revolution. That made no difference to the CIA, MI, nor the Italian right wing diehards, for them Italy had become the epicentre of the cold war and the battlefield to thwart Moscow's aim. They misread history, but the CPI did not win at the polls, so the plan was scrapped. A footnote, the British consulted that paragon of virtue and democracy Henry Kissinger on the matter. What a logical choice! He has engineered a coup against the democratically elected mild Socialist government of Allende, bringing thereby to power another paragon of virtue Pinochet whose long rule left a wake of bodies and ill fortune to Chile.

Bush on democracy, terror, and Iran

Arguably [sic] George Bush is the worst president America has had. Cocksure of himself, he is the last person to lecture on history and democracy. His ego knows no bounds, so it is not surprising that in Abu Dhabi he delivered his scold on democracy, terror, and Iran to a gathering of Abu Dhabi elite who listened to him in polite, cold silence. Bush's idea of democracy is 'one dollar, one vote', which means he favours his class, and more surely the Arab sheikdoms awash with oil and petro dollars that he has been wooing. The complexities of democracy are such that he is willing to wage wars, bolster up despotic Arab regimes, and any tin horn dictator who seeks Washington's protection. But 18Brumaire is saying the obvious, and what is more obvious that the purveyors of terrorism live in Bush's White House or are found say in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Bush harps without skipping a beat on the bombing of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, yet he stubbornly refuses to point the finger of blame at Saudi Arabia the cradle of Islamic terrorism, the bag lady of funds for the spread of radical Islam throughout the Muslim and non Muslim world. For of the 18 hijackers two thirds were Saudi, and of course the brain behind it all Osama ben Laden is of Yemenite Saudi origin. This would be expecting too much from mini mouse Bush whose family have incestuous ties with the Saudi royal house. It is bruited that through the 'good offices' of Saudi royals, on Bush's promise to withdraw US troops from Saudi soil, the home of Islam's sacred Mecca, ben Laden agreed that never again would he plot to bomb anywhere on American soil. Bush kept his promise as did ben Laden, mortal enemies though they are. What's more Bush when questionned as to why the Americans dropped the ball in capturing ben Laden, waved off the question with a 'it is of little importance'. Tell that the American people dolthead Bush! Iran may have many faults but they didn't blow up the WTO. Thanks to Bush's ill conceived and false war in Iraq, he personally is responsible for upsetting the applecart in the region, and catapulted Teheran into the catbird's seat of balance of power in the Middle East. So much for his arrogance and blinded stupidity. The world will breathe easier when he leaves office, and that's the truth!

Citibank goes a begging

A note on the selling of Citibank's soul to China and Kuwait and other foreign private investors. The subprime mortgage meltdown has down the proud Citibank in. It has to go begging far and wide, to absorb the seimic shock of writing off billions in bad loans. And this is just the beginning, for a conservate estimate for the investment banking industry puts the tab around half a trillion US dollars. A wag who reads back issues of the Wall Street Journal will find this cynical comment made by a banker during the 1980's Latin American debt crisis which forced American banks to writhe in pain. `We bankers are for the free market when we can make a buck, and we believe in the state when we are losing a buck!' So much for the capitalism that the toilet bowl cleaner Alan Greenspan believes in! Greed is the spreading cancer eating up the US' prime place in the market.

The Writers' Strike & Upton Sinclair

What has Upton Sinclair to do with the Writers' strike. A lot. The strike is going into its 65 day. It is a strike and has given a shot in the arm to an anemic trade union movement in the US, a movement much weakened by outsourcing of manufacturing and of critical jobs outside the country. The big 6 -- Song, Viacom, CBS, Disney, General Electric, and TimeWarner--are playing hardball to deny intellectual workers in television and Hollywood the just fruits of work of theirs as the industry expands on to the internet, say. So when we strip everything down to its bare bones, we have a classical setting of the big rich bosses against the workers. Now here's where Upton Sinclair comes in. The very much touted and dull film 'There will be blood', loosely based on Sinclair's 'Oil' is a pastiche of the real meat of the long forgotten novel. It has at its core a confrontation of a rapacious oil baron and a strike among oil workers. It is crushed brutally, but Hollywood has eviscerated the body of the story with an ugly portrait of an oil man played by Daniel Day Lewis who crushes an evangelical preacher with a passion for money and his own self promotion.
The Writers' strike won't be crushed in this instant, but the big 6 are doing everything to weaken further a labour union. They're willing to loose hundreds of millions to hold the upper hand. And so the Golden Globe awards are now a press conference, and let's hope the concrete long hours of the Oscars will go down in the dust. For very few actors will cross the picket line, and the big 6 are willing to walk away with a small blip on the very black bottom line of theirs. Little wonder no one in the years following the stunted reign of saint Ronald Reagan thinks much of labour unions or the need to combine the strength of the many into a fist to punch the greedy owners in the nose for a just and equitable standard of living, in an age of rampant individualism and outright greed. Let everyone see 'Let the cradle rock' about workers ... let's see more about the working man. On the radio and television we get the bosses propaganda on business and the like. No one talks of labour and the worker. It's about time. And though many may not think that a strikers win, let them look at the writers!

Mao was right?

The growing yaw of wealth in 'Communist' China and the flocking of peasants from the interior to the coastal and large provincial cities, are the cause of concern in a roaring Chinese economy. Since Deng Xiao Ping's turn to the capitalist road--it's alright to be rich--development is occuring along patterns established when China was cut up by foreign powers during its shame. Mao had the idea which turned into a nightmare when he launched the great proletarian cultural revolution in the 1960's, to keep the peasants on the land and bring industry and the world to the countryside. [Remember it was his investigation into conditions in the countryside which brought him to leadership of the Communist party of China, and his call for the union of the workers and peasants which firmed up his iron fisted rule!]Now it seems the minions of foreign private companies like JNJ and Avon and the like are going back to the countryside in a way that recalls Alice Tisdale's 1930's best seller 'Lamps for the oil of China' or even earlier the purveyors of growing tobacco through the 'generosity' of British American Tobacco earlier in the 20 century. The clean shaven rulers in Beijing are now pushing for a return to the countryside but alas without much vigour. And there lies the rub and the grounds for the party's ultime demise.

More corporate welfare

Markets rebounded yesterday. Spring, it seemed, had come early. Bank of America was riding to the rescue of the embattled mortgage lender American Century, and the bathroom attendant at the Fed Bernanke, wringing hands of great worry, is promising steep cuts in the prime rate for the incompetent banking industry. If Bernanke's words pumped up a sagging capitalist morale, for those with a long memory, he is proposing a tried and true remedy for banks and lenders in deep trouble by throwing away easy money good or bad. Americans have poor capacity for history but think of the S&L scandals in which a Bush uncle and a Bush son were up to their necks in. And then ten years ago the rescue of a failed hedge funds which came on the heels of the Asian downturn. So once again ratepayers, the little men and women whom the banks rip off with endless fees and charges, have to pull belts tighter to bail out the fat cats, coupon clippers, and the whole sorry, smelly capitalists who are greedy and what's more incompetent and should be behind prison walls instead of living high on the hog on say Park Avenue or Greenwich, Connecticut. We should feel no pain for this gang of theives who sit on very fat wallets. John Thain fresh from the NYSE/Euronext and formerly of Goldman Sachs, now ceo of Merrill Lynch is saying his old white shoe firm is going to write down us$15bn of bad subprime debts. Boo hoo...and that is just the beginning of bigger write downs for all investment banking houses whose greed is as depthless as universe. Had the feckle Congress had a strong spine, it would re enact legislation which would keep the banks from slipping from one side of the banking wall to the other...as the now dead Glass Segal [sic] act did during the FDR run in the White House. Like it or not, the US is sliding more and more into recession, and sterner measures are called for, ones that will put the kabosche[sic] on the greedy banking industry for starters. The housing bubbles won't chasten them, only strong laws and political will and an enlightened electorate can box the rotting fish who run this country into the trash heap where they deserved belong.

It's recession, stupid!

Goldman Sachs is not a sounding board for the investment banking community in shouting loud and clear that the US is in recession. Of course they're calling for steep cuts in the prime interest rate to allow the dykes to open for liquidity. But these very fools have done much harm in throwing the country and perhaps the world into recession. The housing bubble. Goldman Sachs & co have greedily sliced and diced and sold off cleaver financial instruments to the greedy who saw nothing about cheap money, exploitation of the poor who couldn't sustain high fees, on the mirage of an ever expanding housing markets where the conflated houses would quadruple in value. No more. The mirage is a desert of debt and foreclosures and oases of liquidity long dried up. There is no easy to capital to seek safe tax or investment havens. The timing was bad for these bloodsuckers who are flailing in a volitile sea of low tides as they wallow in the mud of despair.
The financiers will simply have to lump it. Asian banks and sovereign funds may come to the rescue at a price but oh what a price! A loss of cock of the walk in the world. There is no pity for the small guys and gals who will be thrown out of work or picked up at lower earning power or the blight these turds who invented cdo's & the like...or have cut their la la land living style and only breath the rarefied air of wealth and power as others income have sunk or remained stagnant. They are looking only for their survival...and will sink with ther titanic of subprime debt with lifebelts for their usual, rotten class. In the meantime, like Lampedusa's Prince of Salinas, they will sell a good part of themselves to remain comfortable in the dung heap of finance capital with all the immondice of the world which they call home. Let them all go to hell...let them live in the deepest circle of Dante's Inferno. In other days as Sacha Guity's 'Si Versailles m'etait conte' sang through the voice of Edith Piaf, they like the Bourbons of old...would be ... like 'les artrisocrats, on les pendra!'. They would like Mussoline be strung upside down on a lamp light with genitalia stuffed in their greedy mouths!

Lockdown in Ramallah

George Bush visited Palestinian president Mohammed Abbas in Ramallah. So tight was security, it was as though the city were locked down in a prison during a riot. No one could open windows; no one could stand on balconies for a glimpse of heavily protected mini mouse Bush. 18Brumaire is tempted to say that Ramallah was a field as though cleared for war.
Blockhead Bush was in true form, and ever the optimist. His aging bones told him that before the end of his presidency, he would live to see a peace accord between Israel and Palestine, and sotto voce, if the Palestinians acquiesed to Israeli demands.
Dummy Bush has that gift, be it from God?, that he sees in the hearts and minds of men. Look at his feeling on Vladimir Putin into whose eyes dyslexic Bush read good things. And look at the bad blood Bush has with Putin today. See how bubblehead Bush pumped up the reputation of the tin horn general Mushareff of Pakistan, and see what the mess his old friend Pervez has made of fighting Islamic terrorists. The record of good intentions paving Bush's road to hell, is there for everyone to see.
Herr Bush didn't skip a beat in warning Iran for its adverturesome taunting of American warships. Teheran may play with fire but this week more classified documents have come out in Washington about how Lydon Baines Johnson's White House cooked the books on the incursion in the Bay of Tonkin, thereby allowing the US to pursue a non declared and losing war in Vietnam. Doltish Bush fabricated a war in Iraq, so the odds are more than even that he might prove more foolhardy than ever in making a strike against Iran?
As for his predictions on a peace treaty between Tel Aviv and Ramallah, it would be a victors peace, the more especially the Palestinians are deeply divied, and Bush and Omert will not deal with Hamas, nor will they pull up illegal settlements in what the Israeli call Judea and Sumaria...what a piece of historical hokey!. In Abbas, they've a strawman. Had he any guts, he would send the lying and hawkish pair packing. After 40 years, and in spite of Israel carving up occupied Palestine, Tel Aviv has not quenched the age old thirst for Palestinian independence nor the creation of a national homeland.

Polls, Polls, and glitter and glamour

Senator Hillary Clinton's striking comeback in the New Hampshire primary has proven the pollsters wrong. Senator Barak Obama did not trounce her by a double digit per centage; she beat him by 3 per cent. Obama has the gift of gab, and he has enthused America's young who hardly vote. He won the Iowa causus on the merits of his own talents and the eagerness of his youthful supporters. And his win in Iowa, the pollsters hailed as the coming of the new Jerusalem in American politics. Maybe? But pollsters, newscasters, and talking heads work for big outfits who hop from one event to another to sell newspapers or boost or maintain ratings or are every ready to drop pearls of banality for a fee at a drop of the hat. So they found fool's gold in the Iowa primary, and projected their fancy into another win for Mr. Obama, which proved wrong. As those who still read Freund, projection is a sign of flummery, and this in New Hampshire turned out to be the case. Only one poll, a small university poll, had days before the money on Mrs. Clinton, and they predicted that she would nose out Mr. Obama by 3 per centage points. Which she indeed did! They overlooked the Clinton campaigns strengths, and yes experience and hard work in the political arena, and swallowed the false bait of youth and change. Afterwards they sat before tthe cameras and talked up a storm of what went wrong, and the newspapers flowed purple in stilted prose as to how and why Mrs Clinton pulled the rabbit out of the hat in New Hampshire. The press doesn't like Mrs. Clinton, nor do the talking heads on the whole. Like the Roosevelts and the Kennedys before them, they represent a challenge to the old boys and girls circles of privilege and money and the status quo. These fatuous fools have shown themselves incompetent, and the voters in New Hampshire who see the standing of living of theirs sinking and the country they thought they knew, sold to the highest bidder and awash in corruption and incompetence, know who is on their side. And that's partly why Mrs. Clinton rose victorious like a roc out the ashes of Iowa, and triumphed in New Hampshire. Will pollsters and punsters and pundits and journalists learn the right lesson? Maybe yes? Maybe no? Let 18Brumaire quote the great Roman orator Cicero: 'Not to know what has been transaction in former times is to be always as a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge'. And so it has in the pre New Hampshire primary pollsters' projections!

Bush a false prophet

George W Bush is in the holy land, says he, to hasten the creation of a Palestinian state, further the benefits of democracy, and come as a prophet of healing and understanding. Is he serious? Do not believe a word, he says. Look at his actions. As 18Brumaire says, the Israeli dog is waging the Bush mutt. Bush was greet at his arrival at Lod aeroport by the arch Zionist and faux peace maker, Shimon Peres, a hanger on from the old men who created the state of Israel, and who is a chief architect into throwing Palestinians out of the lands on the West Bank.
Bush's road map has come to a cul de sac, for the simple and obvious reason that he puts Israel's demands first and sees the demands of the Palestinians as marginal unless they bend to the will of Tel Aviv.
Mini mouse Bush's actions are so obvious that only his allies and clients can sang hosannahs of praise of their vacuity and emptiness; for they hardly mask Israel's surrogate role as Washington's kapo in the region. The Arab monarchs and presidents who welcome Bush cling to him the more to keep the groundswell of opposition of their own people from toppling them. But the winds of change are blowing and the answer is in the wind, and the day of reckoning is almost upon them.

Mentally challenged Hank Paulson

As CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson proved himself, but as Secretary of the Treasury, he displays symptoms of being mentally challenged. As signs of deep recession become more and obvious, and the dow jones drops double digits and the meltdown in the housing market seems endemic, and the tide of unemployment rises, he is slow to wake up from his Rip Van Winkle sleep to do anything about it. How can he? Wedded as he is the philosophy of the market regulates itself, and believing in the silliness of the sainted Ronald Reagan that the government is an onerous load on our backs, how can he do anything but put off the problems to the Greek Kalends. How can he? His wealth and class loyalties have so distanced him from the suffering of the ordinary American, he is incapable of coming up with anything but bandaids to yawning wounds in the US economy. Had he an ounce of intelligence, he would set to work calling for funding public works---America's infrastructure is if not collapsing,in serious need of repair; in dealing with the ballooning debt as he pursues Bush's guns for butter economy; in improving the country's education; in debt relief for homeowners...he has found a way to relieve the debt of his fellow big bankers, who like Goldman Sachs have pulled the biggest ponzi scheme in coming up with financial instruments which they salami sliced globally for big, fat returns, rosy bottom lines, and indecent bonuses. Paulson is the wrong man for this task; in fact, no one in mini mouse Bush's government has the brains to try to turn the economy around so attached are they to a Bourbon ideology. Paul O'Neill understood but Bush threw him out on the street, and did much to tar and feather his reputation. Throw the bum out of his job!

Youth the conscience of the nation

Eight years of Bush's mean government for the rich, have awaken sleepy student America. They have become energised by the primaries and by some of the more charismatic candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties for the White House. They are articulate but vague as to what they think the US needs other than change and a breath of fresh air, or a big broom to sweep out the special interests on K street and the congress. Compared to the students of the 1960's be they in the US or France or Japan or elsewhere, these American students do match up well. They have less learning and have been feed on the pap of factionalism which the post modernists and post colonialists served up in the universities.
Change will come for that is the law of life, but like babies these students will have to learn to crawl, then walk and talk and try to make up for the years of the blight on the American mind. Speaking of blight has anyone read the broadsheets and the crap in American journalism or the stilted wooden language on the airwaves which the mini mouse Bush's henchmen are giving away to the greedy few multi billion dollar corporation who are dumbing down the American electorate. A tale of caution in the mind control which has seized the land can be found in Per Wahloo's '33 floor'. Look for it if it is in print!

Rockets over Israel

Days before mini mouse Bush's junket to Israel and Palestine's west bank territories, with its sprawling illegal Israeli settlements and crisscrossed with roads and checkpoints, to keep Palestinians in their place and confined to bantustans, two Katusha rockets fired from Lebanon fell on a northern Israeli town causing some property damage. The Israeli authorities have no idea, nor see any reason as to who launched them, nor why at this moment. Well, Henny Penny the sky has not fallen on Tel Aviv's head. Prime minister Olmert won't dare say in public that the rockets came from Hazbullah territory in southern Lebanon, the more especially since his war in Lebanon broke its teeth partly on a resounding defeat by Hasbullah, and that a recent Israeli government report judged Olmert's preemptive war a serious failure and a damage to Tel Aviv's agressive war policy towards its neighbours.
The rockets fell on north Israel as a warning to Israel, for its over the top war against the legally elected Hamas government in the Gaza strip. Its murderous policy and its onerous measures to cower the Gazans through tried and true means practised by the British against the Boers, the Spanish against the Cubans, and the Nazis against the Jews in ghettos and later concentration camps, and other captive populations in the lands Hitler deemed necessary for his policy of Lebensraum for settlement of his Aryan Germans. The idea of Lebensraum is ever present in Israeli settlement in the occupied territories -- and some in Israel think that Sharon made a monumental mistake in pulling out the Gaza strip. The Israeli ideology is based on the bible which is not sound on imperial expansion, but will do to deprive the Palestinians of their rightful homeland.
So rockets fell from Lebanon on Israel as a warning and as a means to give breathing spell to the Palestinians in Gaza whom the Israeli authorities are depriving of food, water, electricity, and the like, and where the Tsuhal come and go as they please killing and maining the civilian population.
Still, one thing is certain, the Israeli in more than 40 years occupation have not quelled the spirit of resistance against its racist and colonial occupation. And the fight continues.

Deborah Kerr

The Sunday magazine edition of the grey old lady, 'the New York Times' at year's end publishes short obits on famous people who died in 2007. Deborah Kerr's name was conspicously absent. She had a long and distinguished career in film; won an Oscar, and got an honorary one years before she died. She is remembered more notably for her scene on the beach with Burt Lanchaster in 'From here to eternity'. Yet she was not a sex symbol but a seasoned actress. This was brought home to 18Brumaire when he saw at the Museum of Modern Art 'the Innocents' based on Henry James' 'Turn of the Screw'. Kerr turns in a strong and stirring performance. Yet at the time the film came out in 1961, the film reviewers save one or two, shot it down, as too Freudian; as too influenced by the great American writer of belles lettres, Edmund Wilson. To today's public the film may seem quaint but it is suggested you see it for the work well done by Kerr. Truman Capote had a hand in the script as did John Mortimer who supplied additional dialogue. If you want to see another side of Kerr, do grab 'Night of the Iguana' with the strong cast of Ava Gardner and Richard Burton. And then there is that haunting and enchanting film based on Rumer Godden's 'Black Narcissus', set in the high mountains of India which offers the film goer the same frisson but in a different way that he or she would have in seeing 'the Innocents'.
To a great lady of the silver screen who has left us, 18Brumaire vous salue!

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, well, it must be a recession

No one among the candidates is talking about recession, nor about the subprime meltdown in a serious way. Where are the position papers? Recent unemployment figures are proof that the US is sinking deeper in recession no matter what the hand tailored suited economists and bankers say on the BBC or CNN or NPR or any other network. And what about the sinking dollar? And the jobs?
The only sensible talk 18Brumaire has heard so far is letting the whopping taxcut that Bush and his toilet bowl cleaner at the Fed Greenspan allowed for the rich, die on the vine. And the taxes forgiven return to the public coffers. Calpers the California teachers union which has billions to invest has put hedgefunds on warning that they are loathe to pay high fees which buoy up fat pay packets for incompetent senior managers. It's about time that the elite get their financial wings cut, and the Democrats set forth a programme to narrow the growing income gap between the ordinary worker and the ceo...340 per cent separates them in pay!
This country is ready for change, everyone says so. But no one has a clear idea. Unless there is a groundswell from below and a meeting of the minds with the electoral base, we're going to get the same old, same old baloney.

Experience counts & wishing won't make it so

Governor Richard in the last of many debates among Democrats running for their party's nomination for the presidency, spoke the truth when he said, 'experience counts'. Senator Hillary Clinton reinforced the message by say, 'it takes hard work to get things done'. But you wouldn't believe it by the repetition ad nauseum of hope and change and change and hope. And what's more, it's great to feel good again as Americans. And there in a nutshell we have the touchy feely individualism which is fed to Americans from the cradle to the grave.
If the package has shiny wrapping paper and tied with a nice big red, white, & blue ribbon...well what more do you expect. Much more that the pious beating of breasts and the mantra of change which reminds you of those seeking the holy grail.
Let's face it. The American people deserve much better than the 8 years of Bush's engineered war and croneyism and impoverishment of everyone but his class of super rich blood suckers.
Senator Edwards is a practical man, and he has set forth a programme worth supporting. Senator Obama has a smooth tongue, but has rebacked his old speech which he delivered at the last Democratic party convention when Senator Kerry was nominated. He is full of pieties and fine words. He is not one to pull punches but when all is said and done he is as much a social conservative or perhaps slightly more than Governor Huckabee.
If Edwards says Clinton represents the same old, same old. Voters should look at the advisors to all the Democratic candidates. And surprise, surprise...they are the same old boys and girls networks from yes the Carter and Clinton administrations. If that ain't the same old, same old, 18Brumaire doesn't what is!
We need a solid programme for domestic ills--health care, jobs, education, environment, taxing the bloated rotting fish of millionaires, billionaires who get away with murder on the irs charts, and tax the corporations which export jobs abroad; on the policy front, the us has two wars on its hands--we are not speaking of the proxy wars it supports in Somalia, for example--no Democratic nominee can escape being a wartime president, but judging by what Senator Obama says, he will have a nervous finger on the nuclear button, and will engage in pre emptive war as did mini mouse Bush.
Posturing won't bring about change, experience and hardwork will. And until that message sinks in with the electorate, heaven help us all!

Bush the incompetent and the new South Korean president elect Lee

Look at pro business president elect Lee of South Korea. Not sworn into office, he is already saying how's he's going to deal with mortgage deliquency in South Korea. He's going to do something about it, and his government is going to step in and bring relief to beleaguered South Koreans who have fallen behind in mortgage payments or defaulted. Look at George Bush, he's hardly lifted a finger in the maelstrom of America's subprime meltdown and mortgage defaults. The handwriting was already on the wall with his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He was badly brought up by his mum in caring about other people. Remember what Barbara Bush said about all those dirty people from Louisiana who crowded into Houston for relief. They made a blight of clean scrubbed Houston. Thus in a nutshell we have a strong thread of the lack of concern and disdain for those not from the Bush's class and regatta set be they in Newport or Houston or Arizona or on Park Avenue. Only one thing counts and it is them and their rotting coupon clippers.

Bush ponders and the economy slides into recession

Newspapers showed a picture of George W. Bush in a pose of studied vacuity as he pondered whither the US economy. In a twangy imitation of Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, the economy had strengths, it was doing well despite some minor setbacks. In short, everything was business as usual. But was it? The floor sank under the New York Stock Exchange as the Dow fell 256,64. The market has not been able to shake off the 2008 blues; in fact the S&P and Nasdaq composite sank, too. Why? The government reported a hike in unemployment in December--a holiday month which should have seen an increase in workers taken on by employers. The pundits predicted some 70.000 new jobs but it turns out that around 18.000 found new employment, which, translated in to per centages which bean counters like very much, means off the mark by more than 70 per cent of the predicted figure! So if you didn't think the US was slipping into recession, and it is and has, these numbers weigh heavily on that assertion. And Bush looks muddle into the middle distance as to what to do. Not very much. He's not handled the subprime meltdown well. His genius of a Wall Street whiz kid at the Treasury Hank Paulson believes in voluntary measures. Read the fat cats of finance ain't going to do much unless you hold their uncalloused feet to the fire. Bush & his crowd of fat wallets think only of what's good for them, and the little people and the country go to the dogs which is going at a clip which the blind economists cannot see. Bush's crowd is made up of cronies, incompetents, the parvenus rich, the scam artists, and the ideologically committed to 18 century solutions. So Bush contemplates his navel as the American economy falters. Already the rotting fish of Wall Street are selling black souls of theirs to foreign countries and banks; as for business, take chemicals, very few of America's chemical makers are owned by Americans. Everything is for sale. And jobs, well they are outsourced abroad, and now the manufactured goods are coming to the US from there to. But the factories unsurprisingly, are outsourced American arms. Consumerism Mr Bush is dead now, everyone is scrambling to pinch pennies for higher oil and food and health costs. And there you are comfortable and cosy sitting on inherited wealth thinking of what's to be done. Another war? Your guns have brought little butter to American tables. Now Americans have a vague taste of what it was to have an incompetent like Herbert Hoover in the White House as deep recession than depression hit the US and the world. Where has FDR, our Joe Damaggio gone?

Indecent bonuses & Goldman Sachs

It is estimated that the average bonus for 2007 for Goldman Sachs employees is us$370.000. Of course this is the average and since all pigs are not equal, the division of the spoils in the year of market turmoil and subprime mortgage scams and failures, is not and never is equal. Blank[en]fein the CEO pocketed us$67m, a rising of more than 15 per cent above what he took home in 2006. And down the pecking order of senior manage the millions spent on luxury goods diminished in millions granted in bonuses.
Goldman Sachs makes money. They are clever and by half. They smelt the subprime meltdown, and so to lessen their exposure, they repackaged their cdos, sivs, and the like, to other greedy investment banks and moneybags, and in the end wrote off paltry billions from their warchest.
They represent the rot and the decadence of the power elite running the US today. Were our elected officials not in their pay, had they backbone and stiffen wet spaghetti spines of courage, they would tax Goldman Sachs & their band of theives at fair market value and curve rapacious appetites feeding on the nation's ratepayers whose take home income has greatly diminished, who are struggling under heavy debt, and who are facing an old age of neglect and poverty. A call for economic justice should be on the lips of all candidates running for president. But let's not hod our breath that these rich people running for office really care as a class!

The Iowa Caucuses & Hope & Not Staying the Course

Yesterday's Iowa Caucuses are a celebration of so called participatory democracy. It reminds 18Brumaire of small town 4 July parades with its floats, cheer leaders, marching bands, and much hoopla. Iowa kicks off the season of America's tribal rites leading up the nomination of a candidate for the presidency of the US. It magnifies the myths, the call to service to the nation, and re affirms the country's commitment to democracy. And Iowa began on the right foot on this every 4 year crusade for electing a president.
Barak Obama came in first among the Democrats elbowing for the top office, distancing his two rivals Hillary Clinton and John Edwards by a good 7 points. He spent us$9,7 million dollars on his campaign in Iowa, and his money paid off. Obama on one hand broke the taboo that a black man could be elected to the highest office of the land, as does Hillary's campaign as a woman running for the same position. John Edwards is the embodiment of the American dream, that a poor boy with cheek can overcome odds, improve his lot, and become president yet remaining true to his roots.
If Iowa says something, it is this: Americans want change; they no longer support the Bush staying the course. And change was on the lips of everyone among the Democrats running for their party's ointment as candidate for president. Change too was heard from Mike Huckebee the Republican winner who trounced the rich, soap cleaned hand Mitt Romney, who like weather vane on an old barn tuned his message to the shift in the wind, and who stood squarely for business as usual.
Obama and Huckabee spoke of hope, and the crowds cheered. [Huckabee like Bill Clinton comes from Hope, Arkansas.] Aside from the pieties of hope, a new wind, and change, when you scratch the surface Obama's hope and Huckabee's hope vary little. The two utter a prayer for a change without the hungry electors wanting to know more. Scratching the surface, in spite of minor differences, Obama and Huckabee are social conservatives and will tilt towards slightly more flexibility in domestic and foreign policy without rocking the boat and courting the establishment, the monied special issues, and the general status quo. Americans do want change; they hope that the Bush years will simply go away, but Americans are generally enthusiasts and naive, dare we say ignorant as cabbages, as politics. They intone slogans and think like Obama and Huckabee chanting a mantra of and for hope and change will like the magician's wand pull the rabbit out of the hat, and then everything will be hunky dory again. There is such a disconnect between the tribal practices of electing officials and the lives of the ordinary man and woman on main street that the soap bubbles of hope and change evaporate before their eyes after elections; these ordinary guys and gals then simply shrug shoulders and utter a pitiful cry, 'you cannot change city hall'...and slog on till the next presidental elections when hope and change are born anew and engage in the myths of yore with renewed enthusiasm.

Lust, Caution, an Ang Lee film

Ang Lee won his second 'Leone d'oro' for 'Lust, Caution' at the Venice Film Festival 2007, in three years. Nigel Andrew the Financial Times of London film high priest snidely called it a 'shagfest'. Readers of this excellent paper will find his review of the film in the 3 January 2008 of a finer and different appreciation, worthy of 5 stars. Ang Lee is a superior film maker who with his collaborators turn short stories into major, majestic films. In 'Lust, Caution' he has taken Eileen Chang's 60 page story, and transformed it into a 153 minute film, so rich and dark that it rivets the viewer to his seat. The chemistry of love is difficult to distill but here Ang Lee turns blind passion and will into the gold alchemists dream of. The passion is highly physical and intense and brutual, serving the intrigue during the Japanese war against China, between a collaborator and a radical student young woman who with her friends seek to kill him. One is reminded of the song Marlene Dietrich sang in 'Der Blaue Engel' [the blue angel], 'Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe angestellt' [I am made for love]. In 'Lust, Caution', the metaphor is not that of a moth to a flame, but one of a Chinese song of the 1930's, of a needle and a threat, but the denouement is nonetheless tragic. The ending is otherwise, but 18Brumaire suggests his readers see Lee's film. Eileen Chang knew of what she wrote, having survived a husband who collaborated; her writing career suffered because the grand high priests of China studies, like the old men in Mao's Beijing, dismissed her work as 'reactionary' and 'anti patriotic'. She died a broken woman but her small literary legacy is truer to the times than the Potemking novels which routinely followed Mao's footprint of literature and art for the workers and peasants. Chang was true to herself as Lee is true to her in his great film!

Malaysia and Allah

Were it not so serious, the hardening of the arteries of Malaysia's ulema is a case of advanced backwardness. They judged scandalous bordering on the blasphemous the use of 'Allah' by the Malaysian Catholic press. 'Allah', ruled they, is and can only be used by Muslims. Christian, they further pontificated that the Catholics only had the right to use 'Tuan' for the name of God, not Allah. So ruled the Muslim pooh bahs of religion. This ruling has earned the sclerotic Muslim theologians much ridicule, and the foreign press has had a small picnic in making fun of them.
The Malaysian ulema are a backward lot. They take the tree for the forest, so benighted that they are in reading the letter of the religious law so small betraying a monumental short sightedness. Let's face it, Arabic is not readily at their command, or even it were, they are ignorant as cabbages when it comes to linguistics let alone history. Had they an inkling of the truth, they would have grasped the fact that in Arabic 'Allah' is the name of God, and it is used by Jews, Christians, Druze, Muslims, Bahai, and any number of other religious sects. But as 18Brumaire says, they don't. They may know the 'fatiah', but to them it is a rote formula learnt at the madrassa without deeper meaning. It reminds 18Brumaire of the Arabic texts used well into the mid 20 Century describing humans. As an example, the medieval notion that the heart was located in the stomach was taught in spite of the advances of medicine. This is but an example of the distance in time and mentality that prevailed or prevails still between today's world and the universe of the carved in stone of medieval Arabic knowledge. To save the dark, shadowed minds from themselves and to put a slightly brighter and more modern face of Islam, the Malaysian government had to step in and over rule the almighty and sacrosaint upholders of Islam. Kuala Lumpur reversed the ulemas' judgment and thus sanctionned the use of 'Allah' by non Muslims in the Bahasa Melayiu press! Nonetheless the glaring backwardness of Malaysia's religious authorities is a troublesome sign that more harmful ignorance awaits non Muslims in Malaysia which is becoming more and more intolerant of others in a modern secular like state, tilting more and more towards theocracy and greater disciminations against non Muslims and oppression of Muslims in dress, behaviour, freedom of expression, and the like. The current state of political breakdown in Malaysia may very well hasten such a disasterous trend.

2008 is not 1968

Telly viewers and radio listners you're in for a year of nostalgia and bogus comparisons. 2008 is not 1968 although many will find a lot of parallels. 2008 is different from 1968, and not the least that murder, assassination, a generation of the young worldwide believed in a groundswell which would wash away the old men of the past. It didn't.
The 2008 elections in the United States may bring the Democrats back to White House, but the Reagan revolution has tilted the country towards the very rich and privileged. And money plays a role in everything especially in the wads of Yankee dollars greatly discounted on world markets funding all the candidates war chests. Some pundits talk of the great discontent among the American electorate but where are the demostrations, the outcries, the pulling on the donkey tails in the Houses of Congress for change. Nary a world is heard. The country has turned against Bush's lying war in Iraq, but no one until now--John Edwards--has had the courage as a candidate to say that elected he would bring the boys and girls home. The others play footsy with the issue and Guiliani demogagically is calling for a 'surge' in Afghanistan. With whose bodies pray tell?
Voters may surprise us in the privacy of the voting booth, but that's a good 11 months away. It is time for them to put the feet of candidates and Congress to the fire for change and for sanity in the way wealth is distributed in America and foreign policy is conducted. And boot the neo cons and the Bushies on to the dust heap of history!