The anal hairstylist Hank Paulson's scam

If anyone thinks that the anal hairstylist at the US Treasury Hank Paulson's plan to bring order to shaky financial markets, think again, my friends! It's pure and simple sugar coating, pie in the sky, eyewash, call it what you will. The plan won't do much to calm markets, nor as the pundits keep saying turn the corner on the crisis, it simply will make the situation more fragile. For if anything this anal hairstylist is doing everything to save his class' hold on capitalism. It won't do that at all. It is a desperate ploy on the part of a failed and desperate presidency which the subprime scam has shown it hollowness and vacuity. If anything Paulson's plan won't the ugly warts of finance capitalism which stands butt naked in all its shame. Herr Bush's anal hairstylist is playing for time, with an insouciance of a Louis XV...who as we all learnt in our lessons...or should have...uttered these telling words, 'apres moi, le deluge'. Apres Herr Bush is more misery and pain and the fall from grace of the American imperium. The US waits at its peril not to rise up and boldly challenge Herr Bush. His band of thugs are trying to bury the serious reforms that Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd are struggling to bring to legislation which would put a leash around the neck of the enraged dog which is Wall Street. More power to them! Throw Paulson to the wolves!

Samy al-Maghribi

18Brumaire learns with regret of the death of the Moroccan Jewish singer and cantor Samy al-Maghribi in Montreal, at the age of 86. al-Maghribi lived a long and fruitful life. For those of us who remember him, it brings back older days in Morocco which seem another age. Who doesn't smile at his singing 'Kaftanek mahloul ya lala', a song with ironic undertones, or hasn't a tear in hearing him and his children sing 'as shems as shiya', for example. Songs which brought delight to Jew and Muslim alike. For those who enjoyed the style of singing which the expelled Jews and Muslims brought from a reconquered Christian Spain, al-Maghribi's cd's presevre his voice and his art. Lastly for those with a liturgical bent, there is his liturgical music.
In his passing, another page is turned in the history of Morocco where his memory has faded and in the history of the Sefardim. Que Dieu ait son ame!

Dump the anal hairstylist Hank Paulson

Dump Hank Paulson at the US Treasury. The overwhelming forces of tumult in the market which began with the collapse of the subprime deck of cards which he as CEO Goldman Sachs contributed greatly to the elaboration of CDO's, ABS' and the like which shook the temple of finance capital worldwide, has caused him like Alice's Red Queen to run faster to keep in place. Now he's come up with a 'bold' plan to staunch the flow of blood in markets by envisioning more oversight. Eyewash! He is trying to save selfishly the perogatives of his bloodsucking class who rule nations' economies. It won't work. He's trying to forestall the inevitable which means putting a tight leash of regulation in the financial community to return a wholesome degree of stability in the markets. Ultimately he or a man with broader vision will have to do this. Paulson is a throwback to the bad times of the Great Depression, a mossback who belongs in a museum. Throw the bastard out! This is an idle cry, perhaps, but it does say that under Herr Bush's regime everything that tin horn sheriff has touched has turned to dust...We need people with balls who won't be afraid to do bold things...yes, someone like FDR who came into office without much of a programme but meet the challenges of the Great Depression without batting an eyelash. Paulson ain't from that cut of the wood; he would save his class of thugs and thieves and let Rome burn; FDR slapped his class into doing what he abhorred most but saved capitalism from the very people who are dumb and inefficient and crude and who alas have lived another day to ruin this country. Send Paulson back to what he is good at...combing the anal hairs of the rich!

South Korea's Lee goes on the offensive against North Korea

The signs were already there. Lee Myung-bek's ride to the Blue House foreshadowed a tough line on relations with North Korea. He had a good model to follow in Herr Bush who in the end had to open direct talks with Pyongyang. Lee's bravado has had an immediate response. North Korea kicked out South Korean officials in Kaesong's free trade zone kilometres away from the 38th parallel, and now, Kim Jong il's regime has tested rockets in the Eastern Sea. And in one fell swoop of Lee's heated up rhetoric, tension has returned with a vengeance to the divided Korean peninsula. Lee a know nothing has scrapped the Sunshine Policy, and in its place has substituted empty prose which will turn back the clock in dealing with North Korea and the nuclear question. So much for a rational and intelligent, new foreign policy and inter Korean policy. What Koreans need least is another ideological, god fearing leader who won't shy away in brinkmanship. Since he's wanting to show he has big balls between his legs like Herr Bush, his policy towards Pyongyang will lead to a coming to Canossa as Herr Bush did in opening up discussions with Kim Jong-il's government. Herr Bush has 'heuvos secos' or dried eggs, meaning his balls are sterile, and so he know finds a fellow big mouth without substance in Lee Myong-bek. Everyone has much to fear from the rashness of South Korea's new president.

Bear Stearns Jimmy Cayne walks away

The rouge paper billionaire Jimmy Cayne has sold his stock to JP Morgan Chase for a mere us$61 million, stock which a month ago was worth in the hundreds of millions. He has given up the fight to challenge the heist of his bank by the US government and the Fed and JP Morgan. It is a sign that in the end JP Morgan will prevail in its bid for Bear Stearns. Cayne who in 1998 told his peers on Wall Street to take a hike in order to save a hedge fund who had gone belly up, got his in the neck in 2008, owing to greed and a massive subprime scam which has rocked the world markets. He picked up two condos in the very posh and renovated Plaza Hotel by Central Park in New York, for us$32 million the value of which has already appreciated. He can devote his leisure and his 'poverty' to chewing on Havana cigars and playing tournament bridge. He like the Eliot's 'Wasteland' goes off the scene with a whimper for all his table pounding and bluster and his puffery. May he rot for eternity!

Journalism lite--the New York Times new format

A new format for the New York Times makes you think that its readers need stronger glasses for the big print. What used to appear on a half page on p.2, outlining major articles, has now exploded into 3 pages--pp. 2,3, & 4--in larger type and more leading. What's more this unnecessary use of space elbows out more detailled international and national coverage. Now, we're treated to more cultural curosities or odd facts--such as the survival among older Koreans of the use of Japanese forms of poetry written in Japanese, which is interesting, but hardly worth all the space as the news on hot spots at home and abroad get short shrift. It seems that the grey old lady of American journalism has taken a leaf out of USA Today, with its telegraphic style of reporting. Does anyone remember the name of Per Wahloo who along with his wife wrote the Martin Beck murder mystery series and was a keen eyed political novelist. His '33 floor' tells a tale of the cheapening of news and the infantilism of the press to dumb down a people so that they remain in the dark about what's going on even in their own backyard. The result, in this dark tale of caution, is what we're seeing not only in the gutter press a la Rupert Murdoch which glorifies guts & gore and the peccadillos of the glitterati but the rot has now reach the height of the respectable press like the New York Times. The chattering classes are no better in high brow magazines, believe me. And the public is so well trained that it snaps to the whips of the growing authoritian and iron rule of the monied classes. Truly we've entered another dark age of puerile!

Dump Hank Paulson

US secretary of the Treasury and anal hairstylist par excellence has proven himself unfit in these parlous time of recession. Dump him, we say! He recently has come to the conclusion that some discipline [read regulation] has to come back to the market place, but not those 'stringent' measures which FDR' s New Deal gave birth to. In fact, like Herr Bush & the gang of Republican thugs, he has fought to undo that legacy, so that his class of super and ultra super rich flourish wantonly. The last thing this anal hairstylist wants is transparency for that would mean banks would have to expose their books to public scrutiny. Take Goldman where the anal specialist presided for years...they've let their hedge funds or two at least die on the vine. Cash rich as they are, we don't know how many us$ billion they hold in bad loans. Even JP Morgan's thrist for the failed Bear Stearns has it is rumoured debt to the whopping tune of us$288 billion but we won't ever know that till it fails. Britain and France have a more robust way of handling the meltdown in the market...open the books, more transparency, take note of the rot and do something to clean the financial stables. But that is not in the anal hairstylist Paulson's book.s

John McCain the voice of black reaction

John McCain has spit out his contempt at Herr Bush's attempt to rescue Bear Stearns from bankruptcy and Congress for attempts to alleviate the effects of the subprime scam which is weighing onerously on the shoulders of homeowners. A Grandgrind he, no rescue...let them eat cake & all that. Not only is the tub boat admiral a no nothing in foreign affairs, but he's a neanderthal when it comes to economics. Should he become president, boy, is the US in for 4 years which will make Herr Bush's 8 years of incompetency look as though they were worthy of a Nobel prize in goverance. More, the tub boat admiral is a war monger of the first order who is endowed with a one thought mind. He knows nothing, learns nothing, and alas for us should he and his band of neo con thugs come to power, he will hasten further the decline of everything that we think of as the US.

Out of desperation, Jaime Diamon ups the ante for Bear Stearns personnel

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Jaime Diamon the Fed's & the US Treasury's knight in shining armour was supposed to ride into a king's ransom by buying Bear Stearns for us$2 a share. He & his Gang of 4 godfathers in government and the Fed didn't count on the hostile reaction by world markets and Bear's employees for being conquered so brutally and sacked by the Huns who descended on Rome in the 6 century of our era. So, first he jacked up shares to us$10, which floated the value of Bear Stearns to well over a us$1 billion yet still a far cry from which it is really worth. Now to keep the flower of Bear's employees who make money in trading and asset management, Diamon is now promising a bonus of yes us$500m if you bring in at least us$500m in new business! On one hand, he's trying to stop the fleeing of key personnel he thought he would pick up for a song, as they might bolt to his competitors. On the other, it is a sign of complete desperation! No one in these money making areas of Bear will lose jobs, but will benefit from fat pay packets and more, prestige for the privilege of working for the house JP Morgan built. But he isn't counting on Bear pride nor the rough and tumble culture which has put these very men and women to make Bear profitable. Instead of a shoo in, Diamon is finding he has to cough up more than he wanted, woo people he had contempt for, and handle irate stock holders whom he and the US government impoverished with on bloody Sunday 16 March 2006. Diamon is not known for a cool temper...his is more volitile and Mediterrean, but like it or not he's going to swallow his pride if he wants Bear.

China & the Olympics

China is reaping the whirlwind of its own bad actions in Tibet. The summer Olympic games in Beijing in July 2008 were supposed to be the crowning glory of its entry into the big boys club, a new knight in 'democracy's' mail. That's a laugh. Listening to the IOC's president say that the games in Beijing will have a civilising effect on China, must set its leaders gaffawing till they choke for air. If anything the Chinese leader think it is the IOC who are follows and uncivilised. 18Brumaire is quite sure that in 1936 the IOC used the same arguments to justify Herr Hitler's Germany hosting the summer games.
Bless 'les journalistes sans frontieres' and the brave young Tibetans who breached the polite little ceremony in Athens at the historic site of the first Olympics, who called for a boycott of the games and yelled 'free Tibet'! They poked the finger in the eye of puffery, and proved oh how wrong the IOC's and China's propaganda are. The IOC says the 25.000 or so journalists who will flock to Beijing for the games, will be able to discover any hanky panky in freedom of the press. How naive can you be, since China will do everything to discourage any bad news and with force and stealth and outright lying. The Chinese will have to deal with being a pariah nation for a while, for even now torch bearers of the Olympic flame are coping out in protest. China deserves what it gets for its treatment of the Tibetans, and while we are saying that, and oppresing the Ouighars in Xinjiang. A pox on its house!

Bear Stearns...the next episode

JP Morgan's CEO hotspur Jaime Diamon managed to salvage his bid for the failed investment bank Bear Stearns by upping his bid by 5 for us$10 a Bear share of stock. He now holds 39,5 per cent and is shy of a majority to take the company over. The new offer means he takes on for his bank a cool us$1 billion in debt, but that is nothing compared to what he gets by absorbing Bear. JPMorgen Chase will inherit a seasoned assetment management and trading department, for example, which it sorely needed. Discontent among the Bear employees will dissipate with a good, healthy, fat pay cheque. Yet Diamon has a fight on his hands by some major stockholders who don't relish the thought of being taken to the cleaners.
The new offer pumped the Dow Jones Average up along with good news on the mortgage front. But it's a bleep, not a turning of an economic meltdown corner. The markets are sensitive to the least sneeze or bad news, and like all ups in the makets, they are followed by steep declines.
No matter any which way you slice the deal, Jaime Diamon will walk away with the reputation of a rogue prince in the cut of Bear's James Cayne and Ace Goodman, slick, rough and tumble, no nonsense CEO's with hard hearts.
The toiletroom attendent Bernanke and the anal hair stylist Hank Paulson got the shock of their lives when they thought they had tamed the markets by 'rescuing' Bear Stearns; they woke to the news that they had set dominos falling in world markets, and they ran faster on the treadmill of tied laissez capitalist solutions to save the banks, the assurers, Bears' creditors by cutting interest rates, becoming the lender of last resorts to greedy bankers in the mould of Hank Paulson. They've no vision beyond the tip of pointy noses and small minded greed. In no way, shape, or form, have they whipped the recession and the fragile market. They're not the men to turn the mess around but only the cleaners of an Augean stable they do not know where to begin to clean.

Cheney in Israel & Palestine

18Brumaire might be reading too much into vice president Dick Cheney's pledge that the US won't let Israel down, and Israel has to do more to sign a peace deal with the Palestinian authority. Cheney, let's suppose, came to Israel to read Olmert the riot act. The US outwardly will talk tough but Israel has to sacrifice its demands so that Palestine becomes a reality and joins the ranks of nations.
The US holds the purse strings and the power over Israel. So Olmert is going to have to sing for his supper. Lest we forget the US rate or taxpayer has had to fund for the past 60 years the state of Israel to the tune of trillions of us dollars which would better be served to improve the lot of Americans. More, Herr Bush's record in office is abominable, and he needs a win to make that record look less dirty and dingy than it is. So a peace accord is in the wind, and Olmert will have to stop settlements, agree on an Arab Jerusalem, and repatriate its rabid settlers to within its borders, not totally but enough to make Palestine a midldly viable political entity. Time is running out, and Herr Bush will twist Israel's tail for its own means. Which underscores that Israel is a client state of the US, and will hop when Washington cracks the whip, and American Jews will have to like or lump it, and ain't that the truth.

The Bear Stearns buyout turns ugly. Jaime Diamon got too greedy!

All that glitters isn't gold. Jaime Diamon is learning that the hard way. He thought, he was going to pick up Bear Stearns for a song, at a knock down price of us$2 a share, and at rate or taxpayers' nickels & dimes; he hastily signed an agreement which according today's New York Times [24 March 2008] whereby JP Morgan Chase guarantees Bear's trade, and so suddenly in less than week since the deal was announced it looks as though he mortgaged JP Morgan's purse for what he throught was a steal of a buy and a done deal. It ain't. Suddenly, he's upped the ante by offering us$10 a share, but that won't soothe the turbulent waters of anger of Bear's shareholder large or small. The offer is a slap in the face, he has to come up with a mininum of us$30 a share, the very price Bear closed at on 14 March last. Do the sums on your fingers and toes, and that makes the deal less good than Diamon had thought. He would've to burden JP Morgan with billions of dollars in debt which the Fed may very well not cover. Angry, 'apopletic' the New York Times reports, he's threatening to walk away from the deal, letting Bear fall into bankruptcy. But the Fed won't let that happen, and so it looks as though Bear has a chance to lumber through the crisis as Bear. Diamon isn't even sure that the US government will allow the spike of by 5 in share prices he's offering.
If Diamon and the Fed and the Gang of 4 who now are bringing aid and succor to investment banks up to their nose in subprime debt did not envision a cold reception at the way they brought Bear Stearns down, you cannot but think how dumb they are. The first news of Bear's heist brought the markets in Asia and Europe tumbling and the scurrying of the mice in the US government to rescue not only the deal but to bring some calm in not only the US but the world market. So much for the savvy say of the anal hair stylist Hank Paulson and the toilet room attendent Ben Bernanke...
And now there is a turf war going on between Paulson at the Treasury and Bernanke at the Fed about the need of regulating banks and mortgage markets and keeping an eagle eye on the financial con games of the banking industry so that CDO's, ABS' and the like won't rise again or at least for another 50 years!
Paulson hates regulation for it would crimp Goldman's style; Bernanke knows what bank failure means having studied the collapse of world markets in 1930, ushering in the Great Depression. Each are advocates of laissez faire capitalism but Paulson would rather see a Goetterdammerung in the markets than let them be manicled to good regulation, but Bernanke the wiser of the two jackasses strives to save the system. Bernanke knows that to preserve his class' privileges you've to give a little to say the whole. Which brings us back to Jaimie Diamon who slick as he is, let his greed get the better of him, and now his leadership is in question and his shareholders have might cotton to thread about the imploding debt which a revised deal in taking over Bear Stearns entails. Already rumours are on the street that hidden in JP Morgan's balance sheet is debt upwards to us$300 billion. True or not...it is enough to shake the might Morgan bank. Additionally, no one questioned the roaring engine of anger and revenge of Bear's stockholders big and small, and they do matter for it is they who have to hand over share so that JP Morgan can 'rescue' and kill Bear at the same time. And now it looks as though this hostile takeover might remain hostile and bitter and costly to fool's gold Diamon.

Boycott China

Beijing has ripped on the velvet glove on its steel fist. It will suppress as much as it can through murder, rape, rapine, and sheer terror Tibet and Tibetans anywhere in China. There is only one answer outside of China to these thugs...BOYCOTT! Stop buying goods made in China, boycott the summer Olympic games in Beijing, write articles, organise peaceful demos in front of Chinese consultates, banks, businesses. Let these thugs know that they are going to be tracked anywhere they turn up on this planet.
No matter how hard they try, they can never quench Tibet's national longing for freedom...unless these thugs go in for genocide. And we wouldn't put anything passed them on that score. May their innards rot!

Four horsemen of America's financial apocalypse

Splashed across today's weekend edition of 'The Financial Times of London' are in profile the 4 horsemen of America's financial apocalypse. The bathroom attendent Ben Bernanke, the fair haired youngish president of the New York Fed Tim Geithner, an heir apparent to America's future financial levers, and much tied to Heinz Kissinger aka Henry Kissinger, the 'peigne cul' Hank Paulson secretary of the Treasury, and the flunky Robert Steel US undersecretary for domestic finance. This Gang of 4 are fiddling with America's finances which are in an awful mess which the likes of the stroker of anal hairs Paulson is much to blame for, for what we know as CDO's, ABS, and other tricky financial instruments which brought on the scam everyone's call the subprime meltdown. But the flood in financial markets is drowning everyone but the top 1 per cent of the rich mafia which Herr Bush has favoured and which rule this country inefficiently.
What a difference the bankrupting of Bear Stearns by the Gang of 4. It has further destablised world markets, not to speak of accelerating the growing poverty in the US and elsewhere for everyone but the oligarchy of big banks and money that rule the US and they think the world! Eat that pie in the sky, fellows! Scrambling they are to glue together the splitting ends of the House of laissez faire capitalism which is going bust big time! The rot has spread to the UK where the governour of the Bank of England is now talking of the government as the lender of last resort and the St Bernard dog of finance capital come to the rescue by buying up outstanding mortgage. America's Gang of 4 is hesitating to take this step although there is still anemically live and breathing an FDR New Deal institution called the Fair Housing Authority which was created for the very purposes of regulating the mortgage market. The Gang of 4 as fronts for Herr Bush and his reactionary friends are resisting this but the force of the crisis will catapult them into reviving the very New Deal mechanisms Herr Bush & his free marketeers have done everything to crush and dismantle, so that they can rule with impunity through war in Iraq, bilking even the upper middle classes [read 6 to 7 figures in income] down to the very poor of a good life and a future.
By bankrupting Bear Stearns they very well made sure creditors, meaning the big boys got their money and the devil take care of the rest! JP Morgan's Jaime Diamon walks away with his pockets jingling, the Gang of 4 smile that they are handling the crisis which is abating, they think. What is sure, no one really knows the depth of the krash and the widening of what they all hate to call a recession since it doesn't meet a textbook definition---go out on the high and biways, talk to the ordinary people, you fools, you might learn something!
They are like the sorcerer's apprentice in Disney's 'Fantasia', unable to control the flood but by putting fingers in the dyke.
Everything old is new again...so willy nilly the Gang of 4 are going for the little time left in Herr Bush's longish stay in the Oval office to revive some of the New Deal solutions which the Republicans & their hanger ons have tried to flush down the crapper.

Tibet, Taiwan, and Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi and a high powered delegation from the US house of representative met with the Dalai Lama in his aerie in the Indian Himalayas. Her mere presence there is a jolt to the Chinese government even though they feign to ignore it and treat her with the gutter language which is endemic in the official press to those unfriendly towards China. Beijing is not stupid enough to ignore that a new wind is blowing in Washington and that a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress spell business done a little differently than under Herr Bush's inept and syncophantic courting of the grey beards in Beijing. China's harsh and brutal repression of Tibet and Tibetans in other provinces simply show the ugly face of China's dictatorial rule. Beijing won't live up to its own constitution which guarantee its citizens and minority people 'democratic rights' which the central government never observes but when it suits the Communist Party. Even its hand picked Panchen Lama refuses to condemn the Dalai Lama lest he lose any credability he might have as a Chinese puppet among his own people. Pelosi's visit it is hoped with embarass Herr Bush so that he won't turn up as promised at the summer Olympics in Beijing.
Tibet has cast a long shadow on elections in Taiwan. Will it send back to power the current government which tilts towards autonomy or even full independence in Taiwan? Will it favour the yea votes in the referendum calling on the government to be seated in the UN's as Taiwan? If so will Beijing show the island with missiles? Will the US send in the sixth fleet to stay its bloody hand?
China is caught in the net of its own politics and what's more the country is bleeding badly from the very weak and weakening dollar and the collapse in world markets, even though the factories in China are foreign dominated for sagging foreign markets and abstinence in foreign buying power.
China is reeling...but like most bullies...who never cry 'Uncle!', they think only in terms of military solutions which will bring in the end the house of China's Communist party crashing down on its own head. China has much to lose by treating shabbily Tibet. Now Obama has thrown his two cents into the debate--he's willing to go to Beijing to negotiate a settlement between the Dalai Lama and the
Communists. That has to stick in the caw of the Beijing tryants. What were they thinking...the whole smiling face to the world is now one of extreme anger and blind range.

Free for all in the market place

The current instability in the markets has intensified. Commodities once the safe port in the subprime storm are in turmoil, wot, with gold and oil and even wheat losing within a few days 15 per cent of crest prices. The self satisfied bankers in Europe proudly proclaim that the might Euro can withstand the wrenching strains on the global financial system? Can they? That remains to be seen, doesn't it? Already the governour of the Bank of England has had to step in as a lender of the last resort. The toilet room attendent Ben Bernanke at the US Fed is already trying to clean out the Augean stables of America's banking institutions by being throwing them a life line as we have seen in the case of the collapse of Bear Stearns. The blockhead Hank Paulson secretary of the US Treasury and once the baron of Wall Street as the head of Goldman Sachs, with a tinge of banker's envy and revenge, did nothing to help save Bear Stearns. The fall of the house of Jimmy Cayne who ruled Bear Stearns has thrown the world markets into a tumble. Credit is drying up under a Saharan wind of mounting temperatures of the excessive hot potatoes of financial instrutments that are COS, ABS, and the like, the inability to meet mortgage payments, credit card debt, falling retail sales, rising food costs, rising motor gasoline prices...and the litany in a rosary of economic woes and sorrows is just beginning. Herr Bush utters meaningless words of pie in the sky and shucks the crisis is being contained. Eyewash! His minions at the Fed and the Treasury are running around like chickens with their heads lopped off to save the big banks from a krash...Bernanke is hearing the old marching music from 1930 when the US banks toppled, tumbled, and krashed, thus ushering in the Great Depression. Owing to the greed of America's bankers and their short sighted ideas and goals everyone is running for the cellar to ride out the economic whirlwind they are reaping. No one is safe not even the mighty Euro...even the sheiks who hold the Petro dollars are suddenly finding restive foreign workers whose earnings in US dollars have so depreciated that they find they can hardly feed families back at home in south and southeast Asia. These tight little emirates are fearful that this discontent will spread among their own people spared from the harsh labour foreigners do and thus are a threat to their thrones and crowned head. And then there's the war which is the 10 tonne gorilla which no one speaks of. The list is seemingly endless of the ripple effect that suddenly turned into an eddy sucking everyone down by the collapse and the steadfast refusal of the big banks and the US government to save Bear Stearns

Five years in Iraq and counting

Yesterday marked year 5 year of the war Herr Bush lied his country into in Iraq. As 18Brumaire remarked yesterday, Herr Bush surrounded himself with a phalanx of his generals and officers at the Pentagon to give a rousing but mendacious and meterious speech about how he has achieved his goals...by bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq and belling the Al Qaeda cat. [How come old cock of the walk Osama bin Laden is still alive and well and mocking you as you speak?]
All over America there were protests against a seemingly never ending war but the press kept its coveraged muted or shelved in the inner pages with a minimum of commentary. On MacNeil Lehrer the beltway voice of conservative opinion, they still had to show how even handed they were by marshalling the pro war clan to cancel out the vox populi who oppose overwhelming the war at present. And then there is an Iraqi American university professor who sneers at the opposition because most Americans want the more especially since America's losing the war and the hearts and minds of the country of his birth. He sneers but won't turn down their opposition, despite the reason, and for that, he's right.
What makes liberal opposition to the war infuriating is that it still believes in the myth that the US is and should be the world's policeman. A loud gaffaw, please! Illusions die hard, the more the pity! McCain is bonkers on the war, he keeps talking about Al Qaeda where it ain't; Obama will privatise the war and Hillary like Obama will keep around 60.000 troops there with a long list of military bases and long leases on oil fields but even that won't stop the fighting! So the endless war will go on as the us$ weakens and so does the economy and the burden of the poor and working classes suffer as the rich wear togas and laurel crowns and lapse in the luxury of ill gotten wealth.

Bear Stearns as Wall Street's whipping boy

Jaime Diamon JP Morgan's CEO strode confidently through the hallowed but silent halls of Bear Stearns building on New York Madison Avenue. He came as conquerer, and the 5th largest investment bank lay at his feet as though he were Titus carrying off to Rome the booty of the looted second temple in Jerusalem and was on the point of exiling Bear's 14.000 employees into the exile of unemployment.
He bought Bear for a risible us$248m, by wiping out the stock options of its employees and burning its institutional investors and insiders. But that is another story since a fierce campaign is in formation to challenge the buyout which has left blood everywhere. Diamon is not alone he had the Fed as a willing accomplice and now lender of last resorts for Wall Street's fragile big banks who have hid debt owing to those creative instruments known as CDO, ABS, and the like. Which simply shows how bad the economic climate is under Herr Bush's minions, that is, the toilet attendent Bernanke and the court jester at the Treasury Henry Hank Paulson who gave up his empire at Goldman Sachs to tame America's market. Let's laugh out loud, juding by his klewless performance as Herr Bush's money man.
Bernanke could've saved Bear from a highway robbery and collapse but the collusion of Herr Bush and Wall Street was necessary to teach Bear a lesson and send a warning to investment bankers world over. You do not mess too much with our wealth and our standing.
Bear didn't get the Fed's us$2bn bailout but JP Morgan did, and JPM will lend it to Bear who will never repay it once it is absorbed into the mighty house of Morgan. Bear will firm up JP Morgan's weak asset management and investment arms for sure, and this sleight of hand will spare JPM from opening its books. Although JPM says it is homesafe from outstanding subprime debt and its fallout, rumour from inside JPM says the bank has a 9 figure exposure on that count...think of it...a multi hundred billions of debt!
So here we are again, the toiletroom attendent and the slick JP Morgan CEO whistling and laughing all the way to the bank with the rate or taxpayers monies which they won't ever repay.
Nonetheless the weakness of the US house of finance under Herr Bush's direction has humbled the mighty superpower and put enough grease under its wheels to slip rapidly on the road towards a second rate power. That is a lesson to learn from the Bear Stearns hijacking.

Herr Bush's delusions--victory in Iraq

Anyone listening to Herr Bush's speech at the Pentagon on year 5 of his invasion of Iraq, will know that this lame duck has lost touch with reality. He spoke at the Pentagon because he had a captive audience; had he spoken anywhere else in the US, he would'v had to face protesters. Although the economy has eclipsed the war as centrepiece in the presidential elections, few speak of the two as cause and effect. Everyone knows but few say that Herr Bush lied his country into war. His Adam's rib of a vice president Dick Cheney will return from a tour of the Middle East to tell his master that the mission in Iraq has been accomplished time and time again, no matter that Iraqi's have died in the millions, millions more have been displanced or taken the road to exile, and that almost 4000 young Americans have perished for a dumb, unnecessary war to stroke Herr Bush's ego.
As the economy sinks into deep depression and the war rages on and the national debt balloons into the trillions of dollars and the American people but Herr Bush's class and class of war profiteers who have grown fat and richer...Herr Bush's proven an failed leader. And may he rot for that

McCain on Iraq & Iran, Obama on race in America

John McCain once again put his foot into his mouth...claiming Teheran is training Al Qaeda in Iraq. Luckily his travelling companion during his swing in the Middle East that awful Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, was on hand to whisper into the bathtub admiral that he didn't mean Al Qaeda but terrorists! Here's a man who is going to be the Republican party's candidate for the Oval Office who has difficultly like Herr Bush of telling reality from his own wishes. Boy, America is in bad shape!
Barak Obama gave an important speech on race in America which everyone who heard it knew was a major turn in oratory and expose of the racial red thread that runs through American society. Thanks to the intemperate preaching of his own pastor Wright, the junior senator from Illinois was forced to address the issue head on. As a man with a white mother and an African father, he is in a position to deal with the matter with a high degree of dispassion. Not only that he can see the hurts and the gripes on both sides of the racial divide. And he proved himself more than qualified and able to speak on the matter. In a way he cleared the air, and showed he is made of presidential timber.

Tanks rumbling towards Tibet

Beijing has sent by road and by rail armed divisions to quell revolt in Tibet and in Gansu. Shades of 1989 in Tienamen! As 18Brumaire wrote, the Chinese leopard hasn't changed its spots. China uses forces to oppress and suppress opposition. Power after all comes from the end of a gun, dixit Mao. Deng Xiao Peng bought off the Chinese urban masses by taking the capitalist road to rapid economic development even though it left hundreds of millions in the countryside poor and out of work. The current Chinese leaders oversaw the quashing of Tibetans will to better treatment and equality and equity twenty years ago. For them, it was the crushing of annoying ants who don't count for much in Beijing's scheme of things. They are and shall ever remain vassals and serfs and less than human in China's eyes. Well these annoying red ants have upset China's bright face to the world and its applecart of showing up its own Werkschaftwunder at the 2008 summer Olympic games in Beijing. Although many countries won't boycott the games like they did to the Soviet Union when it held the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow in protest of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, they even lack the courage to condemn Beijing's brutal response to the expression of Tibet will to autonomy. The answer is easy to find since China is the workshop of the west...there west companies and banks have factories and large investments which bring them big bucks in profits and handsome returns and very black China ink at the bottom of financial spreadsheets. So for them too, Tibetans lack interest let alone concern.
The Chinese Communist leaders keep shouting splittist or splittism...but the wrenching and stretching of China's cohesion rest solely on their shoulders for 49 years of brutual colonial rule of Tibet and of the Tibetan minorities in Gansu and other provinces into which they enfolded parts of Tibet they cut off and put into other provinces. China has not learnt the lessons it shouts to other countries, and which to take a leaf out of Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh...for Tibetans there is nothing more precious than independence and freedom.

Beijing & Athens & the EU

Tibetan protesters tried demonstrating at the site of Greece's Olympics hallowed ground in Athens. At the urging of the Chinese government and embassy, Greek police were on hand to harass the demonstrators whilst Chinese embassy staff filmed them. The curator of the 'sacred' site of the original Olympics uttered in mock shock the horror that the Tibetans were committing a sacrilege...at least he bit his tongue had he thought of blurting out a 'blasphemy' [sic]. Yet the young Tibetans proved strong and tried and tried again to protest the brutal Chinese suppression of the Tibetan people, their culture, and their identity. At least the BBC were on hand to challenge the police and the Chinese officials who claimed they were 'journalists'.
China's careful plans to show off what a model of 'democracy' and 'progress' it is has received a Scot shower on its designs. The smiling face of accomodation is ripped off and there we see the monster of Tienamen. Beijing hasn't changed a wit when it comes to pushing its interests.
It is accusing the Dalai Lama of masterminding the whole revolt to embarass China, and spitting out 'splittist' or 'splittism' with every salve of saliva it can muster. Beijing has split its own wooden newspeak so many times, it will take them a long while to pick out the splinters of its own making.
After 49 years of brutal and often deadly rule in Tibet, it has never succeeded in suppressing once and for all Tibetan nationalism. Red China should read its own text about the power of revolt and nationalism and the right of self determination, but what is good for the goose in this case is not good for the gander.
China will have to live with its shame, but the feckless EU and Herr Bush will not boycott the summer Olympics in Beijing. Oh would that they did! But perhaps athletes will shun them. Whatever the case China can no longer claim it has established a thousand year Reich in Tibet!

Bear, Bagehot, & Ballsy JPM's us$6 billion war chest

A week ago Bear Stearns' CEO Alan Schwartz went on CNBC to say that his investment bank's credit was good. But he hadn't read his Walter Bagehot, who
waggish remarked in 1873, 'every banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit....in fact his credit is gone'. How true, how true in Bears' case. After saying he was credible and worthy of credit his own words bit his arse, and within 5 days Bear was picked up at a fire sale's price of us$2 a share by Jaime Di[a]mon at JP Morgan. The sale was a steal to say the least and set markets tumbling around the world, and forced Herr Bush's toilet attendant Ben Bernanke at the Fed to cut the lending rate more and cough up us$30 billion to guarantee the Bear sale whilst keeping JP Morgan out of debt's way. The US market rose slightly...some 20 points and the bankers breathed a sigh of momentarily relief. Now the morning press talks of Jaime Di[a]mon as a true heir of JP Morgan without the philanthropy, but it also lets the cat out of the bag he has a fund of us$6 billion to ward off the endless lawsuits challenging his keen practices by buying Bear Stearns. If he has us$6 billion for lawsuits why do the Fed guarantee him us$30 billion and keep him safe from harm's way? These are the questions which may never be answered, but surely should be raised to challenged raw, unbridled laissez faire capitalism

Tibet redux--blaming the victims

The revolt of Tibetans in Lhasa which has spread like a praire fire to other provinces in China is blamed on the Dalai Lama. Some say, it's his last chance to embarass Beijing for its iron fisted rule over his country. Now that is a big wad of sophistry to chew. If anyone wishes to see through detective fiction a record of China's gentle rule in Tibet, let him read any of Elliot Paterison's books. Steeped in a great respect for Tibetan lore, he doesn't spare us of the details of the gulag that China has made of Tibet for Tibetans.
If there is blame, it falls heavily and squarely on Beijing's shoulders and on the arch Han chauvinsim of its leaders.
Repression a la Tienamen is being carried out in Tibet and in those areas of other demonstrations. The Chinese tiger has not changed its spots. The world community is aghast and is trying to sooth this savage beast's fur. Beware it doesn't snap back at you.
Revolt in Tibet has cast a pall on the Beijing Summer Olympics, and if the world had its druthers it would boycott the games as it did when the Soviet Union had invaded Aghanistan in 1979, at the time of the 1980 Summer Olympics. It won't probably. That incompetent Herr Bush will go to the Games as will other world leaders. Which casts an even more ominous shadow on big power leadership.
Some Chinese had come up with a conspiracy theory which put Steven Spielberg's distancing himself from being a propagandist for the Beijing games as the spark for the revolt. Fantasy reigns supreme!
An article on New York Times on line is recommended by 18Brumaire. It deals with the criticism the Beijing leaders are coming under from Chinese think tanks, for pursuing goals which bring shame and dishonour on the motherland. Now, ain't that a kick in the head. Of course Tibet is not that scarlet letter but Beijing's support of Sudan and its thirst for oil and its connexion to repression and genocide is. Yes, China has a lot to answer for!

The cannibalisation of Bear Stearns

JP Morgan and the Fed have cannibalised Bear Stearns valuing the 5 largest investment bank's stock at us$2 a share, in a takeover which has shaken the pillars of world financial markets. JP Morgan got Bear Stearns for a king's ransom and at a bargain basement price whilst the Fed and the US rate or taxpayer will long foot the bill to repay, if ever, loans of some us$30 billion. Jaime Dimon JP Morgan's president got for dirt Bear Stearns building worth anywhere from us$2billion to us$4.3billion, its jewels...asset management and trading gems, and will in no time dismiss most of its 15.000 employees. But the world markets reacted badly. Bear's stock closed at us$30 a share on Friday and by Sunday when the takeover was announced it was worth us$2 or a little more than a Euro. This sharp sleight of hand raises more questions than it answer, for if Bear's stock can go for a song well doesn't it follow that say Goldman Sachs share trading well over us$220 is vastly over valued? Goldman may have the wherewithal to hide its own write downs in the subprime market but confidance in investment banks or more generally in banking is shaken. And this will have a ripple effect on the sagging US economy which now everyone recognises as a sick old man, affect trade, shrink liquidity, and rumble towards untold hardship for Americans and not to say the least even for the Asian and Petro dollar rich emirates.
Cannibalising Bear Stearns has set off a chain reaction of the end of which is difficult to see. So despite the peppermint flavoured words of Hank Paulson at the US treasury or Herr Bush at the Economic Club in New York or Ben Bernanke at the Fed, everyone is scrambling to stem a krash. Cannibalising Bear Stearns is a metaphor for disaster like the giant crane that collapse in mid town Manhattan...it was a tragedy waiting to happen, and it did. The pundits seized the air waves saying, alas, recession has to work itself out...it is easy for them to proffer such pablum, for they've enough stashed away to ride the storm, but what about all the little folk burdened with mortgages and the rising cost of food, housing, education, healthcare, so on and on. Well as the saying goes the rich find a port in a storm but the poor suffer, and suffer they are and will.
Herr Bush will go down in history as a president that will replace Herbert Hoover as the worst president in times of economic hardship. Laissez faire capitalism once again claims its victims, and oh where is a Lord Keynes of an FDR brain trust to rescue us from the greedy and incompetent minions of Herr Bush?

Herr Bush is getting nervous over Pyongyang's refusual to deal with him

Herr Bush's hit man Chris Hill who is negotiating with North Korea to fork over a full laundry list of its nuclear arsenal is meeting resistance. What's new tired voices will moan? Pyongyang is dragging its tail for the simple reason the promises Hill gave are slow in actualisation. You'd think after years of face to face talks with North Korea the US would have more ably to deal with Pyongyang. Apparently they haven't. Herr Bush sent a nicey nice letter to Kim Jong il in December 2007; he even gave the green light to the New York Philharmonic to perform in Pyongyang, but never took the extra step to meet his actions with say Condoleezza Rice's presence at the Philharmonic or Chris Hill's too...she was in Seoul, he in Beijing. What could the North Koreans make of such pusillanous diplomacy...well they saw the fly in America's puny shifts of mood, and rightfully came to the conclusion that there was nothing to be gained at present in dealing with Herr Bush. They didn't break off jawing with Hill, but he will have to do a little better in meeting the obligations the US undertook in talks with North Korea. If it is not clear as a bell that Herr Bush is a failed president who talks big, wages war on the cheap, and plays to the stalls for approval which is feather light in results, well, dealing with Pyongyang is a classic case of turning an opportunity into failure. 18Brumaire recently saw the American Experience 3 segments on the fall of Saigon. It is instructive listening to the arch Nazi Kissinger when he talks about dealing with North Vietnam...he was willing to give away the baby and bath water to get a deal...and he and his crooked Richard Nixon. So has anything changed...in a way yes, North Korea has the bomb and thus the confidence in dealing with Washington as an equal of sorts and taking advantage of Herr Bush who is too clever by half. A golden opportunity has turned out to be another flash in the pan...

Herr Bush & the failure of laissez-faire capitalism

Yesterday Herr Bush addressed a gathering of high powered financial analysts in New York. There he read robot like the sad story of his administration fiscal and monetary policies which came tumbling down by the subprime scam and a crunch on easy cash and at the very moment he was trying to perk up a somber audience with his cheery faux bonhomie, Bear Stearns a us$400bn investment bank was in the midst of a classical run on the bank. The New York Fed stepped in with a loan of us$2bn to allow the bank to pay off its clients, restore confidence in a bank with a good balance sheet but short on ready cash...Thanks to Bears CEO Alan Schwartz who knows the banking business, JP Morgan's Jimmy Diamon and Bears clearing house of a bank will lend the Feds billions. Schwartz has 28 days to turn Bears fortunes around, sell off assets, or find a buyer. The street has been yapping at Bears heels since its two subprime funds went belly up in August 2007, and it has a long memory of the time Jimmy Cayne the old CEO wouldn't come to the rescue of a hedge fund in 1998 when all the other big bracket banks did. And yesterday the rumour mongering against Bear took a bite, with a steep fall in the bank's stock despite Schwartz's words of encouragement about the company. If two days ago Bear had no liquidity problems, it did yesterday with a loss of investers' confidence. The Feds stepped in quickly in Bear's case but not in Carlyle's. Why? for the simple and plain and obvious fact, it feared a domino effect on America's banking industry should Bear fail, even though like the British Northern Rock it has good financials. In Britain the Labour government nationalised Northern Rock, but in the US the government doesn't work that way. And so Bear is saved and the mighty rich Bush family connected Carlyle's capital fund will fail. Eight years of Herr Bush has turned the US into a classic case of a decline in world power and the general impoverishment of its people save Herr Bush's scum of the rich and super rich. No one is making the connexion of Herr Bush's wrongheaded war in Iraq and the general economic mess he engendered. As a rabbi from the Middle Ages cursed the false messiah Sabatai Zvi, let his words fall on Herr Bush & his crowd...may they rot till eternity!

Revolt in Lhasa

Forty-nine years of brutal occupation of Tibet by the Communist Chinese haven't slaked Tibetans thirst for freedom. Today's revolt in Lhasa has taken a broad turn against China's imperialism and its choking to death of the Tibetan culture, language, personality, and soul. The new element in the uprising is the burning and trashing to Chinese owned businesses. The commissars in Beijing have forgotten their Maoist texts. They have behaved towards Tibet in a school book explanation the great helmsman Mao used to describe in his writings and his talks. Oppression breeds resistance and the mild mannered Tibetan monks have risen up in anger to proclaim their birthright and identity and autonomy. The capitalist roaders in Beijing have not grasped the message of the Dalai Lama who is calling for autonomy for his people in China not independence, but these silly men with tailor cut suits and expensive ties and slick hair cuts have dismissed his words out of hand. It is not good for China, they think, and how wrong they are. If they cannot suppress the will for freedom in Tibet which the Communist Party of China with its army hold with an iron fist, how do they think they can mate the aspiration of Uighars in Xingjiang. Again the arrogant dismiss history and the obvious facts and take as the French say 'midi pour 14 heures'...or more pithily they take chamber pots for the globes of lamp posts. Will Beijing learn an age old lesson? No it won't...Now on the eve of the Beijing summer Olympics China is going to bite its nails over the waves of protesters who will shout 'Free Tibet'...they couldn't stop the petite Bork from Iceland who shouted that at the end of her concert in Beijing. Let China lose face over and over and over again for its stupidity and imperialism.

Decline of the American empire

An email informed 18Brumaire that on the evening news scenes of a tent city on the outskirts of Los Angeles flashed across the boob tube. A scene which could have come out of the Great Depression of the 1930's. Here now were swarms of dispossed people who lost home and hearth owing to the subprime scam which has sent US markets into a tizzy and began the meltdown of the US economy and has emasculated the US dollar. The toiletroom attendant Ben Bernanke at the Fed is tearing his hair out to find ways to stanch the flow of vital blood of the American economy without much success. The grand guignol of Wall Street Hank Paulson the once mighty prince of Goldman Sachs has not a klew what to do but will say anything which he thinks will calm markets, perk up a sagging dollar, but his game is as transparent as glass. Angry voters will throw these bums out soon enough, but not sooner enough to bring relief to the suffering 99 per cent of Americans who have been robbed by Herr Bush & his gang of thugs who have pillaged the US for their own selfish aims and growth of their own personal wealth. The US is in deep recession but the simply fool in the White House will today deliever a pep talk to the troops of economists who will cheer him on and haven't a good idea as to what to do anyhow. The times demand bold ideas but the fools who run this country haven't had an idea since they came out of their mums' wombs. Of course the war that Herr Bush decided to wage in Iraq is partly branch and root of the problem but no one is looking at that. It is hardly comforting to think of the hundreds of millions of hard earned cash Obama and Hillary and the tugboat admiral McCain are raising at a time of deep crisis. It goes to show the little people will scratch up nickels and dimes to throw the current bum in the Oval office...and quickly but not quickly enough!
A coda...the greedy banks which haven't engineered the subprime debacle are back at old tricks. The new head honcho at CitiGroup which has so far written off some us$25bn is going to received at year end a salary with perks and bonuses some us$216m...if that ain't disgusting and stomach wrenching, 18Brumaire doesn't know what else will make the ordinary guy or gal on the street sneer with disgust and seethe with anger!

Five years warring in Iraq and a bad recession and bad reviews the world over, Herr Bush's sorry legacy

Today [13 February 2008] the us dollar is worth less than 100 Japanese yen, a return to the sorry state of affairs 13 years ago. The US economy is deeply troubled as it falls into a catatonic state of recession which Herr Bush is incapable of dealing with. His war into which he lied his country into fighting is a week shy of its 5 birthday, and he's no near winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi and he is in bringing freedom and democracy there. Some say over a million Iraqi have perish, and untold millions have taken the road to exile; the oil rich Iraq is incapable of generating honestly the wherewithal to infuse life into an occupied economy beset with corruption and the greedy pockets of Herr Bush's croneys who are war profiteers and scam artists. Herr Bush has given the green light to Israel to wage a terrible war against Gaza and allowed Tel Aviv to salami slice Palestinian territory it has occupied these last 40 years into an island chains of concentration camps so that Palestine as a state would never become a viable, living political entity. France's foreign minister has sounded the knell of Herr Bush's legacy...a failed, stupid presidency. Dr. Bernard Kouchner has said what others dare not say...other than Herr Bush's targets...Dr. Castro or president Hugo Chavez and the icy stares of Argentine's newly elected woman president...that this summer soldier of an American president has left his country and its people poorer, weaker, and the bane of the world's opinion than they were at the time he entered the White House. Neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton nor the war mad tub boat admiral McCain can reverse America's decline. And yet bonehead Herr Bush is proud of a record of scandal, corruption, malfeasance, and ruinous for the country he swore to uphold and prosper. Alas the truth is otherwise.

Spitzer Redux

18Brumaire urged former governor Eliot Spitzer to hold his ground and not tender his resignation. We however hadn't all the messy details at our fingertips. Alas this savvy, progressive man who humbled the mighty of Wall Street ended up tripping over the tied shoe laces of his own sexual appetite. He transferred unintelligently funds from one account to another; this raised a red flag, and the bank alerted the Feds lest it be guilty of aiding and abetting in money laundering and all that sorry 'sin' entails. Spitzer thought with his wrong head--the one between his legs and not the good noggin on his shoulders. Thus he know walks in the footsteps of shame and scandel which the likes of Britain's minister John Pufumo did almost a half-century ago. Here is a sad lesson to learn!

The Carlyle Group, Blackstone, KKR ... crocodile tears over poor earnings

The public should show no sorrow at the news that the Blackstone Group, the Carlyle Group, and KKR, to name a few of LBO firms, have had a loss of 90 per cent in profits as 2007 earnings came to light. Who wants to cry for people who leveraged buyouts of companies with huge debt and little money of theirs; then they proceeded to throw people out of work, outsource the work, turn the companies around for a nice ringing profit. Now as the credit markets have dried up the banks are calling in the debt, and these giants of finance haven't a pot to piss in to repay the debt. Let them bear the pain and the hurt the hard working Americans have had to shoulder owing to their bloodsucking policies for personal gain and profit. Let's take Stephen Schwartz the big enchilada of the Blackstone Group. For his 60 birthday he throw an obscene amount of cash for a themed party where everyone dressed up like decadent Romans of a tottering empire. Today the New York Times ran a long piece on his donation of us$100.000 to upgrade the New York Public Library whose showcase of a research library will now have chiseled in marble the name of Schwartzan. What vanity! What a gimcrack Andrew Carnegie is he! If he can pay the New York Public Library us$100.000 so that his name grace a building as though it were a mausoleum, he jolly well can cough the billions he has tucked away to repay his debts. Again it looks as though we taxpayers are going to bail out the corrupt, stupid, bloodsucking super rich. Let them sell off valuable holdings to meet obligations. Were it you or I they'd through us in debtors prison without batting an eyelash. Lock up these soap cleansed hands bandits and throw the key away.

Were Eliot Spitz King David would he be asked to resign?

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer got caught in a government sting operation. He got caught as client #9 with his pants down frequently an upmarket call girl in Washington. Spitzer apologised to his wife and family and to New Yorkers for his indiscretion. You would think the social shame was enough and everyone would leave him alone. Wrong! His adultery was too good for the gutter and the smart and the very high fulutin' press. Rivers of ink flowed, editorials waxed indignant that Spitzer had strayed from the righteous path as an elected official, and some have called for his resignation. He shouldn't give into the crocodile tears and mock turtle morality of a hypocritical strain of America's puritain legacy. Did he do wrong in his the carrying out of his duties. He didn't. He did what most men do or dream of doing...he had an affair with another woman for money. So 18Brumaire asks the question would these keepers of morality and probity demanded that King David put off his crown and let a son of his succeed him because he coveted Bethsheva and sent her husband to his death? Which amounts to murder to bed a wench, doesn't it? The pious would say David was anointed so he could do no wrong in the eyes of his god who forgave him. We say Spitzer should be pitied more than put on the public pillory. And above all, don't pressure the man to resign. As governor he is doing things which that joke of a president Herr Bush should be doing for the US and isn't. If anyone should be forced out of office it is Herr Bush not Eliot Spitzer. Governor Spitzer is a chastened man, and so leave his shame to him and cut a wide circle around his wife to deal with a family crisis.

The bathroom attendant at the Fed is riding to the rescue of the banks

Wall street banks are in deep crisis. Does anyone remember 1976 when New York City was on the verge of default and the banks called in its debt? And the 'New York Daily News' flashed acrossed its front page...'Ford tells New York City to Drop Dead!'? Well Wall Street markers are being called in and Herr Bush's bathroom attendant is offering towels of us$bn to bail out these slick fools. The Treasury's printing presses are working overtime churning out more dollars which will drive the already anemic dollar further down in value and impoverishing millions the world over who invested savings in the banks paper pegged to the US$.
Herr Bush won't help the poor slog who is walking away from his home, but will come quickly to the aid of banks so that they won't feel the pain. Well let these bloodsuckers pay. Let them sell valuable holdings to raise money to pay their debts. Why should the US rate or taxpayer and other around the world suffer for them? No reason but Herr Bush will save his class just as his daddy saved the savings & loans institutions from going bellyup and as an aside a son of his who was deep into that scam and it was here that the tubboat admiral McCain cut his teeth in corruption! Once again we have to pay for the high crimes and misdemeanors of the rich and the famous. Let them go down the tube, let them pay their fair share, and get them off our backs!

Isreal's peace initiative---one step forward, two steps back

As the guns and rockets quieted in the vicious war Israel is waging against Hamas and the people of Gaza, prime minister Olmert has taken the high road by lordly announcing, he and his government have not given up on negotiating a treaty leading to the creation of a free, independent Palestine. But his words ring hollow as those of his other pledges have. He also announced the building of more housing for Jews in Arab east Jerusalem, which the Palestinian authority of Abu Mazam rightly called 'a slap in the face'. Israel's followed a carefully drawn scenario in dealing with Palestinians. They promise something, but give absolutely nothing. They are the manor born in the lands they occupy and conquered, and the conquered have but one option--to submit.
18Brumaire highly recommends Neve Gordon's 'Shadowplays' in the 24 March 2008 issue of 'The Nation' magazine. There he reviews two books by Hillel Cohen who accidentally stumbled across declassified files which the Israeli authorities unwittingly opened to public scrutiny before they reclassified them when they realised their mistake. Cohen now lets the cat out of the bag. Here's a tidbit. Cohen quotesEzra Danin, head of the secret services Arab department from 1940 to 1948 in ways to control, infilitrate, and turn Palestinians into collaborators even before the creation of the Jewish state. He prosed that the Jewish agency use 'such activit[ies]...similar to the way the Nazis worked in Denmar, Norway, and Holland--touching on every area of life'. And there you have it. The very Nazis who were exteminating Jews in Europe are to be copied by the Zionists in dealing with Palestinians! And in ways big and small the Zionist state for the last 60 years have not deviated from the textbook of occupation of their German teachers in dealing with Palestinians in Gaza, on the left bank, and even Israeli Arabs who in theory are equal to Jews in Israel!. It doesn't take much imagination to see this in the way Olmert & co. have been pulling out all plugs in their seemingly never ending war against Hamas in Gaza. Even the most fervent supports of Israel stood aghast at their behaviour. But to stay their hand, it requires an icy shower by Herr Bush to stop the Israelis in their track. Fat chance at that since he is a war monger of Israeli proportions. So the Israeli leopard never changes spots but their record is no longer hidden in the details which Israeli historians are bringing to the light of day!

Bye Bye Samantha Powers

Samantha Powers Pulitzer Prize winner and professor at Harvard is out of Obama's inner circle. An articulate writer and speaker she has appeared endlessly on the media, print, television, radio--to talk about the state of America and cheer leader for the junior senator from Illinois. She talks a good talk, and rumour had it she was slated should Obama become president, for a cabinet post or a high slot at the state department. Now that hope is dashed for clever Dr. Powers was indiscreet enough to talk to the press out of sheer dispair that he man didn't clinch the Democratic nomination for the Oval office during the Ohio and Texas primaries. So loyal is she her anger got the best of her by calling Hillary Clinton a 'monster who would stoop to nothing to get her way'. In consequent, prize winning Powers is unceremoniously dismissed from Obama's charmed inner circle. Her frustration is an open admission of the complete hatred of Mrs. Clinton by Obama advisors which can seriously hurt the Democrats chances of regaining the White House in 2008, so partisan are they. Obama has much footwork to do to calm tempers and keep everyone's eye on the prize be he president or not...kick the Republicans out of power, for they've a record of corruption, malfeasance, waging illegal warfare, killing the US dollar, robbing harding working Americans of their just rewards by favouring the sick, bloodsucking rich and corporations. Get real guys! 18Brumaire certainly hopes Dr. Powers will have time to think about her unprofessional outburst in the ivory towers of Harvard. She did Obama a great disservice, to say the least.

It's a recession

Herr Bush & co. like Holocaust deniers won't own up to the fact that the US is in recession. The facts belie their hemming and hawing. The recent Bureau of Labour statistics of rising unemployment, loss of jobs, people giving up on ever finding work simply confirms this simple truth. The bathroom cleaner at the Fed Ben Bernanke will lower the prime lending rate some more and will allow banks to trade stock for cash, but that won't work at all, at all. Herr Bush in his usual idiotic simplistic mumblings says the tax gifts of us$300 to us$600 will perk up an anemic economy. He's a stand up comedian this joke of a president! Rising motoring gasoline prices, hikes in food, in clothing, wot, in the necessities of life will go to pay say for gas for the family car...and the money will go into the pockets of Herr Bush's cronies the bloodsuckers of big oil who nickel and dime and cheat the American public and pilfer its coffers every chance it can buy off Congress or chum around with Herr Bush & his venal family including pappy Bush! Let's state the obvious the US is in deep dodo to slip into the childish language of the elder Bush, and Herr Bush & his crowd are putting fingers in the dyke to avoid the inevitable...a bad recession. Admiral McCain who is a no nothing in economics will continue the same old Herr Bush ruinous policies. Obama will move cautiously if elected, but Hillary Clinton knows someothing others don't...she's done her homework and will move aggressively to turn around the US economy and strengthen its ailing dollar. As long as Herr Bush & his clones are in power the country is in peril...SOS

America grows poorer day by day

Herr Bush won't admit it that under his dyslexic eye American households are getting poorer and poorer with each passing day. Already, the flip flopping New York Times reports that people are walking away from houses of theirs thereby letting their piece of the American dream fall into default or disclosure. This is in sharp constract to the plutocratic Forbes magazine the latest issue of which beats pots and pans and blows bells and whistles to advertise the increase in the growing numbers of billionaires. The feckless gray old lady of America's journalism hid in a Saturday edition [see 18Brumaire's commentary] that the US Bureau of the Budget had gathered data which showed that under the iron rule of Herr Bush, the top one percent of America's householder wealth in two years 2003 to 2005 had jumped a mind boggling 46 per centages where as the nearest quintile of American rose a paltry 12 percent. Which means in grosser terms that about one per cent of Americans own as much as 150.000 Americans. Ain't that a kick in the head. But you won't find in American papers the news that poverty is spreading through the middle and the hard working classes. No you won't. Thanks to a mostly Republican Congress which gets marching orders from Herr Bush's lieutenants, corporate taxes are cut to favour his friends and croneys; they have helped balloon the debt to finance a war which Herr Bush lied the country into fighting; they have cut back on funding to help America's households whilst waving the bible in everyone's face; they have left the country's infrastructure to run to ruin and collapse, to favour the rich and increase the size of their wallets. Patriots they! Let 18Brumaire laugh with anger, thank you very much! And the Republican McCain is running on Herr Bush's programme. He's bonkers on war and empty headed on the economy.
The Democrats offer hope but alas although Barak Obama talks the talk he does walk the walk on social issues. And it looks as though the big ticket item in the upcoming presidential race is 'the economy, stupid!'. And that's the reason why Hillary Clinton is still in the race because she talks the talk, and walks the walk. And that's why she may trump Obama in his bid for the nod to the Oval Office. It has little to do with racism but more to do with a programme for getting us out of the mess Herr Bush and his army of thugs and pie in the sky bible thumpers have put us in.

Attack at Merkaz Harav Yeshiva

Art imitates life, some say. Yesterday's killing of 8 students and the wounding of some 35 others at the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva has an echo of life imitating art. A year or so ago Yasmina Khadra had published 'l'attent' [the attack] which eerily follows yesterday's event in Kiryat Moshe, Jerusalem. In the novel, the wife of an Israeli Arab journalist who is well integrated into Israeli life is pushed by the violence of the Jewish state to offer herself as a human bomber. The lonely Palestinian who easily infiltrated the very security conscious Israeli society, opened fire on these Yeshiva students whom the seminary was preparing partly as settlers on Israeli forward settlements in what they call Samaria and Judea but others call the west bank or the occupied territories or under the polite but empty title authority of the Palestinian authority. It does not take a rocket scientist to understand the gunman's motives. They were a gut reaction to Israel's violent, over the top war against Palestinians living in Gaza. Although the loss of these young lives are to be deplored, it behooves us to point out that the lone gunman who himself was killed, sensed that he had to act as a way of protesting the inhuman warfare waged by the Zionist states to deny the Palestinians the right to elect whom they want, live as they please in a state which Israel is salami slicing into isolated ilots which everyone with a grain of sense see as bantustans.
The US Israel's mighty protector tried to force a resolution through the UN's Security Council condemning the killings, but Libya managed to defeat it by simply and humanely stressing that the loss of life is regrettable but the American gambit was tilted very much in Israel's favour and thus was biased for the plain truth that it did not voice a condemnation of Israeli's brutal, unremitting assault on Palestinians living in Gaza, who in less than the week had suffered the loss of over 100 victims men, women, children, and infants which through the magic of the Zionist propaganda machine become terrorists. So once again Israel is reaping the whirlwind of her own making, but that will not deter her from pursuing the Zionist dream of emptying the land for its own racist and rabid nationalist designs.

The sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett

The private preserve of the Forbes family, 'Forbes' magazine has come out with its list of the world's richest. This year the sage of Omaha Warren Buffett takes the gold ring. He's worth us$52000m or us$52bn, a sum which boggles the mind of the poor. Buffett knows how to turn a thin dime into a golden dollar, no doubt about it! He's the only one who has the balls to say that the US is already in recession. Surely a man like him hasn't Herr Bush asking for advice to turn a depressing US economy around.
Buffett turned over a fortune to Bill & Melinda Gates to use in charitable work. And still he made money! He surely smells opportunity which is a rare gift if you look at the bright boys on Wall Street who set up the Ponzi scheme called subprime financial instruments which are sinking the Street, the banks, and the dollar. Would Buffett had done what Herr Bush did by cutting taxes for the rich and famous? Maybe yes, maybe no...Would he have gone to war in Iraq through trickery? Porbably not.
Were there any devine justice, Herr Bush's god would strike him dumb and deaf! Let's see what the sage of Omaha will do with his money to alleviate the plight of America's struggling working poor!

Kol shel Ha-Kiz'anut The ugle voice of Israeli hatred and racism

Yet another report of a blue ribboned commission to say that Israel's offensive against Gaza has reduced the Palestinians there to abject misery and suffering and daily death. It is merely stating the obvious which the world tends to turn a cold eye away from. Even senator Obama and senator Clinton who like lackeys of the American Israeli lobby toe the line saying Israel has the right to self defence as the Zionist state launches offensive warfare against Hamas and the civilian population in Gaza. Israel has violated the rules of civilised behaviour in its rabid escalation of violence to bring Gaza to heel. Herr Bush and the good Christian Blair and the braying donkeys of the European Union have tarred and feathered Hamas with the terrorist brush, thus putting them beyond the pale of the human and into the realm of the demon. And so Olmert & his band of thugs can do what they want as brave Gaza bleeds and dies. Shades of the Spanish Civil War. Listen to the Nazi like talk of a tough troll Itzhak Herzog who speaks with a Zionist military voice. He has no pity for the death of the innocent--babies, children, young and old people who die under Israeli rockets or fire. The over the top assault on Gaza has but an object he boldly brags--to arouse Gazans to revolt against Hamas, overthrew them, and once that is done, Tel Aviv will show them mercy! Who's he kidding? Does he believe in Santa Claus? Hamas which he calls a putschist government was democratically elected by the citizens of Gaza. This sticks in the Zionist caw for it threw off balance the docile Palestinian authority of Mahmoud Abbas, and brought another voice to who represents the better interests of the Palestinian people. Herzog talks the talk of Nazis; he might very well goose step like them. Hamas is the fly in Israel's ointment...they refuse to recognise the racist Zionist state, and this irritates the Israeli's no end. The Zionists who speak respectfully and glowing of Masada and Judas Macchabee and the Jewish resistance to Roman rule have learnt no leasson from their own touted history. The greater the oppression the fiercer the resistance and that is what Hamas represents today's David against the Zionists' Goliath.
The feckless Americans march to the Zionist tune, yet one strong work like the one Eisenhower sent to Ben Gurion would stop Olmert & his storm troopers in their track. Herr Bush is not cut from Eisenhower's Republican wood, he's a tin horn marshall who is of little value now to the Zionist tail that wags the Bush dog. It is time to boycott Israel; to re introduce in the General Assembly a resolution which again equates Zionism with racism and a brother to South Africa's apartheid. It's about time the so called Third World shun Israel; it's time for all people of good conscience to shout in one voice to the Zionists, 'Basta ya!', enough's enough and wage a boycott of Israel, Israeli products, and shame the devil on his own grounds!

Opec gives George Bush a kick in the arse

Just when you thought things were peachy cream with Herr Bush who has deep interests in oil and strong relations with the Saudi royal family, Opec gives him a quick kick in the arse when he appealed to the oil producing nations to increase production. Fat chance! For them, Herr Bush is like a kleenex tissue. They've blown a collective nose on him, and now he's no longer of use, he gets thrown on the dung heap. Sic transit gloria mundi!

Herr Bush & his bathroom cleaner Bernanke at the Fed are moving to do something about the subprime mortgage scam

It ain't an exaggeration to say that Herr Bush and his bathroom cleaner Bernake at the Fed are kicking and screaming as events force them to do something about the crash of the housing markets and the rising number of people who are walking away from foreclosures, which are straining an already strapped banking industry that had perpetrated a Ponzi scheme of what 18Brumaire called the subprime scam. They are thinking of using Household Finance Adminstration, something which they did dismantle from the seeming heroic days of FDR's New Deal to help despondent and worried homeowners fearful of losing homes of theirs.
The subprime scam has chased liquidity from the markets. Such a cruch has contracted ready cash, which anyone having taken Economics 101 could point out to the movers and shakers in Herr Bush's administration and on Wall Street, thereby propelling a crisis from which these midgets in government and finance are stumbling over one another to come up with a solution. Dream on fools! Now Herr Bush and the bathroom cleaner Bernake [sic] have to go back to instruments of a government they despise...yes go back 70 years in time to find a way out to save individual homeowners from being thrown out on the street.
Herr Bush heads a government which has rewarded his crowd with super tax cuts, engendered corruption and gross inefficient...think Katrina and now the subprime Ponzi scheme...and engaged in a war which has benefited the oil barons and companies like Halliburton...and privatised every and anything it could thereby denying the ordinary American rate or taxpayer of any benefit from the dollar of taxes they pay. A weaker dollar, a over militarised society, a country cleared for war against its own citizenry through the use of wiretaps and secret police...this among other misdeeds is the legacy of Herr Bush. Under his reign the US has significantly weakened; it is open to the highest bidder from abroad; it's the scourage not of god but of the dark, satanic forces of its own making.
And so we are now looking at the pathetic spectacle of a failed president and his bathroom clearner trying to snatch some shards of victory from the tragic outcome of mismanagement, blind ideology, and the consequence of a wilful class of Americans who because they own one per cent of mom's American apple pie, they think they are the gods who walk the earth. Far from it, if anything, the lack of brains and policy simply underscores the hollowness between their two ears and the clay their feet are made of.

Gasbag Condy Rice returns hastily deflated from the Middle East

Gasbag secretary of state Condy Rice beat a hasty retreat from her meetings Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. He won't resume negotiations with the hawkish Olmert government in Tel Aviv. She left for Washington, and the Israeli tail who wags the US dog on Palestine went back in full body armour and troops into Gaza spreading rapine and death and more destruction. Rice and her master Herr Bush could put a quick end into Israel's unrestricted war against Hamas by withholding economic and military aid from Tel Aviv. They won't for obvious reasons, wedded as they are to the policy that Israel can do no wrong and added to that 2008 is a presidential election year where Jewish money and votes could a lot in the big states with large electoral college votes. You have to wonder why gasbag Rice went to Egypt then to Palestine with a brief few hours in Israel in the first place. Did she think her sermonising would move Israel and the Palestinian authority to do her bidding? She's a fool if she had so thought. The US roadmap is deader than a door nail and Herr Bush's full and undconditional support for Israel is so wrong that it boggles the mind as to its utter stupidity!

Gasbag Condeleezza Rice is back...in the Middle East

Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice like a bad penny has turned up again in the Middle East to jump start the dead in the water negotiations [sic] between Israel and the Palestinian authority. She didn't first scurry to Tel Aviv, but to Cairo to lecture Hosni Mbarek to put pressure on Gaza's Hamas. The Egyptian rais doesn't cotton up to Hamas the more especially since it's ties with the Muslim Brotherhood which is causing him no end of trouble internally. But he won't help school ma'rm
Rice. How can he? He politically and perhaps personally cannot stand by and allow the rabid out of control Olmert government carry out a war to cleanse Gaza of Hamas. The feckless world media reports that gasbag Rice raised her old maidish finger at Olmert, saying naughty, naughty, naughty...behave yourself! Fat chance, that! Once again as if the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Muslims world over, and we the on the line spectators need reminding, Herr Bush's soul mate in religion is giving unconditional support to anything Israel does. Does this bag of wind expect her charm and even toneless prose will nudge Mahmoud Abbas back to the table to discuss a peace treaty with Olmert. You've got to be laughing up your sleeve, old tattered windsock of a damanged Republican president. The Israeli won't discuss anything of substance...won't talk of east Jerusalem, not stop building of settlements on the west bank or for that matter in east Jerusalem, nor try to deal with the right of return of those Palestinians chased off their land 60 years ago. For the Zionists it's our way or no way...and for now it's now way short of full scale warfare we're witnessing in Gaza, because like Judas Machabee the Hamas leadership refuses to be crushed under the iron boot of Israel. Olmert is no Titus, even though he has the full support of Herr Bush. Israel is already rotting from within owing to corruption, decadence of the overconfident, and a Zionist ideology which has its roots in the same German romanticism that feed Hitler and his band of anti Semites. This time the victims are Semites but Arabs. And the gasbag who fronts for Herr Bush throws her support to them. Little wonder she won't succeed.

Obama the Muslim?

As Barak Obama inches closer to becoming the Democratic Party's candidate to the Oval Office, the political landscape is cleared for a dirty war against him. It is clear as the nose on one's face, he's being tarred with the brush of anti Muslim slurs. Obama's father was Muslim, but his son isn't. He's Christian. The gutter press like to spell out his full name Barak Hussein Obama...well, Christian Arabs are also called Hussein, they don't know. It cannot stoop to the colour of his skin, but it surely will piss on his mother who is white; her reputation will be dragged through the mud as having hots for non whites, of being a hippie...and you can fill in the dots thank you very much. It will make much of the junior senator from Illinois' photo of him wearing a turban and Somali costume. For these small minds, please look on page 2 of the 2 March 2008 'The Week in Review' pullout of the 'New York Times' to see US presidents in all sorts of foreign dress...from Coolidge wearing an American full headdress to George Bush looking very like Alfred E. Newman in Chilean garb not to speak of wearing Vietnamese dress...
Let's face it, no matter what 18Brumaire says, the gutter snipers will go in for the kill, nothing will deter them but public shame and denunciation and pursuit in the courts for racialist behaviour and character assassination. Obama ain't an easy target, for attacking him will bring up a wave of revulsion against an overzealous press with their shirt tails hanging out; against the transparency and the crudeness of their remarks and the amateur way of blackening Obama's reputation.
For all his faults, Obama is a breath of fresh air in the haletosis filled environment in Washington; he offers hope and a new direction to the sorry state of America affairs today; he is the foil of Herr Bush's incompetence, mendacity, and croneyism...he arouses a youthful spirit which the US has not seen since the election of JFK.
Saying this doesn't take away from the dirty tricks and lies of those that will try by hook and by crook to defeat him. Let's hope they shall meet their Waterloo in him, and fail miserably as they should!

Israeli hawks' hand stayed?

Israel has withdrawn tanks and troops from Gaza. Palestinians bury their dead and defiantly protest the latest Israeli murderous assaults there. The Israeli bury war dead. Tel Aviv is denounced in the UN Security Council, by the European Union, and arouses the revulsion of civilised nations and folk the world over. But it cares not a tinker's damn. It will pursue its imperial policy to crush Hamas and 'enslave' the Palestinians of Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas was forced by the imperatives of events to call off the 'peace talks' with the warlike Olmert government. He couldn't do anything but thing but that if he wished to retain a shred of dignity for his Fetah or for the Palestinian people. Secretary of state Condy Rice is flying off to jump start the dead in the water road map to peace. A vain, futile effort which clearly shows the bankruptcy of Herr Bush's total support of Israel.
The Israelis have not learnt a thing. Hamas and the Palestinians will resist till the last man, and it seems that Olmert is pursuing the Zionist dream of cleansing 'eretz israel' of the land that belongs to the Palestinians. Let no one be fooled by the false notes of peace coming from the pipers in Tel Aviv, they want nothing but total subjugation of the Palestinians to their own will, and they shall settle for nothing less.
And yet the world remains silent. The EU have bought Herr Bush's and Israel line that Hamas is a terrorist organisation and that in spite of it being democratically elected by its own people, it deserves nothing but contempt and eradication. Israel is pursuing a burnt earth policy but no Arab government says boo. Even Hezbullah in Lebanon is silent. Once again the world's great power and public opinion acquiese in the mass murder and enslavement of a people. And you wonder haven't we learnt anything since the two world wars, Vietnam, Iraq, and the numerous byzantine wars in Africa? Apparently little, it seems.

Barak and the Jewish Lobby

Should senator Obama win the Democratic party's nod for the White House, one of many issues is making front page headlines...the accusations of his 'anti Semitism'. Already word has spread, he's a Muslim and was sworn into office laying his hand on the Koran. False. But, that hardly matters. The rumour mill is spinning at a record breaking speed. As a politician from Illinois, he has Arab and Muslim constituents; he goes to meetings or dinners of theirs; he says polite words that any elected public figure does; they come to him for help, he helps them, but in this he is no different that senator Joseph Lieberman. Nonetheless he is different. The vile Louis Farrakhan has called him 'the saviour of America' if not the world; his pastor the energetic Reverend Jeremaih Wright has close ties to the Black Muslim leader, and we are yet to hear of Wright's footsing with the likes of the new American pal but much before hated Mouamah Qaddafi...or his wanderings in nasty Sudan.
Obama is trying to court the American Jewish lobby which has a very thin skin, and is vindictive to the extreme. They've money and money counts in elections, and they use it in any which way they see fit. Although Obama has much support among American Jews, these supporters don't have the well oiled machinery to wage a kick him in the balls campaign against the junior senator from Illinois.
One of the rare times Obama chased for words in a televised debate was when he was asked about Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright. He better get his patter down tight to fight the scurrilous attack by the American Jewish Lobby who see him as an enemy and a champion of the Muslim cause. Which is absurd, yet reason is never a strong suit among Americans. They're well trained to believe where there is Hollywood like made smoke there has to be a real fire.
Obama seems stunned. Yet in this age of info true or false out in cyberspace, he should be so Candide like to believe that his personal life is private. It isn't. He's very much a public figure and in the end has to bear the hard knocks of public life.
No matter how much he is willing to sell his soul to the American Jewish lobby, he will remain suspect in his support of Israel, no matter what he say or what he does.

Recession deniers

Stocks tumbled yesterday. American consumers are tightening belts. Spending is down. Mortgage defaults now outstrip home sales. The US debt is spiralling out of control. And America is up for sale to the top bidder. Recession nay sayers refuse to believe the evidence. The feckless media and the wet spaghetti spined pols are saying, everything is going well despite the proof to the contrary. They keep saying the economy will have a soft landing; the top issues in the presidential campaign will turn on the hair of a dime, but the 10 tonne gorilla which is causing all the worry is Herr Bush's phony war in Iraq. His rush to privatise everything from the attic to the basement of America's institution. It doesn't take a practised eye to spot by reading the daily press or listening to a halfway decent news programme on the radio or the television, that Herr Bush & co are taking the country to hell in a hand basket. Nero is said to fiddle whilst Rome burnt; Herr Bush goes to his ranch in Richardson, Texas, and cuts wood, like the exiled German Kaiser did in his Dutch retreat after World War One.
Americans glorify in the wonder that is capitalism. Nonetheless, Warren Buffett the prophet of Omaha who knows how to turn cotton into gold in the market, has again raised his voice in warning. Overpayed senior managers, poor corporate performance, overstated financial results...a recipe for failure...and boy is corporate America failing...the suprime scam and the war notwithstanding.
Columbia University Nobelist in economics Joseph Steiglitz has come out with a good book on what's ailing the American economy, 'the trillion dollar war'. He is not much of a radical but at least he dares to say the Emperor of the economy is naked. He belongs to the small few who say, we're in a recession and that before everyone realises it we're going to be into it up to our necks with all the hardships anyone can imagine for us the small people, but not the likes of theives like Herr Bush & his rotten barrel of fish, spongers off the dying corpse of what was mighty America. It is not ironical, the summer soldier that Herr Bush is, wearing a flag pin, and preaching like a wandering ignorant preacher, extols America's virtues whilst perverting them hardly before the words are out of his mouth. No one can say but the bloodsuckers & Bush croneys & big oil & defence industries they are far the better under this small man's watch in the Oval Office.