Hurting Families Turn to God, Their Kids to Santa!

This is not a good time for parents trying to raise their kids in a sane environment. The number of American families struck by unemployment is growing with alarming rates (533,000 workers lost their jobs in November). More Americans, having lost faith in government, are turning to God, while many children whose prospects for a Merry Christmas are turning bleak, are sending letters to Santa asking for gifts they may not get from their parents this year, and most importantly for jobs their parents may not get from the government, before long. One kid wrote: "I am not getting any presents this year, not because I was bad--I was good, but because my parents are out of work and can't buy me things. So please Santa, help my parents get a job."

Heartbreaking!

More Here..

Bush's Tears

A battery of bad economic news today Friday:

-The number of people who lost their jobs in November hit 533,000 (most in 34 years).

-Retailers posted the worst decline in sales in thirty years.

- Late mortgage payments and the rate of home loans in foreclosure rose to record highs in the third quarter, and 2.2 million home mortgages are expected to start the foreclosure process this year, before the bailout effort takes effect.

-The Federal Reserve reported that consumer credit fell unexpectedly at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in October--the deepest cutback in borrowing since August.

Yet the US Stock Market went up, with the Dow gaining nearly 260 points-- a sign that Wall Street is growing numb to bad economic news. But unlike the oblivious Stock Market, Bush came out of his shell to finally say the country is in a recession! "I am concerned about the viability of the automobile companies," he told White House reporters. "I am concerned about those who work for the automobile companies and their families. And likewise, I am concerned about taxpayer money being provided to these companies that may not survive."

It's good to hear the President's concern about the country and the people. We are finally seeing the real Bush as his aides are busy helping him pack his personal belongings before he moves to his new $2 million mansion in Dallas, TX.

He said he'd miss Air Force One though! A week ago he told GMA Charlie Gibson he'd miss his Marine One Helicopter! Bush didn't say whether he feels any remorse for having led the country to the abyss.

This is the second recession under his watch. The first one took place in 2001 and ended after only 9 months. The current recession may continue much longer and may even turn into a depression.

Thanks to Bush's stubborn policies, we have here the perfect cause-and-effect case. The cause is summed up in this video that enumerates the 14 defining characteristics of a fascist regime (and guess who qualifies?).

As for the effect, we all know tidbits of the extent of the damage that was done to America in the last decade. But there is out there a lot more to be learned, and some of it is, to say the least, scary. I refer you to this article published by InflationData.com: "Is the US Bankrupt?"

Can Obama Survive a Depression?

The US is officially in a recession….since December 2007!!

It is a well-accepted fact that recessionary indicators cannot be determined with any certainty until the malady has already spread to all the vital sectors of the economy. It usually takes two quarters before, if determined, a recession is officially declared. But it took nearly four quarters this time around for the recession to be formally labeled.

Economists don’t agree on a single definition of recession, but there are two different gauges:

1. The GDP goes negative for two consecutive quarters.

2. The business activity, which includes employment, industrial production, real income and wholesale-retail sales, peaks and then begins to spiral downward.

This second definition is espoused by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the very organization that broke the belated recession news two days ago.

By the NBER yardstick, the average recession lasts about a year, which means that the US economy should be out of the woods before President-elect Obama is sworn in.

It’s still unclear, however, why it has taken a year for the NBER to put its label on a recession that was so palpable at least two quarters ago. It’s still unknown, and no one seems to care, whether this delay was the result of a genuine glitch, an excess of caution, or some intentional blockage.

The latter scenario is the most likely one as the holdup took place under an administration known for its law-bending inclinations.

What makes the wrongdoing theory even more plausible is Bush’s unusual and surprising conduct in his attempts to tackle the financial crisis. Many say that, perhaps to not thwart the chances of the GOP in an important election year, Bush departed from his party’s conservative approach to government spending and interventionism and stood behind the colossal $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

If the delay turns out to be a cover up, it should become evident that Bush’s gambit was less about helping the economy and more about gambling with taxpayers’ money to help his own party. The delay in itself is bad enough, as it jeopardizes corporate budgetary and business plans and causes unwarranted job and revenue losses.

Deliberately denying the public the right to be informed, especially with regard to the onset of an event as severe and consequential as a recession, warrants a formal investigation.

But those who expect the upcoming administration to introduce any suspects to justice for their possible lawlessness are in for some disappointments. Obama’s already evident eagerness to rule by consensus will preclude him from shaking up Washington. Many Americans rightly argue that, recession or not, Obama was not elected to appease the establishment. If he stays on his current course, Obama may end up losing the support of the bulk of those who have gone out of their way to vote for him. Worse, Obama runs the risk of becoming just another first-term Democrat President, and maybe the first and the last Black American to make it to the highest office in this century.

Judging from the team Obama has picked, there is little doubt that his policies won’t change much from the usual deceitful politicking that drove the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

Obama’s widely cheered promise of change, his famous saying “this is our time, this is our moment to turn the page from the past” may turn out to be just what many had suspected--empty words!

The country is in a recession. That much is now clear. The question is how long and deep this recession will turn out to be. Obama will have to face the impossible task of getting the country out of the recession before it becomes a depression. But time is not on his side. As of January 20th, he’ll have a little over two months to either announce the beginning of an expansionary period or to concede that a depression is in. If a depression becomes the hallmark of his first year in the White House, it would take a miracle to see him re-elected for a second term, as a depression usually drags on much longer than a recession and may continue to haunt his presidency until the end of 2012.

As a rule of thumb, a recession turns into a depression when the real GDP declines by more than 10 per cent. In the current housing and financial environment, such a decline in the GDP is not far off.

This gloomy specter explains why Obama insists that he wants to hit the ground running. His handpicked aides are on an extensive warm-up mode in the hope to grab the baton from the Bush Administration and run with it as fast as possible to beat the looming depression at the finish line. But it’s a white-hot baton that will need a lot of juggling.

It took almost a year to recognize a recession. It may take only a few months before it becomes evident that the US economy is in a depression. Some even say the depression is already here. We can feel it, but we just haven’t yet seen it written on newspapers’ front page.

Martin D. Weiss, in an article published by Money and Markets, is convinced “America is sinking into its Second Great Depression of modern times.” The place, he says, is every home, business, and community, and the time is now.

Other pundits are also beginning to utter the “D” word, and some predict the feared great one may become official right after Obama’s inaugural.

That’s the bad hand with which Obama will have to start his game. After the inaugural litter is swept away and the laser beams are turned off, Washington will likely be a very cold place indeed. The one thing going for Obama up until now is his eloquence--his ability to articulate the problems and his rhetorical prowess in prescribing remedies and giving the overused word “change” an overtone of hope. All that may come back and hurt his image as the ills of the nation become more and more intractable.

If he goes on listening to his discredited old friends in Congress and appeasing his old foes, Obama is more likely to fail than achieve anything of substance in the most urgent issues facing America, namely the collapsing economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the awful image of America overseas.

Grapes of Wrath

Sometimes one needs to link back to history to understand some of today's phenomena. History books, often skewed and distorted, are far from being the only reference for people seeking answers to complex issues. One might fare better by taking a fresh look at the body of literary works whose authors may have purposely crafted to circumvent the political correctness and the pressures of their times.

Here's a leaf from Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"-- a novel that defies the dust of time and goes straight to the heart of yesterday/today's miseries of the common man:

If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. (…)

The squatting tenant men nodded and wondered and drew figures in the dust, and yes, they knew, God knows. (…) The owner men went on leading to their point: "You know the land is getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it." The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land. Well, it's too late. And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. "A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that." "Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.”

“But—you see, a bank or a company can't do that, because those creatures don't breathe air, they breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so."

The squatting men raised their eyes to understand. "Can't we just hang on? Maybe the next year will be a good year. God knows how much cotton next year. And with all the wars—God knows what price cotton will bring. Don't they make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms? Get enough wars and cotton’ll hit the ceiling. Next year, maybe."

They looked up questioningly. "We can't depend on it. The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size."

No further comment is needed to explain the relevance of such a sober look at the ills and the inadequacies of our system and the awkwardness of those attempting to enforce it.

US Corporate Media: Swallowing the Bitter Pill They Helped Create

It was not until the deafening sound of the bursting housing bubble could no longer be hushed that the US corporate media began shyly reporting on the sub-prime mortgage disaster. The MSM’s failure to do its job of informing the public and uncovering some of the riskiest behaviors of reckless lenders and credit peddlers in history was akin to its unashamed complacency in the face of the Bush Administration’s outrageous constitutional contraventions and its violations of international law.

Now that the ad-spend is plummeting and the share prices of the big media corporations are collapsing, the MSM has only itself to blame. The expected windfall from the US presidential elections and the Olympic Games, two big boon events which took place the same year, just did not materialize.

In a November 28, 2008 article published by Globe and Mail, Richard Siklos wrote that some parts of the industry - particularly local U.S. media - have seen their sales fall off a cliff and their long-term viability as business models called into question. He quotes Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., one of the world's largest media conglomerates, as saying that automotive advertising, which has represented as much as 40 per cent of the advertising at his local Fox TV stations, is down by 40 per cent this year, with some big advertisers such as imperiled General Motors cutting their spending by more than half.

The slowdown in ad revenue described by R. Siklos is hitting newspapers as well. Online advertising is also likely to plummet to meager levels in 2009.

All this is due to the housing disaster and the financial collapse that came with it. Although the crisis turned out to be one of epic proportions, none of the MSM saw it coming, and it’s not a far-fetched scenario that some corporate media organizations may have simply turned a blind eye, perhaps in the hope that it would go away on its own if nobody brought it up. With the exception of the blog community, no serious attempt was made before 2008 to warn consumers of the looming cataclysm and the hardships that may ensue.

This was no small blunder. It dwarfs the US intelligence failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union or to prevent the 9/11 attacks and to anticipate the huge domestic and international backlash from the misguided invasion of Iraq. It dwarfs all of those failures because the housing swindle was happening right before everybody’s eyes and the red flags raised by many bloggers have been ignored for too long.

The current crisis may bring about a historic shift in the media industry. The MSM is losing ground very rapidly, they may never fully recover from the current slump, as they are being hit from all sides: plummeting ad revenues, image problems, proliferation of alternative info and entertainment sources, and the negative impact of the economic downturn.

R. Siklos says the bigger question is the degree to which the media wipeout will imperil businesses whose future was already in doubt when the downturn hit. Recent weeks have seen some print publications, including U.S. News & World Report and the Christian Science Monitor, drastically cut back their publishing schedules, and several magazines fold.

It looks like this unprecedented downturn in US history is finally taking with it the arrogant US corporate media, as it has already deleted from our collective memory eight years of our existence, eight years during which a highly incompetent president wiped out the achievements of the entire Western civilization.

Five Reasons to Admire Hank Paulson

Bedeviled by many in the US for his handling of the financial crisis, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson whose demeanor makes him look like an elk surrounded by a horde of famished hyenas, proved to be foxier than any old-hand politician in Washington.

His appearances before Congress, scanty and far between as they may be, have become a real circus, with all the usual buffooning, laughs, shouts and hubbubs. Yet Hank Paulson should be credited for a steadfastness seldom seen within the beltway. There are at least five reasons for which Hank Paulson deserves our admiration:

1. From the start, he devised a strategy and he stood by it. He seems to have deliberately boxed Congress in an untenable position by giving himself a maneuvering margin ranging from stunt to dare. He began with a shocking, outrageous stunt, by asking for 700 Billion dollars and unbridled powers to disburse the money as he sees fit. It was a “shock and awe” strategy that worked well with an unpopular Congress about to face an irate constituency back home. Paulson didn’t get a blank check from Congress, but he nonetheless ended up with a check cut to the “Bearer.”

2. While Paulson’s visibly dithering testimonies never exceeded the limits of the speech hindrance from which he suffers, he seems to have used that same impediment to his advantage. Oddly enough, Paulson’s stuttering tic was all too befitting, given the momentousness of the crisis he was in charge of tackling.

3. Paulson further unmasked the legislators' ignorance of the extent of a financial crisis that was brewing under their watch for a number of years. Many of our elected officials still admit today they have no clue where the money went or where it’s going—another credit to Paulson’s rightly planned policy to not divulge the names of the money recipients to fend off the risks of any bank runs. Paulson is mindful of a-la-Chuck-Schumer leaks that can come out of the Capitol with no regrad to the consequences.

4. Paulson dropped the TARP provisions of the rescue package without bothering to ask for Congress’s approval—a dare that came to light after half of the money was already handed out. Again, Paulson’s from-stunt-to-dare strategy worked to his advantage and re-enforced his undeclared conviction that Congress is irrelevant when it comes to tackling a matter as earth-shattering as the current financial crisis.

5. Even under pressure, Paulson never wavered from his early position that the auto industry should not expect to be bailed out like Wall Street. Paulson knows the “Bridge” money Detroit is begging for is a bridge to nowhere. This position is based on the fact that what could work for Wall Street may not work for the Big Three. The thrust behind Paulson’s rescue plan has more to do with voodoo economics than with throwing money at the problem. He and the Fed Chief Ben Bernanke have implied it repeatedly in their interventions before Congress. Their main aim was to pronounce the allocation of big money for the rescue effort, but with the hope that they won’t need to use all of it. Paulson and Bernanke’s hopes were pegged on restoring consumers’ confidence and healing investors’ psychological ills by appearing to be busy doing something about the crisis. Like most savvy economists, they are both aware that there just isn’t enough money in the government coffers to cure all the ongoing tribulations of the financial sector.

Paulson might have fared much better by asking Congress to hold prayer sessions, instead of the endless hearings that seem to have no bearing on the current financial and economic turbulence, both at home and abroad.

blogocrat: The Mourning of a Blog

blogocrat: So Long HP!

The Mourning of a Blog

An insightful blog went off the blogosphere after it led many of its visitors to safety in the middle of the US housing storm. After three years of a heated debate over the health of the housing market in the US, or the lack thereof, HousingPanic is no longer active. The blog master, Keith, pulled the plug on HousingPanic on November 5, 2008, a day after the election of Barack Obama to the White House. Keith opened a new blog he titled: "Soot and Ashes: Reinventing America After the Crash.".

In his farewell note, Keith wrote:

"Three years.

Ten million views.

6,000 posts.

Trillions lost.

A world economy in shambles.

And housing prices almost back to where we started.

HousingPANIC ends."

It was quite a ride indeed. HousingPanic was among the first blogs that sounded the housing alarm in 2005. Much of what was written by the blog master and posted by the contributors and the visitors became a reality: The housing bubble, the financial turmoil, the stock market crash, the demise of the GOP, the election of Obama...

I personnally enjoyed posting on that blog under a different name-- one of the reasons I stopped posting in my own blog for a few months! There are hundreds of blogs dealing with the US housing market, like Dr Housing Bubble, Patrick.net, etc, but the thing about HousingPanic is that it was down to earth. It said it all in a way that left no one out.

So long HP! and good luck to you Keith with your new blog.

WHY DO HOUSING-BUBBLE BLOGGERS DESPISE THIS MAN SO MUCH?

Meet Lawrence Yun, the Managing Director of Quantitative Research at the National Association of REALTORS®. He’s sort of the main spokesman for the NAR. He manages the Statistics and Forecasting Groups of the NAR’s Research Division.

Judging from all the bad rap he gets from housing-bubble bloggers, he must be the most despised spokesperson in America today. There even is a “Lawrence Yun Watch” blog, entirely dedicated to ridiculing whatever Lawrence Yun says-- or sometimes what he fails to say-- regarding the housing market and the state of the US economy. In that blog, there's a graph showing what the blogger claims is a compilation of Yun's lies since he joined the NAR in May, 2007, when he replaced David Lereah, an equally controversial NAR chief economist who was at bloggerheads with bubble bloggers. In Housing Panic, another LawrenceYunWatch sister blog on the net, the title of one particularly venomous post reads like this:

FLASH: NAR's Pending Home Sales report hits record low (again) and Lawrence Yun is sent out by his masters to lie, spin, deceive and shovel sh*t

To understand what roils so many bloggers and drives them to the edge, one needs only to take a look at what Dr. Yun writes in Real Estates Insights , one of his association’s many websites. The claims he usually makes, from his reading of the economic reports to his opinions and his forecasts regarding the state of the US economy and the future of housing, flies straight in the face of everything the bubble bloggers stand for and advocate.

For example, his March analysis was titled: “Bringing Out the Buyers”—a highly provocative title that further underlines what his critics have been saying so loudly: L awrence Yun’s main aim is to continue to lure unsuspecting Americans into buying homes, even when buying at this juncture could be a real gamble with their hard-earned savings.

The animosity runs so deep that some bloggers and many post commentators make racist remarks about Yun's looks and Asian background. It is not a far-fetched idea that, perhaps because of that background, many bubble blogs are also leading an active campaign against China's handling of the Tibet crisis, calling on consumers to boycott Chinese products and the largest stores that import heavily from China, like Wal-Mart. Those same bloggers are also actively pushing for a boycott of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing.

Yun writes regular columns on real estate market trends, creates NAR's forecasts, and participates in many economic forecasting panels, including Blue Chip and Harvard University Industrial Economist Council. He was recently chosen by USA Today as one of the top ten business forecasters in the US.

Dr. Yun has been quoted on the real estate market and the economy in the mass media, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. He has also appeared on CNBC and Bloomberg TV. Dr. Yun received his undergraduate degree from Purdue University and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park.

It is not known how much dissuasion power there is in the hands of Bloggers who are actively posting articles and comments, warning against "catching a falling guillotine.” But it looks like the daily shove-and-tug exercise between NAR’s Yun and the bubble bloggers will continue as long as L. Yun continues to be the mouthpiece of the NAR.

The question now is: why attack someone whose job is to put a positive spin on those recurring bad housing news in the US? Lawrence Yun is doing his job, and his is no different than that of any of those spokespersons at the White House, the Department of State, and the Pentagon. They all have been hired for a certain talent most other people don’t possess: telling a lie when having to, but without the risk of being caught.

Banks Cut Off Some Home Equity Credit Lines As They Brace Up For More Defaults-- A Scourge That Could Dwarf First-Mortgage Subprime Woes

With house prices falling fast across the US, upside-down mortgages may force more homeowners to default on their home equity loans, making first-mortgage subprime defaults look like a pre-game show.

Some banks have already begun freezing credit lines extended to homeowners who had equity in their homes during the bubble years, but who have lost most, if not all of their equity in this housing downturn.

It is estimated that the value of all home equity loans in the US exceeds $1 trillion. In 2007 alone, subprime lenders issued a whopping $125 billion in home equity loans.

The targets of subprime loans are usually people with poor credit histories or no steady income, or both. The pool of Americans in need of high-risk, high-interest loans increased in recent years, due to rising credit-card delinquencies and an unprecedented number of bankruptcies, which helped spur the subprime lendeds’ greed. Now both lenders and borrowers are faced with catastrophic losses, as the housing bubble burst.

Social Security, Madicare: Another Looming Disaster

In their annual report, trustees for the government's Social Security and Medicare said today both programs are facing "enormous challenges."

The trustees warned that financial pressures will mount much sooner than projected, as Social Security and Medicare begin forking out more money than they collect in payroll taxes.

Medicare will be first to be hit. The trustees say Medicare will be paying more than it receives as of this year, whereas Social Security will start collecting less money nine years from now as the bulk of the babyboomer generation go on full retirement.

In a recent study, it was shown that most Americans don't know what their full retirement age is. Very few know, for example, that full retirement age is not 62, although one can start claiming retirement benefits at that age.

Social Security folks have a set of age brackets that determine your full retirement age. It could be 65, 66, or 67, depending on whether you were born before or after 1937, between 1938 and 1942, or between 1943 and 1955, and so forth.

Catch 22 situation

You may begin collecting Social Security checks when you reach the age of 62. However, Social Security bureaucrats warn you that if you cash in before your full retirement age, your benefits will be drastically reduced. They advise that you should think about pushing your benefits' claim to the age of 70, unless you don't mind if the value of your monthly check is trimmed by as much as 40 percent.

What the Social Security pundits are not telling you is that by the time you reach 70, if you ever do, there's a good chance that-- like all US-made bubbles -- Social Security would have simply evaporated. So I'd say: retire early and start collecting those checks while they last.

The other advantage of retiring earlier is that you collect benefits for a longer period of time. The Government wants you to wait, perhaps hoping that the millions of baby-boomers who are coming of retirement age this year would not force Social Security into insolvency sooner than expected.

Keep in mind that there are 78 million baby boomers who are going to start collecting their social security checks at the rate of 4 to 5 million new baby boom retirees per year. So, take a number and pray that you reach that window before the last call.

401(k)’s hidden fees

Over 80 percent of 401(k) investors have no clue as to how much they pay in fees. In most cases, the fees associated with 401(K) investments range from 1.2 to 1.6 percent taken from investors’ assets each year.

With inflation inching upward, some bad Mutual Funds’ bubble investments, and the dollar rapidly spiraling downward, 401(K) participants should brace for the smell of rot in their cherished nest egg.

What’s more disturbing is that 401(k) participants are seldom told or notified how much they are paying four their investments’ upkeep. One has to dig for the information in order to get it, like searching the summary annual report on the company's website for the total plan costs incurred during the year.

It is estimated that Americans have between 2.5 and $3 trillion invested in 401(k)'s. Just in case you wonder why the financial services industry keeps encouraging Americans to stash their disposable income away in 401(k)'s, you should know that those firms take in around $30 billion annually in fees paid by millions of mostly-unsuspecting investors.

US Housing Troubles Economists And US Government

With the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the subsequent financial turmoil, the US economy is going through its worst uncertain times.

The free-market fundamentals have become lopsided as the Fed and the Bush Administration have decided to trade their regulator and Executive Branch hats for those of Wall Street financial managers. In their desperate attempt to stop the bleeding gushing out of the US financial system’s wounds, Ben Bernanke and Bush’s economic advisors have resorted to very expensive band-aid that should ultimately be paid by the taxpayer. But most analysts with a sober, detached view from the financial stampede believe those measures will only delay and magnify the pain for all Americans.

Judging from the plethora of US blogsters who come out every day venting their outrage at the Fed, the Bush Administration, and even at the Democrats in Congress and the Presidential elections hopefuls, the number of Americans opposed to government bailouts for failing financial institution and individual mortgage defaulters seems to be growing.

In a government as deceitful as this one and most likely the one that will come next, honest people are considered misfits. The entire US domestic policy is built around consumers' confidence (gullibility) and investors' psychosomatic impulse (greed-induced ecstasy).

Just imagine the hysteria that would engulf the markets had Bush or Cheney walked to the podium and said what honest experts are saying about the country's economy.

The best example is that, up until now, the government’s inflation figures are outrageously low, whereas the consumer is feeling the increasingly painful bite of costly bills.

How does the government come up with those low inflation figures? Read the Daily Telegraph on a similar ‘mysterious’ inflation figure in the UK as well. The paper says: “A loaf, the figures show, is 28 per cent more expensive than when Tony Blair left Downing Street. Butter has risen by 37 per cent. There have been rises, too, in gas bills, petrol and, of course, taxes. Yet, according to the Government, inflation is running at only 2.5 per cent. How can this be? Much of the explanation can be found in changes in how the statistics are compiled.”

It’s cheap Chinese products in the market that are offsetting the skyrocketing prices of other vital consumer goods and services. This means the US government should be thankful to China for shipping over to the American consumer all that inexpensive stuff, allowing the government to cook better inflation figures!

The real truth will never freely come out from the residents of the White House (or Congress for that matter), simply because that would ruin the corporate juggernauts whose generosity helped hoodwink those same “confident” consumers who voted them in.

It’s a vicious circle that even a thousand Stiglitzes, Spitzers and Schiffs would not be able to break. The way out of this may only be through blog-steering US public opinion away from the outrageously-complacent MSM, with the hope that, some day, this kind of blogocracy and simple people-to-people communication prevail over the corrupt corporate media and the shady media moguls.

On that score, there's widespread blogsters' disgust with what they believe is US mainstream media's coverup. (example below)

HousingPANIC - The Housing Bubble and Crash Blog with an Attitude Problem: FLASH: Used home sales crash 24%, prices down record 8% vs. year ago. Mainstream media reports home sales up, Dow rockets on NAR's great news!

Some blogsters have called for the establishment of a Bloggers' Trade Union in the US, where they can have a real voice in the elections. Others have even suggested starting a third political party to rival the GOP and the Dems.

There also are scores of new books out there that predict and warn against an Economic collapse in the US. Taken side by side, those books and the thousands of blogs bracing for doomsday may end up peddling a self-fulfilling prophecy. Knowing that the entire economic system of the US is build on consumer confidence, there’s a real possibility that a self-feeding panic hits main-street America and tears down the entire financial and political system with it.

That is why the Fed and the Administration are pedaling faster and faster everyday to keep the economy moving—not by looking for any lasting remedies to the real ills of America’s economy, but by constantly spinning the propaganda wheel, so that panic does not hit the consumer overnight.

Bernanke and Bush economic aides know all too well that Americans will have to face a real downturn in the economy, but they want to dilute the pain by stretching it over a number of years, rather than a few months. This is why I personally predict that the economic recovery from the current slump in the US won’t materialize before the Presidential elections of 2012.

Rick Falkvinge: Why the US is collapsing

Rick Falkvinge: Why the US is Collapsing

BLOGOCRAT:

I find this analysis very well researched. There are too many conflicting views out there regarding the current state of affairs in America, especially in this election year when every single person is trying to have their voice heard and understood. This view, however, is coming from Sweden. You may or may not agree with it, but it certainly makes good reading. Enjoy!

US Troops Eat Saddam's Fish! But How Safe is That Fish?

Here’s a story that got my attention today:

US Troops in Baghdad Make Fishing a Tradition (NPR RADIO)

“While U.S. troops in Iraq spend much of their time searching for high level insurgents, some soldiers at Baghdad's Camp Victory try to catch another type of "big one." They fish in the lakes surrounding Saddam Hussein's palaces. After five years, it's become a tradition — soldiers on their way out hand fishing rods to newcomers.”

Click Here to Listen to the NPR Story
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But here's the SCARY PART that the US military and NPR may not know about: (read full story below)
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Besides telling us what some of the US troops have sometimes for dinner in Camp Victory, this story is a real eye opener on how lax the discipline has become among the US military in Baghdad.

The report clearly demonstrates that the officers-turned-fishermen knew that at least some of that fish may have had human body parts as food under Saddam’s watch. Saddam’s henchmen were reportedly in the grisly business of water-boarding political prisoners in that same fish pond before throwing them to the hungry fish after they had finished torturing the prisoners to death.

As macabre as it sounds, this account did not seem to bother the US troops who have clearly developed a fondness for fat bass meat. But even more disturbing are some of the accounts I had heard during my stay in Iraq, right after the fall of Baghdad in 2003.

Of the scores of witnesses who came to volunteer stories and leads in the hope of getting media attention, I particularly remember one man who had presented himself to me as the former officer in charge of the infamous Abu Ghuraib prison (he had an ID and several photographs to prove that). At that time, I was looking for information that could lead us to locations where one could find evidence of mass graves, or to places where political prisoners could still be found alive. The man was of no significant help to me on that score, but he sat down and began telling me about some of Saddam’s novel techniques to rid his regime of political foes.

As I recall, one of Saddam’s original ideas, according to that eyewitness,involved using fish to kill his nemeses. And here’s how the story went:

Saddam, with the help of a wealthy guy from Al Saadoun family, according to the man's account, had devised a technique by which he would allegedly feed the fish some kind of chemically treated chicken droppings. This would take several weeks before the fish is ready to be taken out of the pond, cooked, and served to a particular political prisoner for lunch or dinner. The man told me that this dish would be served only once a week. Over a period of five to six months, the prisoner begins to slowly fade away, but with no symptoms, no detectable illness.

The prisoner, after he becomes weak and wasted, is then released from prison, supposedly for humanitarian reasons, and handed back to his family to take care of him, the man said. The prisoner is then allowed to have all sorts of medical exams and blood work, but Saddam allegedly knew all too well that no physician would be able to diagnose his illness. The prisoner would ultimately die in his home, and the victim’s family would even get a letter of condolence from Saddam, according to the man. This way, the man said, Saddam gets rid of his enemy, without the bad press that usually comes with killing a foe in cold blood.

My question to the man at that moment was: “But why would Saddam go to such lengths, knowing that he could just have his men shoot the prisoner?”

The man’s answer was that Saddam did it this way only to prominent political foes who had some clout or popularity in or outside Iraq. "He simply didn’t want to be blamed for their deaths,” the man said.

His answer was convincing, but I still had my doubts as to the credibility of that man. Since then, I haven’t come across any story regarding Saddam’s fish ponds, until today. I couldn’t help making the link. In hindsight, I believe the man was telling me something that deserved attention.

If the US soldiers are shrugging off the likelihood that they may have been eating human-fed fish, they should take a harder look at what they are fishing, it may just be the same fish with which Saddam used to treat his best enemies.

Lebanon, My Kind of Swiss Cheese!

I spent the last ten days in Beirut. When the airplane landed at Rafiq Al Hariri Airport, I was struck by the emptiness of an airport that has always been bustling with local travelers and foreign visitors. I took a cab to a hotel overlooking the famous Corniche of Beirut where a handful of buildings still bear the scars of Lebanon’s civil war. The hotel was similarly deserted. It was an eerie sight that reflected the sad and terrible realities of Lebanon today.

It goes without saying that I felt uncomfortable roaming through Alhamra's streets the following day. I had a nagging trepidation that a gun battle would erupt at any moment, or worse, a carload of dynamite would blow up near one of the many checkpoints I had to go through while moving about.

My anxiety was not unjustified: Lebanon is a country with no government to speak of-- the office of the President has been vacant for months and both the government and the parliament are, to say it politely, utterly dysfunctional.

Both the cause and the effect of all that is a severe factional polarization not witnessed since the civil war. The country is divided and the protagonists, each armed with pointed arguments and weapons of all kinds, are fighting a proxy war, albeit rhetorical, on behalf of other more formidable foes.

The current situation in Lebanon is obviously an extension of the July '06 war between Hezbollah and Israel. It is also, on a broader level, a side effect of the ongoing enmity between the US and Israel on one hand, and Iran and Syria on the other. Add to this volatile mix a handful of other closely or remotely implicated parties, such as France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Hamas.

The presence of two US warships on the shores of Lebanon only aggravated my feeling of nervousness. Many Gulf countries restricted their citizens' travel to Lebanon, and in some cases put a moratorium on issuing visas to Lebanese nationals. US Embassy's warden messages advised extreme vigilance and directed expats living there or Americans visiting Lebanon to avoid public places. But it was those same public places that I wanted to go to, which I did. And it was only there that my fear began to slowly subside.

What I learned from watching people and talking to them was a surprise to me. People, from all sides and all walks of life, did not want to dwell on politics, but they talked freely about the hardships of their day-to-day life-- severe inflation, joblessness, dwindling business activity. Most people I met shrugged off the idea of a looming civil war. They all seem to have figured that the real issue is much bigger than just a factional fight for prime positions in a crippled government.

What I admired most was the orderly way with which the Lebanese people continue to conduct their daily living business. One of the many sayings that go around town, poking fun at the Lebanese officials, goes like this: "If you see a traffic jam at any of the intersections of Beirut, you can be certain that a police officer is there directing traffic."

This funny anecdote is indicative of how much the Lebanese people have matured since the civil war and how jaded they have become in the face of the constant political maneuvering that goes on in their country.

With such a torn social, political, and religious fabric, Lebanon looks more like a slice of Swiss cheese than anything else. Yet, Lebanon has proven to the world that people can live and prosper without a government at the helm. The Lebanese people, hardened by years and years of devastating wars, seem to be more eager to live in peace. The Lebanese people are a model of resourcefulness in the Middle East. They don't want a government. They can live without one. All they want is to be left alone-- just my kind of Swiss cheese!

MSM Finally Jumping On The Wagon

MSM BEFORE

MSM AFTER

Mainstream media is finally trying to catch up with realities on the ground, and at last we can now have some lucid views published or broadcast without the usual limits. Read this article: Homeowners and Investors, Time to Get Real.

Americans Expierience More Sleepless Nights, Study Says

Finally, mainstream media is getting to the real story, but they still are detached from main-street America, and so are the researchers who seem to be living in a different planet.

Judging from this article, they still don’t get it—they mention all the possible causes of lack or loss of sleep in America, except inflation --pizza and beer prices skyrocket--, joblessness, housing and financial crises, like the free fall of the dollar and the sub-prime mortgage disaster (see below how it all happened).

The Sub-prime Disaster Explained

This is how former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Bush Administration, US regulators and rating agencies helped create the housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis:

- Soon after 9/11, in a panicky mood, the Fed moved swiftly to stem any disastrous impact on the US economy by lowering the Fed’s rate to near ZIR (Zero Interest Rate) and parked it there for the next five years.

- Banks, usually relying on depositors’ money to be recycled into loans and financial services, such as mortgage loans, suddenly found themselves holding an empty bag, as rich folks and people with disposable income shied away from low-yield CODs, and began investing in stocks, bonds, and other high-yield investments like Hedge Funds.

- The banks, under the cover of the deregulation policies espoused by Bush, began looking for other (dubious) ways to make money, and before too long, they came up with a new model of mortgage lending, whereby everybody could make a fortune.

- The Federal Government regulators turned a blind eye on the risky business and State and local authorities were forced to look the other way. That big departure from conventional lending, which has become known as sub-prime and Alt-A mortgages, is what is now making millions of Americans lose sleep at night.

Here is how it was all concocted by greedy bankers, realtors, and appraisers:

Is Our System of Government Corrupt?

CLICK HERE to view video: "935 Lies"

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

That saying by John Adams appears more relevant today than ever before. America, thanks to Bush and his henchmen, is no longer the Republic in which the people hold sovereignty, with the right to enforce their own conception of rights and to declare war, and where the “power” of government is derived from the people themselves. Instead, the US is increasingly being looked at as a Kingdom-- a kingdom of bubbles, or Bubbledom: the media bubble, the stock market bubble, the dotcom bubble, the real-estate bubble, the financial bubble.

The tactics of the Bush Administration have consistently been based on scaring people into submission. They used scores of mind-control specialists, spin doctors, corrupt or coerced media people, and coalesced with special interests mafia groups and deep-pocket corporate gamblers to whip the American people into declaring their unequivocal allegiance to King Bush and his dynasty.

From the start, Bush's plan was simple: bomb those rag-tag people in Afghanistan, unleash the US military might against Saddam's junkyards, then declare a quick victory over what the American people were led to believe were utterly dangerous foes. All of our attention was hijacked by such momentous events being paraded on our TV screens in the comfort of our bubble homes, forgetting about our own real woes, like a national debt approaching ten trillion dollars and a whole new slew of bubbles being inflated all around us, including under the roof of our own homes.

The spin machine had done a superb job laying the ground for Bush's scam by churning out doctored images of Saddam, making that ignorant and arrogant Bedouin look as if he were an invincible enemy, and depicting the Taliban, a bunch of tent-dwellers and

sheepherders in the rugged Afghan mountains as the ultimate, formidable force to be reckoned with.

After 9/11, the stage was all set to launch this Machiavellian plan, using deceit and outright lies. The majority of the American people, being busy-- as they increasingly are-- coping with the rat race created by corporate peddlers, failed to discern or even understand Bush's hidden agenda.

Historically, America has mostly had straight-shooters as presidents, from Georges Washington to Eisenhower. Even Reagan was a man of ideals and principals. Then a new breed of dubious politirants took over--first Clinton, then Bush.

Bush, however, came to the White House with a vengeance, literally. If one digs with only a slight effort, the truth about Bush's real motives behind his decision to go to war in Iraq would jump at one's face. The whole world saw through it, except the people that mattered most, the American people.

Bush and his cronies resorted to all kinds of scare tactics. Their plan was outrageously successful: they had many Americans duct-tape their homes, freely spy on their neighbors, accept wholeheartedly that their phones be wiretapped, gladly raise their hands as they get a demeaning strip-search before they take their domestic flights...

In spite of all that, Bush until today argues that "the aim of the terrorists is to change our lifestyle, but they won't succeed." It's Bush and his thugs--not necessarily the terrorists-- who have changed the lifestyle of Americans. They made Americans live in a bubble for six long years. They trashed the image of America abroad and, with it, long decades of hard work and trillions of dollars invested worldwide in building the brand "America" as a nation of compassion, goodwill, and tolerance.

The question therefore is: is our system of government corrupt? If you think so, something must be done to salvage our democracy.

Just an idea: why not encourage the e-populace to create an alternative party in America-- a blog-based political party that could, over a number of years, become viable and competitive enough to give the people a real voice in electing responsible officials?

I suggest we call this new party "The Blogocratic Party," a third choice for Americans. The Blogocratic Party should gain in strength and gather enough tailwind as it goes forward and garners more active bloggers (and non-bloggers as well),until it becomes a real force to be reckoned with.

This new party should restore power back to the people, in line with our constitutional rights, thus giving a real meaning to "WE THE PEOPLE." This party should not accept money from special interest groups. It should draft its own platform and have all bloggers participate in the drafting process, before setting up a referendum to pass or reject any and each one of its clauses. The party's manifesto should then be presented to the general public.

I bet there will be a mass exodus from the two corrupt parties that are now fielding three business-as-usual candidates, of whom one might end up in the White House pretty soon.

Any other ideas?

Tell us what you think.

OPEN THREAD TO DISCUSS THE US PRIMARIES, ADD NEWS, COMMENTS

Who do you support? Does any of the leading candidates appeal to you?

Most blogbuzz turns around Hillary Clinton's imminent demise, do you agree?

Fighting For a Place in History

All things aside, Bush will be remembered for his all-out war against his two biggest nemeses: Al Qaeda’s Usama bin Laden and the beheaded former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. His was not only a war about survival, but also, and most notably, it was a costly fight for a place in history.

Of all three, and since history is made up of facts and figures and dates, only bin Laden seems to have already chiseled himself a cave in the mountain of history books.

After all, bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11-- the one indelible date which most certainly will go in the annals as the big bang which has suddenly catapulted the world into a wholly new ballgame. In all likelihood, the impact of September 11 will have lasting reverberations throughout the 21st century and maybe even beyond.

Contrary to Bush’s repeated vow not to let “the terrorists succeed in changing our lifestyle,” September 11 has already changed the behavior of a great number of people and shattered most of the old strategic doctrines and political dogmas across the globe. The good old “mutual deterrence” based on a fairly simple calculus of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, so much familiar in Cold War rhetoric, has faded away from today’s military lexicon and strategic studies; acronyms with frightening overtones, such as ABM and ICBM, have almost become a relic of the past.

The Terrorism Research Center, an independent institute founded in the US five years before the events of 9/11 came to the conclusion that “the attacks of September 11 will be the precipitating moment of a new kind of war that will define a new century.”

September 11 has prompted the Bush administration to review the strategic doctrine of the US. The outcome of such review was tested in some parts of the Muslim World; pre-emptive warfare has been waged where the US reckoned there was a ‘nexus’ between states and terror groups. The Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s regimes were first to pay the price of such a doctrine.

But if there are any telltales of Bush’s policy failures, as he is a few months away from leaving the White House, they can be summed up by the fact that the Taliban is regrouping again; that bin Laden is still out in the wilderness and, by Bush’s own admission, with some wind left under his wings; that the execution of Saddam did not make Iraq any safer for Americans, as US soldiers are entrapped in a swamp never seen since Vietnam; and that Bush’s popularity ratings have slipped to levels never seen since Nixon’s last days in office.

To bin Laden, having so far succeeded in dodging the US armada is only a bonus to his image as a historic legend. Bin Laden has effectively discarded the 20th century notion that military might comforts friends by deterring foes. Adding insult to injury, bin Laden will forever be remembered for having done so much damage with so little means. To foment and execute his horrendous coup, bin Laden did not have to resort to more than age-old rhetoric and weapons as rudimentary as box cutters and as wicked as civilian planes loaded with innocent people and brimming with cheap Kerosene.

Historically, foreign invasions gave rise to unorthodox methods of resistance among indigenous populations, especially in the Middle East, and suicide operations are not at all a new phenomenon in the region.

For example, (and there are striking similarities between bin Laden and him) a certain Hassan Sabbah, founder of the dreadful Shi’ia occult order known as the Assassins (Hashashin in the local parlance) who, in medieval times and from their strongholds in the mountains of the Levant, terrorized the invading European Crusaders as well as the sect’s adversaries among the Sunni Muslim community by way of suicide attacks.

According to many occidental and oriental chroniclers, Sabbah resorted to hashish - a potent form of processed cannabis- to influence young recruits and send them on suicidal missions, murdering Christian Crusaders and Muslim backers of the Turkish Seljuk dominion. But, since September 11, such a narrative has become more and more polemical, as some researchers are now taking a second look at the Assassins’ historiography.

But as the story went, Sabbah used to get his would-be assassins high on hemp, lock them up with beautiful women inside lush gardens with fruit-bearing trees and water fountains—a perfect worldly rendition of the promised Garden of Eden. While in there, they were supposedly indoctrinated and worked into religious delirium and led to believe that, once they died for the cause, the blissful living they had experienced in their beatific gardens was going to be theirs in perpetuity.

Some scholars now contend that those accounts were all but dubious inferences based on the Occident’s “fanciful impressions of the Orient” and the imagination of a few orientalists and Arab secularists to whom the concept of die-to-kill for a cause was unfathomable.

Back in the 11th Century AD, the returning Crusaders from the Levant, perhaps for pure folkloric imagery and a desire to give more impetus to the prevailing, popular exotic view of the Orient, named Sabbah ‘The Old Man of The Mountains” – an eerie description which, a millennium later, could perfectly suit Usama bin Laden.

One of Al Qaeda’s tapes aired on Al-Jazeera TV Channel, showed bin Laden with his reed and his medieval-looking outfit, strolling down a postcard-perfect, rock-sewn mountainside in some unknown location. The surrounding landscape looked conspicuously close to the mountains from which Sabbah once ruled over his secret cult.

But insofar as the man’s image goes, bin Laden’s grip over his disciples stems not from drug inhalations nor does it come out of some elaborate theatricals or unusual charisma, but rather from his command of the Arabic language, his theological liturgy, and, of all things, from his benign appearance and his modest looks. The effects of such attributes on bin Laden’s youthful followers seem to be just as potent as those of any drug known to humans.

Even more ironic is the fact that, as a collateral outcome, today’s suicide bombings may well give credence to those who are attempting to rewrite the history of the Assassins and shed new light on the real motivations behind those who wrote the sect’s historiography. Bin Laden’s movement may end up restoring the image of Sabbah and his followers, although considered heretics by mainstream Islam, as legitimate Mujahideen who led an honorable fight against the first Crusaders.

The old views held by the West regarding suicide attacks do not seem to have changed much since Sabbah’s time. Willing to sacrifice one’s life in order to kill for a cause, no matter how just the cause is, is still viewed as utterly insane. Hence, the Bush Administration’s constant refusal to admit that there is a link between September 11 and the widespread feeling in the Muslim World of bitterness, humiliation, and injustice.

Al Qaeda statements cite US unconditional support for Israel, US sanctions and actions in Iraq, the US bases in Arabia, as the core motives behind the group’s strikes against American interests in the world.

Saladin Meckled-Garcia, commenting on the root causes of radical Islam, wrote: “radical principles give expression and offer solution to grievances, which include humiliation by Israeli and US interventions in the Middle East.” He further argues that “placing the 9/11 attacks in the historical and social context of US foreign policy will show that retaliatory military responses will only underline the causes of these events rather than addressing them.”

But as long as the US continues to see suicide attacks as irrational, there is virtually no hope that the US will ever take a rational look at the root causes of such a phenomenon. As a US diplomat based in the Middle East put it, “there could be no coexistence with insanity.”

If history is of any counsel, the Bush Administration, which seems to be hell-bent on eradicating radical Islam first and then maybe talk, is doomed to fail. The US still does not comprehend the psyche of Arabs and Muslims and, in all likelihood, bin Laden’s self-propelled ideology will go on as long as the US keeps a blind eye on the real problems shaking the Middle East-- problems ranging from foreign occupation of Arab and Muslim land to domestic oppression and suppression.

At the heel of the US-led invasion of Baghdad, and as I was covering the events in Iraq, I was struck by the huge number of Iraqis who, after they finally got out of their bunkers, were queuing up at the heavily guarded gates of the dowdy Palestine and Sheraton hotels. They were there to meet journalists, hoping to peddle information and scoops of some intrinsic value, from the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, to where they last sighted a truck loaded with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), to the mass grave where Kuwaiti POWs were “seen” buried alive.

Sifting through the daily pile of scuttlebutt to verify the potentially good leads made my job and that of the journalists I met all the more difficult.

In the weeks following the war, the American officers in charge of running a population suddenly set free and let loose, were holed up in hurriedly-vacated or forcibly flushed out palaces in the center of Baghdad. There was no official spokesman representing the occupying force in Baghdad, to explain, deny or confirm.

CENTCOM, the only source for official views on US operations in Iraq, was in Qatar, and many seasoned journalists have fallen victims to the hodgepodge of misinformation and seemingly innocent witness accounts delivered by the Iraqis. And most of those Iraqi-citizens-turned-informers were talking to US intelligence operatives in Baghdad as well.

A young Egyptian field producer working at that time for L.A. Times introduced to me two well-groomed, middle-age Iraqi men. They had a large box full of videotapes they wanted to sell, promising dozens more if the price was right. The tapes, they claimed, had in them one-of-a-kind, exclusive footage never seen before, showing Saddam Hussein and his lieges in questionable activities and highly secret meetings. They both showed me badges given to them by the US military in Baghdad. The passes had, under their names and photographs, a brief inscription stating that they were “friendly individuals” to whom assistance was requested when needed.

One of the men maintained he had worked as a tea boy in one of Saddam’s palaces. He went into a passionate description of how he saw Saddam’s acolytes torturing a political foe, slowly cutting the man’s parts into small pieces, while Saddam sat on a rocking chair and smoke cigar. This was not a far-fetched account, given the horror stories of torment I had heard from a number of rescued Iraqi political prisoners.

But then, perhaps in an attempt to demonstrate his worth, my interlocutor moved closer to me, threw a look around to make sure nobody was eavesdropping, and said: “I have information nobody else has!” He paused to watch the reaction on my face. As I decided to go along and leaned forward to listen, he whispered: “I personally saw Usama bin Laden here in Baghdad. He was with a close aide to Saddam in one of the palace’s backrooms. It was a year or so before the attacks of September 11,” the man said. “I saw bin Laden and the aide looking at a slide of New York’s twin towers. The picture was visible to me because it was projected on a large screen,” he added. “I was bringing an ashtray into the room, when suddenly Saddam’s aide grabbed the ashtray ant hit me with it on the face. He had noticed that my eyes had veered towards the projection screen, and obviously he did not want me to see the picture.”

Off the cuff, this tale appeared to be worth millions of dollars, but like many other stories of similar caliber and scope, it turned out to be yet another fabrication, just as the videotapes which, having screened them myself later, turned out to be of no real worth.

Of the hundreds of accounts, as I recall, only a handful proved to be good leads which had later on materialized in news reports. I can only assume that, given the distrustful and cynical nature of the Iraqi people and their sense of humor, the US intelligence community in Iraq did not fare any better.

Eventually, it has become clear that most of the “informers” were actually double agents whose job was to mislead the US military-- and the journalists as well-- in order to drown the good leads in a sea of misleads. It was therefore not surprising to learn that, nearly five years since Bush declared it “mission accomplished” in Iraq, the US-led coalition forces, or what’s left of that coalition, have yet to receive the flowers they had anticipated from the Iraqi people.

Five years into the Iraq war and no traces of WMDs-- the main reason for which war was waged on Iraq—have been found. The US is yet to set democracy in motion, restore electric power and other vital services, and pump enough oil to generate the revenue the US needs to help reconstruct a country devastated by thirty years of sheer brutality compounded by ten years of debilitating sanctions.

Almost all the prewar scenarios which have been concocted inside the Pentagon wings proved to be wrong. And as the world has learned, the people who have cooked it all, mainly right-wing ideologues and neo-conservatives, were driven by sheer scorn for the others. And the others here include the people of the United Nations, Arabs and Muslims (including the Iraqis), and even people in the Bush Administration who do not see the world through their skewed prism.

Only time will tell if Bush’s hasty decision to go after Saddam has jeopardized the US task of fighting terrorism. The four-star General Wesley Clark wrote in his Winning Modern Wars: “we had re-energized Al Qaeda by attacking an Islamic state and presenting terrorists with ready access to vulnerable U.S. forces. It was the inevitable result of a flawed strategy."

By invading a country historically known for its non submissiveness to authority, be it home-grown or coming from outside, Bush unknowingly, perhaps even gullibly threw his forces into a real quagmire and, with half-a-billion dollar tag to pay each day on those forces, put an unnecessary burden on the already-strained federal budget.

Contrary to the US Government estimates that the Iraq war would end up costing $500 billion, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-Prize Economist, told the Guardian that he had calculated that Bush's Iraqi adventure will cost the US alone a conservatively estimated $3 trillion. Britain and the rest of the world will probably account for about a similar amount.

Going back to my experience with ‘eyewitnesses’ in Baghdad, a young man, in his mid-twenties, who introduced himself as Hassan, claimed that he was one of the Arab Mujahideen who had fought the notorious Saddam Airport battle. He was furious about the way the Iraqi military, as he put it, “f*ed up the whole thing.” He delivered a fiery description of how the Mujahideen were betrayed by the Iraqis in uniform.

The next day, he brought with him his fighting fatigues and took us on a tour to places where he had seen many of his companions die in battle. “The problem was that 95 percent of all the Mujahideen never received any military training in their life,” he said. “The Iraqis took me and my comrades first to a high-standing hotel in town. We stayed there for a month or so. We felt humiliated because we did not come here to stay in hotels and be served good food,” he said.

Hassan also told me how he yelled at one Iraqi officer who had ordered the Mujahideen to take positions alongside the road leading to the Airport, less than ten meters away from the same road which was going to be, a few hours later, roaring with US tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

“We had rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles,” he added, “and being that close to the road would have meant that if we hit any enemy vehicle, shrapnel from the explosion would kill us first.”

“When I complained to the Iraqi officer, he said to me: ’I thought you came here to die,’” Hassan said. “I was so furious that I thought about cutting his throat,” Hassan added.

Hassan was one of the very few credible witnesses I met in Baghdad. But the US military may have never had the chance to meet people like Hassan, except perhaps in gunfire battles across Iraq.

The third day, Hassan came one last time to see me. I met him at the barbwire fence ringing the hotel compound. He was unusually elated. He looked around and back at me. His eyes suddenly sparked and his face lit up. He nodded towards a passing US military convoy and said:”this is priceless, this is heaven, we never saw an American soldier this up close.”

Before he dashed away, I managed to ask the young man about his immediate plans. He answered with a nervous smile and droned: “I am going to Fellujah. I have a lot of work to do.” He then waved a hasty goodbye and, in the blink of an eye, drowned himself in the middle of the crowd.

From my conversation with Hassan, I concluded that he had no direct link to Al Qaida. He, like many others who entered Iraq prior to the US invasion, was rather a loose cannon whose willingness to fight and die was remotely induced by the sweltering rhetoric of bin Laden and his cohort. So when the US talks about dormant Al Qaida cells, I can’t help thinking that there are out there tens of thousands of individuals, like the young Hassan, whose dormant brain cells suddenly become activated by the searing outrage they feel when they see the dolorous daily television parade of Arabs and Muslims being massacred in Iraq and Palestine.

It would be a deadly mistake for the US to solely rely on military might to fight terrorism. Arab friends of the US believe diplomacy may still enable America to achieve what might won’t. But it’s hard to believe that, under this administration’s watch, the US will change its heads-on collision course with the entire Arab and Muslim culture.

Wesley Clark warns about this in his book: “It seemed that we were being taken into a strategy more likely to make us the enemy—encouraging what could look like a ‘clash of civilizations’—not a good strategy for winning the war on terror." This feeling is widely shared by people in the Muslim World and it will likely last as long as US foreign policy is dictated by special-interest groups and driven by the hawks at the Pentagon.

Perhaps as deadly for the US image, already highly tarnished by the occupation of Iraq, is the US giving the appearance that it is following the example of Israel in fighting terrorism. It is no coincidence that, since September 11, Israel has adopted a “hit-the-head-of-the-viper-first” strategy against Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. But the problem with this is that, whereas “the balance of power” had a meaning in 20th century, there can be no such thing as the “balance of terror,” which seems to be the main guiding policy of Israel since her go-it-alone, single-handed invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and her ill-fated war on Hezbollah guerillas in July 2006.

The Israelis seem to have had no problem convincing Bush that the US and Israel were in the same ditch fighting terrorism. Even the European friends of the Palestinians had dismissed the Palestinians’ concerns that Israel would ultimately drag the US into her own war against the Palestinian militant groups. It took little time before Europe came under heavy pressure from the Bush Administration to vote out Hamas as a legitimate political resistance movement.

An old-hand observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict put it this way: “After Bush had tabled his Roadmap hoping to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel turned the map around and drew her own Roadmap for Bush on how to wage war on terror.”

Given all the current elements in this dogged fight over postmortem eternity, Bush seems to have lost a lot of ground. Too many mistakes for a two-term president whose father lived in the White house for four years and who likes to boast that he was “born to win.”

In the heat of the September 11th disaster, just when the world expected to see real leadership and brinksmanship, George W. Bush caved in too quickly to the hawkish instincts of a few longtime dormant and marginalized cells in his entourage. In so doing, he nearly gave the kiss of death to an already weakened United Nations and wrecked the careers of many of his closest allies, chief among them former Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Bush also managed to compromise his own plans to fight terrorism, according to General Clark’s assessment. Clark wrote: “Barely six months into the war on terror, the direction seemed set. The United States would strike, using its military superiority; it would enlarge the problem, using the strikes on 9/11 to address the larger Middle East concerns. . . and it would dissipate the huge outpouring of goodwill and sympathy it had received in September 2001 by going it largely alone, without the support of a formal alliance or full support from the United Nations. And just as the Bush administration suggested, [the conflict] could last for years."

In comparison to Bush and bin Laden, Saddam Hussein seems to be the biggest loser of all. Under his regime, not only did he befall two devastating wars and years and years of punishing sanctions on his country, but he also failed miserably to demonstrate to the world that his country was free from weapons of mass destruction. Even when France, Germany, and Russia tried to help, and even when the UN inspectors came to his rescue under the watch of the highly skillful Hans Blix and IAEA’s Mohammad Al Baradei, Saddam kept exhibiting the look of someone who had something to hide. And Saddam did not need enemies to show the world videotapes where he could be seen walking and talking like a gangster ruling over a tough neighborhood.


In this, Saddam is not alone. Up until it was publicly announced that Iraq was WMD-free, Bush also had an easily discernible look on his face—the serene look of someone who was waiting for his turn to show those who had opposed the war just how gullible they were in their wrongheaded assumption that Saddam had no WMDs. Bush was poised to show the American people and the entire world how smart a move it was from him to go after Saddam. He never got the chance to do it.

Bush himself could do away with his square-headed assertions that his war on Iraq was part of a larger scheme to defeat terrorism; that it was late Yassir Arafat’s fault if the Roadmap did not even unfold; and that the US military intervention could bring democracy and freedom to the people of Iraq. If he only could take a hard look at these assumptions, he could still change the course of his own history, maybe for the better.

And for better or for worse, bin Laden may have reversed the course of world history for good. But the one sure thing he had failed to accomplish is change the fate of his own race. Bin Laden could have fared much better, had he, instead, decided to write a fiction novel. He could have titled it 9/11. He could have thusly spared millions of Muslims the atrocities of war. He could have gained much better fame and glory—even a place in history, among the best-selling horror novel writers of our time. He could have used cheap ink instead of priceless blood to pinpoint weaknesses in US intelligence, and maybe even open the American peoples’ eyes on their government’s foolhardy foreign policy.

By MAX DEMERSHED

Media Manipulated

If the need to know how media moguls influence journalists working for them ever arises, read Bruce Dover’s book “Rupert's Adventures in China” (Mainstream Publishing).

Dover’s account of Rupert Murdoch’s forays to conquer China offers a sobering insider view of how the boss of News Corp tried, but failed, to put China’s media market under his mantle, just as he did in Europe and the US with so much ease.

Bruce Dover* describes how Murdoch unsuccessfully labored to convince the Chinese Authorities that his bid to enter China’s media market had no hostile intent. It seems Murdoch went out of his way to prove to his interlocutors how he could use his magic wand to have his editorial staff toe the line, without having to issue edicts or anything of the sort that’s prevalent in China and many third-world countries. His is as simple a formula as throwing a piece of meet to a hungry dog ready to attack. Dover has coined a phrase for it: “anticipatory compliance.” He writes: “one didn’t need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one’s long-term interests.”

Bygone are the times when journalists used to sit around the editorial desk and discuss the dangers of “self censorship.”

*Dover was Murdoch’s point man in China in the 1990s