By Stephen Lendman It’s not the first time and won’t be the last. On December 27, AP reported that: “Israeli aircraft struck Hamas security compounds across Gaza on Saturday in unprecedented waves of simultaneous attacks, and Hamas and medics reported dozens of people were killed.” Haaretz headlined: “Israel launched (Operation Case Lead) Saturday morning (at [...]

By Michael Hudson Last week the Good Lord evidently realized that not enough people had been reading Hyman Minsky’s explanation of how financial cycles end in Ponzi schemes – the stage in which banks keep the boom going by lending their customers the money to pay interest and thus avoid default. So He sent Bernie [...]

By James Petras “We never thought he would do this to us, he was one of our people”, member of Palm Beach Country Club. December 22, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse” — Wall Street broker Bernard (‘Bernie’) Madoff, former president of NASDAQ, revered and respected investor confessed to pulling off the biggest fraud in history, a $50 [...]

From Global Trade Watch Kids across America face dangerous threats this holiday season from unsafe imported toys. Our trade agreements have flooded the country with toys made in countries with incredibly lax safety standards, while at the same imposing limits on the safety standards and inspections we can impose on imports. China has repeatedly threatened [...]

By Gary Olson December 20, 2008 “Commondreams” December 18, 2008 — In a recent New Yorker piece, Naomi Klein astutely observes that “The crash on Wall Street should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian Communism, an indictment of an ideology.” One hopes so. The financial system’s collapse in [...]

By F. William Engdahl The Federal Reserve has bluntly refused a request by a major US financial news service to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from US taxpayers and to reveal the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. Their lawyers resorted to the bizarre argument that they [...]

By Shamus Cooke Unless things change fast, human history will show that the phenomenon of “retirement” was limited to one generation.;After World War II, when European and Japanese economies stood in tatters, American capitalism could fulfill “the American dream,” since there was little foreign competition to speak of.  For the first time ever, workers were [...]

Obama’s Gamble – The Ultimate And Final Bet By Obama’s Financial Handlers By Matthias Chang A few weeks ago, I warned in my website that the Dow would dive below 7,000 at the earliest by end of December 2008 and at the latest by the end of the first quarter 2009. Any responsible central banker  [...]

The disastrous Bush years have left a legacy of war and financial collapse. They have also brought North America to a political impasse, bemoans Eric Walberg The really extraordinary political event in North American politics as 2008 came to a close was not the albeit remarkable election of the first US black president, but the [...]

A separation of truth and myth about our monetary system By Jon Ronnquist December 13, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse” — The problem with money is essentially a question of faith. Money is a promise represented in paper, metal and digits and is as valuable as it is trustworthy. And because trust is a volatile and abstract [...]