Before Kevin arrived Rupert had just been telling the camera “…some people may not like the bailout but it had to happen”. The “bailout” is the $700 billion W Bush proposal to…to… well the details are still being worked out but we can trust the W Bush regime to do something good. “It had to happen” because the financial ‘powers that be’ in the Empire State (NY’s logo) have decided they can’t trust either Obama or McCain and they want to control the next president’s agenda. Nothing happens for only one reason. They also want any money they can get and to make sure that any solution to the credit crisis (they’ve created) takes care of the upper class, executives and shareholders, before anyone else.

Murdoch’s good at presenting his desires as fait accomplits that are a single inevitable package but the devil is in the details. Obama has defined 4 key points that need to be in any rescue package – one point being support for the small homeowners with mortgages who are caught up in this crisis. McCain doesn’t list that as one of his criteria nor, surprisingly, do the bankers. Rupert, the head of the News-Fox empire, is pretty smart so if he was asked on camera he’d include the little people “if we can”.  . . read more

We must be thankful for this sign that American democracy is not completely dead and supplanted by executive branch authority. However, whatever bailout package that emerges will fail unless it takes into account the following.

Any package that maintains the mark-to-market rule and permits the resumption of short-selling will undermine itself. In panic conditions without the existence of a market, the mark-to-market rule results in asset prices being driven below their values, thus eroding balance sheets and producing insolvencies. Short-selling permits short-sellers to profit by destroying the share prices of institutions suffering balance sheet problems, thus eliminating their ability to borrow and driving them into failure. A bailout, however large, that maintains the mark-to-market rule and permits short-selling will pour money into a black hole. [More] . . read more

The great, soon to be late, Gore Vidal said there was a moment at which the American century ended. Vidal said that when the US of A became the planet's greatest debtor client - I forget the number of trillions - the game was up. He appeared to take satisfaction from that.

I do not. A stock market "correction" implies a recession, over two quarters, from which comes a slump, from which comes a depression, from which comes mass unemployment, and lost homes, and blighted lives, and endemic misery. We left-wing extremists do not, in fact, take much pleasure in being right about capitalism. [More] . . read more

The good news is that, if the U.S. economy collapses, the Pashtun farmer in northeastern Pakistan, the Iraqi shopkeeper in Fallujah, the Iranian worker in Tehran, and the peasant in Venezuela, will no longer have to worry about being bombed or having their children mowed down by a U.S. helicopter gunship. The U.S. would no longer have the funds to pay for such foreign wars. And because a collapse of the U.S. consumer economy would also drag the rest of the world into a prolonged global slump, perhaps reminiscent of the 1930s, we might actually see a significant enough drop in carbon emissions from idled cars, factories and power plants that the global warming catastrophe that is threatening us all will be significantly delayed, giving humanity time to come up with a serious long-term response. [More] . . read more

In America, the bastion of free enterprise, the right wing U.S. government is paying $85 billion for 80% of the voting stock to keep the American Insurance Group operating. If AIG goes broke (as purists advocate) then (because re-insurance is global) a vast amount of mortgage insurance, business lending insurance and insurance covering risk in operations will collapse. No lender lends loan on a house that can’t be insured. Individuals & businesses risk bankruptcy with one uninsured accident. This ‘crisis’ is being manipulated but the U.S. has very little choice largely because its financial ‘powers that be’ brought this crisis on now while they have a president who is certain to do what they want. Why wait? They’re in control and they’ll never get a better puppet.  . . read more