Monthly Archives: October 2008

U.S. Getting Real on Hamas?

Hamas leader claims indirect contact from Washington. About time, too! Continue reading

Posted in 99c Blogging | 12 Comments

Iraq: Why the End is in Sight

The war in Iraq is drawing to a close — and hardly on the terms of those who initiated it. It’s end is being hastened by Iraqi democracy, and by the retrenchment of U.S. power globally, accelerated by the sharp economic downturn Continue reading

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | Tagged , , , , , , | 22 Comments

Embedded with the Jihadis

My crazy friend Nir Rosen goes on embed with the Taliban, and finds out just why the U.S. can’t win in Afghanistan Continue reading

Posted in Shameless Cronyism | 15 Comments

Why Joe Strummer Was a Socialist

Hint: It had nothing to do with bailing out banks Continue reading

Posted in Rebellion Into Money | 12 Comments

The Liverpool-Iraq Connection

Both Liverpool FC and Iraq were acquired with borrowed money Continue reading

Posted in Glancing Headers | 22 Comments

Never Mind the Dow, Here’s the Economy!


Restoring confidence in the credit system may prevent a cataclysmic meltdown in the U.S. economy, but it won’t fix the long-term decline based on fundamental ailments that the bubble-driven stock market and real estate booms of the past decade have simply deferred. Instead of manically watching the Dow yo-yo from day to day, we should simply recognize that it has been vastly overvalued for some time. Until such time as America’s economy (the real economy, not the fetish market of financial services) has been restored to some semblance of health — a generational project, unfortunately, given the devastation wrought by a generation of Reaganomics and, it must be said, by its “New Democrat” imitators — any dramatic recovery in the Dow will be brittle, based on false confidence or some new “bubble.”

…fixing America’s economy will require not only jettisoning the Reagan dogma of deregulation, shrinking government, and tax cuts as the cornucopia of economic growth, but also the Clinton legacy that turned the Democratic Party into as much of a friend to Wall Street as the Republicans had traditionally been. Wall Street is not the economy, and the last two decades have shown that the stock market can be hale and hearty even when the economy is being steadily denuded. It’s on fixing the real economy that voters should be forcing politicians to focus.
Continue reading

Posted in Situation Report | 26 Comments

Israel Gets Real on Iran


Trita Parsi: In public, Israeli leaders have spoken in apocalyptic terms of Iran’s nuclear program, but among themselves, they know better. Continue reading

Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report | Tagged , , | 59 Comments

What the Palestinians Can Learn from Mandela


John Carlin’s extraordinary new book reveals how Mandela’s genius lay not in forgiving his enemies but in disarming and outmaneuvering them, while never compromising on his demand for justice Continue reading

Posted in Situation Report, The Whole World's Africa | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments