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[T]he fiscal policy actions pursued thus far by the Bush administration, but even more so the policy proposals leaked by Obama’s proto-administration are afflicted by the Keynesian fallacy on steroids. They appear to exist outside time, with neither the long-run consequences of the actions like to be implemented over the next couple of years, nor the history that brought the US to its current predicament, the initial conditions, being given any serious attention. ...Willem Buiter's word is not to be taken lightly.
The past eight years of imperial overstretch, hubris and domestic and international abuse of power on the part of the Bush administration has left the US materially weakened financially, economically, politically and morally. Even the most hard-nosed, Guantanamo-bay-indifferent potential foreign investor in the US must recognise that its financial system has collapsed. ...
There is no chance that a nation as reputationally scarred and maimed as the US is today could extract any true “alpha” from foreign investors for the next 25 years or so. So the US will have to start to pay a normal market price for the net resources it borrows from abroad. It will therefore have to start to generate primary surpluses, on average, for the indefinite future. ...
There will, before long (my best guess is between two and five years from now) be a global dumping of US dollar assets, including US government assets. Old habits die hard. The US dollar and US Treasury bills and bonds are still viewed as a safe haven by many. But learning takes place.
Willem Buiter | Can the US economy afford a Keynesian stimulus?
The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.I wonder how long it'll take before the average economist and my bank manager wake up to reality. Here in South Africa we're so insular we appear incapable of seeing — let alone reading — the writing on the wall.
Paul Krugman | Fighting Off Depression
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But that's by the by. I've yet to be seduced by Mammon and am pissed off by events far more meaningful than empty bank vaults and dance marathons. The genocide in Gaza is iconic. It displays, before the media and the world, on a stage 20 miles by four, man's inhumanity to man.
Jack Cluth, bless his crazed soul, decided to dip his social network into a hellbroth of white phosphorous and dismembered babies with Truth is ultimately in the eyes of those defining it. Happily, commenting on Facebook put me in Margaret and Audrey's company and open to Professor Avi Shlaim's pithy message in How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed. ...Read the rest. I could not, as they say, put it better myself. Nor could Sandra Sue. On discovering Jack's site to be an anti-Semitic Islamofascist terrorist cell, she opined, "And, Isreal (sic) is populated by African pygmies!" She gets a gold star for effort and a year's subscription to The Watchtower for defining her particular little truth.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism — the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination.
Guardian | How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
The National Security Cabinet voted Wednesday in favor of continuing the IDF's military operation in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Jerusalem made it clear that Israel has not yet accepted the Egyptian-French ceasefire imitative.You didn't swallow this swill — the BBC and Voice of America, did you?
The cabinet's decision implies that Israel believes that the objectives outlined for the Gaza operation have not yet been achieved. Therefore, in the coming days the IDF is expected to continue its ground offensive with the assistance of the Air Force and Navy. Israel's Gaza operation aims to deter Hamas from firing rockets on the country's south in the future.
ynetnews | Cabinet: Gaza op to continue
For updates from the real world and Gaza in particular, read The Voice of Palestine and watch al-Jazeera or, alternatively, Iran's PressTV.
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
Robert Fisk | Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask
