Today's Stories

October 3 - 5, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

Weekend Edition
October 3 - 5, 2008

"What is the Message?"

Massacre in Morelia

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

"I never saw something like this before, Ross" marveled Samuel Soriano (not his real name), an angular, graying, hardboiled Mexico City undercover detective whom his associates know as "the Major."  "Who did this? What's the message, Ross?" he asks, tapping his long fingers against the gristly photo of bodies blown apart in the handsome colonial plaza of Morelia, the capital of west-central Michoacan state, that was plastered across the front page of my Mexico City News. 

I wondered what so aroused the Major's disbelief - pictures like this appear every day on the front pages of a dozen Mexico City dailies. But the detective had a point: Morelia was different. 

The bombing had come at Mexico's maximum moment of patriotic pride on the eve of Independence Day September 15 while the governor of the state, Lionel Godoy, sounded the final cry of "Viva Mexico!" and began tolling the traditional bell.  Eight celebrants had been killed in the blast and another 132 hospitalized. Several remain in grave condition.  The Morelia bombing was the most devastating terrorist bombing in recent Mexican history.

What, indeed, is the message? Who did this?

Eyewitnesses described a robust, balding, moonfaced man who in composite portraits bears a startling resemblance to both Governor Godoy (he has an alibi) and the state police chief.  "Pardon me, but this is necessary," the neatly dressed gentleman in black apologized politely to those wedged next to him in the packed plaza as he pulled a fragmentation grenade from his pocket and casually tossed it into the holiday crowd just as Godoy finished his third "Grito".  The ringing of the bells partially muffled the explosion and the man in black lost himself in the confusion.  A second fragmentation grenade was exploded five blocks away.

"Who did this Ross? What is the message?" Samuel Soriano insisted.  Where was the Major going with this line of questioning? We were sipping our cafés con leches at the counter of the La Blanca, a downtown landmark, as Samuel often does when he comes off shift.  I'm used to these interrogations by now.  I also suspect that the Major knows just what the message is.

The September 15 bombing in Morelia took place just blocks away from where President Felipe Calderon grew up in the quaint old quarter of the city - his mother still lives in the house.  But let's not jump to conclusions just yet.  The bomb also exploded just meters away from a governor who is a leader of one faction in the severely fractured left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the mortal foe of Calderon's right-wing PAN party.  Former PRD presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) makes a convincing argument that Calderon and the PAN stole the 2006 election from him

At least six people in several batches have been detained for the bombing.  Three young men were arrested the same night as the attack, tortured (according to their families) and held for investigation.  Three other accused "narco-terrorists" were put on display on national television and recited "confessions" that smelled like they were scripted.

"They're 'artistas'," scoffs Samuel, "actors."

"You're not thinking it might be the PRD or even the EPR?" I prompt - the Popular Revolutionary Army is Mexico's most active armed guerrilla and while it is prone to bomb property as it did thrice in 2007 taking out PEMEX pipelines, the EPR has never attacked unarmed civilians.  Indeed, armed guerrilla formations in Mexico have never been implicated in such classic acts of terrorism.

"No, it's not the EPR and least of all the PRD," the Major solemnly responds.

Felipe Calderon was engaged in his own "Grito" in the Mexico City Zocalo when the bombs went off in Morelia.  Informed of the terrorist attack, the President stood up a crowd of margarita-swilling bigwigs to huddle with his security cabinet deep in the bowels of the National Palace.  22 days previous here in this same palace, the seat of the Mexican government, Calderon had convoked a top-level emergency meeting of the nation's business and political elite alarmed at the rising levels of violence throughout the country, to sign a National Security Pact.  The president pledged to intensify his war on organized crime.

The junta followed the kidnap-slaying of the young son of a Mexico City tycoon and Calderon backer.  In fact, Calderon's reinvigorated crusade against "organized crime" borrowed its slogan from the grieving tycoon's challenge "si no puedes, renuncies!" or "if you can't deal with crime, just quit! "

Now, 22 days after the National Security Pact was signed, 438 more Mexicans had died in crime related killings and people were in the street demanding that Calderon resign.

Since December 2006 just days after his swearing in when the dubiously elected President declared war on "organized crime" (he never identifies the drug cartels as the enemy) and sent 30,000 troops into the field to confront the narcos, nearly 6000 Mexicans have died, including nearly a thousand soldiers and police officers in a cruel and relentless battle over turf ("la plaza") and right of way for rival gangs to pass their loads through it ("el piso.")

Indeed, both Calderon and his Secretary of Public Security Genaro Garcia Luna sought to pin the Morelia bombing on the internecine squabble between the cartels. 

Rather than ruing the appalling toll the drug war has taken, Calderon and Garcia Luna tout their offensive as an unqualified success - their convoluted reasoning being that the drug gangs are slaughtering each other at a record clip because of the pressures the administration is bringing to bear on their markets, a line viewed as dangerously delusional by the president's many detractors.

Nonetheless, Calderon remains unflinchingly upbeat as he inspects the troops from his customized Hummer or oversees the traditional September 16 military parade this year featuring overflights by Blackhawk helicopters, an advance installment on Merida Initiative drug war hardware.  Having once donned an oversized army field jacket to address the troops, Calderon is the prized butt of Mexico's political cartoonists who often draw him as a squashed-down dwarf, sometimes drowning in a sea of blood.

The weeks preceding the massacre in Morelia were horrific ones.  13 Raramuri Indians were butchered at a family fiesta in the sierra of Chihuahua.  12 decapitated corpses were found stacked on the side of an access road near the highway to the luxury resort of Cancun. On September 13th, the cadavers of 24 young men, each shot with the same pistol, were discovered at a wooded site just a hundred meters outside the Mexico City limits. Who did these things?  What is their message?

Michoacan was the first state to which Calderon dispatched the Army in January 2007.  Until recently, the state has been a leading marijuana grower but the quality of the herb is poor and Michoacan is far from the northern border.  Still the entity is a leader in out-migration with century-long ties to U.S. Mexican communities.

Since the Colombian cartels went to sea, the big prize in Michoacan has been control of the west coast industrial port of Lazaro Cardenas where container traffic is relatively under-policed.  In addition to cocaine, meth labs dot the state's bare, sun-baked hot land hills - the bulk of Michoacan-derived cocaine and speed invariably works its way up to El Norte.

Of late, the two heaviest homegrown drug gangs, "La Familia" and a branch of "Los Zetas", have been hyper-actively whacking each other all over the state.  The Zetas, founded by ex-Mexican soldiers trained as drug fighters at the Center for Special Forces in Fort Bragg North Carolina, are connected to the Gulf Cartel and have elevated brutal beheadings into an indigenous art form.  La Familia is no slouch at decapitation either, having tossed five still-warm heads onto an Uruapan Michoacan dance floor just a few days before for July 2006 presidential elections. 

Using e-mails and text messages, La Familia proclaims its innocence and blames the Morelia massacre on the rival Zetas.  In so-called "narco-mantas", hand-painted banners often draped from pedestrian bridges in provincial cities on which the drug gangs have taken to expressing their grievances, La Familia boasts that it seeks peace and "defends the weakest" - the Family's banners are emblazoned with a crudely painted dove. The gang also announces that it is conducting a parallel investigation of the Morelia massacre.

In a stab to regain the high ground, President Calderon has been pounding home the necessity for national unity ("pardon me but this is necessary?")  "The Patria needs unity.  We must put aside our ideologies and our beliefs (sic) to unite against those who would sow fear to further their miserable interests," Calderon thundered to the party faithful at the recent 59th anniversary of the PAN, implying that those who do not unite with his government are traitors to the fatherland. 

The remarks are of course aimed at his nemesis Lopez Obrador with whom he is engaged in a fierce battle over the president's plan to privatize PEMEX, the national petroleum consortium, which will soon be voted up or down in congress.  Some Calderon backers even insinuate that AMLO is the dark hand behind the bombings.        

Lopez Obrador's people bristle at the allegations and condemn Calderon for exploiting the tragedy to push his own political agenda.  Julio Hernandez, the left-wing La Jornada's chief political columnist, compares Calderon's tact to that of "another weak president elected by fraud who sought to utilize the 9-11 terrorist attacks to strengthen his hold on power." 

"What happened in Morelia?" Samuel answers his own rhetorical question patting the bloody photo on the front page of the News, "was not a confrontation between La Familia and those other 'changos' (monkeys.)  Those gorillas kill each other but not innocent families celebrating the Grito. 

"It doesn't make any sense for Calderon to say it's between this cartel or the other.  This is something different, Ross.  This raises the "entrada" (ante).  You call this terrorism, my good Ross.  You terrorize the people into thinking only you can protect them.  A lot of the cuates (buddies) who I'm talking to say it's the government that did this."  

John Ross is wrestling with "El Monstruo" in the maw of Mexico City.  These dispatches will continue at 10-day intervals until the draft is done.  If you have further information visit www.johnross-rebeljournalist.com or johnross@igc.org

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