Oct 29th, 2008
08:33 Europe/Berlin

The Newshour: Taleb and Mandelbrot examine Future of Credit Crunch

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, famous economist and author of "The Black Swan" and Benoît Mandelbrot, best known as the father of fractal geometry, say that the present economy could turn out being the most serious event since the American Revolution and that they are having problems sleeping at night.
Oct 18th, 2008
18:25 Europe/Berlin

Bloomberg.com: Lahde quits Hedge funds, thanks "Idiots" for success

A perhaps already legendary, cynical good-bye letter by "the Hedge fund manager with a 1000% return", Andrew Lahde, who is now retiring with age 37.
Oct 14th, 2008
14:35 Europe/Berlin

Frost over the World: Zbigniew Brzezinski

In this edition of "Frost over the World" David Frost interviews the highly experienced and controversive foreign policy expert Zbigniew Brzezinski. Interesting.
Sep 30th, 2008
18:34 Europe/Berlin

OpenCongress: H.R.3997 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

The bailout-bill is not H.R.7xxx titled "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008" as one would have expected, instead it's H.R.3997 titled "An Act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide tax relief and protections for military personnel, and for other purposes. as amended by senate." (Yup, an amendment of an old and unrelated bill.). Why? Let "Kagro X" from dailykos.com do the explaining. "... they're going back to a trick we've seen them use before -- taking an old bill that has passed one House but not both, and hollowing it out and replacing that text with the new stuff. [...] which means it's still available as a legislative vehicle. [..] Because pretending that the bailout package is just a new amendment [...] means they can get expedited consideration on the House floor, plus be protected from a Republican motion to recommit, a procedural move that has plagued the Democrats throughout the 110th Congress."
11:44 Europe/Berlin

What happens after a U.S. Government Bailout?

ProPublica takes a historic look at the aftermaths of bailouts in the past. It shows that although government bailouts can at times proove to be good investments, among the three bailouts involving financial institutions, there is not one that the taxpayer profited from. I.e. the Savings & Loans Crisis cost the taxpayer $178.56 billion.
11:16 Europe/Berlin

The Financial Crisis ... Simplified

This is a humorous way of explaining the Subprime Crisis.
10:32 Europe/Berlin

NYTimes: Olmert says Israel should pull out of West Bank

Unusual words from a departing Israeli leader ...
Sep 28th, 2008
20:18 Europe/Berlin

Trouble in Banktopia: The financial system is blowing up

Mike Whitney writes: "The Federal Reserve itself is in danger. So, it's on to Plan B; which is to dump all the toxic sludge on the taxpayer before he realizes that the whole system is cratering and his life is about to change forever. It's called the Paulson Plan, a $700 billion boondoggle which has already been disparaged by every economist of merit in the country."
12:14 Europe/Berlin

How a Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite made Subprime Crisis inevitable

Investor's Business Daily's Terry Jones draws a short history of how the government got so deeply involved in the housing market. Outlining President Carter's signing of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977 and President Clinton's broading of the CRA during his National Homeownership Strategy. It should be noted that the the Democratic Party's policies, that were supposed to enable "little people" to homeownership by extensively rewriting Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's rules, were not only heavily supported by Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd and House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank, but also by the large majority of representatives from black communities, even after the Republican's demand for more regulation of the two FMs in 2004. Inspite of their previous disagreements, these policies were continued by President Bush because they dovetailed with his Ownership Society goals.
Sep 27th, 2008
20:37 Europe/Berlin

It's the derivatives, stupid! Why Fannie, Freddie and AIG all had to be bailed out

In this very comprehensive article by "Web of Debt" author Ellen Brown, she concludes: "We need to stop funding the culprits who brought us this debacle at our expense. We need a public banking system that makes a cost-effective credit mechanism available for homeowners, manufacturing, renewable energy, and infrastructure; and the first step to making it cost-effective is to strip out the swarms of gamblers, fraudsters and profiteers now gaming the system." But first she explains why Warren Buffett called derivatives "weapons of financial mass destruction".
Sep 18th, 2008
16:53 Europe/Berlin

The Guardian: Reform, not revenge

Thomas Palley writes about the "Liquidity Trap" and the moralistic dimensions involved in finding solutions for the current economic crisis. Wether it's financial conservatives (like Peter Schiff aka. "Dr. Doom"), calling for the defaulting of the market or "the leftists" urge to punish the Wall Street "fat cats", they all carry the risk of writing the debts down through "panicked deleveraging that pulls down good assets too" rather than doing so in an "orderly fashion". In his opinion "Recognition of the scale of financial folly has created a rush for liquidity [...] that cause more selling, damage confidence, and further squeeze credit. That is the paradox of deleveraging. One firm can, but the system as a whole cannot." He suggests "regulators should explore ways to relax capital standards and mark-to-market rules". But isn't confidence in them damaged even more so?
Sep 8th, 2008
19:06 Europe/Berlin

Wealth Creates Poverty - Terrorism, Globalization and Conspiracy

In October 2002, Michael Parenti held an inspiring speech in front of several hundred people in Vancouver. He says: “Globalization is an attempt to extend corporate monopoly control over the entire globe [...] over every national economy, over every local economy, over every life. It does this by treating international corporate property rights and international corporate investment rights as supreme. As taking precedence over all other rights including our democratic sovereignty [...] Globalization, really when you look at it, historically in a centuries old context is a future variant of imperialism.”
“We’re taught a few things about capitalism. We’re taught that it’s a system that works. It’s a system that has brought us prosperity [...] Almost the entire world is capitalist, and almost the entire world is poor [...] IPoverty [...] increase in crime, increase in desperation, increase in misery, increase in homelessness, increase in suicides [...] it’s capitalism at work.”
14:11 Europe/Berlin

International Endowment for Democracy - supporting democracy in the country that needs it most - the USA

The International Endowment for Democracy (I.E.D.) is a new foundation of progressive American scholars, lawyers and activists dedicated to promoting real democracy in the country that needs it most, the U.S.A. They provide a "Critical Democracy Library", a unique educational resource with 150 pieces contributed by people like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and many more.
13:11 Europe/Berlin

Alternative Views: Savings and Loans - Stolen and Looted Update

This is a second interview with Rob Widdowson, following the first on the Savings and Loan Crisis.
12:52 Europe/Berlin

Alternative Views: Savings and Loans - Stolen and Looted

Malcom X once said: "It's a crime, it's a crime what people don't know about their history. And we have not only to learn history, but I invite you to that other excitement, the excitement of unlearning history, unlearning the history that you learned." For almost 20 years the public affairs program "Alternative Views" was part of "that other excitement", broadcasting views not presented by the Establishment Media. With today's government seizing of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the ongoing Mortgage Crisis, it seem's appropriate to start off with a revealing interview with Rob Widdowson about the Savings and Loan Scandal and their perhaps most prominent protagonists, the so-called "Keating 5" (Senators Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, John McCain and Donald Riegle), Charles Keating himself and the current president's brother Neil Bush.
Sep 4th, 2008
15:40 Europe/Berlin

No End in Sight

This award-winning documentary by Charles H. Ferguson "is an [...] insider’s tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003" by insiders such as Jay Garner, Richard Armitage, Lawrence Wilkerson, Barbara Bodine, Walter Slocombe, Marc Garlasco, Gerald Burke, Ali Fadhil, Omar Fekeiki, Robert Hutchings, Paul Hughes, James Bamford, Samantha Power, Feisal al-Istrabadi, Joost R. Hiltermann, Barry R. Posen, Seth Moulton, David Yancey, Hugo Gonzalez, Chris Allbritton, James Fallows, Nir Rosen, Paul Eaton, Robert M. Perito, Amatzia Baram, Yaroslav Trofimov, Ray Salvatore Jennings, Linda Bilmes, Ann Gildroy, Jamal Benomar, Mahmoud Othman, Paul Pillar, Aida Ussayran, Matt Sherman and Ashton Carter.
14:37 Europe/Berlin

While the House Judiciary Committee waited, Rove was on his way to Yalta - and so were others ...

Effective he is, the Republican's key strategist Karl Rove. When he's dodging a congressional subpoena dealing with his involvement in the prosecution of former Governor Don Siegelman, you can be sure he's not just hiding in a closet or in a cave. More probably, he's just staying the course. Preparing for one of his usual $40,000 talks, from which the general conclusion will be that "US policy [...] shall not change substantially after November elections" but that a John McCain "knows this part of the world in a good way ..." and looking forward to spending quality time with good fellows like Richard Haass, Mikheil Saakashvili or Dominique Strauss-Kahn. For any one of us, I'm sure that would be more than enough to lay back for a while and enjoy life, but that just wouldn't be Karl, would it. So his story continues.
Sep 2nd, 2008
23:13 Europe/Berlin

Ritter and McGovern accuse McCain of lying

"John McCain is a political animal [...] he is not this Uber-President, this Uber-Patriot, this person who puts America first. This is all a show ..." - Scott Ritter about Senator McCain and his political motivation.
Paul Jay - Senior Editor of The Real News - interviews Scott Ritter - Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector from 1991 to 1998 and Ray McGovern - former senior CIA analysts, who prepared the President's Daily Brief (PDB) during the first Bush administration. Besides learning more about John McCain and his role in preparing the Invasion of Iraq, we also get some insight on his position towards the U.S.S. Liberty incident, which first hearings were overseen by McCain's father, Admiral John S. McCain, Jr. - at the time European Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Navy.
Sep 1st, 2008
12:14 Europe/Berlin

The Big Buy - Tom Delay's stolen Congress

In this documentary the filmmakers Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck, show how the efforts of Texas Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle led to indictments against the corporations Diversified Collection Services Inc, Questerra Corp, Westar Energy Inc, Sears Roebuck and Co, The Williams Companies Inc, Bacardi USA, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and The Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care Corp, the political action committees TRMPAC - Texans for a Republican Majority and its former executive director John Colyando as well as ARMPAC - Americans for a Republican Majority - and its executive director Jim Ellis and finally Tom Delay himself. But how close did Delay come to his self-stated goal to "completely redesign government"?
Aug 28th, 2008
12:38 Europe/Berlin

The Weather Underground

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, only make violent revolution inevitable." Martin Luther King Jr. quoting President John F. Kennedy.
"The Weather Underground" tells the story of how a small group of men and women, went from being members of the SDS - Students for a Democratic Society - calling for Peace in Vietnam, to becoming white, middle-class America's first mayor terrorist organization - Weatherman.
Aug 24th, 2008
13:54 Europe/Berlin

Conversations with History: Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman

In this edition of "Conversations with History", host Harry Kreisler talks to the liberal Anatol Lieven, Senior Researcher at the New America Foundation, and the conservative John Hulsman, Alfred von Oppenheimer Scholar at the German Council on Foreign Relations, who joined forces to write their progressive manifesto "Ethical Realism. A Vision for America's Role in the World".
Their philosophy promotes an almost quiet commitment to multilateral solutions, reviving the spirits of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and strongly opposing the Neocon's impatience with history and their doctrine of preventive war. Hulsman, formerly with the Heritage Foundation, was fired soon after the book project was announced.
Aug 22nd, 2008
21:44 Europe/Berlin

The Real News: Full spectrum dominance

Pepe Escobar sums up the events that led to the growing tension between the West and Russia.
14:24 Europe/Berlin

J. F. Kennedy's ("Secret Society") speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors

Kennedy's speech largely refers to publications previous to the disastrous "Bay of Pigs", i.e. the New York Times article by Tad Szulc titled "Anti-Castro Units trained to fight at Florida Bases", published on April 7, 1961, 9 days before the attack.
Aug 21st, 2008
20:17 Europe/Berlin

State sovereignty must be altered in globalized era

In this article published by the Taipei Times in February 21, 2006, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, writes about the neccessity of global governance in a world of sovereign states coexisting "with a larger number of powerful non-sovereign and [...] independent actors".
12:17 Europe/Berlin

Benazir Bhutto: 'Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama Bin Ladin'

Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto mentions, in a sidenote, the death of Osama Bin Ladin [06:10 - 06:15] during an interview with Sir David Frost from November 2, 2007, while talking about who she suspects to be behind the bombing of her convoy in Karachi.
09:03 Europe/Berlin

Informed Comment - Translation of Ahmadinejad's 'wipe Israel off the map' speech

In his article 'Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist
And, "We don't Want Your Stinking War!"', Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, precisely translates the speech of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which he held on October 26, 2005 to the "World Without Zionism" conference: 'The Imam [Ayatollah Khomeni] said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time.'
08:45 Europe/Berlin

The Way of the World Transcripts - Discussing the Habbush Letter

A partial transcript of one of a number of taped conversations in which Robert Richer, the CIA's former deputy director of clandestine operations, and "The Way of the World" author Ron Suskind discuss the "Habbush letter" in the spring of 2008.
08:39 Europe/Berlin

The Daily Telegraph - Does this link Saddam to 9/11?

Con Coughlin's report about a secret intelligence memorandum dated July 1, 2001, later to be known as the "Habbush Letter" , which summarized an operational relationship between Mohamed Atta and the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The letter was signed by General Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, chief of IIS, and directed to the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. The letter has been widely considered a fabrication since it was first made public in December 2003.
00:46 Europe/Berlin

The Downing Street Memo(s)

Transcript of "The Downing Street Memo", also referred to as the "Smoking Gun Memo", which was a major story in the British press during the last few days of the 2005 general election campaign. The original document was the first hard evidence from within the UK or US governments that exposed the truth about how the Iraq war began.
Aug 20th, 2008
23:21 Europe/Berlin

The Yes Men

"Correcting identities to make them better, with biting satire, at conferences, on television, on the street, for Dow Chemical, for George W. Bush, for the WTO"
This is how The Yes Men themselves describe their mission. Witness them at work "for" the World Trade Organization and see how inspite of their presented absurdities, the underlying satire stays undetected.
19:42 Europe/Berlin

Mises Media Library

All conferences on such diverse topics as welfare, bureaucracy, war, and monetary reform, as well as weekly seminars, are available online. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is the research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics.
19:41 Europe/Berlin

Interlocking Directorates of Media Corporations

Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations, including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care and pharmaceutical companies and technology companies. This list shows board interlocks for the following major media interests: ABC/Disney | NBC/GE | CBS/Viacom | CNN/TimeWarner | Fox/News Corp. | New York Times Co. Washington Post/Newsweek | Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones | Tribune Co. | Gannett | Knight-Ridder
19:41 Europe/Berlin

Argentina's Economic Collapse

A documentary on how Carlos Menem through his selling of public assets to private corporations caused the economic collapse of Argentina in 2001, which wiped out the middle class and raised the level of poverty to 57.5%.
19:40 Europe/Berlin

The Take (2004)

Canadian journalists and activists Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein visit Argentina after their economic collapse, to report about the people's answer to "Old-School" economics and politics.
19:39 Europe/Berlin

Life and Debt - Globalization and Jamaica

In this documentary Stephanie Black tells the story of how the policies of the IMF, the WTO and the subsidizing of foreign produce have impoverished Jamaica.
19:38 Europe/Berlin

Why is the US government still pouring billions into missile defence?

After revealing its uselessness, George Monbiot (The Guardian) concludes, that "If we seek to understand US foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. [...] The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be."
19:37 Europe/Berlin

The Real News Network

The Real News Network is a member supported television news and documentary network focused on providing independent and uncompromising journalism. The Real News Network does not accept advertising, government or corporate funding.
19:36 Europe/Berlin

OpenSecrets - Net Worth

Personal finances of US Lawmakers.