Death knell for Capitalism Sounds Wild. Nevertheless, Asian Geopolitics Colonised Once Again. Overseas Uranium Hunt Intensify to Match Indian Nuclear

Death knell for Capitalism Sounds Wild. Nevertheless, Asian Geopolitics Colonised Once Again. Overseas Uranium Hunt Intensify to Match Indian Nuclear Ambitions as Market Tank with Sensex at Two-Year Low

Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 80

Palash Biswas
Wall Street tumbles; Dow falls below 10000
6 Oct, 2008, 2119 hrs IST, AGENCIES



Dow Jones industrials skidded nearly 500 points and fell below 10,000 for the first time in four years. In pics: US turmoil | Gainers | Losers | What caused the crisis?


Gold rallies as stock markets slide
Rupee at 5.5 year low as shares slide
RBI cuts CRR by 50 bps to 8.5%, effective October 11
Post Tata's exit, will the Singur land be returned?
6 Oct, 2008, 2124 hrs IST, PTI



Bengal minister Nirupam Sen said there was no legal provision under which the state govt could retun Singur land to farmers.Disputed projects | Your say



Tata executives inspect site in Medak district in AP for Nano
Indian American likely to oversee US bailout package
6 Oct, 2008, 2133 hrs IST, IANS



Neel Kashkari, an Indian American, is expected to oversee the $700-bn bailout package of the US Treasury Department. Top US bank failures



Citi, Wells Fargo shares fall on Wachovia dispute

All headlines



http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/



Wall Street Journal Singur issue an isolated case: LN Mittal
Economic Times, India - 9 Sep 2008
Arcelor Mittal's Laxmi Mittal, who has substantial investments in West Bengal, has not lost hope even after Tata Motors is facing a nightmare trying to keep ...
Singur issue an isolated case: LN Mittal India Today
Singur Fails To Dampen Mittal TopNews
Mittal holds Arcelor assembly in Delhi Times of India
all 98 news articles » AMS:MT - BOM:500570 - NSE:E:TATAMOTORS.EQ



The Collapse of Capitalism as We Know It
The Collapse of Capitalism as We Know It. by Youssef M. Ibrahim. Do you know where your money is? If you have placed your investments with Parmalat, ...
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THE THEORY OF THE COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISM
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The collapse of capitalism - UPI.com
2 Oct 2008 ... It is almost impossible for those of us living in our beloved United Socialist States of America in this happy age to grasp the bizarre fact ...
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The theory of the collapse of capitalism by Anton Pannekoek
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JSTOR: The Collapse of Capitalism.
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News results for Capitalism
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Capitalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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What has they done with Asian culture and identity trying Capitalism! Money making machine is now defined as State Power. Mind control and Brainwashing strategy to hold power have degenerated the entire Generation Next, which has no future as it is deprived of Higher Education, Homely culture, Research and Job Opportunities and love, as society has no spare time for love and affection. Americanised society believes in only Money making and consumption at any cost. On the one hand the enslaved Indigenous communities are being ejected out of nature, livelihood, land and life. On the other hand, the youths within the ruling class are poisoned with drugs and drinks, sexual anarchy!

Capitalism has no Future in the West!

But capitalism has broken into the most ancient glorious Civilisations of Asia!

Mumbai Police on early Monday raided a rave party at a pub in Juhu area and detained 240 young men and women after seizing a large quantity of drugs.

According to a police official, the raid at Mumbai 72 Degree East, yielded over 100 tablets of ecstasy drugs and other narcotics like heroine, LSD and cocaine.

The official said that a filmmaker is one of the co-owners of the pub.

Among the detained include son of a Bollywood actor, 40 young women and a couple of foreign nationals.

Eight drug dealers who were present on the premises have been arrested.


Death Knell for capitalism sounds wild! Tagged with US Zionist war economy, Global finance rashes and the much hyped bailout failed with large scale job crunch in unipolar superpower United states of America. Starvation amongst the whites and the white Terrorism are the latest news breaks. Nevertheless, Ruling Harmonies across political borders have turned the Asian geopolitics s colonised once again. With Indo US Nuke Deal done Nuclear race in south Asia takes momentum. India inc`s greed and risks creates large scale graves within. Terror strikes are common today as War against terror finds the softest targets in South Asia. Obama as well as Mc Cain do seem to try their best to defend the crashing Capitalism worldwide and the ruling Comradors all over the third world including south asia and specially India, oblige!

US Zionist Weapon industry is injected Cromine with Indo US Nuke Deal. New shopping list of Nuclear armament and conventional arms ready with kickbacks imminent. Overseas Uranium Hunt intensify to match the Indian nuclear ambition as Sensex shot down to Two years low!

Laxmi Mittal leads the Global Billionaires in the current melt Down. He lost more than sixteen billion pounds! But Mittal remains religious enough to appease Brahminical Indian ruling Hegemony and he pumps Money to celebrate durga Puja in London. Kolkata based Ramesh Pal and Prashant Pal made the Idol of the Goddess of Indigenous Black Untouchables` annihilation for London Candan centre and mittal pays!

In Mumbai, it is another Billionaire, our own Mukesh ambani who pays for the Bengali association Puja in Vassee!

Durga Puja Festival with retail boom and indiscriminate land aquissition, blind industrialisation and anarchist urbanisation have created new dimensions.

A friend commented, ` they turned Durga into a Priyanka Chopra!’

`No, the girl looks domestic and gentle! The Effluent soft porn hard porn culture has created a religious version of Play Boy and Penthouse central spread!’i commented!

Singur Insurrection leader Ms Mamata Bannerjee is being Demonised as she Triggered out the Tata Motors! Brand Buddha has lost a battle but he assures his comrades that he has not lost the war as yet!

In Assam, Communal Flare Up highlights the internal crisis unaddressed in the geopolitics of the Hindu superpower. Attacks on Minorities continue in Karnatak and Orissa!With ethnic violence spreading to new areas in Assam, the Centre on Monday dispatched 1400 paramilitary personnel to the strife-torn state where bloody clashes between Bodo tribes and immigrant Muslims claimed at least 42 lives.


Mumbai Police claimed to have made a major breakthrough in the blast terror e-mail case. Highly placed sources in the Mumbai Police claimed that they have taken into custody the elusive hacker behind the Indian Mujahideen terror emails!

Meanwhile, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zaradri has backtracked on his comments describing militants operating in India as 'terrorists'!A suicide bomber killed 15 people and wounded a Pakistani opposition politician on Monday in the latest attack to underscore the threat posed by Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants.


Along with some of Wall Street's most storied firms, a certain vision of capitalism has collapsed. How we restore faith in our brand.-- Asian stocks fell for a third day, led by financial companies, after the global credit crisis deepened in Europe
and the U.S. lost the most jobs in five years.The Reserve Bank of India, or RBI, has cut the cash reserve ratio, or CRR, by 50 bps to 8.5% with effect October 11. The cut will infuse Rs 20000 crore into the system.The Securities and Exchange Board of India on Monday did a U-turn by doing away with the restrictions on issue of participatory notes by foreign institutional investors against securities, including derivatives, as underlying.It was a long trip down south for benchmark indices Sensex and Nifty today as the bears thronged the ring at the opening bell and remained busy trampling down stocks cutting across sectors right till the end of the session.

Chitra Somayaji reports for Bloomberg: Nomura Holdings Inc., Japan's biggest securities firm, agreed to buy the back-office operations of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in Mumbai.

The purchase will add 3,000 employees, including 1,200 people who provide computer services, Nomura said in a statement today. The unit, based in the Powai area of Mumbai, provides risk management and analytical services for investment banking, capital markets and research.

Nomura is buying the Asian, Middle Eastern and European operations of Lehman, which filed for bankruptcy last month.

To contact the reporters on this story: Chitra Somayaji in Mumbai at csomayaji@bloomberg.net



WITH just a month to go until election day, Barack Obama has accused John McCain of launching "Swift boat-style attacks" on him instead of addressing the country's problems. Whereas, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin expanded her attack on Democrat Barack Obama's character Monday to include his relationship with an incendiary former pastor as well as his ties to 1960s-era radical Bill Ayers!


U.S. President George W. Bush signed the rescue package into law to
stem the crisis, which has claimed financial companies including Bear
Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The legislation enables
the government to purchase non-performing assets from institutions and
suspend an accounting rule requiring businesses to report losses if
asset values fall.

U.S. payrolls dropped 159,000 last month, the most in five years, the
Labor Department said on Oct. 3. The world's largest economy has lost
760,000 jobs this year, compared with the 1.1 million created last
year.

Crude oil fell for a fourth day in New York, dropping as much as 2.4
percent to $91.60 a barrel, on signs slowing global economic growth
will reduce demand. Oil was recently trading at $91.76.

Stocks tumbled in Europe and Asia and U.S. index futures dropped,while Treasuries advanced.

Emerging market stocks headed for their biggest one-day decline since 1997 as the global banking crisis escalated with European bailouts of Hypo Real Estate Holding AG and Fortis.

The exodus of foreign funds sent the country's stock market crashing down by 725 points, even as the global financial crisis continued to eat away confidence in the markets.The 30-share stocks barometer Sensex, which had lost 529.35 points in the previous session, plunged by another 724.62, or 5.78 per cent to close at a two-year low of 11,801.70. Funds indulged in all-round selling in heavy-weight stocks of consumer durables, metals, capital goods and realty sectors. Sensex touched the day's low of 11,732.97 and a high of 12,284.49 points.

The wide-based National Stock Exchange index Nifty dropped by 215.95 points, or 5.66 per cent at 3,602.35 after dipping to a low of 3,581.60 during the session.



Sorted by relevance Sort by date Sort by date with duplicates included


BBC News Editorial:Lessons for West Bengal
Business Standard, India - 21 hours ago
West Bengal has lost Tata Motors’ Nano car project, and a factory that would have rolled out perhaps half a million cars a year once fully established. ...
Tata’s Telcon project going strong in West Bengal Thaindian.com
Tatas dump West Bengal, seek alternate site for Nano car project Antara
Tata Nano exit shows power of state politics in India Reuters
Hindustan Times - The Statesman
all 917 news articles » BOM:500570

TopNews Durga Puja pandal in Kolkata replicates Nano factory
NDTV.com, India - 11 hours ago
It's festival time once again in West Bengal. But the Durga Puja this time is being held under a looming cloud over the exit of the Nano from Singur. ...
US warns tourists of ‘unsafe’ days of durga puja Indian Express
‘Pandal-hopping’ gathers momentum on Day Two of Durga Puja Thaindian.com
Thick security blanket for Durga Puja Hindustan Times
Hindu - Indian Express
all 41 news articles »

Calcutta Telegraph Buddha confident of Bengal's industrialisation
Hindu, India - 5 Oct 2008
Kolkata (PTI): Breaking his silence since the pull-out of the Nano project from Singur, West Bengal Chief Minister on Sunday said no right-thinking person ...
Singur pullout: Buddha says war not lost Economic Times
A battle is lost, but the war is still on: Buddha Times of India
One battle lost, not the war: Buddha on Nano (Lead) Thaindian.com
India Today - Indian Express
all 27 news articles » BOM:500570

Sify Bangalore: Tata Bids Goodbye to West Bengal Hello, Karnataka?
Daijiworld.com, India - 5 Oct 2008
Bangalore, Oct 5: After Tata bid adieu to Singroor in West Bengal, other governments including Karnataka are all set to woo the Nano manufacturing facility ...
Tata Motors team in Dharwad for Nano project Economic Times
Tata officials visit Dharwad for Nano site Merinews
Press statement: Tata to pull out of Bengal IBNLive.com
Business Standard - Economic Times
all 152 news articles » BOM:500570

TopNews Bengal govt has to take care of Singur farmers: Dasmunshi
Press Trust of India, India - 5 Oct 2008
Malda (WB), Oct 5 (PTI) Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi today said the government of West Bengal will have to take the ...
Dasmunshi says Bengal government has to take care of Singur farmers Thaindian.com
Dasmunsi blames both Tata, WB govt NDTV.com
Tata should make some sacrifice : Dasmunshi Economic Times
Press Trust of India
all 16 news articles » BOM:500570 - BOM:TATAMOTORS

TopNews Repercussions of Tata Nano Singur Project
CarTradeIndia.com, India - 9 hours ago
... Singur as the local people engulfed in despair after Ratan Tata announced that the company was pulling the Nano project from the state of West Bengal. ...
Bandh in Singur to protest Tata pullout NDTV.com
CPI (M) calls bandh in Singur Hindu
Singur observes shutdown protesting Nano pull out Thaindian.com
Indian Express - Times of India
all 58 news articles » BOM:500570
West Bengal cautions puja revelers on HIV
Sify, India - 4 Oct 2008
Kolkata: As West Bengal gears up to celebrate the mega festival of Durga Puja, health authorities and some NGOs are cautioning youth about the risk of ...
Jagdish takes Delhi in quarters
Indian Express, India - 5 hours ago
Batting first, West Bengal were bowled out for 134 runs in 18 overs. Inderjit scored a quick fire 69 runs off 45 balls. Jagdish took four wickets for Delhi. ...
Infant deaths rise to 25 in Murshidabad
Hindu, India - 3 hours ago
Berhampore (PTI): At least 25 infants have died and 142 others hospitalised in West Bengal's Murshidabad district due to breathing difficulty and ...
Unknown disease: Eight children die in W. Bengal, raising the toll ... MyNews.in
In two days, 10 kids die at Behrampore hospital Indian Express
all 5 news articles »

IBNLive.com Harbhajan Singh visits puja pandal in West Bengal
IBNLive.com, India - 20 hours ago
Visit a puja pandal near you and get a peek into Bengal's biggest festival. That's what cricketer Harbhajan Singh did. He visited the Tarun Sangha puja ...


New! Get the latest news on West Bengal with Google Alerts.



Searches related to: West Bengal cpi nandigram kolkata
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India may sign 123 Agreement on October 10
Lalit K Jha
Monday, October 06, 2008, (New York)

The Indo-US Civilian Nuclear Deal -- or the so-called 123 Agreement -- is expected to be signed in Washington on October 10, two days after the US President George W Bush would sign into law the legislation in this regard passed by the US Congress last week.

Informative sources in the State Department told NDTV.com that the External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee is likely to arrive in Washington later this week to ink the deal with his US counterpart, the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The 123 Agreement was initially expected to be signed over the weekend in New Delhi during the visit of Rice to India. But this could not be signed because of what the officials termed as procedural matters.

However, it is believed that India was reluctant to sign the agreement before Bush signs the US India Civilian Nuclear Cooperation and Enhancement Act into law. The Act was passed by the Congress last week.

At a function at the White House on October 8, President Bush is scheduled to sign the bill in presence of a select group of Indian-American leaders and eminent officials and lawmakers who played a key role in its Congressional passage.

The signing of the 123 Agreement -- the text of which has already been agreed upon and was released by both the US and Indian governments on August 3, 2007 -- would bring to an end the process which was started with the issuing of a joint statement by Bush and the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, 2005, when the latter visited Washington on a state visit.

The agreement would also start a new era of relationship between India and the US, with the American corporate world entering into separate agreements with India on civilian use of nuclear technology by India, mostly for generation of electricity.

A number of US companies have already expressed their keen interest in entering into business tie up with India in the field of civilian nuclear energy. With the US economy in a bad shape, US companies and the Bush Administration now expects that the Indian Government would expedite the process.

India has insisted that all international players would get a level playing field and economical viability of the projects would be the sole criteria while awarding projects. Besides US companies, those from Russia and France too are vying for Indian nuclear energy projects. France already inked a deal with India last week when Manmohan Singh was in Paris.
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080067827&ch=10/6/2008%2011:07:00%20AM

Frank writes to political forum:

Capitalism doesn't reward initiative and intelligence, that is often
reward within itself, to create and invent. No, capitalism rewards
greed. The greedier you are the more you accumulate, the more power
you have. It's a system that only a sociopath could embrace, and there
are plenty of those in government. That is why the most powerful
people in our society are the most ruthless self interested reprobates
and their followers amongst the most intellectually handicapped
imbeciles.

How can social inequality be so tolerated in the US, where the richest
1% of the population has more wealth than the bottom 90%?

What leader today has not emerged out of the corporate elite and is
not already wealthy in their own right? Conversely what state leader
can be consider a leader whose overwhelming desire is to advance the
well being of his fellow man?

Capitalism is is a complete failure in every respect, unless you are
rich sociopath, or one of their mindless flunkies of course. No
shortage of flinkies on this board.

BTW, you are not a capitalist unless you own and direct the production
of goods and world finance, you are a slave wage earner, nothing more.
You have only your labor to sell, nothing else.

Bush Provokes Fear to Push for Bailout

Dean Baker, The Center for Economic and Policy Research: "This is the
first time in the history of the United States that the president has
sought to provoke a financial panic to get legislation through
Congress. While this has proven to be a successful political strategy,
it marks yet another low point in American politics. It was incredibly
irresponsible for President Bush to tell the American people on
national television that the country could be facing another Great
Depression. By contrast, when we actually were in the Great
Depression, President Roosevelt said that, 'we have nothing to fear,
but fear itself.'"
http://www.truthout.org/100408Y

Their Crisis, Our Consequences: is this what 1931 looks like?

by Charlie Post
Solidarity

IS THE BANKING crisis the end of capitalism as we know it?

Put simply, no. Capitalism cannot avoid periodic short-term and long-term
crises of falling profits and economic stagnation. However, as Marx pointed
out over 150 years ago, capitalism has internal mechanisms - driving down
wages, reorganizing work, massive bankruptcies - that allow it to recover
from these crises. There will be no "final" economic crisis of capitalism -
it will have to be overthrown.

What do we make of the current financial meltdown? Clearly the collapse of
the subprime mortgage market was the immediate trigger for the crisis,
although, as Doug Henwood has pointed out, subprime mortgages make up at
most about one quarter of the mortgage market, and only 10%-15% of these
loans are at risk of default. The deregulation of the financial sector -
begun under Reagan and the first Bush, and completed under Clinton - has led
to the mushrooming of financial derivatives (hedge funds, mortgage-backed
bonds, etc.) with little foundation in real capital invested in buildings,
machinery, equipment and stocks of goods and services (the "real economy").

But the growth and collapse of fictitious capital - what Marx called the
"circulation of property rights" - is a feature of every capitalist business
cycle. As the business cycle passes its peak, capitalists look for new
profitable investments. Because profits are slipping in the production of
goods and services, capital flows into financial instruments that are claims
on future wealth - speculative bets that the economy will continue to grow.
Financial bubbles inevitably burst as slowing economic growth in the real
economy reduces the value of the assets -- such as housing - upon which
fictitious capital rests. The results are all too familiar - investor panic,
sharp drops in the prices of stocks and other financial instruments, and a
rising tide of bankruptcies in the financial sector.

We have seen a number of these financial crises in the past 25 years - the
Stock Market crash of 1987, the Savings and Loan collapse of the late 1980s
and early 1990s, and the bursting of the "Dot.com" bubble in the early part
of this decade. None of these financial crises, however, sparked a
generalized collapse - deep recession or even full-scale depression - of
investment and production in the "real economy." With an infusion of funds
from the capitalist state, the financial sector was stabilized and growth,
in both the "real economy" and on Wall Street, resumed after each of these
panics.

Ultimately, the underlying health of the "real" capitalist economy cushioned
the impact of these financial panics. A wave of bankruptcies and mergers and
acquisitions that eliminated inefficient fixed capital (devalorized
capital), "lean production" that increased labor productivity (the rate of
exploitation), and neoliberal capitalist state policies that deregulated
capital and labor markets, all stimulated rising profits. The "long-wave" of
expansion of capital accumulation reduced the length and depth of financial
crises.

The current financial meltdown, however, comes at a point when there are
clear indications that the U.S. and global capitalist economies are entering
a new long-wave of stagnation. The very growth of investment - in particular
the increasing capitalization/mechanization of production - in the real
economy during the long-boom of the past quarter century is now turning into
its opposite, pointing toward a long period of declining profits and
stagnant capital accumulation.
http://www.solidarity-us.org/crisis

National Australia Bank Ltd., the nation's largest lender, dropped 3.8
percent after Hypo Real Estate Holding became the latest casualty of
the financial turmoil that generated a $700 billion U.S. bank rescue
plan. Newcrest Mining Ltd., Australia's biggest gold producer, and
Inpex Holdings Inc., Japan's largest oil explorer, retreated at least
2 percent after prices of the two commodities sank.

The MSCI Asia Pacific Index fell 1.9 percent to 102.68 as of 9:50 a.m.
in Tokyo. The measure last week posted the biggest weekly drop since
August 2007 on concern the U.S. bank bailout will fail to stimulate
demand for the region's exports.

Japan's Nikkei 225 Stock Average fell 2.8 percent to 10,636.18.
J.Front Retailing Co. dropped 1.6 percent after the Nikkei newspaper
said the department store operator may miss its profit forecast.

The U.S. Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 9.4 percent last week, the
most since the September 2001 terrorist attacks, as concern that
tightening credit markets will extend an economic slowdown. S&P 500
futures fell 1.6 percent today.

The euro slid to a 13-month low against the dollar as a deepening credit crunch forced European governments to pledge bailouts of troubled banks and increase protection for depositors.

The 15-nation currency fell to the lowest in more than two years
versus the yen as Germany joined with banks and insurers to bail-out
property lender Hypo Real Estate Holding AG and Belgium announced a
revised deal to rescue Fortis, the largest Belgian financial-services
firm. The yen also gained against the Australian and New Zealand
dollars as investors pared holdings of higher-yielding currencies
funded with Japan's currency.

-- The global credit crunch deepened in Europe as
government leaders pledged to bail out troubled banks and protect
depositors.

BNP Paribas SA will take control of Fortis's units in Belgium and
Luxembourg after government efforts to ensure the company's stability
failed, while Germany's government and financial institutions agreed
on a 50 billion euro ($68 billion) rescue package for Hypo Real Estate
Holding AG. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling said
Britain is ``ready to do whatever it takes'' to help its banks.

The developments yesterday came a day after a summit in Paris where
leaders of Europe's four biggest economies stopped short of a plan
mirroring the $700 billion rescue in the U.S. to counter the worst
financial crisis since World War II. Instead, they agreed to work
together to limit the economic fallout, ease accounting rules, and
seek tougher financial regulations.

The US presidential race spotlight returned to the top candidates Friday as Barack Obama and John McCain traded charges over whose policies were to blame for America's deepening economic woes. One day after the vice presidential debate failed to reshape the presidential race, both White House hopefuls turned their attention Friday to the issue that has dominated the campaign and voter interest: a teetering economy and a government plan to rescue Wall Street after weeks of financial upheaval. Several days earlier, on September 25, a few hundred people turned out on Wall Street to demonstrate against the bailout, many of them carrying homemade signs denouncing the giveaway to the banks and asking why their student loans, mortgages, etc., weren’t being bailed
out as well.

Kevin Harkin, a documentary filmmaker living in New York, came to the
demonstration and was filming the protest. The “top 1 percent” was
responsible for the crisis, he said. “They wanted less government
intervention, they wanted the free market, they wanted to let it run
its course, and it’s run its course! It’s a bad gambling debt.”

Russia's Micex index plunged 16 percent before trading was halted and
Indonesia and Saudi Arabia fell the most in at least six years, as oil
sank below $90 a barrel for the first time since February. The MSCI
Emerging Markets Index slumped 6.2 percent, putting it on course for
the biggest drop since the Asian markets meltdown of October 1997.

Russian authorities grappling with the worst financial turmoil since
the 1998 government default have halted share trading seven times in
the past three weeks and pledged more than $150 billion for banks and
companies through loans and tax benefits. Declines in Russia, China,
and Brazil pushed the MSCI emerging market gauge down 44 percent this
year, the biggest annual retreat in at least two decades.

``Dealing with the crisis will remain out of the hands of the domestic
authorities,'' said Ivailo Vesselinov, a senior economist at Dresdner
Kleinwort in London. ``This just goes to show how fragile sentiment
is.''

Western European leaders meeting in Paris this weekend pledged to bail
out their own nations' banks, while stopping short of a regional
rescue effort. Germany's government, banks and insurers agreed on a 50
billion-euro ($68 billion) rescue package for commercial property
lender Hypo Real Estate. BNP Paribas SA, France's biggest bank, agreed
to take control of Fortis in Belgium and Luxembourg for 14.5 billion
euros ($19.8 billion), completing a breakup of the lender after a
government rescue failed.

Paris Summit

Darling's boss, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was among the leaders
gathered in Paris, along with Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, European
Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Central Bank
President Jean-Claude Trichet.

``The good news out of the Paris meeting is that the European heads of
state now recognize the severity of this crisis,'' Goldman Sachs Group
Inc. economists Natacha Valla and Erik Nielsen said in a note to
investors. ``A pan-European approach would be much preferred, but
given the urgency and complexities of organizing such measures between
different fiscal regimes, national measures -- coordinated to the
extent possible -- might still be good enough.''

Policy Recommendations

The leaders agreed on policy recommendations touching on regulation
and accounting and said they'd press for looser enforcement of budget
and competition rules at the EU level.

They said they would seek to harmonize guarantees of deposit levels.
The U.K. bank regulator increased its insurance ceiling to 50,000
pounds ($88,300) per account from 35,000 pounds to stem a flow of
funds to Ireland after officials in Dublin guaranteed all debts and
deposits of its banks.

Anticipating increased spending, declining tax revenue, and government
bank takeovers, European leaders called for ``greater flexibility'' in
the application of the EU budget ceiling.

European finance ministers last month pledged to keep their budget
deficits below 3 percent of gross domestic product even as the
economic slowdown dents tax receipts and boosts welfare payments.

The leaders said they want to allow banks to keep some assets valued
as if they'd be held until maturity, instead of having to review their
value each quarter.

They also said they want to change accounting rules that require banks
to review their holdings each quarter and report losses when the
values decline, the so-called mark-to-market standard. Banks worldwide
have written down more than $580 billion since last year, according to
data compiled by Bloomberg.

Despite Congress' passage of the unprecedented $700 billion financial bailout Friday, there was no indication that economic issues would take a back seat to other concerns. Wall Street ended an intensely volatile week with another sell-off, and the government reported the worst monthly job losses in over five years.

As the US presidential election campaign enters its final month, the
candidates of the two major parties have voiced substantial agreement
on the most critical issues of domestic and foreign policy.

On Wednesday, both the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, and his
Republican opponent, John McCain, cast their votes in the US Senate
for the Wall Street bailout, giving Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson
nearly unlimited authority to supply at least $700 billion in federal
funds to banks and other financial institutions by buying their
worthless mortgage-backed securities. The bill which Obama and McCain
supported also includes an additional $150 billion in tax cuts, mainly
to business and the wealthy.

The bill was passed in the face of massive popular opposition, which
Obama and the Democratic leadership of Congress, in particular,
treated with open indifference in their rush to bail out their allies
on Wall Street.

On Thursday, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator
Joseph Biden, used the debate with McCain’s running mate, Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin, to espouse an even more aggressive foreign
policy than the Republicans. While making a spurious pledge that Obama
would “end the war” in Iraq, to appease antiwar sentiment, Biden
called for increased US military intervention in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, and a more aggressive pro-Israeli policy than that conducted
by Bush. He also defended past US military interventions in the
Balkans, and suggested a new US military role in Sudan.

The same day, Obama’s top national security adviser, Richard Danzig,
who was secretary of the navy in the Clinton administration, told a
press gathering that an Obama administration would increase military
spending over the gargantuan levels already established under Bush. He
said that he did not “see defense spending declining in the first
years of an Obama administration,” adding, “There are a set of demands
there that are very severe, very important to our national well-
being.”

Danzig went out of his way to praise the current Pentagon chief,
Robert Gates, saying that many of his policies “are things that
Senator Obama agrees with and I agree with.” He said that Obama
recognized the need for a smooth transition between the outgoing and
incoming administrations, particularly in the two war zones, Iraq and
Afghanistan. Asked if this meant that Gates might be retained, Danzig
replied that Gates was a good defense secretary, and “He’d be an even
better one in an Obama administration.”

The efforts of the Democrats and Republicans to rescue the financial
oligarchy on Wall Street with hundreds of billions of dollars of
public money have provoked a wave of revulsion and hostility from
workers across the United States.

Some of the strongest reactions have been seen in New York City, the
home of Wall Street. This is the most unequal city in the country,
where millions of working people live cheek-by-jowl with the handful
of billionaires and multimillionaires who have been the principal
beneficiaries of the fraud and parasitism that dominate the financial
industry.

There are 64 billionaires in New York City, who together boast a
combined net worth of $344 billion—more than four times the amount
held by billionaires a decade ago. In the same city, 1.5 million
people live below the federal poverty line, somehow eking out a living
on $16,600 or less a year—for a family of three.

Nearly 70 percent of New York City public school children are
classified as poor. Diabetes rates in the city have doubled in the
last 10 years.

The manic accumulation of personal wealth on Wall Street has fed a
housing bubble in New York that has driven the prices of apartments in
Manhattan into the stratosphere. A realtor advertises in the New York
Times for a building on Fifth Ave. boasting “a choice of gracious
living spaces, the finest finishes, sweeping views and unrivaled
amenities.” The price tag: “$10.5 million to over $47 million.”

Meanwhile, at least 34,000 people go to sleep each night in the city’s
homeless shelters. The ragged ranks of the city’s homeless families
have risen 15 percent over the past two years.

Moreover, gentrification has displaced hundreds of thousands of
working class residents from lower Manhattan, even pricing out many
middle class people, who have moved to northern Brooklyn, where the
higher rents they can afford are in turn forcing out poorer groups of
working people from these same neighborhoods.

Fat salaries and bonuses paid on Wall Street have helped to sustain
some of the finest and most expensive restaurants in the world.
Meanwhile, a recent survey indicates at least 1.3 million people—one
out of six city residents—lack sufficient food and are forced to go
hungry at least some time during the year.

Tens of thousands New Yorkers are employed in offices or perform
service jobs of various kinds in the Wall Street area. Some work in
the financial industry itself while others cater to the substantial
tourist trade in lower Manhattan. Building construction and repair is
continuous, bringing in many laborers and trades people during the day
to the neighborhood.

With that grim economic backdrop, Obama, the Democratic contender, is seeking to solidify his lead in national and battleground polls, while McCain looks for a game-changing development to close a gap that grew in part because he struggled to respond to the financial crisis.

Obama used Friday's ugly job news to argue that the policies of his Republican opponents “are killing jobs in America every single day.'' Republican John McCain retorted that Obama's tax and spending plans will not solve the problem.

The Illinois senator encouraged voters to change Republican leadership in the White House, continuing a theme of tying McCain to the unpopular President George W. Bush. He disputed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Thursday debate claim that his economic plan would be a job killer.

“When Sen. McCain and his running mate talk about job killing, that's something they know a thing or two about,'' Obama said. “Because the policies they've supported and are supporting are killing jobs in America every single day.''

His comments at a rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania came as the government reported employers cut 159,000 jobs last month, marking the ninth straight month of job losses.

Hours later at a town hall meeting in Pueblo, Colorado, McCain himself said Obama's plans would hurt the economy.

“He wants higher taxes, more government, higher spending, and frankly that record is not something which has been good for America and we won't let it happen,'' McCain said. The McCain campaign launched a new national TV ad Friday repeating his criticisms of Obama's tax plans.

Obama is proposing tax increases only for those earning more than $250,000 but would cut taxes for those making less _ details that McCain and Palin don't mention.

Polls show Obama has made progress in persuading voters that he's ready to be president and that McCain would continue Bush's economic policies. But the Illinois senator still has work to do to lock down his lead in case outside events or campaign blunders change the campaign conversation.

Obama planned to continue to use the economy and McCain's 90 percent support for Bush in the Senate to hammer his opponent and to argue that the Republican ticket has failed to articulate how it would be different from the current administration. Aides still view the race as very close.

McCain's campaign is trying to regroup from a disastrous two weeks. As Wall Street crumbled, McCain struggled to strike the right note. Palin's qualifications came under fire from Republican critics after she appeared ill-informed in TV interviews.

The Republican nominee's poll numbers slipped everywhere, dropping so far in Michigan that the campaign pulled the plug. It diverted resources elsewhere, even moving to shore up Republican bastions like Indiana and North Carolina.

Palin on Friday told Fox News that she disagreed



The US House of Representatives set aside doubts that prevailed a few days ago and passed a landmark $700 billion Wall Street bailout bill on Friday that President George W. Bush promptly signed into law. Eyeing both the Nov. 4 elections and stock market indexes, lawmakers voted 263-171 to approve the government's biggest market intervention in decades, despite deep reservations about its mechanics, enormous cost and ideological significance. In a stunning vote on Monday, the House had rejected the bailout proposal, sending stock markets plummeting. Amid the ensuing financial market volatility and voters' fears, the Senate responded on Wednesday and passed the bill, attaching $150 billion in popular tax break extensions and a boost in bank and credit union deposit insurance to rally more House support. The strategy paid off and four days after rejecting the bill, the House easily approved the revised measure, with 26 Republicans switching the "no" votes they cast on Monday to "yes" on Friday and 32 more Democrats voting yes.

Meanwhile,defying curfew, protesters on Monday set fire on an effigy of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari in Baramulla town of Jammu and Kashmir for terming militants operating in the state as terrorists.
More than 400 protesters defied curfew, which has been imposed in the valley since Sunday, gathered in Baramulla town and raised slogans against Zardari for his remarks on Kashmiri militants in an interview to the Wall Street Journal recently, official sources said.

The agitators burnt an effigy of the Pakistani president before dispersing peacefully, they said.



Marketmen and analysts said the sentiment turned distinctly weak after reports that credit crisis deepened in Europe, adding to concern that global economic growth will slow. Germany announced a new bailout package totalling 50 billion euros for Hypro Real Estate, the country's second biggest commercial property lender and the UK said it would rescue its lenders.

They said depreciating rupee against the US dollar too had downward effect on the stock prices.

All the sectoral indices, led by consumer durables goods, metals and realty fell between 3.50 to 11 per cent.

The BSE Consumer Durables index suffered the most with a fall of 318.06 points, or 11.01 per cent at 2,569.60 as Gitanjali Gems fell by 16.75 per cent at Rs 155.85, Titan Industries lost 11.48 per cent at Rs 953.85 and Videocon Industries tumbled 9.99 per cent at Rs 185.50.

CPM state secretary Biman Bose hinted that the continuing protest of the Trinamool Congress at Singur could have been supported by the rivals of the Tata Motors.
“Who has approached them (the Trinamool Congress)? For whose interests are they working?” Bose said at the book launch function at the stall of the National Book Agency—the publishing house of the CPM— near Park Circus Maidan.

Speculations are rife in political circles that some corporate players helped the Opposition to convert the land acquisition issue in Singur into a major controversy.

Tata Sons chairman Ratan Tata had alleged on Friday that the protest at Singur was funded by the rivals of Tata Motors.

Bose also slammed the Opposition for its role in Singur which forced Tata Motors to shift out of the state. “This is a great loss to the industrialisation drive of the state. An automobile industry could have been a catalyst in the development of the state,” said the Left Front chairman.

He also criticised Trinamool legislator Partha Chatterjee for his role in the Tollygunge violence on Saturday night. Bose said it was the duty of the state government to intervene and take action to control law and order. He did not mince words while criticising the role of intellectuals in West Bengal. “A section of intellectuals has become the weapon of reactionary forces in the state. They do not hold any political ideology and take stands only for publicity. They are like weeds and parasites for the society,” he said.



The US House of Representatives Minority Leader Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, credited the "active participation" of Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama in convincing some House members to support the bill.

Conservative Republican House members, aware of a wave of opposition to the bill as they prepared for Nov. 4 elections, attacked it as a step toward "socialism," while liberal Democrats blasted it as a bailout for Wall Street "fat cats."

But a majority decided to forge ahead with the plan, first proposed on Sept. 20 by the Bush administration and modified over two weeks of frantic negotiations on Capitol Hill.

Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the bailout package represented emergency first-aid for Wall Street.

"We will be back next year to do some serious surgery on the financial structure," Frank said. "Starting in January, we have to rewrite housing finance in America."

He also told reporters, "We have to provide new constraints on risk" in the overall financial services industry."

For Frank, an important negotiator for the bill, the Senate's add-ons were not as important to House passage as evidence this week of a seriously worsening US economic picture.

"States like Massachusetts and California couldn't roll over notes" to help finance their day-to-day operations and credit for private borrowers also was freezing up, he noted.

VOTES CHANGED

Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings told reporters he changed his "no" vote on Monday to "yes" on Friday after Obama, of Illinois, called him to urge him to change his position.

Cummings, from economically depressed Baltimore, said he got assurances from Obama that if elected president he would put a high priority on the issue of bankruptcy courts being able to restructure mortgage loans. Cummings said the bailout may not make things better, but "I am convinced it will stop things from getting worse."

The bailout bill will empower the Treasury Department to purchase up to $700 billion of broken mortgage-backed securities that are choking world capital markets. Treasury would dump the securities into a vast federal portfolio in hopes that will unclog the markets.

The bill leaves unanswered precisely how Treasury would price and purchase the assets and manage them -- questions that economists have said will decide whether the plan works and whether taxpayers will one day get their money back.

By attaching the renewal of expiring tax credits to the bill, congressional leaders were able to coax support from some wavering lawmakers, especially Republicans.

The tax provisions include renewing a middle-class tax break, an expanded child tax credit and renewed deductions for state and local sales taxes, important in states like Texas. The bill continues the deduction for local property taxes.

Fiscal conservatives complained the tax portion of the bill was not paid for with spending cuts or other tax increases that the Senate refused to go along with.

The measure will potentially add about $850 billion to the US debt at a time when annual budget deficits are already hitting record levels.

In five years, if the bailout has cost taxpayers money, the president will have to submit legislation setting a levy on Wall Street to cover those costs.

The Fall of America, Inc.
Along with some of Wall Street's most storied firms, a certain vision of capitalism has collapsed. How we restore faith in our brand.

By Francis Fukuyama | NEWSWEEK Published Oct 4, 2008




The implosion of America's most storied investment banks. The vanishing of more than a trillion dollars in stock-market wealth in a day. A $700 billion tab for U.S. taxpayers.. The scale of the Wall Street crackup could scarcely be more gargantuan. Yet even as Americans ask why they're having to pay such mind-bending sums to prevent the economy from imploding, few are discussing a more intangible, yet potentially much greater cost to the United States—the damage that the financial meltdown is doing to America's "brand."
Ideas are one of our most important exports, and two fundamentally American ideas have dominated global thinking since the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was elected president. The first was a certain vision of capitalism—one that argued low taxes, light regulation and a pared-back government would be the engine for economic growth.

Reaganism reversed a century-long trend toward ever-larger government. Deregulation became the order of the day not just in the United States but around the world.

The second big idea was America as a promoter of liberal democracy around the world, which was seen as the best path to a more prosperous and open international order. America's power and influence rested not just on our tanks and dollars, but on the fact that most people found the American form of self-government attractive and wanted to reshape their societies along the same lines—what political scientist Joseph Nye has labeled our "soft power."

It's hard to fathom just how badly these signature features of the American brand have been discredited. Between 2002 and 2007, while the world was enjoying an unprecedented period of growth, it was easy to ignore those European socialists and Latin American populists who denounced the U.S. economic model as "cowboy capitalism." But now the engine of that growth, the American economy, has gone off the rails and threatens to drag the rest of the world down with it. Worse, the culprit is the American model itself: under the mantra of less government, Washington failed to adequately regulate the financial sector and allowed it to do tremendous harm to the rest of the society.

Democracy was tarnished even earlier. Once Saddam was proved not to have WMD, the Bush administration sought to justify the Iraq War by linking it to a broader "freedom agenda"; suddenly the promotion of democracy was a chief weapon in the war against terrorism. To many people around the world, America's rhetoric about democracy sounds a lot like an excuse for furthering U.S. hegemony.

The choice we face now goes well beyond the bailout, or the presidential campaign. The American brand is being sorely tested at a time when other models—whether China's or Russia's—are looking more and more attractive. Restoring our good name and reviving the appeal of our brand is in many ways as great a challenge as stabilizing the financial sector. Barack Obama and John McCain would each bring different strengths to the task. But for either it will be an uphill, years-long struggle. And we cannot even begin until we clearly understand what went wrong—which aspects of the American model are sound, which were poorly implemented, and which need to be discarded altogether.

Many commentators have noted that the Wall Street meltdown marks the end of the Reagan era. In this they are doubtless right, even if McCain manages to get elected president in November. Big ideas are born in the context of a particular historical era. Few survive when the context changes dramatically, which is why politics tends to shift from left to right and back again in generation-long cycles.

Reaganism (or, in its British form, Thatcherism) was right for its time. Since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, governments all over the world had only grown bigger and bigger. By the 1970s large welfare states and economies choked by red tape were proving highly dysfunctional. Back then, telephones were expensive and hard to get, air travel was a luxury of the rich, and most people put their savings in bank accounts paying low, regulated rates of interest. Programs like Aid to Families With Dependent Children created disincentives for poor families to work and stay married, and families broke down. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution made it easier to hire and fire workers, causing a huge amount of pain as traditional industries shrank or shut down. But it also laid the groundwork for nearly three decades of growth and the emergence of new sectors like information technology and biotech.

Internationally, the Reagan revolution translated into the "Washington Consensus," under which Washington—and institutions under its influence, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—pushed developing countries to open up their economies. While the Washington Consensus is routinely trashed by populists like Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, it successfully eased the pain of the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s, when hyperinflation plagued countries such as Argentina and Brazil. Similar market-friendly policies are what turned China and India into the economic powerhouses they are today.

And if anyone needed more proof, they could look at the world's most extreme examples of big government—the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and other communist states. By the 1970s they were falling behind their capitalist rivals in virtually all respects. Their implosion after the fall of the Berlin Wall confirmed that such welfare states on steroids were an historical dead end.

Like all transformative movements, the Reagan revolution lost its way because for many followers it became an unimpeachable ideology, not a pragmatic response to the excesses of the welfare state. Two concepts were sacrosanct: first, that tax cuts would be self-financing, and second, that financial markets could be self-regulating.

Prior to the 1980s, conservatives were fiscally conservative— that is, they were unwilling to spend more than they took in in taxes. But Reaganomics introduced the idea that virtually any tax cut would so stimulate growth that the government would end up taking in more revenue in the end (the so-called Laffer curve). In fact, the traditional view was correct: if you cut taxes without cutting spending, you end up with a damaging deficit. Thus the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s produced a big deficit; the Clinton tax increases of the 1990s produced a surplus; and the Bush tax cuts of the early 21st century produced an even larger deficit. The fact that the American economy grew just as fast in the Clinton years as in the Reagan ones somehow didn't shake the conservative faith in tax cuts as the surefire key to growth.

More important, globalization masked the flaws in this reasoning for several decades. Foreigners seemed endlessly willing to hold American dollars, which allowed the U.S. government to run deficits while still enjoying high growth, something that no developing country could get away with. That's why Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly told President Bush early on that the lesson of the 1980s was that "deficits don't matter."

The second Reagan-era article of faith—financial deregulation—was pushed by an unholy alliance of true believers and Wall Street firms, and by the 1990s had been accepted as gospel by the Democrats as well. They argued that long-standing regulations like the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act (which split up commercial and investment banking) were stifling innovation and undermining the competitiveness of U.S. financial institutions. They were right—only, deregulation produced a flood of innovative new products like collateralized debt obligations, which are at the core of the current crisis. Some Republicans still haven't come to grips with this, as evidenced by their proposed alternative to the bailout bill, which involved yet bigger tax cuts for hedge funds.

The problem is that Wall Street is very different from, say, Silicon Valley, where a light regulatory hand is genuinely beneficial. Financial institutions are based on trust, which can only flourish if governments ensure they are transparent and constrained in the risks they can take with other people's money. The sector is also different because the collapse of a financial institution harms not just its shareholders and employees, but a host of innocent bystanders as well (what economists soberly call "negative externalities").

Signs that the Reagan revolution had drifted dangerously have been clear over the past decade. An early warning was the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Countries like Thailand and South Korea, following American advice and pressure, liberalized their capital markets in the early 1990s. A lot of hot money started flowing into their economies, creating a speculative bubble, and then rushed out again at the first sign of trouble. Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, countries like China and Malaysia that didn't follow American advice and kept their financial markets closed or strictly regulated found themselves much less vulnerable.

A second warning sign lay in America's accumulating structural deficits. China and a number of other countries began buying U.S. dollars after 1997 as part of a deliberate strategy to undervalue their currencies, keep their factories humming and protect themselves from financial shocks. This suited a post-9/11 America just fine; it meant that we could cut taxes, finance a consumption binge, pay for two expensive wars and run a fiscal deficit at the same time. The staggering and mounting trade deficits this produced—$700 billion a year by 2007—were clearly unsustainable; sooner or later the foreigners would decide that America wasn't such a great place to bank their money. The falling U.S. dollar indicates that we have arrived at that point. Clearly, and contrary to Cheney, deficits do matter.
Even at home, the downside of deregulation were clear well before the Wall Street collapse. In California, electricity prices spiraled out of control in 2000-2001 as a result of deregulation in the state energy market, which unscrupulous companies like Enron gamed to their advantage. Enron itself, along with a host of other firms, collapsed in 2004 because accounting standards had not been enforced adequately. Inequality in the United States rose throughout the past decade, because the gains from economic growth went disproportionately to wealthier and better-educated Americans, while the incomes of working-class people stagnated. And finally, the bungled occupation of Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina exposed the top-to-bottom weakness of the public sector, a result of decades of underfunding and the low prestige accorded civil servants from the Reagan years on.

All this suggests that the Reagan era should have ended some time ago. It didn't partly because the Democratic Party failed to come up with convincing candidates and arguments, but also because of a particular aspect of America that makes our country very different from Europe. There, less-educated, working-class citizens vote reliably for socialist, communist and other left-learning parties, based on their economic interests. In the United States, they can swing either left or right. They were part of Roosevelt's grand Democratic coalition during the New Deal, a coalition that held through Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. But they started voting Republican during the Nixon and Reagan years, swung to Clinton in the 1990s, and returned to the Republican fold under George W. Bush. When they vote Republican, it's because cultural issues like religion, patriotism, family values and gun ownership trump economic ones.

This group of voters will decide November's election, not least because of their concentration in a handful of swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Will they tilt toward the more distant, Harvard-educated Obama, who more accurately reflects their economic interests? Or will they stick with people they can better identify with, like McCain and Sarah Palin? It took an economic crisis of massive proportions from 1929 to 1931 to bring a Democratic administration to power. Polls indicate we may have arrived again at that point in October 2008.

The other critical component of the American brand is democracy, and the willingness of the United States to support other democracies around the world. This idealistic streak in U.S. foreign policy has been constant over the past century, from Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations through Roosevelt's Four Freedoms to Reagan's call for Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

Promoting democracy—through diplomacy, aid to civil society groups, free media and the like—has never been controversial. The problem now is that by using democracy to justify the Iraq War, the Bush administration suggested to many that "democracy" was a code word for military intervention and regime change. (The chaos that ensued in Iraq didn't exactly help democracy's image either.) The Middle East in particular is a minefield for any U.S. administration, since America supports nondemocratic allies like the Saudis, and refuses to work with groups like Hamas and Hizbullah that came to power through elections. We don't have much credibility when we champion a "freedom agenda."

The American model has also been seriously tarnished by the Bush administration's use of torture. After 9/11 Americans proved distressingly ready to give up constitutional protections for the sake of security. Guantánamo Bay and the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib have since replaced the Statue of Liberty as symbols of America in the eyes of many non-Americans.

No matter who wins the presidency a month from now, the shift into a new cycle of American and world politics will have begun. The Democrats are likely to increase their majorities in the House and Senate. A huge amount of populist anger is brewing as the Wall Street meltdown spreads to Main Street. Already there is a growing consensus on the need to re-regulate many parts of the economy.

Globally the United States will not enjoy the hegemonic position it has occupied until now, something underscored by Russia's Aug. 7 invasion of Georgia. America's ability to shape the global economy through trade pacts and the IMF and World Bank will be diminished, as will our financial resources. And in many parts of the world, American ideas, advice and even aid will be less welcome than they are now.

Under such circumstances, which candidate is better positioned to rebrand America? Barack Obama obviously carries the least baggage from the recent past, and his postpartisan style seeks to move beyond today's political divisions. At heart he seems a pragmatist, not an ideologue. But his consensus-forming skills will be sorely tested when he has to make tough choices, bringing not just Republicans but unruly Democrats into the fold. McCain, for his part, has talked like Teddy Roosevelt in recent weeks, railing against Wall Street and calling for SEC chairman Chris Cox's head. He may be the only Republican who can bring his party, kicking and screaming, into a post-Reagan era. But one gets the sense that he hasn't fully made up his mind what kind of Republican he really is, or what principles should define the new America.
American influence can and will eventually be restored. Since the world as a whole is likely to suffer an economic downturn, it is not clear that the Chinese or Russian models will fare appreciably better than the American version. The United States has come back from serious setbacks during the 1930s and 1970s, due to the adaptability of our system and the resilience of our people.

Still, another comeback rests on our ability to make some fundamental changes. First, we must break out of the Reagan-era straitjacket concerning taxes and regulation. Tax cuts feel good but do not necessarily stimulate growth or pay for themselves; given our long-term fiscal situation Americans are going to have to be told honestly that they will have to pay their own way in the future. Deregulation, or the failure of regulators to keep up with fast-moving markets, can become unbelievably costly, as we have seen. The entire American public sector—underfunded, deprofessionalized and demoralized—needs to be rebuilt and be given a new sense of pride. There are certain jobs that only the government can fulfill.

As we undertake these changes, of course, there's a danger of overcorrecting. Financial institutions need strong supervision, but it isn't clear that other sectors of the economy do. Free trade remains a powerful motor for economic growth, as well as an instrument of U.S. diplomacy. We should provide better assistance to workers adjusting to changing global conditions, rather than defend their existing jobs. If tax cutting is not a path to automatic prosperity, neither is unconstrained social spending. The cost of the bailouts and the long-term weakness of the dollar mean that inflation will be a serious threat in the future. An irresponsible fiscal policy could easily add to the problem.

And while fewer non-Americans are likely to listen to our advice, many would still benefit from emulating certain aspects of the Reagan model. Not, certainly, financial-market deregulation. But in continental Europe, workers are still treated to long vacations, short working weeks, job guarantees and a host of other benefits that weaken their productivity and will not be financially sustainable.

The unedifying response to the Wall Street crisis shows that the biggest change we need to make is in our politics. The Reagan revolution broke the 50-year dominance of liberals and Democrats in American politics and opened up room for different approaches to the problems of the time. But as the years have passed, what were once fresh ideas have hardened into hoary dogmas. The quality of political debate has been coarsened by partisans who question not just the ideas but the motives of their opponents. All this makes it harder to adjust to the new and difficult reality we face. So the ultimate test for the American model will be its capacity to reinvent itself once again. Good branding is not, to quote a presidential candidate, a matter of putting lipstick on a pig. It's about having the right product to sell in the first place. American democracy has its work cut out for it.

Fukuyama is professor of International Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/162401

Anatomy of a Train Wreck
Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown
Stan J. Liebowitz
October 3, 2008

Executive Summary

Why did the mortgage market melt down so badly? Why were there so many defaults when the economy was not particularly weak? Why were the securities based upon these mortgages not considered anywhere as risky as they actually turned out to be? This report concludes that, in an attempt to increase home ownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, virtually every branch of the government undertook an attack on underwriting standards starting in the early 1990s. Regulators, academic specialists, GSEs, and housing activists universally praised the decline in mortgage-underwriting standards as an “innovation” in mortgage
lending. This weakening of underwriting standards succeeded in increasing home ownership and also the price of housing, helping to lead to a housing price bubble. The price bubble, along with relaxed lending standards, allowed speculators to purchase homes without putting their own money at risk. The recent rise in foreclosures is not related empirically to the distinction between subprime and prime loans since both sustained the same percentage increase of foreclosures and at the same time. Nor is it consistent with the “nasty subprime lender” hypothesis currently considered to be the cause of the mortgage meltdown. Instead, the important factor is the distinction between adjustable-rate and fixed-rate mortgages. This evidence is consistent with speculators turning and running when housing prices stopped rising.


http://www.independent.org/pdf/policy_reports/2008-10-03-trainwreck.pdf

Zardari Treason: India granted transit rights through Pakistan to Afghanistan

By Moin Ansari
New York, October 3, 2008. President Zardari has apparently signed a transit deal with India on the sidelines of the UN summit and granted India transit rights through Pakistan to Afghanistan. This had been a bone of contention between Pakistan and India for several decades. Apparently nothing was given in return for the favour. This after the fact that Mr. Zardari also halted all opposition to India at the IAEA and NSG forums.

How long with the Pakistani nation tolerate Mr. Zardari’s strange actions taken without the consent of the foreign office or the National Assembly? + M Ashraf Mirza +

According to the joint communiqué issued at the end of the meeting between President Asif Zardari and Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh in New York last week, Pakistan has agreed to provide transit facilities for India ’s trade to Afghanistan. The two countries have also agreed to revive their stalled composite dialogue to address their outstanding issues including the core issue of Jammu and Kashmir. The agreement was reached between the two leaders at their meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly annual session in New York. They also decided to open some trade routes between the two countries and across the Line of Control. The communiqué said that Pakistan would take ‘severe’ action against those involved in terrorist acts’ in India as well as in occupied Kashmir. Pakistan will also probe the Indian allegations about Pakistani intelligence agencies’ alleged involvement in the bombing the Indian embassy in Kabul last July, the communiqué said…… Read
http://www.lisauk.com/Articles.asp?aid=528

Why do Hindus violently assault Christians?
Bishop Angelo Gracias of the Roman Catholic diocese of Bombay separates fact from fiction and explains why claims of forced conversions by Christians are lies. He says no religion is as missionary as Hinduism, while Christian have the right to convert.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
By Angelo Gracias

Mgr Agnelo Gracias, auxiliary bishop of Bombay, looks at anti-Christian violence in Orissa and other Indian states. Separating fact from fiction, he explains why claims that Christians engage in forced conversions are lies, asserts that Christians have a right to evangelize and that anyone has the right to convert, and shows that there is no religion as missionary as Hinduism.

Let us look at the phenomenon of the recent attacks against Christians. We shall examine first the alleged reasons for these attacks, and then go into what are perhaps the real causes for the attacks. And since conversion is one of the main reasons brought forward, in a third part, we shall examine the issue of conversion.

I. Alleged Reasons for the Attacks:

1. Christians are being attacked because of the killing of Swami Laxmananda Saraswati in Orissa. Investigations point to the involvement of Maoists in the killing.

In fact, the killing was condemned by Christians. Leaders like Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the Archbishop of Bombay, condemned the killing in his press conference. The official Catholic body of the Church, the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) also condemned it in its press release. The Chairman of the Orissa Catholic Bishops Conference, Bishop Thomas Thiruthalil, condemned it. If I may quote the words of his press conference, "The Catholic Community in Orissa was once again terribly shocked by the brutal murder of Swami Laxmananda Saraswati and four of his close associates... We, the Catholic community in Orissa deeply condemn the barbarous incident…"

In spite of this, the VHP and Bajrang Dal whipped up the mobs to attack hristians. They wanted a pretext to launch their attacks.

2. Christians are being attacked because of a pamphlet denigrating Hinduism supposedly published by the New Life Movement.

If such a pamphlet has actually been circulated, one must first investigate who published it and punish the evil-doers, not use it as a pretext to attack Christians indiscriminately. New Life has denied that they published any such pamphlet. It is extremely unlikely that any Christian group would have engaged in such a foolhardy act at this point of time. For all one knows, the pamphlet might have been published by some anti- Christian group themselves to stoke up communal flames!

There is a common misapprehension that Christians disdain other religions. The stand of the Catholic Church on this point is clear. With regard to other religions, Vatican Council II spelt out the Church's position very clearly: "The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men". Therefore the Church exhorts Catholics "prudently and lovingly, through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, and in witness of Christian faith and life, to acknowledge, preserve and promote the spiritual and moral goods found among these people, as well as the values in their society and culture” (Nostra Aetate, art 2).

3. Christians are being attacked because of conversions; the bogey of conversions is constantly used by the VHP and Bajrang Dal. Let us look at this issue squarely:

If there were so many thousands of conversions, as claimed, the number of Christians should have skyrocketed. The opposite is true. The Census of India shows a decline in the percentage of the Christian population of India vis-à-vis the total population: 2.6 per cent in 1971; 2.44 per cent in 1981 and 2.32 per cent in 1991, 2.3 per cent in 2001! This decline continues.

Forced conversions? The Catholic Church is totally against the use of any form of force. Vatican Council II has declared: "The Church strictly forbids forcing anyone to embrace the Faith, or alluring or enticing people by worrisome wiles. By the same token, she also strongly insists on this right that no one should be frightened away from the Faith by unjust vexations on the part of others” (Ad Gentes, art 13).

Canon Law is explicit: "No one is ever permitted to coerce persons to embrace the Catholic faith against their conscience" (Canon 748.2).

Conversion by allurements? This is an oft-repeated lie. Blessed Mother Teresa wrote in 1979: “Do not belittle the Hindu religion saying that our Hindu poor people give up their religion for 'a plate of rice'. To my knowledge, I have not seen this being done, though we feed thousands of poor of all castes and creeds, though thousands have died in our hands, beautifully in peace with God.”

The opposite is true in India: those who become Christians forfeit the benefits given by the Government, the reservation quota. In spite of losing so much economically, the dalits still embrace Christianity!

Several States have passed anti-conversion bills. The first was Arunachal Pradesh in 1978, Gujarat in 2003, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in 2006, Himachal Pradesh in 2007. There exist very stringent punishments for conversions by force or allurement. Till today, not a single case of such conversion has been brought forward. We have publicly challenged the governments to produce evidence of any such cases.

The fact that the governments have not been able to bring up even one case, is an indication that this charge is a fabrication. The very fact that these Hindus vie to send their children to our schools for education is a sign that they do not really worry about conversion. They should have been worried that we would influence these tender minds. Quite the contrary! They are begging us for admission.

II. What then is the real reason for antagonism towards Christianity and to our work amongst the tribals and dalits?

1. The answer is Socio-economic. With education, these tribals and dalits will no longer allow themselves to be exploited. The economic apple-cart will be overturned. Let's not forget that the RSS is made up of the upper castes which have a vested interest in retaining the status quo.

2. According to the teaching and example of Jesus, love of God and love of fellow humans are inseparable, like two sides of one coin: "For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen" (1 Jn, 4:20). Jesus described his mission in the following terms: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Lk, 4:18).

When Jesus went about healing the sick, mixing with outcasts and assisting the poor, these works were not allurements, but the concrete realisation of the "Kingdom of God" which he preached: a kingdom of love and justice. So also, the humanitarian activities of the Catholic Church are by no means an allurement. She is walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

Rather than be apologetic, we can be proud of the service we render to our country, especially to the poorest and most downtrodden. I wish some of the fundamentalists who are attacking us would visit Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying and the Destitute in Sankli Street etc. Count how many of them are Christians and how many have been baptised. Visit Niramay Niketan in Trombay (a northern neighbour of Mumbai), the home looking after the AIDS-afflicted! An HIV-positive man who needed to have his legs amputated was turned down by almost 100 doctors, before one finally accepted to do the operation. He and many others like him are being lovingly cared for by the Sisters. These fundamentalists would not have come close to these patients, much less touch them. For them, they are human refuse to be consigned to the dustbin. For us, they are not Christians, Hindus or Muslims, but human beings to be loved and cared for.

III. Issue of Conversion

1. None of us is born a Christian or a Hindu or a Muslim – nothing in our blood that marks us out as belonging to a particular religion. Rather we are born within a religion – or better, in a religious community. People generally remain in the religion in which they were born. However, some exercise their freedom to embrace the religion which best satisfies their quest for God and for fulfillment. In matters religious, no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his/her beliefs; nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his/her beliefs. This is what "conversion" is all about. It is not so much a religious right, as a human right.

2. We do not have a right to convert others. We have a right to speak about our beliefs and our religion – the right to propagate our faith. This is guaranteed by the Constitution. The other has a right to be converted, if he chooses to.

3. Today, more than ever before, we live in a 'global village', an open society where ideas freely cross all boundaries. Just as there will always be people who change their ideology or political affiliation, so there will always be people who change their religion. If I can change my political party, why cannot I change my religion?

In conclusion, we can point out that the oft-made claim that Hinduism does not make converts, nor does it send missionaries, is not really true. No country in ancient times sent out more missionaries than India to propagate (Buddhist and Hindu) religion: from Sri Lanka to China! And at present, there are more Hindu missionaries in India and in the West, than Christian missionaries in India. Temples abound and continue to be built in Europe and America.

http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=34&idsub=158&id=16265&t=Why+do+Hindus+violently+assault+Christians%3F


Bollywood junior artistes feel threatened by foreigners
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Reuters
Posted: Oct 06, 2008 at 1101 hrs IST

Mumbai, October 4: Bollywood's junior artistes and workers are not only victims of irregular pay and lack of payment structure, but also face what is becoming a global problem - foreigners taking over.
"Producers bring in foreign extras and junior artistes because they look nicer, and our people lose out on their jobs," said Dharmesh Tiwari, general secretary of the Federation of Western India Cine Employees, the umbrella union for Bollywood employees.

A three-day strike by more than 100,000 junior artistes and workers affiliated to the FWICE was called off late on Friday, after four producers' bodies promised timely payment and proper recruitment of extras.

"One of our demands is that no local artiste should be neglected over a foreign one," Tiwari said.

But producers claim this is not entirely true.

"We have an agreement with the FWICE that if they cannot provide us with the required artistes we can hire from outside and that is exactly what producers are doing," said T P Agarwal of producers body Indian Motion Picture Producers' Association (IMPAA).

Bollywood churns out about 1,000 films a year and most of them feature elaborate dance sequences and the demand for extras to stand in the background or dance behind the lead pair is always high.

Barring a handful of foreign actors that have starred in leading roles most Westerners feature in the backdrop as scantily dressed dancers in nightclubs or drinking at bars.

Shailendra Singh of Percept Picture Company says it is not fair to stop foreign artists from working in Bollywood.

"Its like saying someone from India can't go and work in Hollywood. Why not? There should be no curbs imposed on creativity," he said.

"Creativity is fine, but what about our livelihood?" Tiwari said
Tribal girls duped by agents working as prostitutes abroad
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Agencies
Posted: Oct 04, 2008 at 1151 hrs IST
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Kuala Lumpur, October 4: Lured by promises of lucrative jobs, tribal women from India's north-east are being duped by job agents and brought to southeast Asia to work as bar girls and prostitutes, an Indian High Commission official in Kuala Lumpur said on Saturday.
His remarks came after five girls from Assam and Manipur escaped from the clutches of traffickers in Malaysia. "Job recruitment agents flew the five young women to Singapore on pretext of finding them work as house maids but dumped them in the city state and another agent brought them into Malaysia," said the official.

He said the case came to light when one of them escaped from the clutches of the traffickers and approached a church official who contacted an NGO which then intimated the Indian High Commission. Three women were brought to the High Commission on September 17 and the other two five days later.

The five, who belong to the Zeliangrong tribe, were promised high paying jobs but were duped to work as bar girls and prostitutes in nightclubs in Singapore and Malaysia.

According to available information, at least 150 women from Manipur, Assam and Nagaland had been duped by recruitment agents to work in the region, the High Commission official said.

He blamed recruitment agents in India, Singapore and Malaysia for the plight of these women. The official said the five women were currently in a shelter home and the process was on to fly them back to India.

Sarah Palin
Palin Sued for Private E-Mails About State Business
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/04/palin_sued_for_private_e-mails.html
ANCHORAGE -- In a lawsuit filed in Alaska Superior Court, a Republican
activist seeks to force Gov. Sarah Palin to produce copies of official
correspondence she sent and received on private e-mail accounts.

Andrée McLeod filed the suit Wednesday and publicized it in a news
release today. "Rather than using her state e-mail account, throughout
her two-year tenure as Governor of Alaska, defendant Sarah Palin, as a
matter of routine, has used, and, on information and belief, continues
to use, (at least) two private e-mail accounts... to conduct official
business of the State of Alaska," the suit alleges.

The suit is the latest front in a battle McLeod is waging over Palin's
e-mail. In June, she filed an open-records request and received four
boxes of redacted e-mails. But more than 1,100 others were withheld,
an action Palin justified by claiming executive privilege. McLeod
appealed that claim last month before going to court last week.

McLeod has questioned whether Palin was using private e-mail accounts
to conduct state business in a manner that would skirt open-records
laws. In one notable e-mail, a Palin aide apologized for discussing
state business on a public account. "Whoops!" Palin aide Frank Bailey
wrote, after addressing an e-mail to the governor's official state
address. "Frank, this is not the Governor's personal account," a
secretary reminded him.

A spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin campaign has acknowledged the use
of private accounts. "As a champion of government accountability and
transparency, Governor Palin was exercising an abundance of caution to
ensure that all state and personal business matters were being kept
separate," Meghan Stapleton said recently. "Governor Palin is
committed to serving with the highest regard toward ethics."

But McLeod said she believes the Palin administration fostered a
"culture of corruption" in Alaska where neither she nor her top aides
were accountable to rules of transparency in government.

"The extent of the use of these private e-mail accounts demonstrates
the extent of deception that the governor is operating under," McLeod
said in an interview today. "The process is corrupt. The overall
question now becomes, how did it become so broken that nobody could
tell her, 'Don't do that.' That's why I'm going to the courts."

Palin had routinely used a Yahoo e-mail address until abruptly
abandoning it after hackers penetrated the account on Sept. 17 and
posted screen-captures from its inbox on the Internet.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that Palin maintained an
additional private e-mail account, which she used to communicate with
a small circle of staff members outside the state government's secure
official e-mail system, according to sources at the Wasilla company
that established the system.

McLeod, a former state employee who once was close to Palin, has also
filed an ethics complaint against the governor and others, citing e-
mail traffic that appeared to show that her office improperly helped a
Palin fundraiser obtain a civil service position.



Malegaon, Modasa And Mehrauli Blasts: The Hindutva Connection?
By Subhash Gatade - subhash.gatade@gmail.com
04 October, 2008
Countercurrents.org
http://www.countercurrents.org/gatade041008.htm

Saba Parveen still repents the fact that she sent her younger sister Farheen to Bhikku Chowk to buy some Pakoras. Little she could have the premonition that she would never get to see her 10 year old sister a class V student alive.
The blast at Malegaon's Bhikku Chowk, has literally shattered the family of Shaikh Liaquat Wahiuddin, Farheen's father who lives around 100 feet away from the Chowk near the Kasbapada masjid. A father of three daughters and two sons and a wife has seen all the hell broke lose soon after the bomb blast.
The couple fainted when they reached Wadia hospital to see their own daughter who had suffered severe burns in the blast turned lifeless.
The latest bomb blasts in Malegaon have seen four deaths wherein a motorcycle parked near old SIMI office which was laden with explosives exploded killing four people on the spot. It was worth noting that the people living in the vicinity of the Chowk had informed the police about this unclaimed motorcycle standing there for hours together. But the police did not bother to turn up and reached the place only after the blast which saw these deaths.
It is not difficult to imagine the palpable anger which exists among people about the callousness of the police and the insensitivity of the administration. People of this town which has a significant no of Muslim population have not forgotten the treatment meted out to them by the police and the administration when there were similar blasts in the city during their religious congregations killing 40 people in 2006. Despite enough hints about the involvement of Hindutva terror groups in the perpetration of these acts, where a torso with a fake beard was also identified, ultimately saw few Muslim youths getting booked for this crime who are still languishing in jail. A CBI enquiry which was ordered after lot of pressure claims to have reached a deadend.
In a recent meeting with Baba Siddique, the 'guardian' minister of Nasik, representatives of different Muslim organisations in Malegaon gave vent to their feelings of disgust and deep hurt over the developments. Angry community leaders asked the minister "You blame SIMI for blasts in temples, you blame SIMI for blasts in market places, you blame SIMI for blast Masjids. The latest blast has taken place just below the SIMI office. Now whom will you blame ?"( Mailtoday, Oct 3, 2008)
Hemant Karkare, chief of the Anti Terrorist Squad of Maharashtra Police, who was instrumental in nabbing the activists of Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu Janjagruti Samity for the bomb blasts in Thane, Vashi and few other places in Maharashtra (June 2008) and his team of officers also shied away from blaming some or the other Islamic terrorist organisation for the blast.The perpetrators of the bomb blast who had packed a splendour motorcycle with nuts, bolts, nails and ballbearings and three kilograms of explosive material, near a mosque, beside a SIMI office and the time chosen by them - on the eve of Eid - has definitely put local police and ATS groping in the dark.
But according to an investigative report filed by Mailtoday ( 1 October 2008) : "Police, however, are sure of one thing - that the blasts in Malegaon and Modasa in Gujarat were a coordinated effort, as both occured at around 9.30 p.m. in Muslim dominated areas.Karkare felt that the Gujarat and the Malegaon blasts were similar in nature also."
In fact any close watcher of the bomb blasts in the country cannot miss the fact that bikes have been a favourite instrument of the Bajrang Dal to attack Muslims. A narcotest of those involved in Nanded bomb blasts (April 2006) which saw deaths of two Bajrang Dal activists had clearly revealed that 'mysterious blasts' in Parbhani in 2003 and Jalna (2004) which involved perpetrators on bikes throwing bombs at the congregation and fleeing were actually the handiwork of a terror module of the Bajrang Dal itself.
The report in Mailtoday further adds " This is similar to the blast in Mehrauli market in New Delhi blast on Saturday and also some other cases where bombs were placed on bikes."
Of course Mailtoday is not alone in pointing fingers at Hindu terror groups for these bomb blasts, a detailed writeup in Indian Express ( Hindu Extremist Groups on Radar In Malegaon Probe, Sagnik Chowdhury, 1 st October 2008) reiterates the line of thinking of the ATS officials as far as the particular blast is concerned. " A day after the Maharashtra police said it could not rule out the possibility of Hindu extremist hand in Monday's blast in Malegaon, investigators are revisiting the crude bombs that were planted in auditoriums on the outskirts of Mumbai earlier this year." The ATS is planning to question the activists of Hindu Janjagruti Samiti, Sanatan Sanstha and other stray Hindu extremist organisations for their possible involvement in the act.The 1020 page chargesheet filed by the ATS in September against the members of these organisations for their terrorist acts is an added reminder for it to pursue the case in a balanced manner.
A deeper analysis of terror strikes since 2006 also reveal that there are at least five such terror strikes which targeted minorities and their religious places and they still remain unresolved. A report filed by Aman Sharma ( Mailtoday, October 3, 2008) provides details of these blasts and the status of investigations. Jama Masjid blast ( 14 injured, April 2006 - Friday) where low intensity, crude bombs were placed in a polythene bag is still pending with Delhi police, no outfit has been named. Malegaon ( 40 killed, September 8, 2006 - Friday) which saw four bombs outside mosques on Shab-e-Barat where RDX-ammonium nitrate bombs in boxes on bicycles was used, still remains unresolved. The investigation in Samjhuta express blasts (66 killed, Feb 19, 2007) where six bombs were planted inside Indo-Pak Samjhauta Express has also not shown any progress and neither any organisation has been named. The case of Mecca Masjid blasts ( 11 killed, May 18, 2007 -Friday) where two bombs were planted inside Mecca Masjid in boxes, is also pending with CBI. The enquiry into Ajmer Sharif bomb blasts (3 killed, October 11, 2007 - Friday) where two bombs in tiffin boxes wee used and where ammonium nitrate bombs were triggered by mobile phone has also not made much headway.The case at present pending with Rajasthan police has also not named any organisation.
Looking at the fact that communal common sense dominates the functioning of the police and the media in our country it is difficult to predict what will happen next. The investigations into the recent Kanpur blast (24 August 2008) which saw deaths of two RSS activists, Rajiv Mishra and Bhupendra Chopra, while making ammonium nitrate bombs, is an example worth studying. While the police took two of their colleagues for narcoanalysis, it did not even bother to question their alleged mentors -one of whom happened to be a Professor in IIT with RSS background.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

NCM for ban on Bajrang Dal
Tribune News Service
http://www.tribuneindia.com:80/2008/20081006/main4.htm
New Delhi, October 5
The Bajrang Dal has come under further pressure with the National Commission of Minorities (NCM) suggesting a ban on it, saying such organisations were responsible for the "breakdown of communal harmony" while seeking a judicial enquiry into the violence against the Christian community in Karnataka.
The commission in its report submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a few days back said, "The state must keep a close watch on the activities of all such organisations that have contributed to the breakdown of communal harmony there. Remedial action, including a ban and prosecution, should be initiated."
Terming the violence as gross violation of human rights, the NCM sought a judicial enquiry into the attacks on churches there. An inquiry commission headed by a sitting judge of a high court should be instituted, the commission said.
The NCM's suggestion comes in the wake of a visit by its team to BJP-ruled Karnataka, where churches have been brunt down.
While the commission has rubbished allegations that large-scale conversions of Hindus to Christianity was the reason for the violence in the state, it recommended a thorough enquiry into the origin of the pamphlet denigrating Hindu gods, which is said to have acted as the immediate provocation for the violence. There was no evidence of even a single conversion, it added.
Noting that the attacks on Christians and their institutions appeared well-planned, the commission suggested the state government to pay special attention to build an effective intelligence unit.
The commission headed by Mohammad Shafi Qureshi visited Mangalore, Bangalore and Udupi last month to assess the situation after the attacks on Christians and their places of worship.
According to the report, the Bangalore administration told the NCM that of the 83 persons lodged in judicial custody in connection with the communal clashes, 36 belonged to the Bajrang Dal.
The report said the District Magistrate and the SSP of Udupi district told the NCM that all 17 persons arrested in the district for violence belonged to the Bajrang Dal. The NCM team also took up the statements of Bajrang Dal's Karnataka chief Mahendra Kumar, who reportedly claimed that he damaged the prayer halls in the state.
The NCM has said Mahendra Kumar had not been arrested so far and he should be arrested and serious action be taken against him as well as other persons responsible for the acts.
The commission has already submitted its report to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The report suggests remedial action, including a ban and prosecution, should be initiated. Communal harmony should be maintained at all costs. The NCM has also asked for action against policemen, who allegedly brutally thrashed 25 Christian women at Mangalore. The NCM said it also visited a Christian school in Mangalore, where around 25 women in the age group of 26 to 75 years showed injury marks on their bodies. The women alleged that policemen beat them up with canes and lathis in the prayer hall of the school. Separately, the commission has demanded a flexible approach in giving compensation to the victims of communal clashes in Orissa.
Underlining the problem faced by those whose kin have died without their bodies being recovered, the commission asked the BJD-BJP government to give compensation to their families by relying on the testimony of eyewitnesses to the murder or even by taking an indemnity bond from the compensation recipients.
Bajrang Dal denies role in violence
Bajrang Dal's National Convenor Prakash Sharma today ruled out the involvement of his organisation in the recent violence in Orissa. "The violence in Orissa is not a good sign for the country and the Dal has no link with those incidents", Sharma told reporters here. He also criticised the comparison of Bajrang Dal with the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and said such propaganda was being done to appease the voters. Sharma said Bajrang Dal was observing its silver jubilee this year and to mark the occasion a convention would be held in December in Ayodhya. Besides, Bajrang Dal would also organise 'Jan Jagaran Yatra' to unite the youths, Mr Sharma added. — UNI

What Hamilton Has Wrought
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The current economic crisis is the inevitable consequence of what I call Hamilton’s Curse in my new book of that name. It is the legacy of Alexander Hamilton and his political, economic, and constitutional philosophy. As George Will once wrote, Americans are fond of quoting Jefferson, but we live in Hamilton’s country.

The great debate between Hamilton and Jefferson over the purpose of government, which animates American politics to this day, was very much about economic policy. Hamilton was a compulsive statist who wanted to bring the corrupt British mercantilist system – the very system the American Revolution was fought to escape from – to America. He fought fiercely for his program of corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, public debt, pervasive taxation, and a central bank run by politicians and their appointees out of the nation’s capital.

Jefferson and his followers opposed him every step of the way because they understood that Hamilton’s agenda was totally destructive of liberty. And unlike Hamilton, they took Adam Smith’s warnings against economic interventionism seriously.

Hamilton complained to George Washington that "we need a government of more energy" and expressed disgust over "an excessive concern for liberty in public men" like Jefferson. Hamilton "had perhaps the highest respect for government of any important American political thinker who ever lived," wrote Hamilton biographer Clinton Rossiter.

Hamilton and his political compatriots, the Federalists, understood that a mercantilist empire is a very bad thing if you are on the paying end, as the colonists were. But if you are on the receiving end, that’s altogether different. It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks would say.

Hamilton was neither the inventor of capitalism in America nor "the prophet of the capitalist revolution in America," as biographer Ron Chernow ludicrously asserts. He was the instigator of "crony capitalism," or government primarily for the benefit of the well-connected business class. Far from advocating capitalism, Hamilton was "befogged in the mists of mercantilism" according to the great late nineteenth century sociologist William Graham Sumner.


The Curse of Government Debt

In a lengthy "report" to Congress on the topic of the public debt Hamilton said that "a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a public blessing." He would spend the rest of his life politicking for excessive government spending – and debt. The reason Hamilton gave for favoring a large public debt was not to finance any particular project, or to stabilize financial markets, but to combine the interests of the affluent people of the country – particularly business people – to the government. As the owners of government bonds, he reasoned, they would forever support his agenda of higher taxes and bigger government. (He condemned Jefferson’s first inaugural address and its minimal government message as "the symptom of a pygmy mind.") No wonder one historian entitled his book on Hamilton "American Machiavelli."

Wall Street financiers naturally took an immediate liking to Hamilton’s idea, and became the financial cornerstone of the Federalist Party (and later, the Whigs and Republicans). When Hamilton engineered the nationalization of the states’ debt as treasury secretary – something that was totally unnecessary since many states like Virginia had nearly paid off their war debts – the plan was to cash out much of the old debt at face value. This immediately became public knowledge in New York City, but the news spread ever so slowly to the rest of the country. Consequently, Hamilton’s friends and supporters from New York City and New England went on a mad scramble down the eastern seaboard, purchasing bonds from hapless war veterans (who had been paid in bonds) for as little as two percent of par value. Huge fortunes were made by these slick New York speculators. Robert Morris pocketed a nifty $18 million. John Quincy Adams wrote to his father that the wealthiest Federalist lawyer in Massachusetts made a huge fortune with this caper. Hamilton participated in this parade of plunder himself, but claimed that the profits he made were for his brother-in-law.

The link between Wall Street and the federal government was cemented into place later on, when investment banks took on the responsibility of marketing the government’s bonds, which of course they still do to this day. Thus, Wall Street investment bankers became inveterate lobbyists for any and all tax increases (on the rest of the population, anyway) to assure that their own principal and interest would be paid, and that they could promise their clients – the purchasers of government bonds – that the bonds were a good investment. They were corrupt from the very beginning.

When Hamilton and George Washington led some 15,000 conscripts into Pennsylvania to enforce the hated whiskey tax, the purpose was not only to collect the tax and reassure bondholders, but also to send a message to any future tax resisters. The volunteer officers who led the conscripts were mostly "from the ranks of the creditor aristocracy in the seaboard cities," wrote Claude Bowers in Jefferson and Hamilton. (The rebellion succeeded, nevertheless. George Washington pardoned all of the tax protesters despite Hamilton’s hysterical opposition and his desire to hang all of them.)

James Madison remarked that this episode revealed Hamilton’s agenda of "the glories of a United States woven together by a system of tax collectors." Douglas Adair, an editor of The Federalist Papers, wrote that "with devious brilliance, Hamilton set out, by a program of class legislation, to unite the propertied interests of the eastern seaboard into a cohesive administration party." He also "transformed every financial transaction of the Treasury Department into an orgy of speculation and graft in which selected senators, congressmen, and certain of their richer constituents . . . participated." If this sounds familiar it is because the political descendants of these eighteenth-century "propertied interests" are today’s benefactors of the Wall Street Plutocrat/D.C. Political Class $700 Billion Bailout Bill of 2008.

When Hamilton’s Federalist Party consolidated its power during the Adams administration, government spending and debt skyrocketed. Citizens were prohibited to criticize it, however, thanks to the Sedition Act that outlawed free political speech. The national debt was so large that 80 percent of the government’s annual expenditures were needed to service the debt. This was exactly what Hamilton wanted. As John C. Miller, author of The Federalist Era, wrote, Hamilton’s main objective was "concentrating economic and political power in the Federal government," even if it meant destabilizing the entire nation’s economy.


The Founding Father of Central Banking

Hamilton is also considered to be the founding father of central banking since America’s first central bank, the Bank of the United States (BUS), existed primarily due to his efforts as Treasury Secretary. As William Graham Sumner wrote in his biography of Hamilton, however, "[A] national bank . . . was not essential to the work of the Federal Government." The real purpose of Hamilton’s bank, Sumner believed, was "the interweaving of the interests of wealthy men with those of their government." And interweave it did, providing cheap credit to business supporters of the Federalist Party, attempting to engineer boom-and-bust cycles to influence elections (called "political business cycles" in today’s parlance) and even financing the political campaigns of BUS supporters.

The BUS was a disaster for the general public, however; excessive money creating by the BUS printing press caused 72 percent inflation in its first five years, from 1791 to 1796. It became so unpopular that its twenty-year charter was not renewed, but then the War of 1812 gave it a new life, and it was resurrected in 1817. It immediately caused the Panic of 1819, and did what all central banks have always done: generated boom-and-bust cycles for the next twenty years. The bursting of the housing bubble in our time is the latest example of this hoary tradition.

Hamilton’s BUS was de-funded by President Andrew Jackson, and then a version of it was resurrected once again in 1863 by the neo-Hamiltonian Lincoln administration with several National Currency Acts. This, and other interventions of that period (50 percent average tariff rates, massive corporate welfare for the railroad industry, income taxation, pervasive excise taxation), led historian Leonard Curry to observe in his book, Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress, that the interventions "ushered in four decades of neo-Hamiltonianism: government for the benefit of the privileged few."

The record of Hamiltonian central banking from that time until the Fed was created in 1913 was summarized in a scholarly paper by economists Michael Bordo, Anna Schwartz and Peter Rappaport: "monetary and cyclical instability, four banking panics, frequent stock market crashes, and other financial disturbances." The Wall Street elite’s response to all this central bank-induced monetary instability was even more centralized banking with the creation of the Federal Reserve Board. It may have meant instability to the ordinary citizens, but was the source of great riches to the banking industry and other members of the politically well-connected class. Sound familiar?

Things have not changed at all to this day. A recent Fed publication entitled "A History of Central Banking in the United States" proudly boasts that "the Federal Reserve has similarities to the country’s first attempt at central banking, and in that regard it owes an intellectual debt to Alexander Hamilton" who, the Fed says, "sounded like a modern-day Fed chairman."

When Jefferson and his followers fiercely opposed Hamiltonian statism they were fighting to avoid bringing the rotten, corrupt, and economically-impoverishing system of British mercantilism to America. They understood what Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, which was a harsh condemnation of British mercantilism as both corrupt and impoverishing. Indeed, many of these men (or their ancestors) came to America in the first place to escape from that very system. Hamilton mocked Adam Smith just as he mocked Jefferson’s "pygmy mind" and his "excessive concern for liberty."

It may have taken several generations, but that system of "crony capitalism" or "government for the benefit of the privileged few" has been cemented into place for quite some time now. The politically incestuous relation between the banking and finance industries and government is the sole cause of the current economic crisis, particularly the boom-and-bust cycle caused by the Fed and the system of fractional reserve banking (i.e., lending money that you don’t have) that it administers. Hamilton’s Curse is plaguing America once again.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo151.html

Women participation in state power
- Satya Pahadi
The history does not repeat in the some way. But the history can not be falsified. The stories written in the pages of history can not be justified falsely. The story of the women bravery has a live connection with the whole story of the movements of the people. Women have taken part unprecedently in all the movements from 1951 and especially in decade long people's war (PW).
Nepalese people's movement has to take its bends in each decade. There has been a mentionable participation of women in every movement. Women themselves have made a social status in a way of emancipation.
However, there are some questions about the capacity and efficiency of women. These questions are directly related to the question of women leadership in the decision making place. One of them is the question about whether they are in Constituent Assembly and in council of the ministers only according to the policy of inclusive and proportionate. Is the capacity and efficiency only obstruction for women leadership?
1. Women's problems and the question of ideology:
First of all, the emancipation of women is only possible due to the correct and revolutionary political line. Here, the question rose on women emancipation and the question raised by feminists differs greatly.
The feminists argue that the discriminations over women can be solved even remaining far from the politics and ideology. They always suggest that the movement should be one of politics. This is because men can not understand their problems. The woman questions are only practical question and are not related with theories. If we see it superficially, it seems correct. But, it is incorrect if we see the whole aspects of the lives of women. Misbehaves and exploitations are done against women by women. To reach into depth, we should be aware of the two extremist ideas:
a. The idea to understand women problems as a specific problem and minimize them.
b. The idea to separate women from the entire society and the common problems.
The women problems are related with the problems of castes, region and the different communities. They are solved through the common effort of all. Some of the problems are distinguished ones. Women themselves should take initiative for their solution.
However, the reason behind these especial problems is the feudalistic characteristics of production and feudalistic productive relationship. No ownership in property and culturally put into 2nd sex are the feudal discrimination. Therefore, the real emancipation of women is through the ideology and class ideology.
2. The question of women participation in all the sectors
The question of inclusiveness and the proportionate has become the debated issue today. This awareness has been possible only through a decade long people's war. More than 40% women representatives from different castes and ethnicity are nominated by the Maoist Party. Many women candidates have become victorious in the election first-past-the-post system. Other political parties have hardly trying to follow CPN-Maoist.
Along with the historical participation of women, we have had to answer about the capacity of women whether they are able to run the state power or not. Here, what is the measurement of the women capacity to run the state power? All have accepted the vital role of women in all the movements and wars. It means the capacity of women is heartily accepted in this period. Then, why is there a question about women capacity in this new situation?
3. The question on the development of women capacity
Actually the question has been raised about those women representatives who have been successful to be in the state power by leading and addressing the ambitions and aspirations of the poor and marginalized. Now, the principal cause of the repression of women, the unitarily feudal monarchy, has been ended and the Federal Democratic Republic has been established.
The women consciousness is revolutionary in Nepal. The revolutionary consciousness differs from evolutionary consciousness. If this consciousness is accepted as the measurement of ideology, then, it is not an exaggerated thing that Nepalese women representatives have real capacity to run the state power.
We can not even imagine that the discrimination against women can not be exterminated without the violent struggle because of the patriarchal system, boldly founded over the brutal repression of women since thousands of years ago. Therefore, we, first of all, should be clear from all the illusions that women are not efficient and capable. Simultaneously, we should be aware about the fake argument that the women are made weak by the nature itself.
If we talk about the valor of women is people's war, we comments see a live history from the women of Kalikot, the far western Nepal where only the civil women had seized guns from armed police force with the help of sticks and stones to the jail broken by women in Gurkha district. There are the unprecedented examples of women bravery and capacity.
Responsibility develops capacity. Responsibility itself is both opportunity and challenge. Nevertheless, the main problem is suspicion over the trust in the capacity of women. Some special efficiencies need in some especial jobs: like pilot, doctor, lawyer and scientist. Here, the distinguished capacity is equally necessary both to men and women. Politically, Nepalese women are capable to lead and run the government. Women educated by the political consciousness are capable to lead the society and country any where in the world.


WSWS : News & Analysis : North America Who is Henry Paulson?
By Tom Eley
23 September 2008

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The plan to rescue the US financial industry arrogates virtually
unlimited money and power over the financial affairs of the state to
the office of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Paulson is a figure
with a long history of intimate connections to the political and
financial elite.
In 1970, fresh from the Masters program of the Harvard Business
School, Paulson entered the Nixon administration, working first as
staff assistant to the assistant secretary of defense. In 1972-73,
Paulson worked as office assistant to John Erlichman, assistant to the
president for domestic affairs. Erlichman was one of the key figures
involved in organizing President Richard Nixon’s notorious “plumbers”
unit that carried out illegal covert operations against the
president’s political opponents, including espionage, blackmail, and
revenge. Ehlichman resigned in 1973, and in 1975 he was convicted of
obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy, and was imprisoned
for 18 months.
Utilizing his connections, Paulson went to work for Goldman Sachs in
1974. In a 2007 feature, the British newspaper the Guardian wrote,
“Not only was he well connected enough to get the job [in the Nixon
White House], but well connected enough to resign in the thick of the
Watergate scandal without ever getting caught up in the fallout. He
went straight to Goldman back home in Illinois.”
Paulson rose through the ranks of Goldman Sachs, becoming a partner in
1982, co-head of investment banking in 1990, chief operating officer
in 1994. In 1998 he forced out his co-chairman Jon Corzine “in what
amounted to a coup,” according to New York Times economics
correspondent Floyd Norris, and took over the post of CEO.
Goldman Sachs is perhaps the single best-connected Wall Street firm.
Its executives routinely go in and out of top government posts.
Corzine went on to become US senator from New Jersey and is now the
state’s governor. Corzine’s predecessor, Stephen Friedman, served in
the Bush administration as assistant to the president for economic
policy and as chairman of the National Economic Council (NEC).
Friedman’s predecessor as Goldman Sachs CEO, Robert Rubin, served as
chairman of the NEC and later treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
Agence France Press, in a 2006 article on Paulson’s appointment, “Has
Goldman Sachs Taken Over the Bush Administration?” noted that, in
addition to Paulson, “[t]he president’s chief of staff, Josh Bolten,
and the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Jeffery
Reuben, are Goldman alumni.”
“But the flow goes both ways,” the article continued, “Goldman
recently hired Robert Zoellick, who stepped down as the US deputy
secretary of state, and Faryar Shirzad, who worked as one of Bush’s
national security advisors.”
Prior to being selected as treasury secretary, Paulson was a major
individual campaign contributor to Republican candidates, giving over
$336,000 of his own money between 1998 and 2006.
Since taking office, Paulson has overseen the destruction of three of
Goldman Sachs’ rivals. In March, Paulson helped arrange the fire sale
of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase. Then, a little more than a week
ago, he allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse, while simultaneously
organizing the absorption of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America. This
left only Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as major investment banks,
both of which were converted on Sunday into bank holding companies, a
move that effectively ended the existence of the investment bank as a
distinct economic form.
In the months leading up to his proposed $700 billion bailout of the
financial industry, Paulson had already used his office to dole out
hundreds of billions of dollars. After his July 2008 proposal for $70
billion to resolve the insolvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
failed, Paulson organized the government takeover of the two mortgage-
lending giants for an immediate $200 billion price tag, while making
the government potentially liable for hundreds of billions more in bad
debt. He then organized a federal purchase of an 80 percent stake in
the giant insurer American International Group (AIG) at a cost of $85
billion.
These bailouts have been designed to prevent a chain reaction collapse
of the world economy, but more importantly they aimed to insulate and
even reward the wealthy shareholders, like Paulson, primarily
responsible for the financial collapse.
Paulson bears a considerable amount of personal responsibility for the
crisis.
Paulson, according to a celebratory 2006 BusinessWeek article entitled
“Mr. Risk Goes to Washington,” was “one of the key architects of a
more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and
greater chances in their pursuit of profits.” Under Paulson’s watch,
that meant “taking on more debt: $100 billion in long-term debt in
2005, compared with about $20 billion in 1999. It means placing big
bets on all sorts of exotic derivatives and other securities.”
According to the International Herald Tribune, Paulson “was one of the
first Wall Street leaders to recognize how drastically investment
banks could enhance their profitability by betting with their own
capital instead of acting as mere intermediaries.” Paulson “stubbornly
assert[ed] Goldman’s right to invest in, advise on and finance deals,
regardless of potential conflicts.”
Paulson then handsomely benefited from the speculative boom. This
wealth was based on financial manipulation and did nothing to create
real value in the economy. On the contrary, the extraordinary
enrichment of individuals like Paulson was the corollary to the
dismantling of the real economy, the bankrupting of the government,
and the impoverishment of masses the world over.
Paulson was compensated to the tune of $30 million in 2004 and took
home $37 million in 2005. In his career at Goldman Sachs he built up a
personal net worth of over $700 million, according to estimates.
After Paulson’s ascension to the treasury, his colleagues at Goldman
Sachs carried on the bonanza. At the end of 2006, Paulson’s successor
Lloyd Blankfein was handed over a $53.4 million year-end bonus, while
11 other Goldman Sachs executives raked in $150 million in year-end
bonuses combined. That year, the top investment firms Goldman Sacks,
Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns
handed out $36 billion in bonuses. At the end of 2007, the executives
of the same firms, excepting Merrill, were handed another $30 billion.

159,000 drop in US payrolls signals deepening recession

GM to close Ohio plant by year’s end

By Barry Grey
4 October 2008

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The US Labor Department on Friday reported a net loss of 159,000 non-
farm jobs in September, as payrolls shrank in virtually every sector
of the private economy. The jobless survey, considerably worse than
forecast by economists, reflected the gathering strength of a
recession that is global in scope and is poised to worsen.

The government report, based on a survey conducted prior to the
collapse of credit markets in the wake of the September 15 bankruptcy
filing of Lehman Brothers, does not fully account for the impact of
the widening financial crisis on the broader economy. Many economists
predict that layoffs will accelerate in the coming weeks, with the
official unemployment rate rising from the current 6.1 percent to 7
percent or more in early 2009.

The relentless job-cutting in the US—the report for September
registered the ninth straight month of payroll declines—is indicative
of a systemic crisis of the capitalist system that erupted first in
the United States but is increasingly reverberating around the world.
The Eurozone countries are now in recession and layoffs are mounting
in most of the major industrialized countries, particularly in the
financial sector and the auto industry.

This week alone, the Swiss banking giant UBS announced it would cut
2,000 more jobs—a further 10 percent of its investment banking work
force. The bank, which has written off $43 billion in bad loans over
the past year, earlier announced 4,000 job cuts at its investment
bank.

Lehman Brothers’ European fixed-income division announced it would
wind down its operations, laying off 750 employees.

Recent surveys have shown that manufacturers across the world’s
advanced economies, including the US, Europe and Japan, are slashing
output. The slump has hit particularly hard in the auto sector.

This week, Volvo Trucks announced it was cutting more than 20 percent
of its European blue-collar staff—some 1,400 employees at its three
plants in Belgium and Sweden. Volvo cars, owned by Ford, last month
accelerated plans to cut 2,000 jobs and said it would need to cut an
additional 900 next year. Auto components plants that supply Volvo
said they were cutting jobs.

Ford and Volkswagen have both cut jobs at their car plants in Belgium.

In the US, General Motors announced Friday it would close its sports
utility vehicle plant in Moraine, Ohio by the end of this year, laying
off 1,200 employees, most of them hourly workers.

The slump in auto sales over the summer has been accelerated by the
freezing up of credit markets, making it more difficult for consumers
to obtain loans to purchase new cars. Auto sales in September
plummeted in both the US and Europe. They declined 32 percent in
Spain, 6 percent in Italy and 2 percent in Germany.

Auto companies in Britain are cutting output, introducing three- and
four-day work weeks in some plants. Ford is scaling back production
across Europe.

In the US, the sales figures for September were even worse than in
Europe, hitting Japanese as well as American auto makers. Overall
sales of cars and light trucks fell 27 percent last month, compared to
a year earlier.

The biggest drop among the US Big Three companies came at Ford, which
reported a 34 percent decline. Chrysler sales fell 33 percent and GM
reported a 16 percent drop.

Among Japanese producers, Toyota sales in the US were down 32 percent,
Nissan Motors saw a 37 percent decline, and Honda sales were down 24
percent.

Major US dealerships are starting to go out of business, and analysts
expect that trend to accelerate.

The US Labor Department jobless report registered the biggest monthly
drop in payrolls in more than five years. It brought the net job loss
so far this year to 760,000. The shrinkage in payrolls was spread
throughout most of the economy.

Manufacturing lost 51,000 jobs. Construction fell by 35,000 jobs.
Retailers shed 40,000 workers. Leisure and hospitality industries cut
17,000 jobs. Professional and business services reduced their payrolls
by 27,000.

Service sector employment, which until recently had seen smaller
declines than in goods-producing industries, fell 82,000 in September,
the biggest drop in more than five years.

Employment in manufacturing in the US is now down by 442,000 from its
year-ago level. Of this, the auto sector has lost 140,000 jobs.

The official unemployment rate remained at 6.1 percent, but this
measure vastly underestimates the real level of joblessness, because
it does not count laid off workers who have stopped looking for a job
or those working part-time because they cannot get full-time
employment.

The number of people working part-time because they couldn’t find a
full-time job or because their hours had been cut back due to slack
business conditions jumped by 337,000 to 6.1 million.

A more accurate gauge of unemployment included in the Labor Department
report, the so-called under-employment rate, rose to 11 percent from
10.7 percent, the highest rate for that measure since April 1994.

Another measure of the slumping jobs market and growing economic
distress, the average hourly work week, slipped by 0.1 hours to 33.6.
A mere 3-cent gain in average hourly salary, combined with the shorter
work week, means that the average weekly paycheck fell by 81 cents to
$610.

Unemployment for men rose by 0.5 percent to 6.1 percent. The jobless
rate for black men jumped 1.6 percent to 11.9 percent, the highest
since February of 1994. Unemployment among workers with high school
degrees only stood at 9.6 percent.

“The US economy is shrinking, and there will be many more awful
reports like this,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief US economist at High
Frequency Economics.

Other economic data released this week confirm this prognosis. The
Commerce Department reported that US factory orders fell by 4.0
percent in August, far more than the consensus forecast of economists,
who predicted a 2.5 percent decline.

The Institute for Supply Management said its survey of US
manufacturers indicated output falling at its fastest rate since
October 2001.

The number of US workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits
neared the half-million mark last week, hitting a fresh seven-year
high.

Earlier this month, the job placement consultancy firm Challenger,
Gray & Christmas reported that job cuts announced by US employers in
August jumped 12 percent over a year ago to cap the biggest summer of
downsizing in six years.

Employers announced plans to reduce their work forces by 88,700 jobs
in August. For the summer period of May through August, job cuts
totaled 377,000, up from 249,000 in the summer of 2007. That lifted
the total of announced cuts in 2008 to 668,000, up 29 percent from
516,000 in the first eight months of 2007.

The vicious cycle of contracting credit, resulting from the implosion
of the housing and credit bubbles, mounting layoffs, slumping consumer
spending and a worsening of the financial crisis continues to deepen.
There are many signs that the credit crunch will continue to undermine
major companies.

A growing list of hedge funds, hit by their exposure to Lehman
Brothers and other failed firms, are facing rising withdrawal requests
and are telling their customers they cannot have their money back.

Billions of dollars in contracts on now-defaulted credit default swaps
on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual are
due to be settled this month, with the likely result of billions in
additional losses for major financial firms.

The collapse of confidence in the credit-worthiness of major banks has
led to a virtual freeze in the market for commercial paper, short-term
debt issued by a wide range of companies to finance their day-to-day
operations. The market for commercial paper in the US has fallen from
$2.2 trillion last summer to $1.6 trillion today.

The drying up of credit is throwing small and large companies, state
and local governments, colleges and other institutions into a sudden
crisis, where they lack the cash needed to meet payrolls, pay bills
and buy essential items. One corporate giant whose viability is now
suspect is General Electric, which this week announced an emergency
plan to raise capital by selling $12 billion in common stock. In a
sign of the times, billionaire investor Warren Buffet agreed to inject
$3 billion of capital into GE, through the purchase of preferred stock
(on highly favorable terms), in a bid to restore market confidence and
stem a sharp decline in GE stock.

As the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Indeed, this week, General Electric
Co., long hailed as one of the steadiest companies in America, was
forced to raise billions of dollars of capital on onerous terms partly
because investors in GE’s short-term corporate debt fretted about its
rising borrowing costs. On Wednesday, a money fund catering to
educational institutions froze withdrawals—sending more than 1,000
colleges and schools scrambling to ensure they have cash to pay
teachers and cover expenses.”

On Thursday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sent a letter
to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warning that the largest state in
the US might be forced to ask for a $7 billion emergency loan from the
federal government.

There is little belief in financial markets that the $700 billion-plus
US government handout to Wall Street, approved by Congress and signed
into law by President Bush on Friday, will resolve the financial
crisis or avert a long and protracted recession. The Dow Jones
Industrial Average was actually up more than 200 points before the
House of Representatives voted to approve the bailout, but it fell
steadily thereafter, closing with a loss of 157 points.




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"The collapse that began on Wall Street has finally put paid to the myth of the free market," the article says. All that's left is to decide how it gets ...
So much for the 'free' market. Now what? Toronto Star
all 2 news articles » TSE:TS.B
Bin Laden Used a Similar Strategy to Decimate American Capitalism ...
Huffington Post, NY - 12 minutes ago
In a cave somewhere on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, Osama Bin Laden must be laughing as he watches the collapse of American capitalism as we know it, ...

코리아타임즈 'Financial Meltdown Won’t Lead to Collapse of US Capitalism'
코리아타임즈, South Korea - 23 Sep 2008
... columnist and expert observed Tuesday that the ongoing financial turmoil in the United States will not ultimately lead to the collapse of capitalism. ...
Wildlife Capitalism vs Socialism Zoo!
ireport - 12 hours ago
Due to $700B Bailout, we see people debating socialism and capitalism. Most are so worry about collapse of capitalism. Is Capitalism that perfect? ...

Today's Zaman Will capitalism collapse?
Today's Zaman, Turkey - 4 Oct 2008
The UK will not collapse.” I would say the same thing both to opponents and proponents of capitalism, which is synonymous with the market economy. ...
The financial sector just bombed itself. Is this the end of ...
guardian.co.uk, UK - 19 Sep 2008
All things considered in the current financial crisis you'd expect more from the left about the collapse of capitalism and the opportunities this presents ...
Mike Moore: Rumours of capitalism's demise greatly exaggerated
New Zealand Herald, New Zealand - 5 Oct 2008
Overstretched bad loans and reckless lending has been exposed due to the collapse of the US housing market. When I was briefly Prime Minister, we bailed out ...
This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world
guardian.co.uk, UK - 5 Oct 2008
The left critique of capitalism - that markets delivered instability, booms and busts, monopoly and gross inequity that paradoxically undermined the values ...
Regulators cannot avert next crisis The Australian
all 2 news articles »

One Nation Under Capitalism: It’s Time For A Crucifixion
CounterCurrents.org, India - 2 hours ago
What of the financial markets, Wall Street, and the decaying socioeconomic infrastructure of American capitalism? Let them collapse. What of the rest of us? ...
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be
NeoConstant Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs, AZ - 14 minutes ago
Hanging around outside the conference of Britain’s governing Labour party, I was handed a leaflet declaring that the “crisis of capitalism” was upon us. ...
The Bailout: How Capitalism Killed Democracy
CounterCurrents.org, India - 50 minutes ago
It just might be that the prospect of a bailout—which could make a total collapse no worse for the banks than a garden-variety bear market—could have helped ...
Not Everyone Should Own a Home
Wall Street Journal - 2 hours ago
Politicians who pimped this dream created an unsustainable mortgage industry whose collapse is only surprising because it didn't happen earlier. ...
Blame bad rules, not capitalism Turkish Daily News (subscription)
all 3 news articles »
Capitalism in deepest crisis in 80 years
Inquirer.net, Philippines - 4 Oct 2008
The head of the US Federal Reserve bank Alan Greenspan pumped out dollars to avert systemic collapse, but after the crisis he went on providing unduly cheap ...
Column The Marx-Hayek solution
Financial Express, India - 23 hours ago
They see it as the final collapse of capitalism, the exposure of the dangers of liberalisation, the vacuity of the American way and the folly of the free ...
Has the market failed?
The Punch, Nigeria - 17 hours ago
The collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR have put an end to the rivalry between capitalism and other forms of economic ...

Palestine Chronicle Lessons from the Collapse of Wall Street
Palestine Chronicle, WA - 12 hours ago
By James Petras The ongoing collapse of the stock market and the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars managed by Wall Street investment banks illustrate ...
Commentary: US leadership challenged
Middle East Times, Egypt - 2 hours ago
President Dmitry Medvedev blamed selfish "American capitalism" for the Wall Street meltdown. "Casino capitalism" was a little less disreputable than "bandit ...
The Wall Street bust
Asia Times Online, Hong Kong - 6 hours ago
They believed the Roaring Twenties was the golden age of capitalism. The great bust could have been avoided with a simple ($5 billion or so) banking system ...


Calcutta Telegraph How US crisis impacts Indian economy
Commodity Online, India - 4 hours ago
By Ziad PS How has the US financial crisis affected Indian economy? A crisis that erupted in USA has now spread globally and we have been watching the ...
PM expresses 'deep gratitude' to Indian Americans IndiaPost.com
Global crisis to affect our ability to finance development: PM Indian Express
Build India 'Free from Fear of Want': PM San Leandro India West
Chandigarh Tribune
all 231 news articles »

TopNews Pains of a slowing economy
Times of India, India - 4 Oct 2008
Indian optimists thought that miraculous growth was here to stay. But along came the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and the Indian economy slumped along ...
Meltdown of the US economy: India should take policy initiative Central Chronicle
Credit crisis wipes out $20 trn of global market value Business Standard
Sensex sinks 529 pts as RIL tumbles NDTV.com
The Statesman - Press Trust of India
all 233 news articles »
PM aiding US economy bailout: RSS
Indian Express, India - 21 hours ago
... Minister Manmohan Singh has plans to purchase US Treasury bills worth Rs 56000 crore to help the crumbling US economy at the cost of Indian economy. ...

AFP Indian firms see weakening profits on high costs - survey
Reuters India, India - 11 hours ago
... of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the majority of respondents also saw the Indian economy remaining the same or worsening over the next two quarters. ...
Gloom engulfs corporate India: survey AFP
Erosion in business confidence; outlook looks no better Hindu
all 26 news articles »

BBC News India's Tata Motors project pits industry vs. farmers
Chicago Tribune, United States - 13 hours ago
Industry giants say that if they are going to keep pushing India's economy forward, they need land. Other disputes are playing out throughout the country. ...
Subir Gokarn:Messages from Singur Business Standard
Tata's defeat on Nano project tarnishes India's image International Herald Tribune
Tata Leaves West Bengal, Blames Mamta Banerjee Desicritics.org
Expressindia.com - The Associated Press
all 909 news articles » BOM:500570

Sify Indian stocks down on global economy concerns
London Stock Exchange, UK - 1 hour ago
Indian stocks fell in early trade on growing fears that the global slowdown will worsen. The Bombay Stock Exchange's Sensitive Index, or Sensex, ...
Global woes pull down equities; Nifty down 3% Economic Times
India’s Sensex dips below 12000 to two-year low (Lead) Thaindian.com
Indian market weak in opening trade RTT News
SINDH TODAY - Sify
all 174 news articles »

TopNews Insulating economy our priority: Manmohan
Hindu, India - 1 Oct 2008
ON BOARD SPECIAL AIRCRAFT: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said his government’s foremost priority is to insulate the Indian economy “to the maximum ...
N-deal in bag, PM asks EU business titans to invest in India Thaindian.com
Special Article The Statesman
What Indian American leaders told the PM? NDTV.com
Economic Times - Hindu
all 267 news articles »

Sify A Matter Of Economics
Organiser, India - 5 hours ago
There is so far no credit crunch in the Indian market. Nor has it been proved as in the case of the US that Indian economy is capital market driven. ...
India a good long-term buy now Economic Times
The bailout needs a bailout Hindu Business Line
all 4 news articles »
India tagged its economy to that of the US and now the country ...
India Daily, NJ - 4 Oct 2008
Indian PM Manmohan Singh has ruined the Indian economy just like George Bush ruined the American economy. The biggest mistake for India was to open up its ...
Forum in Bahrain to highlight India as investment destination
Hindu, India - 5 Oct 2008
The event, being organised by the BCCI in cooperation with the Indian Embassy, will highlight the salient features of Indian Economy and the scope of ...

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MSN India India Cuts Bank Cash Ratio for First Time in 5 Years (Update2)
Bloomberg - 3 hours ago
Foreign investors, who bought a record $17.2 billion of Indian stocks last year, are now fleeing an economy which grew last quarter at the slowest pace ...
India Inc feels the heat on the credit front Business Standard
Indian banks: going beyond the current crisis Financial Express
Industry hails CRR cut, seeks lower lending rates Economic Times
Commodity Online - Moneycontrol.com
all 148 news articles » OTC:LEHMQ - BOM:521070 - BOM:532532
High times for Indian hotels
Asia Property Report, Thailand - 13 hours ago
The strong performance of the corporate sector and the growth in the economy has led to an unprecedented surge in business travel. “While the Indian economy ...BOM:500850 - JLL

Zee News Indian Stocks Drop to Two-Year Low; Reliance, Infosys Decline
Bloomberg - 4 hours ago
The world's largest economy has lost 760000 jobs this year, compared with the 1.1 million created last year. Reliance, India's most valuable company, ...
Indian shares tumble on global slowdown, US recession fears; RIL ... Forbes
Indian Stocks Decline; Reliance, Sterlite Industries Lead Drop Khaleej Times
Indian shares lower in early trade on Asian cues, Wall St losses ... Hemscott
Bloomberg - Bloomberg
all 77 news articles » BOM:500209 - BOM:500900 - BOM:532174
Direct tax collection up 33 percent to Rs.1.47 trillion
Thaindian.com, Thailand - 4 hours ago
“Continued high growth in TDS (tax deduction at source) and FBT (fringe benefit tax) collections indicates inherent strength of the Indian economy and ...
Direct tax collections up 33% in first half of FY09 Livemint
all 16 news articles »

GulfNews Terror could derail India's economy
GulfNews, United Arab Emirates - 4 Oct 2008
By Manik Mehta, Special to Gulf News When an American businessman recently asked me at an event in New York whether the Indian Government could contain the ...

Rediff Best nations to do business in; Pak ahead of India
Rediff, India - 7 hours ago
India has the world's fourth largest gross domestic product at $4.726 trillion. India's per capita income is $977. Indian economy is among the fastest ...
‘Must revise indexes, but shortage of manpower to collect data’
Indian Express, India - 21 hours ago
While the Prime Minister himself expressed urgency for a complete overhaul of the data collection system, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy too has ...
Don’t let your wallet be hit
Financial Express, India - 8 hours ago
Besides affecting the Indian economy at large, the steep decline in the value of the rupee could also hit your wallet. It is the law of demand and supply ...
Effect of crisis Business Line
all 2 news articles »

The Associated Press Road of hope for divided Kashmir
Asia Times Online, Hong Kong - 6 hours ago
At present, this market has been catered to by Indian and multinational companies (MNC) from mainland India. By comparison, the PAK economy, sustained by a ...
:. Kashmir is a powder keg Kashmir Watch
all 373 news articles »

NDTV.com India favourites against Aussies: McMillan
Hindu, India - 4 hours ago
The captain of Indian Cricket League (ICL) Kolkata Tigers team, McMillan, said Australia were yet to fill up the big void left by Shane Warne and in the ...
Indian tourism in NSW set to take off Visa Bureau
all 868 news articles »

Washington Post US-Russia divide allows the Middle East arms race to flourish
Taipei Times, Taiwan - 5 Oct 2008
By Shlomo Ben-Ami Israel’s desperate plea that the world act to curtail what its intelligence service describes as Iran’s “gallop toward a nuclear bomb” has ...
The Mideast: More Complex, More Dangerous Christian Broadcasting Network
all 328 news articles » BOM:500278
Japan's Amano makes case to succeed IAEA's ElBaradei
Reuters South Africa, South Africa - 3 hours ago
... Oct 6 (Reuters) - Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano on Monday launched the politically charged race to replace Mohamed ElBaradei as head of the UN nuclear ...
Without assured nuclear supply Iran will keep enriching Zawya
all 411 news articles »

Seattle Post Intelligencer EDITORIAL: Nuclear Fallout
istockAnalyst.com (press release), OR - 9 hours ago
... out of the nuclear closet, so to speak, is certain to exacerbate tensions between the rivals, seeding the incentive for a nuclear arms race in Asia, ...
India: US atomic pact sign 'world needs India' The Associated Press
Pakistan demands US nuclear deal BBC News
Pakistan demands US India-like nuclear deal Khabrein.info
The Hill - AsiaOne
all 475 news articles »

AFP White House contenders go nuclear a month from election day
AFP - 5 hours ago
But while the McCain campaign insists it will not play the race card against Obama, it does intend to portray him as a wild-eyed liberal who is out of step ...

BBC News US-India Deal Passes, Nuclear Arms Race Feared
OneWorld US, DC - 2 Oct 2008
But critics think the deal creates a dangerous precedent and will likely lead to a new nuclear arms race in South Asia. Since the 1947 partition of the ...
Senate approves US-India nuclear trade deal The Associated Press
:. Indo-USA: Is Cash payment delaying the “deal”? Kashmir Watch
Indo-US N-deal could undermine anti-nuke regime: UK media Expressindia.com
Seattle Times - Washington Post
all 1,685 news articles »

BBC News Nuclear race against odds
Calcutta Telegraph, India - 25 Sep 2008
25: Barring a miracle, the nuclear deal is unlikely to be operationalised during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s meeting with President George W. Bush today ...
Nuclear deal reaches US House, may hit a glitch Hindustan Times
US Senate panel advances US-India nuclear deal The Associated Press
India Nuclear-Energy Agreement Wins US Senate Panel's Backing Bloomberg
RTT News - Gulf Times
all 948 news articles »
RWE risks reputation loss with Belene power plant -Greenpeace
Sofia Echo, Bulgaria - 2 hours ago
"Up to now RWE has only operated nuclear power plants in its home market," Greenpeace EU policy and energy campaigner Jan Haverkamp said in the statement. ...

Khaleej Times Bush to sign US-India nuclear deal on October 8
Geo TV, Pakistan - 4 Oct 2008
Meanwhile, American and Indian armed control experts believe that a new nuclear race will begin in the region after the pact.
Rice lauds nuclear deal as key to US-India future The Associated Press
Rice says nuclear deal done, only procedural signing left (Roundup) Monsters and Critics.com
all 1,115 news articles »
US Senate passes India nuclear deal, Bush hails, experts fear arms ...
Associated Press of Pakistan, Pakistan - 1 Oct 2008
... the bill also observed that the deal would undermine Washington’s efforts to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, and could spark a global arms race. ...
US Senate Approves US-India Nuclear Accord Voice of America
Business celebrates late Bush foreign policy win The Hill
Senate approves US-India nuclear deal Livemint
all 429 news articles »
'World will not stop Iran going nuclear'
Jerusalem Newswire, Israel - 15 minutes ago
Addressing a conference in France, Scheffer said he was worried by the failure of the United Nations to slow down or stop Iran's race for an A-Bomb for ...

AFP US policy shifts seen in Asia under new president
AFP - 18 hours ago
Both presidential contenders, senators Barack Obama and John McCain, have new ideas on how to handle a resurgent China, a nuclear-armed North Korea and ...

Jaunted Amazing Race 13: Do You Like American Candy?
Jaunted - 4 hours ago
What they don't realize is that they are reading part of the instructions for the other Detour, making Brooke and Marissa look like nuclear physicists. ...
Word on the Street: US House race gets uglier
Peoria Journal Star, IL - 15 hours ago
The news release also refers to a Callahan campaign advertisement showing a nuclear bomb exploding and criticizing Schock for comments he made before the ...

Times Online Europe's Financial Crisis, McCain's Campaign Challenges, and the ...
Council on Foreign Relations, NY - 3 hours ago
US Relations: In an editorial, the paper considers relations between the United States and Pakistan in the light of the US deal with India on nuclear ...
On the Brink Wall Street Journal
Palin avoids howlers – and some questions Independent
Analysis: Palin Met Expectations, But Still Fell Short WIS
The Daily Star - Leader Vindicator
all 4,774 news articles »
Obama, McCain ready to turn up heat as race nears finish
Detroit Free Press, United States - 5 Oct 2008
McCain will try to focus on energy policy, where he favors more domestic drilling for oil and more development of nuclear power than Obama. ...
Member of Iaea Board of Governors
istockAnalyst.com (press release), OR - 21 hours ago
... adding Israel's non commitment to nuclear non proliferation provisions would push the whole region towards a new armament race. ...
Wake up and smell the crisis
Hindustan Times, India - 48 minutes ago
The present global woes will only compound India’s difficulty in attracting more such investments, except for nuclear power facilities with the passage of ...
Dem incumbent faces GOP challenger in Windsor race
Rutland Herald, VT - 10 hours ago
Mitchell, 74, said he also worked very hard on a bill to try and make Entergy Nuclear — owner of Vermont Yankee — responsible for its own decommissioning. ...
For Bush, Some Good News Amid the Bad
Washington Post, United States - 16 hours ago
Congress also gave final approval last week to a landmark nuclear agreement between India and the United States, a deal that has been in the works for years ...

Jewish Exponent Ahmadinejad isn't too impressed
Jerusalem Post, Israel - 5 Oct 2008
The good news: Both US presidential candidates think the prospect of Iran going nuclear is a bad thing. Republican candidate John McCain went straight to ...
The Race to the White House: How the Vice Presidential Debate ... African Path
McCain a runaway favourite ... among Israelis Toronto Star
all 38 news articles »

all 3 news articles » Meltdown highlights our own failings
Houston Chronicle, United States - 4 Oct 2008
Wall Street as we knew it lies in ruin, the temple of capitalism brought down by hubris so grand that Enron's collapse only bolstered its confidence. ...
Blog cafe No end to capitalism
Financial Express, India - 22 Sep 2008
Consider, for example, that in the decade after Soros’ and others predictions of the collapse of global capitalism following the Asian crisis in the 1990s, ...
That rubbish they talk about the credit
Times Online, UK - 3 Oct 2008
That leads us to the argument about capitalism's terminal failure. As I've argued before, the current collapse owes as much to government intrusion into the ...
Four Crises of the Contemporary World Capitalist System
Monthly Review, VA - 5 hours ago
This essay is adapted from a talk presented to the Amandla Conference “Continuity and Discontinuity of Capitalism in the Post Apartheid South Africa,” in ...
Collapse economy, collect $2000000 & don't go to jail
Manteca Bulletin, CA - 5 Oct 2008
After you get your McMansion, you have two ways to win the game unlike in that old-fashioned game of capitalism known as Monopoly. ...
Global X appeal
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - 3 hours ago
In the second half of the 20th century Wall St was global capitalism's undisputed headquarters. However, London snared part of this role after 9/11; ...