 |
| |
Are you the guy who never knows what's going on in the world except what you hear on the news? When your friends are debating (or killing one another) over politics and world events, do you sit there with a blank look on your kisser?
Well now you have a solution. Morty's Cabin subscribes to the best intelligence services we can find for only the best in News Analysis and Intelligence Reports on the news. And it can be clearly understood by people like you and Morty. OK, OK, so Morty is in a class by himself, but you get the idea.
Now you can be the MOST INFORMED on all current events throughout the nation and the world. Your information was garnered here. Only on Morty's Cabin.
Read it every day and you'll be surprised how short a time it takes for you to become an expert instead of an X-Spurt (the latter meaning a 'has been drip').
Morty
_________________________________
MEMBERS! Post your own stories or articles you've come across [give attributions!]. Just click on Submit Story across the top of the page. You can also tell everyone what you think about any story. Click comments? at the end of each article.Morty's Cabin: In Depth World News Analysis
[ Go to Home | Select a New Topic ] |
|
|
Loan Shark IMF Still in the Pillaging Business
|
|
Published April 6, 2009 by CounterPunch -- www.counterpunch.com
Will the Debtors Fight Back?
The IMF Rules the World
By MICHAEL HUDSON
Not much substantive news was expected to come out of the G-20 meetings that ended on April 2 in London – certainly no good news was even suggested. Europe, China and the United States had too deeply distinct interests. American diplomats wanted to lock foreign countries into further dependency on paper dollars. The rest of the world sought a way to avoid giving up real output and ownership of their resources and enterprises for yet more hot-potato dollars. In such cases one expects a parade of smiling faces and statements of mutual respect for each others’ position – so much respect that they have agreed to set up a “study group” or two to kick the diplomatic ball down the road.
|
Published April 5, 2009 by TomDispatch.com
Global Crime Wave?
A Syndrome of Crime, Violence, and Repression on the Way
by Michael T. Klare
In all catastrophes, there are always winners among the host of losers and victims. Bad times, like good ones, generate profits for someone. In the case of the present global economic meltdown, with our world at the brink and up to 50 million people potentially losing their jobs by the end of this year, one winner is likely to be criminal activity and crime syndicates. From Mexico to Africa, Russia to China, the pool of the desperate and the bribeable is expanding exponentially, pointing to a sharp upturn in global crime. As illicit profits rise, so will violence in the turf wars among competing crime syndicates and in the desperate efforts by panicked governments to put a clamp on criminal activity.
|
|
The Gordian Knot of Politics and Economics
|
|
Published March 27 - 29, 2009 by CounterPunch -- www.counterpunch.com
The Poverty of Monetarism
Too Big to Fail?
By ARNO J. MAYER
Blaming the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown for the global financial and economic blowout of 2008 is like blaming the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for World War I. In each case, a discrete event sparked a wider conflagration—but the tinder was already there.
In the early dawn of the 21st century, American capitalism continues to predominate and set the pace. But ever-more-frequent disturbances in the world economy undermine the pretended apoliticism of the econometrists who presume to legitimate and fine-tune capitalism in normal times. Acute convulsions invariably force a return to classical political economy rooted in moral philosophy and ethics, as practiced by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Friedrich von Hayek. Although today’s reigning economists, finance ministers, and central bankers are adept at manipulating interest rates and the money supply, by themselves such monetarist nostrums are of little use: the present disarray demands concerted political intervention.
|
Published on Sunday, March 19, 2009 by Rollingstone.com
The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power.
by Matt Taibbi
It's over - we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline - a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
|
|
Third World Ramifications
|
|
Published March 18, 2009 by Foreign Policy In Focus -- www.fpif.org
The Second Shockwave
by Michael T. Klare
While the economic contraction is apparently slowing in the advanced industrial countries and may reach bottom in the not-too-distant future, it's only beginning to gain momentum in the developing world, which was spared the earliest effects of the global meltdown. Because the crisis was largely precipitated by a collapse of the housing market in the United States and the resulting disintegration of financial products derived from the "securitization" of questionable mortgages, most developing nations were unaffected by the early stages of the meltdown, for the simple reason that they possessed few such assets.
|
Published March 13 - 15, 2009 by CounterPunch -- www.counterpunch.com
The Crisis and the Consolidation of Class Power
Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?
By DAVID HARVEY
Does this crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? My answer is that it depends what you mean by neo-liberalism. My interpretation is that it’s a class project, masked by a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free market. These were means, however, towards the restoration and consolidation of class power, and that neo-liberal project has been fairly successful.
|
Published January 20, 2009 by The Independent -- www.independent.co.uk
Henry Kissinger: The world must forge a new order or retreat to chaos
Not since JFK has there been such a reservoir of expectations
As the new US administration prepares to take office amid grave financial and international crises, it may seem counterintuitive to argue that the very unsettled nature of the international system generates a unique opportunity for creative diplomacy.
That opportunity involves a seeming contradiction. On one level, the financial collapse represents a major blow to the standing of the United States. While American political judgments have often proved controversial, the American prescription for a world financial order has generally been unchallenged. Now disillusionment with the United States' management of it is widespread.
|
Posted by virge on Saturday, January 24 @ 11:50:32 CST (209 reads)
(Read More... | 8129 bytes more | Score: 5)
|
|
Published January 22, 2009 by Foreign Policy in Focus -- www.fpif.org
Repudiate the Carter Doctrine
by Michael Klare
Twenty-nine years ago, President Jimmy Carter adopted the radical and dangerous policy of using military force to ensure U.S. access to Middle Eastern oil. "Let our position be absolutely he clear," he said in his State of the Union address on January 23, 1980. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region [and thereby endanger the flow of oil] will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
This principle — known ever since as the Carter Doctrine — led to U.S. involvement in three major wars and now risks further military entanglement in the greater Gulf area. It's time to repudiate this doctrine and satisfy U.S. energy needs without reliance on military intervention.
|
Posted by virge on Saturday, January 24 @ 11:34:29 CST (191 reads)
(Read More... | 11746 bytes more | Score: 0)
|
|
Published January 15, 2009 by The Nation -- www.thenation.com
Holding Bush Accountable
By Elizabeth Holtzman
President Obama, on his first day in office, can make a number of changes that will mark a clean break with the Bush presidency. He can, and should, issue an executive order revoking any prior order that permits detainee mistreatment by any government agency. He should begin the process of closing Guantánamo, and he should submit to Congress a bill to end the use of military commissions, at least as presently constituted. Over the coming months he can pursue other reforms to restore respect for the Constitution, such as revising the Patriot Act, abolishing secret prisons and "extraordinary rendition," and ending practices, like signing statements, that seek to undo laws.
While these steps are all crucial, however, it is not enough merely to cease the abuses of power and apparent criminality that marked the highest levels of George W. Bush's administration. We cannot simply shrug off the constitutional and criminal misbehavior of the administration, treat it as an aberration and hope it won't happen again. The misbehavior was not an aberration--aspects of it, particularly the idea that the president is above the law, were present in Watergate and in the Iran/Contra scandal. To fully restore the rule of law and prevent any repetition of Bush's misconduct, the abuses of his administration must be directly confronted. As Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen--recently tapped by Obama to head his Office of Legal Counsel--wrote in Slate last March, "We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of our American ideals."
|
Posted by virge on Friday, January 16 @ 12:43:49 CST (198 reads)
(Read More... | 19347 bytes more | Score: 0)
|
|
Published December 17, 2008 by truthout -- www.truthout.org
Obama's Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling
by: Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Since the 1980s, but particularly under the Bush administration, certain elements of the religious right, corporate culture and Republican right wing have argued that free public education represents either a massive fraud or a contemptuous failure. Far from a genuine call for reform, these attacks largely stem from an attempt to transform schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to the demands and values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the marketplace. As the educational historian David Labaree rightly argues, public schools have been under attack in the last decade "not just because they are deemed ineffective but because they are public."[1] Right-wing efforts to disinvest in public schools as critical sites of teaching and learning and govern them according to corporate interests is obvious in the emphasis on standardized testing, the use of top-down curricular mandates, the influx of advertising in schools, the use of profit motives to "encourage" student performance, the attack on teacher unions and modes of pedagogy that stress rote learning and memorization. For the Bush administration, testing has become the ultimate accountability measure, belying the complex mechanisms of teaching and learning. The hidden curriculum is that testing be used as a ploy to de-skill teachers by reducing them to mere technicians, that students be similarly reduced to customers in the marketplace rather than as engaged, critical learners and that always underfunded public schools fail so that they can eventually be privatized.
|
Posted by Virge on Tuesday, December 23 @ 11:12:10 CST (224 reads)
(Read More... | 22074 bytes more | Score: 0)
|
|
[ Archives ] | |
|
|
