Correction or Collapse-What Me Worry?
February 28th, 2007 - by: danny
Stuart Hoffman, chief economist of PNC: “”We’ve had this ‘What me worry?’ mentality. And this is a little bit of a wake-up call.”
James Trippon, editor of the China Stock Digest:
Many Americans know China as the manufacturing colossus that turns out cheap electronic and consumer products. Very few people realize that China has grown into one of the World’s largest economies.
A severe recession in China could spell economic disaster for the American economy and American investors; it may even decide the next presidential election.
James says that China’s low labor and manufacturing costs have propped up the American economy for years. A disruption to China capital markets could create a disaster for China’s economy. That in turn would affect cost of consumer products in the US, and the value of the dollar
GLOBAL EONOMIC SHOCK AS MARKETS FALL
OIL DEAL IN IRAQ MAY LEAD TO US STAYING
MURDOCH UNDER INVESTIGATION IN UK
As readers know I have become very concerned with the stability of our economic system and the way so much of our business press seems to feel the need to bolster consumer confidence by only stressing the upbeat news. As a small and ineffectual corrective, I have been including items about debt and economic inequality almost every day. The other day I quoted from a website with the upbeat quotes of the “experts” right before the crash of ’29 proved them all out of touch. Recall that after the first shock in ’29, there was a quick recovery and everyone said “nothing to worry about.” Black Friday followed!
Remember the law of gravity–what goes up must come down:
Kiyosaki: All booms eventually go bust.
http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/richricher/24515
I also made a film IN DEBT WE TRUST that is subtitled, “America Before the Bubble Bursts.” (indebtwetrust.com) That bubble did a little bursting yesterday as a major stock plunge hit Wall Street. And its reverberations were felt in Asia by the time the sun rose in the East.
Here are some of last night’s reports:
CBS MARKET WATCH FOCUSED ON THE CHINESE ROLE
Shanghaied again: Losses continue for Asian markets that triggered global sell-off
Stock plunge that started Tuesday in China, rippled around the world, comes back to Asia, where Shanghai, Japan, other major markets continue downward slide in Wednesday trading.
WHAT’S NEXT: More losses likely in short term. If long-term bond yields remain low and economic growth holds steady, bloodletting will likely be brief, investment strategists and traders are saying.
BBC: Steep dip as Asian markets open
Asian markets slide following the dip in global stocks on fears about China, with the Nikkei losing 3.8%.
CNN: The Dow sees its biggest one-day drop in 3 years, ending about 400 points lower after plummeting more than 500 points earlier in the day.
Dow dives deep on Shanghai index plunge
http://e.ccialerts.com/a/tBF5Jm1AO9jmfAdb01pAoX4bhTS/in10
But then–sound the bugle right before the opening bell–the air fills with predictions of a likely rebound. This was CNN this morning:
U.S. stocks were poised for a big rebound at today’s open, after yesterday’s huge selloff that included the Dow industrials’ biggest one-day drop since 2001. “After the violence of yesterday’s sell-off, it would be typical for us to rebound today,” said Art Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies & Co. “I think if we do get a bounce, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
And yet, there are deeper problems in our debt driven economy. Alan Greenspan yesterday warned of a “recession.” The New York Times reports:
“It was sort of one of those days where somebody snaps their fingers, and the market’s hypnotic trance is over,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist of PNC Financial.
In China, where the stock market had been soaring, the government had warned banks about improper loans to finance stock speculation.
In America, the selling seemed to add to worries that a decline in the housing market, and problems in particular with loans to risky borrowers, could spill over. And a report yesterday indicating that orders for durable goods – items like washing machines and computers – were surprisingly weak in January revived doubts about the strength of the American economy.”
BBC summed up whats happening worldwide:
The UK’s FTSE 100 index fell by 1% in morning trading. That took declines in the past two sessions to 3.2% and knocked £52bn off its total value.
France’s Cac 40 index dropped by 1% and Germany’s Dax lost 1.1%. Earlier, markets in Asia, Australia and India had all suffered substantial losses.
Investors are questioning the outlook for economic and earnings growth.
FROM ECONOMIC CRISIS, WE MOVE TO THE NON-STOP WAR
NYT: The Taliban claimed responsibility for the suicide attack outside a U.S. base, but the claim could not be verified.
AP: BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S.-led strike forces seized suspected Shiite death squad bosses Tuesday in raids that tested the fragile bonds between the government and a powerful militia faction allowing the Baghdad security crackdown to move ahead. The sweeps through the Sadr City slum were part of highly sensitive forays into areas loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has ridiculed the 2-week-old campaign for failing to halt bombings by suspected Sunni insurgents against Shiite civilians.
WILL WE EVER LEAVE IRAQ?
Congressional Democrats rule out Iraq war fund cut
David Podvin on the “EXIT STRATEGY”
When George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13303 that effectively transferred Iraqi oil into American custody it constituted history’s greatest acquisition of wealth. Iraq contains proven oil reserves of 115 billion barrels, and geological surveys indicate that a similar amount of unconfirmed petroleum deposits exist. At current prices, the oil that lies beneath the Iraqi sand is worth approximately fourteen trillion dollars.
If America were to leave Iraq it would constitute history’s greatest forfeiture of wealth, so America will not leave. Although the Democrats are saying the United States must withdraw sooner and the Republicans are saying the United States must withdraw later, it is performance art worthy of Oscar consideration. The American military isn’t going anywhere. Not sooner. Not later. Not ever. America’s exit strategy is to stay, which explains why hugely expensive military bases are being constructed throughout Iraq. The world’s only superpower did not build its financial juggernaut by being the type of impetuous nation that repudiates fourteen trillion dollars.
MORE ON THE OIL DEAL; Antonia Juhasz and Raed Jarrar, Foreign Policy In Focus:
http://ga3.org/ct/51NLpbK1HmlS/
David Ray Griffin: Neocon Imperialism, 9/11, and the Attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq
My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus far has not been part of the public discussion.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17194.htm
Robert Jensen, TomPaine.com: The Bipartisan Empire
http://ga3.org/ct/vdNLpbK1Hmlq/
IRAELI’S READY FOR WAR – BUT AGAINST WHOM?
Uri Avnery writes in part:
” “We are ready for the next war,” a reserve soldier in the Israel Defense Forces told a TV reporter this week, on the scene of a brigade-size maneuver on the Golan Heights.
What war? Against whom? About what? This was not stated, and not even asked. The soldier saw it as self-evident that war will break out soon, and it seems that he did not particularly care against whom.
Politicians are used to expressing themselves more cautiously, in words like “If, God forbid, a war should break out” But in Israeli public discourse, the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow’s sunrise. Of course, war will break out. The only question is against whom
Cuba’s Castro says he is recovering, feels stronger
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N27428997.htm
BBC posted an “edited for brevity” transcript of Fidel-Chavez phone conversation. A quick, fun read
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6403683.stm
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UK: Rupert’s Media Under Scrutiny
February 28th, 2007 - by: danny
Mark Lloyd Satellite Radio Days: XM-Sirius Merger Sparks a Welcome Debate As the House Judiciary Committee plans to investigate the XM-Sirius merger, Congress needs to embrace a thoughtful and pragmatic alternative to the FCC’s business-as-usual approach to media ownership.
http://action.freepress.net/ct/DdwOYqM1jBrV/
“We Have a President Who is a Utopian”
Video – Seymour Hersh: Mario Savio Memorial Lecture
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17199.htm
BEHIND A NEWS STORY
AP: 800 CONTRACTORS DEAD IN IRAQ
http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?jrl=488191&story=248688&rfr=nwsl&clk=84571
Mark Crispin Miller comments:
> Here’s another item that the press should be playing up – especially in light of Jeremy Scahill’s shocking new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. For what that book makes clear, although this AP story doesn’t mention it, is that Blackwater is a Christianist endeavor, whose founder, Erik Prince, is a dedicated and inordinately wealthy player on the theocratic right.
Prince’s crackpot sense of mission, and his lavish paramilitary resources, ought to worry any genuine patriot. No less troubling is Blackwater’s total openness to grizzled veterans of extremely dirty wars throughout the world. (E.g., countless troops trained under Gen. Pinochet are now participating in Bush/Cheney’s “war on terror,” their high salaries paid by your tax dollars.)
And so this AP item is far more important than you’d think from reading its account of the high toll among “civilians working under contract to the Pentagon.” These dead were not merely cooks and truck-drivers and fellas who “did laundry” for Our Troops, but, often, well-paid mercenaries fighting on the payroll of a private corporation with a clear dominionist agenda, and close ties to the Bush regime.
IWANTMEDIA.COM: Murdoch Faces Probe of Media Assets
Rupert Murdoch is facing a government review of his U.K. media assets, after ministers decided to intervene in his acquisition of a stake in ITV, the country’s largest commercial broadcaster. The move risks antagonizing the Murdoch media empire, which includes influential newspapers
.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/725eac96-c607-11db-b460-000b5df10621.html
THE POLICE AND DEMONSTRATION NUMBERS
As readers know I have written about the problems peace movements in America have it getting the media to report accurately and fairly on the size of their mobilizations. It now appears that the same problems are manifest in the UK:
Whatever the issue, campaigners and protestors, are now used to the farce of the estimates given out by the police for the numbers on demonstrations when contrasted with the experience of those participating. The most notorious example was the initial figure of 70,000 given out on 15 February 2003 for a demonstration which was the largest in British history, with up to two million protestors on the streets.
Last Saturday was another milestone in the endlessly repeated saga, when the police gave their initial estimate as 2 to 3,000. Following complaints, this was quickly raised by the police to 10,000, a figure that was then adopted by most of the media.
How do we know the figure of 10,000 was nonsense? The combined total of placards distributed at the start of the rally by Stop the War, CND, BMI and just two other organisations affiliated to Stop the War was over 10,000. Many more placards were distributed by other groups. Look at any picture of the march and it is clear that only a minority carried placards. The ratio is around 5-10 people not carrying placards to one person carrying a placard. The maths is quite simple for the whole demonstration.
Stop the War has made a formal complaint to the Metropolitan Police and sent a copy of the complaint to all media sources in the country. We know that many of our supporters have sent complaints to newspapers and television news programmes. What the motivation is for the ever predictable under-estimating of numbers attending demonstrations is anyone’s guess!
Israel Defence Forces break into local radio and TV broadcasts in Nablus
The Israeli defences have begun breaking into local radio and TV programmes as an alternative to dropping leaflets informing residents of their activities. According to a report from the Jerusalem Post, an operation took place Monday in Nablus. Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops sealed off the centre of Nablus’s old city with cement blocks and trash containers and moved from apartment to apartment in search of seven Palestinian fugitives.
In a new tactic, troops broke into transmissions of local TV and radio stations yesterday and broadcast the names of the men, all residents of the old city. Soldiers warned civilians against hiding the fugitives.
Abir Kilani, director of the local TV station Gama, told the Jerusalem Post that her broadcasts were interrupted several times by the army. Kilani noted that this method is much more effective and cheaper than the military’s previous tactic of dropping leaflets with messages to residents.
http://blogs.rnw.nl/medianetwork/?p=7389 – The Jerusalem Post via MediaNetwork Weblog
EGYPT REMOVES CONTROVERSIAL TV STATION
EGYPT: An Iraqi satellite television channel that has angered the US and Iraqi governments for broadcasting anti-US and anti-Shiite news reports has been taken off the air by the Egyptian government, the press reported Sunday.
‘The Iraqi Al Zawraa satellite channel on NileSat 101 was cut off after it repeatedly interfered with the transmission of several other channels,’ the state-owned Al Gumhuriya newspaper reported. It said that several channels had been experiencing transmission problems that were traced to Al Zawraa.
http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070226-061618-7067r -
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Discussing Today’s News And Views
February 28th, 2007 - by: danny
HEX
Paul Harrington of Hexperia California sees what others won’t:
With all these systems problems your having looks like President Bush has put the Hex on you.
THE MARKET FALLS
DXM: If the CNN business analysts would have been listening to the Randi Rhodes Show, they wouldn’t have had to wonder why China dumped a bunch of stock enough to send Wall Street into a 400-500 point tailspin.
Eugene Duran: Danny, Time to pay the piper. Wall Street is in freefall but no worry. Can you say Plunge Protection Team? I suspect they will be up early tomorrow trying to stem the hemorrhaging of the Stock Market and so far they have been quite successful. Any bets they fail this time and the Dow continues its long-overdue correction. The difficult times for our planet are beginning. Get ready for tough times. It’s not like we have not been warned.
George K Clarke writes:
I remember being at the Soldiers and Sailor’s monument in downtown New London, CT, holding up my peace sign while believing that there were no WMD’s and, at the same time, hoping that there were because it would be so embarassing if there were none. I mean, the UN was looking for a long time and did not find any.
I wrote to Gen. Colin Powell and asked for him to quit in protest over this pretense to start the war. We all know what happened then when he went to the UN.
There is a cary passage in Norman Mailer’s new book about Hitler and the demon who helped to bring it all about.
“For the Maestro often pointed to my work on this matter: “There is no better way to usurp the services of a high political leader,” he would tell us, “than by this method. They must not be able to distinguish certain lies from the truth. They are of considerable use to us when they do not even know that they are lying, because the mistruth is so vital to their needs.”
From pp: 316 “The Castle in the forrest” Norman Mailer 2007
WENDI MEREMARK WRITES:
I know, I know, one trick pony, one note samba, beating it to a pulp — Danny, you don’t have to believe, or re-believe, but you are going to burst like a floodwall going on ignoring this tide is rising. Easing into the truth could actually use your help importantly, by taking yourself as a model of how to do it gradually and what works for you in getting to the ‘optical illusion’ moment of image reversal when suddenly, all you saw one way becomes background, and what you mind had fixed in the background becomes the foreground image.
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=3046
Greg Fuller poses a Question for the 4th Estate:
I too have a question for our 4th Estate , why is it that discussion of less than noble motives for our insolvent in Iraq are limited to discussions of Bush’s personal failings of obsession and/or hubris and that discussions of duplicity , depravity and avarice as motives for our involvement in Iraq are off the table ” And who deemed that deprvity and avarice universally implausible in our high public officials ” The rest
of the world* and large numbers of the American public hold no such illusion of presumed nobility of purpose on the part of the Bush crowd . If nothing else, the testimony in the on going Libby trial underscores the basis for a more full and critical analysis of all motives and moves in the Iraq war – it beseeches it
Leith Elder writes from Australia:
y journalism? The Dirty Digger Rupert Murdoch’s flagship in this country “The Australian” carried the following article on
the morning of a court action by David Hicks’ lawyers charging the Australian government with breaching its duty to protect its citizens. In para 3 the journalists blatantly state that the claims they are writing about have already been RETRACTED! If this isn’t contempt of court as well as lousy journalism I’m a marsupial’s uncle!
CHRIS HEDGES ON RALPH NADER
Doug Latimer writes;
Danny, I imagine you know Ralph Nader. May I suggest that you post a link to this piece at your blog, and give your own take on the man?
I don’t know diddley about him personally. All I’ll say is that it seems to me that his actions over the decades have not been the most efficient he could have chosen if his primary goal was egotistical self-promotion.
I’m sure he’s not Jesus on a stick … I have a deep aversion to making anyone out to be an icon, even Dr. King or Fannie Lou Hamer. But the man seems to have more than a modicum of mentschiness … would that be a fair assessment?
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0226-28.htm
GO SEE DAYS OF GLORY’
MOVIES: I think New York Mayor Emeritus Ed Koch missed his calling as a film review. Here’s one of his latest. Not bad:
The battle scenes in this marvelous World War II movie rival those in “Band of Brothers” which in my opinion is the best film ever made about World War II.
“Days of Glory” also provides insight into the terrible way France treated its African (black and Arab) supporters from North Africa seeking to help liberate the “motherland,” France. They were treated with distain and prejudice, the blacks worse than the Arabs. A truly emotional moment occurs when a black African soldier is prevented from taking a fresh tomato at dinner because they were reserved for whites. If you already hold the French government in minimum high regard, as I do, this film will reinforce your feelings.
LISTEN TO JANE FONDA DISCUSS GI RESISTANCE
http://www.sirnosir.com/archives_and_resources/audio/jane_dave_rabbit.html
POETRY FROM INSIDE GITMO
Poetry’s capacity to rattle governments is not, it appears, confined to totalitarian regimes. A collection of poems by detainees at the US military base in Guantánamo Bay is to be published later this year, but only in the face of strong opposition by suspicious American censors.
Twenty-one poems written “inside the wire” in Arabic, Pashto and English have been gathered together despite formidable obstacles by Marc Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University who represents 17 of the detainees at the camp. The collection, entitled Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, will be published in August by the University of Iowa Press with an afterword written by Ariel Dorfman.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,,2021897,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10
FROM YHE UK: TO VIEW TONY BLAIR SINGING WAR! (WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?)
http://tinyurl.com/25nzk4
A BRONX CHEER
I will be showing my film WMD at the Bronx Campus of Fordham Univesrity tonight in media professor Robin Andersen’s class.
OK, I did a little better today. Your comments on this blog are welcome. Your helping getting more subscribers is appreciated. Your input is indispensable.
Write: Dissector@mediachannel.org
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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