Crash Course Chapter Seventeen: Peak Oil

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Change Before It’s Too Late

Frank Rich gets it too.

1. Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures?
2. Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization?
3. Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

How we dig out of this quagmire is the American story that Obama must tell. It is not a story of endless conflicts abroad but a potentially inspiring tale of serious economic, educational, energy and health-care mobilization at home. We don’t have the time or resources to go off on more quixotic military missions or to indulge in culture wars. (In China, they’re too busy exploiting scientific advances for competitive advantage to reopen settled debates about Darwin.) Americans must band together for change before the new century leaves us completely behind. The Obama campaign actually has plans, however imperfect or provisional, to set us on that path; the McCain campaign offers only disposable Band-Aids typified by the “drill now” mantra that even McCain says will only have a “psychological” effect on gas prices.

Even as it points to America’s future, the Obama campaign also has the duty to fill in its opponent’s past. McCain’s attacks on Obama have worked: in last week’s Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, Obama’s favorable rating declined from 59 to 48 percent and his negative rating rose from 27 to 35. Yet McCain still has a lower positive rating (46 percent) and higher negative rating (38) than Obama. McCain is not nearly as popular among Americans, it turns out, as he is among his journalistic camp followers. Should voters actually get to know him, he has nowhere to go but down.

The argument against Obama’s “going negative” is that it undermines his message of “transcendent politics” and will make him look like an “angry black man.” But pacifistic politics is an oxymoron, and Obama is constitutionally incapable of coming off angrier than McCain. A few more fisticuffs from the former law professor (and many more from his running mate and other surrogates) can only help make him look less skinny (metaphorically if not literally). Obama should go after McCain’s supposedly biggest asset — experience — much as McCain went after Obama’s crowd-drawing celebrity.

It is, after all, not mere happenstance that so many conservative pundits — Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Ramesh Ponnuru — have, to McCain’s irritation, proposed that he “patriotically” declare in advance that he will selflessly serve only a single term. Whatever their lofty stated reasons for promoting this stunt, their underlying message is clear: They recognize in their heart of hearts that the shelf life of McCain’s experience has already reached its expiration date.

Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

R.I.P., “Change We Can Believe In.” The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands Change Before It’s Too Late.

drill! Drill! DRILL!

Americans don't like uncertainty.

Americans don't like any suggestion that they must live within any sort of limits.

Americans don't particularly care about the environment, especially when it threatens their lifestyle.

Americans won't endure anyone telling them that their behaviors are selfish, irresponsible and wrong.

"Drill here, Drill now, Pay less" is a lie for those who prefer hearing lies rather than dealing with the truth.

What is the truth? The truth is contained in these charts:

No one of a conservative mindset will understand these charts or what they depict.

They want cheap gasoline

They are entitled to cheap gasoline forever

They will vote for the candidate who promises cheap gasoline forever.

What John McCain knows is that the American people do not have any sort of knowledge about energy nor any appetite to learn.

drill, Drill, DRILL! appeals to the desperation of the simple-minded ignorant.

Lies such as two trillion barrels of oil shale plus billions and billions under the Arctic are perfectly well suited to the American masses.

You've allowed John McCain to use the energy issue to steal your momentum and erase your lead in the polls. McCain told America that we needed to explore all our options to solve the energy crisis, including drilling offshore. He said that you disagreed. He summed up his argument in a powerful little phrase: "Drill here and drill now."

Brilliant!

Yes, I know. It's a gimmick. The relatively small amount of oil that we may find by punching more holes in the floor of the Gulf wouldn't be seen for years.

Furthermore, we have to come to terms with the fact that we are running out of oil anyway. We may be able to push back our day of reckoning, but it's coming. According to the Energy Information administration, our domestic production has fallen 40 percent since 1985, and not for lack of drilling. Since 2000, the number of exploratory and developmental wells has nearly doubled, while crude production has continued to slip.

We have to slake our thirst for crude and invest immediately and aggressively in alternative energy sources.

In spite of all this, people still took the drilling bait. Why?

Because it was concise, catchy and positive. That's the formula. I thought that you understood this, you of the "Yes We Can!" slogan and all. But, apparently not.

Lately, you've demonstrated an unsettling penchant for overly nuanced statements that meander into the cerebral.

Earth to Barack: to Main Street America, nuance equals confusion.

Holla at yo boy Charles Blow before it's too late Baraka....,

Batman and Rush: Why McCain Will Win

This election has already been decided. It's over. The winner is John McCain - according to Jeffrey Lord in The American Spectator. Let's go directly to the moneyshot - Lord's brash conclusion;

Does Batman really care what others think of him? Does Rush? Did Reagan or Teddy Roosevelt? Are you kidding? In other words, every time the media thinks they are promoting Obama they are in fact doing him damage. Subtle, yet irreversible damage that will eventually begin to show itself in the polling numbers if it hasn't already.

What will Americans be voting for in 2008? The same thing they have been voting for routinely in every election since the beginning of American presidential elections. They want action. A willingness to risk. They want someone who doesn't give a damn what others think.

They want Batman. They want Rush.

So they will elect McCain.

Interesting. But far more interesting still is the underlying rationale leading Lord to this conclusion;

What is it that makes Americans choose anything the way they do? And specifically what does this mean when it comes to choosing presidents?

First, he explained to me, we should understand that every human has a brain divided into three parts. The cortex is the seat of logic, while the limbic deals with emotions. It is what he calls the "third brain" -- the "reptilian brain" -- that unmistakably dominates the other two. It houses a person's fundamental instinct for two and only two things: survival and reproduction. While every human walking the planet has these two instincts, some people are more "reptilian" than others. Those others could be depending more on their "cortex" -- the part of the brain that is home to logic, that controls intelligence. Or they can seem to run mostly on emotion. Yet without question, the research shows again and again that whether the subject is picking cars, coffee or presidents, people respond with their instincts. When this fact of life is overlaid with culture -- in the case of voters for president of the United States, American culture -- the result is easy to see.

While other cultures put a premium on thinking (the French) or order (the Germans), Americans want our presidents to respond just as we do in our culture -- with their gut. An American presidential candidate, Rapaille says, "doesn't need to be extremely reptilian, only more reptilian than his opponent is." In particular, and he says this in terms of a cultural observation as opposed to a subjective condemnation, Americans are not culturally disposed to thinking. We prefer, as the Nike commercial has long said, to "just do it." We are a culture of action, of rebellion, of instinct. When Europeans or American liberals deride a George W. Bush or a Reagan as a "cowboy," they think they are hurling an insult. Yet most Americans see cowboys as heroes, so the insult effectively backfires. When it comes to choosing between two candidates for president, we gravitate instinctively to the one perceived as more "reptilian." Rapaille puts it this way: "We don't want our presidents to think too much."

And that my friends, is exactly the way it is. Not that I believe the popular mandate and the selected manager of federal executive branch operations is the final arbiter and shot caller, but as a windsock for public opinion - he ABSOLUTELY serves a critical role for TPTB who must guage, assuage, and ultimately co-opt the political will of the masses.

The Misshapen Mind

How the Brain's Haphazard Evolution Left Us with Self-Destructive Instincts;

A kluge, Marcus tells us, is an improvised engineering response to a problem. It is the product of a tinkerer playing around with odds and ends and creating a functional machine. That, he writes, is what the brain and its package of emotional, intellectual, and logical tools is. It is a series of good but imperfect methods for processing and acting on information, developed over hundreds of millions of years.

Evolution, in other words, produces things that work. That, Marcus argues, is the case with the brain, with how we store memories and how we respond to information. Were our memory systems better designed, they'd store and retrieve memories in the same way computers do. Instead, we rely on context to access snapshots from the past. Moving beyond memory, the logical aspect of higher thought is simply the icing on the cake, Marcus explains -- something that has evolved in an evolutionary microsecond and set up residence in the brain's frontal lobes. The older parts of the brain, call them our reptilian legacy, had much longer to mature. As a result, in many situations, especially when quick responses are demanded, they simply overwhelm our rational side, stampeding us into actions that don't really stand up to serious analysis.

Thus, we see an act of violence in the media (whether it be a single person being kidnapped and murdered, as with the 1993 celebrated Polly Klaas case in California, or mass slaughter, as with September 11), and we respond with a potpourri of inchoate fear, panic, and rage. We feel that the certainties governing our lives have been shattered. Rarely do we successfully step back and analyze the likelihood or unlikelihood of such an event impacting us.

For both Marcus and Gardner, the result is the emergence of an increasingly irrational political system, a sort of Truman Show in which reality is continually altered by an omnipresent media superstructure.

and THAT - ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is precisely what we seek to resolve, not as in "cure", rather, simply to bring into focus so that it becomes first nature for you to spot it and remember it wherever you encounter it. Liminality is as easy as falling out of bed, once you've accustomed yourself to its terms. Always and everywhere, remember yourself.....,

Georgian Endgame

Ramzy Baroud gives a great synopsis in his article The Saakashvili Experiment;

It's rather interesting how a controversial and unpopular plan that has raised the ire of the Polish people -- 70 per cent of the country is against it -- was overcome within days of war and is now embraced as a necessary deterrent. One cannot help but question the relationship between the decision to invade South Ossetia, which was certain to compel some Russian response, and the rush to embrace Bush's military designs in that region. The plan to place missiles in Poland seemed like a resounding failure as late as last month when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "tried and failed just before leaving for Europe on Monday [7 July] to seal a deal to place missiles in Poland, the State Department said," according to CNN. Now Poland is all for it. It return, Poland would receive US assistance in overhauling its military, reminiscent of the Israeli-US efforts in aiding Georgia's military, which emboldened the latter to pursue war with Russia.

While Russia's decisive response to Saakashvili's war may have temporarily reaffirmed Russia's military readiness, it has already provided the needed justification for greater US-NATO intervention in Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. That US presence might be welcomed by the unnerved "democratic" leaders of these states but it will pique the fury of Russia, whose political radars are intercepting the Bush administration's every move in the region with great alarm.

The ceasefire between Russia and Georgia, achieved through French mediation, will hardly be the end of the new Cold War underway in an area too accustomed to cold wars. The fact is that Russia will fight to break away from the pro- US ring of former Soviet states that promise to undermine its influence in a Eurasia, and the US will do its utmost to maintain a level of tension, if not hostilities in the region, for without it neither a missile shield nor the 270 billion barrels of oil in the Caspian basin can be brought within Washington's reach.

I think it's important to understand and carefully reflect on the fact that the U.S. ventured nothing and lost nothing in this experiment. As a matter of fact, it can easily be argued, as Baroud has done, that western oligarchs gained strategic ground in the wake of this little experiment.

Food crisis: Indians asked to try rats

PATNA: A state government in eastern India is encouraging people to eat rats in an effort to battle soaring food prices and save grain stocks.

Authorities in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, are asking rich and poor alike to switch to eating rats in a bid to reduce the dependence on rice. They even plan to offer rats on restaurant menus.

“Eating of rats will serve twin purposes — it will save grains from being eaten away by rats and will simultaneously increase our grain stock,” said Vijay Prakash, an official from the state’s welfare department.

Officials say almost 50 per cent of India’s food grains stocks are eaten away by rodents in fields or warehouses.

Jitan Ram Manjhi, Bihar’s caste and tribe welfare minister, said rat meat was a healthy alternative to expensive rice or grains, and should be eaten by one and all. “We are very serious to implement this project since the food crisis is turning serious day by day,” said Manjhi, who has eaten rats.

In Bihar, rat meat is already eaten by Mushars, a group of lower caste Hindus, as well as poorer sections of society.—Reuters

The next credit crunch

In Fortune/CNN;

Last year, just as the subprime crisis happened, credit card debt took off. The home-equity ATM had been shut down, so people turned to the last source of easy money they had left, the most expensive debt on the menu, credit card borrowing.

Since credit card debt has been growing much faster than the economy - more than 8% in last year's third and fourth quarters and over 7% in May (the most recent month reported)- people are apparently using it as a substitute for income. Thus, for the past year or so we have still maintained the standard-of-living illusion.

So now what? It's hard to see where consumers can turn next. Home prices seem highly unlikely to start rising again soon. Stocks? You never know, but the Great Bull Market looks like a once-in-a-lifetime event. Homes and stocks are households' biggest asset classes by far. There isn't much else to borrow against.

It may be that the standard-of-living bubble finally has to deflate. Sustainable increases in living standards have to be earned, not borrowed, and that means performing ever higher value work that can't be outsourced. We haven't been meeting that challenge very well; doing so will probably require much more and better education for millions of Americans, which takes time and money.

The result may feel like deprivation, but I don't see it that way. Who knows - we might even find that living within our means and saving a little money actually isn't so bad.

The Great Consumer Crash of 2009

How Did I Get Here

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?

And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

- Talking Heads, David Byrne lyrics to Once in a Lifetime

oops, I almost forgot - here's the article

The Mindlessness is Total Are You Ready for Nuclear War?

Paul Craig Roberts (PCR) was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Never one to stutter, PCR's been bringing it hotter than cayenne pepper for the past couple months.

Today, Reagan is gone. The Republican Establishment is gone. There are no conservative power centers, only neoconservative power centers closely allied with Israel, which uses the billions of dollars funneled into Israeli coffers by US taxpayers to influence US elections and foreign policy.

The Republican candidate for president is a warmonger. There are no checks remaining in the Republican Party on the neocons’ proclivity for war. What Republican constituencies oppose war? Can anyone name one?

The Democrats are not much better, but they have some constituencies that are not enamored of war in order to establish US world hegemony. The Rapture Evangelicals, who fervently desire Armageddon, are not Democrats; nor are the brainwashed Brownshirts desperate to vent their frustrations by striking at someone, somewhere, anywhere.

I get emails from these Brownshirts and attest that their hate-filled ignorance is extraordinary. They are all Republicans, and yet they think they are conservatives. They have no idea who I am, but since I criticize the Bush Regime and America’s belligerent foreign policy, they think I am a “liberal commie pinko.”

The only literate sentence this legion of fools has ever managed is: “If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba!”

Such is the current state of a Reagan political appointee in today’s Republican Party. He is a “liberal commie pinko” who should move to Cuba.

The Republicans will get us into more wars. Indeed, they live for war. McCain is preaching war for 100 years. For these warmongers, it is like cheering for your home team. Win at all costs. They get a vicarious pleasure out of war. If the US has to tell lies in order to attack countries, what’s wrong with that? “If we don’t kill them over there, they will kill us over here.”

The mindlessness is total.

By all means, go to Counterpunch and read the whole thing. PCR does a fair amount of recent historical "talking out of class". I always love it when that happens.....,

NATO is Useless...,

NATO is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west's postwar resistance to the Soviet Union's nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now it has become a diplomats' Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of extravagant self-importance.

Yesterday's Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian intervention in Georgia. Ostensibly to save Russian nationals in South Ossetia, the intervention was, in truth, to tell Georgia and Ukraine that they must not play games with the west along Russia's frontier. Nato, which Russia would (and should) have joined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now a running provocation along the eastern rim of Europe.

There was no strategic need for Nato to proselytise for members, and consequent security guarantees, among the Baltic republics and border states to the south. Nor is there any strategic need for the US to place missile sites in Poland or the Czech Republic. This was mere Nato self-aggrandisement reinforcing the lobbying of the Pentagon hawks.

These moves were bound to infuriate the hypersensitive Russians, and did. There is no point in western pundits saying that the thrust of Nato close to the Russian border is quite different from the cold war location of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It seems the same to Russian nationalists.

Nor is it any good pundits remarking that Russia's defence of Russian minorities in Georgia is quite different from Nato's intervention to defend the Kurdish minority in Iraq or the Albanian minority in Serbia. Again, that is just how it seems to Russia.

George Bush said earlier this month that "the age of spheres of influence is over". In that case why push that most potent sphere of influence, Nato, to the Russian border? And what of the sphere-of-influence theory that underpinned Bush's neoconservative plan to conquer the Muslim world for democracy?

In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe This outdated military alliance is playing with fire in Russia. In Pakistan and Afghanistan it is playing with dynamite. Strong stuff in the UK Guardian.

Cyber-nonsense in the News...,

This is NOT hacking. Some nitwit left controls on a PBX exposed to call in usurpation. There are no skills involved with doing this, just a little basic knowledge of phone systems and it goes back more than 25 years, not the 10-15 mentioned in the article. Something like this merely highlights the dubious competence of folks running things in this agency and this department;

A hacker broke into a Homeland Security Department telephone system over the weekend and racked up about $12,000 in calls to the Middle East and Asia.

The hacker made more than 400 calls on a Federal Emergency Management Agency voicemail system in Emmitsburg, Md., on Saturday and Sunday, according to FEMA spokesman Tom Olshanski.

FEMA is part of Homeland Security, which in 2003 put out a warning about this very vulnerability.

The voicemail system is new and recently was installed. It is a Private Branch Exchange, or PBX, a traditional corporate phone network that is used in thousands of companies and government offices. Many companies are moving to a higher tech version, known as Voice Over Internet Telephony.

This type of hacking is very low-tech and "old school," said John Jackson, a St. Louis-based security consultant. It was popular 10 to 15 years ago. Telecommunications security administrators now know to configure security settings, such as having individual users create unique passwords and not continue to use the password assigned to users in the initial setup.

"In this case it's sort of embarrassing that it happened to FEMA themselves — FEMA being a child of DHS, with calls going to the Middle East," Johnson said.

Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Yemen are among the countries calls were made to, Olshanski said. Most of the calls were about three minutes long, but some were as long as 10 minutes.

Sprint caught the fraud over the weekend and halted all outgoing long-distance calls from FEMA's National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg.

FEMA's chief information officer is investigating who hacked into the system and where exactly the calls were placed to. At this point it appears a "hole" was left open by the contractor when the voicemail system was being upgraded, Olshanski said. Olshanski did not know who the contractor was or what hole specifically was left open, but he assured the hole has since been closed.

In 2003, Homeland Security and the FBI investigated multiple reports about private industry being breached by these types of hackers.

"This illegal activity enables unauthorized individuals anywhere in the world to communicate via compromised U.S. phone systems in a way that is difficult to trace," according to a department information bulletin from June 3, 2003.

Back in the day, poor students used to abuse these misconfigured PBX's all the time using exactly this lack of administrative control to place long distance calls to home.

Politics

Cuba's emerging leverage

When US Congress approved some US$42 million in aid destined to Cuba on 22 July, it was a concrete signal. Relations between the two countries are likely to improve over time despite the staunchly anti-Castro contingent that retains a powerful voting block in southern Florida.

Raul Castro is well aware of this future. And while he is willing to play hard ball with Washington, he knows the potential FDI upshot from the US could be beneficial to his people, Cuba's economy, and ultimately his regime.

Raul is also aware that Russia is keen to improve relations. His three-day visit with Sachin erased any doubt that Moscow is eager to invest in Cuba's energy and medical resources. Havana has long been interested in becoming a refining hub in the region, and is eager to complete the LUKoil deal to have the Russian energy firm refine Venezuelan heavy crude for domestic use and, perhaps, export to the US.

Cuba is in the middle with each hand on two heavy geopolitical levers. By applying the right amount of pressure, the country can certainly benefit from both relationships. Too much pressure on either side, and Cuba risks losing one or both connections. In the end, however, the island nation will stick to its historical roots – maintain sovereignty and some dignity no matter what the cost.

"Cuba's attitude is 'We'll take your money, but that doesn't mean we'll do what you want,'" Erikson said, adding, "Frankly, I don't see Russian power projection in the Caribbean or in the rest of Latin America." International Relations and Security Network.

Drawball

Technological Fundamentalism in Media and Culture

Robert Jensen; While media watchdogs and bloggers probe contemporary news media for signs of bias -- from every angle, on virtually every issue -- perhaps the most important of journalists’ biases is ignored: their routine acceptance of society’s technological fundamentalism. This devotion to the industrial world’s core delusion shows up not just in stories about science and technology but in the assumptions about science and technology that underlie virtually all reporting in the corporate commercial news media in the United States.

Let’s start with definitions: While fundamentalism has a specific meaning in Protestant history (an early 20th century movement to promote “The Fundamentals”), more generally the term can be used to describe any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts certainty in the unquestioned truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Fundamentalism shows up in history often enough, in enough places, that it seems to be a feature not of a particular culture but of human psychology -- we humans are prone, though one hopes not doomed, to fundamentalist thinking. The attraction of fundamentalism is not hard to understand; in a maddeningly complex world, such a way of thinking can offer comfort, even if illusory. But fundamentalism is better described as a system of non-thought, for as ecologist Wes Jackson puts it, “fundamentalism takes over where thought leaves off.”

Journalists are conscious of religious fundamentalism and treat it as a phenomenon to be covered, even if they don’t always explore it in much depth. But other fundamentalisms -- which likely are even more dangerous than the religious varieties -- are the water in which journalists swim, rarely reported upon and usually taken as an unquestioned state of nature. This includes national fundamentalism (the belief that we owe loyalty to nation-states and that patriotism is a good thing) and market fundamentalism (the belief that market-based corporate capitalism is the only rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world).

But it may well turn out that the gravest threat to a just and sustainable human presence on the planet is technological fundamentalism -- the notion that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. According to David Orr, an environmental studies professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, technological fundamentalists are those “unwilling, perhaps unable, to question our basic assumptions about how our tools relate to our larger purposes and prospects.”

BD-Vision

Backchannel, Big Don has hipped me to the apocalyptic blip coloring his interpretation of the national security data currently registering on his far-reaching cognitive event horizon. Once you know what Big Don knows, see, what Big Don sees - I think you'll be slapping your head in consternation for having ever doubted his probity and resolve.

Muslims with intercontinental nuke delivery capability...

What I (and all you other SR readers unable to get with the BD program) clearly fail to appreciate is the extent to which our correspondent is presciently channeling Paul Baran (minus the technical skills and inventiveness) but with all the requisite fear, dread, and benefit of 20/20 historical insight.

BD scrys not only the clear and present danger of the Islamic bomb - going beyond this - he's pointing us toward the unthinkable possibility of intercontinental ballistic delivery of the same!!!

Coupled with political subversion from within by a Manchurian candidate like Baraka Hussein - who stands ready to turn over the lion's share of BD's hard earned tax dollars to the internal "golden horde" of OOW overbreeding useless eaters - and you have all the makings of a nightmarish future state unfit for the genetically advantaged spawn of Big Don. Clearly not an acceptable turn of sociopolitical events.

Meet the Economist Who Thinks We're Doomed

For months Roubini has been arguing that the true cost of the housing crisis will not be a mere $300 billion -- the amount allowed for by the housing legislation sponsored by Representative Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd -- but something between a trillion and a trillion and a half dollars. But most important, in Roubini's opinion, is to realize that the problem is deeper than the housing crisis. "Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis," he told me. "But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts." All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. "We have a subprime financial system," he said, "not a subprime mortgage market."

Roubini argues that most of the losses from this bad debt have yet to be written off, and the toll from bad commercial real estate loans alone may help send hundreds of local banks into the arms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. "A good third of the regional banks won't make it," he predicted. In turn, these bailouts will add hundreds of billions of dollars to an already gargantuan federal debt, and someone, somewhere, is going to have to finance that debt, along with all the other debt accumulated by consumers and corporations. "Our biggest financiers are China , Russia and the gulf states ," Roubini noted. "These are rivals, not allies."

The United States, Roubini went on, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. "Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers," he said, pausing to let out a resigned sigh. "This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire." Today in Alternet.

Information Warfare?

Ordinary Americans critical of one-sided media. The conflict may be over, but not the war of words. Moscow claims some Western newspapers have taken a one-sided view of the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict and have been misleading their readers. War moves from battleground to broadcasting studio. The South Ossetian conflict managed to dominate the airwaves at a time when viewers should have been hooked on the Olympic Games rather than horrified by images of war. Georgia's PR campaign throughout the conflict has been directed towards the West, portraying Russia as the aggressor.

Russian English-language television channel Russia Today has acused the U.S. broadcaster CNN of using the wrong pictures in their coverage of the conflict in South Ossetia. A Russian cameraman says footage of wrecked tanks and ruined buildings, which was purported to have been filmed in the town of Gori, in fact showed the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, the RTTV reported on its web site.

Gori was said to be about to fall under the control of the Russian army but the cameraman says the video was actually shot in Tskhinvali, which had been flattened by Georgian shelling.

"When we arrived and news came that Gori was being shelled, I saw my footage. I said: that's not Gori! That's Tskhinvali. I can swear in front of any tribunal. I can point out this location on a map, because I and a cameraman from the channel Rossiya videotaped that," the channel quoted the cameraman as saying. Russian Report: CNN used Fake Video in Coverage of Georgia War

Anybody Else See This?

Fox News cuts American child for thanking Russian troops. A 12-year-old American girl visiting relatives during the conflict in South Ossetia has thanked Russian soldiers for saving her from the Georgian attack. However, America's Fox News attempted to cut her and her aunt off air.

Amanda Kokoeva was in a cafe in Tskhinvali when the firing from Georgian troops began.

She managed to get back to her uncle's basement where she spent the night. In a lull, she then managed to flee across the border to Russia, before boarding a plane bound for San Francisco.

"I want to say that I was running from Georgian troops bombing the city," she told America's Fox News Channel. "I want to say thank you to the Russian troops that were helping us out."

After that her aunt started saying that it was Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili who is to be blamed for the bloodshed, but the presenter tried to cut her off and go to a commercial break. Still, he finally let the woman finish the phrase at least.