World Order?

Washington Post | In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has loudly proclaimed the need to increase regulation and oversight of financial markets, vowing on Thursday to "refound the global financial system" as part of "an intellectual and moral revolution."

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown -- who has set up an economic "war room" at 10 Downing Street -- moved ahead of the United States to inject cash into private banks and is leading calls for global accounting standards and stronger oversight of international banking.

President Bush, by comparison, has been more wary in his public remarks as the crisis on Wall Street has grown into a global panic. The departing U.S. president has agreed to hold a global economic summit in Washington on Nov. 15 but has stopped short of endorsing the kind of far-reaching international proposals put forward by Brown, Sarkozy and others.

The economic summit next month will be held at the National Building Museum in Washington and will include leaders of the Group of 20 major industrialized nations and emerging markets, including China and India. The White House said three top officials will lead U.S. preparations for the meeting: Dan Price, assistant to the president for international economic affairs; undersecretary of state Reuben Jeffery; and Treasury undersecretary David McCormick.

Charles Freeman, a former Bush administration trade official now at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, said that Brown and other foreign leaders also see the crisis as an opportunity to challenge the United States' role as the leader of world's financial system.


"Sarkozy and Brown and others are attacking a U.S.-led order," Freeman said. "They're saying, 'We have to revamp this thing, and the U.S. is the problem.'"

In New York yesterday, the United Nations convened a meeting of its board of chief executives, including the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to coordinate a strategy for containing the crisis.
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U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the IMF and major central banks to set up "substantial standby lines of credit" that can be used to shore up banks in the developing world. A team of economists advising Ban have said that between $500 billion and $1 trillion is required to stabilize these banks.

"We do not yet know whether our efforts to stabilize the financial system will succeed," Ban said. "Too often, in recent weeks, financial leaders have been criticized for being too slow to recognize problems, for doing too little too late. We must act now to prevent today's crisis from becoming worse tomorrow.

Iran's Oil Price Vulnerability

BBC News | For every dollar on the price of a barrel of oil, Iran earns approximately a billion dollars a year. In the past few weeks and months, the price of Iranian oil has dropped between $50 and $60 a barrel.

The head of the Central Bank of Iran has warned that revenues could be cut by $54bn, effectively halving the country's income from oil, which accounts for the vast majority of both its export earnings and government revenue.

Petropars, a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company (NOIC), has even warned that it could go into bankruptcy.

As the effect of those lower oil prices works through, Iran will face a growing budget deficit. The International Monetary Fund said in August that Iran would face unsustainable deficits should prices for its oil fall below $75 a barrel.

Mr Ahmadinejad will have the choice of cutting spending or printing more money. But with inflation already over 25% and unemployment around 10%, neither is an attractive option.

As Iran confronts the world over its controversial nuclear programme, high oil prices have been the insurance policy.

When oil was nudging $150 a barrel, it knew the world did not dare risk pushing prices even higher by imposing tough new sanctions, let alone military confrontation. That all looks very different now.

The strongest tool in the armoury of the US and Europe may be to impose an embargo on petrol sales to Iran.

If Russia blocks agreement at the UN Security Council, they could act unilaterally, or multilaterally.

Amazingly, this oil rich country is heavily dependent on petrol imports because of a lack of refinery capacity.

Iranians love their cars and any restriction on their freedom to drive will not make them happy. Low oil prices make this a distinct possibility.

At the very least, the global credit crunch means there is simply not the money in the global economy for the sort of multi-billion dollar investment that Iran needs for its oil and gas fields.

Economic Warfare?

Washington Post | Both of Russia's stock exchanges plunged about 14 percent Friday, extending a 10-week losing streak and pushing the main indexes down some 75 percent below their May highs. Regulators suspended trading in response, a measure they have adopted more than a dozen times in recent weeks, prompting one analyst to compare the exchanges to a cuckoo clock.

But the country's state-controlled television stations barely mentioned the drop or the suspension of trading. Instead, the evening newscasts have focused on the soothing statements of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, his successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, and their allies. The Kremlin is worried about the possibility of a run on bank deposits or a rush to convert rubles into dollars. Either could derail its strategy of using the nation's huge foreign exchange reserves to bolster the financial system. The government is especially concerned about the pressure on the ruble, which has intensified because of the falling price of oil. Despite new limits on currency speculation, the ruble weakened Friday to its lowest level against the dollar since 2006.

Though some economists have urged the government to devalue the ruble to boost exports, the Kremlin has instead been burning through its reserves -- the total fell by another $15 billion in the week ending Oct. 17 -- to support the currency.

Devaluation would make it more difficult for Russian firms to pay back the nearly $500 billion they owe in foreign debt. It would also bring back memories of the 1998 crisis and undermine the Kremlin's message that the Russian economy remains healthy.

Polls continue to show strong public faith in the ruble, with more than 50 percent of respondents saying it is the most secure currency for their savings. Confidence in the banks appears shakier, with 40 percent of depositors saying they are worried about losing their savings.

"My parents put all their savings in the bank, and we're worried there will be a default," said Dmitrina Rudik, 61, a retired government worker who was pushing her grandson in a stroller in a park. "At the same time, prices of food are getting higher and higher."

Sick Man of Eurasia?

NYTimes | Russia is in the midst of a genuine demographic disaster from which its rulers have no obvious exit strategy. Although the Russia’s fortunes (and the Kremlin’s ambitions) have waxed on a decade of windfall profits from oil and gas, the human foundations of the Russian nation — the ultimate sources of the country’s wealth and power — are in increasingly parlous straits.

Despite net immigration since the end of Communism, the Russian Federation’s population is nearly seven million people smaller today than at the start of 1992. In the post-Soviet era, Russia has seen three deaths for every two births. Despite a “baby bonus” scheme unveiled by the Kremlin two years ago and a small rise in the birth rate, deaths outnumbered births in Russia by over 250,000 in the first half of 2008.

If projections by the United Nations Population Division come to pass, Russia’s population will fall by 10 million more from now to 2020. Those same projections envision Russian life expectancy lagging ever further behind global averages by 2020 to 2025, in this view, overall life expectancy in Russia would actually be a year lower than average for the world’s less-developed countries — with the men’s expectancy nearly five years below the third world mean.

Demography may not be destiny, of course. But this is not a portrait of a successfully and rapidly developing economy — much less an emerging economic superpower.

Pawns in the Pawnshop....,

New York Times |The tribal militias, known as lashkars, have quickly become a crucial tool of Pakistan’s strategy in the tribal belt, where the army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two months in what army generals acknowledge is a tougher and more protracted slog than they had anticipated. And, indeed, the lashkars’ early efforts have been far from promising.

Even in the best of times, there are basic unwritten rules about the tribal militia in Pakistan that limit their impact.

The Pakistani military, for example, can lend moral support but cannot initiate a tribal militia, the generals said. The lashkars come with their own weapons, food and ammunition. They have their own fixed area of responsibility, and they are not permanent.

Great care is taken to make sure the lashkars do not become a threat to the military itself. “We do not want a lashkar to become an offensive force,” said one of the generals, who spoke frankly about the lashkars on the condition of anonymity. For that reason, the military was willing to lend supporting fire from artillery and helicopters but would not give the militias heavy weapons, he said.

Beyond those rules, the Pakistani Army and government have not been able to inculcate the lashkars with the needed confidence, said Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province.

Who is the World For?

More banks report threatening letters

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The number of banks and other agencies reporting that they have received angry letters containing a powdery substance has risen to 45 in 11 states, and there could be more cases, FBI officials said Wednesday.

Wednesday's count is up from the 30 in eight states that were reported Tuesday.

The FBI, U.S. postal inspectors and state and local authorities are investigating, causing what FBI spokesman Richard Kolko called "a drain on resources" for those agencies.

"Even sending a hoax letter is a serious crime, and law enforcement will continue to work to identify and arrest those responsible," Kolko said in a statement. "The FBI and our law enforcement partners are following up on numerous leads, and if anyone has information, they are requested to contact the FBI, USPIS or local authorities."

Postal inspectors offered a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to the conviction of those behind the hoax letters, which they said were mailed late last week.

As of Tuesday, financial institutions in New York, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, Ohio, Illinois, Colorado, Oklahoma, Georgia and Texas had been targeted by the letters. Wednesday, that list had grown to include Virginia, California and Arizona, the FBI reported.

World will tremble if Pakistan falls

The stakes could not be higher: With a rapidly increasing population of more than 150 million -- larger than that of Russia -- Pakistan is also the world's only Muslim nuclear power. But since the fall of President Pervez Musharraf earlier this year, the bitter regional, social and religious disputes that have been building for decades have exploded in public. The current government of pro-American President Asif Ali Zardari is struggling to maintain any effective presence at all in the vast North-West Frontier Province, which covers one-quarter of the country.

If the government in Islamabad goes bankrupt, then the extreme Islamist forces spearheaded by the Taliban of Afghanistan, who already enjoy broad support among the Pashtun tribes of the NWFP, will have a far greater chance to turn the great cities of Pakistan, especially giant Karachi, into chaos.

As American military analyst and UPI columnist William S. Lind has warned, Fourth Generation war -- 4GW -- non-state forces like al-Qaida benefit from undermining the structures of established states and can metastasize rapidly if a state structure collapses, especially in a vast nation like Pakistan.

The Taliban and their fellow Islamists, aided by al-Qaida, already have stepped up their guerrilla operations against the Pakistani army and police.

Also, if Zardari fell, the impact on Pakistan's relations with the United States and on Washington's ability to effectively prosecute the war on terror could be dire. Currently, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan -- around 50,000 in number overall -- are supplied by air along transport corridors over Pakistani territory. If a future Pakistani government should close those corridors, the already embattled U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan would find their situation deteriorating rapidly.

Pakistan's leaders are also understandably reluctant to put their political future and their country's fate in the hands of the International Monetary Fund, for they realize that IMF aid is usually tied to draconian conditions requiring the slashing of government spending. In a country like Pakistan, that means cutting social programs to support the poor, including subsidizing food prices.

Full-monty at Russodaily Space War.

Gird your loins...,

"Gird your loins," Biden told the crowd. "We're gonna win with your help, God willing, we're gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. This president, the next president, is gonna be left with the most significant task. It's like cleaning the Augean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than – think about it, literally, think about it – this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets. This is a systemic problem we have with this economy."

Biden emphasized that the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border is of particular concern, with Osama bin Laden "alive and well" and Pakistan "bristling with nuclear weapons."

"You literally can see what these kids are up against, our kids in that region," Biden said in recalling when his helicopter was forced down due to a snowstorm there. "The place is crawling with al Qaeda. And it's real."

"We do not have the military capacity, nor have we ever, quite frankly, in the last 20 years, to dictate outcomes," he cautioned. "It's so much more important than that. It's so much more complicated than that. And Barack gets it."

After speaking for just over a quarter of an hour, Biden noticed the media presence in the back of the small ballroom.

"I probably shouldn't have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here," he joked.

"All kidding aside, these guys have left us in a God-awful place," he then said of the Bush regime, promptly wrapping up his remarks. "We have the ability to straighten it out. It's gonna take a little bit of time, so I ask you to stay with us. Stay with us." Full-monty at ABC News...,

M-Valued LETS

Sketch of the Most Likely Scenario for Implementing a Post-Bretton Woods Global Monetary System Utilizing m-Logically-Valued Exchange Units based on Quantum Principles of Self-Organization (circa Spring 1998, Saigon)

This site is devoted to all and everything associated with the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units and their applications to LETS, local exchange trading systems. Definitions of scope are broad and shall include: m-valued logic (e.g., fuzzy logic, Lukasiewicz logic); theory of monetary instruments; related quantum theoretical issues; applications technologies (hardware and software); research and development; the involved strategic planning issues; real politik of insinuating m-logically-valued exchange systems into the prevailing Newtonian institutionalization; quantum accounts of self-organization as they apply to questions of monetary theory; autopoiesis and its graphical representation systems; metaphors in theoretical biology, biometeorology, oceanography, and related sciences of multiscale dynamical systems; applicability of complexity theory to monetary systematics; history of any and all related subjects. Definitions of exclusion are narrow and shall be determined only by the propensity of any given contribution to elicit ennui.

Hypertext markup language is one very small step for mankind in the direction of employing m-valued logics. Free associations once were pristine logical accommodation schemata by virtue of animistic “identity transparency”. We are inspired by this fact and will embody that inspiration as complete disregard for conventions of binary logical thought -- though we will make no active effort in crass display of such unrespect.

Prehistoric Economics

Click the picture

The Idiots Who Rule America

Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. That it is still in power, and will remain in power after this election, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality. We still believe in “the experts.” They still believe in themselves. They are clustered like flies swarming around John McCain and Barack Obama. It is only when these elites are exposed as incompetent parasites and dethroned that we will have any hope of restoring social, economic and political order.

“Their inability to see the human as anything more than interest driven made it impossible for them to imagine an actively organized pool of disinterest called the public good,” said the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, whose books “The Unconscious Civilization” and “Voltaire’s Bastards” excoriates our oligarchic elites. “It is as if the Industrial Revolution had caused a severe mental trauma, one that still reaches out and extinguishes the memory of certain people. For them, modern history begins from a big explosion—the Industrial Revolution. This is a standard ideological approach: a star crosses the sky, a meteor explodes, and history begins anew.”

Our elites—the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools—do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of the common good. They are stunted, timid and uncreative bureaucrats who are trained to carry out systems management. They see only piecemeal solutions which will satisfy the corporate structure. They are about numbers, profits and personal advancement. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are able to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships. The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they think, is a secondary product of the free market. And they slavishly serve the market.

Chris Hedges brings the heat once again, full-monty at Truthdig.com

The United States, Europe and Bretton Woods II

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President George W. Bush met Oct. 18 to discuss the possibility of a global financial summit. The meeting ended with an American offer to host a global summit in December modeled on the 1944 Bretton Woods system that founded the modern economic system.

The Bretton Woods framework is one of the more misunderstood developments in human history. The conventional wisdom is that Bretton Woods crafted the modern international economic architecture, lashing the trading and currency systems to the gold standard to achieve global stability. To a certain degree, that is true. But the form that Bretton Woods took in the public mind is only a veneer. The real implications and meaning of Bretton Woods are a different story altogether.

Excellent historical summary - full-monty at Stratfor.com

Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Godwin's Law is often cited in online discussions as a deterrent against the use of arguments in the reductio ad Hitlerum form.

The rule does not make any statement whether any particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that one arising is increasingly probable. It is precisely because such a comparison or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact. Although in one of its early forms Godwin's Law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions, the law is now applied to any threaded online discussion: electronic mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, and more recently blog comment threads and wiki talk pages.

Gears Just Grinding.....,

In this 28th edition of the GEAB, LEAP/E2020 has decided to launch a new global systemic crisis alert. Indeed our researchers anticipate that, before next summer 2009, the US government will default and be prevented to pay back its creditors (holders of US Treasury Bonds, of Fanny May and Freddy Mac shares, etc.). Of course such a bankruptcy will provoke some very negative outcome for all USD-denominated asset holders. According to our team, the period that will then begin should be conducive to the setting up of a « new Dollar » to remedy the problem of default and of induced massive capital drain from the US. The process will result from the following five factors studied in detail further in this GEAB:

• The recent upward trend of the US Dollar is a direct and temporary consequence of the collapse of stock markets

• Thanks to its recent « political baptism », the Euro becomes a credible « safe haven » value and therefore provides a « crisis » alternative to the US dollar

• The US public debt is now swelling uncontrollably

• The ongoing collapse of US real economy prevents from finding an alternative solution to the country's defaulting

• Strong inflation or hyper-inflation in the US in 2009?, that is the only question.

Studying the case of Iceland can give an idea of the upcoming stages of the crisis. That is what our team has been doing ever since the beginning of 2006. This country indeed provides a good illustration of what the US and the UK should be expecting. It can be considered – and that is what most Icelandic people do today – that the collapse of Iceland's financial system came from the fact that it was disproportionate to the size of the country's economy.

Financially speaking, Iceland thought of itself as UK, in the same way as, financially speaking, UK thought of itself as the US and the US thought of themselves as the entire world. It is therefore quite useful to study the case of Iceland in order to understand the course of events that London and Washington will follow in the next 12 months.

The Roots of the Crisis

The financial crisis finds its roots in the oil crisis and nobody seems to care about it. The current events that nobody saw coming, were already announced as early as 2006 by Dr. Colin Campbell, a geologist, former Vice-President of Fina Oil Company and founder of the nowadays respected ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil).

Listen to what he says in this video:

Expansion becomes impossible without abundant cheap energy. So I think that the debt of the world is going bad. That speaks of a financial crisis, unseen, probably equalling the Great Depression of 1930; it’s probable we face the Second Great Depression. It would be a chain reaction, one bank would fail, and another one would fail, industries will close…

Crash Globally, Grow Locally

At noon eastern time, the Washington Post will host a live discussion of Joel Kotkin's thesis that the poor economy, high energy prices and technology are revitalizing american communities. Kotkin's original article is linked here, and I've included an excerpt:

But for all our nightmares of drowning in a sea of bad mortgages, foreclosed homes and shrunken retirement plans, the truth is that the effects of this meltdown won't be all bad in the long run. In one regard, it could offer our society a net positive: Forced into belt-tightening, Americans are likely to strengthen our family and community ties and to center our lives more closely on the places where we live.

This trend toward what I call "the new localism" has been underway for some years, driven by changing demographics, new technologies and rising energy prices. But the economic downturn will probably accelerate it as individuals and corporations look not to the global stage but closer to home, concentrating and congregating on the Main Streets where we choose to live – in the suburbs, in urban neighborhoods or in small towns.

In his 1972 bestseller, "A Nation of Strangers," social critic Vance Packard depicted the United States as "a society coming apart at the seams." He was only one in a long cavalcade of futurists who have envisioned an America of ever-increasing "spatial mobility" that would give rise to weaker families, childlessness and anonymous communities.

Should be interesting to see what kind of discussion jumps off in this most mainstream of media contexts.

Collapse Casualties Voting Their Interests...,

Washington Post | For all the emphasis on Sen. Barack Obama's chances with working-class voters in declining Rust Belt cities, the biggest swing vote in the presidential election is likely to be in outer suburban communities, where Democrats hope to capitalize on economic unease and demographic shifts to overturn traditional Republican strengths.

Across the country, the housing collapse has been most acute on the suburban fringe. In Prince William, sales are picking up again, but at severely reduced prices -- the median price for detached single-family houses plunged 41 percent in the past year, from $405,000 in September 2007 to $239,900 last month. There were 844 foreclosures last month, up from 256 a year before and 40 in September 2006. Exacerbating the real estate collapse was the spike in gasoline prices, which hit hardest in exurbs where 30-mile commutes are the norm.

It was the oil spike more than anything that led Gary Blake to strongly consider voting for Obama after voting for Bush in 2004. Blake, who lives in a McMansion community near the Potomac River, said fuel costs hurt his pest-control business, which inspects homes as far away as West Virginia. Even now that gas prices have dropped somewhat, Blake sees how things have gone amiss in the number of foreclosed homes on his inspection list.

"I've become more swayed to the left after the last eight years," he said. "In 2004, I was more swayed by the tax stance of the Republicans, and thought it would benefit us more. But I've concluded that was a mistake."

Robert Lang, a demographer at Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute in Alexandria, says it is a generalized discontent like Blake's that has increased the Democrats' share of the exurban vote.

Rich must apologise now

Madeleine Bunting brings it once again in this morning's Guardian|

Europe and the US have spent the weekend talking of reform of global capitalism and a Bretton Woods II, but they need to start with a grovelling apology. In recent decades, they have used their power through the IMF to write the rules and impose them across the world by ruthless manipulation and bullying. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have together more votes in the IMF than China, India and Brazil.

In the past month, the US and Europe have been humiliated by the catastrophic failure of their own rules, and have been forced to rip them up. The double standards of western interests have been starkly exposed - their bail-outs are exactly what they have refused, repeatedly, to allow other countries to do in similar crises.

Those who will pay the heaviest price for the foolhardiness of deregulated financial capitalism are among those who are least responsible, as Brazil's President Lula angrily pointed out last week. The shockwaves of the west's banking crisis will shipwreck more vulnerable countries. In developing countries, people don't have the resources - welfare provision, savings, insurance - to tide them over a crisis. Instead, they go hungry, homeless - and they die. Across Africa and Asia, countries are bracing themselves for multiple hits, with falls in aid already threatened and a likely decline in the remittances that buoy up their economies - in the UK, the immigration minister Phil Woolas is already signalling a harder line on immigration. Fear of global recession is bringing commodity prices down and will reduce the demand for luxury products such as flowers, green beans and hot holidays. The anger among developing countries will spread. Our worries about jobs and pensions pale in comparison with the fallout on the billions who will not be able to feed or educate their children.

The Green New Deal

Taipan Publishing Group:

Time for a New Motor?

George Soros thinks the conclusion is foregone.

For the last 25 years, Soros observes, the “motor of the world economy” has been the American consumer. And not only has the American consumer been aggressively consuming, he “has been spending more than he has been saving.”

“So that motor is now switched off,” says Soros. “It’s finished. It’s run out of -- can’t continue. You need a new motor.”

The declines of that truly awful week when the Dow lost 18% were tied to the credit crisis. Before governments across the globe stepped up, there was a fear that nothing would be done.

The declines that followed Monday’s rally, however, were tied to a separate issue... rooted in fears that the U.S. consumer may, after many years and countless false alarms, be well and truly tapped out. If so, we don’t know what the new “motor of the world economy” is going to be.

Soros has a notion of what that new motor could be. Moral aspects aside, I think he is right. It’s an idea some readers will like and others will hate...

“We have [another] big problem,” Soros says. “Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy for years to come... instead of consuming, building an electricity grid, saving on energy, rewiring the houses, adjusting your lifestyle where energy has got to cost more until you introduce those new things. So it will be painful. But at least we will survive and not cook.”

The Green New Deal

Concerns over global warming and the high cost of fossil fuels are closely aligned. Whether or not you embrace the concept of global warming -- and there is still real debate on the subject -- you no doubt remember the sky-high fuel prices the world had to deal with earlier this year.

Energy prices are falling now, mainly due to deflation fears and the phenomenon of “demand destruction.” But when global growth resumes, energy prices will go right back up again. And then there are the indirect costs, like the rampant pollution and quality-of-life issues that plague China and India.

Many top thinkers thus agree with Soros. There is a very strong feeling that the world needs a “Green New Deal”... an alternative-energy-focused motor that can get the global economy humming again.

Anna Schwartz - Bernanke Is Fighting the Last War

Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview| On Aug. 9, 2007, central banks around the world first intervened to stanch what has become a massive credit crunch.

Since then, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have taken a series of increasingly drastic emergency actions to get lending flowing again. The central bank has lent out hundreds of billions of dollars, accepted collateral that in the past it would never have touched, and opened direct lending to institutions that have never had that privilege. The Treasury has deployed billions more. And yet, "Nothing," Anna Schwartz says, "seems to have quieted the fears of either the investors in the securities markets or the lenders and would-be borrowers in the credit market."

The credit markets remain frozen, the stock market continues to get hammered, and deep recession now seems a certainty -- if not a reality already.

Most people now living have never seen a credit crunch like the one we are currently enduring. Ms. Schwartz, 92 years old, is one of the exceptions. She's not only old enough to remember the period from 1929 to 1933, she may know more about monetary history and banking than anyone alive. She co-authored, with Milton Friedman, "A Monetary History of the United States" (1963). It's the definitive account of how misguided monetary policy turned the stock-market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression.

Since 1941, Ms. Schwartz has reported for work at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where we met Thursday morning for an interview. She is currently using a wheelchair after a recent fall and laments her "many infirmities," but those are all physical; her mind is as sharp as ever. She speaks with passion and just a hint of resignation about the current financial situation. And looking at how the authorities have handled it so far, she doesn't like what she sees.

China - Pakistan: Cash Money No

IHT - ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: Food prices have soared, making some basics, even flour, too expensive for the poorest to afford. No large-scale riots have occurred, but concern is mounting that such protests are not far off.

The new government has reduced subsidies on fuel and food, and the central bank moved on Friday to ease an intrabank liquidity crisis

President Asif Ali Zardari returned from China late Friday without a commitment for cash needed to shore up Pakistan's crumbling economy, leaving him with the politically unpopular prospect of having to ask the International Monetary Fund for help.

Pakistan was seeking the aid from China, an important ally, as it faces the possibility of defaulting on its current account payments.

With the United States and other nations preoccupied by a financial crisis, and Saudi Arabia, another traditional ally, refusing to offer concessions on oil, China was seen as the last port of call before the IMF

Accepting a rescue package from the fund would be seen as humiliating for Zardari's government, which took office this year.

An IMF-backed plan would require Pakistan's government to cut spending and raise taxes, among other measures, which could hurt the poor, officials said.

The Bush administration is concerned that Pakistan's economic meltdown will provide an opportunity for Islamic militants to capitalize on rising poverty and frustration.

The Pakistanis have not been shy about exploiting the terrorist threat to try to win financial support, a senior official at the IMF said.

But because of the dire global financial situation, and the reluctance of donor nations to provide money without strict economic reforms by Pakistan, the terrorist argument has not been fully persuasive, he said.

China - Pakistan: Nuclear Power Yes

CNN| Pakistan said Saturday that China will help it build two more nuclear power plants, offsetting Pakistani frustration over a recent nuclear deal between archrival India and the United States.

The agreement with China was among 12 accords signed during Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's recent visit to Beijing, said Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

While Qureshi gave few details, the accord deepens Pakistan's long-standing ties with China at a time when its relations with Washington are strained over the war against terrorism.

U.S. officials including Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher, who arrived in Islamabad on Saturday for talks, have rejected Pakistani calls for equal treatment with India on nuclear power.

Chinese leaders "do recognize Pakistan's need, and China is one country that at international forums has clearly spoken against the discriminatory nature of that understanding" between Washington and New Delhi, Qureshi said.

Zardari met with China's top leaders during his first official trip to Beijing since replacing stalwart U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf as president in September.

China Wary of Islam

To be a practicing Muslim in the vast autonomous region of northwestern China called Xinjiang is to live under an intricate series of laws and regulations intended to control the spread and practice of Islam, the predominant religion among the Uighurs, a Turkic people uneasy with Chinese rule.

The edicts touch on every facet of a Muslim’s way of life. Official versions of the Koran are the only legal ones. Imams may not teach the Koran in private, and studying Arabic is allowed only at special government schools.

Two of Islam’s five pillars — the sacred fasting month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca called the hajj — are also carefully controlled. Students and government workers are compelled to eat during Ramadan, and the passports of Uighurs have been confiscated across Xinjiang to force them to join government-run hajj tours rather than travel illegally to Mecca on their own.

Government workers are not permitted to practice Islam, which means the slightest sign of devotion, a head scarf on a woman, for example, could lead to a firing.

The Chinese government, which is officially atheist, recognizes five religions — Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Taoism and Buddhism — and tightly regulates their administration and practice. Its oversight in Xinjiang, though, is especially vigilant because it worries about separatist activity in the region.

In the NYTimes - Wary of Islam, China Tightens a Vise of Rules

Rachel Maddow: Jonathan Turley on Voter Suppression

My man Rembom hipped me to Rachel Maddow's coverage of organized GOP voter suppression and efforts on the part of the Obama campaign to seek legal recourse against it. Rachel has more on the voter fraud/suppression breaking news and the Obama campaign's request for a Special prosecutor. Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley weighs in on how this is just more of the same thing GOP operatives have pulled in the last election with the same states targeted in an effort to keep people from voting.

Blocking the Vote

In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

Full Monty in Rolling Stone.

Scientists pick their President

If scientists ruled the world, then the world would be extremely blue. Mind you not blue as in its mood, but blue as in its political party affiliation. The Scientist's recent mock election showed a clear trend towards Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee. Barack Obama carried a staggering 56% of the total votes while his Republican counterpart, John McCain, only received 39% of the total votes. This is a margin of 17% which is statistically significant.



As most Americans know all too well, the popular vote doesn't determine the winner of the presidential election. Al Gore actually won the popular vote in 2000, but lost the election due to electoral votes. (For more details Google: +Florida +2000 +"hanging chads"). So if The Scientist wanted to determine a "true" presidential winner, then The Scientist would have to breakdown the voting by state in an attempt to calculate the electoral votes. Using Google Analytics to determine state locations of our voters, The Scientist found that Barack Obama would carry a whopping 464 electoral votes (the most since Ronald Reagan) and that's not even including the 45 votes still up for grabs.

Full Monty at The Scientist.

The Evolutionary Roots of The Base

We have had a long-standing high regard for Paul Rosenberg's devastating account of modern *conservatism*.

It’s my main thesis in this series that conservatism is not fundamentally about ideology, but about the preservation of elite power, maintained as a form of identity politics.

But now we've happened upon a compact treatment referencing extensive sociobiological research with even more devastating explanatory power concerning the evolutionary underpinnings of that most alarming element comprising the broad demographic so ruthlessly exploited by cunning conservative manipulators, you know who - The Base.

Here's a question for you. Why hasn't natural selection driven the religious right to extinction?

You should forgive me for asking. After all, here is a group of people who base their lives on patently absurd superstitions that fly in the face of empirical evidence. It's as if I suddenly chose to believe that I could walk off the edges of cliffs with impunity; you would not expect me to live very long. You would expect me to leave few if any offspring. You would expect me to get weeded out.

And yet, this obnoxious coterie of retards — people openly and explicitly contemptuous of "intellectuals" and "evilutionists" and, you know, anyone who actually spends their time learning stuff — they not only refuse to die, they appear to rule the world. Some Alaskan airhead who can't even fake the name of a newspaper, who can't seem to say anything without getting it wrong, who bald-facedly states in a formal debate setting that she's not even going to try to answer questions she finds unpalatable (or she would state as much, if she could say "unpalatable" without tripping over her own tongue) — this person, this behavior, is regarded as successful even by her detractors. The primary reason for her popularity amongst the all-powerful "low-information voters"1? In-your-face religious fundamentalism and an eye tic that would make a Tourette's victim blush.

OH MY GAWD!!! This fellow is off to a rip-roaring good start.

Surely, any cancer that attacks the very intellect of a society would put the society itself at a competitive disadvantage. Surely, tribes founded on secular empiricism would develop better technology, better medicines, better hands-on understanding of The Way Things Work, than tribes gripped by primeval cloud-worshipping superstition. Why, then, are there so few social systems based on empiricism, and why are god-grovellers so powerful across the globe? Why do the Olympians keep getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of intellectual paraplegics?

The great thing about science is, it can even answer ugly questions like this. And a lot of pieces have been falling into place lately. Many of them have to do with the brain's fundamental role as a pattern-matcher.

Julian Jaynes explained all of this and far more nearly forty years ago in his dazzling exploration of the origins of human consciousness The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. But these guys have whittled it down to its provable and repeatable dimensions and empirically demonstrated what Jaynes understood and described. Jaynes treatment of idols and idolatry as artifacts of precisely the type of surveillance community described by Watts is simply remarkable as a tour de force of deep psychopaleological insight. Understanding how these most primitive tribal formations are organized at a deep level provides no possibility of a cure of this persistent collective cognitive error, however, it informs you precisely how deep and intractable the problem is such that squander no valuable time, effort, or resources attempting to reason with it.

The Roots of Sovereignty

On monday we linked the major Michael Pollan piece in the NYTimes, Dear Farmer-in-Chief. Comes now Joe Windish at the Moderate Voice with a tight breakdown of the totality of what Pollan was talking about.

In a long and serious article on food policy in today’s NYTimes Magazine, Michael Pollan writes that the era of cheap and abundant food is coming to a close. He says the next American president, no matter which man is elected, is going to find that the health of our nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security.

His argument is that, unless we address the industrial food system, we will not be able to make significant progress resolving the three main issues of our day — health care, energy independence and climate change:

Food policy hasn't exactly been a hot-button issue in the presidential election. And it's not going to be. We're sure to hear more about Joe the plumber, drill, drill, drill, or whatever the sanctioned, theatrical nonsense du jour. That said, most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.

Pakistan's Bid for Chinese Cash

Washington Post | Pakistan's financial problems go back at least a year, with current and past administrations borrowing from the central bank to sustain generous state subsidies on gasoline and diesel. As global oil prices surged, the government of former President Pervez Musharraf curried favor with average Pakistanis by having the state absorb the shocks. Musharraf ousted a democratically elected government in 1999 and ruled until a civilian coalition was voted into office last spring, headed by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. The government forced Musharraf from the presidency in August, electing Zardari as his replacement in September.

U.S. military and intelligence officials fear that Pakistan's increasingly precarious economy will compound an already unstable political situation and undermine military cooperation. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban leadership are located in the rugged, economically depressed region along Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan. The Bush administration and Congress have been shaping a long-term economic and military assistance package for Pakistan, but there is no indication the United States is able to step in with a short-term financial lifeline.

Pakistan is going to the Chinese now "because you go to the guys with the money," a senior International Monetary Fund official said. "And right now, the Chinese are the ones with the money."

Securing as much as $6 billion would buy the government the breathing room it needs, analysts say, to begin a desperately needed overhaul of its budget to sustain Pakistan's battered economy in the longer term.

Pakistan's bid for Chinese cash underscores the potential of Beijing's $1.9 trillion in foreign reserves, the largest in the world, to boost its global influence. The government is now seeking as much as $3 billion in emergency assistance from China, as well as assistance from oil-rich Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to a senior Pakistani official. Pakistan's central bank governor, Shashad Akhtar, is in Washington this week to review a draft plan for overhauling the country's finances with the International Monetary Fund, potentially paving the way for future aid.

Should the Kremlin bail out the billionaires?

Washington Post| With stock markets here down more than two-thirds from their May highs and continuing to fall, almost all of Russia's billionaires -- men and women who made their fortunes in the transition to capitalism after the Soviet Union's fall -- are hurting. According to one analysis, the wealth of the top 25 on the Forbes Russia list has plunged nearly $240 billion in the past five months.
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These losses have been felt across the Russian economy, as the tycoons' businesses trim jobs, cut salaries and suspend projects, and have presented Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with a delicate political question: Should the Kremlin bail out the billionaires?

Putin has already reached into the nation's huge reserve funds, the third-largest in the world, and announced one emergency measure after another in an attempt to end the turmoil that has gripped the Russian financial system. The government has pledged more than $200 billion thus far to bolster stock markets and banks, an amount equal to about 15 percent of the country's gross domestic product.

But it remains uncertain whether the money will be enough, how it will be distributed, and to what extent the Kremlin will try to use it to help friends and punish enemies. In a sign of growing dissatisfaction with Putin's handling of the crisis, an influential business group published an unusually blunt letter last week warning that the reserves could be exhausted within two years and urging the Kremlin to refrain from playing favorites as it distributes aid.

"The principles of providing state support to companies should be made public and transparent," wrote Alexander Shokhin, president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, complaining that the Kremlin often only helps the few, privileged businessmen who can get meetings with officials.

"Comrade Bush" turns left in crisis

Reuters | "Bush is to the left of me now," Chavez told an audience of international intellectuals debating the benefits of socialism. "Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks."

Chavez, who has insulted Bush in the past as a drunkard or the devil, called him clueless on Wednesday. He accused him of simply parroting the words of his aides without understanding the new policies that rely on heavy state intervention.

"I am convinced he has got no idea what's going on," said Chavez, who has nationalized swaths of the OPEC nation's economy in recent years and is in negotiations to take over a Spanish bank in Venezuela.

Chavez lauds his nationalizations for allowing the state to refocus companies' activities on helping the poor rather than creating value for their shareholders.

The Bush administration, which has promoted free-market policies throughout Latin America, resisted taking equity in banks for weeks. But, faced with a spiraling financial crisis, it reversed course this week with a $250 billion plan.

Chavez, who the United States labels an autocrat, is popular among his supporters at home for criticizing Bush and sometimes wins praise abroad for voicing anti-U.S. opinions.

Despite the ideological differences between the two governments and the diplomatic sparring that led weeks ago to the countries expelling each other's ambassador, Venezuela remains a major oil supplier to the United States.

America’s Political Cannibalism

It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.

As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is true for all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.

More of Chris Hedge's article at Truthdig.com

Lazy ants "social cancer" of colony

Lazy "cheater ants" have been observed to take advantage of the hard working members of their colony for their own evolutionary advantage, according to research published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Scientists at the University of Tokyo found that larger ants in the colony laid more eggs, but hardly took part in any of the co-operative activities, thus resulting in a lower fitness of the colony as a whole. These larger ants have been identified as a distinct genotype that seems to represent a lineage that has specialized in cheating described as a "social cancer" of the colony.

An important first step in the field study was to find a system containing both co-operators and cheaters living together under natural conditions. In colonies of this particular ant, females reproduce asexually and there are very few males in the population as a result. The usual queen caste is absent and the females share reproductive and work duties over the course of their life.

Evidence of such cheating is rare in the animal kingdom, but co-operation within a species has always been vulnerable to strategies that exploit the benefits of co-operation without paying the fair cost. This discovery is an important step towards the major goal of evolutionary biologists to explain where co-operation originated and why it continues to thrive, despite the obvious opportunities for cheating.

What's That Smell?

The authorities have blamed subprime mortgages for the crisis. Why then does their solution fail to address the problem of the mortgages? Instead, the solution directs public money into an increasingly concentrated private financial sector, the management of which is not only vastly overpaid, but also has escaped accountability for the financial chicanery that, allegedly, threatens systemic financial meltdown unless bailed out by the taxpayers.

Perhaps my nose is too sensitive, but this bailout doesn't pass the smell test.

Read all of Paul Craig Roberts A Trillion Dollar Bait and Switch

Rescue for the Few, Debt Slavery for the Many

We are now entering the financial End Time. Bailout “Plan A” (buy the junk mortgages) has failed, “Plan B” (buy ersatz stocks in the banks to recapitalize them without wiping out current mismanagers) is fizzling, and the debts still can’t be paid. That is the reality Wall Street avoids confronting. “First they ignore you, then they denounce you, and then they say that they knew what you were saying all the time,” said Gandhi. The same might be said of today’s overhang of debts in excess of the economy’s ability to pay. First the policy makers pretend that they can be paid, then they denounce the pessimists as spreading panic, and then they say that of course students have been taught for four thousand years now how the “magic of compound interest” keeps on doubling and redoubling debts faster than the economy can squeeze out an economic surplus to pay.

What has ended is the idea that “the magic of compound interest” can make economies rich without having to work and without industry. I hope we have seen the end of derivatives formulae seeking to make money by playing in a zero-sum game. A debt overhang always ends either in foreclosure of the debtor’s property, or in a debt annulment to preserve the economy’s overall freedom and equity.

This means that the postmodern economy as we know it must end – either in financial polarization and debt peonage to a new oligarchic elite, or in a debt cancellation, a Jubilee Year to rescue society.

Michael Hudson details The Great Bailout Swindle

Isn't That Special?

Absolutely Priceless.....,

Jesse Jackson: Obama will rid United States of 'Zionist' control

Haaretz| The New York Post reported Tuesday that the Rev. Jesse Jackson said the United States will rid itself of years of "Zionist" control under an administration headed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The daily quoted the veteran civil rights leader on Tuesday as having said that although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they will lose a much of their clout when Obama enters the White House.

Speaking at the first World Policy Forum event in Evian, France, Jackson promised "fundamental changes" in U.S. foreign policy. He said the most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel's interests first" would end.

Jackson said that Obama "wants an aggressive and dynamic diplomacy." He went on to criticize the Bush administration's handling of Middle East diplomacy, telling the Post, "Bush was so afraid of a snafu and of upsetting Israel that he gave the whole thing a miss. Barack will change that," because, as long as the Palestinians haven't seen justice, the Middle East will "remain a source of danger to us all."

Jackson has not always been such a strong Obama supporter. In July, he apologized to the Illinois senator for "crude and hurtful" remarks he had made about him after an interview with a Fox News correspondent. Speaking to a fellow interviewee without realizing his microphone was on, Jackson said, "See, Barack's been talking down to black people.... I want to cut his nuts off."

"It was very private," Jackson said, adding that if "any hurt or harm has been caused to [Obama's] campaign, I apologize."

National Review Boots Buckley Son For Obama Boost

Washington Post|

Buckley delivered his endorsement of the Democratic presidential nominee last Thursday in the cyberpages of the Daily Beast, a new, blog-heavy Web site launched by Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. "I went out of my way to spare NR from being associated with this endorsement," Buckley said.

In that piece, Buckley said that he has known McCain since 1982 and once wrote a speech for him but that the senator has changed, airing "mean-spirited and pointless" attack ads and -- "What on earth can he have been thinking?" -- picking Sarah Palin as his running mate. While the result was "genuinely saddening" and even "tragic" for the country, Buckley wrote, he had concluded that Obama has a "first-class temperament and a first-class intellect" and could be a great president. That is, "assuming anyone gives a fig" about his views.

Buckley noted that columnist Kathleen Parker, after a National Review Online piece declaring Palin unqualified to be vice president, had received 12,000 hostile e-mails. Parker, who is syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group, described the reaction in her next column: "I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should 'off' myself."

In his embrace of Obama, Buckley quoted his father as saying, "You know, I've spent my entire lifetime separating the Right from the kooks."

Smaller Banks Resist Federal Cash Infusions

Washington Post| Community banking executives around the country responded with anger yesterday to the Bush administration's strategy of investing $250 billion in financial firms, saying they don't need the money, resent the intrusion and feel it's unfair to rescue companies from their own mistakes.

But regulators said some banks will be pressed to take the taxpayer dollars anyway. Others banks judged too sick to save will be allowed to fail.[...] in offices around the country, bankers simmered.

Peter Fitzgerald, chairman of Chain Bridge Bank in McLean, said he was "much chagrined that we will be punished for behaving prudently by now having to face reckless competitors who all of a sudden are subsidized by the federal government."

At Evergreen Federal Bank in Grants Pass, Ore., chief executive Brady Adams said he has more than 2,000 loans outstanding and only three borrowers behind on payments. "We don't need a bailout, and if other banks had run their banks like we ran our bank, they wouldn't have needed a bailout, either," Adams said.

The opposition suggested that the government may have to continue to press banks to participate in the plan. The first $125 billion will be divided among nine of the largest U.S. banks, which were forced to accept the investment to help destigmatize the program in the eyes of other institutions.

In rolling out the program, Treasury said it would make the rest of the money available to banks that requested it. Officials said they expected thousands of banks to participate.

But both the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America said that they knew of few banks that planned to participate.

"I'm not sure we've heard from any that want to participate," said Karen Thomas, vice president for government relations at the community bankers group, which represents about 5,000 banks. "That said, if any community banks do enroll, we anticipate it will be just a small minority."

The Nuclear Illusion

A widely heralded view holds that nuclear power is experiencing a dramatic worldwide revival and vibrant growth, because it’s competitive, necessary, reliable, secure, and vital for fuel security and climate protection.

That’s all false.

In fact, nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete—so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn’t debate whether it’s clean and safe; it weakens electric reliability and national security; and it worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options.

Yet the more decisively nuclear power is humbled by swifter and cheaper rivals, the more zealously its advocates claim it has no serious competitors. The web of old fictions ingeniously spun by a coordinated and intensive global campaign is spread by a credulous press and boosted by the nuclear enthusiasts who, probably for the first time ever, now happen to lead nearly all major governments at once. Many people have been misled, including four well-known individuals with long environmental histories—amplified by the industry’s echo box into a sham but widely believed claim of broad green endorsement—and some key legislators. As a result, the U.S. Congress in late 2007 voted $18.5 billion, and the industry will soon be back for another $30+ billion, in new loan guarantees for up to 80% of the cost of new U.S. nuclear units. And the long-pronuclear British government, abruptly reversing its well-reasoned 2002 policy, has decided to replace its old nuclear plants with new ones, although, it claims, without public subsidy3—a feat no country has yet achieved. Thus policy diverges ever farther from market realities.

Dr Amory Lovins - head of the Rocky Mountain Institute - on the real status of nuclear power.