The fertilizer shortage might even be overcome just now. But the crisis won’t go away. It and many more to come are built into both what’s going on in world capitalism and what we have been doing in India. We’ve dismantled vital parts of our agriculture and with it, the livelihoods of millions. This at a time when the World Bank and IMF are trying to hide their tracks in the trail of disaster they left the world over
Counterpunch
via Stan Goff
-
one of Russia's richest and most discreet businessmen
Mad Cow
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Glenn Greenwald v. Keith Olbermann vis Obama's FISA true colors
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There isn't enough money in the entire global economy to bail out the banks from a massive derivatives default today. When the investors realize that the "insurance" against catastrophe that they have purchased in the form of derivatives is worthless, they are liable to jump ship and bring the whole shaky edifice crashing down.
Ellen Brown
via Global Research

small, submarine-like semi-submersibles assembled deep in the jungle to outmaneuver drug agents and traffic cocaine

Common Dreams:

even-odds whether the North Pole melts out
-
fishermen, Alaskans and the world
-
the Holocene epoch — the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization — has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.”
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U. S. mayors, feeling the disastrous effects of the war in Iraq on their city budgets and local military families, are speaking out to try to stop another disastrous war. Thanks to a grassroots campaign initiated by CODEPINK, Global Exchange and Cities for Peace, a group of mayors have signed on to a National Mayors Resolution for Diplomacy with Iran.

U.S. Stocks Tumble, Sending Dow to Worst June Since Depression
Bloomberg 26.Jun.08
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Better Consumer Data Lifts Stocks
that headline today in the WSJournal was shifted to:
Stocks Enter Bear Market
Wall Street Journal 27.Jun.08

Hatches? What hatches?

Barclays Capital has advised clients to batten down the hatches for a worldwide financial storm, warning that the US Federal Reserve has allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle and let its credibility fall "below zero".

"We're in a nasty environment," said Tim Bond, the bank's chief equity strategist. "There is an inflation shock underway. This is going to be very negative for financial assets. We are going into tortoise mood and are retreating into our shell. Investors will do well if they can preserve their wealth."

TelegraphUK 27.Jun.08
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via cryptogon

But he added: "There is nothing about the soil that would preclude life. In fact, it seems very friendly ... there is nothing about it that is toxic."

"If we don't, we may have to say goodbye to the American way of life we all know and love."

"I'm an American, working for America"

Quickly, Carefully, and Generously

Drill:

I will not accept that the end result of all this financial mayhem is the result of the free market.
This is the result of very powerful people using their power to subvert the life saving signals that a free market will send to people telling them TO STOP WHAT THEY ARE DOING!! Those signals are being intercepted at every conceivable point in the market. From the press(MSM financial manipulation of epic propartions) to Gold prices(GATA has more than proven their case that gold is being manipulated by National banks the world over), to prices to governmental reporting.
All of it is being manipulated in an attempt to keep the con going a little longer. Because the whole system is based on a confidence game, HENCE THE NAME!! A confidence man can only keep swindling people if the MARK keeps having confidence in the man who is deceiving him.
Imagine a confidence man(swindler, grifter, whatever the hell you call him) who has the ability to control all the information around you. He could keep you in the dark for years, because there wouldn't be anyone around you to scream at you "HE'S CHEATING YOU!".
We are in the same boat as an entire society. The people around us who are supposed to be screaming STOP are not doing it, because they are part of the swindle.
They are blocking all signals to the average person, that the system is fatally broke and a realignment is coming full force at them.

Life After the Oil Crash Forum / Daily Economic Update 24.Jun.08

Iran all the way home:

"This time it will be largely the Air Force's show, punctuated by missile and air strikes by the Navy," writes McGovern. "Israeli-American agreement has now been reached at the highest level; the armed forces planners, plotters and pilots are working out the details."

raw story
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Jewish General To Pilot Evangelical-Friendly Air Force

the callousness required to defend the decapitation of a six year-old as necessary retaliation

Chris Hedges:

We confuse how we feel about courtiers like Obama and Russert with real information, facts and knowledge. We chant in unison with Obama that we want change, we yell “yes we can,” and then stand dumbly by as he coldly votes away our civil liberties. The Democratic Party, including Obama, continues to fund the war. It refuses to impeach Bush and Cheney. It allows the government to spy on us without warrants or cause. And then it tells us it is our salvation. This is a form of collective domestic abuse.

Fanonite

45 million gallons of easily available fat:
Barbara Ehrenreich's modest proposal could resolve the fuel crisis

George W. Bush is living proof:

Most of the Left does not hate evil; hatred of evil is primarily found on the Right. With exceptions such as Tony Blair and Joseph Lieberman, virtually the entire Left finds evil far less disturbing than global warming, smoking, economic inequality, and drug prices. And with the exceptions of "paleoconservatives" such as Pat Buchanan, most of the Right regards the use of American power to vanquish evil as the greatest good the U.S. can engage in.

TEN LESSONS FROM SADDAM HUSSEIN'S CAPTURE
by Dennis Prager
Wall Street Journal
December 17, 2003
via Lobe

whale meat embezzlement ring

The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised:

The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.

"A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared," said Bob Janjuah, the bank's credit strategist.

Evans-Pritchard/TelegraphUK

People have been kind:
Chris Locke
Frank Paynter
Sheila Lennon
Barry Pike ?
and large-hearted Tom Matrullo.
Thank you, fellow humans.
The problem isn't so much bad luck or artificially induced karma, but my inability to groove with the economy on its terms. This is what happens when you don't participate adequately. There's a smug heart to it all that repels me, but that's getting its ass handed to it now across the board.
Here we all are watching the fluttering bits of information precipitate. What does the world look like today. Tomorrow. There I was comfortable and now am not. How many others just like that. Hard work and plenty of it. Stubborn refusal to compromise means you stick out, they like it when you do cause you can be beaten down and that's fun. Jesus at the bottom of the pile, or near it. But we all have to eat. Where does the food come from? How to extend the line of living.
And then medical disaster. Or are those integral, do they fit together somehow, the necessities of health all patented and copyright and my goodness that's a lot of money.
What I need is a job. Lots of people in that boat now. And any sense of my own pathetic condition is modulated completely by the sight and knowledge of whole families with young kids slipping off the shrinking edge of the common endeavor.
Humility's in the cards, but assertion, you have to insist on the rightness of your own being or the dark will eat you.
Maybe I could get a job at this office.

crazy rasberry ants

It's getting hot out here:

If you live downwind from us, you might want to pay a little attention to what's happened to Navajos living on a 26,000 square mile reservation that spans the Four Corners region where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. For three generations now, they have been breathing uranium-laden dust from mine tailings and drinking from wells tainted with minute traces of radioactive mining waste. From 1946 into the late 1970s, more than 40 million tons of uranium ore was mined near Navajo communities.

More than a thousand mines were abandoned on the reservation. For every 4 pounds of uranium extracted, 996 pounds of radioactive refuse was left behind in waste pits and piles swept by the wind and leached into local drinking water. In addition to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Navajo miners who sickened and died of cancer and respiratory illnesses -- it's hard to say just how many, since nobody in power bothered to keep track -- epidemiological studies reveal a terrible ongoing toll. Navajo children living near the mines and mills suffered five times the rate of bone cancer and 15 times the rate of testicular and ovarian cancers as other Americans. Exposure to uranium has also been linked to kidney damage and birth defects.

Chip Ward/TomDispatch