Political-Watch

You voted for:

Leadership by decree.

Leadership by the faceless spindoctors.

Leadership by a political reality show using favoured media.

He will have his way via the gagging of his own parliamentarians.

Political history using the shredder.

The absolute power of party officials and the unions.

What’s the use of falling at his feet, unless you are welcoming the end.

Vader and The Wine Traveller will expound on these points when he has recovered from listing them. The WT would really like to return to writing about wine.

The United States has spent half of all the military spending on earth over the last 20 years. This web page breaks it all down with graphs and explanations.
Think about these statistics. Does all this expense bring peace? Does it really save lives, or does it kill people unnecessarily?

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This article was provided by Al Jazeera English. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2008/10/20081011184826882921.html

Missile strike reported in Pakistan

 The AFP news agency quoted Pakistani security officials as saying that the missiles hit a compound, belonging to a Taliban member, late on Saturday.

The US is suspected in at least 11 missile strikes on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border since mid-August, killing more than 100 people, most of them alleged fighters, according to an Associated Press (AP) count based on figures provided by Pakistan intelligence officials.

“Two missiles struck a compound just outside Miranshah,” a security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The targeted compound was the residence of Taliban member Omar Daraz, the official said.

There was no immediate confirmation of the strike from the Pakistani military or from US-led forces in Afghanistan.

A similar suspected US missile strike on a house in the same district on Thursday killed nine people including six Arab fighters, according to security officials.

Orakzai burials

Elsewhere in Pakistan, mourners on Saturday buried victims of a suicide bombing near the border that targeted anti-Taliban tribesmen moving to evict fighters from their region.

Asghar Khan, a government official, told AP that authorities had tallied at least 34 bodies, but that as many as 25 other bodies may have been taken away by relatives in Orakzai, one of Pakistan’s seven semi-autonomous tribal regions.

Some media reports put the death tally from the Friday attack much higher.

One unconfirmed TV report late on Saturday said 113 people died in the bombing.

‘Hideouts’ destroyed

A security official said that Friday’s attack occurred a day after tribesmen had targeted two hideouts belonging to pro-Taliban groups operating in the area.

It also came a day after four tribal elders in Bajaur, a tribal region north of Orakzai, were abducted and beheaded after attending another pro-government meeting, officials said.

“People will tell you that Pakistan is already in a state of war. Every day there are suicide bombings,” Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from the North West Frontier province, said.

“The violence is escalating at a time that the national assembly is not able to come to grips with the situation.”

At least five people have been killed in a missile attack by suspected US drones in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region on the Afghan border, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.

This article was provided by Al Jazeera English. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2008/10/2008101243153951657.html

Strauss-Kahn expressed hope that government actions would prove powerful enough to persuade banks to resume lending and bring an end to a spreading credit crunch.

“In the coming days … what I expect is that the reaction by the different institutions will be positive enough to unfreeze the different markets and to restore the necessary funding,” he said.

Amid the financial turmoil, markets in the Middle East continue to spiral downward on Sunday, the first day of the business week for most countries in the region.

The Qatar Index fell 7.18 per cent by the close. In Saudi Arabia they have continued to fall after Saturday’s four-year low - this time by 2.59 per cent.

In Dubai, stocks are also down by 5.41 per cent, and in Egypt, they have dropped by 5.39 per cent.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, after meeting in France, said they had “prepared a certain number of decisions” to present at the European summit on Sunday in a bid to restore normal flows in blocked credit markets.

‘Exceptional vigilance’

The IMF said it backed a plan by the G7 most industrialised nations to try to stabilise markets and urged “exceptional vigilance, co-ordination and readiness to take bold action” to contain a firestorm that pushed global stocks to five-year lows on Friday.

Christine Lagarde, France’s economy minister, said the Sunday gathering would go beyond talking about remedies to “put meat, muscles on the bones of that skeleton and to develop, follow up and execute upon it”.

The US appealed for patience but the IMF said time was short after the G7 nations - which include the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada - failed to agree on concrete measures to end the crisis at a meeting on Friday.

George Bush, the US president, met with G7 economic chiefs and officials from the IMF and World Bank and said top industrial nations would work together to solve the crisis.

Bush ‘confident’

“I’m confident that the world’s major economies can overcome the challenges we face,” Bush said, adding that Washington was working as fast as possible to implement a $700bn financial bailout package approved a week ago.

“The benefits will not be realised overnight, but as these actions take effect, they will help restore stability to our markets and confidence to our financial institutions.”

Bush acknowledged the market disruption originated in US mortgage markets but warned everyone must help to resolve it.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a rich country or a poor country, a developed country or a developing country - we’re all in this together. We must work collaboratively,” he said.

The Sunday Times newspaper in London meanwhile said Britain would launch its biggest retail bank rescue on Monday when the four largest banks - HBOS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and Barclays - ask for a combined $60.5bn lifeline.

Bank rescue

The unprecedented move would make the government the biggest shareholder in at least two banks, HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland, the newspaper said on its website. It did not give a named source for its information.   

No government officials or representatives from the four banks were immediately available to comment on the report.

Australia also announced that it would guarantee all bank deposits for three years and guarantee wholesale funding to Australian banks in an attempt to combat the credit crisis.

Australia would also make $2.6bn available for mortgage-backed securities to help maintain liquidity for non-bank lenders, Kevin Rudd, the prime minister, told reporters.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that the world’s financial system is near meltdown.

“Intensifying solvency concerns about a number of the largest US-based and European financial institutions have pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief, said on Sunday.

As an aparuddic I feel that Kevin 747 is becoming an Autocrudd. He makes recisions on the run in an autoruddic manner, leaving us all beruddled. Have you had your carbonrudd experience yet? Have you worked out your carbon-footprint size? Kevin and his ruddsters and ruddificarians want to brainwash you into Ruddism, so we all become rudded.

Do you want to make sense out of this ruddant writing?

Well, I can explain with my Collection of Ruddisms, as part of The Wine Traveller’s Winictionary.

Contact me for a copy, and more dialogue on the scruddy ruddonists who are leading this country down the ruddhole.

Vader and the WT

WMR has learned from knowledgeable Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sources that the Bush administration is putting the final touches on a plan that would see martial law declared in the United States with various scenarios anticipated as triggers.

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With any luck the world will be able to forget about this man. Then again, I would like to see him on trial for war crimes. In the same manner that Saddam Hussein was tried and convicted. George W Bush should be tried for the deaths of the 100,000 people who have died in Iraq since the US lead invasion.

Colonel Gaddafi from Libya. He’s been a bit quiet lately and not making the news very often.

But who knows where and when this quintessential bad guy will turn up next?

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The designers of the international economy sternly demand that the poor accept market discipline, but they ensure that they themselves are protected from its ravages, a useful arrangement that goes back to the origins of modern industrial capitalism, and played a large role in dividing the world into rich and poor societies.

We might also take note of the striking similarity between the structural adjustment programs imposed on the weak by the International Monetary Fund, and the huge financial bailout that is on the front pages today in the North. The US executive-director of the IMF, adopting an image from the Mafia, described the institution as “the credit community’s enforcer.”

Under the rules of the Western-run international economy, investors make loans to third world tyrannies, and since the loans carry considerable risk, make enormous profits.

Suppose the borrower defaults. In a capitalist economy, the lenders would incur the loss. But really existing capitalism functions quite differently. If the borrowers cannot pay the debts, then the IMF steps in to guarantee that lenders and investors are protected. The debt is transferred to the poor population of the debtor country, who never borrowed the money in the first place and gained little if anything from it. That is called “structural adjustment.” And taxpayers in the rich country, who also gained nothing from the loans, sustain the IMF through their taxes. These doctrines do not derive from economic theory; they merely reflect the distribution of decision-making power. - Noam Chomsky

Sounds the same for us. We sustain the IMF to allow corporations to put debt onto the populations of poor countries, and we sustain our government to put debt onto our population.

Corporations win, we lose.

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