Non è sorprendente che la conferma di Zapatero in Spagna non abbia suscitato particolari entusiasmi nel Centro-Sinistra italiano e che la cosa sia stata liquidata molto velocemente, nonostante in teoria Zapatero e Veltroni stiano dalla stessa parte. Almeno in teoria.

In effetti, la conferma di Zapatero in Spagna, premiata addirittura da un incremento dei consensi che lo ha portato a raggiungere quasi la maggioranza assoluta, è una tegola non da poco sul progetto veltroniano ed una mina che è stato meglio disinnescare subito.

Sono finiti i giorni in cui ci si congratulava senza riserve quando un partito di Sinistra o di Centr

Ci sarà un motivo se, in nessun paese Occidentale (ma non ne risultano nemmeno in altri), nessuno ha mai tentato una operazione come quella del Partito Democratico, eccezion fatta per gli Stati Uniti, dove però il sistema bipartitico ha un'altra storia? Partiamo quindi dalle conclusioni: nessuno ha mai fatto una cosa del genere semplicemente perchè non c'è modo che funzioni.

Non c'è dubbio che il Pd è la coronazione dell'idea di Politica, di Stato e di Società che Veltroni ha difeso da almeno 10-12 anni e quindi non c'è dubbio che lui fosse il pi&

I motivi per cui Prodi è stato costretto a dimettersi, dopo il "no" del Senato alla Fiducia, sono riassunti benissimo in un editoriale di Massimo Giannini per La Repubblica, pubblicato subito dopo l'esito del voto.

In questo articolo, Giannini non è esemplare in quanto analista della situazione politica. Piuttosto, è esemplare come parte di quelle truppe cammellate del costituendo (e probabilmente già morto) Piddì, che stanno confluendo in una lobby che costituisce l'idea velotroniana di

Vorrei dire che la cosa mi sorprende, cioè che Walter Veltroni sia stato invitato (ed abbia partecipato) all'annuale incontro del Bilderberg group del 1996, ma la cosa in verità mi sorprende poco (la lista dei partecipanti del 1996 la puoi trovare qui). Sicuramente è stato un incontro interessante, vi dirà, e ci dirà anche che si è dicusso di tante cose, di problemi etc etc. Sapete come è fatto lui, no? Dice una cosa banale come se fosse un grande programma politico...

La domanda che bisognerebbe porgli invece è: che cosa ci fa un ex-Comunista (almeno spero che lo sia stato), diciamo un uomo di Sinistra, a tavola

La domanda principale è: la Sinistra può avere una banca? E' ovvio che possa. A patto che sappia cosa farsene, chiaramente. Il problema della vicenda Unipol-BNL non è tanto nel reato che persone come D'Alema o Consorte avrebbero commesso.

Certo, il giudice Forleo deve applicare la legge e queste persone sono state intercettate mentre venivano loro riferiti reati come insider trading e aggiotaggio. Sappiamo bene come questi cosiddetti reati siano la base stessa del mercato liberista: non si lanciano OPA se non si hanno già praticamente tutte le azioni che servono o gli accordi stipulati per ottenerle. Al momento dell'OPA, le teste di legno che hanno comprato le azioni le cedono al compratore finale (e nemmeno sempre). Anzi, in molt

Non c'è dubbio che alla fine l'accordo aggiunto sulla riforma del sistema pensionistico non è quello che la Sinistra voleva raggiungere. In pratica, sebbene il cosiddetto Scalone venga più che ammorbidito, la riforma sostanzialmente conferma gli effetti della legge Maroni, rivedendone leggermente i tempi. Non sarebbe accettabile ma si poteva davvero fare di più?

Dopo aver mostrato disappunto, qualcuno pensa che l'ala di Sinistra della maggioranza dovrebbe dare un segnale più forte, magari far cadere il Governo. In verità oggi si apre una nuova fase per la maggioranza e soprattutto per la Sinistra.

Ricordiamo a noi stessi che questo non è un governo di Sinistra, neanc

di Carlo Bonini

ROMA - Con un rapporto di 52 pagine, che chiude un'indagine di quattro anni sulle attività dell'Intelligence americana che hanno preceduto l'invasione dell'Iraq, il "Select Committee on Intelligence", la commissione bicamerale di controllo del Parlamento americano sulle attività dei Servizi Usa, approfondisce e documenta con dettagli inediti e cruciali il solco aperto nel 2005 dalle inchieste di Repubblica sul coinvolgimento, che si scopre ora anche finanziario, del governo Berlusconi e del nostro Servizio militare, il Sismi, allora diretto dal generale Nicolò Pollari, in piani clandestini per il rovesciamento del regime iraniano. Ne illumina la contropartita. Petrolio e gas.

La scena è Roma. La data, i giorni che vanno dal 10 al 13 dicembre 2001. Funzionari americani del Dipartimento della Difesa, nell'inconsapevolezza della Cia e della re

KATMANDU - Gli ex ribelli maoisti del Nepal hanno vinto con ampio margine le elezioni del 10 aprile. I risultati definitivi, resi noti oggi da un responsabile della Commissione elettorale, confermano il successo degli ex insorti che tramite il loro leader Prachanda hanno subito avvertito che il re Gyanendra sarà rimosso al più presto dal trono.

Il 10 aprile scorso circa il 60% dei quasi 18 milioni di aventi diritto ha partecipato alle prime elezioni libere in Nepal dal 1999. I maoisti hanno ottenuto 217 seggi all'assemblea, contro i 107 degli avversari. Una vittoria a sorpresa che implica l'abolizione della monarchia. Tre giorni fa, il re Gyanendra, aveva escluso un'imminente partenza per l'esilio, precisando di non avere in programma di lasciare il Paese. Il probabile futuro premier, il numero due dell'ex guerriglia maoista, Baburam Bhattarai, gli ha concesso quattro settimane di tempo per lasciare il palazzo, dopo di c

Caroline Elkins
is an associate professor of African studies
at Harvard University

As Big Ben struck midnight, Londoners welcomed in 2008 by cheering a blaze of fireworks above the Thames skyline. But the new year has been marked by far less happy conflagrations in several fledgling democracies that had once been part of Britain's empire. Days earlier, Pakistan had been rocked by the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Iraq seems trapped in a cycle of terror and counterterror. Afghanistan looks much the same. Zimbabwe squirms under Robert Mugabe's thumb.

Now Kenya, too, appears to be on the brink. The East African country - widely seen as a model of economic and democratic progress since 2002, when the 24-year dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi was swept aside - has been moving toward an ethnically charged civil war since a disputed election Dec. 27

As of December 31 last, all UK ISPs dutifully responded to Home Office minister Vernon Coaker’s request to ‘voluntarily’ sign up for the Cleanfeed system.

Thus, as in China, the British have sheepishly agreed to have their Internet content, filtered, censored and where the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) or the Home Office decide blocked. This despite there being no legislation to support the Cleanfeed system.

British Telecom developed Cleanfeed. A list of IP addresses is drawn up by the ‘industry watchdog’, the Internet Watch Foundation, supplied to the Home Office which then augments it, and then handed to ISPs with the order to block traffic to and from those addresses.

As the Legalize Cannabis Alliance points out, no one except the Home Office knows what's on that final list. We were originally led to believe that it would be purely a list of child pornography sites. It

ROMA - Il Tar del Lazio ha accolto il ricorso di un gruppo di associazioni, fra le quali Madre Provetta, Amica Cicogna e Warm, annullando per eccesso di potere le linee guida sulla fecondazione medicalmente assistita, la legge 40. In particolare la parte contestata riguarda il divieto di diagnosi preimpianto agli embrioni contenuto nelle linee guida. Lo ha annunciato l'avvocato Gianni Baldini in rappresentanza dell'associazione Madre Provetta. Il tribunale amministrativo ha anche chiesto alla Consulta di pronunciarsi sulla costituzionalità della legge 40.

Un mese fa un tribunale di Firenze aveva accolto il ricorso di una coppia, stabilendo che le linee guida che vietano la diagnosi preimpianto degli embrioni sono inapplicabili perché contro la legge stessa e contro la Costituzione,

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
www.dissidentvoice.org
September 1, 2006

In a little-noted article printed in early August in the Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community, early retired Major Ralph Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US strategic thinking. And they are extremely disturbing.

Ethnically Cleansing the Entire Middle East

Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was responsible for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the Middle East should be fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial endeavor designed to correct past errors. “Without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East,” he observes, but then adds wryly: “Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 ye

di Filippo Ceccarelli

A mali estremi, estremi rimedi. Anche questo fu la guerra fredda in Italia, là dove il male estremo, più che una generica idea di comunismo, era la concretissima possibilità che il Partito comunista italiano andasse al potere.

Era il 1976, l'anno delle elezioni più drammatiche dopo quelle del 1948. Ebbene: dinanzi al male assoluto che un governo con il Pci avrebbe arrecato al sistema di sicurezza dell'Alleanza atlantica, nel novero degli estremi e possibili rimedi il fronte occidentale, le potenze alleate e in qualche misura la Nato presero in considerazione anche l'ipotesi di un colpo di Stato. Un "coup d'Etat", letteralmente: alla francese. Eventualità scartata in quanto "irrealistica" e temeraria.

Nei documenti britannici di cui Repubblica è venuta in possesso grazie alla norma che libera dal segreto le carte di Stato dopo tre

Africa - US Imperialism in Africa
Tuesday, 27 November 2007

The star-studded hue and cry to "Save Darfur" and "stop the genocide" has gained enormous traction in U.S. media along with bipartisan support in Congress and the White House. But the Congo, with ten to twenty times as many African dead over the same period is not called a "genocide" and passes almost unnoticed. Sudan sits atop lakes of oil. It has large supplies of uranium, and other minerals, significant water resources, and a strategic location near still more African oil and resources. The unasked question is whether the nation's Republican and Democratic foreign policy elite are using claims of genocide, and appeals for "humanitarian intervention" to grease the way for the next oil and resource wars on the African continent.

Top Ten Reasons to Suspect "Save Darfur" is a PR Scam to Justify US Military Inter

During his 26-year papacy, John Paul II elevated 483 individuals to sainthood, more saints than all previous popes combined, it is reported. One personage he beatified but did not live long enough to canonize was Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin who had been wined and dined by the world’s rich and famous while hailed as a champion of the poor. The darling of the corporate media and western officialdom, and an object of celebrity adoration, Teresa was for many years the most revered woman on earth, showered with kudos and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her “humanitarian work” and “spiritual inspiration.”

What usually went unreported were the vast sums she received from wealthy contributors, including a million dollars from convicted savings & loan swindler Charles Keating, on whose behalf she sent a personal plea for clemency to the presiding judge. She was asked by the prosecutor in th

THE RADIOACTIVITY PERSISTS FOR OVER 4,500,000,000 YEARS KILLING MILLIONS OF EVERY AGE FOR CENTURIES TO COME .THIS IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY WHICH MAY RANK WITH THE WORST ATROCITIES OF ALL TIME .


The people out there – the Iraqis, the media and the troops – risk the most appalling ill health. And the radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere. It’s going to destroy the lives of thousands of children, all over the world. We all know how far radiation can travel. Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales and in Britain you sometimes get red dust from the Sahara on your car.’

A secret study by the World Bank, which reportedly has not been made public on pressure from the Bush Administration, concludes that bio-fuel cultivation in especially the USA and EU are directly responsible for the current explosion in grain and food prices worldwide. The US Government at the recent Rome UN Food Summit claimed that "only 3% of food prices" were due to bio-fuels. The World Bank secret report says that at least 75% of the recent price rises are due to land being removed from agriculture—mainly maize in North America and rapeseed and corn in the EU—in order to grow crops to be burned for vehicle fuel. The World Bank study confirms what we wrote more than a year ago about the madness of bio-fuels. It fits the agenda described in the 1970’s by Henry Kissinger, namely, ‘If you control the food you control the people.’

According to the London Guardian newspaper which has been given a copy of the suppr

by Dr. Ellen Brown

Global Research, June 25, 2008
webofdebt.com

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin (1802)


Jefferson had it right. More than 1.5 million homeowners are expected to enter foreclosure this year, and about half of them are expected to have their homes repossessed. If the dire consequences Jefferson warned of 200 years ago have been slow in coming, it is because they have been concealed by what Jerome a Paris c

By DR. VERA BUTLER –Australia


Very slowly, but surely, Russian society came to the conclusion that, today, a war is being waged against Russia as such- not against this-or-that ideology or political movement. It is a new kind of war, new and unusual for us. Sometimes it is called "informational psychological," or "civilizatory," or "third world war." All of these descriptions say little-we didn’t really quite understand the nature of this "cold war" declaration. But it was a war of destruction-today that’s clear to everybody.

Although today our society, our people, are divided, yet the feeling of the "strange" war enters the consciousness of people from a wide variety of backgrounds- and, odd as it may sound, it even begins to lay a unifying role. There’s no point in quarreling among each other if the invisible enemy is capable o

The Subprime Crisis is Just Starting
by Daniel R. Amerman, CFA | March 20, 2008

Overview

As the author of three books on mortgage finance and related derivative securities, and speaking as someone who first turned mortgages into rated securities in 1983, I’m going to let you in on an unfortunate little secret – the real subprime mortgage securitization crisis may not have even started yet. But, there is a good chance the real crisis will arrive soon.

This assertion that the crisis could just be getting started may seem absurd and extraordinarily out of touch. What about the approximately 45,000 homeowners losing their homes to foreclosure in the United States every month? What about the 8.9% plunge in nominal housing prices in 2007, the largest decline in over 20 years? What about Bear Stearns losing 94% of the value of its stock in 2 days, with even the remaining 6% in value being

The Globalizer Who Came In From the Cold

JOE STIGLITZ: TODAY'S WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS

by Greg Palast

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping - including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections

"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.

And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life.

I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a London hotel and final

Colossal Collateral Damage

The multi-trillion dollar US-centered securitization debacle began to unravel in June 2007 with the liquidity crisis in two hedge funds owned by Bear Stearns, one of the world's largest and most successful investment banks. The funds were heavily invested in sub-prime mortgage securities. The damage soon spread across the Atlantic to a little-known German state-owned bank, IKB. In July 2007, IKB's wholly-owned conduit, Rhineland Funding, had approximately ¤20 billion of Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP). In mid-July, investors refused to rollover part of Rhineland Funding's ABCP. That forced the European Central Bank to inject record volumes of liquidity into the market to keep the banking system liquid.

Rhineland Funding asked IKB to provide a credit line. IKB revealed it didn't have enough cash or liquid assets to meet the request of its conduit, and was only saved by an emergency ¤

11/02/08 "ICH" --- — Low interest credit and “financial innovation” are a deadly-combo. They've knocked the banking system for a loop, clogged the credit markets with billions of dollars of subprime sludge, and left the real estate market sprawling on the canvas. Still---even though $2 trillion of capitalization has been wiped-out from falling home prices; and even though the financial system is in a terminal state of paralysis---no one has been held accountable. In fact, not one trader, mortgage lender, rating's-agency official, fund manager, or investment banker has been indicted or charged with criminal wrongdoing.


NOT ONE. The system operates without rules or guard rails. It's the Wild West!

The system is so thoroughly marinated in corruption, that every trace of regulatory-oversight has been removed. The SEC is little more than a public relations sham loaded with business-friendly sycophants who

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

On December 8, Chinese and French news services reported that Iran had stopped billing its oil exports in dollars.
Americans might never hear this news as the independence of the US media was destroyed in the 1990s when Rupert Murdoch persuaded the Clinton administration and the quislings in Congress to allow the US media to be monopolized by a few mega-corporations.
Iran's oil minister, Gholam Hossein Nozari, declared: "The dollar is an unreliable currency in regards to its devaluation and the loss oil exporters have endured from this trend." Iran has proposed to OPEC that the US dollar no longer be used by any oil exporting countries. As the oil emirates and the Saudis have already decided to reduce their holdings of US dollars, the US might actually find itself having to pay for its energy imports in euros or yen.
Venezuela's Chavez, survivor of a US-led coup against him and a likely

By Henry C K Liu

(See also PART 1: Fed helpless in its own crisis)

It has been forgotten by many that before 1913, there was no central bank in the United States to bail out troubled commercial and associated financial institutions or to keep inflation in check by trading employment for price stability. Few want inflation but fewer still would trade their jobs for price stability.

For the first 137 years of its history, the US did not have a central bank. The nation then was plagued with recurring business cycles of boom and bust. For the past 94 years the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, has assumed the role of monetary guardian for the nation, yet recurring business cycles of boom and bust have continued, often with the accommodating participation of the Fed. Central banking has failed in its fundamental functions of stabilizing financial markets with monetary policy, succeeding nei

January 20, 2008
Bush To Abandon Supply-Side Economics?

By Paul Craig Roberts

With his tax rebate policy, President Bush has put economic policy back on a Keynesian basis. Will it work?

During the two decades it was in effect, supply-side economics had restorative effects on the American economy. Its predecessor, Keynesian demand management, stimulated demand more than supply. Consequently, over time the trade-offs between employment and inflation worsened, and for a while it appeared that inflation and unemployment would rise together. The breakdown of the Keynesian policy opened the door for the Reagan administration’s supply-side approach.

By following Nobel economist Robert Mundell’s advice to "reverse the policy mix," the supply-side policy allowed the US economy to grow without paying for the growth with rising rates of inflation. However, the new mac

Ripartire dalla sconfitta (anche culturale) - Parte I

Non c'è dubbio che la sconfitta devastante che ha portato, per la prima volta, la Sinistra fuori dal Parlamento Italiano sia un punto di partenza, forse anche necessario, per una inversione di rotta. In Italia, più che negli altri paesi Occidentali, l'alleanza con i moderati non ha portato altro che uno scivolamento verso le politiche neoliberiste. L'idea che una forza di Sinistra possa incidere in maniera positiva nell'ambito di un processo di assimilazione delle idee e dell'organizzazione neoliberista è chiaramente perdente e in tutti i paesi si è assistito ad un lento arretramento di quelle che erano le priorità della Sinistra, anche in presenza di governi di Centro-Sinistra (o Sinistra-Centro). Questo significa che, in tutti i casi, l'alleanza con forze moderate fa sempre il gioco della Destra, che è l'unica che ne trae vantaggi