The Prime Minister for the City of London

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I don't always agree with economist Will Hutton but his furious response to Cameron's EU veto is classic:

David Cameron is the best and worst of upper-middle class, home counties England – decent enough but saturated with prejudices he has never cared to challenge. He understands his own party and its instincts, but beyond that his touch is uncertain and his capacity to empathise with others close to non-existent. ...His circle is the hedge fund managers who payroll his party, rightwing media executives and the demi-monde of Tory dining clubs, Notting Hill salons and country house weekends, all of whom he knew could be relied to cheer him for his alleged bulldog spirit and Thatcher-like courage in saying No to European "plots".

For him, politics is not about statecraft in the pursuit of a national vision that embraces all the British. It is an enjoyable game to be played for a few years, in which the task is to get his set in and look after them and hand the baton on to the next chap who will do the same.

The over-riding preoccupation was to manage his tribe, now in thrall to the worst of ancient Tory instincts that have been so consistently wrong. ....

The detestation of the EU is largely irrational – even if very real. Britain enhances its power and de facto sovereignty through membership; it loses it by becoming the creature of the financial markets and the City of London so beloved by Conservatives...


None of the eurosceptics baying for a referendum objects to Mayfair, Kensington and Knightsbridge becoming ghost towns owned by foreigners, nor to swaths of our great companies and brands falling into foreign ownership. This loss of control and autonomy is fine. But to make common cause with our European neighbours to enlarge our capacity to act in the world causes collective heart failure.

His article was followed by the following devastating comment:

David Cameron is the Prime Minister for the City of London.

The same City of London which is primarily responsible for the financial crisis.

The same City of London which contributes 11% of tax revenues each year but which is instrumental in facilitating $3trillion of tax funneled to tax havens every year.

The City has become disproportionately dominant over the last 30 years, a period in which the wealth gap in the UK has widened massively, a period in which we have all become massively indebted as real incomes for ordinary people have stagnated.

It's extraordinary that Cameron thinks that his priority is to defend the interests of the City regardless of the impact of EU isolationism on the UK manufacturing sector.

Cameron's stupidity has cheered the swivel-eyed bigots on the Right of his party and his sponsors in the City, but it was not done in the national interest and it will tear the coalition apart, after which it will tear the Tory Party apart.

Why Ed Miliband should speak the language of Marx

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I wish I'd written this. I still think in those marxist phrases - I just don't use them anymore. People in particular don't like being reminded of class because where ever you stand socially it's somehow uncomfortable. Hence why 75% now call themselves 'middle class' - I suppose it makes us feel less divided. I always hated Brown's "hard working families" - what about bloody hard working single people? "Squeezed middle" is only marginally less annoying.

The "squeezed middle" has been chosen as "word of the year" by the Oxford English Dictionary. It is associated with Ed Miliband, and I can see why: because, although clever, he's a toneless sort of man, and it's a toneless sort of phrase.
But I first heard "squeezed middle" (and I would like to point out to the Oxford English Dictionary people that it is a phrase and not a word) in Gordon Brown's 2009 conference speech. I had the impression something had fallen off the end, that Brown had pulled up just before letting slip the taboo word "class". My other problem with squeezed middle is it reminds me of Fern Britton and her gastric band.
As a description of the constituency Labour is aiming for, I marginally prefer it to its equally anodyne companion: "hard-working families". Men, especially, don't really want to be reminded of their families, and I doubt it's much of a spur to political action. It also reminds me of John Major, that great promoter of "family values", which in turn calls up a mental picture of him having one of his extra-marital sex sessions with Edwina Currie.
Squeezed middle does neatly evoke that current sense of being caught in a pincer movement between the bitterness of the downtrodden and the triumphalism of the rich. For example, I know from experience that the driver who eventually kills me on my bike is either going to be the rich owner of a giant 4x4, or an apoplectic plasterer in a white van. But its use hasn't helped Miliband's poll ratings, and I wish Labour would revert to something trenchant: the language of, or associated with, Karl Marx. Now there was a phrase-maker. His philosophy may be workable in practice because it sure looks good on the page, especially in our present times.
Admittedly, Miliband can't claim to speak on behalf of both the proletariat and bourgeoisie because in Marxism they are locked in class struggle. And he can't speak for the proletariat alone, as Labour leaders once did, because it has been decreed by… well, by the ruling class that a society run in the interests of the workers would be inequitable. Ruling class demands a return, I feel – just observe Cameron and Osborne on the front bench. But who are those somewhat less confident-looking people sitting alongside them? They are the Lib Dems, the ones who assist the controllers of capital to remain in power. They are in fact capitalist lackeys.
We are all familiar with the gilded "1%" being protested against in the City, but how did they reach their eminence? Surely through the tendency, identified by Marx, for more and more money to be in fewer and fewer hands: the concentration of capital, which is associated with the tendency of financial capital to supersede industrial capital.
You know all those young people today working for nothing in the name of "work experience"? That's called exploitation. Turning to the young rioters of earlier this year, they appeared to be economically below the proletariat (in that many did not have jobs), and more interested in getting a pair of Nike trainers than political protest. Marx would have called this unprogressive and poorly educated sub-stratum the lumpenproletariat. It's not a pretty word, but it does the job. As for the extreme desirability of those Nike trainers, and the veneration of Apple man Steve Jobs, that's commodity fetishism.
But there's one Marxian concept that seems to encapsulate the life of the majority of Britons whatever they be collectively called. I refer to that feeling of working ever harder for ever less, at the mercy of giant, probably foreign corporations run by people who earn more in an hour than you do in a week, and then coming home and seeing Simon Cowell on TV. It's called alienation. I've looked up the symptoms in my Marxist dictionary, and I definitely have it. How about you?

As the writer suggests, alienation and the feeling of "us and them" - Marx's class division - is being forced on us by capitalism and its drive toward concentration of wealth and impoverishment. On top of that we have a political class who have put all their eggs in the banker's basket. This really feels like a Titanic moment - but the Titanic sank quickly, while the sinking of the apparently doomed ship Financial Oligarchy may take a little longer and claim more lives. Common perceptions of Marxism, particularly the Bolshevik version of it, are coloured by the bloody history of the 20th century. Bolshevism turned the class struggle into a bloody reign of terror, though not before terror and subversion was visited upon them. The attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918, by agents most likely employed on behalf of Britain, led to a counter-revolutionary terror against the Revolution's enemies. Lenin was keenly aware that in Marx's time the experience of the Paris Commune (1871) was the object lesson of what happens to a revolution when it can't defend itself. Some 30,000 Communards were executed when Paris fell to the French/Prussian forces. (A century later the same thing happened to Chile's Allende.) This was the fate awaiting Russia's revolution - hence Lenin's choice of 'hard men' to defend it, ultimately leading to his fateful choice of Stalin as general secretary. The great tragedy of the 20th century was that the survival of Bolshevism-Stalinism became, by example and myth, the object lesson on how to conduct a successful revolution across the colonial world. And the lesson was that, although workers (and, in the Maoist version, peasants) were the social agents for revolution, they needed a disciplined party of Marxist-Leninists to lead them. By surviving the civil war and then the crisis of the late 20s/early 30s, it appeared that Lenin and Stalin had laid down a blueprint of how to overthrow the semi-feudal classes and their imperialist overlords, and then how to modernise the country. Liquidation of the landowning and bourgeois classes and the destruction of all independent parties were the primary methods. Stalin set out to achieve industrialisation in 10 years where the Western nations had needed 50. Millions died. Mao, Mengistu, and the young officers who instigated the Afghan revolution all followed the blueprint with bloody results. Pol Pot pushed the nihilistic elements of Mao's idiosyncratic version of Marxism-Leninism to the ultimate extreme, turning the essential modernism of Marxism into its opposite - instead of industrialisation, he emptied the cities. Instead of mass education, he liquidated all those who were educated. Instead of internationalism, there was a racist nationalism, in which non-Khymers were eliminated. At this nadir in the development of the movement that began with Marx, communism had become its opposite. Western marxism, both European and Latin American, mostly did not take this course toward anti-modernist, national chauvinism. From Gramsci to Castro and Allende, the essential democratic and internationalist impulse was preserved. Stalinism/Maoism never achieved a monopolistic grip as it did in eastern Europe and Asia. To be sure, there was plenty of dogmatism at work in the communist and Trotskyist parties of western Europe and north America. In Africa, there was Mengistu's African Stalinism, Mugabe's opportunistic anti-imperialism, and other versions of socialism such as Nyerere's in Tanzania. In many cases the embrace of Marxism was purely geopolitical. Angola's Dos Santos declared the state Marxist-Leninist as long as Soviet aid was available, then promptly switched to crony capitalism when it dried up. Across Francophone Africa, experiments in state socialism lasted a decade or two before collapsing in economic failure. The legacy of dictatorship, terror and economic failure hangs over Marx and Marxism.

Social democracy and the welfare state achieved unparalleled social mobility and rising living standards in the years between 1945 and 1980. Since then both Keynsian economic intervention and redistribution have been in retreat worldwide. Capitalist triumph in 1990-91 with the collapse of communism, was followed by its carnival years. Only now, 20 years on, can we see the results of unleashing capital and putting labour on a leash, on a divided society and failing economy. Marx's  own works have stood the test of time. In the greatest irony, it was only after the collapse of all the socialist regimes, or their transformation into state capitalism, when capitalism itself was able to once again throw off the shackles imposed on it in the 20th century, that Marxism was rediscovered in its essential form. Financial collapse followed the greatest asset bubble in history, then bailout and sovereign debt crisis. The stagnation of average living standards, with bosses reap obscene 'rewards' by seizing all the gains were the very phenonema Marx described in Capital - exploitation and the extraction of surplus value from labour, followed by crisis as capital destroys its own market. We are now in such a disfunctional phase of the system that fictitious capital has, until 2008, become the main source of profit taking by finance capital. Normal capitalism was replaced by a gigantic pyramid scheme.
Another strange turn of events is that, for the first time most people are urban dwellers and one form of 'proletarian' or other. Yet, crucially, they do not necessarily see themselves as such. The marxist understanding of the proletariat is a downtrodden class that becomes aware of its own position in relation to the owners of production and organises to wage class struggle against the boss class. This no longer describes the general situation in most countries. The globalisation of capital and de-industrialisation of much of the formerly industrialised world has stripped the old working class of its muscle and confidence. Until recently we were all heading toward bourgeois nirvana, as Blair and his ilk so firmly believed. In truth, from the 1970s in America, and since 2000 in Europe, wages have been stagnating, while independent small capital has been gradually destroyed by corporate capital. Bourgeoisification has gone into reverse.

Meanwhile the workers of the world's new workshops in Asia and elsewhere, even where they are resisting their own exploitation, are not part of a wider class struggle as was the case for most of the 20th century. The new way in which the global economy at the level of production is decentralised makes it much harder for the wage earners to engage in struggle. How can a cocoa worker in Cote D'Ivoire, working on a plantation for slave wages, locate the source of his oppression when the corporations who controls his industry are located thousands of miles away in Kensington?
The exception to this general trend has been the rise of the social movements of Latin America, where wide sections of the disorganised working class, and those like the coca workers of Bolivia and the informal classes of Caracas, have found novel ways to organise around new leaders and parties and strike blows against capital. Instead of the Leninist centralised party, there are social movements that remain by Leninist standards massively anarchic - and yet they are able to unite around basic demands for social justice and control of natural resources. This regional exception has led to leftist governments taking power - and retaining it - across the continent. However, only in Venezuela is there any suggestion that capital could be overthrown, and 12 years into the Bolivarian revolution, no collectivisation a la Stalin or Mao is imminent. And yet, history may yet surprise us. In the midst of the rightwing reaction in Europe and the apparent death of social democracy, a cataclysmic turn of events could yet give the lonely Marxists a chance to finally fulfil his prophecy, or watch us slip back into some dystopian zombie capitalism. We are teetering now. The mood and response of the masses to this onslaught on all the was won over the last century, as in Cairo, Tunis and Sana'a, will be the decisive force in this unknown outcome.

The best rejection I've ever had

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I received my ninth rejection for my novel The Overwhelming yesterday. This one was from Canongate Books, and it said: "The story is exciting, relevant and beautifully written. Though I do believe there is a market for this type of project, I do not feel it is quite right for the Canongate list at present." Now I could be disappointed. Usually when I see one of these letters on the doormatt, a feeling of dread comes over me. Oh no, not another one. But this one is different. It confirms that the novel is good and marketable. Thank you Canongate for rejecting me. I know now I won't give up.

Quiet Goldman Sachs coup in Europe

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Goldman Sachs have done it again, performing a silent coup across Europe on the back of the euro crisis. And here is that rare thing - a serious analysis of events that looks behind the appearance of things to explain what and who is really pulling the strings. Who? - why the blood sucking vampire squid Goldman of course - giving us the new Italian Prime Minister, the new Greek prime minister and the new head of the European central bank.

Who ever said rising house prices are a good thing?

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One male wage used to be enough to support a family. Since women joined the labour market, it now requires two wages. Why? Housing inflation. Why have rents and house prices increased so much - it's a simple market failure. Housing prices rise because the market inflates according to the ability of people to pay, however reluctantly, what sellers want. People MUST have somewhere to live - and there is a limited amount of desirable land and property. If people did not need to live near where they worked, or near hospitals and schools, they could live somewhere cheaper. But unfortunately most don't have that choice.
Banks have played the housing market by - until the recent crisis - increasing availability of mortgage borrowing, which of course encourages house price inflation. Most perversely of all, governments, the media and economists have all bought into the absurd idea that house price inflation is good. Why? How can making life unaffordable for most people while making a minority of landlords rich be good for us? For a while some people saw themselves as wealthy by virtue of rising house prices. But if you only have one house, the only way you can benefit from an expensive house is to move somewhere cheaper, or into something smaller, to cash in. Of course, when you die, you can pass on this cash pile to your children. So it works as a way of passing on unearned income to children. Why unearned? Because this money was not made through work or skill, but through buying when it was cheap and watching the value rise through asset inflation. By passing it on to kids, you help perpetuate a division in society between the housing rich and the housing poor.
Somehow we must get back to lower house prices and lower rents. The market will never do this - only state intervention through taxation, regulation of the market and provision of social housing can change this. The housing bubble helped cause the financial crisis. The housing market is totally disfunctional but no politician will propose meaningful solutions because they are all wedded to the idea that property owners and ownership are untouchable and that landlord greed is not to be tampered with. Private health used to be seen in the same way. Then came the NHS. We need a revolutionary change in the way we see housing. It could solve a huge number of social problems. People could start to work less hours, spend more time with family and doing things they enjoyed.

Part time work could become the norm, now that so many of the labour intensive industries of the past have declined. There simply isn't enough work for everybody anyway, and the current system, where some people are killing themselves working 50+ hours a week while there are three million people unemployed is just stupid. And the elderly are clearly going to have to be part of this too, there are now so many of them that it just isn't sustainable for the working population to carry them.

But, before this can become a reality, two major things need to happen, firstly we need a massive drop in housing costs, because at the moment it is pretty much impossible for a couple to manage of two part time salaries when so much money is sucked up in rents and mortgage payments, and secondly we need a change in attitude that does away with the idea that working excessive hours is somehow impressive, rather than an admission of incompetence, because you can't get your job done in the allocated hours.

The Parallels with the 1930s are growing

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There is a systemic crisis. We are more than four years into the crisis that began in the summer of 2008. Four years into the Depression that began in 1929 was 1933, the year Hitler came to power. So far this crisis has not claimed any democratic regime in the developed world. The bailouts have so far prevented a collapse of credit, production and employment as was seen in the early 30s in Europe and America. Meanwhile the Huffington Post reports that US median incomes have fallen by 7% in real terms in the last decade - this is a dramatic decline in historic terms. The real term fall in UK incomes is comparable to the early 1920s and late 70s.

Another parallel with the 1930s is that while the western economies are in crisis, the economies of developing countries are benefiting from high commodity prices and undergoing rapid development - in Latin America, Russia and north Asia in the 1930s. Today it is happening across Asia, Africa and south America. In the 30s communism and fascism were all the rage, today the non-orthodox models are variations on state capitalism, from Chinese market communism to Venezuela's 21st century socialism. It's ironic that despite China's stellar growth, it seems incapable of breaking free of dependence on western consumers - the rulers of China are in no hurry to start redistributing wealth away from big quasi state companies to the masses. Gradually more social security is introduced, but the country sits on £2 trillion in western bonds - effectively the unpaid debts of the consumers who buy its mass products. Globalisation was supposed to allow countries to specialise in what they were best at - which turned out to be making stuff that the workers can't afford in China and borrowing money to buy stuff made somewhere else in the West. The one thing that neoliberal capitalism cannot do is put money into the pockets of ordinary people.  Quantitative easing? No problem. Redistribution - never. Postwar welfare capitalism did this more successfully than anything before or after. It foundered in the inflation and rightwing shift of the late 70s. The neoliberalism that replaced it promised universal wealth but ended up creating a mega-rich 1 percent and a gradually vanishing middle class. It can't last.

Democracy is in crisis too, as the Occupy movement signifies, although with the possible exception of Greece, it is not seriously under threat. What Occupy, the Indignados of Spain and assemblies of Greece pose is the possibility of a more protaganistic democracy where people, rather than professional politicians, set the terms of the debate. Cynicism about the ability of the system to respond to our economic problems  is widespread. In the West our version of representative democracy seems to mainly represent the interests of money, while in the Arab world people are demanding basic democratic rights. There is no trend back toward authoritarianism in any region, although it is still entrenched in Russia, China and central Asia.

The 'debt crisis' of the West - Europe and USA - is actually a financial and economic crisis of capitalism. In place of economic growth and real income growth, we had 15 years of debt growth. Now we have public and private debt crisis. The only long term way of solving a debt crisis is to grow your way out of it - or to default on your debts. In the 1930s, it was rearmament and war that allowed the western economies to emerge from a decade long depression. The market was unable to self-correct - proving its economic theorists wrong and giving a huge boost to Keynsian and socialist economics. That war caused so much destruction that the next 20 years allowed for growth out of the rebuilding of the countries affected. We may yet stumble into another global conflict - perhaps starting with an attack on Iran. A war would allow governments to intervene in the economy to drive growth - but it could also lead to catastrophe, as it did for Germany in 1945. The Bible advocated a Jubilee every 50 years when all onerous debts were cancelled and people could start again. We are moving toward the point where a Jubilee for debt-based finance capitalism will be unavoidable.

10 reasons to be cryogenically frozen

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It's been on my mind recently that the future - the far future, say 1000 years from now - will be much better than now. The civilisation we live in is in a process of decay, even as technological capitalism speeds across the planet, transforming all culture into something that looks and feels very similar, crowded, urban, fast...so here are my reasons why I think cryogenically freezing myself for 1000 years is the best bet to time travel into a very different now.
1. The five day week is a theft of time by capital and renders the victims unfree, robbed of our most precious resource - time. In the future it will disappear as will wage labour.
2. Population growth will go into reverse. The planet will be much less crowded and pleasant to live on.
3. Advertising will disappear as the wastefulness of consumerism is replaced by a more rational distribution of goods. Planned obsolescence in production will be replaced by self evolving technology that never needs replacing. Production and art will merge back into the common human activity.
4. Disease will be abolished and humans will effectively be immortal as cell structure comes entirely under technological control. This development alone will radically alter the way we perceive our life and will be cause humans to turn away from short-term selfish thinking
5. Inter dimensional travel will eliminate polluting traffic. We will never need to commute again as anyone and anywhere will be close by.
6. Languages will have merged and technology will instantly translate any unknown meanings. We will all understand one another.
7. Finance and banking will be as relevant as feudal knights are now. Abundance will have eliminated the need for hoarding and speculation and money, if it exists at all, will be something quaint for collectors.
8. All tedious and arduous repetitive work will be eliminated. People will devote their lives to creativity, socialising and interplanetary exploration
9. Politics as we know it will be replaced by direct mass intelligent decision making - a single human brain combining all thought to reach rational decisions about human needs.
10. Owning stuff will not matter anymore. Life will be about experience and using your time for leisure and self realisation.

Of course I could be wrong as I cannot predict the future but for sure lots of very stupid things will have been abolished. Perhaps what will be lost is the joy of struggling against the odds to live a good life. Because everyone will actually live a good life.

FT and NYT back Occupy Wall Street

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The Financial Times published an editorial three days ago supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement. The rightwing media including the Daily Mail have also been sympathetic.

The FT says:

So far the protests in the US have been largely peaceful. They may be diffuse and inchoate. But the fundamental call for a fairer distribution of wealth cannot be ignored. What is at stake is the future of the American dream. The bargain has always been that all who work hard should have an opportunity for prosperity. That dream has been shattered by a crisis brought about by financial excess and political cynicism. The consequence has been growing in­equality, rising poverty and sacrifice by those least able to bear it – all of which are failing to deliver economic growth.

The frustration of protesters railing against the global financial system, and of the 54 per cent of Americans who polls suggest support their calls, is legitimate. The wonder is why it has taken so long for citizens to come out in popular protest across political boundaries. For the last three years, the country has been paralysed by a political gridlock that has put its future on the line.
…
Politicians in both camps have failed to spot and channel the righteous anger of those who have seen government spend billions on bailing out banks, while bickering over how to create jobs or educate children. One opportunity after another has been squandered – most recently in the failure promptly to pass a proper jobs bill.

It ends by saying that this “cry for change” must be “heeded”.

Last week the New York Times also published an editorial supporting the OWS movement.

The protests, though, are more than a youth uprising. The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery.

The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer.

Extreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment.

When the protesters say they represent 99 percent of Americans, they are referring to the concentration of income in today’s deeply unequal society. Before the recession, the share of income held by those in the top 1 percent of households was 23.5 percent, the highest since 1928 and more than double the 10 percent level of the late 1970s.

That share declined slightly as financial markets tanked in 2008, and updated data is not yet available, but inequality has almost certainly resurged. In the last few years, for instance, corporate profits (which flow largely to the wealthy) have reached their highest level as a share of the economy since 1950, while worker pay as a share of the economy is at its lowest point since the mid-1950s.

The NYT is missing the elephant in the room which is asset ownership - in this the top 1% own the same as the bottom 50%. Does this mean that the intellectuals of the US capitalist class, and the likes of Buffet and Soros, realise something must be done or the protests could begin to threaten the system? Or is it that they don't threaten the system and there is a desire to keep these protests cuddly. In the crisis of 1979-81, the most severe postwar crisis before now, there were strikes and riots too. The occupy movement is new, it is more middle class than traditional strikes or the riots, perhaps as impoverishment hits the new graduate classes of the 21st century. Perhaps that's why politicians and the media are less quick to condemn it. Michael Moore got a respectful hearing on Newsnight on Wednesday - Paxo just listened rather than barking at him for being a lefty. Strange, unfamiliar territory...

An explosive new 9/11 charge....from US counterterror chief

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In a new documentary, former national-security aide and 9/11 insider Richard Clarke suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up.
Former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks. The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who made the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary.
In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11. Clarke speculates —and readily admits he cannot prove—that the CIA withheld the information because the agency had been trying to recruit the terrorists, while they were living in Southern California under their own names, to work as CIA agents inside Al Qaeda. After the recruitment effort went sour, senior CIA officers continued to withhold the information from the White House for fear they would be accused of "malfeasance and misfeasance," Clarke suggests.
Clarke says it is fair to conclude "there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information." Asked who would have made the order, Clarke replies, "I would think it would have been made by the director," referring to Tenet. Clarke said that if his theory is correct, Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today "even if you waterboarded them."

Clarke's theory addresses a central, enduring mystery about the 9/11 attacks— why the CIA failed for so long to tell the White House and senior officials at the FBI that the agency was aware that two Al Qaeda terrorists had arrived in the United States in January 2000, just days after attending a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia that the CIA had secretly monitored. In a written response prepared last week in advance of the broadcast, Tenet says that his partner in lies Clarke, who famously went public in 2004 to blow the whistle on the Bush White House over intelligence failures before 9/11, has "suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration." The CIA insisted to the 9/11 Commission and other government investigations that the agency never knew the exact whereabouts of the two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, inside the U.S.—let alone try to recruit them as spies. Agency officials said the CIA's delay in sharing information about the two terrorists was a grave failure, but maintained there was no suggestion of deception by CIA brass. Tenet has said he was not informed before 9/11 about Hazmi and Mihdhar's travel to the U.S., although the intelligence was widely shared at lower levels of the CIA. The 9/11 Criminal Commission investigated widespread rumors in the intelligence community that the CIA tried to recruit the two terrorists—Clarke was not the first to suggest it—but the investigation revealed no evidence to support the rumors. The commission said in its final report that "it appears that no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA" about the two terrorists.

But in his interview, Clarke said his seemingly unlikely, even wild scenario—a bungled CIA terrorist-recruitment effort and a subsequent cover-up—was "the only conceivable reason that I've been able to come up with" to explain why he and others at the White House were told nothing about the two terrorists until the day of the attacks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRmWFnnIb8g

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/11/september-11th-anniversary-r...

Orwellian plot used by US to attack Iran

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This implausible plot, allegedly by a dodgy Iranian car salesman from Texas, to kill the Saudi ambassador, is being used by patsy Obama and his friends in Israel and Saudi Arabia to ratchet up pressure on Iran. Since 9/11 we have seen Orwellian manipulation of the terrorist threat to arouse US and global opinion in support of US and Zionist aggression. The UK media have on this occasion immediately questioned the authenticity of this new plot - thankfully - yet somehow there is a sense that the Americans don't care if no one believes this to be real. They needed something to beat Iran with, and lacking anything substantive, they have found this ludicrous plot. Only Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s can compare with US false flag terror plots, leading to the most elaborate of all - 9/11 itself. Stalin's henchmen thought up outlandish plots allegedly carried out by his rivals such as Trotsky and Bukharin in alliance with fascist and bourgeois enemies. This was used to hound them, arrest them, beat them into confession. Then they were put on show trials. Their execution ended the story - rather like the execution of Osama bin Laden. No trials for these people - America only dared put one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers on trial (the 20th) after he was waterboarded 83 times and 'confessed' to masterminding the plot.
The Nazis used false flag attacks - on the Reichstag - and later on the Polish border, first to seize power in Germany and then to launch their war in Europe.
Seventy years later, the Neocons used 9/11, WMDs and other alleged terror plots to whip up war hysteria at home and abroad. This latest plot is the most implausible of all. But they don't care. It serves its purpose - and our politicians will very likely go along with it. Orwell would know all too well what this was all about - manufacturing lies for truth. War is the goal. A good analysis can be found here.

And who said this?

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"Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality … Civil government supposed a certain subordination. But as the necessity of civil government gradually grows up with the acquisition of valuable property, so the principal causes which naturally introduce subordination gradually grow up with the growth of that valuable property … Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

Answer: Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations 1776

My iPhone and the miraculous Abu Talal

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After Bashar Al Assad, you must come to Homs, said Abu Talal, the man who came 100 miles to give me my lost iPhone, the one I dropped in the mountains of Petra. I love the way Abu Talal says this, in the sure knowledge that Syria’s time of trouble will end. Petra had wowed me, swept me up in its breathtaking grandeur, both natural and man-made. Only at the end of the day back at the hotel did I realise I no longer had my cherished iPhone. The hotel staff made some calls to the restaurants in the heart of Petra – two are located at the end of the Roman road that completes the world’s Seventh wonder. The 2300-year-old Nabatean metropolis is set amid majestically slung gorges and mountains, sculpted and layered in implausible forms and colours, a trade hub of the ancient world lost for a millennium.

Tanushka had extolled to me tirelessly the hospitality and grace of her Jordanian parentage. Since arriving here, I have experienced this on enough occasions to know it is something undeniably real. We are talking cab drivers who, when asked how much, shrug and say ‘No problem.’ And mean it - until you insist on paying. Shopkeepers who give you water for lack of the right change. Our daughter is showered with gifts – jewellery, drinks, kisses. A little Arabic and an adorable toddler help to endear, but the Jordanians are always sincere in their generosity. Almost never have we suffered from the harsh sales tactics and double dealing that are part of the tourist package elsewhere in the world.
Abu Talal topped anything I had so far experienced in Jordan, or could reasonably expect – even if he was Syrian. My phone could have fetched a fair sum on the open market if someone wished to sell it. I left Petra with a shrug. C’est la vie. You get to see the Seventh Wonder of the World, climb to the top of a valley and see a mad man in a Bob Marley T-shirt climb up an 80 foot Nabatean temple carved from the mountain. You watch this cracked Bedouin jump from ancient stone roof to hanging buttress, and pirouette from the highest pinnacle to the nervous awe of the tourists and Bedouin traders below. All it needed was a New Yorker to shout ‘Go on, buddy, jump!” He didn’t. In fact he risks his life to wow the crowd once an hour, before descending into the empty chamber of the temple where he listens to reggae and smokes the stuff that numbs his fear. I climbed the final stretch to the summit where a Bedouin tent overlooks the Arabian desert far below. The horizon is lost in infinite dunes. A Bedouin with intense blue eyes framed by a black headscarf plays a mean Arabian blues on his oud. He tells me he sleeps here most nights because here you can only hear silence and the wind. He has travelled all over the Arab world but always comes back. He loves this place because of the history, he says. People have been here since the stone age, leaving their tools amid the more elaborate encryptions of the peoples that came after. Nomads from the Arabian desert, the forefathers of today’s Bedouin, arrived 25 centuries ago. Later as their wealth grew, they added their magnificent tombs to the very rock that is the meaning of the word ‘Petra’. There has always been water and this has always been a place of refuge, trade and pilgrimage. Before earthquakes and changing trade patterns ended Petra’s golden age in the Seventh century, all wanted a piece of its riches. Now its wealth is in tourism. Its £50 to get in, up massively in recent years, but how can you price something that surpasses all superlatives for an ancient wonder?
Next to Wadi Rum, an earthscape of crenelated rocks and high-walled valleys that rise from the desert as if carved from the very mind of God, declaring forever the miracle of creation. In the valley of Rum, the camels stand motionless in the dry mid-afternoon heat beneath a sculpted cliff of sandstone split by a gorge, while black vultures circle in the indigo sky to the ethereal imploring of the muezzin. David Lean eat your heart out.
Aqaba, by contrast, is a bustling Arabian port and burgeoning tourist hub, taking on its rival Eilat only a stone throw away in Israel across the bay. Here the top of the Red Sea joins the southernmost tip of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Israel. At our borrowed apartment on the hill we receive a call from Amman. I have some good news, says Nabil, our celebrated host in the capital. Nabil is a true household name here in Jordan. Say to almost any Jordanian – like our taxi driver – ‘Nabil Sawalha’ – and they will exclaim his name back to you. Nabil Sawalha, I love him, they say. He is a satirist, TV and film star, and much loved radio raconteur. We watched his home videos of his Ramadan sketch show which he performed at the Amman Sheraton last month. Nabil as Gamel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Syria’s Hafez al Assad (the late father of current Bashar), Saddam Hussein and last but not least Brother leader Muammar Gadaffi. And the late King Hussein of Jordan of course. After his whirwind tour of recent Arab big men, Nabil comes on stage as himself, lamenting the lack of such characters in the Arab world today. This one is not for broadcast, Nabil explains from his sofa.
Back to that call. Someone’s found your phone. He was on the mountain climbing up to the temple when his son saw it and gave it to his dad. Abu Talal took it to a phone shop, charged it up, went through the numbers and found Nabil, a Jordanian name. He rang it, and hey presto. I was amazed that this considerate and resourceful man had bothered to track me down. Nabil explains that Abu Talal lives in Ma-an, 100 miles up the Desert Highway. He gives me the number. Tanushka calls him and in her basic Arabic thanks him and says we will call back tomorrow. We mull over how to retrieve the phone. Next morning Hassan, our ever helpful taxi driver, says he will get it back ‘No problem’. The same day, mid afternoon, he calls us at our flat in Aqaba. In Arabic he tells us he is with Abu Talal and they want to come round with the phone. Abu Talal here? In Aqaba? They’ll be round in two minutes. Suddenly, they are here. Hassan, and two other guys – one large-framed with a moustache and wearing a traditional white dishdash. Abu Talal. Hassan says he has seen the pictures I took on the phone and wanted to see our faces to be sure that it is indeed us. Abu Talal leaves nothing to chance. We are effusive in our thanks. Tanushka rushes inside and grabs whatever she can find – her favourite pashmina for his wife, some dates and bananas. After the expected refusals, my saviour accepts our meagre gifts. He tells us he is from Homs, heart of the Syrian revolt, the city that has suffered more than any from Assad’s brutal crackdown. You must come to Syria, says Abu Talal. Well, yes, we had planned to go there before the uprising erupted. We promise we will come to Homs, after Basher al Assad is gone. He gives me my phone and Hassan drives them away. I check the phone is working. It’s now connected to an Arab network. Even better, the keyboard is now in Arabic. I also discover that he has left me a video of him eating lunch with his friends, a little memento to remember him by. Thank you Abu Talal.

Guardian breaks cover on 9/11

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The Guardian studiously toes the official line on 9/11 until this piece on a New York 9/11 symposium.
Some very important Google search suggestions at the end of it too.

We have to do something. Even if that something is simply to Google 'Cass Sunstein' and start from there. Begin your own cognitive infiltration. Google 'Vigilant Guardian' or 'Able Danger'. Crosscheck 'Abdel Hakim Belhadj' and 'Al-Qaida'. Begin digging. Begin thinking. And stop believing.

Posted by Charlie Skelton Monday 12 September 2011 15.03 BST guardian.co.uk

BBC's 9/11 Conspiracy Roadtrip Exposed

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I saw the BBC Conspiracy Roadtrip programme on BBC3. I was not convinced it fairly represented 9/11 sceptics and felt strongly that its attempts to prove the official version correct were also unconvincing. You knew from word go what the programme was going to try and prove - that 'truthers' were dumb and their arguments and beliefs about 9/11 paper thin. Now one of the participants explains how the programme's editors totally misrepresented the actual tour of the group portrayed in the doc. Good for her - seriously revealing:

This summer I participated in a BBC hit piece on 9/11, entitled “Conspiracy Roadtrip”. The premise is simple: five non-believers of the official story journey across the east coast of the USA in search of the truth. On the way we meet “experts” and victims of the attacks, guided by “comedian” Andrew Maxwell who believes the 9/11 commission report was the be all and end all of the 9/11 story.

The show aired a few hours ago and I felt compelled to write my version of what happened on that 8 day roadtrip, to give you the perspective you were not shown by BBC 3.

Firstly, I must tip my hat to them. They did a wonderful editing job. Anyone who has ever had a conversation with me or knows me personally will be very much aware of my opinions re: 9/11, and how outspoken I am about them. However, on this show I appear to be pretty much silent the entire way through.

I wasn’t.

Throughout my time on the show I asked question after question. I asked every single person we met whether they believed the official story to be true and the vast majority of them said no. Ask yourselves this question: why has the footage of us meeting Tom Owen, a voice analyst who worked on the Osama Bin Laden “confession” tapes, been cut completely? There is a simple answer. Because he told us not to believe the official report. Why? Because we aren’t in the “need-to-know” category, his words, not mine. Throughout our entire meeting with Tom Owen it was pretty much clear that the director of the show wasn’t happy with his take. Like most of our meetings with “experts” she would try and steer the conversation in a direction that would better fit her hit piece.

I’d also like to ask why footage of [FAA National Operations Manager] Ben Sliney saying that someone needs to be held accountable for 9/11 was cut? Surely that’s something that the TV license paying public should be able to see? But no, it didn’t fit their requirements for the perfect hit piece.

On the journey I was one of the most vocal contributors, consistently asking questions and receiving no answers whatsoever. I wonder why? Is it completely out of this world to assume that the answers to my questions might have made the truth about 9/11 a little too clear to the viewer? Is it a ridiculous conspiracy theory to assume that the reason the BBC turned me into a mute was to create a biased hit-piece? As with most 9/11 “conspiracy” documentaries, they focused on mostly debunkable theories such as no plane hit the Pentagon and fake phone calls. In other words, shit that pushes us further away from real truth and accountability. They also did a great job at making it seem like I believed most of these theories. I’ll freely admit that before I went on the show I was a “9/11 was an inside job” sort of girl. Hell, I even have a t-shirt from infowars.com. Yes that’s right, I knowingly gave money to Alex Jones.

Before I went on the show I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that all evidence points to a plane hitting a Pentagon, that maybe the twin towers and Building 7 weren’t a controlled demolition and maybe Dick Cheney and co hadn’t plotted the whole thing with fake hijackers. Now I don’t know what is true and what isn’t. I am not 100% convinced about controlled demolition but it is a distinct possibility. I just decided to focus on the other, less spoken about side of 9/11. The fact that with multiple warnings, the US failed to prevent an attack on their own shores. The fact that so many people have been gagged from talking about 9/11 and revealing information they might know. The fact that the 9/11 commission report, by it’s own ADMISSION was set up to fail. These are just a few of the facts that I brought up on the show. Were they shown? No.

I made it very clear, before I went to the US, that I thought these theories can sometimes be harmful to our chances of ever getting a new investigation into 9/11. I asked repeatedly to speak to some sort of government representative, someone who I could ask my questions to. And despite being told I would get to speak to someone, alas that time never came.

So tonight I watched the show and saw no effort on the BBC’s part to differentiate myself from these theories. In fact, they made it look like these theories were actually my own. As you will see if you watch the show, they told me to ask about airport security, yet they cut out clips of me asking why the hijackers weren’t prevented from entering the country. I asked why, with all of the foreknowledge that the US had, were precautions not taken to protect the innocent American people that tragically lost their lives. I didn’t get an answer.

In ten years, not one person has been held accountable for the events of 9/11, when it is now so evident that the attacks could have been prevented. Hell, even Ben Sliney said that the attacks could’ve been prevented. Why are we so comfortable with letting people get away with this? And why, after ten years, are people that dare to question the official story still painted as conspiracy theorists? Hasn’t it been proven, time and time again, that elements of the US administration covered up their criminal involvement in 9/11?

Interestingly, the whole show seemed to be centered around Charlotte, trying to portray her as something she isn’t. The editing was truly phenomenal. Here we have a typical conspiracy theorist, unwilling to listen to anyone else’s point of view and adamant that she is right. That’s not how it was. They also included an argument that Charlotte and I had and took it completely out of context. They failed to include the fact that we made up shortly afterwards, with me apologizing to her. It made me quite angry to see vicious comments about her, considering the fact that she is a friend of mine and one of the people I have stayed in most contact with after the show. Yes, I may disagree with her on some points, but that is the great thing about being able to formulate our own opinions. Charlotte and I are united on the fact that 9/11 desperately needs a new investigation. Please don’t fall for the BBC’s clever editing trick, she is not a bad person and the show misrepresented her entirely.

The same goes for Rodney, the other person I have stayed in contact with since being in the US. Again, we may not agree on everything and we have our differences, but in my experience with him he is a rational and down to earth person. Maybe we should all remember that this was a well-crafted hit piece and the editing was designed to generate ill-feeling towards Rodney and Charlotte, the most head-strong people on the show (along with myself, obviously).

And here we reach Andrew Maxwell, the Irish comedian who consistently ridiculed us and walked away in the middle of debates. See, the BBC don’t want you to know that he complained throughout the entire shoot, laughed about us behind our backs and on more than one occasion said that he wished he’d never signed on to do the show. He’s not a bad person. He was there trying to make some money, we were there trying to get some truth. It’s as simple as that.

Personally, I’m disgusted at the documentary and I think participating in the show will always be one of my biggest regrets. But at the same time, I feel pretty lucky that I got to meet the people I did and ask the questions that I did, even though they weren’t included in the show. It saddens me that I look like a dumb student who doesn’t know a thing about 9/11 and it angers me that I barely have a voice in the entire 60 minutes that the show runs for.

Overall the experience was an interesting one, but one I wouldn’t do again. Imagine intense heat, stuck on a bus all day with cameras shoved in your face, 12 hour filming days, early mornings and emotional breakdowns. It was intense to say the least.

There are a lot more grievances I have with the show but that’s something I will write about another day. Now, it’s time to get some sleep and try to find hope in the fact that I know what happened on the 9/11 Conspiracy Road Trip, I know what I said and I know the answers I got.

What Lies Beneath: The Essence of Modern America in Somalia’s Blood-drenched Soil

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What Lies Beneath: The Essence of Modern America in Somalia’s Blood-drenched Soil

For days, weeks on end, we have been bombarded with earnest disquisitions on the “meaning” of 9/11, its implications for America and the world ten years down the line. Oceans of newsprint and blizzards of pixels have been expended on this question. But in all the solemn piety and savvy punditry surrounding the commemoration of the attacks, almost nothing has been said about the place where the true “legacy of 9/11” can be seen in its stark quintessence: Somalia.

That long-broken land is, in so many ways, a hell of our own creation. Year by year, stage by stage, American policy has helped drive Somalia ever deeper into the pit. Millions of people have been plunged into anguish; countless thousands have lost their lives. It seems unimaginable that the situation could get even worse – and yet that is precisely where we are today: on the precipice of yet another horrific drop into the abyss.

Britain gave 100% backing, including on the ground intelligence support and funds, to the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006, which lasted until the end of 2007.

By now it should go without saying that the Nobel Peace Laureate in the White House has continued, entrenched and expanded his predecessor's failed and corrupt policies in Somalia, as he has in so many parts of the degraded American imperium. And it is in Somalia that our serious, savvy bipartisan elite -- and their innumerable enablers on both sides of the political fence -- are building up what may turn out to be the mother of all blowbacks: generations of implacable hatred sprung from unfathomable suffering, inflicted on innocent people by vicious warlords in the pay of the CIA, by America's own death squads ranging through the land, and by the entirely predictable (indeed, predicted) extremist insurgencies that arise in the chaos our elites create in their imperial marauding. Here, if anywhere, is the true legacy of 9/11.

MUST SEE Where was Larry Silverstein on 9/11? - video

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The new owner of the Twin Towers explained how he happened not to be at work that morning in this truly startling video interview. He only acquired the buildings on 26 July and says right at the beginning of the interview that every day he came into the WTC at 8am for a morning meeting except on 9/11, because his wife booked him an appointment with his dermatologist. Yeh, sure. And how does he labour this! How does he come across? I don't know about you...but I know what I think when I see this video. Insincerity does not begin to describe his performance. This is without doubt the most revealing and chilling single video I have seen since I began researching 9/11 several years ago. We must remember that Larry bought the towers only 6 weeks before, he only put $14m of his own money in when he bought the 99-year lease from the Port Authority, and won $4.55 billion in insurance payouts. What an amazing return on his investment! We must also remember that at least 60 Israeli intelligence operatives were arrested by the FBI in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and they had been following the activity of terrorist cells, as well as casing US military buildings - this is documented and confirmed by French intelligence reports among others. Five Israelis set up a camera to "record the event" (their words during a later Israeli TV interview) from a top story carpark and were seen smiling and dancing as the towers were hit. The FBI released the 'dancing Israelis' eventually and sent them home. Israel did warn the US about imminent attacks in August 2001. Silverstein is a highly connected Zionist individual who has long-term relations within the Israeli establishment. Shall I paint a picture? I don't need to - the video says it all. Or perhaps I am being cynical about aggressive property dealers and the limits of human greed. The fact that the buildings were targets of terrorists since before the first attack in 1993 - and known to be such, would never lead someone to do something as audacious as buy them in the knowledge they would be attacked, now would it?

Chemical engineer backs up thermite evidence from WTC site on 9/11

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This interview with chemical engineer Mark Basile from last October, from Cincinatti 911 Truth, really does seem to verify the findings of Niels Harrit and Dr Stephen Jones in their open source paper on nanothermite published in early 2009. As Harritt said in the recent BBC Conspiracy Files documentary, since that paper's release, no scientific paper has come forward to discredit its findings. Basile's own tests, which he explains in this interview, back up the Harrit/Jones findings.

What Basile explains is that the evidence of thermitic deposits in the WTC dust cannot be dismissed as a product of the collapse and fires. It can only be explained as something that was put there to achieve an incendiary effect, and its origins are military scientific. They cannot be acquired on the open market by amateur terrorists. This is somewhere between a smoking and a loaded gun. I am surprised this interview has had so little coverage.

Transcript of the Bin Laden 'confession'

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The following interview between Al-Jazeera television correspondent Tayseer Alouni and Osama Bin Laden took place in October 2001. Al Jazeera decided not to broadcast it, but CNN did. It is chilling - as Bin Laden justifies terrorism, including the killing of innocent women and children (because his enemies have done so). Importantly, he admits to inspiring the 9/11 hijackers but he does not admit - but rather denies - directly masterminding 9/11. Perhaps this is why he was never on the FBI Most Wanted list for 9/11. But the mainstream media have NEVER given any attention to this fact. Perhaps for some this is not significant, because inciting terrorism is also a crime. To me, it seems very significant, especially given his execution on Obama's orders. He was guilty for inspiring countless innocent deaths, especially in Iraq - but if he had ever stood trial, would the whole 9/11 'story' have collapsed like a house of cards? His death ensures we will never know.

The following transcript of the interview, which was done in Arabic, was by a translator hired by CNN.

TAYSEER ALOUNI: Dear viewers, welcome to this much-anticipated interview with the leader of the al Qaeda organization, Sheikh Osama Bin Laden.

Sheikh, the question that's on the mind of many people around the world: America claims that it has convincing evidence of your collusion in the events in New York and Washington. What's your answer?

OSAMA BIN LADEN: America has made many accusations against us and many other Muslims around the world. Its charge that we are carrying out acts of terrorism is an unwarranted description.

We never heard in our lives a court decision to convict someone based on a "secret" proof it has. The logical thing to do is to present a proof to a court of law. What many leaders have said so far is that America has an indication only, and not a tangible proof. They describe those brave guys who took the battle to the heart of America and destroyed its most famous economic and military landmarks.

They did this, as we understand it, and this is something we have agitated for before, as a matter of self-defense, in defense of our brothers and sons in Palestine, and to liberate our sacred religious sites/things. If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists.

Q: Sheikh, those who follow your statements and speeches may link your threats to what happened in America. To quote one of your latest statements: "I swear that America won't enjoy security before we live it for real in Palestine." It is easy for anyone following developments to link the acts to your threats.

BIN LADEN: It is easy to link them.

We have agitated for this for years and we have issued statements and fatwas to that effect. This appeared in the investigations into the four young men who destroyed the American center in Ulayya in Riyadh, as disclosed and published by the Saudi government. The [Saudis] reported that they were influenced by some of the fatwas and statements that we issued. Also, apart from that, incitement continues in many meetings and has been published in the media. If they mean, or if you mean, that there is a link as a result of our incitement, then it is true. We incite because incitement is our [unintelligible] today. God assigned incitement to the best of all mankind, Mohammed, who said, "Fight for the sake of God. Assign this to no one but yourself, and incite the faithful."

[Bin Laden recites verses from the Quran.]

This is a true response. We have incited battle against Americans and Jews. This is true.

Q: Al Qaeda is facing now a country that leads the world militarily, politically, technologically. Surely, the al Qaeda organization does not have the economic means that the United States has. How can al Qaeda defeat America militarily?

BIN LADEN: This battle is not between al Qaeda and the U.S. This is a battle of Muslims against the global crusaders. In the past when al Qaeda fought with the mujahedeen, we were told, "Wow, can you defeat the Soviet Union?" The Soviet Union scared the whole world then. NATO used to tremble of fear of the Soviet Union. Where is that power now? We barely remember it. It broke down into many small states and Russia remained.

God, who provided us with his support and kept us steadfast until the Soviet Union was defeated, is able to provide us once more with his support to defeat America on the same land and with the same people. We believe that the defeat of America is possible, with the help of God, and is even easier for us, God permitting, than the defeat of the Soviet Union was before.

Q: How can you explain that?

BIN LADEN: We experienced the Americans through our brothers who went into combat against them in Somalia, for example. We found they had no power worthy of mention. There was a huge aura over America -- the United States -- that terrified people even before they entered combat. Our brothers who were here in Afghanistan tested them, and together with some of the mujahedeen in Somalia, God granted them victory. America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.

America left faster than anyone expected. It forgot all that tremendous media fanfare about the new world order, that it is the master of that order, and that it does whatever it wants. It forgot all of these propositions, gathered up its army, and withdrew in defeat, thanks be to God. We experienced combat against the Russians for 10 years, from 1979 to 1989, thanks be to God. Then we continued against the communists in Afghanistan. Today, we're at the end of our second week. There is no comparison between the two battles, between this group and that. We pray to God to give us his support and to make America ever more reluctant. God is capable of that.

Q: You said you want to defeat America on this land. Don't you think that the presence of al Qaeda on Afghanistan soil is costing the Afghan people a high price?

BIN LADEN: This is a partial point of view. When we came to Afghanistan to support the mujahedeen in 1979, against the Russians, the Saudi government asked me officially not to enter Afghanistan due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership. They ordered me to stay in Peshawar, because in the event the Russians arrested me that will be a proof of our support of the mujahedeen against the Soviet Union. At that time, the whole world was scared of the Soviet Union. I didn't obey their order. They thought my entry into Afghanistan was damning to them. I didn't listen to them and I went into Afghanistan for the first time.

We sacrificed a lot in order to keep the Muslim faith alive and save the children. This is a duty for every Muslim, in general, not the Afghans especially. If I run to the rescue of my brothers in Palestine, it doesn't mean it's Osama's duty alone. This is a duty of all Muslims. The jihad is a duty for everyone, not just for the Afghans. The Afghans are suffering, that's true, but this is their Islamic duty. As far as the bombing of Afghanistan, this is not a personal vendetta. America didn't take my money or hurt me in any way. The bombing is a direct effect of our inciting against the Jews and the Americans.

America is against the establishment of any Islamic government. The prophet has said, "They will be target because of their religion." Not because Osama bin Laden is there. When I came here the first time it was because of a desire to revive the Muslim spirit and an attempt at rescuing the children and the powerless. The British attacked Afghanistan before Osama bin Laden was here, Russians came here before me and now the Americans. We pray that god will defeat them just like he did their allies before them. We ask God to give us the power to defeat them as we did others before.

Q: Let's get back to what happened in New York and Washington. What is your assessment of the attacks on America? What's their effect on America and the Muslim world?

BIN LADEN: The events of Tuesday, September the 11th, in New York and Washington are great on all levels. Their repercussions are not over. Although the collapse of the twin towers is huge, but the events that followed, and I'm not just talking about the economic repercussions, those are continuing, the events that followed are dangerous and more enormous than the collapse of the towers.

The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.

The proof came when the U.S. government pressured the media not to run our statements that are not longer than very few minutes. They felt that the truth started to reach the American people, the truth that we are not terrorists as they understand it but because we are being attacked in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir, the Philippines and everywhere else. They understood the truth that this is a reaction from the youth of the Muslim nation against the British government. They forgot all about fair and objective reporting and reporting the other side of the issue. I tell you freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people and the West in general will enter an unbearable hell and a choking life because the Western leadership acts under the Zionist lobby's influence for the purpose of serving Israel, which kills our sons unlawfully in order for them to remain in their leadership positions.

Q: What is your assessment of the Arabic reaction and the effects on the Islamic world? Some were joyous. Others said, "We can't accept this. This is terrorism, not Islam."

BIN LADEN: The events proved the extent of terrorism that America exercises in the world. Bush stated that the world has to be divided in two: Bush and his supporters, and any country that doesn't get into the global crusade is with the terrorists. What terrorism is clearer than this? Many governments were forced to support this "new terrorism." They had to go along with this although they knew that we are defending our brothers and defending our sacred values. Many Western and Eastern leaders have said that the true roots of terrorism should be dealt with; they meant the Palestinian cause. Then we have a righteous cause, but they couldn't admit this out loud of fear of America. They say we are terrorists but solve the Palestinian cause. All of a sudden, Bush and Blair declared, "The time has come to establish an independent state for Palestine." Throughout the past years the time hasn't come, until after these attacks, for the establishment of the Palestinian state. They only understand the language of attacks and killings.

Just as they're killing us, we have to kill them so that there will be a balance of terror. This is the first time the balance of terror has been close between the two parties, between Muslims and Americans, in the modern age. American politicians used to do whatever they wanted with us. The victim was forbidden to scream or to moan. [unintelligible]

Clinton has said, "Israel has the right to defend itself," after the massacres of Qana. He didn't even reprimand Israel. When the new President Bush and Colin Powell declared in the first few months of their taking office that they will move the American embassy to Jerusalem. They said Jerusalem will be the eternal capital of Israel. They got a standing ovation in Congress and the Senate. This is the biggest bigotry, and this is tyranny loud and clear.

The battle has moved to inside America. We will work to continue this battle, God permitting, until victory or until we meet God before that occurs.

Q: Sheikh, I see that most of your answers are about Palestine and the Palestinian cause. In the beginning, your focus on killing the unfaithful and the Jews ... and you specified then that the Americans should be sent out of the Arabian Peninsula. Now you're turning your attention to Palestine first and the Arabian Peninsula second. What's your comment?

BIN LADEN: Jihad is a duty to liberate Al-Aqsa, and to help the powerless in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon and in every Muslim country. There is no doubt that the liberation of the Arabian Peninsula from infidels is a duty as well. But it is not right to say that Osama put the Palestinian issue first. I have given speeches in which I encourage Muslims to boycott America economically. I said Americans take our money and give it to Israel to kill our children in Palestine. I established a front a few years ago named The Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders. Sometimes we find the right elements to push for one cause more than the other. Last year's blessed intifada helped us to push more for the Palestinian issue. This push helps the other cause. Attacking America helps the cause of Palestine and vice versa. No conflict between the two; on the contrary, one serves the other.

Q: Sheikh, now let's talk about Christians and Jews. You issued a fatwa for jihad against the Christians and the Jews. As we can see, some other clerics also issued fatwas. There might be some who share your views, and some who oppose them and said this is against the teachings of Islam They ask how can you kill a Jew or a Christian or a Catholic just because of his religion? They say that your statements contradict what Muslim clerics teach.

BIN LADEN: God bless Allah, many fatwas have been declared on these issues, especially in Pakistan. Sami Zai in Pakistan is a very well known authority on this. He has written many times on the subject. So did the famous Abdullah bin Ohkmah Al-Shehebi of Saudi Arabia. I read a book titled "The Truth About The New Crusades." They all wrote about and allowed the fighting of Americans and Israelis in Palestine and allowing their killings and destroying their economies and properties.

Q [interrupting]: How about the killing of innocent civilians?

BIN LADEN: The killing of innocent civilians, as America and some intellectuals claim, is really very strange talk. Who said that our children and civilians are not innocent and that shedding their blood is justified? That it is lesser in degree? When we kill their innocents, the entire world from east to west screams at us, and America rallies its allies, agents, and the sons of its agents. Who said that our blood is not blood, but theirs is? Who made this pronouncement? Who has been getting killed in our countries for decades? More than 1 million children, more than 1 million children died in Iraq and others are still dying. Why do we not hear someone screaming or condemning, or even someone's words of consolation or condolence?

How come millions of Muslims are being killed? Where are the experts, the writers, the scholars and the freedom fighters, where are the ones who have an ounce a faith in them? They react only if we kill American civilians, and every day we are being killed, children are being killed in Palestine. We should review the books. Human nature makes people stand with the powerful without noticing it. When they talk about us, they know we won't respond to them. In the past, an Arab king once killed an ordinary Arab man. The people started wondering how come kings have the right to kill people just like that. Then the victim's brother went and killed the king in revenge. People were disappointed with the young man and asked him, "How could you kill a king for your brother?" The man said, "My brother is my king." We consider all our children in Palestine to be kings.

We kill the kings of the infidels, kings of the crusaders, and civilian infidels in exchange for those of our children they kill. This is permissible in law and intellectually.

Q: So what you are saying is that this is a type of reciprocal treatment. They kill our innocents, so we kill their innocents.

BIN LADEN: So we kill their innocents, and I say it is permissible in law and intellectually, because those who spoke on this matter spoke from a juridical perspective.

Q: What is their position?

BIN LADEN: That it is not permissible. They spoke of evidence that the Messenger of God forbade the killing of women and children. This is true.

[Break in tape.]

Q: This is exactly what I'm asking about.

BIN LADEN: However, this prohibition of the killing of children and innocents is not absolute. It is not absolute. There are other texts that restrict it.

I agree that the Prophet Mohammed forbade the killing of babies and women. That is true, but this is not absolute. There is a saying, "If the infidels killed women and children on purpose, we shouldn't shy way from treating them in the same way to stop them from doing it again." The men that God helped [attack, on September 11] did not intend to kill babies; they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world, to attack the Pentagon that houses more than 64,000 employees, a military center that houses the strength and the military intelligence.

Q: How about the twin towers?

BIN LADEN: The towers are an economic power and not a children's school. Those that were there are men that supported the biggest economic power in the world. They have to review their books. We will do as they do. If they kill our women and our innocent people, we will kill their women and their innocent people until they stop.

Q: Media organizations as well as intelligence information says that you run a big network in some 40 to 50 countries. There is information that al Qaeda is very influential and powerful and it is behind attacks and Islamic foundations and terrorist organizations. How much is al Qaeda dependent on Osama Bin Laden?

BIN LADEN: This has nothing to do with this poor servant of God, nor with the al Qaeda organization. We are the children of an Islamic nation whose leader is Mohammed.

We have one religion, one God, one book, one prophet, one nation. Our book teaches us to be brothers of a faith. All the Muslims are brothers. The name "al Qaeda" was established a long time ago by mere chance. The late Abu Ebeida El-Banashiri established the training camps for our mujahedeen against Russia's terrorism. We used to call the training camp al Qaeda [meaning "the base" in English]. And the name stayed. We speak about the conscience of the nation; we are the sons of the nation. We brothers in Islam from the Middle East, Philippines, Malaysia, India, Pakistan and as far as Mauritania.

Those men who sacrificed themselves in New York and Washington, they are the spokesmen of the nation's conscience. They are the nation's conscience that saw they have to avenge against the oppression.

Not all terrorism is cursed; some terrorism is blessed. A thief, a criminal, for example feels terrorized by the police. So, do we say to the policeman, "You are a terrorist"? No. Police terrorism against criminals is a blessed terrorism because it will prevent the criminal from repeating his deed. America and Israel exercise the condemned terrorism. We practice the good terrorism which stops them from killing our children in Palestine and elsewhere.

Q: What's al Qaeda's strategic plan in the Arab world. Some countries had commented about what's going on while others supported the Americans in their position toward you. The Saudi interior minister warned people against you, and against what you say, and against what you do and the path you follow. What's your reaction to his statement?

BINLADEN: We are a part of that nation. We work hard to lift it out of oppression, and to stop those who want to manipulate its book and its God. I heard some of what the Saudi interior minister said when he said that we are turning Muslims to atheists, God forbid. Our goal is for our nation to unite in the face of the Christian crusade. This is the fiercest battle. Muslims have never faced anything bigger than this. Bush said it in his own words: "crusade." When Bush says that, they try to cover up for him, then he said he didn't mean it. He said "crusade." Bush divided the world into two: "either with us or with terrorism." Bush is the leader; he carries the big cross and walks. I swear that every one who follows Bush in his scheme has given up Islam and the word of the prophet. This is very clear. The prophet has said, "Believers don't follow Jews or Christians." Our wise people have said that those who follow the unfaithful have become unfaithful themselves. Those who follow Bush in his crusade against Muslims have denounced God.

[Bin Laden recites verses from the Quran on same subject.]

Those who support Bush, even with one word, have fallen.

Q: Even with one word: You are putting a big group of Muslims in the circle.

BIN LADEN: Know the truth and its roots. The book of God is our guide. Either Islam or atheism.

Q: Can small countries like Qatar, or Bahrain or Kuwait, which don't have much control, be excused? The Qatari foreign minister said, "I am surrounded by superpowers that will very easily wipe me off the map. That's why I have to ally myself with Americans and others."

BIN LADEN: In the subject of Islam and the killing of the faithful, what those people are doing cannot be excused. If the emir of Qatar orders someone to kill your child, and you ask this person why he did it, he'll say, "Look, brother Tayseer, I like you very much, but I was forced to do it." Nothing will excuse him for aiding the tyrant to kill your child. Your child's blood goes to waste like this. They claim that they don't have much control. Their claim that they were forced into it is not considered righteous in Islam. People's blood is being wasted in this case.

Q: What do you think of the so-called "war of civilizations"? You always keep repeating "crusaders" and words like that all the time. Does that mean you support the war of civilizations?

BIN LADEN: No doubt about that: The book mentions this clearly. The Jews and the Americans made up this call for peace in the world. The peace they're calling for is a big fairy tale. They're just drugging the Muslims as they lead them to slaughter. And the slaughter is still going on. If we defend ourselves, they call us terrorists. The prophet has said, "The end won't come before the Muslims and the Jews fight each other till the Jew hides between a tree and a stone. Then the tree and stone say, "Oh, you Muslim, this is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him." He who claims there will be a lasting peace between us and the Jews is an infidel. He'll be denouncing the book and what's in it. Begin, the leader of the massacre of Kfar Yassin, and the traitor, Anwar Sadat, who sold the land and the blood of the mujahedeen both were given the Nobel Peace Prize. There will come some deceiving times where the liars will be believed and the truthful won't be believed. That's the situation in the Arabic world with its great leadership. They are lying to people. But god's relief and victory is coming soon.

Q: As you call it, this is a war between the crusaders and Muslims. How do you see the way out of this crisis?

BIN LADEN: We are in a decisive battle with the Jews and those who support them from the crusaders and the Zionists. We won't hesitate to kill the Israelis who occupied our land and kill our children and women day and night. And every person who will side with them should blame themselves only. Now how we will get out of the tunnel, that is the [unintelligible] of the other side. We were attacked, and our duty is to remove this attack. As far as the Jews are concerned, the prophet has announced that we will fight them under this name, on this land. America forced itself and its people in this [unintelligible] more than 53 years ago. It recognized Israel and supported its creation financially. In 1973, under Nixon, it supported Israel with men, weapons and ammunition from Washington all the way to Tel Aviv. This support helped change the course of history. It is the Muslim's duty to fight. ...

[America] made hilarious claims. They said that Osama's messages have codes in them to the terrorists. It's as if we were living in the time of mail by carrier pigeon, when there are no phones, no travelers, no Internet, no regular mail, no express mail, and no electronic mail. I mean, these are very humorous things. They discount people's intellects.

We swore that America wouldn't live in security until we live it truly in Palestine. This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel's interest above its own people's interest. America won't get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel. This equation can be understood by any American child, but Bush, because he's an Israeli agent, cannot understand this equation unless the swords threatened him above him head.

Q: Do you have anything to do with anthrax that is spreading around the world?

BIN LADEN: These diseases are a punishment from God and a response to oppressed mothers' prayers in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine. There is no wall between the prayer of the oppressed and God. This is God's response to these prayers.

Q: Do you have a message for the viewers of Al-Jazeera? You know Al-Jazeera is now translated into so many languages and transmitted around the world.

BIN LADEN: In this fighting between Islam and the crusaders, we will continue our jihad. We will incite the nation for Jihad until we meet God and get his blessing. Any country that supports the Jews can only blame itself. If Sheik Suleiman Abu Gheith spoke specifically about America and Britain, this is only an example to give other countries the chance to review their books.

What do Japan or Australia or Germany have to do with this war? They just support the infidels and the crusaders.

This is a recurring war. The original crusade brought Richard [the Lionhearted] from Britain, Louis from France, and Barbarus from Germany. Today the crusading countries rushed as soon as Bush raised the cross. They accepted the rule of the cross.

What do the Arab countries have to do with this crusade? Everyone that supports Bush, even with one word, is an act of great treason. You change your name and you help the enemy to kill our children, and you are telling me we are facilitating things between us and the Americans. What are they talking about? Those who talk about the loss of innocent people didn't yet taste how it feels when you lose a child, don't know how it feels when you look in your child's eyes and all you see is fear, don't know how it feels when, in Palestine, our brothers are being hunted by army helicopters in the middle of their own homes with their families and children. Everyday. They show you the injured and the dead, and they shed tears, but no tears are shed for our women and children killed in Palestine. Are they not afraid that one day they get the same treatment?

[Bin Laden recites verses from the Quran on same subject.]

The Europeans are free, but when they side with the Jews, that their [unintelligible]. I tell Muslims to believe in the victory of God and in Jihad against the infidels of the world. The killing of Jews and Americans is one of the greatest duties.

[More Quranic verses.]

Remember the saying, "If they want to exile you, they can't exile you unless it is written by God." Don't ask anyone's opinion when it comes to the killing of Americans, and remember your appointment with God and the best of the prophets.

[More Quranic verses.]

As far as Pakistan siding with the crusaders, our brothers in Pakistan and their actions will facilitate our attack on the coalition of crusaders. Everyone supporting America, even medically, is considered renouncing Islam. Our brother in Pakistan should react pretty quick and strong in order to praise God and his prophet. Today, Islam is calling on you to act quickly.

[Quoting the farewell speech of Mohammed] "Oh, Islam, oh, Islam, there is no other god than God, and Mohammed is the prophet of God."

BBC Conspiracy Files 9/11

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The new Conspiracy Files documentary on BBC2 tonight very much took the line that the 9/11 'conspiracy theories' were just that, and set out to demolish them. This is of course what you would expect the BBC to do. There was some solid journalism ie talking to credible sources - the thing that those who question the official theory sorely lack. It had at least 2 very convincing sources. First of all, the architect of WTC 1 and 2 said that the planes hitting the towers and the fuel released were sufficient to bring down the buildings in the manner that they collapsed. The steel in the buildings did not need to melt in order to give way, merely to become weak and then buckle. This could happen at lower temperatures than the demolition theorists have claimed. I have long thought this. However, it was seriously remiss of the programme not to interview anyone from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (1500 signatories) or Pilots for 9/11 Truth. In regard to flight 77 hitting the Pentagon, they had the convincing account of the airforce pilot who witnessed the American Airlines jet hitting the Pentagon from the air. This is hard to refute - although the FBIs's failure to release lots of CCTV footage does still raise questions. They interviewed Niels Harrit, the Danish co-author of the 2009 paper on the WTC7 collapse, which found thermitic materials in the WTC dust - and they found 2 American scientists who did an unconvincing job of refuting his work. No scientific paper has refuted the Harrit paper in the 2 years since it was published.

The programme used the effective but unfair technique of only interviewing the more unconvincing or out there 'conspiracy theorists' while ignoring the credible ones. In particular, going to the Loose Change film makers was a clear effort to discredit those who question the official theory. (The film takes in so many claims that they tend to undermine the more credible claims.) And Dylan Avery himself, Loose Change director, comes over like an wannabe upstart in this film. They then wrapped up the programme by saying that the victims' families would have to continue suffering the indignity of these theories for some time to come. This is an outrageous slur on the very same families who have supported calls for a new investigation of 9/11 - there are a large number of these. Are they all just conspiracy fools too? Disappointingly, the film makers decided not to interview any 9/11 family members calling for a new investigation.

The programme just scratched the surface of the massive evidence that the intelligence services and their masters in government knew that there was a plot to use jets to hit the WTC and the Pentagon. Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial jets on news of a threat. There are credible insider witnesses they could have interviewed but chose not to - although they did give a few seconds to one senior Bush official, Richard Clarke, who has recently suggested that the government did not act on the information it had. All in all, some good journalism, but a basic failure to give air to the most convincing advocates and witnesses to a cover up. It is true there is no real hard evidence of an 'inside job' - with the possible exception of building 7 - but there is hard evidence that some in the government knew what was planned and did not act to stop it.

Furthermore, by focusing on the idea of a Bush led plot to use the attacks to start wars, it sets up a premise that cannot be proven without an investigation. It is one thing to say the official narrative is a false one - another to set up another narrative that is also unproven. The only thing that can be proven is that the official account does not add up and hence a new investigation is needed.

AE911 Truth new video - hard to ignore

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The most authoritative video yet calling for a new 9/11 investigation made by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. No doubt narrated by that well known conspiracy nut Ed Asner and featuring dozens of engineers, architects, explosive experts and 9/11 family victims will be dismissed as a bunch of gullible, misguided 'Truthers' by supporters of the official conspiracy theory. But the tide is turning...

Chile's new student hero

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The Chilean students have a beautiful leader - they are leading the fight for quality education for all. The country is in upheaval and the government is on its knees. As she says: "We do not want to improve the actual system; we want a profound change – to stop seeing education as a consumer good, to see education as a right where the state provides a guarantee.

"Why do we need education? To make profits. To make a business? Or to develop the country and have social integration and development? Those are the issues in dispute."

This is the message we need to send in the UK to a government that in education has put a price on everything and values nothing other than profit. It has also probably inadvertently created a system more expensive for students and taxpayers in its crazed pursuit of a US style higher education 'market'.

We don't do this sort of thing, do we?

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Dag Hammarskjöld: evidence suggests UN chief's plane was shot down, reports The Guardian. Eyewitnesses claim a second aircraft fired at the plane raising questions of British cover-up over the 1961 crash and its causes. Hammarskjöld was an independent minded secretary general who annoyed America, Britain and other great powers.

The new evidence was collected by a Swede, Göran Björkdahl, who works for the Swedish international development agency, Sida. His investigation was carried out in his own time and his report does not represent the official views of his government. However, his report echoes the scepticism about the official verdict voiced by Swedish members of the commissions of inquiry.

Björkdahl concludes that:

• Hammarskjöld's plane was almost certainly shot down by an unidentified second plane.

• The actions of the British and Northern Rhodesian officials at the scene delayed the search for the missing plane.

• The wreckage was found and sealed off by Northern Rhodesian troops and police long before its discovery was officially announced.

• The one survivor of the crash could have been saved but was allowed to die in a poorly equipped local hospital.

• At the time of his death Hammarskjöld suspected British diplomats secretly supported the Katanga rebellion and had obstructed a bid to arrange a truce.

• Days before his death, Hammarskjöld authorised a UN offensive on Katanga – codenamed Operation Morthor – despite reservations of the UN legal adviser, to the fury of the US and Britain.

The most compelling new evidence comes from witnesses who had not previously been interviewed, mostly charcoal-makers from the forest around Ndola, now in their 70s and 80ss.

Prophet of the crash says Marx was right.

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Nouriel Roubini, the economist who predicted the Great Crash, said something very interesting in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: So you painted a bleak picture of sub-par economic growth going forward, with an increased risk of another recession in the near future. That sounds awful. What can government and what can businesses do to get the economy going again or is it just sit and wait and gut it out?

Roubini: "Businesses are not doing anything. They're not actually helping. All this risk made them more nervous. There's a value in waiting. They claim they're doing cutbacks because there's excess capacity and not adding workers because there's not enough final demand, but there's a paradox, a Catch-22. If you're not hiring workers, there's not enough labor income, enough consumer confidence, enough consumption, not enough final demand. In the last two or three years, we've actually had a worsening because we've had a massive redistribution of income from labor to capital, from wages to profits, and the inequality of income has increased and the marginal propensity to spend of a household is greater than the marginal propensity of a firm because they have a greater propensity to save, that is firms compared to households. So the redistribution of income and wealth makes the problem of inadequate aggregate demand even worse.

"Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That's what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They're not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else's income and consumption. That's why it's a self-destructive process."

Anger at poverty, unemployment and despair is driving popular protest across the industrialized world, he notes, and "even the world's middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities."

Marx, to put it more simply than he ever did, saw capitalism's market logic as producing recurring, ever more dangerous crises, precisely because of its tendency to channel most of the wealth produced in society into the pockets of a wealthy elite -- and seeking to increase profits by cutting costs, i.e. the wage bill -- leaving growing numbers of people no longer able to afford to buy what was being produced, forcing a slowdown and contraction of the economy.

That sounds suspiciously like what we're seeing in the U.S. and other Western economies right now -- an economic crisis rooted in low and diminishing demand, which meant that even once the financial crisis was averted, the economy has remained effectively stagnant, at best, as depressed U.S. demand creates a vicious cycle in which corporations see no point in expanding production (and creating new jobs) if consumers can't afford to buy them, and unemployment and poverty expands, further depressing demand.

The "greed is good" mantra may drive Wall Street, but greed can be bad for the wider capitalist economy. The depressed demand in the U.S. economy, for example, may be a product of decades of growing economic inequality. While real household incomes of working people have remained largely static or fallen since the late 1970s the rich have, to put it mildly, gotten a lot richer -- incomes of the richest 1% has grown by more than 176% over the same period. Today one in four dollars earned in the United States accrues to just one in 100 Americans -- or, by a different measure, half of the income earned in the U.S. want to just one in five Americans.

American society, of course, has never had a moral problem with inequality in principle, and there's a widely-held -- if naive -- assumption that anyone who works hard and shows drive and ingenuity can become rich in the U.S. Perhaps, but for every Horatio Alger story there are tens of thousands born on the wrong side of the tracks who are destined to die on the wrong side of the tracks. But the problem posed by inequality, now, is a structural rather than simply a moral one, because of its impact on depressing demand in the economy.

Housing bubbles and cheap credit may have compensated for many years, with the robust consumer-driven economy essentially based on American households living beyond their means, their government borrowing money from China for them to spend on American brand-name products manufactured by low-wage Chinese workers. But when the sub-prime mortgage bubble ruptured in 2008, it was no longer possible to defer the consequences of a massive long-term redistribution of wealth to the rich.

Capitalist societies, including the U.S., have found, through their political systems, the means to avert collapse and its potentially dangerous political consequences by redistributing some of society's wealth back down to poorer sections of the population, spending money to build infrastructure, provide basic health care and education to a population that would otherwise struggle to afford them, by ensuring that working people earned enough to maintain viable consuming households, by creating a welfare support system that allows people to survive unemployment and continue consuming to provide a domestic market, and so on.

"To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods," writes Roubini. "That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.

Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/08/16/dr-doom-warns-wall-street-and-washington-heed-karl-marxs-warning/#ixzz1VEO9oUFo>

It seems now the capitalists, including Warren Buffett, are talking about taxing the rich, redistribution and approving Marx. Things must be getting really bad.