by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible “global economic collapse” over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction.

In a report entitled “Worst-case debt scenario”, the bank’s asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.

Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350pc in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of “deleveraging”, for years.

by Rick Rozoff

There is no way of overestimating the challenge that the emergence of ALBA and the overall reawakening of Latin America pose to the role that the U.S. arrogates to itself as lord of the entire Western Hemisphere. The almost two-century-old Monroe Doctrine exemplifies Washington’s claim to exclusive influence over all of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean Basin and its self-claimed right to subordinate them to its own interests. Never before the election victories of anti-neoliberal forces throughout Latin America over the past eleven years has the prospect of a truly democratic, multipolar New World existed as it does now.

by William Bowles

“Britain’s last surviving World War I veteran shunned Remembrance Day commemorations Wednesday because he was against the glorification of war” — ‘Britain’s last WWI veteran shuns Remembrance Day’

After eight years and tens of thousands of Afghan casualties, the occupiers are settling down to a war of unknown duration. And contrary to Brown’s earlier declarations that ‘al-Qu’eda’ was operating out of Afghanistan, Brown, all-dressed up for the Lord Mayor’s banquet told the assorted ‘dignitaries’,

“Mr Brown has acknowledged that al-Qaeda is not operating in Afghanistan but cautioned that it continued to recruit and train.

by Rick Rozoff

“Not only does one country account for the overwhelming plurality of world military expenditures, but that nation also has troops and bases on all six habitable continents (as well as a 54-year military mission in Antarctica, Operation Deep Freeze) and eleven aircraft carrier strike groups and six navy fleets that roam the world’s oceans and seas at will. It is also expanding a global interceptor missile system on land, on sea, in the air and into space that will leave it invulnerable to retaliation.”

by Sergey Balmasov

US army bases will appear on the Black Sea Coast – in Bulgaria and Romania. About $50 million will be assigned to build the base in Romania, and the Pentagon plans to spend $60 million more for the same purpose in Bulgaria.

The Romanian base is expected to be put in operation in 2010, whereas the second one will most likely be launched in 2011 or 2012. Over 4,000 US military men are expected to serve at the two bases: 1,600 in Romania and 2,500 in Bulgaria. The authorities of the two nations expect that the US military men will settle there for a long time.

by Anna Yashchenko

Based on autopsies, we have come to the conclusion: it’s not pneumonia, but cardiopulmonary insufficiency and cardiogenic shock … The virus enters directly into the lungs, there is bleeding … Antibiotics should not be used …

Why do we have such a high mortality rate in the country?

Because people are going to pharmacies to get medicine instead of going to their doctors to be treated … No it is not pneumonic plague. It’s all nonsense … antibiotics do not help … Those with strong immune systems will survive. People with weak immune systems will succumb to the illness … Face Masks provide 30% extra protection. Wearing glasses gives an additional 10% protection, that is 40%, because the virus penetrates the mucose membranes.

by Paul Craig Roberts

It is conventional wisdom that it was the draft that ended the Vietnam war. According to this explanation, cowardly college students subject to the draft and their unpatriotic families, forced an end to the war. This is Karl Marx’s explanation. Material interests, not empty morality, are said to have brought the war to an end.

by Danny Schechter

How The Prosecutors Blew The First Big Case

PARIS: I had come from a heated financial journalism conference in a far more orderly Brussels where I had been thundering against Wall Street crime. The first news I saw from “the homeland” was that the only two big shots busted for crimes against their investors when they ran Hedge Funds, now imploded, at Bear Stears were acquitted in a New York courtroom dramatizing the difficulties prosecutors face in achieving the “jail-out” I have been calling for.

Here’s how the NY Times covered it:

by David Kerans

“I have no interest in spending all of our time relitigating the policies of the last eight years.… laying blame…. can distract us from focusing our time, our efforts and our politics on the challenges of the future.”

–Barack Obama, speech on national security, delivered at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., May 21st, 2009

by Dahr Jamail and Sarah Lazare

As the Obama administration debates whether to send tens of thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan, an already overstretched military is increasingly struggling to meet its deployment numbers. Surprisingly, one place it seems to be targeting is military personnel who go absent without leave (AWOL) and then are caught or turn themselves in.