At least they built the railroads (to ship food away from the starving natives)

A moral audit of the British empire by Piers Brendon

"The history of the Raj was punctuated by further famines, which caused tens of millions of deaths. These were not, as Mike Davis claims, colonial 'holocausts'. But the British failed lamentably in India, as they did in Ireland, in their duty of care."

I don't know Piers, but if one defines a holocaust as a great destruction of human life, it is hard for me to understand why the Indian famines Mike Davis describes in his "Late Victorian Holocausts" do not so qualify. By forcibly drawing Indian agriculture into world markets under British dominion and thereby eviscerating traditional safeguards against drought-induced famine, the Raj "caused tens of millions of deaths". In India as in Ireland, food was shipped by rail away from famine-ravaged regions for sale on world markets (and British soldiers used lethal force to keep stores of grain from being eaten by starving Indians). Tens of millions of deaths resulted. How is this not a great destruction of human life, caused of course by drought but also by the crucial intervention of human agency - the British imperial system - and therefore, unequivocally, a "colonial holocaust"?

Time to open the window and go to the ledge?

The McLaughlin Group - Is this the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

What's bad for the U.S. economy is not necessarily bad for the rest of the world. The current international economic structure is so unjust as to be absurd. Working people throughout the world slaving away to produce throwaway products for United Statesians, who produce little in return, while their central banks bankroll United Statesian deficits largely comprising military spending on wars and an international network of bases that the rest of the world hates and resents? The invisible hand, and its lesser known counterpart the visible hand of powerful governments, must surely be attached to an imbecile. If only it were time for the few who profit from this state of affairs to open the window and hop over the ledge.

Thomas Friedman is apt to miss this from his suite at the Bombay Intercontinental

Indexing Humanity, Indian Style by P. Sainath

"The day the Sensex crossed 19,000, India clocked in 94th in the Global Hunger Index--behind Ethiopia. Both stories did make it to the front page (in one daily at least).

But, of course, the GHI ranking was mostly buried inside or not carried at all that day. The joy over the stunning rise of the media's most loved index held on for a bit the next day. The same day, India clocked in as the leading nation in the number of women dying in childbirth. In this list, the second, third and fourth worst countries put together just about matched India's 117,000 deaths of women in childbirth. This story appeared in single column just beneath the Sensex surge.

Next came the fall of several hundred points in the Sensex. That is, barely a couple of days later. It took minutes for the top guns to swing into action. Fingers were in every dyke... What stood out, of course, was the swiftness of both government and media response to each twitch in the index.

No Minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit the 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index. That's out of 118 countries."

No, the city's not a magical bubble-free zone

Feeling the Effects of a Housing Bust (in NYC) by Andrew Beveridge

"As the housing bubble seems about to burst, low-income people with mortgages have the most to lose, but most New Yorkers will feel some effects of any real estate collapse. ....."

Executive summary: Minority and poor New Yorkers will feel the effects of the nationwide housing bubble's burst most acutely; big surprise to the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, maybe? Probably no one else.

Also, if financial firms keep getting hammered, there could be a repeat of 1987, when the NYC housing market fell along with the stock market, but took eight years longer to recover. The 1929 crash is unlikely to happen again, since the ideology of believing in the perfection of free market capitalism died a few years after; and although it largely resurrected itself in the 80s, it is now understood by all but the most zealous that socialism has to be used to rescue capitalists whenever they stumble into one of their inevitable bouts of financial self-destruction.

The butter goes to feed soldiers anyway

End of the guns and butter economy by Scott B MacDonald

When the choice will have to be made, which will be the first to go? The guns or butter?

Shortest-lived empire ever

The Impossibility of American Empire by William Pfaff

The United Statesian historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called him “Walter Lippmann’s authentic heir.” He has been a regular columnist for the International Herald Tribune since 1978. He isn't widely read by United Statesians.

This is just one representative example of William Pfaff's writing. Check him out.

"Take the current Republican party candidates for their party’s presidential nomination. The level of intelligence, emotional and intellectual maturity, and simple information about the subjects on which they discourse, would disqualify them from mainstream political rank in any other major democracy.

This is seriously distressing – although in principle a soluble problem, since there are plenty of intelligent people in the United States, as well as great universities and a rich culture. But elected U.S. government has been so debased by the national willingness to submit elections to the values and habits of a medium of entertainment, television, and to the corruptions of money, that it is hard to see that such a nation can indefinitely maintain representative government."

Propagandelicious

Worst EU Lobbying Awards 2007

Vote for the worst EU Lobbies! Celebrate freedom! As our wise Supreme Court says, propaganda is constitutionally-protected free speech (gotta hand it to the Founders, so far-sighted in thinking to protect propagandists over a century before the art really came into its own).

read it and find out

How Argentina Jump-Started Its Economy by Mark Weisbrot

I'm posting this in response to Monday's op-ed by The Wall Street Journal's Resident Latin America Hack, Mary Anastasia O'Grady, in which she wrote "the Kirchner government has made a mess of the economy." As opposed to the prior administration, which made a catastrophe ending in default and riots that we are to suppose was... well-organized?