Stephen Lendman

After the 1929 October 24, 28 and 29 market crash, the weekly entertainment industry magazine Variety (on October 30) published its most famous ever headline: "Wall Street Lays an Egg." In October 2008, history repeated, and since the October 2007 peak, equity prices plunged over 50% after the Dow and S & P (in February) posted their second worst ever monthly percentage declines - topped only in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. So far, the current market drop matches its 1929 - 1932 pace, and like then, shows no signs of abating.

With world economies collapsing, stocks are still overvalued by every metric - dividends, price to book, sales, free cash flow, or earnings based on GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principals) or "reported" earnings, not "operating" ones, easily manipulated to exclude "write-offs." By the mid-late 1990s, companies switched to the latter method to hide over-valuations. The practice still continues to let expensive stocks masquerade as cheap ones and make the market overall look attractive to the unwary.

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by chycho

Importance of The Big Three

“General Motors, Ford and Chrysler weren't labelled the Big Three just because they produced the most vehicles in North America. As giant employers, they had big influence, energizing entire economies with their big union wages and benefits packages. As giant manufacturers, they created style. Status was instantly signalled by black Lincolns and pink Corvettes. Seatbelts, reduced vehicle emissions and electric cars had to wait until the carmakers were good and ready. As giant political contributors, they had big power. The L.A. Times recently calculated that since 1990, the auto industry as a whole has donated $100 million US to Republicans and $34 million to Democrats.”

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Michael Collins

I first wrote about Susan Lindauer's struggle against the Bush-Cheney regime in October 2007, "American Cassandra: Susan Lindauer's Story." This was initially published in "Scoop" Independent Media (complete series) and carried by a wide variety of concerned Internet news sites and blogs. This interview follows the full dismissal of charges against her just before President Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009. This is the first in depth interview that Lindauer has offered regarding 911. Below is part one of the interview.

I asked Ms. Lindauer to make her own statement about why she's willing to go into detail now about 911 and the governments handling of pre 911 intelligence.

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eileen fleming

[Occupied East Jerusalem, March 1, 2009] Mordechai Vanunu wrote the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo:

Dear Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo,

I am Vanunu Mordechai, who has been nominated several times to Nobel Peace Prize, also this year’s 2009 award.

I am asking the committee to remove my name from the list for this year’s list of nominations.

My main reason for this is that I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres. He is the man who was behind all the Israeli atomic policy.

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Angie Riedel

Pretend, if you would for a short moment, that I have in my hands a magic camera which will allow us to take a snapshot of this moment in time, and freeze everything in the whole wide world in place. We'll then be able to step into the photograph and with everything frozen around us, we can explore and investigate, up close and personal, anything and everything we like.

The aim and purpose of doing this would be to figure out once and for all who's who and what's what and what goes on where and how, so that we will finally know why things are the way they are in this world. Because things are all messed up. Why are our stated values lived in direct opposites? Why do we claim to be moral people when the world around us, in many and varied ways, has devolved into phalanges of pornography?

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by Walter Brasch

Barack Obama was determined that the only way anyone was going to take away his BlackBerry was if they pried it from his cold dead hands. Or, something to that effect.

The President justifiably relies upon his BlackBerry, but many rely upon electronic communications as a status symbol or as a crutch so they don’t have to make decisions or engage in face-to-face conversations. Such was the case at a party I thought I might have attended.

It might have been an enjoyable party, but I didn’t experience much of it since pagers, cell phones, Palm Treos, and BlackBerries were going off all evening, and all I heard were excuses of why used car salesmen, real estate agents, and grocery store clerks had to break off conversations to answer the calls of nature.

“So, what’s your sign?” a striking brunette asked me, only to excuse herself when one of her cell phones chimed some hip-hop music. Apparently her sign was Ice-T, with AT&T rising.

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Norm Lowry

As a US citizen, I am personally responsible for the worldwide murders of 200,000+ people…Every Day. Commonly labeled as “Excess Deaths” (just as starving people are said to be “Food Deficient”); the truth would have it that these deaths are admittedly avoidable. Pathetic descriptors, coined by oligarchic leadership, do not erase the fact that lives are purposefully being erased for mostly selfish & illicit ends.

My country was supposedly founded on “Christian” principles; principles that would cause a person to die so that others might live; not to live so that others may die. Somehow, these grand ideas have mutated into the creation of a society which seems to see itself as being more honorable or moral than all others. This allows us an illicit luxury: purposeful deafness & blindness to the use of blatantly vile power & control to purchase an illusion of ease & comfort.

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Peter Chamberlin

Hurricane winds pound at the gates of Fortress America and our leaders send out the order for more straw and sand to pound into the widening cracks. The harder the winds of change blow the more apparent it becomes that our “leaders” cannot lead, when they themselves await orders from above. As our house of cards flies apart at the seams, the master planners send their minions scrambling to salvage their disintegrating investments, worrying only about their “property,” caring less about the human life that is huddled in fear within.

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Mickey Z.

The single most irrigated crop in the United States is…(drum roll please) lawn. Yep, 40 million acres of lawn exist across the Land of Denial and Americans collectively spend about $40 billion on seed, sod, and chemicals each year. And then there's all that water. If you include golf courses, lawns in America cover an area roughly the size of New York State and require 238 gallons of (usually drinking-quality) water per person, per day. According to the EPA, nearly a third of all residential water use in the US goes toward what is euphemistically known as "landscaping."

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Brenda Norrell

American Indian activist Russell Means said President-elect Obama was selected by the colonial powers as president to improve the US image globally in the aftermath of George Bush. Further, Means said Obama’s appointments show that he is a Zionist controlled by Israel.

Speaking on Red Town Radio today, Means said what is happening now to Palestinians is what happened to American Indians.

“Every policy now the Palestinians are enduring was practiced on the American Indian,” Means said on Red Town Blog Talk Radio, hosted by Brenda Golden, Mvskoke Creek. “What the American Indian Movement says is that the American Indians are the Palestinians of the United States, and the Palestinians are the American Indians of Europe,” Means said.

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