The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election.  

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm.  

Exxon Mobil Corp. smashed its own record for quarterly profits today, ringing up $14.8 billion in net income in the third quarter powered by soaring summertime crude oil prices. 

Exxon Mobil's earnings, at $2.86 a share, are up 58 percent from the same period in 2007 and higher than what analysts expected, capping a week of strong profit numbers from the world's biggest oil companies, all of whom benefited from the spike in oil prices in July.  

Presidential candidate Barack Obama has reached out to US voters in a half-hour, prime-time advertisement on seven US TV channels six days before polling. 

The broadcast came as the Democratic senator appeared with former president Bill Clinton at a rally in Florida. 

Throw your mind back to September 10, 2001. The price of gas: $1.40 per gallon. 

The national debt: $5 trillion dollars, sizeable but only about half of what it is today. 

America had over 3 million more manufacturing jobs.  

On channel Seven 4:30 afternoon news today, (29/10/08) Westpac's Global Head of Economics, Bill Evans, said something stupefying... Amazingly, he did not understand the way money was ebbing and flowing anymore...

Imagine!!!!

As the stock market plummets and house prices slump, Tony Blair, the man who as Prime Minister championed the "light touch" system of financial regulation blamed by many for the current crisis, is enjoying an unprecedented boom in his fortunes.  

Wars, bases, and money. The three are inextricably tied together.  

In the 1980s, for example, American support for jihadis like Osama bin Laden waging war on (Soviet) infidels who invaded and constructed bases in Afghanistan, a Muslim land, led to rage by many of the same jihadis at the bases (U.S.) infidels built in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.  

On this site we've pointed out way before the financial crisis that Greenspan was asleep at the wheel..., same went with Costello. That's our opinion and some people are entitled to express views to the contrary.  

Many serious cartoonists in the US are already joining the bandwagon. Here is my serious contribution for the day... 

Is Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, a pocket dictator? Is there no drop of liberalism in her veins, no concept of personal freedom, no fear of a repressive state? Or is she just another home secretary?  

This month she apparently felt obliged by dark forces beyond her control to add another weapon to the armoury of illiberal power.

Noam Chomsky lashed out at western media reports saying Tehran was "defying the world" over its nuclear program. 

"That's a funny definition of the 'world'. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), for example which is the majority of countries, endorses Iran's right to enrich uranium," said Chomsky. 

The U.S. military has warned Iraq that it will shut down military operations and other vital services throughout the country on Jan. 1 if the Iraqi government doesn't agree to a new agreement on the status of U.S. forces or a renewed United Nations mandate for the American mission in Iraq.

Many Iraqi politicians view the move as akin to political blackmail, a top Iraqi official told McClatchy Sunday.

It began as a dirty open secret and is now Chicago lore: From the 1970s into the 1990s, African American men in the city of Chicago were routinely arrested, taken into police custody, and tortured, during interrogations lasting hours on end.  

An estimated 150 black men endured abuse that included savage beatings, suffocation with bags and typewriter covers, and in many instances, electrical shocks applied to their genitals.  

With the final week of campaigning ahead, Senator Barack Obama redoubled his efforts to tie Senator John McCain to the Bush administration by seizing on Mr. McCain’s remark Sunday that he shared a “common philosophy” with the president. 

The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography.