A March 25 George Lekakis column in The Herald Sun summarised the case: “Data collected by Bloomberg News shows that the default risk of Australian banks has never been higher, with Macquarie Bank emerging as one of the riskiest banking players in Asia. ... ‘Macquarie is the closest link in Australia to the problems that are afflicting Bear Stearns and other US investment banks,’ said David McDonald, of Shaw Stockbroking.”  

At the NATO Summit in Bucharest this week, our Kevin found time to catch-up with an "old friend".  

At the start of the session on Afghanistan, Kevin saluted the world’s greatest terrorist, war criminal, thief & draft dodger, establishing his own credentials as the US replacement for little rattus as as regional ‘deputy sheriff’. 

The head of the crisis-hit investment bank Bear Stearns has blamed short sellers and market manipulators for spreading negative financial rumours to induce a collapse of the 85-year-old Wall Street institution. 

On the small, remote island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and Indonesia, the United States has one of the most secretive military bases in the world.  

President George W. Bush's successor should renounce his monarchy. It betters the instruction of King George III, which provoked the Declaration of Independence. 

from Crikey ….. 

Torture for Dummies: a US Justice Dept primer 

Jeff Sparrow writes: 

In his bleakest economic assessment to date, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Wednesday that the American economy could contract in the first half of 2008, meeting the technical definition of a recession, and he encouraged Congress to help homeowners caught up in the mortgage crisis. 

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea. 

Much of what lines supermarket aisles is not food. It's merely foodlike, and it's making us sick. 

When NATO leaders meet in Romania on Wednesday to decide whether to put U.S. allies Georgia and Ukraine on a path toward eventual membership, they will find themselves uncomfortably wedged between Washington's firm backing of the former Soviet states' bids and a Kremlin digging in its heels against any further eastward expansion by the alliance. 

If you think Americans in general have a strong preference for peace, you have not been paying attention; nor have you been immersing yourself in history books.

The country in which Americans take such pride today is the product of people who were willing, and often eager, to kill anyone who obstructed what they presumed to be their Manifest Destiny.

Hillary Clinton has vowed to fight on in the contest to be the Democrats' presidential candidate, comparing herself to the film character Rocky. 

Speaking in Philadelphia, where the film Rocky was set, she said: "When it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit." 

The US Congress, the US media, the American people, and the United Nations, are looking the other way as Cheney prepares his attack on Iran. 

If only America had an independent media and an opposition party. If there were a shred of integrity left in American political life, perhaps a third act of naked aggression – a third war crime under the Nuremberg standard – by the Bush Regime could be prevented.  

Abdul Qader's suffering is part of the human toll of the worst violence in months in Iraq.