Alternative Press Week in Review

A weekly roundup of news, announcements, articles and other items of interest.

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Poll: What is the best thing that could happen to George Bush?

Official Site to Re-select Bush-Cheney in 2004

Calendar of Errors
A representative sample of reports from the U.S. and British news media since the search for Iraq’s WMD began.

Analysis of "Patriot II"

Satire: Bush visits USS Truman for dramatic veterans’-benefits-cutting ceremony

Lemon World
Comic strip from cartoonist Jonathan Lemon focusing on current world events with a pinch of irony, a side helping of social commentary and a twist of lemon humor and bitterness.

As the Economy Crumbles
Weekly column summarizing the crappy economic news of the week

Book of the Week

Traveling America Broke – The Live and Crimes of Joey Grether

Publications of the Week

Willful Disobedience
Volume 4, Number 2 – Spring/Summer 2003
Quarterly anarchist publication of insurrection and rebellion.

Impact Press
#45 – June/July 2003
Nonprofit, bi-monthly, socio-political magazine of investigative journalism, commentary, and satire.

Articles of the Week

What’s Happening?
Atilio A. Boron Interviews Noam Chomsky
The Bush administration, let me repeat it again, they are not conservatives; they are statist reactionaries. They want a very powerful state, a huge state in fact, a violent state and one that enforces obedience on the population. There is a kind of quasi-fascist spirit there, in the background, and they have been attempting to undermine civil rights in many ways.

Talking About Hope in a Bloodbath
Ramzy Baroud, Alternative Press Review
I always believed that the Palestinian people should be strongly commended for their courage in the face of the Israelis, unconditionally supported by the US. This small nation's amazing ability to assert its rights, despite the giant effort to undermine them, needs not mere words or applause to validate it. But despite all of that, things are still tragic.

Fast forward into trouble
Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, The Guardian
Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan's first crime wave – murder, fraud, drug offences.

Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Jennifer Loewenstein, CounterPunch
Israel is an offshore US military base and weapons testing ground. It is a westernized colony for white supremacists seeking ways to discreetly dispose of its nigger population. It is an American franchise for the new global economy, a consumer outlet, an ad for Disney-World-gone-native, a terrorist training camp for Jewish fundamentalists, the most well-funded terrorist organization outside the mainland United States, a strategic foothold in the Middle East for oil-thirsty, power-hungry neo-cons.

What if?
John Whitbeck, Al-Ahram Weekly
Virtually all governments and commentators agree, at least in their public pronouncements, that deeper engagement by the United States is essential if Israeli-Palestinian peace is ever to be achieved. Wrong. The best hope for peace would be total American disengagement -- and the sooner the better.

Bringing the War Home: Right Wing Think Tank Turns Wrath on NGOs
Jim Lobe, FPIF
Having led the charge to war in Iraq, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential think tank close to the Bush administration, has added a new target: international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

U.S. media caved in to the Bush agenda
Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun
I scanned the major U.S. networks for voices challenging the distortions and bunkum coming from the White House and neo-cons. There was virtually none.

Turning the tanks on the reporters
Philip Knightley, The Observer
The Pentagon made it clear from the beginning of the Iraq war that there would be no censorship. What it failed to say was that war correspondents might well find themselves in a situation similar to that in Korea in 1950. This was described by one American correspondent as the military saying: 'You can write what you like – but if we don't like it we'll shoot you.'

"Leave Us Alone or We'll Move NATO"
David Lindorff, CounterPunch
Is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld an idiot or just an unbelievable boor? And do the Times and the Associated Press have historical memories that reach past the prior day's news?

Conflating protests with terrorism
Bill Berkowitz, Working for Change
Police departments across the country are spying and compiling dossiers on political activists.

Winning Hearts and Minds With Rifle Butts
Thomas Chittum, Prison Planet
Even as I write these words, we’re conducting full-blown, Vietnam-style search-and-destroy missions north of Baghdad. The media isn’t calling them search-and-destroy missions yet, but that’s exactly what they are. These missions include sweeps by infantry and tanks backed up by strikes by jet bombers and helicopter gunships.

Gilded Cage: Wackenhut’s Free Market in Human Misery
Greg Palast, Guerrilla News
One of the hottest stock market plays of the 1990s was the investment in hotels without doorknobs: privately operated prisons. And the hottest of the hot was a Florida-based outfit, Wackenhut Corporation, which promised states it would warehouse our human refuse at bargain prices.

Tony Blair has never allowed the facts to get in the way of a good war
Neil Clark, Spectator
For amid the present furore over the no-show of Iraqi WMDs, let us remember that in Kosovo our humanitarian Prime Minister dragged this country into an illegal, US-sponsored war on grounds which later proved to be fraudulent. In 2003 Tony’s Big Whopper was that Saddam’s WMDs ‘could be activated within 45 minutes’. In 1999 it was that Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia was ‘set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two’.

They impeach murderers, don’t they?
Ted Rall, TedRall.com
Although Bush, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice denied such legal niceties to the concentration-camp inmates captured in their illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, these high-ranking Administration henchmen should be quickly turned over--after impeachment proceedings for what might properly be called Slaughtergate--to an international tribunal for prosecution of war crimes.

Revealing Statements from a Bush Insider about Peak Oil and Natural Gas Depletion
From The Wilderness
I think basically that now, that peaking of oil will never be accurately predicted until after the fact. But the event will occur, and my analysis is leaning me more by the month, the worry that peaking is at hand; not years away. If it turns out I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. But if I'm right, the unforeseen consequences are devastating.

Hawks turned media into parrots
Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star
Turns out that CNN was the Pentagon's Bitch after all.

US launches major military offensive in “liberated” Iraq
James Conachy, WSWS
Two months after the fall of Baghdad, the American military has been forced to launch a major assault on an area to the northwest of the Iraqi capital in a desperate bid to suppress mounting resistance to the US occupation.

History of America
Kalle Lasn, Adbusters
The unofficial history of America™, which continues to be written, is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the pursuit of a dream. It is a story of democracy derailed, of a revolutionary spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced to servitude.

America's shameful legacy of radioactive weaponry
Heather Wokusch, HeatherWokusch.com
A study by the Washington, D.C. based Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) suggests coalition forces used Afghanistan as a testing ground for radioactive weaponry, thereby placing generations of civilians – not to mention US service members – at unspeakable future risk.

World’s bloodiest war ignored by the West
Chris Fagan, Socialist Worker
When the mainstream press pays any attention to the Congo--or African wars in general--they invariably characterize the conflicts as "ethnic" or "tribal" wars, rooted in age-old hatreds. This explanation is not only false, but racist.

The right to party
Neil Pollack, Brooklyn Rail
Our right to party is being attacked by forces far more powerful, more sinister, and more organized than Mayor Daley’s liquor-law enforcement bureaucracy. Everything fun about America is under serious threat.

Pinter blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair
The Guardian
The playwright Harold Pinter last night likened George W Bush's administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying the US was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched.

Drifting towards fascism
David Roselle, Capital Times
Based upon how our America now conducts itself among its fellow human beings – including us, its own citizenry – what is our nation becoming? What, if we're honest with ourselves, are we to call a system of government that behaves in these ways…

Censorship of the Press
Robert Fisk, Independent
Paul Bremer has ordered his legal department in Baghdad to draw up rules for press censorship.

White House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intel Six Months Before War
Jason Leopold, Antiwar.com
Six months before the United States was dead-set on invading Iraq to rid the country of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, experts in the field of nuclear science warned officials in the Bush administration that intelligence reports showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons was unreliable and that the country did not pose an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East or the U.S.

Iraqi “bioweapons” trailers: another “smoking gun” goes up in smoke
Bill Vann, WSWS
In his State of the Union address at the end of last January, Bush had warned the American public that the Saddam Hussein regime had as many as “30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical weapons” and facilities to produce “over 25,000 liters of anthrax” and “38,000 litters of botulinum toxin.” Iraq, he continued, could be in possession of “500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.”

Baghdad: A race against the clock
International Crisis Group
Eight weeks after victoriously entering Baghdad, American forces are in a race against the clock. If they are unable to restore both personal security and public services and establish a better rapport with Iraqis before the blistering heat of summer sets in, there is a genuine risk that serious trouble will break out.

DEA Uses RAVE Act to Shut Down Fundraiser
Drug Policy Alliance
Only two months after the RAVE Act was passed by Congress it has been used by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to intimidate the owners of a Billings, Montana, venue into canceling a combined benefit for the Montana chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP).

Suppose You Wanted to Have a Permanent War
Robert Higgs, Independent Institute
As Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Harry Truman in 1947 at the outset of the Cold War, gaining public support for a perpetual global campaign requires that the government “scare hell out of the American people.” Each crisis piques the people’s insecurities and renders them once again disposed to pay the designated price, whether it takes the form of their treasure, their liberties, or their young men’s blood.

War revisionism!
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Lewrockwell.com
For those of us skeptical of all war, there was nothing really new in the latest Iraq fiasco. The government was lying (of course), the true motives were hidden (of course), it has created a disaster (of course), it ended up spreading death and misery (of course), and it was and is enormously costly (of course). All of this could be known in advance by anyone following the history of US wars. It's the same pattern, repeated again and again.

Suburbs as we know them are doomed by the coming energy crunch
Richard Gilbert, Globe&Mail
The price of natural gas is soaring. Next it will be oil. Suburban life as we know it could be doomed. Many suburban homes could be worthless in less than 20 years.

World economy sliding towards deflation and recession
Nick Beams, WSWS
In the United States, the recent upturn in the market masks a worsening situation in the economy as a whole. The continued decline in manufacturing—highlighted by the approaching crisis in the car industry—points to the fact that the Fed’s ability to prevent a full-scale recession may be coming to an end.

The Insidious Prophet of Petty Fascism
B.J. Sabri, Dissident Voice
Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist of the New York Times, is an insidious prophet of petty fascism, where arrogant judgments, studied preconceptions, bloated self-righteousness, and a message for hatred and violence constitute a value system.

Troubles at the Times: Beyond Blair
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
While Blair's record was shameful, it is important to recall that the Times has been guilty of sloppy or inaccurate reporting involving domestic and international stories of greater consequence than those Blair covered.

Clarifying the occupation lexicon
Amira Hass, Haaretz
Israeli political discourse relies on terms that have become so distorted in meaning that the understanding of the reality behind them has also been distorted.

Germany In 1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism
Bernard Weiner, Dissident Voice
America in 2003 and Germany seventy years earlier are not the same, and Bush certainly is not Adolf Hitler. But there are enough disquieting similarities in the two periods at least to see what we can learn -- cautionary tales, as it were -- and then figure out what to do with our knowledge.

The largest covert operation in history
Chalmers Johnson, History News Network
…the "tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists" the CIA armed are some of the same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; blew a hole in the side of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden harbor in 2000; and on Sept. 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

NewsWire

Iraqi Mobile Labs Nothing To Do With Germ Warfare, Report Finds

Long, difficult occupation looms for US

U.S. attack threatens to create thousands of new Iraqi enemies

Oakland High rallies to fire principal who put up barbed wire, locked school gates, let Secret Service interrogate students

Criminalizing home schooling

Ashcroft used cloak of secrecy to violate the rights of hundreds

Afghanistan deteriorating: US seeking help from Taliban

Battles rage across Iraq as resistance to occupation grows

FRANCE: Strikes, Demonstrations, Occupations Against Government Grow More Confrontational

America’s Imperial Delusion: US drive for world domination has no historical precedent

Fabric of lies unraveling

War may have killed 10,000 civilians, researchers say

Troops, families increasingly angry, disappointed; await war’s real end

Resistance to occupation is growing: US/UK troops being sucked into Iraqi quagmire

Korea: ominous removal of America’s ‘tripwire’

Stasi Nation

Aceh: Echoes of East Timor

NYPD botched anti-war protests

Natural gas in dangerous decline

California desert residents use water like there's no tomorrow — but tomorrow is coming

IFJ called on US forces in Iraq to explain arrest of three journalists in Baghdad

US army launches patriotic magazine to rally under-fire troops in Iraq

Reservists pay steep price for service

Guard, Reserve short on recruits; Heavy use takes toll on Army part-timers

Toll grows as attacks on troops get smarter, more organized

New reports implicate soldiers in death of journalists

Guantanamo Eyes Possible Execution Chamber

Blix smeared by Pentagon “bastards”

Consumers may have a beef with cattle feed

Anti-bush actress’ tv show dumped

Homophobic reverend gets pied

Alarm as US gas supplies hit low

Ferlinghetti's City Lights, Still A Beacon at 50

US threatens mass expulsions

Secret US chemical warfare attack kills 5 in Afghanistan

The ever-growing US military footprint

Iraq's U.S. oilman says sabotage rampant

Widespread Looting Leaves Iraq's Oil Industry in Ruins

Week in Review editor: Dean Thomas

Alternative Press Review
PO Box 4710
Arlington, VA 22204

AS THE ECONOMY CRUMBLES

"If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves." – Mark Twain

Issue #13 - June 16, 2003

-------------------------------------

1. Depleting Resources
2. Free Market Misery
3. Deficits, Deflation, Recession, Depression
4. No Jobs
5. Increasing Costs, Decreasing Benefits
6. Iraq and a Hard Place

-------------------------------------

Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the Decade

1. DEPLETING RESOURCES

World Without Oil
It has become the foundation upon which our entire modern civilization has been built. Recently, that foundation has begun to develop some cracks and has become a little shakier than it used to be, as cheap oil and natural gas become harder to find and acquire. Even if we were to develop a new source of energy and a more fuel-efficient car today, without oil, modern civilization as we have come to know it is still in deep trouble.
FROM: Alternative Press Review, 6 Jun

Suburbs are doomed by the coming energy crunch
The price of natural gas is soaring. Next it will be oil. Suburban life as we know it could be doomed. Many suburban homes could be worthless in less than 20 years.
FROM: Globe & Mail, 22 May

Ocean’s bounty is gone
The journal Nature this spring published the most comprehensive study ever conducted of the worlds fisheries. Simply put, it concluded that the worlds oceans are wrecked.
From: Miami Herald, 5 Jun

Natural gas in dangerous decline
Gas production and drilling results in Western Canada have been so "dreadful" in recent months almost no amount of drilling can overcome production declines in the next few years, according to a report by FirstEnergy Capital Corp.
FROM: National Post, 11 Jun

Alarm as US gas supply hits low
Natural gas supplies in the US have reached critically low levels in recent months and may be inadequate to meet demand during a hot summer this year.
FROM: Financial Times, 9 Jun

California desert residents use water like there's no tomorrow — but tomorrow is coming
"We've gone from being assured that we lived in this magical place where the rules of water didn't apply to now having, I think, a very appropriate wake-up call about the fact that we do live in the California desert," said Buford Crites, a 17-year member of the Palm Desert City Council. "People have lived in this false water utopia."
FROM: Environmental News Network, 11 Jun

Revealing Statements from a Bush Insider about Peak Oil and Natural Gas Depletion
I think basically that now, that peaking of oil will never be accurately predicted until after the fact. But the event will occur, and my analysis is leaning me more by the month, the worry that peaking is at hand; not years away. If it turns out I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. But if I'm right, the unforeseen consequences are devastating.
FROM: From the Wilderness, 12 Jun

Canadian gas production can’t keep up with US demand
The United States shouldn't look northward to ease its worsening natural gas supply crunch because Canadian production won't be able to keep up with soaring demand south of the border, a U.S. congressional committee has heard. Canada has filled half of all new U.S. gas demand for a decade now, but the well is running dry, Harold Kvisle, president and chief executive officer of TransCanada Corp. of Calgary, warned the energy and commerce committee yesterday.
FROM: Globe & Mail, 11 Jun

Heating bills may rise again
The United States has limited opportunities to boost natural gas supplies, which may mean surging prices for heating fuel again this winter, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a letter to lawmakers.
FROM: Bloomberg, 10 Jun

Gas price surge hits chemical makers
Fertilizer makers and petrochemical companies that rely on natural gas as a component of their manufacturing processes, and not just a fuel source, have seen their single largest cost soar since the beginning of the year. And the situation is only likely to get worse.
FROM: CBS MarketWatch, 14 Jun

Crude Awakening: Add Oil to the List of Worries
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan highlighted the risks of higher natural gas prices. Conversely, scant few seem terribly concerned about oil prices, Greenspan included. But those believing robust economic growth is imminent, and thus higher stock prices are justified, have reason to be at least a little concerned.
FROM: TheStreet.com, 12 Jun

Crude Awakening
This isn't the way it's supposed to go. As it became clear that the war in Iraq was not going to go as badly as some traders feared, and that Saddam Hussein lacked the will or, more likely, the ability to scorch his country's oil fields, the market was enthusiastic that oil prices would come scuttling down.
FROM: CNN Money, 12 Jun

Oil prices surge past $32 a barrel
Oil prices surged above $32 a barrel for the first time since mid-March on Wednesday, as traders fretted about scant supplies, the rising price of natural gas and a signal from OPEC that production cuts might be on the horizon.
FROM: Associated Press, 12 Jun

Electricity costs near 20-year highs
U.S. air conditioning bills might bulge this summer as electricity prices are projected to rise to their highest level in at least two decades. ... The expected price increase is partly attributed to elevated natural gas prices, which have climbed as inventories have fallen to 29% below the five-year average. Natural gas is the third-biggest source of electricity generation after coal and nuclear power.
FROM: USA Today, 9 Jun

2. FREE MARKET MISERY

Downsizing in Disguise
Iraq looks like every other country that has undergone rapid-fire "structural adjustments" prescribed by Washington, from Russia's infamous "shock therapy" in the early 1990s to Argentina's disastrous "surgery without anesthetic." Except that Iraq's "reconstruction" makes those wrenching reforms look like spa treatments.
FROM: The Nation, 5 Jun

Gilded Cage: Wackenhut’s Free Market in Human Misery
One of the hottest stock market plays of the 1990s was the investment in hotels without doorknobs: privately operated prisons. And the hottest of the hot was a Florida-based outfit, Wackenhut Corporation, which promised states it would warehouse our human refuse at bargain prices.
FROM: Guerrilla News Network, 11 Jun

The Truth That Economists Forgot
Clive Hamilton, director of the Canberra think-tank the Australia Institute, is a former econocrat with a PhD in economics. His book, Growth Fetish, published by Allen & Unwin, is a powerful attack on conventional economics and its rarely examined assumption that unending growth in the consumption of goods and services is what will make us happy. Hamilton argues that economists have created a story about how the world works based on certain aspects of human behaviour: self-interested calculation, individualism and materialism. "The strangeness of the economists' world," he says, "arises from the fact that they recognise only this form of behaviour as valid and insist on imposing it on everything that people do." In other words, Homo Economicus - the person who inhabits the economists' models - bears only a passing resemblance to you and me. The economists have seized on a few aspects of human nature and assumed (because it makes their models easier to play with) that this is all there is to us.
FROM: Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Jun

3. DEFICITS, DEFLATION, RECESSION, DEPRESSION

World economy sliding towards deflation and recession
In the United States, the recent upturn in the market masks a worsening situation in the economy as a whole. The continued decline in manufacturing—highlighted by the approaching crisis in the car industry—points to the fact that the Fed’s ability to prevent a full-scale recession may be coming to an end.
FROM: World Socialist Web Site, 11 Jun

Looking Like Japan?
The problem? Japan's failure may have had nothing to do with the eventual cutting back on economic stimulus, and everything to do with the overcapacity that developed during the bubble years. The United States is dealing with similar excesses, said Dresdner Kleinwort Benson global investment strategist James Montier (who was his firm's Japan economist in 1995), and pouring money on the economy will not make them go away.
FROM: CNN Money, 13 Jun

The “Enronization” of America
Could the U.S. economy go the way of Enron?
FROM: Business Week, 10 Jun

Drowning, First-Class Style
To begin on a somber note, the bubble and the bust of high technology, the debt build-up of American households, the obsession with a strong dollar -- all of this existed before we got George Bush. The late 1990s were a fine time, but they set the stage for a slump which began in late 2000, from which we have not recovered, and will not recover soon.
FROM: TomPain.com, 9 Jun

CBO expects deficit to shatter record
Congress' top budget analyst warned Tuesday that the government is on track this year for a record deficit exceeding $400 billion…
FROM: Associated Press, 10 Jun

U.S. States Face Record Deficits, Boost Taxes as Bush Cuts Them
U.S. states are boosting taxes and fees to erase their biggest deficits since World War II, moves that will blunt the impact of President George W. Bush's $330 billion in tax cuts, state budget officials said.
FROM: Bloomberg, 11 Jun

Insiders’ big stock sales may be omen
Here's some cold water for a red-hot stock market: Executives are rushing to sell their companies' shares at a pace not seen since 2001. ... The moves are a concern because insider buying and selling – by people who presumably are the most knowledgeable about their companies' prospects – have been good predictors of the market's direction. For example, many executives sold their holdings in early 2000, just before a bear market in stocks began.
FROM: Wall Street Journal, 8 Jun

US consumers in gloomy mood
New figures have revealed a surprise decline in US consumer confidence, dashing hopes that free-spending shoppers would revive the sluggish economy.
FROM: BBC, 13 Jun

Pop goes the housing market?
Some critics who say there is a dangerous runup in housing prices across the nation worry that the shake-up at the nation's No. 2 domestic mortgage financing company could spell big problems for home prices -- and the U.S. economy.
FROM: CNN Money, 10 Jun

Freddie Mac: US mortgage financier in derivatives trouble
The ousting of three top officials from Freddie Mac, the second biggest financier of residential mortgage loans in the US and one of the world’s biggest financial institutions, and the launching of criminal investigations has sent a shiver through US financial markets.

4. NO JOBS

Jobless at 20 year high
In an ongoing sign of the weak economy, the number of Americans getting unemployment benefits hit the highest level in more than 20 years during the last week of May.
FROM: NY Daily News, 13 Jun

Jobless recovery persists as unemployment continues to climb
Prior to the revisions, it appeared that 2.1 million total jobs and 2.7 million private-sector jobs were lost between the beginning of the recession in March 2001 and April of this year. With today's revisions, and including May's results, those losses have been revised to 2.5 million and 3.0 million. Both in terms of numbers and percentages, more private-sector jobs have been lost over this downturn than in any prior comparable period in post-WWII history.
FROM: Economic Policy Institute

Down and Out in White-Collar America
Professionals have never had a tougher time finding a job. It's not just the economy; the rules of the game are changing.
FROM: Fortune, 9 Jun

5. INCREASING COSTS, DECREASING BENEFITS

US health costs rose 9.6 pct in 2002
U.S. health care costs grew robustly in 2002, easing slightly from the year earlier, fueled largely by a hospital building boom experts said is causing overuse of medical services and higher patient costs, a survey found.
FROM: Reuters, 11 Jun

France faces more chaos as pensions strike continue
France braced for yet more disruptions after being hit by another day of walkouts, protests and transport chaos, as trade unions stepped up the pressure on Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to withdraw a controversial pensions reform bill.
FROM: AFP, 11 Jun

All Work and No Play
American workers already put in more time than those in most other industrialized nations. Now, with little comment or scrutiny, the Labor Department and Congress have declared open season on the 40-hour week, pushing ahead on new workplace rules that could turn offices into all-night crash pads.
FROM: Los Angeles Times, 8 Jun

6. IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE

Reservists pay steep price for service
Thousands of citizen soldiers charged with rebuilding Iraq face an even more daunting prospect when they return home: repairing the damage to their careers and personal finances.
FROM: USA Today, 9 Jun

Postwar euphoria evaporates in US economy
Post Iraq war euphoria evaporated in the United States as the sluggish no-jobs recovery failed to gather speed, data showed…
FROM: AFP, 14 Jun

Post-war euphoria fades as consumers wake up to reality
The road map to peace lies in tatters, the “battle for Iraq” is far from over and the economy is still shedding jobs. Welcome back to reality.
FROM: MSNBC, 13 Jun

AS THE ECONOMY CRUMBLES is compiled by Visualize Economic Collapse
Editor: Dean Thomas
Feedback / suggestions to: Economic Collapse

Previous issues are available at: Infoshop News