Economics

Panels & Presenters • Schedule

As they took down their "Clausurado" [Shut Down] banner from the rostrums of the two houses of Mexico's Congress, the FAP deputies declared victory, singing the national anthem and chanting slogans to defend Pemex.

The Third World

Asia

(a) SOUTHEAST ASIA. Only in China’s traditional “sphere of influence” has the People’s Republic given consistent material support to powers abroad – to North Korea and North Vietnam – and verbal support to movements against governments with which it has friendly diplomatic relations.

May 1, 2008 was the 5th anniversary of the day President George Walker Bush, televised from a U.S. Battleship, told the American people that we have completed our mission in Iraq.

Five years later there is one thing we do know for sure. We are still stuck in Iraq and will be for an undetermined length of time. Since that time another almost 2,000 Americans and Iraqis have died in Iraq. Many deaths were the "innocents" whose only fault was in living too close among the terrorist fighting population.

OCALA, Florida (Reuters) - A "very sorry" Wesley Snipes, star of the "Blade" movies, was sentenced to three years in prison on Thursday for willfully failing to file U.S. income tax returns for 1999 through 2001.

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He read a prepared statement, describing himself as an "idealist, naive, passionate, truth-seeking, spiritual-seeking artist" who epitomized the expression "mo' money, mo' problems."

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless. In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow - it is released again when the fuel is burned. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be "decarbonising" our transport networks.

CONCLUSIONS

On April 4-6, 2008, the Second Continental Conference took place in Mexico City with 283 delegates in attendance. During the different phases of the conference, leaders, workers and activists from 16 countries participated: Mexico, the United States, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Costa Rica, Cuba, Martinique, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

Somebody goofed. When Fed chairman Ben Bernanke cut interest rates to 3% on Thursday, the price of a new mortgage went up. How does that help the flagging housing industry?

About an hour after Bernanke made the announcement that the Fed Funds rate would be cut by 50 basis points the yield on the 30-year Treasury nudged up a tenth of a percent to 4.42%. The same thing happened to the 10-year Treasury which surged from a low of 3.28% to 3.73% in less than a week. That means that mortgages — which are priced off long-term government bonds — will be going up, too.

n the 1980s, as developing countries across the world struggled with crushing debt burdens and slow-growing economies, they were pushed—by the United States and international financial institutions—to embrace a set of policies that promised to rescue them. These policies, which are often grouped under the label neoliberalism, proceeded from the assumption that developing countries interfered too much with the workings of their markets.

Are we beginning to think that, maybe, housing and feeding nonviolent lawbreakers — white-collar criminals, drug users and the like — over long periods of time lacks utility? Good sense? Fiscal prudence?

Last week, when a federal court in Chicago sent international publishing tycoon Conrad Black up the river for six years on an array of financial charges, a University of Toronto professor commented, "When more taxpayer money goes into shutting a white-collar offender up than is spent on a hospital patient or a university student, isn't it time to rethink our assumptions?"