Chris Floyd

On Friday, Tony Blair appeared before the "Chilcot Inquiry," the panel of hoary, lugubrious Establishment worthies set up to "examine" -- with extreme circumspection, exquisite politeness, and all due reverence to authority -- the "origins" of Britain's involvement in the mass-murder spree known as the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The event could be summed up entirely in a single headline:

Tony Blair to a million dead Iraqis, and the grieving survivors of British soldiers: Fuck you.

Blair's appearance before the panel has occasioned some entirely misplaced and uninformed kudos from some in the American progressiverse, who laud the Brits for holding such a bold inquiry. "It's the kind of thing you would never see in the United States," they say, forgetting, if they ever knew, such minor matters as the Watergate hearings -- which actually had the power to send people to jail for lying, unlike the completely powerless Chilcot panel -- or the Watergate grand jury, which named a sitting president as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a criminal case, or even the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton by the United States Senate, which I believe happened well within the adulthood of at least some of our leading progressives.

In any case, there was never any chance that the well-wadded Chilcot worthies were going to lay a glove on former PM turned corporate shill and Catholic saint-in-waiting. Blair was never going to do anything but repeat the bluster -- and outright lies -- he has regurgitated ad infinitum about his blood-soaked adventure with George W. Bush -- and the Chilcotniks were never going to call him on his bullshit. [Blair's knowing and deliberate lies are thoroughly detailed here.]

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Aleksandr Shustov

In a number of regards, 2009 was a watershed year for the Central Asian republics which gained independence 18 years ago as the result of the disintegration of the USSR. No doubt, the key 2009 developments will be affecting the situation in the region in 2010 and beyond. Some of the political and economic decisions made last year are going to define the future of the Central Asian republics both in the nearest and more distant future.

1. Escalation in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan

The return of some of the armed formations of the former united Tajic opposition, which were forced to leave Pakistan due to the intensification of fighting in the Swat valley, to Tajikistan's Tavildara Province became a prologue to a series of armed conflicts and terrorist outbreaks in Central Asian republics. The formations clashed with the government forces in July and the insurgents were largely routed by the end of August. An Uzbek border checkpoint came under fire in Hanabad in late May, and later several kamikaze attacks took place in Andijon. Two groups of insurgents were eliminated in the southern part of Kyrgyzstan in July. Several attempts on clerics and officers of law-enforcement agencies were reported in Uzbekistan, and a number of armed groups were eliminated in Tashkent in September. In October a group of 8 guerrillas managed to fight its way from Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan but was subsequently suppressed in the Vorukh enclave. The above range of events highlights the threat of further destabilization in Central Asia.

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Ellen Brown

We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Rubin/Geithner). The bodies left strewn on the battleground could include your pension fund and 401K.

The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that U.S. politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.

In 2000, the Rockefellers and the Morgans joined forces, when JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan merged to become JPMorgan Chase Co. Today the battling banking titans are JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that gained notoriety for its speculative practices in the 1920s. In 1928, it launched the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a closed-end fund similar to a Ponzi scheme. The fund failed in the stock market crash of 1929, marring the firm’s reputation for years afterwards. Former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin came from Goldman, and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rose through the ranks of government as a Rubin protégé. One commentator called the U.S. Treasury “Goldman Sachs South.”

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