• A Captive Nation: Economic and Social Crisis at Home Equals Wars Abroad? 
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Eric Walberg’s otherwise excellent book ‘Post modern imperialism geopolitics and the great games’ [...] utilizes [Sir Halford J.] Mackinder’s metaphor of the ‘The Great Game’ to great effect, to map out what he describes as three distinct ‘games played’, the days of Mackinder’s British Empire being ‘Game 1’. But I fear that the use of this metaphor, handy though it is in shorthanding the machinations of imperialism brings with it the danger of a kind of fatalism, reducing us to mere pawns on Brzezinski’s ‘Grand Chessboard’. A view I might add, that reinforces our fatalism as it transforms sociopaths like Brzezinski into a character out of an Ayn Rand novel, possessed of super powers and the natural inheritor of Mackinder’s haughty and arrogant view of the world.  

• Fukushima dumping of radioactive water into Pacific Ocean violates international law 
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Atlas Shrugged  | As soon as the American people wake up and realize their social security money has long since been looted and spent by the feds, we’re likely going to see a mass of public protests that could thrust this nation into political chaos. And to think, it all started when planet Earth shrugged off the coast of Japan. Or, you might say, Atlas Shrugged.  

• The source of the current economic crisis: “A Chicago state of mind” 
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Capitalism  | “Then Clinton-era ‘reform’ of investor protections, led by Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, enabled the ‘financial supermarkets’ at the core of this collapse -- including Citigroup where he became a senior executive alongside CEO Sandy Weill,” [says Jeff Gates]. [....] “Rubin successor Larry Summers (now Barack Obama’s top economic adviser) fought for ‘reforms’ that de-regulated financial derivatives -- magnifying the impact of the crash as those arcane arrangements grew from $88 trillion a decade ago to a market that now represents transactions with a face value of $600 trillion,” Gates says. “Add to that toxic mix the easy credit policies of a central bank overseen by Alan Greenspan, a disciple of Ayn Rand, a Russian-Ashkenazi philosopher and market fundamentalist.”  

• The end of capitalism? 
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Capitalism  |Inaccurate  | Greed is the fuel that energizes [capitalism]. Ayn Rand, the most virulent defender of capitalism, simply put it this way: greed is good.  

• Economic democracy and a guide to the 2008 presidential election 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | The most efficient system is not the dog-eat-dog capitalism of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged where business becomes a weapon reflecting Hobbes’s “war of each against all” or is played as a financial gambling chip like what Enron did to the energy industry. Laissez-faire or Libertarian capitalism applied to those elements of the economy that should be cartelized or regulated is a really bad idea.