Americas

"...even moderate Israeli actors are contributing to Arab-Jewish alienation in Israel. The fence/wall that so mindlessly cuts off East Jerusalem Arabs from their brethren in the West Bank is radicalizing them--witness the series of suicidal attacks launched in West Jerusalem by frustrated Palestinians from the outlying villages of East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Israeli governmental refusal to create new Arab towns or an Arab university exacerbates the pressures generated by the increasingly crowded Arab living space in Israel."

"If Israel does not treat all its civilians equally, and without a solution to the problem of the part of the Palestinian people who live under occupation, the tensions that led to the Acre riots are likely to be repeated."

"This late in the campaign season, the codes have been written and the voting machines and compilers are in place. Whose decisions will they report: those of the voters or those of the programmers? We will likely find out on November 5."

"Given the complexities associated with a global economy, and the unsupervised power of financial entities to do harm to themselves and others, in a sense it doesn't really matter whether it's McCain or Obama in the Oval Office. Both would have to concern themselves with righting the ship of state and the financial institutions that keep it stable and functioning. Doing so requires government oversight and regulation of the giant corporate and financial behemoths. In short, America will become, to a greater or lesser degree -- with enough greed-loopholes built into the new system to satisfy the Wall Street elites -- a distinctly American variant of the "social democracies" in Europe."

"Let’s hope that the rhetoric on al-Qaeda’s website is just bluster, as in October 2004, rather than turning into an attack, as it did in Spain in March 2004. We want a fair election with no outside interference from evildoers."

"...there are 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, one fifth of the country’s population. Of those, one quarter are internal refugees, or officially classified as “present absentees”: present in Israel in terms of citizenship but absent in terms of legal redress over their forced removal from their homes."

"This money has never produced the anticipated abundance. Stagnant production has always been the consequence of this money excluded from the markets out of parsimony."

"Hundreds of billions here, hundreds of billions there--pretty soon you're talking about real money. It will be highly depreciated money, however, because the government's bailout commitments to date, along with its already huge budget deficit, ensure that the Fed will be flooding the world with newly created dollars, and, other things being equal, each one's creation reduces the purchasing power of every existing one."