The largest contributor to the AEI is Irving Moskowitz, a bingo hall operator from Florida. He is a militant supporter of the Jewish settlement movement in Israel and the occupied territories. Going down the list of Bush Administration foreign policy gurus, one encounters dozens of graduates of the AEI, a pro-Israeli lobby group that camouflages itself in the garb of a pseudo-academic ?research? establishment. In fact, the only thing they research at the AEI is the best marketing strategies for selling Sharon?s real estate fantasies with a ?made in America? label.
After placing so many of their operatives in such sensitive second tier positions; the next step for this bingo hall subsidized cabal was to project their presence on the national stage. For this task, they recruited mass media operatives like William Safire, who boasts about writing Sharon?s speeches and Charles Krauthammer, a designated OSP leaker. Some of the other neo-con media personalities are Judith ?WMD? Miller, Wolf ?War Room? Blitzer, Aaron ?arson? Brown, Andrea Mitchell (a centerfold on AEI?s web site) and Ted Koppel, a family friend of Netenyahu. By far, the most formidable part of their media arsenal is Rupert Murdoch?s neo-con gang at FOX. The Weekly Standard and the New York POST.

While projecting themselves as a political movement, the neo-cons went shopping for a ?real? constituency. They found willing allies among the millions of Americans on the Christian Right who believe Armageddon is around the corner. All it took to convince them was the promise that the neo-con agenda would speed up the end of times.

Veteran New York money manager Arnold Schmeidler - who did not invest in dot.com IPOs - warns, "We are in a period unlike anything since the 1930s when the world is confronting deflationary forces."
Schmeidler concludes, "The single greatest force for deflation is when you have open trade between nations that have the ability to import the most efficient manufacturing expertise into a low-wage-base society, and so can produce products of the same quality as the high wage economy. The price pressure on the product allows consumers to get more for their money and they benefit. But it is disinflationary, if not deflationary."
Almost half of the US Treasury bonds are now owned in Asia. So China is financing Bush's bold economic experiment: running two or more wars simultaneously with a huge budget and trade deficit, and equally huge tax handouts for the richest Americans.
One has to question the long-term economic rationale for China of putting its long-term assets into very low-interest bonds in a currency that has already dropped recently by a third - and is going to drop even more. It certainly makes strategic sense: if push came to shove over, for example, the Taiwan Strait, all Beijing has to do is to mention the possibility of a sell order going down the wires. It would devastate the US economy more than any nuclear strike the Chinese could manage at the moment.

mred - btw, the hutton thing looks like a murdoch attack on the beeb license fee.