While many of us find ourselves swallowed up by the panic stimulated by 24-hour news cable services and the dying daily press, when we consider the current credit crunch and threats of doomsday, it is important to get some perspective on what is really happening.

History provides us that perspective. The following description of the famous economic panic that followed the collapse of the speculative bubble that surrounded railway expansion in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century presents an illustrative example.

The economist writing here looked back at this famous economic collapse and drew some serious conclusions. The parallels between then and now are striking, even if “then” was over 150 years ago (emphases added):

And that’s a pleasant way to describe the bailout in the works by the corrupt politicians of the United States, these narcissistic, craven sellouts, who couldn’t bring themselves to stop their own country from invading another and killing 100,000s and displacing millions more, who couldn’t stop their military interrogators and gestapo-like spies from torturing thousands. These moral zeros are about to send something just under a trillion dollars to the scions of finance capital. These latter have lived high off the hog, raking in millions, and in some cases billions of dollars, off a pyramid credit scheme, leaving us — the suckers — to pay up for a generation or more when their con finally went spectacularly bust, unraveling into a wilderness of economic “instruments” and “derivatives” so convoluted and intertwined that no one could ever untangle it.

The Election Committee of the American Psychological Association announced today that the referendum of APA members, in regards to prohibiting psychologist participation in settings where human rights violations take place, has passed with almost 60% of the vote. The total vote, which took place by mail ballot and closed officially on September 15, exceeded the total number of votes cast in the 2005 and 2007 APA presidential elections, and recent by-law votes. The vote turnout clearly indicates a great deal of interest in the interrogations issue by the membership.

The vote for the referendum represents an important victory for anti-torture, civil liberties forces, both inside and outside the APA. Dan Aalbers, one of the authors of the referendum text, and who along with psychologists Ruth Fallenbaum, Brad Olson, and Ghislaine Boulanger, was one of the members of Psychologists for an Ethical APA who worked hard to secure the measure’s passage, in a phone interview called the vote “a decisive victory…. Now we have to work to ensure that APA bows to the will of its members.”

Stephen Soldz has a story up at Psyche, Science and Society questioning whether there has been undue interference by staff at the American Psychological Association, “rallying sentiment against the Referendum.”

The Referendum’s key passage reads:

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.

Former Executive Director of the APA Practice Directorate, Bryant Welch, has written to APA CEO Norm Anderson “expressing concern about… staff interference in the voting process.”

The UK TimesOnline has posted a video of the aftermath of the killings of dozens of villagers in the Afghan village of Nawabad (called Azizabad in other stories). The U.S. has maintained that seven civilians and three dozen Taliban militants were killed in the combined U.S. Special Forces/Afghan Army/U.S. air operation last August 21. The United Nations and local villagers insist that 92 civilians were killed, over half of them children. According to the article:

In the video scores of bodies are seen laid out in a building that villagers say is used as a mosque; the people were killed apparently during a combined operation by US special forces and Afghan army commandos in western Afghanistan. The film was shot on a mobile phone by an Afghan doctor who arrived the next morning.

Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship.

The following letter has been faxed to the defense counsel of Mohammad Jawad, currently due to stand trial as part of the military tribunal process at Guantanamo. A juvenile when arrested in Afghanistan, Jawad’s likely innocence, and his abuse at the hands of both Afghan and U.S. captors has been well documented. His attorney, Major David Frakt, is asking interested individuals and organizations to write similar letters on his client’s behalf.

There is also a petition covering the primary details of the case, and asking for withdrawal and dismissal of charges against the former teenage combatant. I urgently ask my readers to at least consider signing the petition. A great wrong can be undone, if you help and take action.

The text of my letter:

No, this is not a post about alcoholism, and the only drunkenness to which it might refer is the manic inebriation that comes with the exercise of great power.

As the U.S. presidential race settles into its pattern of opposing camps supposedly at great odds, especially every four years — of conservative against liberal, hawk against dove, progressive versus reactionary — it is good to be reminded that underneath all of the hullaballoo (and I agree it’s hard not to be caught up in it, as detestable as Bush’s GOP has been these last seven years), that nothing about this race will really change how the U.S. is run, or rather who runs it.

Along those lines, I’d like to refer to a succinct statement of this issue from Chris Floyd, who himself quotes the insightful Gore Vidal. Reading the following, inspired by Floyd’s coverage of the U.S. intervention into Somalia and the subsequent human rights disaster that has followed, is like a splash of cold water, of stone cold sobriety regarding both the festivities and inanities of the past two convention weeks.

Nothing is more wrenching, more emotionally volatile than the story of prisoners of war, no matter what the country or the cause: the torture they endure (or endured), and the mind-numbing horror of contemplating the inhumanity of those who do the torturing. McCain is playing on his torture history as POW in his run for the presidency. On Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, also-ran former Senator Fred Thompson gave a speech lauding McCain, and describing the suffering of the GOP presidential nominee when he was held as a prisoner by the North Vietnamese from 1967-73.

There is much that could be made of the lies, exaggerations, and ordinary political mischief in Thompson’s speech. But one big lie stood out. In his narration of McCain’s torture story, he changed one important fact. And since it bears on the larger question as to whether torture “works,” it’s worth mentioning here.

In his speech, Thompson said the following:

Amy Goodman reported from the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul), site of the Republican National Convention, September 1, 2008, Labor Day:

Armed groups of police in the Twin Cities have raided more than a half-a-dozen locations since Friday night in a series of preemptive raids before the Republican convention. The coordinated searches were led by Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher but conducted in coordination with federal agencies….

Minnesota Public Radio is reporting that the FBI is at least one of the “federal agencies” acting in concert with the Minneapolis/St. Paul police departments. A professor at the University of Minnesota has snapped a photo of FBI presence at one of the raids. Many of these police gestapo actions involved two dozen or more riot police entering private homes with guns drawn, handcuffing the residents, and rifling through the house to search computers, and political literature.