A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects

George Monbiot, Tuesday August 28, 2007, The Guardian

For the first time the UK's consumer debt exceeds the total of its gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion. Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.

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In March 2007 the London Review of Books published John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay 'The Israel Lobby' below. The response to the article prompted the LRB to hold a debate under the heading 'The Israel lobby: does it have too much influence on American foreign policy?'. The debate took place in New York on 28 September in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union. The panellists were Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer and Dennis Ross, and the moderator was Anne-Marie Slaughter.A video of the event, produced by ScribeMedia, is now available to view online. Click here to view the debate.

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

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By FIONA MacRAE -

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=473616&in_page_id=1770

McDonald's: 'up to six times more appetising than identical snacks in plain wrappers'

Children find food in McDonald's packaging up to six times more appetising than the identical snacks in plain wrappers, research shows.

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Channel 4 aired the Dispatches 'Undercover Mosque' show in January

Police are reporting Channel 4 to the media regulator Ofcom over the way an undercover programme was edited.

Police asked the CPS to consider a prosecution of Channel 4 under the Public Order Act 1986 for showing material likely to stir up racial hatred

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