Updated News Sources on the Web
For various reasons, I am leaving unchanged my 1991 essay on Web sources for information. It is however now out of date. Now one can go to Google.com and then “News” for access to 4,500 news sources around the world, including excellent sources in Arab countries, Pakistan, India, and China. To be well informed, one needs to keep up with these.
The Google/News website is however selectively screened for American viewers, in a way that must please the White House. Among the sources NOT available on Google/News are some of the best newspapers reporting on the world today. I am supplying hotlinks for some of them here. You can also find some stories on Google/Web by searching for “topic [e.g. Iraq] + source [e.g. AsiaTimes].”
You should check for yourself. As of January 10, 2004, some of these best sources not available on Google/News are:
Le Monde (Paris, in French).
Le Monde diplomatique, in English, which gives summaries of articles in Le Monde diplomatique, plus an opportunity to subscribe.
AsiaTimes. Excellent articles, not just on Asia, but on the whole world, including the United States. [Correction: as of 1/12/04, I find Asia Times well represented on Google/News. I want to recommend it here anyway.] As an example of their US reporting, I recommend a <href=http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FA10Ak02.html> 1/10/04AsiaTimesstory on how,
“with the new troop deployment rotation planned by the Pentagon, these troops [National Guard and reserve troops] will serve on the front lines [in Iraq] and will certainly see casualties among their ranks.”
For students of America’s economy and fiat currency, I recommend another story by Henry Liu in the
1/10/04AsiaTimes on Alan Greenspan’s bank-friendly performance at the Federal Reserve:
`Greenspan built his reputation by his release of a single-sentence statement that said he would supply all the liquidity the banking system needed to stay afloat during the 1987 crash. He pumped billions of US dollars, a fiat currency that he could print at will, into US financial institutions by pushing down the overnight lending rate aggressively. Greenspan’s move flooded financial markets with money, which helped preserve liquidity and restore confidence in the US financial system, but it started the bubble economy of the 1990s, which ended in Asia on July 2, 1997. Greenspan, in essence, did the same thing in 1998 and again after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Greenspan will go down in history as the central banker who r evived moral hazard, a fatal virus in any banking system.
`There is nothing wrong with deficit financing to keep the economy humming by smoothing out conventional business cycles. But providing liquidity to keep an undisciplined banking system afloat is another matter. It is an indulgence that the Fed itself has been criticizing the Bank of Japan (BOJ) for doing. The trouble is that the Fed under Greenspan thinks the banking system is the whole economy, or at least the part that really counts, and that the banking system should be or can be helped by risking the fundamentals of the economy. Greenspan is a permissive regulator who encourages systemic risk as an engine of growth by offering to bail out financial excesses that translate into unsustainable systemic risk.
`Former president Ronald Reagan attacked the wrong target when he said that government does not make money, only the private sector does. Money is created only by government, w! hich makes money through the issuance of sovereign credit to allow the money economy to operate. Banks, despite popular misconception, do not make money; they merely keep a percentage of the cash flow for their intermediary role, as a reward for channeling the money toward productive uses. When banks fail by indiscriminate lending to keep money productive, they deserve to be punished with losses. In fact, the health of the financial system depends on the fair punishment of wayward banks to avoid a moral hazard. It is a rule that the Fed under Greenspan seems to have forgotten.’
I welcome suggestions as to other good sources that for whatever reason are being ignored by Google/News.
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