You might have heard that the United States Postal Service is in trouble: that it's losing billions, that it will have to end Saturday service and close branches - and most inflammatory, that it might need a government bailout. Perhaps you heard that the Postal Service couldn't pay $5.5 billion bill that came due Sept. 30 and that only an emergency postponement saved it from the government's equivalent of default.

In fact, it's the Postal Service that's currently bailing out the U.S. government. Politicians have been raiding Postal Service revenues for years, using them to make the federal deficit appear smaller than it really is. The fiscal gyrations are so twisted that the Postal Service is right now forced to pre-pay health care benefits for employees the agency hasn't even hired yet - in fact, for many future employees who haven't even been born yet - all to artificially shrink the federal deficit.

It's these crushing accounting tricks, not the cost of delivering mail, that has pushed this 200-year-old institution to the brink.

Welcome to the wacky world of Washington, D.C., accounting.

No one opposes unity. And no one opposes a stronger, more unified Europe. What people oppose is policy; policies that slash workers wages, privatize state assets, increase unemployment, and prolong recession. That's what people oppose. The people who are burning cars and fighting police in Athens aren't doing so because the hate unity. What they hate is a policy that shifts all the burden of the financial crisis onto their shoulders. The issue is fairness, not unity.

For over a year we've been hearing about a debt crisis that's spread from one EU country to the next. But, keep in mind, the crisis was predicted long before problems arose in Greece. From the very beginning, experts warned that structural flaws in the make-up of the monetary union would eventually lead to disaster. And so it has. So why is everyone acting so surprised? And why are the politicians and central bankers so eager to blame Greece? This is a structural problem. It has nothing to do to profligate spending, huge budget deficits, or "lazy Greeks". Those are all just red herrings. The one-size-fits-all currency was bound to end in catastrophe unless steps were taken to level the fiscal playing field. What does that mean?

Mounting instabilities in the Chinese economy have provoked fears among international analysts that world capitalism is about to be hit by another shock.

A clear indicator of global concern over a crash in China is the rising net value of outstanding credit default swaps (CDS) on Chinese sovereign debt - a type of insurance against a Chinese government default. This now stands at $US8.3 billion - the world's 10th largest total, ahead of Portugal and the Bank of America. Just two years ago, the CDS total for China was $1.6 billion and ranked 227th in the world.

An editorial by Bloomberg News on October 3 entitled, "China's fall, not its rise, is the real global threat," summed up the sentiment. It warned that China's expansion, based on "cheap labour, undervalued currency, heavy investment in manufacturing and focus on exports," had reached its limit, with "far-reaching consequences for the US and Europe, both of which are increasingly dependent on China."

The editorial listed the stresses facing the Chinese economy. First, "labour costs are surging" as young factory workers now expected a higher living standard and wage, threatening China's role as the world's largest cheap labour platform. Second, stimulus measures since late 2008 had unleashed cheap state bank credit to the tune of trillions of dollars, which, "has driven overinvestment and pushed up real estate prices to levels many families can't afford, adding to social tensions and possibly setting the country up for a bust."

With anti-Wall Street protests spreading to over 100 US cities and towns, President Barack Obama at a White House press conference Thursday cynically sought to exploit the outpouring of spontaneous anger at the banks and big business as a vehicle for his reelection bid.

On Thursday, new Occupy Wall Street protests sprang up in a number of major cities, including Philadelphia, New Orleans, Washington, Tampa, Dallas, Houston and Austin. They came on the heels of the largest demonstration so far in New York City, where an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 marched through lower Manhattan Wednesday night.

The demonstrations are driven by a profound anger over unprecedented levels of social inequality as, three years after the financial meltdown on Wall Street, unemployment and declining wages persist and deepen alongside record profits and increasing wealth for the top one percent.

Video of a talk given at Universtiy of British Columbia, Canada on Sept. 15 2011

"I went to Guantanamo Bay as a lawyer and came out as a broken father. I never thought in my lifetime that I would go to such an evil place, and see such evil being done." - Dennis Edney

Dennis Edney, was Omar Khadar's Lawyer for eight years, talks about the "War on Terror", his visits to Guantanamo to see Omar where witnessed the continued building of that illegal prison, and his frustration with the Canadian public's apathy to allow this to happen

As insurrection in Syria lurches towards civil war, the brakes need to be put on the propaganda pouring through the western mainstream media and accepted uncritically by many who should know better. So here is a matrix of positions from which to argue about what is going on in this critical Middle Eastern country:

1. Syria has been a mukhabarat (intelligence) state since the redoubtable Abd al Hamid al Serraj ran the intelligence services as the deuxieme bureau in the 1950s. The authoritarian state which developed from the time Hafez al Assad took power in 1970 has crushed all dissent ruthlessly. On occasion it has either been him or them. The ubiquitous presence of the mukhabarat is an unpleasant fact of Syrian life but as Syria is a central target for assassination and subversion by Israel and western intelligence agencies, as it has repeatedly come under military attack, as it has had a large chunk of its territories occupied and as its enemies are forever looking for opportunities to bring it down, it can hardly be said that the mukhabarat is not needed.

2. There is no doubt that the bulk of people demonstrating in Syria want peaceful transition to a democratic form of government. Neither is there any doubt that armed groups operating from behind the screen of the demonstrations have no interest in reform. They want to destroy the government.

The High Court in London will soon to decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as "crazy". Sweden's chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both the women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain.

However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a "grave danger" to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the "torturous" dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April, President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive "He broke the law".

This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on Assange's extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country -- has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix", a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted blacks by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.

Here is what the Democratic President has created and implemented, and what many party loyalists explicitly endorse (when there's a Democrat in the White House) - from Reuters:

© Reuters

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions . . . . There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council . . . . Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate. . . . The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process. . . .

Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing. The process involves "going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president" . . . .Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described. They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC "principals," meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval . . . But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals' decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

"Greetings:

If you are reading this, the President of the United States has declared you to be a terrorist or enemy combatant. As a result, you will be detained without charge or trial, tortured, and/or extrajudicially executed. You are not entitled to any legal due process, you have no civil rights, and there is absolutely no need for the United States government to prove any of the allegations it has made against you, even if you are a citizen of the United States.

Sincerely, Barack Obama"

Throughout much of its history, America had a Bill of Rights that protected the fundamental freedoms of its citizens, as well as a "check-and-balance" system that ensured no government institution, branch or individual would ever obtain unbridled power.

But all that ended with the recent extrajudicial execution of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. And while most politicians and pundits are opportunistically applauding al-Awlaki's death, a few perceptive Americans are growing increasingly concerned about the unprecedented powers the executive branch of government is assuming.

President Obama's betrayal of the environmental protection movement could cause him to lose his activist base and ruin his bid for re-election next year. That's the editorial opinion of The Nation magazine in its October 3rd issue and there's a lot to it.

"Obama has 13 months to persuade voters that they should blame not him but the GOP for his presidency's shortcomings. He has much less time to convince the thousands of activists nationwide---who do the grunt work of getting out the vote---that he's worth their sweat and sacrifices one more time," the editorial said.

While noting that Obama "has done some good things on the environment," including the fuel efficiency standards he pushed through this year, "he has done bad things as well, including opening vast tracts of the West to coal mining and providing much more funding to nuclear and fossil fuel than to green alternatives," The Nation said.

One of those "bad things," the liberal magazine charged, was his decision September 2nd "ordering the EPA to delay new regulations on ozone emissions because the rules pose undue 'burdens' on corporate polluters." Environmental activists want Obama to live up to the pledge he made when running for office that during his watch the global warming trend would slow.