The stakes couldn't be higher for Ben Bernanke. If the Fed chief decides to lower rates at the end of April, he could be condemning millions of people to a death by starvation. The situation is that serious. Food riots have broken out across the globe destabilizing large parts of the developing world. China is experiencing double-digit inflation. Indonesia, Vietnam and India have imposed controls over rice exports. Wheat, corn and soya are at record highs and threatening to go higher still. Commodities are up across the board. The World Food Program is warning of widespread famine if the West doesn't provide emergency humanitarian relief. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said it best:

"It is a massacre of the world's poor. The problem is not the production of food. It is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis."

Consider what the Clinton camp and the media have put Obama through because of Farrakhan's unsolicited endorsement.

Did Clinton demand that Rendell "denounce" or "reject" his association with Farrakhan? Did she condition her cooperation with the governor on his distancing himself from the Nation of Islam?

Can a mule whistle?

No candidate for president from either party since Herbert Hoover in 1932 has faced a bleaker situation than John McCain, so why is this man considered an even bet to win?

Hoover and his Republican forebears, Calvin Coolidge and Warren G. Harding, had only led the economy over a cliff. George W. Bush and the party to which McCain pledges his fealty have done that in far more identifiable ways than Hoover did, and they also misled the country in one war and into a second ruinous one, corrupted the nation's oldest ideals, savaged its reputation and its storied honor around the world and destroyed the last shred of public confidence in the essential goodness of democratic government.

Except for torture, McCain supports all the policies that put the country in those straits, and he does so at least as cheerily as Bush does. Yet he stands pretty close to even with either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton in the polls.

Nader says that in the past 15 years, under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, giant corporations have consolidated their control of US government and the nation’s public resources. “Not one department or agency has escaped overwhelming corporate control, inside and outside the agencies,” he said, noting that the bureaucracies and leadership of federal departments are increasingly manned by executives from the industries that the departments are supposed to regulate, whily lobbyists’ money subverts Congressional oversight. “It’s the corporate state in its most maturing level. It’s on a collision course with American democracy, and democracy is losing. Losing, losing, losing.”

Nader regards a Hillary Clinton or a John McCain presidency as insurace that the corporate takeover of the public sphere will continue unabated. Asked how he feels about Barack Obama, whom many progressives have adopted as their candidate, Nader said, “The same…His record as a senator was quite mediocre and quite concessionary to corporate demands. He’s no Wellstone. He’s not a challenging senator. That’s how I judge these people. He’s got a different style, it happens to be a hip style. He excites young people. He’s got a good, well-honed speech down that’s short on specifics, but the most exciting speeches are short on specifics. I don’t see him making much of a change; he’s not willing to confront power and take it on.”

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a “limited” nuclear attack on the main Iranian underground site in Esfahan would result in three million people killed by radiation within two weeks and 35 million people exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

Yet another preemptive attack and the devastation of another civilian population would be grossly immoral and in violation of all international codes of conduct. No one can predict how such an attack would end, especially in the tinderbox that is the Middle East. Every patriotic American, and especially every member of Congress, should do whatever is in their power to stop the Bush-Cheney cabal before they drag us into World War III.