While Private Defense Contractors Should Make Out Like Bandits in Both Russia and Georgia

The party's over for investors in non-defense foreign industry:

Russia's invasion of neighboring Georgia has resurrected concerns about the geopolitical risks inherent in emerging markets.

But if the morally sawed-off Republicans yell loud enough about their selective grasp of injustices in Eastern Europe we won't notice the market forces driving the latest war and funding their candidates for office.

Do these guys have any short term memory when it comes to overthrowing a government, occupying a capital, knocking over their statues, stacking their prisoners, referring to the horrific level of civilian casualties as the "birth pangs of democracy"?

Socialized Rescues of Corporations

Socialism is alive and well in America, but not at the bottom of the market, where conservatives claim it is. Government bailouts of corporations amount to socialism for the very rich, and the same social Darwinism used as a weapon against the lower and middle classes is not brandished on the wealthy.

In the case of Bear-Stearns: insurance companies appear to be the "welfare queens" (absent food stamps) in the Federal Reserve's hands-on salvation of Bear-Sterns. Does anybody blame those queens? Not without risk of being ironically labeled as socialists who oppose "free" markets. But we know for whom American socialism truly works.