poetry

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I hope yer out there banging pots and pans right this very now.

Reading the cables, it is clear that their release did not cause the fall of the President—he was laying the groundwork for that himself—though it may have affected the timing. It also, perhaps, clarified the moment for the Tunisians; will it also do so for us?

It would be useful, for example, to know more about the grand jury in Virginia that is apparently pursuing criminal charges against WikiLeaks. Good for Twitter for telling a number of people that the government wanted to know their account information, prompting what is now one of my favorite Tweets of all time, from Birgitta Jónsdóttir: “do they realize i am a member of parliament in iceland?” It’s good to realize, and remember, that people, in Iceland and Tunisia and elsewhere, might actually care quite a bit how we conduct ourselves, what we ignore or try to wriggle around or condone.

Everything might actually depend on it.
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love, 99
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i've asked him to replace paypal, or add another option

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I am darn happy that Joseph P. Farrell is at last ramping up for a solid online presence. I gobble up everything I can find from him and now there will be an easier way to go about it, and more of it. But I don't know anyone willing to use PayPal to support him in this, and he NEEDS the support, so I've officially begun my one woman campaign to get some decent way to accomplish this. I know it seems daft because, whatever he will be charging for subscription membership will probably be more than I can pay, but I can dream... or I can diet....

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love, 99
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world's worst public speaker

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Much as one has to love Chris Hedges, his sanctimony and self-congratulation drive me up all my walls at the same time. I know, however, that many, many people heavily approve of what he he says, so I brung it t'ya, k?

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Okay. I made it fifteen minutes before I had to snap it off. A buddha needs to shoot a silver bullet into his third eye or something. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. He's such an insufferable prig about stuff that should be evident to everyone, and MIGHT be evident to more people if he could get OFF his towering pulpit and the pukitude of his self-regard.

He's not trying to HELP anything! He thinks he is! He's too busy sliming us with pomposity and ego problems instead.

WHAT A FUCKING WASTE!

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Meanwhile, for comparison's sake, edit KO's partisan blather from this short clip and just hear Jeremy Scahill. Did not Jeremy Scahill make you feel and think more in those couple of minutes than Hedges did in his whole long monologue with the gods?

Yes. Yes, he did. No sanctimony. No self-regard. All fact-filled fire.

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love, 99
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celente on wwiii

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Just always make it a point to listen to straight talkers. Even when they are wrong, they are much more reliable than the dizzying array of spinners.

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WILL they let me adopt jeremy scahill?

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I am dying of love for him. Scott Horton, sans headbanger music and interruptions, interviews this BEAUTIFUL kid, and I just love them. Let's get them together with Glen Ford. Let's build a powerful counter-force to these stone cold killers running our world. Let's, let's, let's!

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if we manage not to slime iceland with gulf oil

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Among the issues under discussion was debt relief options for householders and the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, the press freedom bill championed by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The bill was passed.

Iceland might become the very last outpost where true humans might honestly dig in for the long haul... volcanoes and all....

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Beloved Agent BB2 adds more depth... as usual.

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power to the people

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Literally. Literally.
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bit of a dust-up in the ukraine parliament

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Seems the pro-fascists are angry at the anti-fascists in power. Never mind that the pro-fascists who took power in one of our covert ops color revolutions brought Ukraine to its knees, and were soundly trounced by the anti-fascists in the recent elections, they're not done fighting, not above turning parliament into a circus for the world media.
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I'm thinking I'm just about to write something to turn into its own page for this blog, and am not much moved by the news today, so I don't know how many posts I will be doing until probably much later tonight... not sure... but I want to reiterate that the slide show presentation linked directly below was FASCINATING. I really enjoyed it. It's 45 minutes long and worth your time to see some really cool stuff.

I was mad that I didn't get some kind of summation of the research to date on Atlantis, but I guess I'll have to keep looking for something not too obviously wuwu for that.

Anyway, maybe something semi-new will be issuing forth here pretty soon.
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sing it, naomi!

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What a marvelous thing to wake up to! If you don't want to register at OpEd News, you can just hit the iTunes button and listen to it on iTunes.

AND, OF COURSE, YOU REALLY SHOULD, BECAUSE IT'S NAOMI, AND SHE'S RIGHT!

Of course, as usual.

It's a little irritating because they keep making her stop to explain terms like "oligarchy" and "open vs. closed society" but... if that's what it takes... fine!

GO NAOMI!

Back before Jeans West/GAP bought the Banana Republic, which was this WONDERFUL little boutique in Mill Valley that sold outrageously chic military surplus clothes, their bags had this wonderful doodle all over them, with a big peace sign and a bunch of other stuff, and the logo read: DON'T BE STUPID — CHOOSE LOVE. I saved their bags and tacked them up on my walls.

Naomi must have shopped there too....
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the reasonableness behind the census hysteria

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Trying hard to look at where conservatives are right about things, I have spent a lot of time trying to read Libertarian stuff... mostly Ron Paul's. What a strange man! I read about his plans for a freedom president and had to balk at a great deal in there... while still recognizing the wisdom in some of the ideas. It seems to me that a Kucinich/Paul co-presidency would be something a lot closer to ideal than we've ever had.

Where Paul is a fairydust righty, Kucinich could bring him back awake, and where Kucinich is a fairydust lefty, Paul could return the favor. We might really end up with something transcendental.

I have heard some people bitch that Ron Paul is a racist, and I'm not sure that's right, but I can see where he is completely ignoring the best interests of the greater black population. Actually, just the greater poor population. For instance, his thing about education is just stupid. Where he has a point the size of Asia about how poorly the federal government is handling it, his proposals are guarantees of one horrific divide in educational opportunities, worse even than what we have now.

One minute I want to kiss him and the next I want to grab his ear and twist it so hard he can't use it anymore, screaming, "WHAT! ARE YOU TEN YEARS OLD? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? WHAT! WHAT! WHAT?" Jesus. He goes from the very picture of lucidity and practicality to outright braindead psychotic, sometimes in the space of one sentence.

I don't understand his competing currencies crap at all. Whut? You die in the dirt if you picked the wrong one? WTF? I can so hang with firing the Fed, abolishing it utterly forever, and at whatever cost to MAKE it stay gone forever, but competing currencies? Huh? This is not helped at all by my conviction that any currency is just filthy greed and insecurity hiding behind the facade of consensual reality. We change our minds about it, and, poof, no longer necessary at all. This whole bit about people rising or falling on their wits and industry and blind luck is just fucking Witch's Brew with wormy ice cubes... and too much booze. Jesus.

So, but, I'm trying my hardest to set all this aside to find the little gateways where everybody can begin to stop gouging each other's eyes out, okay? I have genuine enthusiasm for their/our good points and genuine intolerance for our/their bad ones, and, well, so should we all, but at least I might be able to bring up some feasible starting points. We need to make common cause with those who are willing to fight with us, whatever their views might be.

So. The Census people are trying to sound reasonable, relying on the tradition of interfering with our privacy for way more than the Constitution provides, and what Paul says about the abuses of it are perfectly truthful, real problems to consider when you know you cannot trust your government any farther than you can throw it. SO much of what liberals want is COMPLETELY dependent on good faith actors ALWAYS being in charge... and that is fairydust... to put it nicely. Just about every one of them I know forgets that part utterly no matter how many times you remind them. It's time to wake up to that. Keep it front and center.

So all the people the left has put hits on for bringing this up are not, on this point at least, wrong or bad or liars for making a big deal out of it. Period.
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as though horton and giraldi set out to bolster all my arguments

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Right after I got done with my last post, I proceeded to listen to this interview. These are guys from the conservative end of our bipolar spectrum. Tell me what they are saying that is so offensive to you. Tell me these two aren't completely on our side.
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the final installment of a very important report

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DeGraw has done an excellent job with this. The links to all six parts head up the piece, in case you have missed any of them. He's also publishing this in book form and I hope he shoots to the top of the bestseller list. 99% of us need immediately to dismantle the hegemony of the 1%. We are already horrifically late.

Don't make us any later.
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they don't want you to think too much

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Ron Paul’s Victory: How Sweet It Is!
Paul victory causes panic on neocon Right, Obama-ite Left

by Justin Raimondo, 24 February 2010

Ron Paul is to neocons what a silver bullet is to vampires, and, for me at least, a great deal of the joy accompanying Ron Paul’s CPAC victory has been anticipating the squeals of outrage, shock, and real pain coming from those circles. This may be my sadistic streak coming out, albeit not for the first time, but after years of hearing Paul and his supporters dismissed as “fringe” irrelevant sectarians with no real political prospects, you’ll forgive me if I indulge myself in a little gratuitous cruelty.

Fox News simply repeated the word “unscientific” whenever it mentioned the CPAC poll results, as its “news” reporters wondered aloud if indeed Paul’s runaway victory had any meaning at all. Most of the attendees were young activists, Fox anchors endlessly reminded their viewers – and oh those wacky kids! Fox also amplified the boos that greeted the announcement of Paul’s victory, but the reality is that the hall was at that moment filled with those who had come to hear Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich, two speakers that were boycotted by the libertarians present on account of their odious views and smears directed at the Good Doctor. Is Fox News seriously asking us to believe the conference-goers were booing themselves?

The reliably neocon blog Powerline harrumphed that the Paul victory “is dismaying, to the extent one takes it seriously. Ron Paul is the crazy uncle in the Republican Party’s attic. He is not a principled libertarian like, say, Steve Forbes. Rather, as I noted in this post, where I likened him to Pee-Wee Herman, Paul has a rather sinister history as a hater and conspiracy theorist.”

Paul, the genial 75-year old physician from rural Texas, who radiates a palpable benevolence – “sinister”? Aside from the melodramatics, however, what this means is that, according to Powerline, a significant portion of the conservative movement has been taken over by a “sinister” conspiracy of – conspiracy theorists! Oh, and Paul’s not really a libertarian – only plumb-line supporters of perpetual war, torture, and the suspension of the Constitution in the name of the “war on terrorism,” such as the editors of Powerlust, are “real” libertarians. Uh huh. Sure they are. War, torture, and tyranny – sounds “libertarian” to me!

Oddly, the supposedly “conservative” Powerline echoes the leftist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who angrily notes in the Huffington Post the less than reverent Paulian approach to Abraham Lincoln, and reiterates the same grab-bag of lies and innuendo unleashed by Jamie Kirchick at The New Republic and dutifully echoed and amplified by Reason magazine and its former employee David Weigel – who has now graduated up to the “right-wing extremist” beat at MSNBC. I debunked this nonsense here, here, here, here, and here – or, as Hutchinson would put it, I “reveled in it.”

Hutchinson’s screed is remarkable for its tone of hysteria – Paul’s followers are invariably “fanatical,” having fallen victim to “Paul mania,” and they are also “scary.” Although this fusillade comes from someone on the ostensible “left,” it is indistinguishable from the jeremiads that poured forth from the likes of David Frum and the neoconservatives during the GOP presidential primaries: Hutchinson accuses Paul of being a racist, claiming that his CPAC speech was “sprinkled here and there with racial baits.” Really? I challenge Hutchinson, or anyone else, to listen to Paul’s speech, go through it line by line, and come up with a single half-credible “racial bait.” Where oh where are these “baits?” On this point Hutchinson is mum: he doesn’t think he needs to be more specific, because, you see, he’s the expert on racism, and we’ll just have to take his word for it.

Hutchinson is riled by Paul’s insistence that the Civil War could and should have been avoided, if at all possible. As to whether it could have been avoided, I’ll leave that to the historians and specialists to argue out. After all, it’s a risky business to engage in could-have-beens, and so it’s best to leave that to the authors of alternate histories. That it should have been avoided, if at all humanly possible, would hardly seem to be a controversial position: it was certainly the bloodiest war in our history, one that tore the nation asunder long after the issue had been “settled” by force of arms. Why is it a hate crime to suggest that it would have been better if hundreds of thousands of Americans hadn’t been slaughtered, maimed, and impoverished by a vicious conflict must remain a mystery of the Hutchinsonian mind, one best kept under lock and key.

All of these anti-Paul polemics seem to blend into a single panic-stricken shriek. Ex-Reason employee Weigel chimes in with his view – really a hope – that conservatives are essentially hostile to the antiwar Paulian message, and, what’s more:

”Conservatives don’t want their image to the American people to be septuagenarian politicians who bang on about the need to close down American bases and speak at meetings of the John Birch Society. … It was accidentally very revealing of how far right the party’s gotten.”

The first time as tragedy, the second as farce – the old Marxian aphorism comes unbidden as I contemplate the reappearance of the Birch Scare. You’ve heard of the Red Scare, of course, as a time of evil, when honest pinkos were tarred as Commies and a monster called Tail-Gunner Joe roamed the land. I’ll bet you haven’t heard of the Birch Scare, however, a weirdly parallel phenomenon that occurred during the early 1960s, when the John Birch Society first came to public attention.

The Birch Society was founded by Robert Welch, a candy maker, a rather mild-mannered and courtly man who for a while was excoriated by the liberal media as a veritable devil. After first being denounced by the neoconservatives of his day in an anthology titled The Radical Right, Welch and the Society found themselves inundated by a series of hysterical journalistic attacks that portrayed them as demonic hate-mongers secretly plotting to overthrow the government. Breathless exposés appeared almost daily in the mainstream media, warning against the dire Birch menace: they were organized into secret “cells,” and they were spreading their message of “hate” and “division” – well, you know the drill.

In reality, Welch was a rather idiosyncratic example of an Old Rightist, that breed of conservative that died out with the death of Robert A. Taft and Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. Sure, he had some, ah … exotic views, but in essence he was just a good old fashioned anti-Communist whose suspicion of what he called “internationalism” eventually led him to oppose US military adventurism overseas. In a mid-1960s edition of the Birch Society’s internal bulletin, he denounced the Vietnam war and proposed that the Society initiate a campaign to extend their slogan of “Get US Out” – which had previously applied to the United Nations – to mean get us out of the war.

That’s why it was funny to watch MSNBC’s “news” anchors rail on and on about how the Birchers – who had been allowed to co-sponsor CPAC – had re-”infiltrated” the conservative movement, and isn’t it horrible, blah blah blah. They then had the nerve to trot out Buckley’s ghost, wondering why WFB’s famous “excommunication” of the Birchers had been rescinded. If only those commie-hippie-liberals realized that one of the principal reasons given by Buckley for the anti-Bircher interdict was Welch’s opposition to the Vietnam war. The Birchers were tolerated as long as they confined themselves to rehashed McCarthyism – after all, Buckley had written a book defending the red-baiting Senator, although somewhat half-heartedly. And of course McCarthy’s downfall occurred when he started targeting alleged Communist infiltration of the US military – an investigative thread that Welch simply took up and elaborated on.

Although the Society has been smeared as racist, as well as anti-Semitic, and called every name in the book, the truth is quite the opposite: Welch was an intransigent opponent of racism, and he regarded anti-Semites as sinister “neutralizers” who were objectively aligned with the Society’s enemies. (The raving lunatic Revilo P. Oliver, a professor of classics and a fanatical anti-Semite, was unceremoniously kicked off the JBS Council by Welch, and racists regularly received the same treatment.)

The Birchers’ real sin, in Buckley’s eyes, was to oppose the Warfare State as much as they opposed the Welfare State. They were the first to alert conservatives to the dangers of George Herbert Walker Bush’s “New World Order.” And when Bush II moved to implement and complete his father’s hegemonist dream at gunpoint in Iraq, the Society strongly opposed the war – unlike various and sundry “liberals.”

When liberals who know or care nothing about the history of the conservative movement trot out Buckley, you know they’re up to no good. They claim they want to “understand” what’s going on with the tea-party movement, and the identity crisis on the Right, but their “analysis” is just a lot of ideological ax-grinding. There’s no real attempt to come to grips with the issues raised by the Ron Paul movement, and the much wider wave of discontent that is now rolling across the country.

The anti-interventionist, anti-government trend in the GOP, represented by the Paulian triumph at CPAC, is really just a delayed reaction to the end of the cold war and the promise of a return to normalcy. You’ll recall, back then, when the Berlin Wall fell, conservatives came around to a non-interventionist outlook. Bill Clinton’s promiscuous meddling in affairs that should have been none of our business accelerated a trend that would have developed naturally anyway. What happened to interrupt this growing “isolationism” was 9/11.

Yet as signal an event as that was, as hard as it hit the American psyche and changed our politics, the objective circumstances that gave rise to anti-interventionism on the right are still present and on the increase. To begin with, there is no worldwide ideological challenge to liberal democracy, no competing universalist ideology like Communism seeking to claim the allegiance of the world’s peoples. The sectarian”appeal” of al-Qaeda and allied terrorist organizations is very narrow, strictly limited to the Muslim world: in any case, the threat posed by bin Laden is hardly equal to that posed by the old Communist International.

This fact and the economic facts of reality – that we cannot continue to fund an overseas empire without going bankrupt – conspire against any “conservative” who wants to limit government and mobilize massive armies to occupy vast portions of Central Asia.

In the midst of an economic crisis such as has not been seen since the 1930s, the War Party is at a loss as to how to drum up enthusiasm for yet another bout of Mideast adventurism. That they’ve even lost their most reliable allies in the conservative movement, which is now rallying behind the anti-interventionist champion Ron Paul, shows just how remarkably weak they have become. The Rabinowitz-Frum wing of the Republican party is small, and getting smaller by the minute: how many battalions does Powerline command, anyway?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, as a supporter of the present admnistration – which is waging an immoral and unsustainable war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan – has every reason to find Ron Paul and his supporters “scary.”So do the neocons, the vultures of the American politics, who hover over every battlefield cheering on the slaughter. I revel in their fear: it gladdens my heart and sustains me. Because it means, not that we’re winning, necessarily, but that we can win. And in a battle of this kind, so hard and unforgiving, that makes all the difference.

Having read a riveting biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which was detailed about Lincoln's bungling as Commander in Chief, I can't bring myself to be much more than "less than reverent" about him myself. Millions died needlessly because of the years he wasted putting pencil pushers in charge. If he had not finally decided on Grant there might not have been enough Americans left to defend our ill-gotten gains from the decimated natives—the natives decimated solely on account of the widely-held belief in the righteousness of profit.

Of course, nowadays, I'm wondering if we shouldn't be reviling Lincoln for "saving the union"....

I liked this Raimondo piece especially because it shows how long plutocrats have been able to lead the American public by the nose with horrifically-consequential distortions and outight lies. It wasn't just the McCarthy shit, not by a long shot. They try to marginalize real opposition first. Then they vilify it. Then they assassinate it. Sometimes they have to skip the preliminaries and go straight to assassination, but they do it unerringly, and they're doing it to the Tea Partiers now.
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there is in fact quite a lot to work with here

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The Tea Party Movement is NOT the "Tea Party Express" crap professional progressives were, and probably still are, calling "teabaggers"—and I wouldn't know just now because I won't voluntarily visit any of their sites and I don't watch tv—if I'm accidentally landed in the vicinity of these their shit bounces off so fast I don't note it. If you're still doing it, you need to assess the damages unrelenting propaganda has done to your synapses. So. It's NOT what those jackasses—anti or pro—are only calling it. This is serious stuff from our fellow Americans... heavily to the libertarian and old style conservative, but also consisting of Ron Paul liberals and 9/11 Truthers, and people who have never had ANY political identity for their entire lives. So I'm going to say it again: liberals in the MSM and on the tubes are PURPOSEFULLY misrepresenting this stuff—AS egregiously as Limbaugh or Beck—because that's what's good for the fascist wing of the Democratic Party. They are desperate to get a Sarah Palin or some other crank to run against in 2012 because that is their ONLY hope of keeping the White House and any part of the legislature.

THEY'RE TRYING TO KEEP YOU COMPLETELY CONSUMED BY THE CULTURE WARS WHEN IT IS IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF 99% OF AMERICA, THE WORLD, TO UNITE AGAINST THE 1% WHO ARE LOOTING OUR TREASURE AND DRIVING US OUT OF OUR HOMES AND STARVING US AND ENSLAVING US AND TORTURING US AND BOMBING US TO KINGDOM COME WHENEVER IT SUITS THEM.

These shill bloggers and MSNBC talking heads are NOT good people. Some of them might be hypnotized good people, but they are ADULTS and it is their responsibility to wake up to their error and perform. How many of these glib name-callers have you heard wondering aloud how destitute blue collars can vote Republican? How can intelligent liberals vote for FASCISTS? Get the clue! These people are NOT more duped than you! They're your countrymen, whether you agree with them or not. They are your natural allies in the fight against fascism.

Wake, the fuck, up!
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ron paul quakes cpac, walks off with the straw poll victory

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Not hyperbole. Not hyperbole. WHEN are the jackasses going to quit falling for the fascist crap about the Tea Parties being peopled solely by racist crackers who are puppets of the RNC? WHEN are "progressives" going to grow a pair and join them? We could end the wars and THEN fight over entitlements.
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just shoot me

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Jane for President. Katrina for Latrina Cleana.
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let's make ourselves useful

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liberté, égalité, fraternité

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Somebody tell the president....

I mean, ordinarily, I'd assume this stuff to be so ridiculously obvious it wouldn't even be linkworthy on a lark, but, well, it's become clear that what I find dirt obvious is beyond the grasp, or beneath the notice, of many. So. Yes. Somebody tell the Nobel President.

an ACORN Act we can believe in

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ohhhh! YIIIIIPES! this ROOOOCKS!

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Oh. My. God. I have been hoping my head off for this! Yippeeeeee!

Sarkozy questions US missile shield plan
By ANGELA CHARLTON – 2 hours ago

NICE, France (AP) — France's U.S.-friendly president sent a clear message Friday to the next American administration: Plans for a U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe are misguided, and won't make the continent a safer place.

Nicolas Sarkozy also warned Russian President Dmitry Medvedev against upping tensions by deploying missiles on the borders of the European Union in response to the U.S. planned missile defense system.

Sarkozy's comments, at a summit with Medvedev, were the strongest to date by an American ally against the missile-defense plans — and undercut the rationale behind U.S. President George W. Bush's European security strategy.

The plans for using sites in Poland and the Czech Republic have infuriated Russia despite the Bush administration's insistence that they are aimed at protecting Europe from Iran.

"Deployment of a missile defense system would bring nothing to security ... it would complicate things, and would make them move backward," Sarkozy said at a news conference with Medvedev. Medvedev smiled and pointed his finger at Sarkozy in approval.

The remarks came at the end of a week in which the United States and Russia rejected each other's proposed solutions to the standoff over the missile plans, making it increasingly likely that it will not be resolved before U.S. President-elect Barack Obama takes office.

Obama has not been explicit about his intentions on European missile defense, saying it would be prudent to "explore the possibility" but expressing some skepticism about the technical capability of U.S. missile defenses.

Moscow sees the defense plans as a Cold War-style project that could eliminate Russia's nuclear deterrent or spy on its military installations. Much of Western Europe is nervous about the idea of such major defensive weaponry stationed around the continent.

But Poland and the Czech Republic, where bad memories of Soviet domination run deep, hope Obama follows through on the plans.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra said in a statement he "was surprised" about Sarkozy's remarks, made at an EU-Russia summit.

"France never consulted with us such a standpoint," he said. "As far as I know a stance on the missile defense was not part of the French presidency mandate for the EU-Russia summit." France currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

Sarkozy said he was worried about Russia's threat to deploy short-range Iskander missiles near Poland in response to the U.S. move.

"We could continue between Europe and Russia to threaten each other with shields, with missiles, with navies," he said. "It would do Russia no good, Georgia no good and Europe no good."

Sarkozy said he would discuss the missile issue with NATO counterparts at a summit early next year and proposed a pan-European security conference after that, to include Russia. Medvedev welcomed the idea.

Sarkozy has generally been hawkish on Iran and allied himself more closely with Bush than his predecessor Jacques Chirac. But Sarkozy is also clearly looking ahead to his relations with Bush's successor.

Medvedev stuck to Russia's stance. He suggested that the Russian threat to install missiles in the Baltic Sea region of Kaliningrad — announced just hours after Obama's election — was "a response to the behavior of certain European states that agreed to deploy new (missile defenses) on their own territories without consulting anyone."

Friday's summit made a key step toward rapprochement between Russia and the European Union: The EU announced the resumption of partnership talks with Russia that had been put on hold because of the war in Georgia.

Critics, including the United States and Georgian governments and [fascist] human rights groups, say it is too soon to forgive Russia, in effect, when Russian troops remain implanted and unchecked in the two breakaway Georgian provinces at the core of the war.

Sarkozy, temporarily in charge of the 27-nation EU, insisted that the resumption wasn't "a sign of weakness."

He and Medvedev remained divided, though, over the continuing presence of Russian troops.

The European Union is Russia's No. 1 customer and No. 1 investor, and heavily dependent on Russian energy. With the world financial crisis shaking markets in Europe and beyond, officials of the 27-nation EU say reaching out to Moscow is crucial to ensuring stability and to keeping Russia from shutting off its economy to outsiders.

Medvedev pointed on Friday to the lucrative trade between the EU and Russia, worth hundreds of billions of euros annually.

"We should think of this when we make decisions on all cooperation," he said.

The EU-Russia talks, launched in 2007, aim for an agreement that would increase economic integration, tighten relations on justice and security and boost cooperation in education and science. U.S. diplomats warned European officials that the resumed talks could undermine Western attempts to rein in the Kremlin's aggressive foreign policy.

Sarkozy and Medvedev left France for Washington, where they will join Bush and other world leaders seeking a new financial architecture.

Associated Press writers Desmond Butler in Washington, Mike Eckel in Moscow and Karel Janicek in Prague contributed to this report.