However, according to Le Monde diplomatique, cobalt, uranium and other minerals that require more capital-intensive, large-scale mining operations, are now becoming more profitable than coltan — giving the West an incentive to impose some sort of order. This may explain why the bloodshed in the DRC has finally become a major news story in the West, accompanied by calls for a “humanitarian” intervention. However, what African-American revolutionary Malcolm X said in 1964 remains true today: “The basic cause of most of the trouble in the Congo right now is the intervention of outsiders — the fighting that is going on over the mineral wealth of the Congo and over the strategic position that the Congo represents on the African continent. “And in order to justify it, they are … trying to make it appear that the people are savages.”

Within this deadly context, George W. Bush proposed the Mérida Initiative, dubbed "Plan Mexico" due to its striking similarity to Plan Colombia. Plan Mexico is a US aid package that will provide equipment, training, and resources to the Mexican police, army, and government to support Calderón's doomed war on drugs and organized crime. While it was originally valued at $1.4 billion over a period of three years, Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Barack Obama have both stated that Bush's proposal falls short and that much more money over many more years will be necessary to fulfill Plan Mexico's mandate.

What follow is a very brief outline (and totally unoriginal—see bibliography) presentation of the four main radical and Marxist theories of crisis: under-consumptionism, profit-squeeze, over-competition, and falling rate of profit as a result of increasing mechanization/capitalization of capital. After presenting each theory, I will attempt to evaluate them in terms of their political implications, logical structure, and factual/empirical validity.

To save Loe Sam, the army has destroyed it. The shops and homes of the 7,000 people who lived here are a heap of gray rubble, blown to bits by the army. Scraps of bedding and broken electric fans lie strewn in the dirt. As Pakistani Army helicopters and artillery fired at militants’ strongholds in the region, about 200,000 people fled to tent camps for the displaced in Pakistan, to relatives’ homes or across the border into Afghanistan.
(...) Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Afghans form the hard core of its opponents, enlisting young, unemployed local men who join the militants for money and the prestige of sitting armed with a rifle in a double-cabin pickup, the favored Taliban vehicle, General Khan said.
(...) “If the government doesn’t rebuild, we will be thieves, suicide bombers,” he said. “We will be forced to do these things.”
(...) The army says 1,500. But two officers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were contradicting their superiors, said that the number appeared excessive. One army captain involved in the fighting said 300 seemed closer.
(...) In his wood-paneled office, Col. Nauman Saeed, the officer in charge of day-to-day operations at the headquarters in Khar, said he was mired in a classic guerrilla conflict. In September, he said, Taliban leaders in Bajaur had replenished their forces with 950 more men from Afghanistan. “You keep killing them,” Colonel Saeed said, “but you still have them around.”

The journalists travelled to the region separately and by different routes. They spoke to different people. But their findings are consistent: Georgia launched an indiscriminate military assault on South Ossetia's main town, Tskhinvali. The hospital was among the buildings attacked; doctors were injured even as they operated. The timing of the Georgian attack, as of the arrival of the first Russian reinforcements two days later, coincides for the most part with the original Russian version. It was only then that the Russians crossed into Georgia proper in the invasion of sovereign territory that has been universally decried. For the record, it should be added that Russia has now withdrawn from uncontested Georgian territory, in accordance with the agreement mediated by President Sarkozy.

"They are between the devil and the deep sea," said Akhunzada Chitran, a tribal representative from the Bajaur area. "On the one side, there is the Taliban, but on the other side, they are being forced by the government to fight the Taliban or flee or the government will bomb them. It's a very difficult choice to make, but we have made up our minds to take on the Taliban."

"I agree with the farmers, they need more support. The government needs to at least limit these kind of imports ... in order to make them (farmers) competitive in the international market," said Aqa. "It's not a good time to introduce a free market in Afghanistan at the moment."