This season's entertainment blockbuster, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, is the whole shooting match: Your chance to shoot Russians (or, if you prefer, innocent civilians), investors' opportunity to score off game maker Activision, and jingoists answering a call to glory on Veterans' Day.

Already hailed as the biggest videogame launch ever (even worldwide), MW2 is shipping out up to 8 million units this week, probably a record. The Street already gave its approval last Friday: Activision's stock rose in anticipation of the game's release. (See GamePro's review here.)

As I pointed out in June, marketers vowed the biggest entertainment-industry launch ever for the game. Call of Duty veterans may be pissed off that MW2 tries too hard to lure first-timers, but that's the war business for you.

Forget film offerings like the next Twilight or James Cameron's Avatar, Reuters says. This is your week to celebrate war. As one analyst says, "This is the one game that could buck the economic trend for the holiday season."

Everyday horror: A woman and her child flee from a burning compound during one of the Congo's typical election campaigns.

The soaring price of gold and the plummeting price of human life are converging this week. Is that good or bad news?

Gold prices surged to an all-time high today, spurred by the International Monetary Fund's sale of 200 tons of the stuff to India's central bank.

That's got to be great news for the Democratic Republic of Congo, which sits atop the world's most concentrated collection of untapped gold and other precious metals. Latest news on the Street shows that mining company Randgold advanced 6 percent after saying it's boosting its stake in the DRC's lucrative Moto gold deposit.

At this point, however, even more blood than anything else flows in the DRC, still the scene of the world's deadliest conflict since World War II.

Just yesterday, Human Rights Watch accused the UN peacekeeping force MONUC of actually supporting the Congo military's current campaign of murder and rape. The UN force is partners with the Congo army in Operation Kimia II.

The Congo is the rape capital of the world — sexual violence is a recognized tool of war — so the "rape of the Congo" is more than just a metaphor for the constant plundering of the country's natural resources.

Sad fact: The lust for the Congo's rich resources has never resulted in an easing of tensions over there, but has only intensified the civil war for control. So gold's record-high prices aren't exactly destined to spread peace and sunshine over central Africa.

New Phase of Crisis: Securities Sink Banks (WSJ)

"The U.S. banking crisis is entering a new stage, as lenders succumb to large amounts of toxic loans and securities they bought from other banks."

Souring Prime Loans Compound Mortgage Woes (WSJ)

Frightening foreclosure figures. One in eight households nationwide are in foreclosure or behind on mortgage payments. "Loans extended to borrowers with good credit are deteriorating at a faster clip" than loans to subprime borrowers. Doesn't feel like "recovery." Calculated Risk's detailed breakdown/analysis points out that Alt-A loans are included in the "prime" category, which may make the high numbers a little misleading. More on that (plus this explanation) from Reuters: "That could be skewing things since Alt-A loans by definition are less than prime and extremely loose lending standards during the boom have made them look more like subprime loans. For example, borrowers taking out an Alt-A loan could state their income rather than prove it."

Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall (NYT)

John McAfee's net worth has fallen from $100 million to $4 million. Send him a sympathy card.

Burress Will Receive 2-Year Prison Sentence (NYT)

A New York millionaire, football player Plaxico Burress, who wounded no one but himself and threatened no one, gets two years in jail for his gunplay. Other New York millionaires who didn't need to pack heat to cripple millions of Americans are still on the loose on Wall Street.

Insider Selling Highlights Growing Downside Risk (TradingHelpDesk.com)

"... Company insiders are now selling stock at the highest rate in two years. This action does not guarantee a market decline but it does imply the easy money in the current bullish run has been made and downside risks, whether temporary or cyclical, have increased. ..."

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

Satellite image of a suspected hijacked tanker at anchor off the Somali coast at Garacad, near Eyl, Puntland, September 2008. (UNOSAT photo)

Yo-ho-ho and a barrel of toxic waste.

When the U.S. loses money and loses face, you know that Somalia's pirates are as doomed as their starving and poisoned countrymen.

Add to the situation that the world press is mostly ignoring the other side of the story in chaotic Somalia — the reasons that some Somalis might be desperate enough to become pirates.

And then add the fact that this is the first reported hijacking of a U.S. merchant vessel by pirates since the Barbary Coast pirates roamed the north African seas 200 years ago and made Stephen Decatur and the Battle of Tripoli part of U.S. elementary-school lore.

And now we're sending in the big guns. As allAfrica.com reports this morning:

Most stories about the current piracy imply that most of the hijacked ships were simply going about the business of carrying desperately needed humanitarian supplies to Somalia. But there's another side to the story pointed out by the U.S. African Chamber of Commerce — surely making history as the first U.S. business group to openly endorse piracy of the open-seas, skiffs vs. tankers variety.

This morning, seven Somalis denied charges of piracy lodged against them in a Mombasa court. Why, you ask, are they being tried in Kenya? A Xinhua story explains:

From CBPP'S March 2008 report "Federal Spending, 2001 Through 2008."

The global financial crisis seemed to take us by surprise, and now the fallout and drive toward recovery are daunting, but if we'd been looking in all directions, especially behind us, we might have been able to at least brace for the impact.

The legend on rear-view mirrors is in fact true: "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." Go back a year, when George W. Bush was about to drop a steaming load of his legacy on our heads.

We weren't quite sure that we had a financial crisis — other than the usual one — when the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities unveiled on March 8, 2008, its "Federal Spending, 2001 Through 2008" report.

As if we need a reminder of how Bush and the country's real CEO, Dick Cheney, settled the guns vs. butter debate in their own heads, the report noted that "Bush called for large funding increases for defense and related programs while demanding considerable restraint in domestic appropriations."

We spent eight years under an administration that valued defense firms more than the public. We're paying for that right now.

Delving deeper into the topic, the report — written by people who, unlike most members of Congress, actually pore through and parse the budget figures — added:

You think that's because of 9/11? It's not. Take a look at the graphic atop this item; it's plucked from the report. To repeat what the preceding paragraph and the graphic say: The "regular" Department of Defense budget — not counting Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of the "war on terror" — rose at a higher rate than those of all parts of the domestic budget.

This was the kind of careless spending that helps make this year's budget decisions so tough: Even without the current global financial crisis, our budget was out of whack and worsening.

Making up ground during this crisis is practically impossible, especially with a recalcitrant Congress that seems to want to protect the tax status of the wealthiest 1 percent of the populace.

But at least Barack Obama's administration recently proposed tax aid that might actually reach many of the rest of us. Like the Making Work Pay Credit — awkwardly named but aimed at more than 100 million American taxpayers. Here's a brief rundown of this part of the economic-recovery package. Don't count on its surviving intact, but here it was as of late last month:

As many as 6.8 million New Yorkers would qualify — we're third behind the 12.4 million Californians and 8 million Texans who would get help this way.

George W. Bush himself undoubtedly won't qualify. More importantly, defense firms like Northrop are obviously ineligible because they're not human beings, but they're doing pretty well anyway, despite the planetary crisis.

If you figure that the defense industry is actually doing pretty well while the rest of the economy is tanking, then it stands to reason that defense firms will have plenty of money for lobbying and for campaign contributions to pols.

And they're not going to be pushing for the domestic budget, of course. That probably makes the survival of such budget morsels as the Making Work Pay Credit problematic, especially if you go by past history.

Pimpin' ain't easy these days, even on Wall Street. Straight-up robbery — banks holding up taxpayers for bailout money — is much easier.

But the money's liquid for drugs and guns. The big drug dealers have still got the cash flow to transact big business. In Zurich, Roche has enough money to absorb U.S. biotech giant Genentech. And the Wall Street Journal points out that mergers and acquisitions among drug dealers are proceeding apace and even more energetically these days, despite the global financial crisis:

When it comes to guns and other weapons, yes, those dealers have been hurt by the global recession. But things are looking brighter, as Barron's noted the other day in "Northrop Grumman: Full Speed Ahead!":

This spring's U.S. surge into Afghanistan can only be good for the war industry. And shellshocked soldiers returning to U.S. soil will require drugs — not to mention the medication that many other people will seek while trying to endure the loss of their jobs and houses or the increases in health-care (requiring even more drugs) that Obama is trying to push through.

Even GOP governors like California's Arnold Schwarzenegger are embracing Obama's plans to pump money into health care and the like.

Synergy — that's what you call the continued appetite for drugs and guns. But we're only human.