"WHERE WE DISCUSS THE ISSUES THAT PROFOUNDLY AFFECT YOUR FREEDOM,
YOUR CIVIL LIBERTIES, YOUR FINANCIAL LIBERTIES, YOUR RIGHTS TO HAVE A GOV'T THAT STAYS WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THE CONSTITUTION."
Israel should launch a pre-emptive strike to prevent arch-foe Iran from going nuclear, a former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said on Monday.
“I am of the opinion that, since there is an ongoing war, since the threat is permanent, since the intention of the enemy in this case is to annihilate you, the right doctrine is one of pre-emption and not of retaliation,” Shabtai Shavit told a conference.
Shavit, who served as chief of Israel’s foreign spy agency from 1989 to 1996, was speaking at a conference held at the hawkish Bar Ilan University outside Tel Aviv.
“To use retaliation as the main strategy means to sit idly and wait until the enemy comes to attack you,” a university statement quoted Shavit as saying.
“But we are dealing with an enemy that plans all the time and waits for the opportunity to arise in order to attack, so what is the point, even morally, to wait and do something only when we are attacked,” he said. Full article here
With hundreds dead and tens of thousands of refugees, ethnic violence has brought chaos to Kyrgyzstan. Central Asia policy expert Andrea Schmitz told SPIEGEL ONLINE about the history behind the attacks on the Uzbek minority and the wobbly transitional government. SPIEGEL ONLINE: The news from Kyrgyzstan is deeply disturbing. Officially, 170 people have been killed during the angry unrest over the last week and other sources put the death toll above 700. What is the current situation? Schmitz: Official figures probably understate the number of dead, which is likely to be considerably higher. I do not have the exact numbers. The situation at present is so chaotic no one can reliably count the dead. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Reports say almost all the dead belong to the Uzbek minority. Schmitz: That appears to be correct. However, it’s also said that those behind the unrest have tried to turn Kyrgyz and Uzbeks against each other. But the violence has clearly focused on the Uzbek minority. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Some speculate that the ex-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was toppled in April, is behind the unrest. Do you consider this plausible? Read entire article
Hundreds of Palestinians protest near Ramallah against lethal raid on Gaza aid flotilla. Palestinian Parliament member Mustafa Barghouti says, ‘Israel has made fatal mistake, will have to answer to 40 European, Arab countries’ .
Hundreds of Palestinians on Monday joined a line of protests against the Israeli military operation against the Gaza aid flotilla and called for an end to negotiations with Israel.
The Palestinians protested in Qalandiya, near Ramallah, against the lethal raid, and called out anti-Israel slogans and slogans in support of the activists on the ships. The demonstration was organized by a number of Palestinian groups, but Palestinian Authority officials did not attend. However, a number of Fatah officials and senior sources from other organizations were at the protest, including Palestinian Parliament member, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti. Speaking from the scene of the demonstration, Barghouti told Ynet that Israel has proven on Monday “that it is the most despicable state in the world if it expects anyone to believe its pathetic lies, according to which the peace activists on the flotilla were carrying weapons, as the Israeli spokespeople have claimed.” Full article here
The government of Israel, aided by many quarters of the international media, is attempting to spin today’s deadly IDF assault on a humanitarian aid ship carrying supplies to Gaza as the fault of the murdered activists on board the vessel, ludicrously characterizing machine-gun carrying Israeli troops who killed over a dozen innocent people as the victims of the incident.
“Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a press conference on Monday that while he was sorry for lives lost, the organizers of the Gaza-bound protest flotilla were solely responsible for the outcome of the fatal IDF raid earlier in the day,” reports the Jerusalem Post.
Elsewhere, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his “full backing” to the Israeli military and Israeli Navy commander Vice-Admiral Eliezer Marom commended the “bravery” of the IDF commandoes who slaughtered innocent people who were attempting to take food and supplies to the Gaza Strip, which has been under Israeli blockade for the last three years, a situation humanitarian groups have labeled “collective punishment,” a throwback to how the Nazis brutalized entire cities of people in retaliation to attacks against them by resistance groups. In addition, a video released by Israeli authorities is circulating on You Tube entitled, Demonstrators Use Violence Against Israeli Navy Soldiers Attempting to Board Ship, which ludicrously claims to show activists attacking troops unprovoked, without mentioning the fact that troops aggressively boarded the vessel outside of Israeli territory with the aid of army helicopters and heavily armed IDF soldiers before the activists did anything. In reality, the video shows very little because it is shot from a perspective where the people on board look like ants and almost nothing can be deciphered from this. Comments were disabled on the video to prevent people from making this criticism.
The video “helpfully explain[s] what you’re supposed to see,” writes one Israeli journalist.
“And, of course, the clip only contains the footage the IDF wanted to release; we don’t know what happened before or after this 60 seconds of video,” reports Al Jazeera.
The tone of Israel’s propaganda, that it was peace activists armed with nothing more than sticks and molotov cocktails who were responsible for the violence, and not heavily armed commando fighters backed up by helicopter gunships who in fact slaughtered at least 19 of the peace activists, is being cautiously parroted by some elements of the U.S. media.
One only has to look at the nature of the death toll to understand who was responsible for this brutal attack.
At least 19 people, and this figure is rising by the hour, were killed during the attack, with dozens more injured. Not one of those 19 victims is an IDF soldier, every single one is a Palestinian activist. If the activists on board the ship had planned to attack the soldiers, you might at least expect them to have claimed one fatality – but this wasn’t an attack by activists, it was a brutal assault by armed men with machine guns who violated international law and committed a despicable war crime before calling the monsters who carried it out brave heroes.
The Palestinian territories are controlled by Hamas, a group who legitimately won power in a democratic election. The ships were not therefore “seized” by Hamas as is being implied, the Hamas government controlled the ships because they won the election and it is their job to provide food and aid to their people.
Crucially, the attack took place in international waters, not inside Israeli territory. Israel had no right to board the ship under any legal definition.
As Mike Rivero at WhatReallyHappened explains, “Israel has no legal authority over the ships of other nations in international waters. Israel may not issue orders to foreign flagged ships in international waters. Ships are considered sovereign territory of the nations whose flags they fly. Setting foot on one without the permission of the captain is technically an act of war.
“The aid convoy did not “attack” the IDF. The aid convoy, being in international waters, attempted to defend themselves from an act of piracy by a nation with no legal authority over those ships.”
With Israel’s attack being condemned globally by every nation on the planet besides the U.S. and Britain, and being savaged by every media outlet besides the ever-compliant U.S. establishment press, attempts to lay the blame on the very activists who were killed while lauding their murderers as heroes will only crystallize the fact that Israel, alongside Britain and America and the globalists who control all three countries, are nothing less than the new Nazis and represent the biggest threat by far to international security and the sanctity of the rule of law.
Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, summed it up best: “Dealing with a banking crisis was difficult enough,” he said the other week, “but at least there were public-sector balance sheets on to which the problems could be moved. Once you move into sovereign debt, there is no answer; there’s no backstop.”
In other words, were this a computer game, the politicians would be down to their last life. Any mistake now and it really is Game Over. Or to pick a slightly more traditional game, it is rather like a session of pass-the-parcel which is fast approaching the end of the line.
The European financial crisis may look and smell rather different to the American banking crisis of a couple of years ago, but strip away the details – the breakdown of the euro, the crumbling of the Spanish banking system to take just two – and what you are left with is the next leg of a global financial crisis. Politicians temporarily “solved” the sub-prime crisis of 2007 and 2008 by nationalising billions of pounds’ worth of bank debt. While this helped reinject a little confidence into markets, the real upshot was merely to transfer that debt on to public-sector balance sheets. Read entire article
If the trouble starts — and it remains an “if” — the trigger may well be obscure to the concerns of most Americans: a missed budget projection by the Spanish government, the failure of Greece to hit a deficit-reduction target, a drop in Ireland’s economic output.
But the knife-edge psychology currently governing global markets has put the future of the U.S. economic recovery in the hands of politicians in an assortment of European capitals. If one or more fail to make the expected progress on cutting budgets, restructuring economies or boosting growth, it could drain confidence in a broad and unsettling way. Credit markets worldwide could lock up and throw the global economy back into recession.
For the average American, that seemingly distant sequence of events could translate into another hit on the 401(k) plan, a lost factory shift if exports to Europe decline and another shock to the banking system that might make it harder to borrow. Read entire article
The last time Greeks were shown to be storming their parliament on live TV, we got a 1,000 point drop on the Dow Jones. Today, another 100,000 protesters of austerity are expected to hit the streets as the entire country is essentially shut down. From the BBC: "Much of Greece's transport network has been immobilised, as trade unions stage another 24-hour general strike against austerity measures. Ferries are tied up in port, railway stations shut, and the Labour Ministry occupied by communist protesters. Organisers are hoping that up to 100,000 people will join protests on the streets later. There are fears of renewed violence after protests in Athens two weeks ago led to the deaths of three people. The country's main civil service and public sector unions say they represent some 2.5 million workers. "People are bleeding financially but they will participate in the strike," Ilias Vrettakos, a senior member of the ADEDY union, was quoted as saying by Reuters." And for those who wish to follow the strike and potential Storming Of The Parliament Part 2, here is a live feed from the main Parliament square.
Despite EU finance ministers trying to put on a brave face, confidence in the euro and the entire EU project as a whole continues to crumble, as former Bank of England policy maker David Blanchflower warns that the entire region could break up and that another euro bailout is inevitable.
Speaking with Bloomberg News, Blanchflower said that another European bailout was coming after the $1 trillion dollar package passed last week did little to reassure markets that the situation was under control.
Blanchflower said that there were “major cracks” in the EU, and when asked whether or not the common currency was dead and if the region would break up, Blanchflower said, “I didn’t think it was going to but I’m more concerned and worried now that it may well do so.”
The former Bank of England official also predicted that the euro would sink to parity with the U.S. dollar.
“It looks to me like down for quite a while to come so parity may not be crazy….I think now we’re in a position where it may be unstoppable,” said Blanchflower.
The euro rebounded a little yesterday after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Global Economist Jim O’Neill characterized as “ridiculous” suggestions that the euro area would disintegrate as a monetary union.
“This is 60 years of history in the making, so the idea that the euro simply falls apart at first test of its credibility, I think it highly unlikely,” O’Neill said. “It might well be in 20 years time it doesn’t exist but the idea that it’s not going to exist in the next year because the market is worried about Spain and Portugal’s funding requirements is ridiculous.”
However, according to John McCarthy, director of currency trading at ING Financial Markets LLC, the euro has “breakup written all over it”.
“It is possible they cobble something together and everybody works hard, but as a betting man I’m betting it’s not going to survive in its current form,” he said.
As we have highlighted, EU bureaucrats are unlikely to let the euro collapse because such a crisis would discredit the justification for a move towards a global currency bossed by a global central bank, as IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn outlined last week during a speech in Zurich.
If the euro were to go under, it would expose the inherent weakness of continental monetary unions and all but derail the wider agenda for a one world currency.
Watch the interview with Blanchflower below.
Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, fears that America shares many of the same fiscal problems currently haunting Europe. He also believes that European Union must become a federalised fiscal union (in other words with central power to tax and spend) if it is to survive. Just two of the nuggets from one of the most extraordinary press conferences I have been to at the Bank.
What with all the excitement yesterday over our new Government, I never had time to remark on the Inflation Report press conference. Most of our attention was on what King said about the Government’s fiscal plans (a ringing endorsement). But, as Jeremy Warner has written in today’s paper, it was as if King had suddenly been unleashed. Bear in mind King is usually one of the most guarded policymakers in both British and central banking circles. Not yesterday.
It isn’t often one has the opportunity to get such a blunt and straightforward insight into the thoughts of one of the world’s leading economic players. Most of this stuff usually stays behind closed doors, so it’s worth taking note of. And I suspect that while George Osborne will have been happy to hear his endorsement of the new Government’s policies, Barack Obama and the European leaders will have been far less pleased with his frank comments on their predicament.
The transcript and video are online at the Bank’s website, but below are the extended highlights, all emphasis mine. Well worth checking out. America, and many other large economies including the UK, share some of the same problems as Greece with its public finances:
Every country around the world is in a similar position, even the United States; the world’s largest economy has a very large fiscal deficit. And one of the concerns in financial markets is clearly – how will this enormous stock of public debt be reduced over the next few years? And it’s very important that governments, both here and elsewhere, get to grips with this problem, have a clear approach and a very clear and credible approach to reducing the size of those deficits over, in our case, the lifetime of this parliament, in order to convince markets that they should be willing to continue to finance the very large sums of money that will be needed to be raised from financial markets over the next few years, at reasonable interest rates. Full article here
The Western financial world is officially in full panic mode. A nearly $1 trillion bailout of Greece confirms that fact. Our very own Federal Reserve is providing billions to the effort, but this is much more than a bailout for Greece. It is a bailout for banks holding Greek debt and the debt of other European nations teetering on default.
This bailout is not a fix or a cure for too much debt. People on both sides of the pond are simply spending more than they earn. The “fix” is a long painful road of consuming less and saving more, but that is not what this bailout represents. What the leaders of the Western World chose was the short painless path of money printing. You have to ask yourself where did they come up with nearly a trillion dollars in such a short amount of time?
If real assets were used for this bailout, it would not be done. Think about this for a minute. Let’s say for the American part of this rescue we had to put up half of New York State for collateral. Does the thought of that much prime land frittered away make you squeamish? How about putting up 500 million barrels of oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? Too valuable you say? Then maybe a couple thousand tons of gold out of Fort Knox would be okay to use, after all, it’s just sitting there (I hope). Doesn’t this sound absurd? It sure does because these are real assets and printed money is not. This is why the U.S. Fed is using dollars created out of thin air to help bail out its banking buddies in Europe. It is the easy way out, at least at the beginning. Read entire article
KARACHI, Pakistan — American drone aircraft fired 18 missiles at militants in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region on Tuesday, killing at least 14 fighters and wounding four, a security official and a resident of the area said.
The missiles struck a region known as Datta Khel on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Taliban and Qaeda fighters prepare for operations against United States and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
The unusually intense drone attack was the third since a failed car bombing in Times Square 10 days earlier. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American charged in the attempted attack, has told American investigators he visited North Waziristan to train under the auspices of the Pakistani Taliban. Read entire article
As Europe is bailed out to the tune of nearly $1 trillion dollars, Congressman Ron Paul warns that the constant monetization of debt, allied with taxpayer-funded bailouts, will inevitably lead to runaway inflation and the collapse of paper currencies.
Under the terms of the Federal Reserve’s credit swap deal with the EU – in addition to an additional IMF bailout of which U.S. taxpayers will be picking up 20 per cent ($57 billion dollars) of the tab, Paul pointed out that not just taxpayers but “anybody that buys anything” will be funding the European bailout because of the attendant inflationary consequences.
“The prices are going up already, producer prices are going up, the cost of living will go up so everyone in American will suffer and eventually the whole world will suffer because we cannot carry the whole world with our dollar,” Paul told Fox Business, adding that eventually people will lose confidence in the dollar.
The Congressman agreed with the host that the bailouts would lead to the crash of paper currencies, noting that last week’s stock market turmoil was accompanied by gold acting as a currency rather than just reacting to the value of the dollar.
“Gold has been money for 6,000 years and it will remain that way and it will rule the roost,” said Paul, adding that the dollar was weak in comparison with the strength of gold.
“All paper currencies are under attack and this cannot be sustained,” said the Congressman.
Paul then explained how the ECB has completely reversed its promise that it wouldn’t monetize debt and how Bernanke had also gone back on his word that U.S. dollars would be use for this purpose. “When I talked to Bernanke last time in the Committee he said they had no intention of bailing out Greece but they are, through the IMF as well as opening up these swap lines to all the central banks, so it is on the shoulders on the burden of the American taxpayer and our dollar so all we’re doing is perpetuating a very very bad system and this is not a solution at all,” he said.
Paul agreed with the host that the bailout was merely a stunt to buy time while failing to address the underlying problem of European socialism and the entitlement culture, which is fast running out of money with which to keep itself ticking over.
Watch the clip below
The bailout outrages never stop.
Of the 110-billion Euro Greece bailout, 30-billion (approx $40 billion) will be paid for by the IMF.
The US supplies almost 20% of the IMF’s funding (per quotas). So that means US taxpayers are providing ~$8 billion of the $145 billion going to kick the Greek can down the road.
That’s the first outrage. (Why is this our problem?)
The second outrage is that, as in some of the US bailouts, our bailout money is JUNIOR to Greece’s existing debt. That means that, over the next couple of years, the idiot banks that loaned bankrupt Greece money will get their money back. And then, when Greece runs out of cash again, we’ll be left holding the bag (along with Germany and the rest of the folks who bailed Greece out).
In any normal financing, the lender of last resort would be SENIOR to all existing debt. It would get its money back first, before the other idiots got a penny.
In the Greece bailout, however, the new money we’re putting in will be going right out the door to pay off existing lenders who would have lost their shirts. And if the Greece austerity measures don’t work and there’s nothing left for us? Tough.
(Why don’t the existing creditors have to lose a penny? Same reason the AIG creditors didn’t lose a penny. Because it would apparently be too traumatic to ask them to do that. The idea that the existing creditors might have to lose money was apparently so unthinkable that it was never even on the table).
It’s nice of us to bail out Greece, isn’t it? Can’t we at least get the Parthenon as collateral or something?
They call NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini–”Doctor Doom.” He got the moniker because his ominous predictions, a few years back, came true. I really hate the “Doom” name. I think he should be called “Doctor right on the money.” So when Roubini talks I listen. It seems the spotlight is off the U.S. for the moment because of Greek debt and rumors of default. But Roubini says Greece is just the “tip of the iceberg” in the world of sovereign debt problems. Here’s more from Reuters: Professor Roubini, the New York-based academic who was one of the few to anticipate the scale of the financial crisis, told a panel in California that the buildup of debt is likely to lead to countries defaulting or resorting to inflation to ease the burden on their populations. “While today markets are worried about Greece, Greece is just the tip of the iceberg,” Roubini told the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. “The thing I worry about is the buildup of sovereign debt.” Although Greece’s misreporting of the scale of its own debt has helped shatter investors’ faith, the southern European country is not alone in its struggle. The depth of the property bust in both Spain and Portugal has prompted the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the creditworthiness of both. (Click here for the complete Reuters story.)
The US is preparing to pivot from domestic regulatory reform to a push for a tough new international capital regime after the weekend’s G20 and International Monetary Fund meetings glossed over differences between leading economies.
Tim Geithner, US Treasury secretary, met Mario Draghi, chairman of the Financial Stability Board, on Sunday to discuss the contours of a system that would decide the safety and profitability of banks for decades to come and could eclipse the arguments over bank taxes and regulation.
But the different positions of senior central bank and government officials from several countries expressed to the Financial Times on the sidelines of the G20 meetings in Washington suggested that a final international agreement remains a challenge.
The G20 communiqué on Friday said: “We recommitted to developing by end-2010 internationally agreed rules to improve both the quantity and quality of bank capital and to discourage excessive leverage.” Full article here
BAGHDAD — A series of bombings on Friday struck mosques, a market and a shop in Baghdad, as well as the homes of a prosecutor and police officers in western Iraq on Friday, killing dozens, only five days after a joint Iraqi-American raid killed the country’s top two Al Qaeda leaders.
Iraq’s leaders had hailed the killings early Sunday as a devastating blow to the group but warned that retaliation was almost certain to come, though it was not clear that Al Qaeda in Iraq, also known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was behind the last jolt of violence.
According to preliminary accounts by the Ministry of the Interior, 12 bombs — including car bombs and improvised explosive devices, but not suicide bombers, an Al Qaeda hallmark — killed at least 39 people and wounded nearly 100. Some officials warned that the toll was much higher. Read entire article
