Wall Street “secret government” outed …………
http://www.voltairenet.org/
American democracy is kidnapped by a secret government that many researchers have identified as being a powerful oligarchy that manipulates from behind the scenes the very essence of the state, controlling the financial wealth of the country beyond the reach of any State institution. Printing money indiscriminately and creating wealth out of thin air, this unscrupulous elite has ruined the economy and generated the biggest bubble in history, that of the dollar, which will ultimately knock it off its pedestal of world reserve currency.
- Timothy Geithner (left), US Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke (right), Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Fed), photographed in April 2010 are the public figureheads a secret government that wields billions of dollars at will.
We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason. [1]
These documents show how top government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-’09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms. Here’s what we now know:
The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008.
Knowledge of the secret bailout funds was not shared with Congress even while it was drafting and debating legislation to break up the big banks.
The secret funding, provided at below-market rates, gave Wall Street banks an additional $13 billion in profits. (That’s enough money to hire more than 325,000 entry level teachers.)
The secret loans financed bank mergers so that the largest banks could grow even larger. The money also allowed banks to step up their lobbying efforts.
While Henry Paulson (Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury) was informing Congress and the public that only minor reforms were needed to protect Fannie and Freddie from collapse, he met secretly with leading Wall Street hedge fund managers — among them his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs — to alert them that he was about to nationalize the giant mortgage companies – a move that would eradicate nearly all the stock value of the companies. This information was enormously valuable because it allowed these hedge funds to short Fannie and Freddie and thereby make a fortune.
While Timothy Geithner was head of the NY Federal Reserve, he argued against legislative efforts by Senator Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, to limit the size of banks because the issue was “too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions,” Kaufman recalls. Meanwhile, Geithner was fully aware of the enormous secret loans while Senator Kaufman was kept in the dark. Barney Frank, who was authoring key bank reform legislation was also not informed of the secret loans. No one in Congress was told.
So what does this all mean?
1. The big banks and hedge funds were in much more trouble than we were led to believe.
As many of us suspected, all the big banks were on their knees begging for help – secretly – while telling their investors, the public and Congress that all was well. They had gambled and lost. Under the rules of ideal capitalism, they should have suffered some “creative destruction,” and seen their shareholder value eliminated through bankruptcy, and their managers replaced. The entire banking system should have been reorganized from top to bottom as well. Instead, these colossal failures were secretly rewarded.
2. Wall Street’s secret government made sure the largest banks would grow even larger, aided by the secret funding.
While Congress was debating legislation to break up the large banks and reinstitute Glass Steagall (to separate risky investment banking from insured commercial banking,) the secret government was using public funds to grow even larger through mergers and acquisitions. Because Congress and the public were unaware of the secret funding and ill-health of all the banks, the legislation was easily defeated. As the chart below makes painfully clear, too-big-to-fail banks grew even bigger.
3. The bigger Wall Street becomes, the more government it can buy.
This part isn’t secret. As the top six banks grew larger, they spent more funds lobbying to make sure that they wouldn’t suffer any unprofitable impacts from banking reform legislation. So after the biggest banks received hundreds of billions in secret loans, they upped their lobbying funds to maintain their size and power. Read ‘em and weep:
4. Wall Street’s secret government protects its own.
At first, it’s not easy to understand how Treasury Secretary Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs, could risk attending a secret meeting with giant hedge fund managers, many of whom used to work at Goldman Sachs. How could the nation’s highest ranking financial official dare to tip off these hedge fund elites about the imminent government takeover of Fannie and Freddie before Congress and the public were informed? Well, one answer is that Paulson felt obliged to warn his old comrades of the impeding nationalization. Maybe, he wanted to get them out of harm’s way just in case they were heavily involved in those markets. Or maybe he also wanted to give them a very valuable tip to profit by. But the deeper explanation, I believe, is that Wall Street’s key government officials – Paulson, Summers, Geithner, Orszag (the former Obama OMB chief who now makes millions working for CitiGroup), etc. truly believe the following:
Wall Street banks are the best in the world and are the cutting-edge of the American economy. They are our future.
Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers are enormously smarter and sharper than the rest of us. They deserve our admiration.
Helping Wall Street to grow and prosper is precisely the same thing as helping all Americans and the entire economy. They deserve our support.
Secret meetings to provide insider information are normal on Wall Street. There’s nothing wrong with warning your friends about upcoming policy decisions that might impact their profits.
There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with providing trillions of dollars of secret loans to the best and the brightest and not telling Congress about it.
It’s all a closed loop of self-justification and self-deception: Wall Street is brilliant. What Wall Street does is for the good of the country. Helping Wall Street profit is good for the country. Hiding the truth from democratically elected leaders is also for the good of the country because Wall Street is brilliant and knows better.
And all this is deeply believed by Wall Street and its secret government, even though Wall Street, and Wall Street alone, took down the economy and killed 8 million jobs in a matter of months. Simply brilliant!
5. Wall Street is a clear and present danger to democracy.
Usually, I am not an alarmist. In fact, I often argue against facile conspiracy theories. I want to believe that our democracy still has promise. But, the Wall Street-induced crash and the government’s response to it has me very worried. The Bloomberg News revelations suggest that Wall Street’s secret government has enormous disdain for what remains of our democracy. The financial elites obviously believe that Congress cannot be trusted to do the right thing even when it is bought and paid for by the very banks it supposedly regulates. As for the rest of us? We’re just a financially illiterate mass to be manipulated through the mass media. Our minds too can be bought and sold through careful marketing.
This financial arrogance and corruption is enormously corrosive to our democratic values. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, no longer trust their government. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, no longer vote. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, believe that democracy as we know it is a sham. Wall Street couldn’t have written a better script to maintain its domination.
6. Occupy Wall Street is fundamentally correct, but we need more.
The occupiers dramatically attacked Wall Street elites and captured the country’s imagination with their 1 percent, 99 percent framework. And the idea is sticking and spreading. But that’s only the start. To reclaim our country from Wall Street’s secret government we will need to develop an enormous movement among the 99 percent. Although we hope it just happens spontaneously through Twitter and Facebook, we all know it will require hardcore organizing involving millions of us.
At the moment, no one knows what form it will take. But we do know this: great concentrations of power and wealth do not give up their power and wealth without an enormous fight. Wall Street’s secret government is more than ready to protect itself, even if it means subverting democracy. Our occupiers have shown great courage in helping us reclaim our democratic rights. Let’s hope it spreads…and soon.
Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world ………
http://www.newscientist.com
The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)
AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).
“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world’s economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”
“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system’s behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, “is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups”. Or as Braha puts it: “The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy.”
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning “Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…” was misattributed.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy
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Some Cops Furious NYPD Officer Flashed Peace Sign In Photo With Occupy Wall Street Protester ……..
http://gothamist.com
via photon frequency’s facebook
The above picture, featured on the Facebook profile of someone named “Photon Frequency”, is presented as an example of how police and protesters really can get along: “Much of the NYPD are really on our side. We need to stay away from negative media influence and stay supportive and respectful of their difficult job. Many of the officers I spoke to are supportive of this movement and gratefully acknowledged the peaceful efforts of the protesters.” However, don’t tell that to any of the cops over at Thee Rant police forum—they’re pretty darn annoyed at the cop for posing with these “miscreants.”
Thee Rant is the internet forum for retired and current members of the NYPD, and they seem to heartily disapprove of officers engaging with protesters in any manner other than from an authoritarian position. User 10 08 wrote, “there are only 2 types of reactions you give these people. #1 – NOTHING #2 – ARREST.” BNDB agrees in a long message:
Exactly right! When we do anything else other than the above, we undermine the mission we have as police officers to be proffesional and maintain a STRONG AUTHORITATIVE presence…Act professional at all times!
Dont show any signs of weakness, by doing that, we raise the threat level for all other officers!
Even if we agree with these trust-fund punks, as Police Officers, it is not our job to appease and empathise with them, it is our job to make sure we, and all other officers GO HOME SAFELY!
These punks we stand with, laugh with now, ten minutes later will be throwing their piss and shyte at us, calling us pigs and climbing the barriers to try to fight us…DON’T FORGET THAT!These trust fund bytches are NOT OUR FRIENDS! They want to see us hurt, either physically or on the job. They want to see us indicted for doing our job. They want to see us lose our jobs, our means for support to our families, they want to see our lives ruined…THEY ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS!
If you really feel that strongly about them, that you empathize with them, then maybe you should think about resigning your position as a New York City Police Officer.
Not everyone is ready to damn the office-in-question: some hope-against-hope that maybe it’s all a big misunderstanding! User bxnarcorgr asks, “Could it be he was bored and in a moment of stupidity, he flashed the peace sign more out of sarcasm than out of sympathy for the cause?” Murray Da COP said, “Maybe the cop is putting in his order for coffee or something. Yea TWO sugars please!”
If this is their reaction to a little peace sign, we can’t wait to see what they think about the protester who allegedly was caught on camera defecating on a cop car.
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US protesters rally to #OccupyWallStreet …….
http://stream.aljazeera.com
Protesters gather in New York’s financial hub for demonstration against what organisers call corporate dominance.
What started as an online campaign has translated into action on the ground, with protest organisers calling for thousands of people to “occupy Wall Street” on Saturday.
“On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up beds, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” organisers wrote on the www.occupywallst.org website.
“Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.”
The leaderless movement includes hacktivist group Anonymous among the protesters. The group released a video online calling on people to take to the streets on September 17.
Similar to the structure of the hacktivist group itself there is no defined central authority, but Twitter accounts like @AnonOps are hubs of information for those attending the protests in person and virtually.
The Stream is following events in New York City and around the globe via social media and will update the elements below as the story progresses.
These are some of the social media elements featured in this episode of The Stream.
[View the story "Social media elements from #OccupyWallStreet" on Storify]
Thumbnail image: NEW YORK – JANUARY 22: A tour bus passes the Wall Street bull in the financial district January 22, 2007 in New York City. In a study commissioned by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), it was determined that New York could lose its place as the financial capital of the world in as little as 10 years. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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#WikiLeaks – US, France Knew In 2007 Financial Collapse Was Imminent Due To Wall Street Fraud ……..
Posted by Alexander Higgins –
September 3, 2011 at 8:29 pm ,
Source via Alexander Higgins Blog
In 2007 top US and France officials knew rampant fraud being committed by regulators, rating agencies and Wall Street Banks would soon cause a global financial collapse.Wall
While investors and nations around the world were happily giving trillions of dollars away to crooked Wall Street bankers top officials in the United States and France knew the market would soon collapse and people would be robbed of millions.
While raising the issue that the role of government regulators and rating agencies needed to be reviewed in the wake of the upcoming crisis, US officials ignored calls from the French government to enact necessary regulation to stop the rampant fraud that would soon result in investors losing tens of trillions of dollars they had invested into the markets.
The cable reveals that while discussing the ability of the French banks to survive the crisis, French President Sarkozy was pushing the US to enact regulations to forestall the crisis. Instead, Henry Paulson responded by telling Sarkozy not to overreacted because the” it would take months, not weeks, for credit to be re-priced” telling France this is “not a major crisis.”
Paulson went on to warn that the major problem was with the German banks and which would require a bailout from the taxpayer while warning that the assets held by banks but covered up from investors by being held off-balance sheet presented systematic risk to banks and to sovereign wealth.
The cable clearly reveals that taxpayer bailouts would be needed. Paulson further up sticks up for the Wall Street hedge fund saying they were not to blame for the crisis while acknowledging there were major Wall Street transparency issues.
To summarize, the cable reveals that top government officials in France and the US knew Wall street banks were committing fraud in the origination and packaging of sub-prime mortgage and lying to investors about the resulting securities they were creating and selling. Officials knew banks were also lying about their own liabilities and hiding them from investors by keeping the assets off their balance sheets. The government also knew that both regulators and ratings agencies were participating in the scheme.
Remember as you read this cable, these conversations all took place over a year before the 2008 financial collapse when taxpayers around the world were forced into giving up trillions of dollars for banker bailouts. Also keep in mind that while the cable discusses “systemic risk”, “bailouts” and “market turbulence”, none of these had happened yet. They were discussing what would soon happen in the future.
The discussion of “systemic risk”, “market turbulence” and “taxpayer bailouts” over a year before the markets actually collapsed and those events actually occurred, show they knew a global financial collapse. Not only did they know it would occur but knew what the consequences would be for the investors and the governments who were fleeced by Wall Street. As the cable reveals, Paulson chose to deal with the crisis by letting it continue and urging France to keep the issue underwaps by urging Sarkozy not to “over react”, hence allowing the scandal to the continue which just postponed the inevitable.
Also remember when we were forced into these bailouts, it was under the guise that our governments had no idea the banks were doing this and this was a sudden and unforeseeable crisis. Finally, remember that – while there have been plenty of accusations from “conspiracy theorists”, “fringe economists” and “wing nut” politicians such as Ron Paul – there still has been no admission from our government that financial regulators or the ratings agencies played a role in the crisis.
PAULSON DISCUSSES FINANCIAL MARKETS, IRAN WITH SARKOZY, LAGARDE
| Subject | PAULSON DISCUSSES FINANCIAL MARKETS, IRAN WITH SARKOZY, LAGARDE |
| Origin | Embassy Paris (France) |
| Cable time | 2007-10-01 10:46 UTC |
| Classification | CONFIDENTIAL |
| Source | http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/10/07PARIS4109.html |
| History | First published on WES, 30 Sep 2011 01:44 UTC |
Viewing cable 07PARIS4109, PAULSON DISCUSSES FINANCIAL MARKETS, IRAN WITH SARKOZY, LAGARDE
If you are new to these pages, please read an introduction on the structure of a cable as well as how to discuss them with others. See also the FAQs
Reference ID Created Released Classification Origin 07PARIS4109 2007-10-01 10:46 2011-08-30 01:44 CONFIDENTIAL Embassy Paris
VZCZCXRO3134 RR RUEHDBU RUEHFL RUEHKW RUEHLA RUEHROV RUEHSR DE RUEHFR #4109/01 2741046 ZNY CCCCC ZZH R 011046Z OCT 07 FM AMEMBASSY PARIS TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 0558 RUEATRS/DEPARTMENT OF TREASURY WASHDC RHEHNSC/NSC WASHINGTON DC INFO RUEHZL/EUROPEAN POLITICAL COLLECTIVE
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 PARIS 004109 SIPDIS SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL:09/18/17 TAGS: EFIN ECON PREL FR SUBJECT: PAULSON DISCUSSES FINANCIAL MARKETS, IRAN WITH SARKOZY, LAGARDE Classified by EMIN Seth Winnick for reasons 1.4 (b) and (d) ¶1. (C) Summary: In successive meetings Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told Minister of Finance Christine Lagarde and President Nicolas Sarkozy that it was important not to overreact to financial market turbulence. Sarkozy asked for U.S. support for Dominique Strauss-Kahn's candidacy for IMF Managing Director. Discussions also touched on continued cooperation on Iran, Sarkozy's reform agenda and China. End summary. ¶2. (C) During a September 17 visit to France, Treasury Secretary Paulson and accompanying delegation met with Sarkozy and Lagarde, and lunched with leading representatives of France's business community. Sarkozy made a strong push for public U.S. support for Dominique Strauss-Kahn's candidacy for Managing Director of the IMF. Calling Strauss-Kahn the "smartest socialist," Sarkozy said it was important not to encourage President Putin by entertaining the candidacy Czech Josef Tosovksy, who has KGB ties. ¶3. (C) In response to Secretary Paulson's urging that France's business and financial sectors reduce exposure to Iran, Sarkozy said the United States could count on French cooperation in toughening sanctions. "There will be no double talk from France. Stopping the bomb is more important than business contracts." But Sarkozy said unilateral legislation under consideration in the U.S. Congress would be a "disaster" and make the Iranians "very happy." Sarkozy's diplomatic advisor Jean-David Levitte noted that France would look to work, if necessary, outside the Security Council, notably with EU partners, on further measures against Iran. ¶4. (C) On sub-prime-related market turbulence, Sarkozy said regulation was needed to forestall such events and minimize impact on global economic growth. Paulson underscored the importance of not over-reacting. It would take months, not weeks, for credit to be re-priced, but this was "not a major crisis." Several issues were coming into focus: conduits and other off-balance sheet funding vehicles had been a surprise; in the U.S. there was a need to look at mortgage origination, as well as the role of regulatory supervision and rating agencies. Asked for his views on French banks, Paulson said they had strong balance sheets and were profitable, though they, too, might have challenging off-balance sheet obligations. Paulson said the German Landesbanken were "the biggest problem," though they presented little systemic risk and would be bailed out by the German taxpayer. ¶5. (C) Sarkozy asked for views on U.S. exchange rate policy. Paulson said the United States supported a strong dollar. Exchange rates ultimately were market-driven and the U.S. would pursue policies that increased confidence in the U.S. economy. In an exchange on China, Paulson said the U.S. message to China was that if it wanted to be a "member of the club," it needed to adhere to global norms on issues such as Sudan, Iran as well as market-determined exchange rates. The real concern was not that China's economy would pass that of the United States, but that China would reform too slowly and ultimately run into problems. Paulson asked Sarkozy to "make a big impact" in China by carrying a similar message. ¶6. (C) In a brief exchange on trade issues, Sarkozy said France was not afraid of globalization, but would insist on reciprocity in its foreign relations. Sarkozy was not shocked that the United States defended its farmers: "we're doing the same." Paulson pushed Sarkozy to help "drive Doha to a conclusion." Sarkozy would "do (his) best," butQould not support a deal that was not fair to France. Lagarde on Economic Reform, China and Financial Markets - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ¶7. (C) Finance Minister Lagarde sketched out GOF reform priorities, saying the real focus would be on France's social programs and associated costs. Reform of the so-called "special pension regimes" for certain categories of public workers (including rail workers) was high on the agenda. The GOF wanted to bring such pensions in line with those of other public sector employees. Lagarde acknowledged that the issue had brought down the Juppe government in the mid 1990s, but said the GOF would be tough on pension reform. Product market reform - including changes to distribution and retail sectors - was also in the offing. ¶8. (C) Touching on issues subsequently raised by Sarkozy, Lagarde said the GOF wanted strong cooperation on Iran. She suggested an informal U.S. Treasury - Ministry of Finance "task force" be created to look at Iran-related banking issues. Paulson noted that BNP-Paribas had suspended work in Iran, but that Natixis had become more active. Beyond the financial PARIS 00004109 002 OF 002 sector, it would be important to look at the role of industrial companies in Iran, Paulson said. Although France's exports to Iran were a small percentage of its overall exports, they represented 8% of Iran's imports. French Treasury director Xavier Musca underscored the importance of the U.S. consulting with the GOF before engaging directly with French banks on Iran. ¶9. (C) Lagarde and Musca worried about China's (as well as the UAE's) role as financier for Iran, as well as its undermining of good governance efforts in Africa with easy money. More generally, Lagarde said the weakness of the yuan was "hurting our economies." The 9/14 informal Ecofin meeting in Porto saw agreement to add exchange rate issues to the EU - China summit agenda in November. Lagarde suggested that Brazil and South Africa be brought in on the issue. Paulson said the U.S. was pushing for reform and financial market opening in China, and "this would help all investors." He agreed to raise yuan exchange rate issue with RSA Finance Minister Trevor Manuel in the context of the November G-20 finance ministers meeting. ¶10. (C) On financial market issues, Lagarde said the large French banks were strong, with minimal exposure to asset-backed securities. She was "fairly confident" that the smaller banks were also well-positioned. Market transparency and related issues had been discussed in Porto, and would be the subject of ongoing consultations within the EU. Paulson said the President's Working Group on Financial Markets was looking at similar issues, including conduits and off-balance-sheet items of regulated institutions. But it was important to guard against overreaction. In particular Paulson said he sensed that Europe was "obsessed" with hedge funds. Though the link to regulated institutions (via bank lending) was an important issue, it was hard to blame hedge funds for current market turbulence. Asked about sovereign wealth funds, Lagarde saidQ the issue was not as big a deal in France as it was in Germany. ¶11. (U) The Paulson delegation has cleared this cable. STAPLETON.
Imperialism: Bankers, Drug Wars and Genocide
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by Prof. James Petras
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Global Research, May 19, 2011
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In May 2011, Mexican investigators uncovered another mass clandestine grave with dozens of mutilated corpses; bringing the total number of victims to 40,000 killed since 2006 when the Calderon regime announced its “war on drug traffickers”. Backed by advisers, agents and arms, the White House has been the principal promotor of a ‘war’ that has totally decimated Mexico ’s society and economy.
If Washington has been the driving force for the regime’s war, Wall Street banks have been the main instruments ensuring the profits of the drug cartels. Every major US bank has been deeply involved in laundering hundreds of billions of dollars in drug profits, for the better part of the past decade. Mexico ’s descent into this inferno has been engineered by the leading US financial and political institutions, each supporting ‘one side or the other’ in the bloody “total war” which spares no one, no place and no moment in time. While the Pentagon arms the Mexican government and the US Drug Enforcement Agency enforces the “military solution”, the biggest US banks receive, launder and transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the drug lords’ accounts, who then buy modern arms, pay private armies of assassins and corrupt untold numbers of political and law enforcement officials on both sides of the border. Mexico’s Descent in the Inferno Everyday scores, if not hundreds, of corpses – appear in streets and or are found in unmarked graves; dozens are murdered in their homes, cars, public transport, offices and even hospitals; known and unknown victims in the hundreds are kidnapped and disappear; school children, parents, teachers, doctors and businesspeople are seized in broad daylight and held for ransom or murdered in retaliation. Thousands of migrant workers are kidnapped, robbed, ransomed, murdered and evidence is emerging that some are sold into the illegal ‘organ trade’. The police are barricaded in their commissaries; the military, if and when it arrives, takes out its frustration on entire cities, shooting more civilians than cartel soldiers. Everyday life revolves around surviving the daily death toll; threats are everywhere, the armed gangs and military patrols fire and kill with virtual impunity. People live in fear and anger. The Free Trade Agreement: The Sparks that lit the Inferno In the late 1980’s, Mexico was in crisis, but the people chose a legal way out: they elected a President, Cuahtemoc Cardenas, on the basis of his national program to promote the economic revitalization of agriculture and industry. The Mexican elite, led by Carlos Salinas of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) chose otherwise and subverted the election: The electorate was denied its victory; the peaceful mass protests were ignored. Salinas and subsequent Mexican presidents vigorously pursued a free trade agreement (NAFTA) with the US and Canada , which rapidly drove millions of Mexican farmers, ranchers and small business people into bankruptcy. Devastation led to the flight of millions of immigrant workers. Rural movements of debtors flourished and ebbed, were co-opted or repressed. The misery of the legal economy contrasted with the burgeoning wealth of the traffickers of drugs and people, which generated a growing demand for well-paid armed auxiliaries as soldiers for the cartels. The regional drug syndicates emerged out of the local affluence. In the new millennium, popular movements and a new electoral hope arose: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). By 2006 a vast peaceful electoral movement promised substantial social and economic reforms to ‘integrate millions of disaffected youth’. In the parallel economy, the drug cartels were expanding and benefiting from the misery of millions of workers and peasants marginalized by the Mexican elite, who had plundered the public treasury, speculated in real estate, robbed the oil industry and created enormous privatized monopolies in the communication and banking sectors. In 2006, millions of Mexican voters were once again denied their electoral victory: The last best hope for a peaceful transformation was dashed. Backed by the US Administration, Felipe Calderon stole the election and proceeded to launch the “War on Drug Traffickers” strategy dictated by Washington . The War Strategy Escalates the Drug War: The Banking Crises Deepens the Ties with Drug Traffickers The massive escalation of homicides and violence in Mexico began with the declaration of a war on the drug cartels by the fraudulently elected President Calderon, a policy pushed initially by the Bush Administration and subsequently strongly backed by the Obama – Clinton regime. Over 40,000 Mexican soldiers filled the streets, towns and barrios – violently assaulting citizens – especially young people. The cartels retaliated by escalating their armed assaults on police. The war spread to all the major cities and along the major highways and rural roads; murders multiplied and Mexico descended further into a Dantesque inferno. Meanwhile, the Obama regime ‘reaffirmed’ its support for a militarist solution on both sides of the border: Over 500,000 Mexican immigrants were seized and expelled from the US ; heavily armed border patrols multiplied. Cross border gun sales grew exponentially .The US “market” for Mexican manufactured goods and agricultural products shrank, further widening the pool for cartel recruits while the supply of high powered weapons increased. White House gun and drug policies strengthened both sides in this maniacal murderous cycle: The US government armed the Calderon regime and the American gun manufacturers sold guns to the cartels through both legal and underground arms sales. Steady or increasing demand for drugs in the US – and the grotesque profits derived from trafficking and sales— remained the primary driving force behind the tidal wave of violence and societal disintegration in Mexico . Drug profits, in the most basic sense, are secured through the ability of the cartels to launder and transfer billions of dollars through the US banking system. The scale and scope of the US banking-drug cartel alliance surpasses any other economic activity of the US private banking system. According to US Justice Department records, one bank alone, Wachovia Bank (now owned by Wells Fargo), laundered $378.3 billion dollars between May 1, 2004 and May 31, 2007 (The Guardian, May 11, 2011). Every major bank in the US has served as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels – including Bank of America, Citibank, and JP Morgan, as well as overseas banks operating out of New York , Miami and Los Angeles , as well as London . While the White House pays the Mexican state and army to kill Mexicans suspected of drug trafficking, the US Justice Department belatedly slaps a relatively small fine on the major US financial accomplice to the murderous drug trade, Wachovia Bank, spares its bank officials from any jail time and allows major cases to lapse into dismissal. The major agency of the US Treasury involved in investigating money laundering, the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, deliberately ignored the blatant collaboration of US banks with drug terrorists, concentrating almost their entire staff and resources on enforcing sanctions against Iran . For seven years, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey used his power as head of the Department for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence to pursue Israel ’s phony “war on terrorism” against Iran , rather than shut down Wachovia’s money-laundering operations with the Mexican drug terrorists. In this period of time an estimated 40,000 Mexican civilian have been killed by the cartels and the army. Without US arms and financial services supporting both the illegitimate Mexican regimes and the drug cartels – there could be no “drug war”, no mass killings and no state terror. The simple acts of stopping the flood of cheap subsidized US agriculture products into Mexico and de-criminalizing the use and purchase of cocaine in the US would dry up the pool of ‘cartel soldiers’ from the bankrupted Mexican peasantry and the cut back the profits and demand for illegal drugs in the US market. The Drug Traffickers, the Banks and the White House If the major US banks are the financial engines which allow the billion dollar drug empires to operate, the White House, the US Congress and the law enforcement agencies are the basic protectors of these banks. Despite the deep and pervasive involvement of the major banks in laundering hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit funds, the “court settlements” pursued by US prosecutors have led to no jail time for the bankers. One court’s settlement amounted to a fine of $50 million dollars, less than 0.5% of one of the banks (the Wachovia/Wells Fargo bank) $12.3 billion profits for 2009 (The Guardian, May 11, 2011). Despite the death of tens of thousands of Mexican civilians, US executive branch directed the DEA, the federal prosecutors and judges to impose such a laughable ‘punishment’ on Wachovia for its illegal services to the drug cartels. The most prominent economic officials of the Bush and Obama regimes, including Summers, Paulson, Geithner, Greenspan, Bernacke et al, are all long term associates, advisers and members of the leading financial houses and banks implicated in laundering the billions of drug profits. Laundering drug money is one of the most lucrative sources of profit for Wall Street; the banks charge hefty commissions on the transfer of drug profits, which they then lend to borrowing institutions at interest rates far above what – if any – they pay to drug trafficker depositors. Awash in sanitized drug profits, these US titans of the finance world can easily buy their own elected officials to perpetuate the system. Even more important and less obvious is the role of drug money in the recent financial meltdown, especially during its most critical first few weeks. According to the head of United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, “In many instances, drug money (was)… currently the only liquid investment capital…. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor…interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities… (there were) signs that some banks were rescued in that way.” (Reuters, January 25,2009. US edition). Capital flows from the drug billionaires were key to floating Wachovia and other leading banks. In a word: the drug billionaires saved the capitalist financial system from collapse! Conclusion By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it has become clear that capital accumulation, at least in North America, is intimately linked to generalized violence and drug trafficking. Because capital accumulation is dependent on financial capital, and the latter is dependent on the industry profits from the multi-hundred-billion dollar drug trade, the entire ensemble is embedded in the ‘total war’ over drug profits. In times of deep crises the very survival of the US financial system – and through it, the world banking system – is linked to the liquidity of the drug “industry”. At the most superficial level the destruction of Mexican and Central American societies – encompassing over 100 million people – is a result of a conflict between drug cartels and the political regimes of the region. At a deeper level there is a multiplier or “ripple effect” related to their collaboration: the cartels draw on the support of the US banks to realize their profits; they spend hundreds of millions on the US arms industry and others to secure their supplies, transport and markets; they employ tens of thousands of recruits for their vast private armies and civilian networks and they purchase the compliance of political and military officials on both sides of the borders For its part, the Mexican government acts as a conduit for US Pentagon/Federal police, Homeland Security, drug enforcement and political apparatuses prosecuting the ‘war’, which has put Mexican lives, property and security at risk. The White House stands at the strategic center of operations – the Mexican regime serves as the front-line executioners. On one side of the “war on drugs” are the major Wall Street banks; on the other side, the White House and its imperial military strategists and in the ‘middle’ are 90 million Mexicans and 40,000 murder victims and counting. Relying on political fraud to impose economic deregulation in the 1990’s (neo-liberalism), the US policies led directly to the social disintegration, criminalization and militarization of the current decade. The sophisticated narco-finance economy has now become the most advanced stage of neo-liberalism. When the respectable become criminals, the criminals become respectable. The issue of genocide in Mexico has been determined by the empire and its “knowing” bankers and cynical rulers. |
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| Global Research Articles by James Petras. | |||||||
US : The True Cost Of The Wall Street Bailout
http://dailybail.com
Special report from Bloomberg — Adding It All Up
Allison Stewart from Need to Know with Bloomberg reporter Bob Ivry. None of this is new to Bail readers, though the details might surprise you. The Bloomberg total is $12.8 trillion.
We all know about TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which spent $700 billion in taxpayers’ money to bail out banks after the financial crisis. That money was scrutinized by Congress and the media.
But it turns out that that $700 billion is just a small part of a much larger pool of money that has gone into propping up our nation’s financial system. And most of that taxpayer money hasn’t had much public scrutiny at all.
According to a team at Bloomberg News, at one point last year the U.S. had lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to rescue the economy. The Bloomberg reporters have been following that money. Alison Stewart spoke with one, Bob Ivry, to talk about the true cost to the taxpayer of the Wall Street bailout.
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Like this:
Matt Taibbi: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” (Complete Interview)
found on : http://www.democracynow.org
Nobody goes to jail,” “writes Matt Taibbi in his the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine. “This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth.” Here is the complete interview from which we played an excerpt on our Feb. 22 show. Taibbi explains how the American people have been defrauded by Wall Street investors and how the financial crisis is connected to the situations in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Matt Taibbi. But before I do, let me read a sentence from a recent paper by Dean Baker, who concludes, “Most of the pension shortfall using the current methodology is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today.”
And this—he quotes David Cay Johnston of tax.com: “The average Wisconsin pension is $24,500 a year, which is hardly lavish. But what is stunning is that 15% of the money contributed to the fund each year is going to Wall Street in fees,” which is why we now ask the question, “Why isn’t Wall Street in jail?”
Actually, that’s the title of reporter Matt Taibbi’s new article for Rolling Stone magazine. In the piece, Matt writes, quote, “Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth.”
Well, I interviewed Matt Taibbi on Sunday about his report, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”
AMY GOODMAN: Welcome to Democracy Now!, Matt Taibbi.
MATT TAIBBI: Thanks for having me back.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re seeing these mass protests in Madison, Wisconsin, and there’s other protests that are happening. We see the working poor, the middle class, under tremendous stress, and yet they’re the ones who are being hit hardest, not Wall Street. Explain what has happened. Why isn’t Wall Street in jail?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, it’s an incredible story. I mean, just to back up and provide some context, I think, for this Wisconsin thing, and especially for the Ohio thing, given what their governor used to do for a living—
AMY GOODMAN: Explain.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, he was an employee for Lehman Brothers, and he was—
AMY GOODMAN: This is Governor Kasich.
MATT TAIBBI: Governor Kasich, yeah, and he was intimately involved with selling—getting the state of Ohio’s pension fund to invest in Lehman Brothers and buy mortgage-backed securities. And of course they lost all that money. And this, broadly, was really what the mortgage bubble and the financial crisis was all about. It was essentially a gigantic criminal fraud scheme where all the banks were taking mismarked mortgage-backed securities, very, very dangerous, toxic subprime loans, they were chopping them up and then packaging them as AAA-rated investments, and then selling them to state pension funds, to insurance companies, to Chinese banks and Dutch banks and Icelandic banks. And, of course, these things were blowing up, and all those funds were going broke. But what they’re doing now is they’re blaming the people who were collecting these pensions—they’re blaming the workers, they’re blaming the firemen, they’re blaming the policemen—whereas, in reality, they were actually the victims of this fraud scheme. And the only reason that people aren’t angrier about this, I think, is because they don’t really understand what happened. If these were car companies that had sold a trillion dollars’ worth of defective cars to the citizens of the United States, there would be riots right now. But these were mortgage-backed securities, it’s complicated, people don’t understand it, and they’re only now, I think, beginning to realize that they were defrauded.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the crime is. Who has profited? Who should be on trial?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, you know, again, the broad crime in all of this was just fraud. They were taking—these banks were taking, again, these subprime mortgages, and they would have these billion-dollar pools of mortgages where, in some cases, 70 or 80 percent of the loans were to people who had no identification or no jobs or who had put no money down into the mortgage. And then they were taking these loans and applying this phony baloney, hocus pocus math, these derivative instruments, and turning them into AAA-rated investments. And they were marketing, again, these securities to, say, state pension funds as AAA-rated investments, which means credit risk almost zero. So they took the stuff that they knew was very, very risky and very, very likely to default, and they were going to the state of Wisconsin, the state of Ohio, the state of New York, and saying, “Hey, this is almost as safe as—or in fact, it is as safe as United States Treasury bonds. You should buy this, and you’ll earn a little bit more than you’ll earn if you buy T-bills.” The reality was, they were just taking absolutely worthless stuff and sticking it with these people and then fleeing the scene. This is no different than drug dealers who take a bag of oregano and sell it to you as, you know, a pound of weed. That’s exactly the same scam.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about John Mack and Gary Aguirre.
MATT TAIBBI: This is an amazing story, just because it demonstrates how far above the law these people are. John Mack is one of the most powerful people on Wall Street. Right now he’s the chairman of the board at Morgan Stanley. He used to be their CEO. Way back in 2001, when he was sort of between jobs, he had left Morgan Stanley and was interviewing with Credit Suisse First Boston. He was involved in a case that was investigated by the SEC. A hedge fund called Pequot made a very suspicious investment into a company called Heller Capital, which was about to be acquired by General Electric. This hedge fund bought, you know, an enormous amount of Heller stock three weeks before this acquisition by GE of Heller. Credit Suisse First Boston was Heller’s investment banker. John Mack was interviewing for the job with Credit Suisse a few days before Pequot made its purchases, and he was in direct contact with the hedge fund guy who made those purchases. Under any normal circumstances, he would be targeted for investigation by the SEC.
AMY GOODMAN: And his name was?
MATT TAIBBI: The investigator’s name was Gary Aguirre. And Aguirre—
AMY GOODMAN: And the guy buying up?
MATT TAIBBI: Art Samberg was the name of this hedge fund manager. He was a big star on Wall Street. In fact, there are articles about, you know, how does Art Samberg manage his amazing returns year after year? Well, you know, this was sort of a clue as to how.
Anyway, this SEC investigator named Gary Aguirre wanted permission to go interview John Mack, and his superiors at the SEC told him—they basically told him that he couldn’t, and the reason they said was because Mack has, quote-unquote, “powerful political connections.” At the time, he was a Ranger, one of Bush’s fundraising Rangers. He would later become a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. So he played both sides of the fence. This, again, is very typical of Wall Street. And Aguirre, when he pressed the matter, he was fired by the SEC.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the high-level people involved, like Mary Jo White.
MATT TAIBBI: Mary Jo White was the former U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. She was basically Rudy Giuliani for a few years. This is the top cop on Wall Street, basically. And she, at the time, was representing Morgan Stanley for the defense firm Debevoise & Plimpton. Again, this is what all these investigators do. When you leave a high-ranking position from the SEC or the U.S. attorney’s office, they all jump to these lucrative partnerships at corporate defense firms, where they make, you know, $2, $3, $4 million a year. So the incentives to really prosecute these guys are all backwards. And they all leave, and they take these jobs. Mary Jo White had left the U.S. attorney’s office. She’s representing Debevoise & Plimpton. She intercedes on behalf of Mack. And one of the SEC officials that she was in contact with, Paul Berger, Aguirre’s superior, ended up working for Debevoise & Plimpton a year later. And this is a very typical situation.
AMY GOODMAN: And Aguirre is fired.
MATT TAIBBI: He’s fired. He was—
AMY GOODMAN: He’s told to investigate, and then he starts to seriously investigate, and he’s fired.
MATT TAIBBI: Right. They gave him—two days after he started work at the SEC, one of his superiors handed him Pequot, just generally. They said, you know, “Look at this company.” Within a year or so, he was onto the Samberg case, and he had targeted Mack as a clear suspect in the case. He had overwhelming evidence. I mean, there were emails, there was documentary evidence. They put Martha Stewart in jail for much, much less than they had on Mack.
AMY GOODMAN: What did they have on Mack?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, again, they had emails demonstrating that Mack had been in touch by telephone with Samberg. They had the fact that Samberg had a personal relationship with Mack. They knew that the company had never had any meetings about this Heller Capital. It was—Aguirre described it to me as though Samberg awoke one morning, and God Himself told him to start buying shares of Heller Capital. And they had the fact that Mack was clearly privy to the inside information. He had had this meeting with Credit Suisse. He would later say that he destroyed his notes of his meeting with Credit Suisse on the way home from Switzerland, after that meeting. But clearly, he was—under any normal circumstances, he would have been targeted, would have been interviewed, but he was not.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Pequot is bought up?
MATT TAIBBI: Right. Well, no, Heller was bought.
AMY GOODMAN: Heller was bought up.
MATT TAIBBI: By GE, of course.
AMY GOODMAN: By GE. And how much does Samberg make? How much does—
MATT TAIBBI: He made—Samberg made $18 million on that trade. Another important part of the story is that Mack—Samberg cut Mack into a different deal that Pequot was doing, and as a result of that deal, Mack made about $10 million. So, all the dots connect. You know, Mack comes back from Switzerland. Samberg starts buying Heller. GE acquires Heller. Samberg makes $18 million. Mack gets cut in for $10 million. This is the outlines of a classic insider trading case.
AMY GOODMAN: So you think Mack should be in jail.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, he should—absolutely he should have been on trial. I mean, you know, it’s not for me to say; I’m not a jury. But clearly, they have prosecuted on far less evidence before.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi, talk about Dick Fuld.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, Richard Fuld, whose nickname on Wall Street was “The Gorilla,” he was the head of Lehman Brothers. He was a much feared and ferocious character on Wall Street. And Fuld, again, he oversaw Lehman during this period when it was going through its death spiral, and there were a number of irregularities about Fuld that were extremely interesting.
I talked to a former Lehman Brothers lawyer named Oliver Budde, who was responsible for vetting some of Lehman’s public disclosures, and Budde discovered that Lehman had been hiding about $250 million worth of Fuld’s income from the SEC in its public disclosures. He, too, ended up having to leave his job because he was told that he couldn’t do his job. He protested the way that Lehman was doing its disclosures. He got kicked out. He went to the SEC in 2008, six months before its collapse. He gave them a huge packet of information about what Fuld was doing, and he was completely blown off by the SEC. He tried repeatedly over a period of six months to get them interested in the case. They said no.
When Fuld later testified before Congress, after the company’s collapse, he told Congress that he had only earned somewhere in the region of $350 million during his tenure at Lehman. Budde knew that the real number was more like $520 million. He told the committee members in Congress that Fuld had probably lied while he was testifying. And they weren’t interested in that, either. So here we have a situation where Roger Clemens is being investigated—you know, the state is trying to put Roger Clemens, baseball star, in jail for lying to Congress, but Dick Fuld apparently is not worth going after.
AMY GOODMAN: A man recently named the worst CEO of all time—
MATT TAIBBI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN:—by Portfolio magazine.
MATT TAIBBI: Absolutely. Again, Fuld presided over Lehman during this period where it was engaged in all sorts of irregularities. I mean, aside from this matter of hiding his own personal income, Lehman, during the last few years of its existence, was engaged in these very, very shady transactions called the “Repo 105″ transactions. This was a kind of Enron-esque accounting where they were essentially borrowing tens of billions of dollars at the end of every quarter and then booking all that money as revenue. So, if you were an investor in Lehman Brothers and you’re looking at their bottom line, you’re thinking, “Hey, they’re making a lot of money. They’re doing great.” In fact, those were all loans, and after the quarter was over they were repaying that money. And it was guys like Fuld who were cashing out while everybody else was staying in.
AMY GOODMAN: Oliver Budde, who was he?
MATT TAIBBI: He was Lehman’s lawyer. He was the guy who uncovered those irregularities about Fuld’s reporting income, and he was the guy who went to the SEC and was told that, you know, they weren’t interested in his story.
AMY GOODMAN: No regulation?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, no. I mean, clearly—you know, the interesting thing about the Fuld case is that Lehman had been taking advantage of a loophole in the SEC’s rules in the early part of the 2000s to misreport Fuld’s income. But they actually caught themselves. They noticed that this practice was very widespread, and they created a new rule specifically to target this kind of income hiding that Fuld was doing. But they created the rule, but they didn’t do anything about it. They had clear cases of this rule being misused, and they chose not to do anything about it. So, even when we do have regulation on Wall Street, the laws are really often meaningless, because you need someone who has the will to prosecute, the will to investigate, to make them real.
AMY GOODMAN: Has anyone gone to jail?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, Bernie Madoff. And clearly, he’s the only person in this whole tableau—
AMY GOODMAN: Always called the greatest swindle of all time.
MATT TAIBBI: Right. But Bernie Madoff, honestly, compared to all these other guys, he’s really small potatoes. He’s also not really representative of what went on on Wall Street during this period. He’s a garden variety Ponzi scheme artist. Of course, he did it on a much bigger scale than most Ponzi scheme artists, but this is a crime that could have happened in the ’20s, the ’30s, the ’40s. It had nothing to do with this incredibly sophisticated, complex criminal fraud scheme involving, you know, the mortgage bubble and the sale of these phony baloney mortgage-backed securities. Madoff had nothing to do with that. He was just a garden variety criminal. And this is exactly the kind of case that the SEC and the Justice Department do prosecute: these outliers, these guys who are not part of the top echelon executives. And they make these cases, and they say, “Here’s evidence we’re doing our job.” The reality is very different.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk, Matt Taibbi, about what are the repercussions of what happened. What did the 2008 crash mean?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, it was—you know, this was the collapse of a giant bubble scheme. You know, when they did this, when they pumped the whole country full of these defective cars, which were these defective mortgages, it created a very, very dangerous situation for the entire country. They ended up essentially bankrupting or fatally wounding pension funds and insurance companies and banks all over the country. And so, now we’re all paying for those phony scams.
But the other amazing thing that they did is, you know, the banks, when they flooded the market with these phony securities, some of them were smart enough to realize that they were eventually going to blow, so they started betting against them. They went to companies like AIG, and they took out trillions of dollars of credit default swaps and pseudo-insurance policies on these mortgages. When they all blew up, you know, it blew up some of these companies, like AIG. And that’s what the bailout was really all about. The bailout wasn’t really to pay off real losses in these mortgages. It was really to pay off the bets on these mortgages. So, not only did they flood the market with a trillion dollars of defective merchandise, they got the United States taxpayer to pony up $5, $6, $7 trillion worth of bailout money to pay off their bets on all this stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: Which brings in the Obama administration. You talk about a lot of this happening under President Bush, but talk about what the Obama administration, what Geithner—talk about also Alan Greenspan, through the Bush years.
MATT TAIBBI: Right. Well, the most important thing to get from the Obama administration is that its economic policy represented absolute continuity with the policy of the previous administration. Timothy Geithner was the principal architect of Bush’s bailouts, and he was retained. Ben Bernanke, who was the head of the Fed under Bush, stayed on under Obama.
And they essentially continued the same bailout policy, which, again, was essentially to tell Wall Street that we’re going to make you whole again. You know, after they flooded the entire international economy with all these toxic debt instruments, their policy was to get Wall Street well again, and ostensibly they were supposed to reinvest in the economy and put people back to work. But instead, they just kept the money. And, I mean, they literally went from being completely insolvent to, you know, making $150 billion bonus pools every year, and that money is all public money. It’s pure bailout gift from the taxpayer.
AMY GOODMAN: Is Obama doing this because he’s got to raise a billion dollars in 2012 for the presidential race, and he’s going to turn to Wall Street for this?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, clearly. You know, look, Barack Obama’s number one private campaign contributor was Goldman Sachs. He took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate in history. He was heavily influenced by Wall Street guys. When he was elected, he immediately put Citigroup executives in charge of his economic transition team. I remember when I was covering his campaign how he promised never to bring a registered lobbyist into his cabinet. And one of the first things he did was put Mark Patterson, Goldman Sachs’s lobbyist, in the number two job at the Treasury. He’s got a JPMorgan Chase executive, who has $8 million in Chase stock, as the chief of staff right now. He’s been incredibly friendly to Wall Street. These guys have remained the architects of his economic policy.
AMY GOODMAN: And Jeffrey Immelt, head of GE?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, yeah. I mean, obviously he was a key player, as well. Again, its continuity with the previous administration is the key thing to focus on.
AMY GOODMAN: Alan Greenspan?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, Greenspan—I think what people don’t understand about the Fed is what an important role the Fed plays in this entire mess. Going back, you know, 20, 25 years, every time Wall Street gets in a lot of trouble, the Fed has been there to bail them out. They even had a term for it on Wall Street called the “Greenspan Put,” which essentially meant that every time the banks blew up a speculative bubble, they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent, and then start the game all over again.
After the crash in 2008, interest rates were slashed to basically nothing. The banks could go to the Fed and get money for free, and then they’re out lending it to us at five, six, seven—I mean, how much is your interest on your credit cards? It’s 15, 20 percent. It’s almost impossible not to make money in banking if your cost of capital is zero. That’s what banking is all about. And that’s what the Fed has done. It’s provided a massive subsidy system for the banks on Wall Street.
AMY GOODMAN: You say in your article that the justice system has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals, not just not prosecuting them, but protecting them.
MATT TAIBBI: Right. Well, one of the things that I found out when I was interviewing former SEC officials and whistleblowers, people who had been involved in some of these cases, is, you know, when you look at the revolving door situation with all these—the Mary Jo Whites and the Gary Lynches and the Linda Thompsons, these former high-ranking financial cops who leave government service and they go to work in these millionaire partnerships on Wall Street, it creates this collegial atmosphere where it’s just a few—a small group of lawyers who all know each other, and they’re in this constant merry-go-round, from government, back to private service, back to government again, and they’re really in this—it’s far too collegial.
There’s a scene in my story where the current head of the SEC enforcement, Robert Khuzami, is giving a speech to all these lawyers, and he’s saying, you know, “We have a new policy now where if you’re a defendant or if you’re a company that’s being investigated, you can come to the SEC, and we will get you answers as to whether or not the Department of Justice has a criminal interest in your case.” So, essentially, the SEC is now acting as a middleman for these companies, so they can go and find out whether they’re going to be criminally prosecuted. Then, once they get that information, they can make a decision about whether or not to settle financially with the SEC. And they pay a settlement. Nobody gets criminally prosecuted. No individuals ever get fined. They pay these fines, and they almost always have a little section in there that says that they do not admit wrongdoing. So, they don’t even have to say they’re sorry, essentially. These companies go and they pay their fines. No individuals have to suffer at all. And it’s all done in a very collegial way.
AMY GOODMAN: You suggest in your piece that Bernie Madoff went to jail because it was rich people who were the victims.
MATT TAIBBI: Absolutely. Every single former investigator or current investigator that I talked to said the same thing: Madoff went to jail because the wrong people suffered. You know, it was famous actors. It was, you know, the glitterati in New York. If these were teachers and firemen and all the usual suspects—you know, look at the—we have a million people in foreclosure in this country right now, and a lot of them are there because of predatory lending and because of this fraud scheme, but there are no criminal prosecutions. I think that’s the reality now, is that we don’t see anybody being criminally targeted unless their victims were powerful people themselves.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Lynn Turner, the former chief accountant for the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, Lynn Turner was the guy that I talked to, the former chief accountant—the chief accountant’s job at the SEC is actually an investigatory position. What they do is they look at disclosure violations, which means, you know, when companies issue their SEC quarterly reports, they have to make sure that everything that they say in those reports are accurate. That’s the chief accountant’s job. And Turner told me that, you know, that was his job, and in his experience, he saw case after case in which they had good evidence against companies that were involved in very shady dealings, and these cases were either slowed down or not pursued at all.
He gave me an example, you know, the Rite Aid case, which of course turned into—there were many cases like Rite Aid, that, you know, they had this case years before the Enron case blew up. They maybe could have done something about Enron if they had proceeded fast enough.
AMY GOODMAN: And the Rite Aid case was?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, Rite Aid was a company that was hiding billions of dollars in losses. It’s similar to the Lehman Brothers situation. They were trying to make their bottom line look better for shareholders, so they created, you know, these little cookie jar companies to hide their losses in. This is very similar to what Enron was doing, very similar to what WorldCom was doing. They had plenty of evidence on this case, but the case went nowhere for seven, eight years. And this is the typical MO of the SEC. They just do not act fast enough.
AMY GOODMAN: You mention that before the corruption starts, the state is at a disadvantage because policing Wall Street requires serious intellectual firepower, and the banks seize a huge advantage from the start by hiring away the top talent.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, you know, one lawyer I talked to put it to me this way. He said everybody knows that the top 80 percent of all the graduating classes of all the best law schools, they go to Wall Street. They go to these corporate defense firms where they get the real money-making jobs. The bottom 20 percent, he says, go to the SEC. That’s the way this works. And, you know, the way he described it, he says, “It’s just such a mismatch, it’s not even funny.” And even that 20 percent, of course, they get roped into the revolving door situation, so if any talent rises from that pool into positions of responsibility, they get lured away by the million-dollar partnerships.
So what your left is—you know, not to insult the people who work at the SEC, but clearly, the very best and brightest lawyers are working for these banks, where they continually come up with these very fiendish and almost brilliant defenses for the schemes that their companies are involved with. They always find a way to claim that what we did was legal, and they come up with these elaborate justifications. And some of these lawyers are really overwhelmed by these justifications, and they end up, you know, not having the gumption to prosecute or move forward with cases.
AMY GOODMAN: You think of the thousands of people who have been deported in the last years?
MATT TAIBBI: Three hundred and ninety-three thousand last year.
AMY GOODMAN: You think of the people who have gone to prison and what they’ve gone to prison for.
MATT TAIBBI: Right, right. You know, it’s incredible. I mean, there was a case in Ohio that somebody forwarded to me, where a woman, a single—a black single mother of two children, she lied about where she was living so that her two kids could get into a better school system. And the state of Ohio actually prosecuted her for fraud, and the judge in that case insisted—they sentenced her to, actually, I think it was five years in jail, but they insisted that she actually do 15 days. And the judge’s quote in that case was that if she didn’t do real jail time, that would demean the seriousness of the offense. And so, I mean, the case was ultimately commuted because of the public outcry, but this, to me, is symptomatic of what we’re dealing with here.
You have people in this country who—we have two-and-a-half million people in jail this country, you know, more than a million who are in jail for nonviolent crimes. And yet, we couldn’t find a single person on Wall Street to do even a day in jail for losing 40 percent of the world’s wealth in a criminal fraud scheme? And that tells you that we have—this goes beyond the cliché that rich people have better lawyers and they have an advantage. This is a step beyond that. This is a situation where the system is completely corrupted, and it’s true regulatory capture. The SEC and the Justice Department are essentially subsidiaries of Wall Street.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you mentioned Obama’s chief of staff, Bill Daley, newly appointed. What, $20 million he made last year, mainly from Chase.
MATT TAIBBI: Right, right. I mean, it’s—
AMY GOODMAN: What about the media coverage, when people are being appointed, when these deals are made, talking about just basic tenets of good journalism, following the money, talking about who’s profiting where and who’s surrounding those who are making these decisions?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, it’s funny. The general narrative with political journalism in this country—and I know, because I was one of these people for a long time. I covered presidential campaigns and presidential politics. A lot of the reporters who cover the stuff don’t know a whole lot about economics, and so they believe this sort of general notion that the guys on Wall Street are the experts; if you want to have somebody running your economy, you have to go to the experts; so it makes perfect sense that the President would want to surround himself with executives from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. And I think that their thinking doesn’t really get any more sophisticated than that. And so, a lot of these guys get a pass. Then people don’t really look at what these companies have been up to, what kind of influence they might have over the President’s decision making. And so, I think there isn’t very much coverage. There isn’t enough debate about what these appointments mean.
AMY GOODMAN: If you were president, what would you do right now?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, I would certainly get rid of all those guys, you know, from Wall Street. I think there needs to be a freeze on foreclosures. I mean, there’s all kinds of things that need to be done. But the most important thing is we have to, you know, get the right people into bodies like the SEC and the Justice Department. Everybody I talked to said the same thing. The existing laws we have, you know, they’re not perfect, but they’re probably good enough to do some real good. It’s just that we don’t have the right people in the jobs, and the will isn’t there to do these prosecutions. So, I think we’ve just got to get the right people in the right jobs.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi, his latest piece, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” It’s in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Thanks so much.
MATT TAIBBI: Thank you, Amy.
USA : HOW WE GOT WHERE WE ARE (video)
February 7, 2011 posted by Gordon Duff ·
THERE’S A NEW WORLD COMMIN’…EVEN WORSE THAN THIS ONE
“The son would kill more, millions in fact, rig two elections and run up more national debt in a single month than Jimmy Carter did in four years. America would have its own GESTAPO, called “Homeland Security” but managed by his good friends in Israel, cementing their partnership with what was once the party of Reagan, now running America into the ground, from “triple crown winner” to “glue factory nag” in 8 long and painful years.”
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
Political dialog in America is a sick joke. Only Ron Paul ever talks about issues and can’t move in Washington without continual snickering behind his back. He is seen as a joke, a caricature, a anachronism, part of the “lunatic fringe” of “conspiracy theory” folks. Paul, of course, totally charisma free and with the leadership ability of a cantaloupe, is the only one talking about the issues, albeit in a waffling “left handed” manner.
He knows very well that he is politically hopeless unless he packages himself for the Israeli lobby, an effort that would require him to reverse every stand he has ever taken. Expect him to do just that, everyone else has.
Wait for it, his statements on 9/11 alone show him to be morally flexible enough to succeed. He could be “Obama 2″ or even “Bush 3.”
After all, why should Ron Paul want to die of loneliness, talking about 9/11 conspiracies or the Federal Reserve. According to the media, these issues don’t exist, in fact I am not sure what the issues are. Every two years we get a few “bumper sticker” slogans and personal smears, what now passes for electioneering in the United States, interspersed with a generous helping of race hatred, class envy and religious bigotry.
With the people of Egypt hitting the streets, a real outpouring of courage and political awakening, the kind of yearning for democracy that Americans have, for 235 years, talked about spreading around the world, we here at home sit complacent in an increasingly totalitarian and dictatorial state.
Where did it get us? Where are we? What have we earned for ourselves with our new version of political activism, bullied into compliance by news censorship and domination of the media by New World Order disinformationalists. Oh, are we dragging out the “NWO” term today? Oh yes we are, thank you very much, I call it as I see it..
This is where we are:
- Broke-busted, we can’t even file bankruptcy, China won’t let us. America is 5 minutes away from a currency collapse. 94% of America’s 15 trillion dollar debt, built over 235 years, came from 3 presidents, Reagan, Bush and Bush. That wasn’t money that was “trickling down.”
- Continual decline in standard of living since Reagan and not by accident, the borders weren’t opened by the same people who crushed labor unions for nothing.
- 20 million empty homes, where did the people go?
- Hyperinflation, totally artificial, totally planned, driven by speculation in oil and commodities, price fixing in health care and Wall Street looting of the economy is hitting now. Buying gasoline, food and paying utilities will push millions of Americans into poverty. The extra 75 cents a gallon for gasoline alone is the biggest tax increase in history, one no American voted for, not knowingly.
- 80% of Americans believe their “news” is continually lying to them but continue to watch, accept and believe anyway. The American media is an outlet for press releases from the New World Order and nothing else. It doesn’t get any better than this!
- When the Supreme Court gave corporations full political rights, they created a class of feudal overlords. Americans are now indentured serfs in their own country!
- Israel receives, not 3 billion but between 10 and 20 billion yearly from the US, inclusive of “off the books” military aid and “no bid” contracts. 2 billion of that is spent in “pump priming,” paying off American politicians to take the real figure to 30 billion soon. Problem is, Israel is one of the richest countries on earth with nearly half the world’s 1000 billionaires holding Israeli passports though only 18 were born in Israel. Israel could give the United States 30 billion a year and not even notice it. Where did you think the 3 trillion dollars lost during the Bush administration went to? Check the names.
- After 9/11, an event Ron Paul rightly fears calling the “false flag” attack it was, laws were passed in the US that ended all constitutional rights for Americans including the right to bear arms. When habeas corpus was suspended in 2006, gun rights went with it, yes, the 2nd Amendment was eliminated but only when the government feels guns are a threat. The best part, they get to decide “when.” Under the Patriot Acts, which nullify the constitution further, they can enter any home, take guns, seize any property and jail any person indefinitely without legal representation or trial. When habeas corpus went, due processwent with it, you know, all that stuff about trials and confronting your accuser, jury of your “peers,” etc, etc. (and you were worried about “Obamacare”…)
- Almost 900,000 Americans have security clearances with 100,000 “top secret” and over 50,000 “SCI” (Special Compartmented Intelligence). One thing that isn’t a secret is that Israel has their pick of any American secrets, peddling our military technology to the highest bidder and sending the rest to ”Wikileaks.” The only people kept in the dark are the American people and the information kept from them is done so for a good reason. If the American people knew the truth, they might just so something about it, and we don’t mean “vote.”
- Since the collapse of 2007-8, most state and municipal governments, including school systems, have been bankrupt. None have cash reserves, only debt underwritten by bonds, and a few assets. Those assets are quickly being sold off, including, here in Ohio, the state’s turnpike system may be heading to China. If you don’t think you may have to have a credit card out when privatized police arrive at your home to seize your guns or take you to debtors prison, you aren’t paying attention. I hear that the prisoners in Gitmo are having to pay for torture. Are we waterboarding with Perrier now?
How we got here is obvious. Reagan put us here, or did he. Dick Eastman writes about that today:
“I can’t resist defending Ronald Reagan — and losing friends as happens whenever I defend that even greater man, Richard Nixon.
Reagan was really a good guy — but he didn’t know his enemy, and didn’t even recognize them when they infiltrated his administration — when they arranged an assassination attempt to but GHW Bush in the Oval Office — and then when it failed they controlled Reagan by gatekeeping non-Rockefeller viewpoints and actually actually slipping him poisons that degraded his functioning.
Donald Regan, his Secretary of the Treasury was part of the sabotage of the US economy — the co-architect with Burns and Volker of the so-called S & L scandal — that diverted all investment to junk while looting savers and destroying the Savings and Loan industry to effect greater financial-intermediary concentration in Rockefeller/Morgan/Sachs/etc hands — the biggest economic crime since crashing of the stock market in 1929. But Ronald Reagan did not know what Donald Reagan was up to.
But I know Reagan was not evil — although he was used by evil — because I myself held exactly the same views without realizing the evil behind them — in 1980 I was in the doctoral program in economics at Texas A & M – a convinced Misesian and Friedmanite Monetarist and reader of Ayn Rand — such a perfect antidote for Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter economics (of Samuelson, Galbraith, the “inflationists” Miller) — who really understood what Donald Reagan, Volker and the rest were up to at that time?
Reagan looked up to Wall Street as the bastion of “free enterprise” — I doubt he had heard of social credit — I know I had not (except for reading something about Kitson in the library one day — but then forgetting the name — until I rediscovered him and first learned about Douglas and Kitson in the early 2000s. These thinkers just were not known to Americans in Reagan’s time — communism and inflation and the welfare state were the issues. Yes, the big trade deficits began under Reagan, but there were justified as temporary and necessary for buying China off to keep her from reuniting with the USSR against us etc. — or so we thought.
I believe that Reagan of 1980 — if he could be moved to our time and given time to study the situation — would be a populist — would undergo the same realizations that I did — because the basic American virtues that are in many of us – most certainly lived in him. He really was a good guy, and no one is going to convince me otherwise.”
When Ron Paul spoke in front of the House of Representatives, to an empty room of course, pinning the blame for Saddam invading Kuwait on President Bush:
(from the Congressional Record)
“It had been long assumed that the United States Government, shortly before Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, gave Saddam Hussein a green light to attack.A State Department cable recently published by WikiLeaks confirmed that U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie did indeed have a conversation with Saddam Hussein one week prior to Iraq’s August 1, 1990, invasion of Kuwait.
…Ambassador Glaspie affirmed to Saddam that “the President had instructed her to broaden and deepen our relations with Iraq.” As Saddam Hussein outlined Iraq’s ongoing border dispute with Kuwait, Ambassador Glaspie was quite clear that, “we took no position on these Arab affairs.”
There would have been no reason for Saddam Hussein not to take this assurance at face value. The U.S. was quite supportive of his invasion and war of aggression against Iran in the 1980s. With this approval from the U.S. Government, it wasn’t surprising that the invasion occurred. The shock and surprise was how quickly the tables were turned and our friend, Saddam Hussein, all of a sudden became Hitler personified.
The document was classified, supposedly to protect national security, yet this information in no way jeopardized our security. Instead, it served to keep the truth from the American people about an event leading up to our initial military involvement in Iraq and the region that continues to today.
{time} 1440
The secrecy of the memo was designed to hide the truth from the American people and keep our government from being embarrassed. This was the initial event that had led to so much death and destruction–not to mention the financial costs–these past 20 years.”
Stepping this back further into time, the October Surprise, once thought to be a “conspiracy theory” also, again George H.W. Bush the actor. Bush, a private citizen, meeting with Iranians in Paris, telling them that if they kept Americans hostage, he would reward them with advanced weapons systems, although they were “technically” an enemy. During the Iran Contra hearings, we learned of the weapons sales, missiles of all kinds, advanced systems, millions in profit for Bush friends.
When the younger Bush took office, based on this history, 9/11 was a given. Now proven to have been in the planning since 1999, even before taking office, it was the son upstaging the father. Dad had rigged an election by selling out American diplomats. Later, as president, he “green lighted” Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war that killed hundreds of thousands. Remember when he sold out the Kurds in Iraq, allowing them to be slaughtered by Saddam, a favor for his friends in Turkey?
The son would kill more, millions in fact, rig two elections and run up more national debt in a single month than Jimmy Carter did in four years. America would have its own GESTAPO, called “Homeland Security” but managed by his good friends in Israel, cementing their partnership with what was once the party of Reagan, now running America into the ground, from “triple crown winner” to “glue factory nag” in 8 long and painful years.
This is how we got where we are.
Now a new generation of American geniuses are looking at Jeb Bush.
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Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer plans to hand over offshore banking secrets of the rich and famous to WikiLeaks
http://www.sott.net
Ed Vulliamy
Observer
Rudolf Elmer in Mauritius
He will disclose the details of ‘massive potential tax evasion’ before he flies home to stand trial over his actions.
The offshore bank account details of 2,000 “high net worth individuals” and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland.
British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London. Those involved include, Elmer tells the Observer, “approximately 40 politicians”.
Elmer, who after his press conference will return to Switzerland from exile in Mauritius to face trial, is a former chief operating officer in the Cayman Islands and employee of the powerful Julius Baer bank, which accuses him of stealing the information.
He is also – at a time when the activities of banks are a matter of public concern – one of a small band of employees and executives seeking to blow the whistle on what they see as unprofessional, immoral and even potentially criminal activity by powerful international financial institutions.
Along with the City of London and Wall Street, Switzerland is a fortress of banking and financial services, but famously secretive and expert in the concealment of wealth from all over the world for tax evasion and other extra-legal purposes.
Elmer says he is releasing the information “in order to educate society”. The list includes “high net worth individuals”, multinational conglomerates and financial institutions – hedge funds”. They are said to be “using secrecy as a screen to hide behind in order to avoid paying tax”. They come from the US, Britain, Germany, Austria and Asia – “from all over”.
Clients include “business people, politicians, people who have made their living in the arts and multinational conglomerates – from both sides of the Atlantic”. Elmer says: “Well-known pillars of society will hold investment portfolios and may include houses, trading companies, artwork, yachts, jewellery, horses, and so on.”
“What I am objecting to is not one particular bank, but a system of structures,” he told the Observer. “I have worked for major banks other than Julius Baer, and the one thing on which I am absolutely clear is that the banks know, and the big boys know, that money is being secreted away for tax-evasion purposes, and other things such as money-laundering – although these cases involve tax evasion.”
Elmer was held in custody for 30 days in 2005, and is charged with breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws, forging documents and sending threatening messages to two officials at Julius Baer.
Elmer says: “I agree with privacy in banking for the person in the street, and legitimate activity, but in these instances privacy is being abused so that big people can get big banking organisations to service them. The normal, hard-working taxpayer is being abused also.
“Once you become part of senior management,” he says, “and gain international experience, as I did, then you are part of the inner circle – and things become much clearer. You are part of the plot. You know what the real products and service are, and why they are so expensive. It should be no surprise that the main product is secrecy … Crimes are committed and lies spread in order to protect this secrecy.”
The names on the CDs will not be made public, just as a much shorter list of 15 clients that Elmer handed to WikiLeaks in 2008 has remained hitherto undisclosed by the organisation headed by Julian Assange, currently on bail over alleged sex offences in Sweden, and under investigation in the US for the dissemination of thousands of state department documents.
Elmer has been hounded by the Swiss authorities and media since electing to become a whistleblower, and his health and career have suffered.
“My understanding is that my client’s attempts to get the banks to act over various complaints he made came to nothing internally,” says Elmer’s lawyer, Jack Blum, one of America’s leading experts in tracking offshore money. “Neither would the Swiss courts act on his complaints. That’s why he went to WikiLeaks.”
That first crop of documents was scrutinised by the Guardian newspaper in 2009, which found “details of numerous trusts in which wealthy people have placed capital. This allows them lawfully to avoid paying tax on profits, because legally it belongs to the trust … The trust itself pays no tax, as a Cayman resident”, although “the trustees can distribute money to the trust’s beneficiaries”.
Now, Blum says, “Elmer is being tried for violating Swiss banking secrecy law even though the data is from the Cayman Islands. This is bold extraterritorial nonsense. Swiss secrecy law should apply to Swiss banks in Switzerland, not a Swiss subsidiary in the Cayman Islands.”
Julius Baer has denied all wrongdoing, and rejects Elmer’s allegations. It has said that Elmer “altered” documents in order to “create a distorted fact pattern”.
The bank issued a statement on Friday saying: “The aim of [Elmer's] activities was, and is, to discredit Julius Baer as well as clients in the eyes of the public. With this goal in mind, Mr Elmer spread baseless accusations and passed on unlawfully acquired, respectively retained, documents to the media, and later also to WikiLeaks. To back up his campaign, he also used falsified documents.”
The bank also accuses Elmer of threatening colleagues.
From Haiti to Australia: The Horrendous Payback of Global Capitalism
 . pic : http://www.socialist.netPost by Finian Cunningham
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Global Research, January 13, 2011
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From the ongoing hell of Haiti’s earthquake victims to the horror of families being swept to their deaths in Australia’s catastrophic floods, one conclusion is clear despite the mainstream news media’s usual myopic coverage: this is the perverse payback of the capitalist system. A system in which the private profit of an elite dominates all other needs of the common people – no matter how vital those needs are.
Decades of exploitation and neglect of social needs are now magnifying manifold the impacts from natural phenomena that are part and parcel of living in a physical world. Such events are inevitable, but the extent of destruction is not – only it is inevitable because of the perverse profit system that mandates death and destruction in the wake of its seismic injustice.
Whether it is profiteering by US transnational corporations from Haiti’s sweatshop poverty or profiteering by Australian property developers and banks – all aided and abetted by supine governments that do the bidding for these entities by slashing taxes on the wealthy and giving free rein to their depredations – the appalling bottom line is that the vast majority of citizens are being abandoned more than ever in the face of the consequences. The same gargantuan scam of privatizing profits, socializing costs is evident elsewhere around the world as countless people die from freezing weather in North America and Europe simply because they can’t afford to heat their homes or even live in a home.
Adding insult to injury is the pathetic, callous response of these servile governments as the increasing havoc of crony capitalism descends. Despite initial pledges of generous aid to Haiti from the US government, scarcely a cent has actually been sent as more than a million people in that Caribbean country continue to live in makeshift tents and thousands more die from cholera. (By contrast, the solidarity of ordinary Americans digging deep into their already threadbare pockets to send over $1 billion in aid to Haiti is truly edifying – and a sign of hope for the coming necessary historic change.)
Meanwhile, the Australian government talks about handing out millions-of-dollars-worth of aid to tens of thousands of flood victims, compared with billions-of-dollars-worth of profits that were siphoned off by a coterie of bankers and developers who were allowed to build whole towns on high-risk lands. But through its crocodile tears this same government insists that federal budgets must still be balanced to placate the same financial oligarchy. Citizens are exhorted – via the usual media mouthpieces – to drum up “self-reliance”. One wonders what the mothers who had babies ripped from their arms by the torrents make of that scrap of advice.
Among the insults from the global oligarchy is the absurd response to the Australian crisis from British prime minister David Cameron who announced that the United Kingdom stood ready to help its former colony. What? Help from a government that is forcing draconian austerity budgets on its populace and sending in police riot squads to bludgeon civil protest. Surely this is public relations at its most absurd. Or how about the report that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is making a personal (but undisclosed) donation to help her subjects in Queensland. How touching that this blue blood antecedent of the global oligarchy should dip into the £10 million or so a year that she sucks from the taxpayers.
So there you have it. The ordinary workers and citizens spend a lifetime being exploited, neglected, degraded and ripped off by the wealth-siphoning system – otherwise known as capitalism – and then when the walls of that same unsustainable system come crashing down, we are informed through a loudhailer by the rich and their puppets on safer ground: you are on your own.
But the truly heartening and inadvertent thing is that we are not alone. We are in vast and growing numbers, and through the mayhem and misery, we – the vast majority of ordinary people around the world – are realizing that the empire of capitalism is finished and its last vestiges of rotten corruption must be swept away and a new society needs to be built; one where social needs are served by economics and politics. It is a harsh and horrendous way to learn, but we are nevertheless learning.
Finian Cunningham is a journalist and musician: finianpcunningham@yahoo.ie, www.myspace.com/finiancunninghammusic |
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Gerald Celente – Internet nuke bomb waiting to go off
http://dprogram.net
(RussiaToday) – Gerald Celente, the founder of the Trends Research Institute, believes that the Internet will empower the youth of the world to unite to start a revolution that will overthrow the existing deadlocked elitist establishment. He predicts that in 2011 every citizen is going to realize that the Great Recession the world has been living through is actually a Great Depression, because the American establishment is “running out of schemes.”
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The Daily Bail ………
« Rothschild Bank AND Goldman Sachs Are Both On The LIST Of Bondholders Getting U.S. Taxpayer Billions In Irish Bailout »
Complete list of bondholders inside, and BBC footage of Sir Eveylyn de Rothschild. The deceased Guy de Rothschild, pictured, no longer exploits the masses for banking profit, but his progeny carry on his legacy effectively.
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Scroll down for VIDEO of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild…
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U.S. taxpayers finance approximately 20% of the IMF’s budget.
Guess what, Ireland. Brian Lenihan and Brian Cowen just sold you down the IMF river. Why? To bail out bank bondholders and giant European banks. Of course! That’s what governments are for these days, apparently. And they’ll tell you that the bailout policy is all for you own good. And for little old ladies and pensioners and orphans. Just don’t tell that to the cancer patients.
Yep, another nation made IMF debt slaves on behalf of the international banking cartels. And Goldman Sachs and Rothschild & Compagnie are on the list.
Check it out below — Guido Fawkes’ blog has acquired the list of Anglo-Irish Bank’s bondholders.
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Anglo-Irish Bank did not represent a systemic risk to the Irish economy, it wasn’t a high street bank like AIB or the Bank of Ireland. If it had been allowed to go the way of Lehmans the only losers would have been shareholders and bondholders. The Irish state stepped in and nationalised a bank that was basically run by crooks lending to property speculators.
- The Irish people are taking losses that should rightly have been shouldered by bondholders.
Every child in Ireland is being bequeathed a huge debt at birth to protect the interests of foreign, mainly German, bondholders – why? Guido was once a bond trader, it was always understood that sometimes the bond issuer defaults.
- That is the risk investors take.
So why is Dublin’s political establishment so keen to protect foreign investors at the expense of future generations? Guido has obtained the list of foreign Anglo-Irish bondholders as at the close of business tonight. These are the people whom Dublin’s politicians really seem to care about:
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Great analysis of the list from the Golem XIV…
Of the 80 listed companies only 7 listed pensions and being a cooperative savings institution. Of those only 4 listed churches and unions as their clients, the others could well have been big pension funds. The churches and unions in question were in Germany not Ireland. Those seven companies are amongst the smallest of Anglo Irish’s bond holders. I only have figures for four of the seven. The largest, Union Investments of Germany, has a mere €165 billion in assets under management.
The total assets under management which I was able to compile from publicly available figures is €20,871,150,000,000. That is an underestimate because the bond holders who turn out to be Private and Swiss banks don’t publish any figures. So Anglo Irish’s ‘bond holders’ hold and invest MORE than 20.8 trillion euros. Guido lists those bond holders as holding between them 4 Billion euros in Anglo Irish bonds.
Now, in my opinion both figures are likely to be wrong. Certainly my figure is a large underestimate. But taking them at face value Anglo Irish would account for one 5000th of the total assets being managed by all the bond holders. So would even a total default by Anglo Irish cause that much, let alone systemic, pain and risk? Why are the ‘Bond holders’ and the Irish government so concerned that the Irish people be forced to take the loss and pay the debts for them?
Now lets look at the other side of the equation, at Ireland itself. Well Ireland’s GDP before the crash, in 2008, was … drum roll please… €207 billion. Or 0.207 trillion.
SO…. on one side we have Ireland whose bond holders, its people, have between them a total GDP wealth of 0.207 trillion euros. Who are being FORCED, against their will, to pay Anglo Irish bank’s debts to its bond holders, who between them hold 20.8 Trillion euros. The people of Ireland are paying to, and protecting the wealth and power of, people who have 100 times more wealth!
So where do these wealthy bond holders live and work?
Germany has the most with 15 of the bond holders. Who between them hold 5.3 trillion euros.
France is next with 10 bond holders. Who have about 4 trillion to keep them warm.
Britain is third with 9 who have around 3 trillion.
The Swiss have 6 but who have about 8.5 trillion.
America has only three and hold only a trillion.
Other nations include, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Holland Finland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, South Africa and Italy.
All these figures are very rough. The figure for Switzerland is certainly under because Private Swiss banks just don’t publish figures. What we can say for sure, figures or no figures, is these are not banks investing widow’s pensions or orphan’s pennies.
So who are they? Well many of the bond holders are privately held banks, which list their activities as asset management for off-shore, non-resident and high value individuals. To give you an example, one of the private banks is EFG Bank of Luxembourg. EFG stands for European Financial Group which is the third largest private bank group in Switzerland. It manages over €7.5 trillion in assets. It is ‘mostly’, 40%, owned by Mr Spiro Latsis, son of a Greek shipping magnate. He also owns 30% of Hellenic Petroleum. His personal fortune is estimated to be about $9 Billion.
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DB here. Blasphemous rape of a nation in order to reward billionaire bondholders who were reckless investors and malignant in oversight.
Video – Text from Youtube page – Sir EVELYN DE ROTHSCHILD talks about the global financial crisis to the BBC in October 2008…
In 2003, following the retirement of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild as head of N M Rothschild & Sons of London, the English and French firms merged to become one umbrella entity called “Group Rothschild.” Ownership was shared equally between the French and English branches of the family under the leadership of David de Rothschild. In 2007, the English branch sold their share to the French branch. The French branch now fully own N M Rothschild & Sons.
Related stories:
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The secret Wall Street bailout
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| The US Federal Reserve chairman looked depressed in an interview with the television show 60 minutes because the economy may be heading for a depression, says Danny Schechter [GALLO/GETTY] |
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Go, Wall Street, Go!
Never mind the rise in unemployment and foreclosures. Never mind the folks waiting to know if they will get the benefits they need before they are cut off. Never mind the growing gap between rich and poor, and the rapid spread of poverty. (Did you know that inequality in the US is at the highest level of any industrialised country?)
Does any of this matter?
The idea of equality as a social goal is apparently passé. Christmas has a special meaning on Wall Street: It’s bonus time.
Just five too big to fail bankster companies have stashed $90 billion for payouts to prized employees. They know that the beat on The Street is fading, so it seems to be take the money and run time. Incidentally, that “bonus pool” will rise with end of the year earnings.
Right now, the greedsters have a PR problem – how to transfer all this wealth from the banks to themselves with the lowest possible tax rate and the lowest degree of bad publicity. They also will try to focus the media on supporting their right to such over the top rewards and “incentives” in the name, of course, of fostering an economic recovery.
Selling your soul for a sixpence
Yes, it is a cynical exercise but no more blatant that the successful campaign to extend the Bush tax cuts for millionaires. The mantra is simple: to those who have, more should be given. So say the faux populists of the Tea Party and their Republican benefactors. So say the Democrats in the interest of compromise and getting some unemployment benefits to workers even at an unacceptable cost.
Who will remind the American people that many of these banks are only here to pay because the government – our government – bailed them out and, then, the Federal Reserve Bank pumped trillions in low-interest loans into their coffers.
Can we count on the media to point this out, to make the connection clear about the many government subsidies behind the gigantic payouts that are on the way to companies lobbying against government programs? Don’t count on it.
Last Sunday, the television programme 60 Minutes sat down with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, they asked him about the bonuses. The Fed head had nothing to say about that. He just wanted to praise his own efforts to save the financial system.
The language that never lies
If you watched his body language you could see that his stab at optimism was forced. He admitted it will be at least five years – if that – before more jobs come back. He seemed depressed perhaps because he didn’t want to tell us we are in a depression. His past track record as a forecaster has been flawed to a fault. That was not noted.
As is common these days on the networks, no criticisms or contrary concerns integrated into this world-shaking interview. There was no comment from Bernie Sanders who challenged the Fed’s admission of a “jaw-dropping” injection of trillions into banks here and abroad. There wasn’t even a response from libertarians like Ron Paul who was also horrified.
So much for reporting.
David Degraw of Amped Status says the recent Fed disclosures were shocking.
“Just when I thought the banksters couldn’t possibly shock me anymore… they did. We were finally granted the honour and privilege of finding out the specifics, a limited one-time Federal Reserve view, of a secret taxpayer funded ‘backdoor bailout’ by a small group of unelected bankers. This data release reveals ‘emergency lending programs’ that doled out $12.3 trillion in taxpayer money – $3.3 trillion in liquidity, $9 trillion in ‘other financial arrangements.’ Wait, what? Did you say $12.3 trillion tax dollars were thrown around in secrecy by unelected bankers… and Congress didn’t know any of the details!?”
Of course not!
Wall Street: master of puppets
The myth that the media continues to truck in, is that somehow the Congress and the President are in charge of the economy. They aren’t. Wall Street and the corporate world are clearly running the show, with little restraint so far, effective oversight or regulation.
Back to Degraw: “The Federal Reserve was secretly throwing around our money in unprecedented fashion, and it wasn’t just to the usual suspects like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, etc.; it was to the entire Global Banking Cartel. To central banks throughout the world: Australia, Denmark, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, England… To the Fed’s foreign primary dealers like Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Royal Bank of Scotland (UK), Barclays (UK), BNP Paribas (France)… All their Ponzi players were ‘gifted.’ All the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations got their cut.”
Degraw continues: “If you still had any question as to whether or not the United States is now the world’s preeminent banana republic, the final verdict was just delivered and the decision was unanimous. The ayes have it…. I’ve been arguing for years that the market is rigged and that the major Wall Street firms are elaborate Ponzi schemes, as have many other people who built their beliefs on rational thought, reasoned logic and evidence. We already came to this conclusion by doing the research and connecting the dots.”
Where does this leave us? Is there any hope?
In search of a ‘scape goat’
The critics of the Fed see little: There are some related developments underway that could shake things up. The Bernie Madoff ponzi probers are targeting banks including HSBC that went along with his $65 bn dollar fraud. A Swiss bank has already admitted it was complicit. The FDIC is investigating officials from banks that failed. Bank of America just coughed up millions for financing an illicit bond scheme.
At the same time, the “Justice Department” has mounted an investigation into insider trading. They say there are 343 criminal investigations underway but none against big players. ProRublica writes: “Everyone is wondering: Where are the investigations related to the financial crisis?”
John Hueston, a former lead Enron prosecutor, wonders: “Have they committed the resources in the right place? … Nobody from Lehman, Merrill Lynch or Citigroup has been charged criminally with anything.”
At the same time, WikiLeaks is promising new revelations about financial chicanery at a major US bank that many suspect is Bank of America. On the housing front, many class action suits and investigations by state officials are challenging major fraudclosures.
The crimes of Wall Street may yet do the bonus babies in. There is still a slim chance that, as the economy gets worse, the people of this country will finally get to see through the haze and the BS and act. Neither the Democrats nor the Repugnicans seem to have any fresh ideas.
It’s up to us to break through our own illusions to fight the plunder of our country and world. We need to call for a jailout, not a bailout. of financial criminals – a full investigation followed by the prosecution of wrong doers. We need a campaign for economic justice.
If you are as disgusted by all this, as I am, it’s time to act. Will we? Will you?
Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film on DVD about the financial crisis as a crime story. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com)
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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10 Things You Can Do to Starve the Wall St. Beast and Grab Yourself a Piece of the Pie
Pic: Copyright Danielle Lee All Rights Reserved 2008
http://www.alternet.org
Dialogue on the economic crisis has focused on symptoms: bailouts, corruption on Wall Street, collapse in housing prices, intractable unemployment, Federal Reserve monetary policy. Most people have been socialized to silence on the topic of the disease itself: debilitating wealth concentration. We hear little on the overwhelming argument that wealth concentration is the root cause of the lingering crisis because within milliseconds of the words escaping into the public arena, screams of “Socialist! Socialist!” proliferate; an army of right wing talk radio buffoons fill the airwaves with dire warnings of the growing communist threat of wealth redistribution; Rick Santelli spazzes out on CNBC; and the Tea Partiers figuratively (or literally) stomp on us.
The people who scream the loudest aren’t the super rich who control the wealth; they’re part of a labyrinthine network of hired hands who function as high pitch bodyguards for the wealth hoarders. The actual super rich are the folks who appear on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans; people like Charles and David Koch, each worth $21.5 billion, who create multi layers of front groups, like Americans for Prosperity, to make it not only socially acceptable to hoard wealth but social nirvana. The Kochs hold secret confabs with their wealthy friends once a year, fingering their worry beads and plotting to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, lest they become number 6 on the Forbes list of billionaires instead of number 5. This, while 43 million of their fellow Americans live beneath the poverty level; including one in every 5 children.
David Barber, Associate Professor of American History at the University of Tennessee, is not afraid of the cacophony from the wealth hoarders’ cabal, writing bluntly about the dangers of wealth concentration. In response to an email query last week, Dr. Barber said:
American society’s fantastically skewed distribution of wealth stands as one of the main structural fault lines underpinning the Crash. America’s richest one percent of the population own over forty percent of America’s wealth — exclusive of home ownership — in this, the most opulent society history has ever known. On the other hand, the bottom sixty percent of Americans own approximately one percent of all of America’s wealth. Maintaining the Bush tax cuts for the rich only perpetuates a part of the contradiction which brought on the present phase of the world economic crisis.
Dr. Barber’s statistics come from a study conducted by Edward N. Wolff for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in March 2010. Other findings from that study include the following:
The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007. The next 4 percent also received about a third of the total gain and the next 15 percent about a fifth, so that the top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11 percent.
In 2007, the top 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of all stocks; the top 5 percent owned 69 percent; the top 10 percent held 81 percent.
Debt was the most evenly distributed component of household wealth, with the bottom 90 percent of households responsible for 73 percent of total indebtedness.
Wealth concentration in too few hands while the general populace is saddled with too much debt to buy the goods and services produced by the corporations, in whom the wealthiest hold 81 percent of the stock, is a replay of the conditions leading to the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. (The Social Security system was borne out of that debacle. This time around, the wealthiest hope to use the funds from the bottom 90 percent flowing into the Social Security trust to prop up stock prices for the benefit of the top 10 percent. Any action today which postpones the inevitable process of more equitable wealth distribution, such as privatizing Social Security or retaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, will simply hasten the onset of more economic pain which will broaden out to devour the wealth of the upper quintiles through deflation.)
Writing in his book, “The Worldly Philosophers,” Robert Heilbroner explained the situation leading up to the depression of the 1930s:
The national flood of income was indubitably imposing in its bulk, but when one followed its course into its millions of terminal rivulets, it was apparent that the nation as a whole benefited very unevenly from its flow. Some 24,000 families at the apex of the social pyramid received a stream of income three times as large as 6 million families squashed at the bottom — the average income of the fortunate families was 630 times the average income of the families at the base…And then there was the fact that the average American had used his prosperity in a suicidal way; he had mortgaged himself up to his neck, had extended his resources dangerously under the temptation of installment buying, and then had ensured his fate by eagerly buying fantastic quantities of stock – some 300 million shares, it is estimated – not outright, but on margin, that is, on borrowed money.
In both eras, Wall Street ceased being an allocator of capital to worthy enterprises and became an institutionalized system of rigged wealth transfer. The primary artifices this time around included issuing knowingly false stock research; lining up large institutional clients to buy at predetermined prices (laddering) on the first day of a new issue of stock – this made the price appear to soar and thus sucked in the small investor; threatening to take the stock broker’s commission away (penalty bid) if the broker let the small investor take profits in the newly issued stock – the practice was known as flipping and was reserved for the big boys. When the tech mania went bust and the rigged game was revealed, the small investor left in droves. Wall Street, with the Fed’s able assistance, fueled the next bubble – housing – and crafted complex derivatives to turn this market into a cash cow for Wall Street and foreclosures for Main Street.
The January 21, 2010 Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to have staggering financial influence in our elections (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) and the November 2, 2010 results of the midterm election should send a bone chilling message. Help is not on the way. The end game of this massive wealth concentration is long-term deflation, economic misery and multiple generations who will look back on us as the hapless society who couldn’t tame the Wall Street greed machine for want of a plan.
Thinking Americans can no longer wait for politicians to save us. When a dedicated public servant like Senator Russ Feingold from Wisconsin is unceremoniously tossed out and a billionaire-financed Senator like Rand Paul from Kentucky is sworn in on a so-called populist mandate, the baton for economic salvation falls to the individual. I offer below ten ideas to get started on the first course of starving the Wall Street beast. And, just to be clear to those perched on the edge of their seats preparing to scream “Socialist!,” I’m not suggesting “redistributing” wealth; I’m suggesting putting the wealth back into the hands from which it was taken in a rigged wealth transfer scheme.
(1) Shorten Your Home Mortgage: Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis summed it up: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” The Wall Street beast is thriving on interest on our debt and using it to hire lobbyists and fund politicians who will work for their interests, not ours.
According to March 31, 2009 data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, four Wall Street behemoths control 35 percent of all the insured bank deposits in the U.S. and 46 percent of the assets (although the quality of those “assets” is very much a subject of debate). Those firms are: Bank of America Corporation, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup, Inc. That leaves the other 8,242 FDIC insured banking institutions to share the balance. The total domestic deposits were $7.5 trillion with total assets of $13.5 trillion as of March 2009. That is far too much wealth concentration in too few hands as we’ve sadly learned from having to bail out those four institutions.
Seek your accountant and/or financial advisor’s advice about converting your 30 year mortgage to a 15 year to move wealth from the bank’s shareholders pockets to yours. Rates have never been more favorable for such a move. Typically, over the life of the loan, you will save tens of thousands of dollars of interest. You can look at the savings for your specific situation by clicking on the mortgage calculator at www.bankrate.com. (I’m not endorsing any of the bank loans offered at this site since I haven’t done any research in that area; I’m just suggesting the use of the mortgage calculator.)
Talk to your children before they buy a home about the interest differential between a 30-year and 15-year mortgage over the life of the loan. Show them how to use the mortgage calculator.
(2) Think Local: Consider moving money as it becomes liquid out of the big Wall Street banks that have an iron grip on your Congress and moving it into FDIC insured certificates of deposit at your community bank (being careful not to exceed the insurance limits). A good rule of thumb is to ladder maturities to coincide with when you will need the money. Again, you should consult with your accountant and/or financial advisor. This will also help provide loan funds to local businesses and residential housing in your area.
(3) Start a Business: Don’t worry about the possible arrival of the pink slip; be proactive. Start a business on the side. Do well by doing good: what product or service can you provide that a struggling consumer wants and can afford. (Ideas might include: debt counseling, low cost child care, foreclosure counseling, a pick-your-own fruit and vegetable business if you own farm land, consignment shop, home staging services to help with quicker resales.)
(4) Invest Wisely: Get smart with your 401(k). Investing in the S&P 500 is simply feeding the beast; the beast that’s using your cheap capital to hire lobbyists, create PACs and separate you from representative government. Some 401(k) plans allow you to roll over 50 percent or more to your own IRA after reaching a certain age. Call your benefits office and find out what your options are. Speak to your accountant and/or financial advisor before making any move. You may also want to consider opening an IRA at a community bank and buying insured CDs as an alternative to putting more funds in the 401(k).
(5) Check Out Credit Union Membership: Do you have a family member that belongs to a Credit Union? Chances are they can get you an account there. If you need to use a credit card, try to get one through the credit union at a reasonable rate and then cut up any high-rate card. It’s an outrage that some of the banks that required a citizen bailout are getting their money from the Federal Reserve at almost no cost while charging struggling citizens 20 percent interest.
(6) Don’t Use Credit Cards from Corporations That Abuse You: All of the following have one thing in common: Home Depot, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Macy’s, Sears, Zales. They all extend credit to their customers on a Citigroup credit card. Forty million customers are helping to prop up Citigroup and its anti-consumer, anti-citizen practices by using these cards. Citigroup makes its workers sign away their rights to go to court (see number 8 below) and has serially abused investors through corrupt practices.
(7) Brand Attacks: Chances are high that your local storeowners don’t have a PAC and lobbyists on K Street working against your interests? Reward them with your business and starve the S&P 500 firms until they get the message: if you want me to honor your brand, honor my right to representative government.
(8) Return the Courts to Workers: Many of the largest corporations force workers to sign away their rights to the Nation’s courts as a condition of employment. It’s called mandatory arbitration and it’s an unfair process that is rigged to favor the corporation. If you interview for a new job, ask if the company has such a policy and walk away if they do.
(9) Complain: Don’t let shady practices go undetected. Write a detailed report and file it with the appropriate body: local district attorney, state attorney general’s office, consumer protection groups; and write a letter to the editor to the local paper. This helps good businesses prosper and starves dirty businesses of customers.
(10) Just Say No: To frontal nudity photographs/skin radiation/genitalia groping; all just to board a plane. Don’t fly. You will be standing up for civil rights and starving Wall Street. Body scanner companies trade on Wall Street and the banksters are hoping domestic surveillance is their new cash cow.
Alex Jones: The Real Pyramid of Power
http://www.infowars.com
Comment :
The”Sith Lords” exposed by Alex Jones !
related Post found on http://dprogram.net :
‘Wall Street behind US wars’ – Stephen Lendman
Posted by sakerfa on November 12th, 2010
(PressTV) – The Wall Street banks are behind the US government’s policies, including decisions to go on war, a senior American journalist has told Press TV.
“The Wall Street banks have a controlling interest. They decide the way the country will be run, including waging wars,” Stephen Lendman, writer and radio host from Chicago told Press TV in a Wednesday interview.
“One reason for waging wars is they are so profitable. Not just to the defense contractors, [but also] to the big banks, to technology companies, all companies that supply goods and services including private contractors that have every incentive to want America to be in war,” he added.
During his two terms in office, former US president George W. Bush ordered invasions on Afghanistan and Iraq. The two wars resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair justified the Iraq war by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which were never found.
In his recently released memoir Decision Points, Bush says he was shocked when WMDs were not found in Iraq.
“The plan to go to war with Iraq was already conceived. The blueprint was written. It was on the shelf ready to take out,” Lendman said.
Source: PressTV
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Gerald Celente on the Corbett Report – October 30th, 2010
Note : The Top News from Gerald Celentes Blog are now available in my Sidebar
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Isn’t she beautiful ?
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- Storytelling: NATO rewrites the Syrian conflictYossef Bodansky, the U.S.-Israeli expert who wrote the official history of Al Qaeda, is back. The one who had explained with a straight face that bin Laden was both an Iraqi and Iranian agent, and that Saddam Hussein had financed the attacks of September 11, no longer works for the U.S. Congress and the Defense Department, but for the Institute Strategie für […]
- Israel developing 'spy-butterfly' for indoor surveillanceThe future is here and this is not a butterfly on your wall, as Israeli drones are getting tiny. Their latest project – a butterfly-shaped drone weighing just 20 grams - the smallest in its range so far – can gather intelligence inside buildings. The new miniscule surveillance device can take color pictures and is capable of a vertical take-off and hover fli […]
- The NSA can spy on Google and moreThe National Security Agency is under no obligation to disclose the nature of its relationship with Google, confirmed a Washington D.C. federal appeals court on 11 May 2012. A three-judge panel ruled that in view of NSA's special status, any arrangement with the Internet giant can remain secret. "Any information relating to the relationship between […]
- May 2012-05-18, Syrian Crisis UpdatedCeasefire violations Anti-government activists talk about bombardments by Syrian Arab Army in Al-Sultanieh and Jobar neighborhoods and in Rastan area of Homs Explosions are heard in several neighborhoods of Homs this morning including Rastan area of Homs countryside. News says one shell is fired on the electronic bakery in Rastan area Ahmad Al-Qaai gets kill […]Syrian Center for Documentation
- The Empire Holds Its War Council in ChicagoThe Obama administration imposed the most draconian police state legal structures in U.S. history before summoning the heads of NATO to Chicago. NATO accounts for 70 percent of military spending on the planet – combining the capacities of yesterday's imperialists and the current superpower. According to the Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, “The […]Glen Ford
- Kelly Thomas, victim of police brutalityOn July 5 last year Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old schizophrenic homeless man, was so badly beaten and stun-gunned by Fullerton California police officers that he was left unrecognizable. He died 5 days later from blunt force trauma to the head. Up to 5 police officers assault him with batons, tasers and fists. When the unconscious and bloodied body of Thomas w […]
- May 2012-05-17, Syrian Crisis UpdatedCeasefire violations Anti-government activists say that a mortar shell was fired on Douma area which killed 5 members of Al-Shanwani family. Clashes between the Syrian Army and insurgents took place last night in Daraya and continued on this evening; anti-government activists talk about causalities. Gunmen assassinated last night Sergeant Imad Shkaira in Al- […]Syrian Center for Documentation
- Shale gas: Halliburton's weapon of mass devastationAcross the United States the exploitation of gas and oil from shale rocks using Halliburton's hydraulic fracturing technology continues amid rising disasters. Unregulated drilling practices, rendered legal by the "Halliburton Loophole" engineered in 2005 by Vice President Dick Cheney, have had staggering health and environmental effects. Lured […]F. William Engdahl
- AFP rewrites the Lockerbie case
- Signs of the times (www.Sott.net)
- New research shows long term high-fructose corn syrup diet alters learning and memory May 21, 2012New research out of the University of California, Los Angeles has found that aside from the health risks already associated with high-fructose corn syrup, long term diets heavy in the sugary substance could actually result in a decline in memory and learning ability. Thankfully, this study wasn't purely bad news, as it revealed that this can actually be […]
- Ancient Mayan workshop for astronomers discovered May 21, 2012Archaeologists have found a small room in Mayan ruins where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society's intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago. The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya. Scientists already knew they must have been keeping such records at that ti […]
- Is an eruption at Costa Rica's Turrialba Volcano imminent? May 21, 2012Costa Rica's National Seismological Network has upgraded the color threat level to yellow of Turrialba Volcano, in the province of Cartago east of the capital. A statement issued by Raúl Mora-Amador, coordinator of Seismology, Volcanology and Geophysical Exploration at the University of Costa Rica, indicates a threat level of yellow means that the Natio […]
- Facebook's Overnight Millionaires Begin Lavish Spending Spree May 21, 2012Facebook's $104 billion initial public offering on Friday transformed thousands of young people into instant millionaires - as well as a few billionaires - and already the booming luxury market in Silicon Valley is experiencing an upswing. Multi-million dollar mansions and $100,000 Porsches are flying off local shelves in the Palo Alto, Santa Clara and […]
- The unholy trinity of industry, government and academics : "just study something industry would fund" May 21, 2012Here's what happens when corporations begin to control education. "When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer's markets, the first one told me that 'no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,'" said a PhD student at a large […]
- Monsanto Funds College Research: Big Ag 101 - Playing at a Campus Near You May 21, 2012When government officials insist on making science-based decisions in food and agricultural policy, what happens when the research is increasingly funded by huge corporations with a vested interest in the results? According to a new report by GAP coalition partner Food & Water Watch, almost 25 percent of agricultural research funding at land-grant univer […]
- M6.2 quake and several above M5.0 hit off Northeast Japan in last day May 21, 2012Earthquake Information Japan Meteorological Agency 17:50 JST 20 May 2012 17:42 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.1 2 17:27 JST 20 May 2012 17:21 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.4 2 16:54 JST 20 May 2012 16:49 JST 20 May 2012 Ibaraki-ken Hokubu M3.3 1 16:38 JST 20 May 2012 16:28 JST 20 May 2012 Sanriku Oki M5.7 2 16:32 JST 20 May 2012 16:20 JST 20 May 2012 Sanrik […]
- Marijuana Oil Helps 3-Year-Old Son Beat brain Cancer, Dad Says May 21, 2012What would you do if your 3-year old son was stricken with brain cancer? Most parents wouldn't think twice about bringing their child to a mainstream doctor, only to undergo modern-day cancer 'treatments' such as chemotherapy. This is what one father, Mike Hyde, from Montana did when his 3 year old was diagnosed with brain cancer, but the fath […]
- Terror charges ahead of Chicago NATO summit for beer-making kit May 21, 2012Trio accused of making petrol bombs and plotting attacks, but supporters say suspect materials were beer-making kit. Three protesters arrested in a late-night raid days before the start of this weekend's 60-nation NATO summit in Chicago have been charged with terrorism for possession of explosive devices, police and their attorney have said. The men hav […]
- Great-grandma: Ready to 'lose' my life protesting May 21, 2012Chicago, Illinois -- Nan Wigmore brought her walker and packed her sign, "Grateful Great Grandmas Circle The Wagons, Support Occupy," and rode on a bus for some three days, sleeping in the same clothes, to make it to the NATO protests in Chicago. The 75-year-old from Portland, Ore., says she couldn't imagine being anywhere else despite the dis […]
- New research shows long term high-fructose corn syrup diet alters learning and memory May 21, 2012
- Alternet.org (US)
- The Rise of the New Economy Movement May 21, 2012Activists, theorists, organizations and ordinary citizens are rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.Gar Alperovitz, AlterNet
- The Terrifying Ways Google Is Destroying Your Privacy May 21, 2012 David Rosen, AlterNet
- 826 Valencia: Transforming a Community, One Student at a Time May 21, 2012826 has blossomed from a noble experiment into one of the top innovators and influencers in the education field.Theresa Ralston, AlterNet
- The Enviro Disaster You Know Nothing About: The Eco-Devastating Quest for "Frac Sand" in Rural America May 21, 2012Midwestern rural communities are being devastated by energy companies searching for a form of sand to use in their destructive fracking operations elsewhere in rural America.Ellen Cantarow, TomDispatch.com
- Attachment Parenting: More Guilt for Mother May 21, 2012Not only is 'attachment parenting' bad for women; it's not necessarily good for children, either.Katha Pollitt, The Nation
- Oregon Activists Pick Up "Health Care as a Human Right" Campaign for Real Universal Care May 21, 2012 Peter Shapiro, Labor Notes
- Why Mobility In America is in the Dumpster May 21, 2012 Tina Dupuy, TinaDupuy.com
- Why Do Sex Scandals Destroy Democrats But Not Republicans? May 21, 2012Not all politicians are created equal. And not all are treated equally. Therein lies an issue deserving a closer look: whether vulnerable Democrats are targeted for destruction.Russ Baker, WhoWhatWhy.com
- NATO Comes to Chicago, Highlights Violence and Inequality at the Heart of the System May 21, 2012Much like the NATO summit, the system is set up not to spread wealth but to preserve and protect it, not to relieve chaos but to contain and punish it.Gary Younge, Comment Is Free
- Are JPMorgan’s Losses A Canary in a Coal Mine? May 21, 2012Bill Moyers talks to Simon Johnson, once chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and now MIT professor, about the (possible) fall of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan.Bill Moyers, BillMoyers.com
- The Rise of the New Economy Movement May 21, 2012
- Antiwar.com (US)
- Obama or Anarchy? May 21, 2012Rahm Emanuel runs Chicago like he ran the Obama White House: with an iron fist and a foul mouth – and the NATO summit, being held in the Windy City, is the perfect occasion for him to demonstrate just how “tough” he can be. “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean [...]Justin Raimondo
- Baghdad Judges Refuse To Hear Evidence That Could Clear Iraq VP of Terrorism Charges May 21, 2012A three-judge panel has rejected evidence that could help clear Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi of terrorism charges, causing Hashemi's team of lawyers to quit the case in protest. Meanwhile, at least two Iraqis were killed and eight more were wounded.Margaret Griffis
- Six Killed in Iraq Violence May 20, 2012At least six Iraqis were killed and six more were wounded in light violence.Margaret Griffis
- The Serbian Job May 19, 2012Nebojsa Malic on stealing an electionNebojsa Malic
- Applying the Six-Day War to Iran May 19, 2012Ray McGovern on the mythical Six-Day WarRay McGovern
- Iran Hawks in Congress in Some Disarray May 19, 2012Hopes by Iran hawks here to get the U.S. Congress to wield the threat of a U.S. military attack on the Islamic Republic on the eve of next week’s critical negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program appear to have fallen unexpectedly short. While the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Thursday to reject "any U.S. policy that [...]Jim Lobe
- 15 Killed, 72 Wounded at Baghdad Pet Market, Restaurant and Home May 19, 2012In the capital, multiple attacks harkened back to the height of sectarian tensions. At least 15 Iraqis were killed and 67 more were wounded.Margaret Griffis
- What Does Ron Paul Want? May 18, 2012A movement primed for victory, says Justin RaimondoJustin Raimondo
- Dangerous Legislation May 18, 2012I strongly oppose H Res 568, a resolution "expressing the sense of the House of Representatives regarding the importance of preventing the Government of Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability." Once again we see on the "suspension" calendar, which is customarily reserved for non-controversial legislation, a resolution designed t […]Rep. Ron Paul
- Walk to the NATO Summit: Striding Toward Peace May 18, 2012On what is now the 17th day of our walk from Madison to Chicago, the number 165 does not seem to encapsulate all the progress we have made. We are 17 days and 165 miles away from the day I drove into Madison, where news arrived that Air Force One had descended on pre-dawn Kabul [...]Buddy Bell
- Obama or Anarchy? May 21, 2012
- Human Rights Investigations.org
- The International Commission of Inquiry on Libya March 11, 2012The Report of the The International Commission of Inquiry on Libya has been issued and provides some interesting reading. A few initial comments: Tawerghans – to be ‘wiped off the face of the planet’ The report supports Human Rights Investigation’s position regarding the crimes committed against the Tawerghans. The report confirms our […]HRI Mark
- Responsibility to protect: the liberation of Sirte October 27, 2011According to NATO figures, coalition aircraft delivered 415 key strikes on the town of Sirte between Sunday 28th August and Thursday 20th October. We have compared this to the bombing of Guernica and other comparisons have been made to the widely condemned levelling of Grozny. In addition, the rebels, described in NATO circles as a [...]HRI Mark
- Colonel Gaddafi captured and killed October 20, 2011Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi was reportedly captured and shot dead 20 October. As the evidence below shows the Libyan leader and his son Mutassim were summarily executed by the rebels, sharing the fate of so many Libyans in this conflict. NATO involvement NATO have said that a French jet bombed 2 military vehicles in a convoy leaving the area [...]HRI Mark
- التطهير الُعرقيّ والإبادة الجماعيّة والتورخا October 20, 2011التطهير الُعرقي و الإبادة الجماعيّة و التورخا هيومن رايتس إينفستيخاشيون (HRI) تُتابٍع عن كثب الوضع في منطقة ا”لتورخا”، وهنا نلفتُ معاً المعلومات، ونجِدُ، ، استناداً إلى تقارير الشهود والصحافيين والعاملين في مجال حقوق الإنسان ، بأنّ حالة ا”لتورخا” ليست مُجرد حالة تطهير عُرقي ولكن وفقاً للتعريف القانوني، إِبادة جماعيّة. HRI لديها مخاو […]HRI Mark
- William Hague’s deportation of Malyshevs to torture in Uzbekistan October 20, 2011Below is a repost from Craig Murray’s excellent blog . Craig, has a very clear knowledge of the Karimov regime as he was British Ambassador there from 2002 to 2004. Uzbekistan is a state with widespread torture, kidnapping, murder, rape by the police, financial corruption, religious persecution, censorship, and other human rights abuses. In 2002, accor […]HRI Mark
- Sarkozy, Cameron, Obama, Al-Thani and the suffering of the children of Sirte October 11, 2011The background to the video and image below is the ongoing bombardment of Sirte by NATO aircraft in support of the rebel brigades who are indiscriminately firing tank, mortar and artillery shells into this urban, civilian-populated area. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has refused to comment on why NATO is not fulfilling its UN mandate [...]HRI Mark
- Nobel Peace Prize winners: Tawakul Karman, Leymah Gbowee and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf October 7, 2011The Nobel Peace Prize has long been a nonsense and has been accused of being a kind of tool of Norwegian foreign policy. Who can forget the farcical scenes as Barack Obama was awarded the prize (about which Martin Luther King would have had a few things to say) or that it was once awarded to Henry Kissinger, or that Mahatma [...]HRI Mark
- Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International fan the flames of conflict in Syria October 6, 2011A major thread running through the story of the Libyan conflict has been the information war – propaganda spread by intelligence agencies, military, media and political groups designed to encourage hatred, conflict, war, foreign intervention, death and destruction. One sad aspect of the propaganda war has been the role played by Amnesty International a […]HRI Mark
- NATO ‘protection of civilians’ – propaganda and pretence to escape war crimes trials October 4, 2011As is now well documented, the rebellion in Libya began with violent attacks on police stations, such as this one in Al-Bayda where people locked inside were reportedly burnt to death: An intensive propaganda campaign systematically distorted the facts on the ground, including in particular allegations that the Libyan airforce was bombing peaceful protestors […]HRI Mark
- Ethnic cleansing, genocide and the Tawergha September 26, 2011Human Rights Investigations has been following the situation of the Tawergha closely and here we draw the information together and find, based on the reports of witnesses, journalists and human rights workers, the situation of the Tawergha is not just one of ethnic cleansing but, according to the legal definition, genocide. HRI has grave concerns, not only f […]HRI Mark
- Will Obama veto ‘the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for a state of their own?’ September 24, 2011President Barack Hussein Obama made a speech in Cairo in June 2009, which was widely hailed as marking a new beginning; as the great speech of a true humanitarian and worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Here are some key passages from that profound, deep and moving speech, which gave hope to the people of [...]HRI Mark
- High treason, barbarity and the importance of the Geneva Conventions in Libya September 22, 2011On Saturday 17th September, as reported by Al Jazeera, Ahmed Bani, the interim government’s military spokesman, said gave army personnel still loyal to Gaddafi a last chance to join the ranks of former rebel fighters: “The soldiers and officers who will not heed this last call will be accused of high treason.” The invocation of [...]HRI Mark
- The International Commission of Inquiry on Libya March 11, 2012
- Uruknet.info (middle east)
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- Mathaba News ( Libya)
- Occupy Bilderberg 2012 May 21, 2012The annual Bilderberg conference is taking place from May 31 to June 3 in Chantilly Virginia more...
- Chicago Under Siege May 21, 2012NATO arrives everywhere violently. Chicago was no exception. During summit activities, city cops are enforcers. They specialize in serving wealth, power, and imperial interests. more...
- Life in Occupied Chicago May 21, 2012Through Monday, downtown residents live in occupied Chicago. Mathaba Analyst Stephen Lendman reports from the city. more...
- Green Charter Movement Activist Contest - Entry 11 May 21, 2012Another entry from USA in The GREEN WALL Activist Contest 2012. Write in a public place WWW.GREENCHARTER.COM and send us photos of evidence showing before and after, and we will publish it here more...
- Chicago Militarized for NATO May 20, 2012more...
- Israeli Police State Crimes May 20, 2012more...
- Chicago Police Crack Down on Public Ahead of NATO Summit May 20, 2012Photo: Police hit and run a man as wide spread police violence against peaceful anti-war protesters takes shape ahead of NATO military summit in Chicago more...
- Former Malaysia PM Dr Mahathir: What a `toothless` tribunal can do May 20, 2012Failure to uphold international laws has allowed nations like the US to get away with crimes against humanity, writes Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia (photo, right, with Mathaba News founder and editor, left) more...
- Homenagem à Identidade Lusa May 20, 2012Rainer Daehnhardt com o elmo de D. Sebastião more...
- Israel`s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons May 20, 2012Israel`s long known open secret is its formidable nuclear arsenal. Less is known about its chemical and biological weapons (CBW) capability. Mathaba Analyst Stephen Lendman takes a look. more...
- Occupy Bilderberg 2012 May 21, 2012
- Syrian Arab News Agency (sana.sy)
- Russia Dedicates Majority of Its Contribution to WFP for SyriaDAMASCUS, (SANA) – Russia, as a creditor of the UN World Food Program, decided to dedicate the majority of its remaining contributions to the Program for sending urgent humanitarian relief to Syria
- Al-Nusra Front Claims Responsibility for Suicide Bombing in Deir Ezzor DUBAI, (SANA)- A militant group called 'al-Nusra Front', which is connected with al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing which targeted the city of Deir Ezzor, eastern Syria, that killed nine people and injured more than 100 others
- Syrian Community in Russia: Terrorist Attacks in Syria will not Defeat Syrian PeopleMOSCOW, (SANA) – The Syrian community in Russia condemned on Sunday the terrorist attacks witnessed in Syria, the latest of which was the terrorist bombing in Deir Ezzor province, stressing that these attacks will not defeat the determination of the Syrian people.
- Ryabkov: Situation in Syria Cannot Be Resolved by Pressuring Its GovernmentMOSCOW, (SANA) – Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that during the G8 Summit in Camp David, Russia adhered to its stance which states that the situation in Syria cannot be resolved through exerting pressure via force or otherwise on the Syria government
- G8 Calls for Halting Violence in Syria, Condemns Latest Terrorist Attacks CAMP DAVID, U.S, (SANA)- The Group of 8 Summit called on all sides in Syria to immediately halt violence and carry out the plan of the UN envoy Kofi Annan
- Health Cooperation between Syria and Iran Discussed TEHRAN, SANA_ Syria and Iran on Saturday reviewed means of strengthening bilateral cooperation in health filed.
- Russia Condemns Targeting the International Observers in Syria and the Opposition's Pursuit for ArmingMOSCOW, (SANA)- Russia on Friday expressed condemnation of the terrorist attempt that targeted the international observers in Syria, saying it was aimed at foiling the plan of the UN envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan
- Gen. Mood: We Are to Find Successful Way for Deployment in Syria Thanks to Syrian Government and UN's CooperationPROVINCES, (SANA)- Head of the UN observer mission to Syria, Gen. Robert Mood, said on Friday the mission is working at finding a successful way to be deployed in Syria thanks to the advanced level of cooperation by the Syrian government, the UN Presidency and the contributor countries
- President of the European Council Stresses Important of Russia's Role in Settling the Crisis in SyriaMOSCOW, (SANA)- President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy stressed the key role Russia is playing to settle the crisis in Syria
- Tunisian Authorities: Tunisian Citizens Within Armed Terrorist groups in SyriaTUNIS, (SANA) – Tunisian authorities on Friday admitted that there are Tunisian citizens who were killed or arrested in Syria, and that they were members of the armed terrorist groups
- Russia Dedicates Majority of Its Contribution to WFP for Syria
- Occupied Palestine
- IOF soldiers arrest seven Palestinians including 70-year-old May 21, 2012[ PIC 21/05/2012 - 09:37 AM ] NABLUS, (PIC)– Israeli occupation forces (IOF) arrested seven Palestinian citizens in the West Bank at dawn Monday including a 70-year-old man in Nablus, local sources said. Eyewitnesses told the PIC reporter in Nablus city that IOF soldiers stormed the city before dawn and withdrew after taking away four [...]occupiedpalestine
- Settlers, amongst soldiers, fire live ammunition on Palestinians – Videos May 21, 2012Maan News Agency | May 21, 2012 (updated) BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — An Israeli human rights group released footage on Sunday of settlers firing on Nablus-village a day earlier, and called on Israel’s military to investigate the assailants, as well as the army’s role. Settlers entered Asira al-Qibliya on Saturday and threw rocks at propertie […]occupiedpalestine
- PALESTINE NEWS | May 21, 2012 May 21, 2012LIVE BLOG ▶ PALESTINIANS ON HUNGER STRIKE | #PalHunger LIVE BLOG ▶ Commemorating 64 Years of Catastrophe in Palestine | #Nakba64 LIVE BLOG ▶ Israel Attacks Gaza May 17, 2012 & lies about it | #GazaUnderAttack continuous updated آخر الأخبار والتحديثات May 21, 2012 | 23382 Days Since Al-Nakba & Gaza has been under siege [...]occupiedpalestine
- A conference held in Netherlands to mark Nakba anniversary May 21, 2012[ PIC 20/05/2012 - 08:45 PM ] THE HAGUE (PIC)– The Palestinian community in the Netherlands held, on Saturday, a conference to mark the 64th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba in the capital Amsterdam, with the participation of the former PM of Netherlands, Dries van Agt, and with a large presence of the Palestinian community [...]occupiedpalestine
- “We hope 4th generation returns to free country” May 21, 2012Al-Qassam Website | 21-05-2012,08:37 Al Qassam website (PressTV) – Palestinian refugees want their next generation to go back home to a free “Palestinian state” and to build their country themselves, a young Palestinian refugee tells Press TV. The comment comes as Palestinians commemorated the 64th anniversary of Nakba Day on May 15; when over 750,000 […]occupiedpalestine
- Palestinian Seriously Wounded, Kept On The Ground As Soldiers Stepped on His Palms May 21, 2012Monday May 21, 2012 03:31 by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC Palestinian medical sources reported Sunday that a Palestinian youth was injured near the Etzion Israeli settlement, between Bethlehem and Hebron in the occupied West Bank. The soldiers then stepped on his palms to pose for pictures as the resident continued to bleed. Salah Sghayyar – [...]occupiedpalestine
- A researcher: 66% of Jerusalemites threatened with displacement May 20, 2012[ PIC 20/05/2012 - 08:06 PM ] OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (PIC)– A Palestinian researcher revealed that more than two thirds of Jerusalemites owe money to the Israeli occupation’s different organs and departments. The Jerusalemite activist and researcher, Fakhri Abu Diab, said that Israeli official data showed that there are over 43 thousand debt files in […]occupiedpalestine
- PALESTINE NEWS | May 20, 2012 May 20, 2012LIVE BLOG ▶ PALESTINIANS ON HUNGER STRIKE | #PalHunger LIVE BLOG ▶ Commemorating 64 Years of Catastrophe in Palestine | #Nakba64 LIVE BLOG ▶ Israel Attacks Gaza May 17, 2012 & lies about it | #GazaUnderAttack continuous updated آخر الأخبار والتحديثات May 20, 2012 | 23381 Days Since Al-Nakba & Gaza has been under siege [...]occupiedpalestine
- Two youths injured in IOF shooting one seriously May 20, 2012[ PIC 20/05/2012 - 05:44 PM ] AL-KHALIL, (PIC)– A Palestinian teen was seriously injured near Gush Etzion settlement to the north of Al-Khalil after Israeli occupation forces (IOF) fired at him. Medical sources said that the 17-year-old youth Salah Zaghir was seriously wounded in his abdomen after an Israeli soldier fired at him near [...]occupiedpalestine
- Barhoum champions third intifada to protect Aqsa and holy shrines May 20, 2012[ PIC 20/05/2012 - 05:52 PM ] GAZA, (PIC)– Spokesman of Hamas in Gaza Fawzi Barhoum has charged that the Jewish settlers’ storming of the Aqsa mosque on Sunday fell in line with the religious war waged by the Israeli occupation government against the Palestinian people. Barhoum told the PIC that the repeated visits by [...]occupiedpalestine
- IOF soldiers arrest seven Palestinians including 70-year-old May 21, 2012
- IRNA (Iran)
- Qom International Airport to become operational by February 11 May 21, 2012Qom, May 21, IRNA – Official in charge of Qom International Airport project Nasir Nassiri says the Airport will become operational by February 11, 2013.-1391/03/01-17:50
- Iran, Turkey to expand economic cooperation May 21, 2012Tehran, May 21, IRNA – Vice-President for International Affaires Ali Saeedlu and Turkish Minister in charge of Planning and Programming Judat Yilmaz on Monday stressed expansion of Tehran-Ankara economic cooperation at bilateral, regional and international levels.-1391/03/01-17:48
- Iranian envoy: Iraq ready to host Iran-G5+1 talks May 21, 2012Tehran, May 21, IRNA - Iranian Ambassador to Baghdad Hassan Danaeifar on Monday said Iraq is prepared from logistically, security and administrative points of view to host talks between Iran and G5+1 in Baghdad.-1391/03/01-17:26
- IAEA Chief, AEOI Head discuss issues of mutual interest May 21, 2012Tehran, May 21, IRNA – Director General of the Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukio Amano met and conferred with Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Fereydoun Abbassi here on Monday.-1391/03/01-17:13
- India-Iran cultural relations “extensive”: Indian Scholar May 21, 2012New Delhi, May 21, IRNA – Terming the cultural relations between India and Iran as “extensive” and “uninterrupted”, an Indian scholar Monday emphasized the need to further strengthen the ties between the two nations.-1391/03/01-16:06
- Visa not required for Bolivians willing to visit Iran for 30 days May 21, 2012Tehran, May 21, IRNA - The Iranian Government has dropped visa requirement for Bolivian nationals willing to visit Iran for 30 days.-1391/03/01-16:00
- Iranian nation capable of reaching scientific peaks, president May 20, 2012Mahshahr, Khuzestan Prov, May 21, IRNA – Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here on Monday that the Iranian nation is well capable of reaching the industrial and scientific peaks in the world.-1391/03/01-13:17
- Turkish economic delegation in Iran May 21, 2012Tehran, May 21, IRNA – A high-ranking Turkish economic delegation arrived in Tehran on Monday.-1391/03/01-11:55
- Iran’s Red Crescent to dispatch humanitarian aid to Syria May 21, 2012Tehran, May 21, IRNA – Head of Iran’s Red Crescent Society Abolhassan Faqih said Iran will shortly send humanitarian aid to Syria.-1391/03/01-11:46
- Ban underlines need to preserve marine biodiversity May 21, 2012Tehran, May 21, IRNA — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his message on the International Day for Biological Diversity, May 22, 2012, while warning that between 30 and 35 per cent of critical marine environments are estimated to have been destroyed called for national and international actions to preserve marine biodiversity.-1391/03/01-11:24
- Qom International Airport to become operational by February 11 May 21, 2012
- Press Tv
- Iran urges effective IAEA cooperation May 21, 2012Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Fereydoun Abbasi has stressed the importance of more effective cooperation between Tehran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
- Iran holds seminar to honor Sven Hedin May 21, 2012Iran has held a seminar to honor the work of Swedish explorer and geographer Sven Hedin and his long journey through Iran of the late 19th century.
- Prison riot kills one, injures 8 in US May 21, 2012A riot has left at least one prison guard dead and eight other people wounded at a private-run jail in the US state of Mississippi, American officials say.
- Britain fails to stop Afghan drugs flow May 21, 2012The UK government has failed to stop Afghanistan’s deadly heroin trade, a pledge former Prime Minister Tony Blair made when he was making the case for invasion of the country.
- Anti-NATO demos to be held in Chicago May 21, 2012Fresh anti-NATO demonstrations are set to be held in the US city of Chicago at 0330 GMT, Press TV reports.
- ‘West must draw back from Iran stance’ May 21, 2012A senior Iranian commander says domestic problems and lack of popular support have left the West with no option but to draw back from its Iran stance.
- Riot police clash with Quebec protesters May 21, 2012Riot police have once again clashed with protesters in Montreal and arrested some 180 people protesting at the new legislation aimed at ending the three months of anti-tuition hikes protests.
- 'Iran's Army to stage drill in Isfahan' May 21, 2012Commander of the Iranian Army’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan has announced the army’s plans for a military drill in the central province of Isfahan.
- Olympics made no boon to UK small firms May 21, 2012Small British companies say the government is shutting them out of the Olympics trade boost despite earlier ‘selling’ the games to taxpayers as an economic boon.
- China's oil imports from Iran up 53.2 pct May 21, 2012China's oil imports from Iran have increased by 53.2 percent in April to 388,034 barrels per day (bpd) from 253,302 bpd a month earlier, Chinese customs data shows.
- Iran urges effective IAEA cooperation May 21, 2012
- Globalresearch (US)
- The Globalization of War: The "Military Roadmap" to World War III July 14, 2012The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.
- Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War: The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation May 28, 2012The dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination... Eventually all major regions of the World will be affected.
- SUPERPOWER: Behind the Scenes of America’s National Security Apparatus May 24, 2012For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
- Down but Not Defeated: Why the Truth Must be Told May 23, 2012For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
- Shell Oil in Nigeria: A Social and Environmental Disaster May 21, 2012For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
- Chicago: cops start preemptive arrests on the eve of NATO Summit May 21, 2012For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
- Police violence in Chicago May 21, 2012For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
- Chicago NATO Protests May 21, 2012For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
- NATO. "1984" Revisited. When "War is Peace" May 21, 2012For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
- Social Nightmare Foretold if Greece Heads for Euro Exit May 21, 2012For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
- The Globalization of War: The "Military Roadmap" to World War III July 14, 2012
- Globalresearch TV
- Appelle à réfléchir à la désobéissance civile contre la Loi matraque May 18, 2012 grtv
- Montréal: Quelle place pour les médias? What is the Role of Media? May 17, 2012 grtv
- Pentagon Talks Peace, Then Arms Syria Rebels Via Gulf Allies May 17, 2012 grtv
- Toronto 9/11 Hearings: Uncovering 10 Years of Deception (Trailer) May 16, 2012 grtv
- Home Not So Sweet: Foreclosure & Debt Push Americans to Extremes May 16, 2012 grtv
- Alex Jones Infowars
- Teacher Yells At Student: Criminal Offense to Criticize Obama May 21, 2012Paul Joseph Watson | Disturbing trend of Obama cult of personality in school system continues.paul
- As The Elite Fences Itself In, Kissinger Announces Order Out Of Chaos May 21, 2012Jurriaan Maessen | Kissinger: social upheaval and mass civil unrest to be used as a means of merging the US into an “international system”.kurtnimmo
- Homeland Security in the Land of the Free May 21, 2012Sartre | Remember Tiananmen Square before yet another Kent State becomes routine.kurtnimmo
- Recovery or Collapse? Bet on Collapse May 21, 2012Paul Craig Roberts | The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose.steve_watson
- Jim Cramer Is Predicting Bank Runs In Spain And Italy And Financial Anarchy Throughout Europe May 21, 2012The Economic Collapse | During an appearance on Meet The Press on Sunday, Jim Cramer of CNBC boldly predicted that "financial anarchy" is coming to Europe.steve_watson
- Why Mankind Is Screwed: The People Are Children, And Leaders Are Fathers May 21, 2012Saman Mohammadi | Barack Obama is a Father Figure to his naive, blind, and delusional followers.steve_watson
- The Top 50 Excuses For Not Prepping May 21, 2012The American Dream | With the way that things are heading in this country, it is not surprising that there are approximately 3 million preppers in the United States today.steve_watson
- Obama: The Groomed from Birth Dictator May 21, 2012Infowars.com | Alex talks about the continued and long overdue outing of Kenyan-born Obama the imposter.steve_watson
- Barack Obama: A Foundation Operative! May 21, 2012Infowars.com | Alex covers the global elite on the run as the establishment media is forced to report on the Bilderbergers.steve_watson
- Judge in 9/11 Case at Guantanamo Weighs Splitting up Defendants and Holding Multiple Trials May 21, 2012NY Daily News | Ten years later, still trying to pretend that the government didn't stage the attacks.undergrowth
- Teacher Yells At Student: Criminal Offense to Criticize Obama May 21, 2012
- Veteranstoday.com (US)
- Homeland Security in the Land of the Free May 21, 2012The horror stories about the Transportation Security Administration are indisputable. In the post 911 environment, civil liberties routinely ignored or eliminated, become a mere memory in a country that once prided itself as the beacon of freedom for the entire world. The TSA is part of the Department of Homeland Security. FEMA, the Federal Emergency [...]SARTRE
- Hafez Aladdeen is an Israeli Patriot May 21, 2012When Cohen attempts to bond with his protagonist Dictator Aladeen, he actually speaks in his mother tongue, Hebrew. Cohen speaks Hebrew because Aladeen is not an Arab dictator, he is actually an Israeli patriot like Cohen himself.Gilad Atzmon
- US Declares ‘Total War’ on Islam May 21, 2012By Dr. Ismail Salami In an organized act of brutality, a number of US soldiers went on a house-to-house shooting spree in Zangabad village, Kandahar in March and massacred 16 people including nine children while they were sleeping and all Washington had to say were a few words of condolence and apology nonchalantly strung together [...]Dr. Ismail Salami
- Cross Talk : Farewell Israel? May 21, 2012Is the American-Jewish romance with Israel coming to an end?Veterans Today
- NATO – Rogue Arm Of America’s War Machine Must Be Dismantled May 20, 2012There is much to both question and criticize about NATO but primary is the fact that America has created an international organization that is not answerable to international or constitutional laws and is still mired in a cold war mentality.Allen L Roland
- Life in Occupied Chicago May 20, 2012Secret Service agents, NORTHCOM and National Guard forces, as well as thousands of state and local police seem everywhere.Stephen Lendman
- Screw Religion! Go With God May 20, 2012This is another column exploring the evil sway of scientism, not science, that dominates worldwide behavior.Tom Valentine
- 9/11 and Islamophobia May 20, 2012My Recent Comment on Prof. Richard Falk's Blog Highlighting the Failures of the Mainstream Media to Cover the Hunger Strike Aimed a Calling Attention to Israel's Violations of the Universal Human Rights of Palestinians.Anthony Hall
- NATO Vulture Culture May 20, 2012Russian Aurora has discharged a preemptive salvo against the Atlantic freedom vultures in America, which have camped out at sweet home Chicago. No, it wasn’t another Bolshevik mutiny at the legendary cruiser in St Petersburg; it was an audacious Russian think tank, Institute for Foreign Policy Research & Initiatives, www.invissin.ru that boarded ritzy Ma […]Col. Eugene Khrushchev
- Evil, Madness, and Blind Spots: Two New Books on Psychopathy Leave their Selective Empathy Showing May 20, 2012So let us ask Dr. Baron-Cohen: What part of the Jewish brain is malfunctioning to produce this widespread empathy-deficit disorder?Kevin Barrett
- Homeland Security in the Land of the Free May 21, 2012
- The Daily Bail ( US )
- VIDEO - Clint Eastwood's Chrysler Super Bowl Commercial: "It's Halftime in America" February 7, 2012 DailyBail
- Fed Prez Who Owns Over $1 Million in Gold, Greek Bailout May Have To Be $19.7 Billion Higher, How The Government Manufactures Low Unemployment Numbers (LINKS) February 6, 2012Fed Prez Who Owns Over $1 Million in Gold Greek Bailout May Have to Be $19.7 Billion Higher Greece misses another bailout deadline - Reuters Foreclosure deal deadline arrives, not all states are...DailyBail
- VIDEO - Rand Paul Introduces Amendment To Force Former Elected Officials To Forfeit ALL Benefits If They Become Lobbyists February 4, 2012Video - Sen. Rand Paul on the Senate Floor - Jan. 31, 2012 This law is approximately 40 years overdue, and it took a neophyte Senator to be the first to propose such legislation in the history of...DailyBail
- Nigel Farage: 'For Greece It's Diplomacy At Gunpoint, And Portugal Is Next' February 4, 2012Video - Nigel Farage - Feb. 1, 2012 Transcript "Well, Congratulations everybody. Davud Cameron had you worried for a bit. You thought he was even a eurosceptic. But it's okay, you had a quiet word...DailyBail
- Bailout Battle - The IMF vs. Germany, Banking Giant HSBC Accused Of Laundering Billions, Yale Discovers A Fungus That Eats Plastic (LINKS) February 4, 2012Counterfeit Value Derivatives: Follow the Bouncing Ball Bailout Battle - The IMF vs. Germany Summary of Bernanke's testimony before Congress Bernanke: Deficit reduction must be top priority 47...DailyBail
- Alexander Higgins Blog
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- Asian Times
- Riddle of the Scarborough Shoals May 18, 2012In the matter of the Scarborough Shoal mess, the Philippines started it and the infamous Chinese nine-dash line encompassing almost the entire South China Sea looks like an audacious claim drawn from an appetite for aggression. A closer look reveals that there is some genuine method to Beijing's madness, and a chance that gas and greed, rather than inte […]
- THE ROVING EYE : NATO occupies sweet home Chicago May 18, 2012The North Atlantic Treaty Organization hopes that If you can't beat them in Pashtunistan, you can at least corral them in the home of the blues, with NATO's Chicago summit planned to instill in members the "common values" behind drone warfare and base expansion. As riot police lock down the city, some partners likely fear they've mar […]
- US Iran hawks in some disarray May 18, 2012Hopes by Iran hawks for the United States Congress to provide enough ammunition to threaten Iran with a military strike on the eve of critical talks over Tehran's nuclear program have fallen unexpectedly short. The House has retracted its talons, while over in the Senate a new sanctions bill was blocked by Republicans because it wasn't sufficiently […]
- Tehran: To talk or not to talk May 18, 2012The possibility of direct talks between the United States and Iran emerged in January when new sanctions gave the White House political cover to revert to a policy of engagement. However, Tehran's profound mistrust of American sincerity hampers progress. The only sensible way forward is to let bygones be bygones and work through an intermediary such as […]
- The 'illogic' of China's North Korea policy May 18, 2012China's refusal to use its leverage as North Korea's friend and protector to halt its provocations strengthens the United States alliance system that Beijing considers a tool of encirclement. As Pyongyang blithely continues with missile launches and other acts that undermine China in the international arena, it seems hard to image a policy more dam […]
- BOOK REVIEW : Cherry-picking from China's success May 18, 2012What the US Can Learn from China by Ann Lee This book forces the reader to confront China's growth in the midst of America's decline, drawing attention to the reasons US politics became too self-serving, too short-sighted and too partisan. The author doesn't argue the Chinese approach is flawless, but she does hold up China's single-minde […]
- SPEAKING FREELY : Nepal's constitution: Respect the dissenters May 18, 2012The transition to a new constitution and the rule of law cannot be achieved overnight (South Africa's model constitution was seven years in the making). Yet the rush to get Nepal's new code into shape has been seemly, with the result that it will not have legitimacy, simply because politicians have failed to hear the dissenting voices of the people […]
- China's start-ups hold global potential May 18, 2012Western opinion has largely greeted China's early attempts at innovation with skepticism. Yet companies such as Tsing Capital and Chrysalix Venture Capital are discovering entrepreneurs whose concepts represent a potential next wave of innovative technologies that could impact the world. - Benjamin A Shobert
- US gives green light to investment in Myanmar May 18, 2012The United States is to permit investment by US companies in Myanmar, while a ban will remain on imports from the still largely military-run country. Critics say the move is too early, with armed conflict still raging in the north, and will inevitably benefit human-rights abusers.- Carey L Biron
- IT WORLD : Facebook floats May 18, 2012Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now officially worth close to US$20 billion after successfully bringing off the initial public offering for his young social network site. Fans keen to grab a piece of the company may have to pay 50% more than the initial price when the shares start trading Friday. Martin J Young surveys the week's developments in com […]
- Riddle of the Scarborough Shoals May 18, 2012
- RT (Russia today)
- Too many liberals in new government – Communists May 21, 2012 RT
- Welcome to the jungle: Putin approves new government amid ‘tough times’ May 21, 2012 RT
- Russia’s Euro 2012 squad: Aleksey Berezutsky May 21, 2012 RT
- Dope floats: Multi-million-dollar pot haul found adrift off LA May 21, 2012 RT
- Beirut clashes draw Lebanon into Syria conflict May 21, 2012 RT
- Air-France-KLM: Austerity job cuts coming? May 21, 2012 RT
- Assange Episode 6: Ecuador’s fight against its media vultures May 21, 2012 RT
- Princess grieves Russian millionaire toy boy’s death May 21, 2012 RT
- Facebook IPO gains to exceed commodity profits of Russian moguls May 21, 2012 RT
- New ‘network’ party aims to replace United Russia May 21, 2012 RT
- RIA Novosti ( World News Russia )
- U.S. missile shield in Europe May 21, 2012
- Moscow Reiterates Missile Defense Threats May 21, 2012
- Azerbaijan Responds to Iran Eurovision Criticism May 21, 2012
- Turkish Intelligence Foils Kidnapping of Syrian Opposition Army Chief May 21, 2012
- Defects Spotted in Ukrainian Armored Vehicles for Iraq May 21, 2012
- Search for SuperJet Black Box Goes On – UAC May 21, 2012
- Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash in Indonesia May 21, 2012
- Suicide Bomber Kills 96 at Yemen Military Parade May 21, 2012
- G8 Join Efforts to Cut Short-Lived Climate Pollutants May 21, 2012
- G8 Summit at Camp David 2012 May 21, 2012
- American free press.net
- Foreign Wars Could Send Hoards of Third Worlders to our Shores in Coming Decades May 14, 2012News Item...
- Middle Class at a Crossroads May 14, 2012News Item...
- Students Living the American Nightmare May 14, 2012News Item...
- All the Terrorism That’s Fit to Invent May 7, 2012News Item...
- Inside the Murky World of International Arms Smuggling May 7, 2012News Item...
- Foreign Wars Could Send Hoards of Third Worlders to our Shores in Coming Decades May 14, 2012
- Gerald Celente.com(US) financial research
- Gerald Celente – The Gary Null Show – May 18, 2012 May 18, 201218 May 2012admin
- Gerald Celente – Morning news with Tony Cruise – May 16, 2012 May 16, 201216 May 2012admin
- Gerald Celente – Goldseek Radio – May 16, 2012 May 16, 201216 May 2012admin
- Gerald Celente – Brian Sussman KFSO – May 15, 2012 May 15, 201215 May 2012admin
- Gerald Celente — Capital Account — 14 May 2012 May 14, 201214 May 2012admin
- Gerald Celente – The Gary Null Show – May 18, 2012 May 18, 2012
- Middle East Monitor (UK)
- Israel regards African migrants as a military and security threat May 21, 2012The Israeli government has been plunged into unprecedented panic by claims that the number of African migrants entering the country via Egypt is increasingly out of control. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the migrants a "serious national threat to the character of the Zionist state". At the beginning of Sunday's cabinet meeting, Neta […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Khalid)
- Arab League head visits Sudan to discuss crisis with the South and Darfur developments May 21, 2012The Secretary General of the Arab League, Dr. Nabil Al-Arabi, arrived in Sudan on Sunday for discussions with President Omar Al-Bashir and senior Sudanese officials. The agenda will cover the crisis with South Sudan and the latest political and security developments in Darfur. A press release from the Arab League revealed that Al-Arabi had a meeting on Frida […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Khalid)
- SA university pulls plug on Israeli Embassy May 21, 2012South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) has pulled the plug on the Israeli deputy ambassador to South Africa, Yaakov Finkelstein. This is yet another blow to Israel-South Africa relations that have recently become tense. Finkelstein was due to speak at UKZN later on today, Monday (21 May 2012), but yesterday afternoon, UKZN's Deputy Vice […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Khalid)
- Nablus schoolgirls display handicrafts May 19, 2012EXCLUSIVE PICTURES Schoolgirls from the Muhammad Tufaha School in Nablus have held a craft exhibition under the title "Flowers of Spring", which featured their work from across the academic year. The exhibition was supervised by craft instructor Maha Al-Qadomi and was attended by local officials, parents and students. Many of the exhibits underline […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Khalid)
- Egypt's new role in the future of Palestine May 18, 2012Recently, millions of Egyptians crowded round TV sets in Cairo to watch two presidential candidates debate their country's future. For citizens more used to having a political system imposed on them than joining in the discussion, they seem to have adapted quickly. Cheers and applause broke out as the candidates each exploited their opponent's weak […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Amelia Smith)
- Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails: Their legal status and their rights May 18, 2012Introduction The status of prisoners of war is a very complicated issue in international humanitarian law. Many people think - wrongly - that all of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are to be considered as prisoners of war. International humanitarian law, in particular the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and its protocols, gives a very precise defi […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Dr Abdulrahman Muhammad Ali)
- Why the BBC must change May 18, 2012Love it or hate it, the BBC is perhaps the most powerful media institution in the world. Not even the Murdoch empire in its heyday matched the scale and impact of the BBC's operations. Yet, in the last week, it has suffered two embarrassing setbacks in the aftermath of which its funders, the British public, are entitled to a change of policy. For almost […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Dr. Daud Abdullah)
- Jewish settlers break into Al-Aqsa with government minister and Knesset members May 18, 2012A group of illegal Jewish settlers, accompanied by an Israeli government minister and a number of members of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), broke into the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque on Thursday morning, 17 May, amid a state of alert and while being heavily guarded by Israeli occupation forces. Mahmoud Abu Atta, a spokesman for the Al-Aqsa for Endowment […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Khalid)
- BBC poll ranks Israel third in list of worst countries worldwide May 18, 2012A poll conducted by the BBC World Service has ranked Israel in third place among the worst countries in the world, keeping company with North Korea and only just ahead of Iran and Pakistan. The results of the global poll, organised by the BBC and covering 22 countries, showed that Israel stands among the countries with the most negative influence on the worl […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Khalid)
- Growing racism in Israel May 18, 2012A report on Israel radio has revealed that manifestations of racial discrimination are widespread across Israeli society. The racism is particularly evident between Jews and Arabs, but there is also evidence of racism between Jews themselves and against African refugees who come to work in Israel. The report noted instances of attempted arson attacks on buil […]khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Khalid)
- Israel regards African migrants as a military and security threat May 21, 2012
- Commondreams.com (US)
- Nearly 100 Soldiers Dead, 300 Wounded in Yemen Blast May 21, 2012Reports indicate a single suicide bomber who detonated powerful explosives amid a crowd of soldiers rehearsing for an upcoming parade in Yemen's capital city of Sanaa left at least 96 dead and perhaps 300 or more wounded. "We are hearing reports that 96 people were killed and many more injured. There have been requests for blood donations and the d […]jon
- Drones of Its Own: NATO Signs Deal with Northrup Grumman for 'Global Surveillance Capabilities' May 21, 2012 jon
- NAACP Endorses Same-Sex Marriage May 20, 2012The NAACP on Saturday resolved to support same-sex marriage by voting to affirm marriage equality as a civil right. (photo: sushiesque) read moreandrea
- Shut Down the War Marchine!: Thousands in Anti-NATO Rally May 20, 2012 andrea
- At G8 France's Hollande Pushes Against the Austerity Drive May 20, 2012 andrea
- Chicago Police Hold Occupy Activists on State Terrorism Charges With Dubious Evidence May 19, 2012The City of Chicago has filed charges against three Occupy activists, Jared Chase, Brent Beterly, and Brian Jacob Church, including possession of explosives or incendiary devices, material support for terrorism, and conspiracy. Chicago police during anti-NATO protests. (photo: Mikasi) read moreandrea
- 25,000 Rally Against Austerity in Germany May 19, 2012 andrea
- How Twitter Mapped a ‘Covert’ US Drone Operation in Yemen May 19, 2012The local press was quickly at the scene but Twitter broke the story first. Though the hour was late, Yemen’s social media was still very much awake. A US drone’s missiles had just slammed into a convoy of vehicles in a remote part of Yemen, killing three alleged militants. read moreandrea
- 'An Economy for the 99%': People's G8 Demands 'Robin Hood Tax' May 18, 2012See below for livestream and Twitter updates... Thousands of protesters are in Chicago today for a "People's G8" in a call led by National Nurses United (NNU) to demand an economy for the 99% and heal the "financial traumas faced by real people at the hands of Wall Street." read more […]andrea
- The Organic Watergate: Alarming Report Reveals USDA's Cozy Relationship with Corporate Agribusinesses in 'Organics' May 18, 2012Today, the Cornucopia Institute released a report titled The Organic Watergate, revealing widespread corruption in the USDA's organic food monitoring panel -- the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). read morejacob
- Nearly 100 Soldiers Dead, 300 Wounded in Yemen Blast May 21, 2012
- surgar.net ( Afghanistan)
- Gunbattles leave 2 dead, Syria spillover feared May 21, 2012
- Iran finance minister: 'Rest assured' record oil prices over nuclear sanctions May 21, 2012
- Al-Qaeda attack' on Yemen army parade causes carnage May 21, 2012
- Suicide blast 'kills 10' at Afghan checkpoint in Khost May 19, 2012
- SpaceX Dragon ship aborts launch May 19, 2012
- Washington Independent.com
- Navigating anti-abortion online strategy February 7, 2012Updated: 6:15 p.m. EST with a clarified quote*. In the seemingly endless war over abortion rights in America, battles are waged in legislatures, in courts and, most recently, on the Internet. The strategy of using abortion-related keywords to send a woman searching the web for abortion information More...Sofia Resnick
- FCC to modernize low-income broadband Internet access program January 10, 2012On Monday, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski announced changes that would modernize the agency’s Lifeline program to give greater broadband Internet access to low-income Americans. Lifeline has traditionally provided “discounts on one basic monthly telephone service (wireline or wireless) for qualified subscribers.” While announci […]Marcos Restrepo
- Local Michigan county wants to force meds on HIV criminal suspect January 10, 2012Sangeeta Ghosh, assistant corporate counsel for Kent County, Mich., says should the 51-year-old man charged in two cases of failing to disclose his HIV-positive status to sexual partners make bail, the county is prepared to ask a court to force him to take antiretroviral medications. “The county is More...Todd Heywood
- Michigan Rep. Hoogendyk preparing to challenge Upton in 6th Congressional District? January 10, 2012Former Michigan state Rep. Jack Hoogendyk is likely to announce next week that he will challenge Congressman Fred Upton (R-St. Joseph) in the GOP primary in August. Hoogendyk unsuccessfully challenged Upton for the seat two years ago, when he was able to garner only 43 percent of the vote, More...Todd Heywood
- Right-wing think tank leaks salaries of Florida public employees via new website January 9, 2012The Foundation for Government Accountability debuted a new website Monday — an online database of the salaries of Florida’s public employees: FloridaOpenGov.org. The website is almost a replica of a project by Foundation President Tarren Bragdon at his last place of employment, the Maine Heritage Policy Center. More...Ashley Lopez
- Ski industry exploited ‘lax regulatory environment’ under Bush, says former Forest Service official January 9, 2012Going to court may be “the best way” to resolve a dispute over water rights between the U.S. Forest Service and the National Ski Areas Association, according to a former Forest Service ski area permit coordinator. “Frankly, litigation may be the best way forward on this issue,” Ed Ryerson More...Troy Hooper
- Arkansas AG stops anti-abortion group from introducing ‘personhood’ bill January 9, 2012Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has blocked the state’s Personhood affiliate from introducing a bill that would define life from the moment of conception, on the grounds that it is “too vague” as written. Though “fetal personhood” measures across the country have been criticized for that very reason, Personhood Arkansas More...Virginia Chamlee
- New Florida bill would outlaw gender- and race-based abortions January 9, 2012With the beginning of session only days away, Florida legislators have been busy filing a slew of anti-abortion bills. Add yet another to the list: a measure outlawing race- and gender-based abortions. The bill was filed by state Rep. Scott Plakon, R-Longwood. House Bill 1327, or the “Susan B. More...Ashley Lopez
- News anchor, anti-abortion activist to be the ‘face’ of Minnesota anti-gay marriage amendment January 9, 2012Kalley King Yanta, a former anchor for a Minneapolis-based television station and an anti-abortion-rights activist, has joined the Minnesota for Marriage group to anchor videos intended to convince Minnesotans to vote for the anti-gay-marriage amendment on the ballot in 2012. The videos — and Yanta — have come under More...Andy Birkey
- Media analysis: Grand Rapids HIV criminal case spurs ‘sensationalist’ reporting January 9, 2012An alleged admission by a 51-year-old Comstock Park, Mich., man that he attempted to infect hundreds of people with HIV through unprotected sexual activity and needle-sharing has sparked a media feeding frenzy, which HIV activists and legal experts have roundly censured as “sensationalist.” In spite of the national condemnation, More...Todd Heywood
- Navigating anti-abortion online strategy February 7, 2012
- AllAfrica news
- Lesotho: Violence As Lesotho Starts Early Voting May 21, 2012[allAfrica.com] Lesotho has seen political violence flare ahead of May 26 elections, with the opposition claiming that dirty tricks have undercut their turnouts.
- East Africa: Lead U.S. Commander 'Confident' Kony Will Be Caught May 21, 2012[New Vision] The Commander of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) Gen. Carter F. Ham has stated that he is confident the Lord's Resistance Army chief, Joseph Kony will be brought to justice.
- Equatorial Guinea: Government Resigns According to Reform Plan May 21, 2012[Capital FM] Malabo - The government of Equatorial Guinea's Prime Minister Ignacio Milam Tang resigned in line with a constitutional reform approved in November, the country's communications minister said on Friday.
- Africa: G8 to Poor Countries - It's Not You, It's Me May 21, 2012[Oxfam] As the Camp David G8 Summit winds down, international agency Oxfam criticized G8 leaders for failing to renew measurable funding and policy commitments to help address global food security. Leaders were unwilling to continue current efforts to invest in developing country agriculture, even as they set a new goal of helping 50 million people lift them […]
- Somalia: Multiple Explosions in Mogadishu Kill 8 May 21, 2012[Garowe Online] Mogadishu - Multiple explosions in Mogadishu's busy Bakara market and another blast in east Mogadishu killed 8 and injured more than 15 on Saturday, Radio Garowe reports.
- Tanzania: NGOs Push for More Budget On Maternal Health May 21, 2012[Daily News] SOME 35 NGOs have teamed up to petition the government, urging it to allocate adequate budget for maternal and newborn health during the 2012/2013 financial year.
- Egypt: Pro-Revolution Candidates Fail to Unite May 21, 2012[Aswat Masriya] Cairo - Campaign of presidential candidate Hisham Bastawisi denied reports that he may withdraw for another candidate, insisting on his intention to run the race until the end.
- Somalia: Violent Clashes Erupt in Somaliland May 20, 2012[UN News] The United Nations envoy in Somalia, Augustine P. Mahiga, today expressed concern over recent violent clashes in the northern city of Hargeisa, located in Somaliland, between Somaliland security forces and citizens which allegedly resulted in the deaths on both sides.
- Sudan: Security First, Bashir Tells Mbeki May 20, 2012[Sudan Tribune] Khartoum - The chairman of the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP) saw little change in Khartoum's position regarding the resumption of negotiations with Juba during his talks today with Sudanese president Omer Hassan al-Bashir.
- Angola: Stop Rape, Abuse of Congolese Migrants by Security Forces May 21, 2012[HRW] Johannesburg - Angolan security forces frequently abuse irregular migrants during expulsions from Angola, including sexual violence and other degrading and inhuman treatment, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
- Lesotho: Violence As Lesotho Starts Early Voting May 21, 2012
- The Jakarta Post.com (Indonesia)
- Free-e-book promotes fall releases with excerpts May 21, 2012Summer is weeks away, but the fall book season has already started."Buzz Books 2012" is a free e-book that came out Monday (Tuesday Jakarta time) and features excerpts from 33 upcoming works, ...
- 'Forrest Gump' actor Sinise to raise money for vet May 21, 2012Actor Gary Sinise is keeping a promise to help raise money for a southwest Virginia Marine who lost his limbs in Afghanistan.The star who played disabled Vietnam War veteran Lt. Dan in "Forrest Gump" ...
- Groups’ aspirations on Gaga show necessary, SBY spokesman says May 21, 2012The government needed to accommodate the aspirations of certain civilian groups concerning the Lady Gaga concert in Jakarta that had been scheduled to take place on June 3 at the Bung Karno Stadium, ...
- Vocational school students assemble 2,000 laptops May 21, 2012Vocational school students of SMKN 3 Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara, have managed to assemble 2,000 laptops for fellow students in schools throughout the region since 2009.The students have worked with ...
- Govt prepares report for UNHRC May 21, 2012The government will accurately describe its human rights record in a report to be given to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) later this week, a top Palace official says.“The Office of ...
- Promoter reveals different side of Lady Gaga May 21, 2012Contrary to her controversial and eye-catching image, Lady Gaga is actually very modest, according to a representative from local concert promoter Big Daddy Entertainment.“For instance, she ...
- IM2 eyes SME segment for expansion May 21, 2012Local Internet and multimedia service provider PT Indosat Mega Media (IM2) plans to expand its market into the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) segment for future growth.IM2 president director ...
- Bali officials remain ‘in the air’ over the possibility of hosting Gaga concert May 21, 2012With uncertainty surrounding US singer Lady Gaga’s upcoming concert scheduled in Jakarta, it has been rumored that her promoter has switched the venue to Bali instead. Bali officials, however, ...
- National futsal team to compete in 2012 Asia Cup May 21, 2012The Indonesian national futsal team is ready to compete in the 2012 Asia Cup in Dubai, which will run from May 25 to June 1."We began training in April. Our team is ready to compete and to do their ...
- Tangerang Police arrest two suspects in minimarket robberies May 21, 2012Tangerang regency police (Polresta Tangerang) have arrested two of the seven members of Pitam Kuning, a gang that has allegedly been involved in a number of armed robberies targeting minimarkets ...
- Free-e-book promotes fall releases with excerpts May 21, 2012
- todayszaman.com (Turkey)
- Israel denies plans to deploy commandos to Greek Cyprus May 20, 2012A spokesperson from the Israel Foreign Ministry refuted an Anatolia news agency news report which said the Israeli president has requested permission to deploy at least 20,000 soldiers to Greek Cyprus in exchange for building a gas terminal on the island.todayszaman.com
- Yemen bomber kills at least 63 soldiers on parade May 20, 2012A suicide bomber infiltrated a military parade rehearsal in Yemen's capital Sanaa on Monday, killing at least 63 people in the bloodiest single attack in the city in recent years of instability.REUTERS
- Public bus attacked with Molotov cocktail in İstanbul May 20, 2012A group of masked assailants threw a Molotov cocktail onto a public bus along the Taksim-Osmanbey route when the bus stopped at a red light near the Okmeydanı Şark Kahvesi, setting the bus on fire, in İstanbul's Şişli district on Sunday.Today's Zaman
- Six İskenderun students drown during picnic event May 20, 2012Six teenagers attending a picnic organized by a district Quran course drowned over the weekend in İskenderun, Hatay, when they were swept away by strong currents after going for a swim in the sea.Today's Zaman
- Protesters threaten to attack Turkish firms if Hashemi not handed over May 19, 2012Turkish-Iraqi ties have been further strained after the burning of a Turkish flag during a protest near the Turkish Consulate General in Basra on Saturday and threats by protesters against Turkish firms operating in the city.Today's Zaman
- Clashes in Beirut after army kills anti-Assad group members May 20, 2012Residents of a Beirut suburb fired heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at each other on Sunday, the latest violence to raise fears that Syria's turmoil was spilling over the border into its neighbour.Reuters
- One officer killed, five wounded in clashes with PKK May 20, 2012A special ops team officer was killed and five other security personnel were wounded in a clash with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the Kulp district of Diyarbakır province on Monday.todayszaman.com
- Turkish police detain three for plotting to abduct Syrian defector May 20, 2012Turkish police on Monday detained three people, including two Turks, for their suspected involvement in a plot to abduct a defected Syrian colonel who fled to Turkey.todayzaman.com
- Turkish prime minister arrives in Pakistan for talks May 20, 2012Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrived in Pakistan's capital city Islamabad late on Sunday as the formal guest of his Pakistani counterpart, Yousuf Raza Gilani.todayszaman.com
- Syria briefly shuts down border gate with Turkey over clashes May 19, 2012Syria briefly closed its Bab al-Hawa border gate with Turkey on Saturday, apparently because of a military operation carried out by Syrian troops against a village near the border.Aydın Albayrak
- Israel denies plans to deploy commandos to Greek Cyprus May 20, 2012
- hurriyetdailynews.com (Turkey)
- May 19 celebrations are better this way May 18, 2012We used to watch the ceremonies on May 19, the Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day with much interest and enjoyment.
- Space camp a favorite among world’s children May 20, 2012One of three space camps in the world, Space Camp Turkey in İzmir is already booked full for this summer...
- Bardo museum reopens in Tunis May 20, 2012The Bardo Museum in Tunisia’s capital, renowned for its exceptional collection of ancient mosaics...
- Di Matteo enjoys his glory night - it might be his last May 20, 2012Caretaker coach Roberto Di Matteo leads Chelsea to the club’s first-ever Champions League title...
- ‘The Dictator’: When racist replaces racy May 21, 2012Once one of the best comedians in the world and a crusader fighting the ignorance ...
- Egypt expats favor mild Islamist May 20, 2012Former member of the Egyptian Brotherhood Abolfotoh leads in the presidential elections held by Egyptian embassies abroad, according to partial results.
- Uludere and politics as a conspiracy May 20, 2012Uludere was a terrible event and has been a controversial issue from the beginning. Now, there is a new controversy concerning U.S. involvement ...
- The wrong guys did something good again! May 20, 2012Saturday was May 19, the 93rd anniversary of the beginning of Turkey’s War of Liberation by the country’s visionary founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
- Inflation risk is not an illusion May 20, 2012Shall the world economy be able to return to reasonable growth rates again without entering a new inflationary era?
- A new political face for Greece? May 20, 2012The results of the Greek general elections of May 6 produced no clear winner and the negotiations among the parties that entered ...
- May 19 celebrations are better this way May 18, 2012
- Buenos Aires Herald
- Spain says economy to likely slump in the second quarter May 21, 2012Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said economic activity would likely slump by another 0.3 percent between April and June, further fuelling doubts about the country's ability to get a grip on in its finances and nurse an ailing banking sector back to health.
- Facebook falls below $38 issue price in premarket May 21, 2012Facebook Inc shares fell below their $38 issue price in premarket trading today as support from underwriters of the initial public offering dissipated after its debut on Friday.
- European shares bounce back from five-month lows May 21, 2012European shares bounced back from five-month lows today as investors bought into some stocks and sectors that had been particularly badly hit in the previous week's sell-off.
- NATO to endorse Afghan exit plan, seeks routes out May 21, 2012NATO leaders will endorse plans to hand over combat command in Afghanistan by mid-2013 and seek practical progress in opening routes to bring an international army of more than 130,000 back home from an unpopular, resource-draining war.
- Strauss-Kahn investigators open group rape inquiry May 21, 2012French prosecutors said today they had opened an inquiry into allegations of group rape by Dominique Strauss-Kahn and three friends, as part of an investigation into his ties to a suspected prostitution ring in the northern city of Lille.
- Euro area bonds to be discussed at informal EU summit May 21, 2012French President Francois Hollande and like-minded euro zone leaders are expected to promote the idea of mutualised European debt at an informal summit in Brussels this week, increasing pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to drop her opposition to the proposal.
- Scioli rejects rumours of 'rifts' with CFK, says he is not campaigning May 20, 2012
- Bomber hits Yemen military practice, kills 63 May 21, 2012A suicide bomber killed 63 soldiers at a military parade rehearsal in the Yemeni capital Sanaa today, a police sources said.
- British nuke sub on her way to Malvinas, UK newspaper May 20, 2012British nuke submarine HMS Talent was dispatched last night to the Malvinas Islands with Tomahawk warheads on what could be a warning signal to Argentina, according to UK’s sensationalist tabloid The Sun.
- Spain: Companies 'need to think twice before investing in Argentina' May 20, 2012
- Spain says economy to likely slump in the second quarter May 21, 2012
- Venezuelanalysis.com
- Venezuelan Authorities Regain Control of La Planta Prison after Violence May 19, 2012 tamara
- Venezuelan Economy Growing Ahead of 2012 Expectations May 18, 2012Venezuela's economy grew 5.6% in the first quarter of 2012 confirmed planning and finance minister Jorge Giordani and Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV) president Nelson Merentes on Thursday. read moreewan
- Germany Asks European Union to Step Up Support for Venezuela’s Opposition May 18, 2012A German news website has revealed that the German government has been pushing for Eurozone countries to adopt a more active role in backing the current Venezuelan opposition coalition, the Roundtable of Democratic Unity (MUD), in the run up to this year’s presidential elections. read moreewan
- Tourism to Venezuela Increases by 49.5% in 2012 May 18, 2012A total of 312,725 international tourists have visited Venezuela between January and April 2012, a figure which represents almost a 50% increase compared with the same period last year. read moreewan
- Millions of Venezuelan Workers Now Eligible for Social Security May 17, 2012The government has revealed that there are about 3.7 million independent workers in Venezuela who could potentially benefit from the reforms to the Law on Social Security in Venezuela, enacted on April 21 by President Hugo Chávez. read moreRachael
- Venezuelan Opposition Candidate’s Campaign “Stagnating”, Journalists Attacked May 16, 2012Government representatives and private media have said opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles’ campaign is “stagnating” as he fails to gain support, while journalists also marched yesterday protesting violent attacks committed against them by Capriles’ supporters. read moregreg
- Chávez Returns to Venezuela after “Successful” Treatment, Riding High in Polls May 15, 2012Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez returned to Venezuela on Friday night, announcing a successful conclusion to his radiotherapy treatment in Cuba and his intention to return to the frontline of Venezuelan politics. Meanwhile, polls show him extending his advantage over rival Henrique Capriles Radonski. read more […]greg
- Alternative Venezuelan News Website Aporrea.org at 10 Years May 15, 2012Venezuelan alternative news website Aporrea.org reached its tenth anniversary today, marking a milestone in Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. read moregreg
- Unasur Nations Reveal Military Spending, Deepen Cooperation May 11, 2012 tamara
- Venezuelan Government and Communities See Urban Agriculture Increasing May 9, 2012 ewan
- Freegaza movement news (Palestine)
- Gaza's Ark: Building Hope May 17, 2012The Canadian Boat to Gaza, in cooperation, with international initiatives in the US, Australia and other countries, is launching a new initiative to challenge the illegal and inhumane Israeli blockade of Gaza, the only Mediterranean port closed to shipping. This new initiative: Gaza’s Ark, will build a boat in Gaza, using existing resources. A crew of intern […]Greta Berlin
- Outing Omer: The Fake Gay “Flotilla Activist” May 4, 2012FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (London, May 4, 2012) Last summer, “Omer” posted a video saying he had been turned down as a passenger on board one of Free Gaza’s boats because he is gay. Within a few days, he was discovered to be a fake, apparently recording his statement coordinated with the Israeli government press office. Yesterday, Jon Ronson from the Guardian, f […]Free Gaza Team
- Gaza “More Dire Than Ever” April 13, 2012April 11, 2012 During the Israeli “Operation Cast Lead” in Dec. 2008 – Jan. 2009, Dr. Gilbert was one of only two outside doctors in Gaza. Last week the International Criminal Court, to the protests of Amnesty International and other groups, stated it would not issue prosecutions for the Israeli Operation. Recently Gilbert, co-author of “Eyes in Gaza,” retur […]Free Gaza Team
- I have returned from Beit Hanoun. A terrible day. March 31, 2012I spent the early afternoon at a demonstration attended by several thousand people. The Hamas authorities refused to allow the people to march to the border, and clashes broke out with the police. .When we finally found a way to get around the Hamas cordon, we found shabob (Kids from roughly the age of 12 to 25) at Erez Crossing. They were throwing stones a […]Free Gaza Movement
- They Will Never Beg March 18, 2012We don't usualy post blogs, but this one from Audacity of Hope passenger, Johnny Barber, is eloquent and timely. He is currently in Gaza as a photojournalist and puts a face and a family to the murdered men, women and children from last week. http://onebrightpearl-jb.blogspot.fr/2012/03/hey-will-never-beg.htmlFree Gaza Team
- Gaza's Ark: Building Hope May 17, 2012
- Mondoweiss (US) Israel-Palestine matters
- Neocons in Washington Post: Military strike on Iran would ‘calm nerves in the region’ May 21, 2012Washington Post pushes war with Iran with argument by two neoconservativesPhilip Weiss
- South African artists, intellectuals and gov’t ministers take steps to isolate Israel May 20, 2012How long before South Africans are accused of being anti-Semites? South Africa to ban labeling West Bank settlement products as 'made in Israel', Amira Hass Minister of Trade and Industry says South Africa recognizes the State of Israel only within … Continue reading →Today in Palestine
- Aharon Appelfeld’s rage at the German language (and Arendt’s need for it) May 20, 2012It wasn't the German language that went crazy, Hannah Arendt explained. Israeli prize winner calls German a language of murderersEleanor Kilroy
- Feeling the hate in Long Island May 20, 2012Obama's Jewish support has gone from 78% to 62% and rightwing rabbi stirs the pot with video of old Jews hinting Obama is a secret MuslimPhilip Weiss
- The awakening: Missouri paper runs a Jew’s call for equal rights for all May 20, 2012Columbia (MO) Daily Tribune runs article exposing the 'Zionist mythology' that covers up the NakbaPhilip Weiss
- Monumental Dutch exhibit: Zionism built ‘a house, a cage, a UN shelter… a zoo’ May 20, 2012Inspired by the donkeys of the Gaza zoo, Israeli architect Malkit Shoshan exposes the inhumanities of Zionism in a Dutch exhibit that has stirred critics across EuropeAnnie Robbins
- ‘King Bibi’ is ready for his close up, and ‘Time’ is willing to oblige May 20, 2012Time magazine crowns Benjamin Netanyahu in its latest cover article, although he comes across as the leader of a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown.Craig Higgins
- A tale of two festivals May 20, 2012Eleanor Kilroy compares Palfest and the Jerusalem International Writers Festival.Eleanor Kilroy
- Kristol: ‘I don’t see it as a huge problem’ May 19, 2012Jeremy Ben-Ami and Bill Kristol debate at a synagogue in ManhattanAnnie Robbins
- New US demographics make Israel’s demographic fears seem all the more prehistoric May 19, 2012How long will Obama be able to honor Israel's demographic concerns without sounding like a total racist?Philip Weiss
- Neocons in Washington Post: Military strike on Iran would ‘calm nerves in the region’ May 21, 2012
- ynet.co.il (Israel)
- Ex-ambassador who shared intel with Lieberman convicted May 21, 2012Zeev Ben-Aryeh convicted within framework of plea bargain for leaking information to foreign minister regarding criminal investigation against him
- 3rd suspect in Ramat Yishai rape surrenders to police May 21, 2012Suspect linked to rape of two women in north Israel on Sunday surrenders to officers near his home; attorney of man suspected of aiding to alleged rapists says alibi solid
- TA police chief: Migrants committing 'survival crimes' May 21, 2012During Knesset session on wave of violence, Commander Aharon Aksol says employing foreign migrants would curb phenomenon. MK Danon: Solution is simple – deportation
- Chinese execs to study at Tel Aviv University May 21, 2012Executives to take business course as part of cooperation agreement with Nanjing
- Ministers approve ban on biking with headphones May 21, 2012Bill also calls for additional bike lanes, requires cyclists to wear reflective clothing
- Mother recalls West Bank kidnapping attempt May 21, 2012Palestinian cell indicted in attempted kidnapping of Yael Shahak and 8-year-old daughter, now she recalls incident: 'Look in his eyes changed and he became crazed'
- Russian refusenik remembers Jerusalem May 21, 2012Minister Edelstein says Six Day War 'changed the standing of Israel in the eyes of Jews across the world'
- Ex-ambassador who shared intel with Lieberman convicted May 21, 2012
- The Nation (US,New York) subscribers only )
- Can Occupy Fight Back Against the War on Women? May 18, 2012 Sarah Seltzer
- Can Occupy Fight Back Against the War on Women? May 18, 2012 Sarah Seltzer
- Comments of the Week: Standardized Testing, Poverty and Attachment Parenting May 18, 2012Sarah ArnoldSmart comments from our live chat on education reform and testing, along with comments on poverty and attachment parenting.Sarah Arnold
- With Hollande in Power, Can Germany's Social Democrats Force Merkel to Discard Austerity? May 17, 2012Norman BirnbaumThe fate of the EU hangs in the balance.Norman Birnbaum
- Preying on the Poor May 17, 2012Barbara EhrenreichHow government and corporations use the poor as piggy banks.Barbara Ehrenreich
- Obama Can't Knock the Hustle May 17, 2012Robert ScheerEven after it was known that Jamie Dimon’s bank blew more than $2 billion, Barack Obama still had praise for the intellect of his political backer.Robert Scheer
- Obama and the Arc of the Rainbow May 16, 2012The EditorsThe president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage is a testament to the generations of activists who waged a brave and often lonely battle for gay rights.The Editors
- Wisconsin's Recall May 16, 2012John NicholsIn the June 5 recall election to unseat Gov. Scott Walker and his cronies, grassroots activists are fighting millions in corporate cash.John Nichols
- Noted May 16, 2012Ari Berman on Mitt Romney’s bogus job numbers.
- Reality Bites Republicans May 16, 2012Chris MooneyPolitical watchdogs like PolitiFact and the Washington Post's "Fact-Checker" are accused of favoring Democrats—but it is the facts themselves that have a liberal bias.Chris Mooney
- freeviewdocumentaries.com (US)
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- EU Observer.com
- [Ticker] Nato launches European missile shield May 21, 2012Nato has told AFP that a US warship in the Mediterranean armed with interceptor missiles and a radar system in Turkey have come under Nato command out of a base in Rammstein, Germany. The move is phase one of a Europe-based missile shield system to be fully operational by 2018.
- [Opinion] Nato: Do what you do best May 21, 2012Nato should consider opening up its Partnership for Peace scheme to post-Arab-Spring democracies, writes Jos Boonstra.Related StoriesEU takes aim at Israeli settler productsObama presses EU leaders on growth
- [Ticker] Le Pen's parliamentary seat under threat May 21, 2012French far-right leader Marine Le Pen may lose her parliamentary seat to far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon in next month's parliamentary elections. An Ifop-Fiducial poll showed Le Pen would win 34% of first round votes to 29% for Melenchon but would be beaten 55-45% in the 17 June second round.
- Serb nationalist wins elections, pledges EU allegiance May 21, 2012Serb nationalist Tomislav Nikolic has backed Serbia's EU bid after his surpise victory in presidential elections.
- [Ticker] Denmark to label products made in Israeli settlements May 21, 2012Denmark is planning to label products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, foreign minister Villy Søvndal told Politiken Friday. In a similar move, South Africa's trade ministry Saturday said Israeli products made on Palestinian land must be marked "Made in Occupied Palestinian Territories." Israel described the move as "racist. […]
- [Ticker] Iranian filmmaker awarded EU prize in Cannes May 21, 2012Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi was awarded the European Union's Media Prize at this year’s film festival in Cannes. The 60,000 euro prize is meant to help fund his next film.
- [Ticker] Frankfurt sees thousands protest against austerity May 21, 2012More than 20,000 people demonstrated in Frankfurt on Sunday against austerity measures in Europe and the power of banks. Activists from the ”Occupy Frankfurt” set up tents outside the European Central Bank’s headquarter after police cleared out an earlier encampment at the same place last week.
- Hollande to confront Merkel on eurobonds at EU summit May 21, 2012French leader Hollande has said he will call for joint eurozone debt at Wednesday's EU summit, despite German opposition.Related StoriesGreece struggling to manage asylum seekersEuropean Commission should be EU government, says GermanyObama presses EU leaders on growth
- Obama presses EU leaders on growth May 20, 2012A weekend summit of G8 leaders stressed the need for the eurozone to focus on keeping Greece inside the euro. But plans are reportedly being drafted to deal with its potential exit.Related StoriesEuropean Commission should be EU government, says GermanyHollande to confront Merkel on eurobonds at EU summit[Opinion] Nato: Do what you do best
- [Ticker] Turkey accuses Israel of violating northern Cyprus airspace May 18, 2012Turkey Thursday accused Israeli airplanes of violating the airspace of northern Cyprus - recognised only by Turkey. Ankara said the Israeli plan was driven off by Turkish fighter planes. The incident happened on Monday and comes as Turkey and Israel's relations have soured recently.
- [Ticker] Nato launches European missile shield May 21, 2012
- The European Union Times (UK)
- NASA plans to Land on Asteroid and stay for a Month May 18, 2012The space agency Nasa is training a team of astronauts to land on asteroids after a three million mile journey – dwarfing the mere 239,000 miles travelled to the moon. The mission, planned for the next decade, would land on an asteroid travelling at more than 50,000 miles an hour. The astronauts will drive vehicles [...]The European Union Times
- Moody’s cuts ratings of 16 Spanish banks May 18, 2012The European banking industry has suffered another crushing blow after Moody’s ratings agency downgraded the credit ratings of 16 Spanish banks, citing the weakened government’s ability to support some banks. The agency downgraded the long-term debt and deposit ratings by one to three notches for 16 Spanish banks and Santander UK PLC, a UK-domiciled subsidia […]The European Union Times
- Kepler space telescope records the number of superflares May 17, 2012NASA’s Kepler space telescope has recorded the number of superflares or enormous releases of magnetic energy that can damage a nearby orbiting planet. According to the report published in the journal Nature, superflares are much less frequent on slow-rotating stars like our Sun. The biggest recorded flare on the Sun happened on September 1, 1859 [...]The European Union Times
- Minority report: White births no longer majority in the US May 17, 2012For the first time in US history, racial and ethnic minorities outnumber its white majority – white births make up fewer than half the children born in the country, according to the US Census Bureau. The new 2011 census, which was made public on Thursday, reveals non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 per cent of all [...]The European Union Times
- Russia warns West against hasty wars and rising regional tension May 17, 2012Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has warned the West against launching ‘hasty wars’, which may increase regional tensions and even trigger a nuclear war. “Sometimes these [military] actions — which undermine state sovereignty — could result in a fully-fledged regional war, and even — although I do not want to scare anyone […]The European Union Times
- NASA plans to Land on Asteroid and stay for a Month May 18, 2012
- reddit.com
- A materials scientist at Michigan Technological University has discovered a chemical reaction that not only eats up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, it also creates something useful. And, by the way, it releases energy. May 21, 2012
- Holy shit! May 21, 2012
- High hopes for the future! May 21, 2012
- Every rage comic on this subreddit from now until the end of time. May 21, 2012
- Good Guy Tyler Perry May 21, 2012
- Perfect timing. May 21, 2012
- SKYFALL - First Official Teaser Trailer May 21, 2012
- TIL that Whoopi Goldberg choose her stage name, not just as a reference to a Whoopee Cushion, but also because her mother thought "Goldberg" was Jewish-sounding enough to make it in Hollywood. May 21, 2012
- Gordon Ramsay goes undercover, and takes a cooking class. May 21, 2012
- Recently discovered a secret about a house I've driven past on my way to work for 3 years. May 21, 2012
- Xinhuanet ( China )
- Poll suggests Gingrich benefits from Cain exit December 6, 2011New poll results released on Monday showed former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich on top of the GOP field and benefiting from the exit of Herman Cain from the presidential campaign.
- Egyptian new PM completes cabinet line-up December 6, 2011Egyptian Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzouri has completed the line-up of the new cabinet, state TV reported Monday. Ganzouri led the Egyptian gov't under the Mubarak regime from Jan. 1996 to Oct. 1999.
- Senior British official rules out military intervention in Syria December 6, 2011The most senior security policy adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron told a committee of the Houses of Parliament on Monday that it was highly unlikely that there would be any British military intervention in Syria.
- Obama presses Congress to OK payroll tax cut extension December 6, 2011Obama Monday urged Republican lawmakers in Congress to join Democrats and approve the extension of payroll tax cuts next year to revive the U.S. economy.
- Abbas says ready to present Palestinian visions on status issues December 6, 2011Abbas announced Monday that the Palestinians are ready to present their visions concerning all the permanent status issues to end the conflict with Israel.
- Sarkozy, Merkel agree on new EU treaty to stem debt crisis December 6, 2011Europe's powerhouses France and Germany agreed Monday on a series of reforms aimed at changing the European Union (EU) treaty to impose tough control of eurozone budgets.
- Russia's ruling party to win Duma majority: CEC December 5, 2011Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) announced Monday that the ruling United Russia party won 49.54 percent of the votes after 95.71 percent of the ballots were counted.
- Syria responds "positively" to AL protocol, proposes minor amendments December 5, 2011Syria has responded positively to the Arab League (AL) protocol on an observer mission, but proposed "minor amendments" to the plan, a foreign ministry spokesman said Monday.
- Pakistan wants solid outcome of Bonn Conference: FM spokesman December 5, 2011Pakistan said on Monday that it wants solid outcome of Bonn Conference on the future of Afghanistan to promote peace and reconciliation in the war- shattered country.
- Irish PM gets tougher on budget December 5, 2011Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny on Sunday called for tougher measures for next year's budget, reminding the public that the country is running a deficit of 16 billion euros (21.46 billion U.S. dollars).
- Poll suggests Gingrich benefits from Cain exit December 6, 2011
- Wired Magazine
- Laser Levels and Motion Capture Show Everything You Know About Bike Fit Is Wrong May 21, 2012 Chuck Squatriglia
- 7 Social Networking Apps for When Facebook Jumps the Shark May 21, 2012 Christina Bonnington
- Nexus Smartphones: Who Wins, Who Loses if Google Launches Android 5.0 in Multiple Handsets? May 21, 2012 Nathan Olivarez-Giles
- Alt Text: 5 Horrifying Combo Monsters for Syfy Creature Features May 21, 2012 Lore Sj?berg
- May 21, 1927: Lucky Lindy Flies His Way Into the Celebrity Ranks May 21, 2012 Tony Long
- 5 Nuclear Sites That Could Launch War With Iran May 21, 2012 Spencer Ackerman
- How Apple and Microsoft Armed 4,000 Patent Warheads May 21, 2012 Robert McMillan
- Kevin Smith Riffs on Spoilers, His New Show for Movie Geeks May 21, 2012 Angela Watercutter
- A Google-a-Day Puzzle for May 21 May 21, 2012 Ken Denmead
- Watch Live: Annular Solar Eclipse Creates Ring of Fire May 20, 2012 Adam Mann
- cyveillanceblog.com (US)
- Protecting Corporate Assets with ShodanHQ – An Interview with the ShodanHQ Creator April 25, 2012 Cyber Intelligence Division
- APWG’s CeCOS Conference in Prague: Face to Face Collaboration in the Fight Against eCrime April 18, 2012 Cyber Intelligence Division
- Forget Marriott Introducing Ads into Your Hotel Wifi – Whose Network Are Your Employees On Anyway? April 6, 2012 Cyber Intelligence Division
- Defensive Measures of Google+ for Businesses April 3, 2012 Cyber Intelligence Division
- Contacting the Owner of a Website Using WHOIS Information March 7, 2012 Cyber Intelligence Division
- Common Questions About the New gTLDs February 22, 2012 admin
- Monitoring DMCA Safe Harbor Provisions February 9, 2012 admin
- Securing the Internet with DNSSEC February 6, 2012 Cyber Intelligence Division
- Cyber Attacks Abound with the Proliferation of New Technology – No Time for Complacency December 16, 2011 admin
- Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) Explained November 14, 2011 admin
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
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- telesurtv.net (Venezuela)
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- La Jornada (Mexico)
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- zonavirus.com (España)
- España piratea software por valor de 800 millones de euros May 22, 2012
- Variante de spyzbot - z May 22, 2012
- Nueva variante de reveton.a (virus de la policia) May 22, 2012
- Nuevas variantes de fakedoc que afectan a ficheros doc de unidades compartidas May 22, 2012
- Nueva variante de fake av security shield cazada por la heuristica del elistara May 22, 2012
- Los ciberdelitos supusieron 485 millones de dólares en pérdidas en 2011, solo en ee.uu May 21, 2012
- Vulnerabilidades en openoffice y libreoffice May 21, 2012
- Ahora el virus de "la policia" llega aparentando ser multa de la sgae por delitos contra la propiedad intelectual May 20, 2012
- Ficheros .doc convertidos en .scr, en servidores con comparticion de ficheros de dicho tipo (relacionado con fakedoc) May 19, 2012
- The pirate bay y wikileaks se recuperan de ataques de negación de servicio distribuidos... May 19, 2012
- Stampa Libera (Italia)
- Stefano Saglia: si fracking in Italia May 21, 2012 Lino Bottaro
- Siria – Appunti sulla geopolitica del caos May 21, 2012 Redazione
- Terremoto – Ministro Romani lo dica che è dovuto al Fracking delle trivelle texane autorizzato da Lei, o no? May 20, 2012 Lino Bottaro
- Ornella Vanoni – Una ragione di più May 20, 2012 Redazione
- Niente più risarcimenti per le calamità naturali, ci vorrà l’assicurazione May 20, 2012 Domenico Proietti
- Colonizzazione sottile May 20, 2012 Redazione
- L’Iran catturò dei terroristi protetti da Israele alla vigilia dell’incontro diplomatico P5 + 1 May 20, 2012 luca martinelli
- Perche’ la Russia teme un attacco atomico Usa? May 20, 2012 Redazione
- Stelle per uscire dallo stallo May 19, 2012 Roberto Duria
- NON TUTTO VA MALE! …ESEMPI DA SEGUIRE. May 19, 2012 Ascanio Montisci
- theintelligence.de (Deutschland)
- Erste Ergebnisse zur Ägypten-Wahl! May 21, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Kim Kovalsky)
- Ende mit Schrecken: Drachme statt Euro! May 21, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Otmar Pregetter)
- Tagesschau geifert gegen Griechen „Gebaren als linksradikaler Erz-Flegel“ May 20, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Gerd R. Rueger)
- Ein kurzer Blick ins Reagenzglas May 20, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Kolumnistenschwein)
- Die Krise News (72) – Farbenspiele May 19, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (KriSe)
- Erlebnisse in China (2) May 19, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Theophil Sempes)
- Wem dient die EU? May 18, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Christian Brand)
- Die Sache mit der Grundordnung ... May 18, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Peter Reuter)
- Notaufnahme – Der kleine Roman (Teil 1 bis 4) May 17, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Oliver Wellmann)
- Erlebnisse in China (1) May 17, 2012 mrr@theintelligence.de (Theophil Sempes)
- gesundheitlicheaufklaerung.de
- Der Theta-Zustand – Zugriff auf das Unterbewusstsein May 16, 2012 Sandra Weber
- Tote Rinder durch Gen-Mais – Bauer erstattet Strafanzeige gegen Syngenta May 9, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- Gerhard Klügl, Aurachirurge: “Ich bin ein Weltenmensch” (Doku) May 3, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- Die Weltbank und das positive HIV April 20, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- BAYER: 30 Jahre Kritische Aktionäre April 20, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- Der Sonne ist unsere Zeit egal – Sagen Sie NEIN zur Zeitumstellung! April 13, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- Kapitalismuskrankheit Burnout – Ausgebrannt: Wenn nichts mehr geht April 13, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- Diskussion: Die große Verschwendung – Nahrungsmittel im Müll April 12, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- Petition: Landwirtschaftliche Bodennutzung – Ersatz mineralischer Phosphordünger und Klärschlamm durch Humusdüngung April 11, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- Buchtipp: Einfach Ballengang – natürliches Gehen April 10, 2012 Gesundheitsapostel
- info.kopp-verlag.de (Deutschland)
- +++ Zukunft der Euro-Zone: Asmussen plädiert für zwei Europas +++ JARS-Raketensystem: Rußland rüstet Nukleararsenal um +++ Litauen: NATO muss auf Militarisierung von Gebiet Kaliningrad antworten +++ (Zeitgeschichte) May 21, 2012
- Abstimmung mit dem Möbelwagen: Ärzte kehren Deutschland den Rücken (Enthüllungen) May 21, 2012
- Fliegeneier statt Fischmehl (Enthüllungen) May 21, 2012
- Warten wir ab, für wen es am Ende wirklich bitter wird! (Wirtschaft & Finanzen) May 21, 2012
- Der Honigmann sagt ….
- Russlands neue Regierung steht! May 21, 2012 honigmann
- Nikolai Levashov (Teil 1) – “die Ausbreitung der Emotionellen Pest” May 21, 2012Seit 2007 habe ich gezögert von folgendem zu berichten und meine damalige Einsicht immer wieder verdrängt. Aber irgendwann kommt alles Verdrängte an die Oberfläche. Zunächst einmal wird dem aufmerksamen Leser aufgefallen sein, daß ich in meiner Besprechung des skandalösen Begleitbandes zu OROP Wüste den zweiten Teil des Büchleins, der von Richard Blasband zu […]honigmann
- “Die gesamte abendländische Geschichte ist das Ergebnis eines einzigen Konfliktes: zwischen Juden und Germanen. Es ist ein Kampf ums Dasein” May 21, 2012Einer der brillantesten Wissenschaftler, Rassenkundler und Kenner der jüdischen Geschichte: Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (* 9. September 1855 in Portsmouth, England; † 9. Januar 1927 in Bayreuth) war ein Schriftsteller, Verfasser zahlreicher populärwissenschaftlicher Werke, unter anderem zu Richard Wagner, Immanuel Kant und Johann […]honigmann
- Pfingstausflug 2012 für alle die nicht zu den Externsteinen kommen können… May 21, 2012Um den Tag der energetischen Wurzel des Neuanfanges mitgestalten zu können, gibt es viele Möglichkeiten… Die Intuition einer lieben Leserin brachte uns auf die Idee, Orte ausfindig zu machen, die Pfingstsonntag um 14:30 Uhr durchaus eine Reise wert sind! Für den Süden Deutschlands sind zwei Orte zu nennen, an denen wir Pfingstsonntag um 14:30 Uhr [...] […]honigmann
- Neun Leichen hingen an einer Brücke – 23 Tote in Mexiko May 20, 2012Grausamer Drogenkrieg in Mexiko: Im Norden des Landes wurden 23 Tote gefunden. Mehrere Leichen hingen von einer Autobahnbrücke, die Köpfe der anderen Opfer lagen vor einem Rathaus. Neue Gewaltexzesse im mexikanischen Drogenkrieg: 23 Tote sind in der Grenzstadt Nuevo Laredo in Nordmexiko entdeckt worden. Neun Menschen hingen am Freitag von einer Autobahnbrück […]honigmann
- Französische Regierung kürzt ihre Gehälter, die deutsche erhöht sie May 20, 2012Der Sozialist Hollande setzt mit der 30prozentigen Kürzung ebenso ein Zeichen wie die konservative Kanzlerin mit der 5,7prozentigen Erhöhung Es ist eine symbolische Geste, wenn der frisch gewählte französische Präsident Hollande sich und seinen Ministern zu Beginn schon einmal eine 30prozentige Gehaltskürzung verordnet. Gleichwohl setzt die neue Regierung da […]honigmann
- “Das war´n Schuß in´n Ofen…” – alles blieb ruhig May 20, 2012Blockupy – Erfolg oder Niederlage? Mehr als 25.000 Menschen sollen heute (gestern) in der Frankfurter Innenstadt nach Veranstalterangaben gegen die Politik der EU-Troika demonstriert haben Das Spektrum der Demonstranten reichte von Gewerkschaften, der Linkspartei, Attac bis den außerparlamentarischen Bündnissen Ums Ganze und der Interventionistischen L […]honigmann
- Röttgen wehrt sich gegen Merkels Demontage May 20, 2012Nach dem kühlen Rausschmiss von Norbert Röttgen durch Kanzlerin Angela Merkel, wehrt sich der Ex-Bundesumweltminister nun: Er möchte sein Amt als Merkels erster Stellvertreter behalten © DAPD Den Rausschmiss will Ex-Bundesumweltminister Röttgen so nicht auf sich sitzen lassen. Er möchte stellvertretender CDU-Vorsitzender bleiben Der am Mittwoch entlassene Bu […]honigmann
- Film am Sonntag – Cagliostro – Teil 1 – Audienz in Versailles May 20, 2012Der Dreiteiler basiert auf dem Roman “Joseph Balsamo” von Alexandre Dumas Abenteurer, Hochstapler, Magier, Goldmacher, Geisterbeschwörer – “Graf” Cagliostro suchte im 18. Jahrhundert fast alle Hauptstädte und Höfe Europas heim. Im Jahre 1791 wurde er von der Inquisition verurteilt und verschwand bis an sein Lebensende hinter Ker […]honigmann
- Sonntagsansichten – Die armen, armen Männer….. May 20, 2012Wir verlangen, dass wir genau wie die Frauen mit einem Tag geehrt werden, da wir ständig Opfer von Missbrauch, Demütigungen, verbalen, physischen und sexuellen Attacken sind. Außerdem muss folgendes beachtet werden: Wer ist der Einzige der sich traut, alles aufzuessen, was ihm vorgesetzt wird, ohne zu mucksen ? Der selbstlose Mann ! Wer hebt die [...]honigmann
- Polskaweb.eu (Poland /German version)
- Wahrheit: NATO eine kriminelle Vereinigung May 21, 2012
- Schwindler Zuckerberg und die Facebook- Aktie May 20, 2012
- Horror: Wiesenthals "Geist" in Auschwitz unterwegs May 18, 2012
- Volksbetrug: Wolfgang Thierse ist gar kein Ossi ! May 16, 2012
- Schock: Weiterer Bundespräsident als Betrüger entlarvt May 13, 2012
- Radio Utopie (D)
- Stromfresser Stuttgart 21 abschalten! May 21, 2012Dokumentation: Die Rede von Parkschützer Matthias von Herrmann auf der heutigen 124. Montagsdemonstration der Stuttgarter Bürgerbewegung für den Kopfbahnhof und gegen das verkehrsindustrielle Umbauprogramm "Stuttgart 21" (S21).Redaktion
- Der G-Null-Gipfel May 20, 2012Ein Resumee des Gipfels der G-8-Regierungen in Camp David. Und ein Ausblick über den Horizont.Daniel Neun
- “World Wide Rebel Song”: Rock statt Rocks in Chicago zum NATO-Gipfel May 20, 2012Rund 500 Demonstranten versammelten sich vor dem Haus des Bürgermeisters von Chicago Rahm Emanuel, um gegen die kürzliche Schliessung der psychiatrischen Kliniken als Teil einer Reihe von Kundgebungen und Märsche zeitgleich mit einem NATO-Gipfel zu protestieren. Die Menschen hatten Transparente mitgebracht mit den Slogans “food not bombs”, “seize the peace” […]petrapez
- SYRIZA-Vorsitzender Tsipras: “Es ist ein Krieg zwischen den Völkern und dem Kapitalismus” May 19, 2012Griechenland: Nachdem vorher der Botschafter der Berliner Republik in Athen, Wolfgang Dold, und der deutsche EU-Parlamentspräsident Martin Schulz (SPD/SPE) bei ihm rausgeschlichen kamen, hat der Vorsitzende der Koalition der Radikalen SYRIZA, Alexis Tsipras, auch dem britischen "Guardian" eine Audienz gegeben. Auszüge des Interviews im Wortlaut: […]Daniel Neun
- Frau Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, streichen Sie bitte Paul Watson von Roter Liste … May 19, 2012Sea Shepherd Conservation Society warnte am 17.Mai davor, dass Paul Watson in Costa Rica nicht sicher ist und um sein Leben fürchten muss. Die taiwanesische Haifang-Mafia hat seit Jahren ein Kopfgeld in Höhe von 20.000 Dollar auf den Captain ausgesetzt. “Wir wissen, dass der Arm der taiwanesischen Fischerei-Mafia nicht nur bis zur illegalen Fischerei in Cost […]petrapez
- Der neue Protest May 18, 2012Sie hat nichts mit dem Ereignis zu tun, das ihm den Namen gab: Die riesige Rallye für Frieden , an deren Ende die Ermordung Yitzhak Rabins war. Diese Rallye war in jeder Hinsicht anders. Es war ein fröhliches Ereignis. Dutzende von NGOs, viele von ihnen klein, einige von ihnen etwas größer, jede mit einer anderen Agenda, kamen zusammen, um den sozialen Prote […]Uri Avnery
- Denn Mutti sagt immer die Wahrheit May 18, 2012Heute hat Angela Mutti Merkel versucht, ihrem griechischen Volk ein Referendum zu geben.. Leider gab es da ein kleines Mißverständnis. Dabei will sie nur ständig das Beste. Und zwar mit Zinsen. Heute hat also Mutti – wer würde ihr schon was antun? Einfach abwählen?! Niemals! Ihr Muttimörder! – dem griechischen Volk ein Referendum über blühende [. […]Daniel Neun
- Blockupy Frankfurt 18.5.2012 May 18, 2012Videos und updates In ganz Frankfurt und Randgebiete ist das Recht auf Bewegungsfreiheit, Meinungsäusserungen und Pressefreiheit ausser Kraft gesetzt, denn die Repressalien der Polizei erstrecken sich auf Kontrollen und Platzverweise für alle Besucher, einschliesslich Touristen und Einwohner. Auch am heutigen Freitag kamen tausende Menschen in die Innenstadt […]petrapez
- Frankfurter Paulskirche: 1000 Demonstranten halten Grundgesetz in die Höhe May 17, 2012Liedermacher Konstantin Wecker auf dem Paulsplatz zu den Blockupy-Protesten: Wecker: “Begräbnis demokratischer Rechte” Livestreams und updates von den “Bloccupy”-Protesten. Ohrfeige nach Karlsruhe aus der Main-Metropole: die Bürger verhalten sich wie Bürger, die zur Verteidigung der Verfassung sowie für das Gemeinwohl der Gesellschaft […]petrapez
- US-Gericht blockiert National Defense Authorization Act! May 17, 2012Mit diesem 565 Seiten umfassenden Gesetz wäre ein Freibrief durch einen kurzen Paragraf in Statut 1021 für das Militär in Kraft getreten, jeden Bürger auf unbestimmte Zeit ohne ein ordentliches Gerichtsverfahren zu inhaftieren, dem vorgeworfen wird, wissentlich oder unwissentlich Unterstützung des Terrorismus zu leisten.petrapez
- Stromfresser Stuttgart 21 abschalten! May 21, 2012
- heise.de (Deutschland)
- Thunderbolt-Mainboards von Asus, MSI, Intel und bald auch Gigabyte
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- Perl 5.16.0: neues Release der Skriptsprache
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- wirtschaftsfacts.de
- Niederlande: Obacht, Steuerzahler – nationale Hypothekenmärkte wackeln May 21, 2012 REd
- Hollande pocht auf Eurobonds – und ist nicht allein… May 21, 2012 REd
- USA: Steuerverweigerer im Ausland – wir kriegen Euch alle… May 20, 2012 REd
- Krugman über Europas Apokalypse; wir sprechen über apokalyptischen Krugman May 20, 2012 REd
- Facebook: Bewertung mit 100-fachem des Gewinns – LoL! Sichere Short-Wette? May 19, 2012 REd
- Facebook: Der erste Handelstag … enttäuschend May 19, 2012 Robert Schroeder
- Riskante Staatsanleihemärkte: Japanischer Pensionsfonds setzt erstmals auf Gold May 18, 2012 REd
- Italien: Neue Industrieaufträge brechen im März regelrecht ein May 18, 2012 REd
- Katzenjammer im globalen Minensektor setzt sich fort May 18, 2012 REd
- Spaniens Polizeikräfte nicht zimperlich im Einsatz gegen Demonstranten May 17, 2012 REd
- NATO website
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- Reuters top news
- Facebook shares fall 11 percent in early trading May 21, 2012
- Death toll in Yemen suicide bombing rises to 90 May 21, 2012
- Subdued Libyan funeral for Lockerbie bomber Megrahi May 21, 2012
- France presses for euro area bonds as crisis salve May 21, 2012
- Alibaba buys back 20 percent stake held by Yahoo for $7.1 billion May 21, 2012
- Barclays to sell $6.1 billion BlackRock stake May 21, 2012
- Spain to slump further but will hit deficit goal May 21, 2012
- NATO to hand combat role to Afghans as it seeks way out of war May 21, 2012
- Strauss-Kahn investigators open group rape inquiry May 21, 2012
- Zuckerberg's post-IPO wedding is smart legal move May 21, 2012
- Times Magazine ( Top Stories)
- A Year of Recovery in Joplin, Mo.: Photos by Eric Thayer May 21, 2012
- Obama's Afghanistan Problem: Neither Karzai Nor the Taliban Like the 'Reconciliation' Script May 21, 2012
- The Passing of the Lockerbie Bomber: Have More Secrets Died in Libya? May 21, 2012
- Robin Gibb, Bee Gees Singer and Pop Pioneer, Dies at 62 May 21, 2012
- Has Obama 'Gotten It' in Time? May 21, 2012
- Why the Coalition Trying to Recall Scott Walker Is Splintering May 21, 2012
- From China's State Press, a Not-So-Fond Farewell to Activist Chen Guangcheng May 21, 2012
- What You Need to Know About the New Census Numbers on Hispanic Births May 21, 2012
- NATO in Chicago: Geopolitics Meets Reality of a U.S. City May 21, 2012
- A Monstrous Act in Brindisi: Why Was an Italian Girls School Bombed? May 21, 2012
- CNN ( Top Stories)
- Dominique Strauss-Kahn may face gang rape allegations May 21, 2012
- Gibb, 62, dies after cancer battle May 21, 2012
- GOP problem: Their voters are dying off May 21, 2012
- Zelizer: Blame GOP for gridlock May 21, 2012
- Crazy protests hit Chicago May 21, 2012
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- China human rights activist now in U.S. May 21, 2012
- Lockerbie bomber dies in Libya May 21, 2012
- Flesh-eating bug victim off ventilator May 21, 2012
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- CBC (Canada)
- Montreal tuition protesters defy law and clash with police May 21, 2012
- Prince Charles and Camilla arrive in Canada May 20, 2012
- Mount Everest descent claims Canadian woman, 2 others May 21, 2012
- Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb dies May 21, 2012
- 'Ring of fire' eclipse dazzles millions May 21, 2012
- Yemen suicide bombing kills dozens at army parade May 21, 2012
- Afghanistan mission won't be extended, MacKay says May 21, 2012
- Salad recall expanded after Listeria contamination May 21, 2012
- Quake-struck Italians fear return to homes May 21, 2012
- Leukemia fighter keen to meet royals May 20, 2012
- The Guardian – (UK) Global News
- Sana'a suicide bomb attack kills 63 May 21, 2012 Sam Jones, Tom Finn
- Nato summit: US-Pakistan rift widens May 21, 2012 Ewen MacAskill
- Settler filmed firing gun at Palestinians May 21, 2012 Harriet Sherwood
- Syria crisis hits Beirut - live updates May 21, 2012 Matthew Weaver
- Eyewitness: Chelsea, London May 21, 2012
- Ryanair says fuel costs and eurozone crisis will hit profits May 21, 2012 Zoe Wood, Gwyn Topham
- Picture desk live: the day's best news images May 21, 2012 Fiona Shields
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- 24 hours in pictures May 21, 2012
- Warda gave us a soundtrack for the Arab spring | Nabila Ramdani May 21, 2012 Nabila Ramdani
- The Washington Post ( Politics)
- White House visitor logs provide window into lobbying industry May 21, 2012 T.W. Farnam
- Featured Advertiser May 21, 2012
- Cory Booker commits the classic Washington gaffe May 21, 2012 Chris Cillizza, Aaron Blake
- Santorum, Gingrich campaigns owe millions May 21, 2012 T.W. Farnam
- As Obama opens NATO summit in Chicago, focus is on winding down Afghanistan war May 21, 2012 Karen DeYoung, Scott Wilson
- Supreme Court faces pressure to reconsider Citizens United ruling May 20, 2012 Robert Barnes
- Romney could best Obama in fundraising May 20, 2012 Chris Cillizza
- Mitch McConnell, John Boehner double down on deficit concerns May 20, 2012 Ed O'Keefe
- Obama’s cash advantage grew in April May 20, 2012 Aaron Blake
- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel endorses Scott Walker May 20, 2012 Rachel Weiner
- New York Times (Global)
- Attacks in Yemen Raise Concerns About Qaeda Affiliate May 21, 2012 By ALAN COWELL
- Bo Xilai’s Fall in China Put Allies in Peril May 21, 2012 By EDWARD WONG and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
- Megrahi’s Death Revives Debate Over Trial and Release May 21, 2012 By JOHN F. BURNS
- Cairo Journal: In Streets and Online, Campaign Fever in Egypt May 21, 2012 By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAYY EL SHEIK
- Nuclear Agency Resumes Talks With Iran May 21, 2012 By WILLIAM J. BROAD
- Euro Watch: Stock Markets Calm on Lukewarm G-8 Support for Euro May 21, 2012 By DAVID JOLLY
- Europe Offers to Let Google Settle Potential Antitrust Charges May 21, 2012 By JAMES KANTER
- Supply Lines Cast Shadow at NATO Meeting on Afghan War May 21, 2012 By HELENE COOPER and MATTHEW ROSENBERG
- Italy Quake Kills 5 and Causes Widespread Damage May 21, 2012 By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
- At the Ethiopian News Agency, Hope for Freer Journalism May 21, 2012 By BENNO MUCHLER
- Huffingtonpost.com
- Out Of Bounds: Queen Latifah, La La Vazquez, Holly Robinson Peete And Jennifer Sterger Talk 'Rocky' (VIDEO) May 21, 2012 The Huffington Post News Editors
- Conquering Retirement: Smarter Ways To Help Kids With College May 21, 2012 The Huffington Post News Editors
- Katie Couric Delivers Commencement Address At University Of Virginia (PHOTOS) May 21, 2012 The Huffington Post News Editors
- Miami Facing Police Shortage, As Cops Retire And Hiring Drags On May 21, 2012 The Huffington Post News Editors
- Obama Photo Caption Contest: President Shoots Soccer Ball May 21, 2012 The Huffington Post News Editors
- Ultra-Orthodox Jews Hold Massive NYC Meeting At Citi Field To Protest Internet May 21, 2012 The Huffington Post News Editors
- Lung Cancer CT Scans: Just For Older Heavy Smokers May 21, 2012 The Huffington Post News Editors
- Alan Dershowitz: New Forensic Evidence Is Consistent With George Zimmerman's Self Defense Claim May 21, 2012 Alan Dershowitz
- Leo W. Gerard: Workers of the World Unite -- With Shareholders May 21, 2012 Leo W. Gerard
- Kaylee Scottaline: The View from My 31st Birthday May 21, 2012 Kaylee Scottaline
- ilmessaggero.it (Italia)
- Brindisi, l'ultimo saluto a Melissa Riapre la scuola: studentesse in lacrime May 21, 2012
- Terremoto Emilia, nuove scosse Salgono a 4.500 gli sfollati, sette i morti May 21, 2012
- Terremoto in Emilia, tendopoli già piene Sciacalli: finti sms e falsi volontari May 21, 2012
- Ballottaggi, seggi chiusi Affluenza in picchiata May 21, 2012
- Terrorismo, il ricordo di D'Antona Napolitano: rinsaldare coesione sociale May 21, 2012
- Terremoto, leghista su Fb: «Scusate il disagio, la Padania si sta staccando» May 20, 2012
- Crisi, Monti invita anche Rajoy al vertice con Merkel e Hollande May 21, 2012
- Chicago, in migliaia protestano al vertice Nato: almeno 45 arresti May 21, 2012
- Brescia, si getta con i figli dal balcone Tre morti, i bimbi avevano 1 e 4 anni May 21, 2012
- Coppia di Caserta sequestrata e uccisa in Venezuela: giallo a Maracaibo May 20, 2012
- Corriere della sera (Italia)
- Proiezioni: a Palermo Orlando al 70% Parma, il grillino Diretta tv May 21, 2012
- Brindisi, individuato un presunto killer Fuggito l'uomo, sotto torchio il fratello May 21, 2012
- Melissa, applausi ai funerali| May 21, 2012 Redazione Online
- Notte di paura, nuove scosse Sette morti, 5.000 sfollati May 21, 2012
- Che succede alla Pianura Padana? May 21, 2012 Giovanni Caprara
- Coppa Italia, fischiato inno di Mameli May 21, 2012 Redazione online
- Uccide i suoi due figli lanciandoli dal sesto piano e poi si suicida May 21, 2012 Redazione Brescia Online
- Rapallo, bomba carta davanti a seggio May 21, 2012 Redazione Online
- La Ue a Google: «Misure contro rischi di abuso di posizione dominante» May 21, 2012 Redazione Online
- Caso Orlandi, sospesi esami salma De Pedis May 21, 2012 Fabrizio Peronaci
- El Pais ( Madrid )
- Roland Berger y Oliver Wyman auditarán a los bancos españoles May 21, 2012 El País
- Oliver Wyman encumbró a un banco irlandés antes de su colapso May 21, 2012 Cristina Galindo
- Guindos cifra en 7.500 millones el saneamiento pendiente de Bankia May 21, 2012 El País
- Archivada la denuncia por los gastos del presidente del Tribunal Supremo May 21, 2012 José Yoldi
- Bruselas exige cambios a Google en “semanas” para evitar la multa May 21, 2012 Claudi Pérez, Agencias
- El Gobierno reutilizará antiguas campañas contra la violencia machista May 21, 2012 María R. Sahuquillo
- Un ataque suicida mata a un centenar de militares en Yemen May 21, 2012 Agencias
- Monti suma a Rajoy a la ‘cumbre del crecimiento’ con Merkel y Hollande May 21, 2012 El País
- Rubalcaba rechaza el rescate de la UE: “Podemos hacerlo solos” May 21, 2012 El País
- Miles de personas desplazadas por el terremoto en el norte de Italia May 21, 2012 Lucia Magi
- El Universal ( Mexico )
- Ana Anabitarte Desde Europa May 21, 2012 Ana Anabitarte
- José Vales Desde el Cono Sur May 21, 2012 José Vales
- J. Jaime Hernández Agenda Washington May 21, 2012 J. Jaime Hernández
- Suman 96 los muertos por atentado en Yemen May 21, 2012 Notimex
- Se eleva a siete el número de muertos por sismo en Italia May 21, 2012 Notimex
- Welt online (D)
- Jemen: Selbstmordattentäter tötet fast 100 Menschen May 21, 2012
- +++ DFB-Verhandlung – live +++: DFB-Sportgericht lehnt Hertha-Einspruch ab May 21, 2012
- Linksradikaler Grieche: Tsipras will mit Merkel über Sparkurs verhandeln May 21, 2012
- Sozialbetrug: Wie vermögende Türken den deutschen Staat ausnehmen May 21, 2012
- Konfliktforschung: Elf Kriege stehen der Menschheit noch bevor May 21, 2012
- "Hand nicht gesehen": Schweinsteiger entschuldigt sich bei Gauck May 21, 2012
- FC Bayern München: Uli Hoeneß zum vierten Mal Zweiter in dieser Saison May 21, 2012
- Geheime Verführer: In welche Psychofallen wir im Supermarkt tappen May 21, 2012
- Fahrrad-Verkehrsregeln: Handy verboten, Suff erst ab 1,6 Promille strafbar May 21, 2012
- Astronomie: Über Asien und Amerika leuchtet ein Feuerring May 21, 2012
- Der Spiegel (Germany)
- Skandalspiel von Düsseldorf: DFB schmettert Hertha-Protest ab - Berlin steigt ab
- SPD: Gabriel sorgt für Eklat bei Frauenkongress
- Bergdrama am Mount Everest: Verkehrsstau in der Todeszone
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