Nearly ten weeks after the election, Cecilia Tkaczyk, backed by the progressive Working Families slate, wins her race for the New York State Senate over wealthy real estate developer George Amedore.

ThinkProgress reports:

Progressive Democrat Cecilia Tkaczyk has been elected to the New York State Senate over former Assemblyman George Amedore (R), after a successful court challenge led to the counting of 99 previously uncounted ballots from the November elections. Amedore, a wealthy real estate developer, saw his 37-vote lead become a 19-vote loss as the ballots were counted Thursday and Friday.

Tkaczyk ran a strongly progressive campaign in the Albany-area district, emphasizing her support for public education, LGBT equality, equal pay for women, reproductive choice, environmental protection, and campaign finance reform. Though she was heavily outspent by Amedore, she benefited from outside spending by supporters ofpublic financing for candidates. In a December op/ed, she observed: “If I do get sworn in, I’ll know my support for public financing is a central reason I won the job.”

Yes, that’s certainly one of the reasons, but the other one is equally central: Every vote counts. The fact that she had to mount a court challenge to count uncounted votes is shameful, but it’s fortunate for her that she won it. Her victory would not have been celebrated today if those 99 votes had not been counted.

The result is a real victory for progressives, as ThinkProgress notes:

A coalition of Republicans and Independent Democrats share power and jointly control the 63-member Senate. But with Tkaczyk’s newly-determined victory, Republican Conference Leader Dean Skelos will have a minority of seats – strengthening both the influence of the five-member Independent Democratic Conference and the likelihood of progressive legislation passing the body. Gov. Andrew Cuomo and State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver are both Democrats.

Congratulations, Senator-elect Tkaczyk.

In today’s On the News segment: Despite accusations that the President is anti-business or even a socialist, an analysis by Bloomberg News shows that corporate profits have grown a whopping 171 percent under Obama; as much as 16.6 million more metric tons of carbon dioxide will be pumped into the atmosphere if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved in March; millions of Americans are at risk of having their homes flooded, as a result of our deteriorating infrastructure; and more.

TRANSCRIPT:

Thom Hartmann here — on the news…

You need to know this. Ten Governors around the nation, along with the premier of Saskatchewan, are urging President Obama to approve construction of the rest of the Keystone XL pipeline. The administration is expected to make a decision by the end of March, and for the sake of the planet, let’s hope the President says, “no way!” A new study by Oil Change International looked at the potential environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline — and discovered they were worse than previously thought. As much as 16.6 million more metric tons of carbon dioxide will be pumped into the atmosphere, as a result of the Keystone XL pipeline — and new estimates show that annual carbon emission will be 13% higher than previously estimates. While Big Oil and foreign transnational corporations urge the President to approve this environmental time bomb, more rational scientists are pleading for the President to reject it. On Tuesday, 18 of the nation’s top climate scientists wrote a letter to President Obama, urging him to scrap the pipeline. In order to tip the scales away from Big Oil, “we the people” need to get active and fight for the planet — because with projections showing a 5-degree increase in temperatures by the end of the century, if we sit around and do nothing — the consequences could be catastrophic.

In screwed news…Millions of Americans are at risk of having their homes flooded, as a result of our deteriorating infrastructure. According to an investigation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, more than 300 levees covering more than 2,000 miles around the country are in need of “urgent repair”, and risk failing. And this problem could be much worse, as only 40% of the nearly 2,500 structures, which protect 10 million people from floods, have been reviewed so far. In New Orleans in 2005, we saw the horrific consequences of what happens when levees fail. And these deteriorating levees are part of a bigger problem — a deteriorating infrastructure. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers — our infrastructure requires $1.6 trillion in repairs — and if nothing is done by the end of the decade, that number will grow to nearly $3 trillion. Decaying infrastructure is estimated to cost our economy 3.5 million jobs over the next decade. Of course, there’s a simple solution to all of this: Invest government money into rebuilding and modernizing our nation’s infrastructure. Unfortunately, since such a thing will put tens of millions of Americans back to work, improve our economy, and prove that the government can indeed be a force for economic good — Republicans in Congress are blocking this much needed infrastructure stimulus. So, you know who to call next time the levees break — John Boehner and Eric Cantor.

In the best of the rest of the news…

Corporate America is doing very, very well under President Obama. Despite accusations that the President is anti-business or even a socialist, an analysis by Bloomberg News shows that corporate profits have grown a whopping 171% under President Obama. That’s the biggest gain under any president ever in the post-war era. To put it in perspective — as Bloomberg points out, “Profits are more than twice as high as their peak during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, and more than 50 percent greater than during the late-1990s Internet boom, measured by the size of the economy.” At the same time, workers’ wages as a percent of GDP are lower than they’ve ever been. Despite what you hear on Fox so-called News, and the Conservative misinformation complex — big business is doing very well under President Obama. It’s the workers who aren’t. So if the President really is a socialist, then he’s not doing a very good job.

Mired in the worst flu season in decades, Americans are demanding business owners give their workers paid sick days. According to a new survey by the consumer organization, ORC International, 57% of Americans say it is “very important or important” that restaurants provide their workers with paid sick days. This is common sense, after all, who wants sick people handling their food? Unfortunately, the United States of America is the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave, holiday pay or paid vacation days. As a result, 90% of restaurant workers don’t get paid sick time. The same is true of 79% of ALL food industry workers. According to a 2009 study by the CDC — as many as 5 million more Americans get the flu every year, because restaurants don’t offer paid sick days to their workers. This is insanity. Enough with putting corporate profits ahead of the health of entire communities. Give workers what they’ve earned — a paid day off when they have the flu. With corporate profits as percentage of GDP higher than they’ve ever been before, Corporate America can easily afford it.

And finally…Republicans are now admitting that the only reason they still control the House of Representatives is because they rigged the election. In a new report by the Republican State Leadership Council, the Party brags about how it spent $30 million in 2010 to put Republicans majorities in state legislatures in blue states, like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Those majorities went on to carve up Congressional districts in a way that benefits Republicans — by carving up very safe red districts —and hurts Democrats by splitting up Democratic strongholds. So by the time the 2012 elections came along — Republican House seats were already very well-protected. As the report notes, “2012 could have been a repeat of 2008, when voters gave control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Democrats…Instead, Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House…having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.” Yes, Republicans just admitted that voters wanted Democrats to control the House — but Republican gerrymandering prevented that from happening. Clearly the Republican Party has adopted one simple strategy: If you can’t win elections fair and square — then steal them.

And that’s the way it is today — Friday, January 18, 2013. I’m Thom Hartmann — on the news.

A security guard stands outside the cooling towers for a coal-powered power plant in the suburbs of Beijing. Coal burning has been a major contributing factor towards a rise in mercury emissions. (AFP Photo / Goh Chai Hin)

A convention signed in Geneva has legally bound over 140 countries to a set of newly established laws as part of an attempt to prevent the spread of deadly mercury pollution following a rise in the toxin’s emissions.

Environmental mercury levels have been rising, and anticipated further increases have motivated UN delegates in Geneva to reach a consensus on the solution. Mercury can cause a range of neurological and health problems, and is potentially fatal in large doses.

The set of legally binding rules, known as the Minimata Convention, was established on Saturday morning following overnight negotiations preceded by a week of discussions.

UN Environment Program (UNEP) spokesperson Nick Nuttall told Reuters that a “treaty to start to begin to rid the world of a notorious health-hazardous metal was agreed in the morning of January 19.”

The UN approval of the treaty followed recently published data which demonstrated an alarming rise in levels of the highly toxic metal, especially in developing states.

‘Minimata’ is the Japanese name for a neurological disorder that arises from severe mercury poisoning, symptoms of which can include numbness in the extremities, ataxia, damage to speech, sound and sight, paralysis and death.The condition itself is named after the Kyushu Island city which suffered a severe outbreak in 1956 from untreated chemical factory wastewater.

Once released into the environment, mercury can become more concentrated as it moves up the food chain. It can bioaccumulate in fish, which humans then consume.

UNEP said a growth in small-scale mining and coal burning were the primary reasons for the rise in mercury emissions.

The UN-mandated limits on mercury emission include restricting the supply of and trade in mercury, its use in products and industry, measures to reduce emissions from small-scale gold mining, and measures to reduce emissions from metal production facilities and power plants.

However, UNEP told Reuters that the agreement could take three to five years to come into force.

The poisonous metal is frequently used in chemical production and mining. Coal-burning power plants are infamous for being the largest human-caused source of mercury. However, it was reported in November 2012 that plans had been made for more than 1,000 new coal power plants to be built worldwide, 76 percent of which would be built in China and India.

Prior to the new agreement, UNEP had published a report warning that developing nations were facing growing health and environmental risks from increased exposure to mercury, attributing the rise in emissions to small-scale mining and coal burning.

Joe DiGangi, a science adviser with advocacy group IPEN, told AP that while the treaty is “a first step,” it is not stringent enough and should impose stricter limitations in order to accomplish the goal of reducing overall mercury emissions.

The signing ceremony for the new regulations will take place later this year in Japan.

AFP Photo / Olivier Morin

Mac Wilson, an 8-year old lad, could get his first job at English League One club Doncaster after he wrote a letter describing his vision for the team’s development, which reached the table of club chair John Ryan.

Ryan was so impressed with young Mac’s application for the vacancy left by Dean Saunders’ departure that he invited him in for an interview.

“My daughter Claire was with me at the time that I got Mac’s letter and my first thought was to give him a ring,” the Doncaster Free Press quoted him as saying.

“I got his dad on the phone and asked if I could speak to Mac with regards to the vacancy at Rovers,” Ryan said. “He came on the phone and I asked him whether he would like to come down for an interview. I invited them both down on Saturday for a look round, meet the players and to give him an interview.”

In his letter, Mac promised to get the team in the Premier League in three years. “I thought that was a very positive statement,” Ryan said.

Mac’s dad Adi said the boy was convinced his older brother was playing a trick on him. “We sent off the email for a bit of fun really. All credit to John for responding. Mac has been absolutely full of it since he got in touch and so excited,” the same source quoted Adi as saying.

Rovers season-ticket holder Mac was officially invited to the Keepmoat Stadium to watch the Rovers, lead by a caretaker boss Brian Flynn, play Leyton Orient on Saturday.

The young man’s future with the club will be announced shortly but one thing is certain: He has hit the ground running. One of the best young coaches in the sport, Tottenham manager Andre Villas-Boas, wrote his famous letter to Sir Bobby Robson when he was 17, so Mac has some time as handicap.

Pakistani Minister of Oil and Natural Resources Asim Hussain says Islamabad wants to complete Iran-Pakistan (IP) gas pipeline as soon as possible to deflect the emerging power and gas crises.

“We are dependent on this project as there is no other substitute at present to meet the growing energy demand [in Pakistan],” Hussain said on January 19.

The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, projected to cost USD1.2-1.5 billion, is aimed to export a daily amount of 21.5 million cubic meters of Iranian natural gas to Pakistan.

Describing the project as beneficial for Iran and Pakistan, Hussain said Islamabad started work on the IP project in December 2012.

Hussain had said on September 4, 2012 that the gas pipeline project would become fully operational in 2014, adding that, “Surveys for the project are due to be completed before October 2012 and construction can start as early as December 2012.”

This is while Iran has already constructed more than 900 kilometers of the pipeline on its soil.

The Pakistani minister added that the implementation of the project showed that Islamabad had a flexible foreign policy.

According to reports, the US has been trying to lure Islamabad away from the gas pipeline project by offering cheaper gas to the country.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, however, reiterated on December 20, 2012, that Islamabad has a resolve to push ahead with the gas pipeline project.

The Pakistani foreign minister also underscored Pakistan’s daily-growing demand for Iran’s gas and said the project would continue “under any condition.”

MYA/SS

President Barack Obama during his speech accepting the 2009 Nobel Peace prize in Oslo, Norway, Thursday , Dec. 10, 2009. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)A simple twist of fate has set President Obama’s second Inaugural Address for January 21, the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.

Obama made no mention of King during the Inauguration four years ago — but since then, in word and deed, the president has done much to distinguish himself from the man who said “I have a dream.”

After his speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, King went on to take great risks as a passionate advocate for peace.

After his Inaugural speech in January 2009, Obama has pursued policies that epitomize King’s grim warning in 1967: “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.”

But Obama has not ignored King’s anti-war legacy. On the contrary, the president has gone out of his way to distort and belittle it.

In his eleventh month as president — while escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, a process that tripled the American troop levels there — Obama traveled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech, he cast aspersions on the peace advocacy of another Nobel Peace laureate: Martin Luther King Jr.

The president struck a respectful tone as he whetted the rhetorical knife before twisting. “I know there’s nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naive — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King,” he said, just before swiftly implying that those two advocates of nonviolent direct action were, in fact, passive and naive. “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” Obama added.

Moments later, he was straining to justify American warfare: past, present, future. “To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason,” Obama said. “I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.”

Then came the jingo pitch: “Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Crowing about the moral virtues of making war while accepting a peace prize might seem a bit odd, but Obama’s rhetoric was in sync with a key dictum from Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Laboring to denigrate King’s anti-war past while boasting about Uncle Sam’s past (albeit acknowledging “mistakes,” a classic retrospective euphemism for carnage from the vantage point of perpetrators), Obama marshaled his oratory to foreshadow and justify the killing yet to come under his authority.

Two weeks before the start of Obama’s second term, the British daily The Guardian noted that “U.S. use of drones has soared during Obama’s time in office, with the White House authorizing attacks in at least four countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is estimated that the CIA and the U.S. military have undertaken more than 300 drone strikes and killed about 2,500 people.”

The newspaper reported that a former member of Obama’s “counter-terrorism group” during the 2008 campaign, Michael Boyle, says the White House is now understating the number of civilian deaths due to the drone strikes, with loosened standards for when and where to attack: “The consequences can be seen in the targeting of mosques or funeral processions that kill non-combatants and tear at the social fabric of the regions where they occur. No one really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands.”

Although Obama criticized the Bush-era “war on terror” several years ago, Boyle points out, President Obama “has been just as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor.”

Boyle’s assessment — consistent with the conclusions of many other policy analysts — found the Obama administration’s use of drones is “encouraging a new arms race that will empower current and future rivals and lay the foundations for an international system that is increasingly violent.”

In recent weeks, more than 50,000 Americans have signed a petition to Ban Weaponized Drones from the World. The petition says that “weaponized drones are no more acceptable than land mines, cluster bombs or chemical weapons.” It calls for President Obama “to abandon the use of weaponized drones, and to abandon his ‘kill list’ program regardless of the technology employed.”

Count on lofty rhetoric from the Inaugural podium. The spirit of Dr. King will be elsewhere.

A single economy for the island of Ireland would be good for prosperity, jobs and investment, Sinn Fein has claimed.

Party president Gerry Adams called on the Irish and British governments to set a date for a border poll and let the people of Northern Ireland vote on a united Ireland.

Delivering a keynote address almost 15 years since the Good Friday Agreement, he said a referendum in the next term of the Assembly and Oireachtas would be a key element in moving forward.

“Irish unity makes sense,” the Louth TD said in Dublin.

Gerry Adams said on Saturday a unified Irelands ‘makes sense’

“It makes political sense. It makes economic sense. It is in the best interests of the people of these islands.”

Despite loyalists staging a protest in Belfast over the Union flag controversy for a seventh week and the economic crisis in the Republic of Ireland, Adams maintained that it is time to legislate for the island to be united.

“Republicans believe that partition has been bad for the people of this island and for our economy. It has been bad for investment, bad for growth, bad for jobs,” Adams said.

“A planned single-island economy would be good for prosperity, good for jobs, good for investment. It would benefit everyone. Together is stronger.”

Greater co-operation and harmonisation and unity would transform the economic and political landscape, Mr Adams said.

Adams was speaking almost 15 years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed

“Imagine the financial and efficiency benefits if there was one education system, one health service, one energy network and all-island investment practices.

“Imagine one economy, not two, and without the differing rates in VAT, in corporation tax, in excise duties, as well as currency.

“Imagine how much better off citizens would be if there was a comprehensive all-Ireland economic recovery plan which was able to deliver prosperity and sustainable economic growth.

“Imagine ‘Brand Ireland’ being employed creatively to grow our exports and create jobs.

“All of these things and more are possible.”

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian says the number of its boots on the ground in Mali has reached 2,000.

The announcement was made in a televised interview on Saturday. Le Drian also said that a further 900 French soldiers were supporting the military operation from bases outside the African nation.

Asked whether Paris would send further troops on ground in Mali, the minister said, “2,500 is what was initially announced, perhaps we will go beyond that.”

Le Drian added that “around 4,000 troops will be mobilized for this operation” in Mali and outside bases.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said at a meeting in the Ivory Coast capital Abidjan on Saturday that it was time for the African nations to take over the military operation in Mali.

Fabius said France was “obliged to intervene… But it is well understood that it is the Africans that must pick up the baton.”

The United States, Canada, Britain, Belgium, Germany and Denmark have already said they would support the French operation against Mali.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) pledged to support the French operation by sending 5,800 soldiers to Mali.

Oil-rich Chad also confirmed it would send 2,000 soldiers to Mali, while Nigeria said it would increase its troops to 1,200.

France intervened in Mali on January 11 by launching an air offensive under the pretext of halting the advance of militants.

Chaos broke out in the African country after Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure was toppled in a military coup on March 22, 2012. The coup leaders said the move was in response to the government’s inability to contain the Tuareg rebellion in the north of the country.

SAB/HGH

Daniel Radcliffe has put the boy wizard firmly behind him with an explicit new portrayal of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

The Harry Potter star’s new film, Kill Your Darlings, has been premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

His new role sees Radcliffe as the young Ginsberg initiated into drink and drugs and some dubious sexual encounters with men, including a scene of oral sex in a library.

The film recounts a little-known 1944 story of a murder involving Ginsberg’s friends, including fellow future Beat heroes Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William S Burroughs (Ben Foster).

Dane DeHaan co-stars as Ginsberg idol and intimate Lucien Carr who introduces him to Burroughs, Kerouac and the bohemian life. It is Carr’s older lover who meets an untimely death.

Radcliffe was initially apprehensive of taking on a real-life literary heavyweight but director and co-screenwriter John Krokidas helped him to put it in perspective.

He said: “I think John made us all feel much more relaxed about that and it was such an amazing process.

“I’ve never had a director work with me so closely, and I think all the actors felt that. It’s made us all feel much less intimidated by the whole thing. I hope.”

Krokidas said Radcliffe became his muse on the film and that it was clear within minutes of their first meeting that the part was his.

Casting Radcliffe effectively came to him in a dream.

“Daniel Radcliffe was an idea I had in the middle of the night. I basically made a list of all the actors I thought were fantastic under 30,” he said.

Just before he fell asleep, Radcliffe had moved to the top of the list.

Krokidas said young Ginsberg starts as a dutiful son who spends his time taking care of others but eventually spills over with repressed passion.

“By the end of the movie, he is a poet and a rebel,” Krokidas said. “I had a feeling Dan might be able to relate to this.”

Also on the red carpet at Sundance to promote the film were Dexter star Michael C Hall, who plays Kammerer, Foster, DeHaan and Huston.

Kill Your Darlings is one of 16 films in the US Dramatic Competition category at Sundance, all receiving their world premieres.

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, center, arrives at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Dec. 4, 2012. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)Out of the guts of the internet, we find an endless stream of misattributed quotes and made-up stories that end up in chain emails that you eventually receive from your loopy uncle in Texas who’s trying to justify right-wing economics or anti-Obama conspiracy theories.

It’s just one of the headaches of the Internet Age.

But, there’s one quote in particular that’s always attributed to an obscure Scottish historian, Sir Alexander Frasier Tytler (as if that gave it great credibility), and it seemed to both make sense and prophecy the end of the American Republic.

Tytler was supposed to have said: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

Tyltler goes on to talk about the process by which democracies fail as a result of this “voter selfishness.”

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years,” he was rumored to have said. “These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again to bondage.”

Now, here’s the reality: Tytler never said any of these words. They can all be tracked back to right-wing American businessmen in the early decades of the twentieth century. And why would right-wing businessmen say such things? Because, in actual point of fact, the thing that corrupts democracies is not “the voters” demanding “free stuff” (to paraphrase Romney), but, instead, its businessmen buying off politicians.

It’s not the powerless who corrupt democracies, as that viral right-wing quote would suggest; it’s the powerful who corrupt democracies. And money is the source of that power.

Yes, over the last hundred years, average American people have voted themselves benefits like Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. But at the same time, they’ve also supported tax increases to pay for all of these things. Remember, the Social Security tax only applies to the first $113,000 of wages – earned income. People like Paris Hilton and Mitt Romney, when they get all their money from capital gains, dividends, and carried interest, don’t pay a penny of Social Security taxes on their millions of income. And the average top CEO in America, with an income of $13.7 million a year, over a million a month, only pays Social Security taxes on his first few days of income every year – every other day is Social Security tax-free. Quite literally, as Leona Helmsley famously said, only the “little people” pay such taxes. The safety net program for working class people is exclusively paid for by working class people.

On the other hand, when the Billionaire Class extracts benefits from the government for themselves, the generally don’t pay higher taxes. The billions in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil, trillions in bailouts and bonuses for Wall Street banksters, and hundreds of billions for war profiteers are always accompanied by demands for more tax cuts at the top.

And, truth be told, billionaires aren’t even receiving these benefits by voting for them. Instead, they always get them through the simple process of buying politicians. For example, Sheldon Adelson spent $150 million in the last election. That’s more than any American spent in any election in American history. And he spent all that money to give himself the “benefits” of derailing an Obama Justice Department investigation into his casino in China and to get his taxes cut even further.

Billionaires also corrupt democracy to get their benefits through billionaire-funded think tanks, like the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council that writes legislation to benefit Corporate America, and then has Republicans state lawmakers introduce and pass laws in state after state, across the nation.

But despite this very clear reality of who is demanding largesse from our government, it’s still working people and average voters who are targeted by right-wingers and their viral emails as the selfish “takers.” That’s the reason why the Business Roundtable is saying the best way to fix insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare is to raise the retirement age to 70 and voucherize Medicare.

Of course, the average CEO for an S&P 500 company doesn’t need Social Security. But they know that by raising the retirement age, they’re shielding themselves from any tax increases that may come with raising that payroll tax cap, so even billionaires pay into Social Security, which will quickly and easily make that insurance program solvent forever.

America’s fiscal problems have nothing to do with voters. In fact, the Billionaire Class is trying to make it harder and harder for people to vote by pushing for voter suppression ID laws and restrictions on early voting.

America’s fiscal problems are a direct result of the Billionaire Class working behind the scenes of our democracy and syphoning off massive amounts of wealth for themselves while paying lower taxes than they’ve paid in a half-century. As Senator Bernie Sanders points out, a quarter of all profitable corporations in America pay zero federal taxes. And Mitt Romney and Paris Hilton’s income tax rates top out at 20 percent.

Tytler didn’t really say those words that the Billionaire Class think-tanks and email shills attribute to him. But, had he said them, he probably would have something more along the lines of this: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the billionaires discover that they can steal for themselves largess of the public treasury through buying politicians. From that time on the billionaires will always buy candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

If we are concerned about the future of our American democratic republic, the way to preserve it isn’t to protect it from greedy Social Security recipients by pushing the retirement age back to 70. It’s to get money out of government, thus neutering the political power of the Billionaire Class. And that means reversing two core doctrines that the US Supreme Court has created out of thin air (at the request of big business and billionaires): that corporations are people, and that money is speech.

The best way to do that is through a constitutional amendment that says corporations are not people, and money is property and not speech.

Go to MoveToAmend.org to join the fight for the survival of our democratic republic.

Niono, Mali – Islamist rebels withdrew from their forward positions on both of Mali’s war fronts Friday, an apparent sign that they’ll be shifting tactics after heavy French aerial bombardment pounded their positions even in civilian residential areas.

The Malian military announced that it had regained control of Konna, the city whose fall last week prompted the French to send troops and air power to the West African nation.

The Islamists also pulled out of the town of Diabaly, which they’d taken Monday, after days of intense aerial bombardment. Malian troops were expected to occupy the town Friday night.

Residents fleeing Diabaly said they never saw any ground combat or French soldiers but that the air attack included jets and helicopters. Both officially and privately, local authorities said that as far as they knew, there’d been no ground attack on Diabaly.

“Diabaly is free. There is not even a single rebel in Diabaly,” said Seydou Traore, the prefect of the Niono region, which includes Diabaly. “I don’t know if it is a tactical withdrawal or if they ran away. There was no ground fighting.”

In Paris, a French military spokesman said the rebels abandoned Konna after a fierce aerial campaign that included 70 airstrikes. But the spokesman, Col. Thierry Burkhard, did not acknowledge the withdrawal from Diabaly, perhaps signaling the suddenness of the rebel departure. “There has been no action in Diabaly,” he said.

Burkhard said that French troops had not engaged in close combat with the Islamists. “Only the French special forces have been in contact” with the enemy, primarily from the air, he said. There had been “no real fighting,” he added.

He said French troops were continuing to arrive in Bamako, the country’s capital, nearly 200 miles to the south of Niono, and that a company of French soldiers had been sent to Markala, about 160 miles north of the capital, both to guard a crucial dam there and to serve as a blocking force should the Islamists attempt to move toward Bamako.

The rebels’ push southward 10 days ago from the harsh Sahara Desert, which composes most of northern Mali, into the lush green lands of central Mali, where rice paddies and eucalyptus plantations irrigated by the Niger River dominate, had surprised Mali’s government, which feared the Islamists’ advance soon might include Bamako. Mali’s president quickly asked the United Nations and France for help, and French troops began arriving in this former French colony a week ago.

A French bombing campaign failed, however, to dislodge the Islamists from Konna, the town on the eastern bank of the Niger River that the Islamists had captured Jan. 9. Then on Monday, the rebels opened a front on the western side of the river, taking Diabaly in a two-pronged attack that routed the Malian garrison. Malian troops at other outposts in the area also withdrew, allowing the Islamists to expand their presence to the abandoned towns.

It was unknown whether all those gains had been ceded to the French-backed Malian government Friday or whether some rebels had remained behind. Nor was it immediately clear whether the rebel withdrawal from both positions was coordinated.

What precipitated the withdrawal was the subject of rumor. Reports swirled among Diabaly townspeople that the rebels’ sudden withdrawal came after French aircraft bombed a truck piled with rebel corpses that was heading to the cemetery. The truck was obliterated, incinerating the corpses, now denied a proper Muslim burial. Then the rout began, said residents pouring into Niono. No one, however, claimed to have seen the incident personally.

A withdrawal for purely cat-and-mouse reasons seemed unlikely. By pulling back, the rebels abandoned their checkpoints around the communities, opening the floodgates for a stream of relieved residents who hadn’t yet found a way to escape. Without a civilian population around them, the rebels would have become far more exposed to the aerial attacks.

Fleeing residents had been reporting for days that rebels were parking their gun-mounted trucks in residential areas in hopes that the possibility of killing civilians would deter the French. But as civilians fled, the tactic’s utility was waning.

The French probably were aided in their aerial assault by special forces on the ground, operating with the advantage of night-vision technologies.

Four armored vehicles of French special forces rolled out north of Niono toward Diabaly on Thursday evening, said a local official, who asked not to be named as he wasn’t authorized to speak on military matters. The official said the special forces didn’t return and were manning a covert forward operating base.

Niono has been under a strict 6 p.m. curfew since the fall of Diabaly. On Friday, after the news of the rebels’ Diabaly retreat, the local state radio made a special announcement to remind residents to stay indoors after 6 p.m. There would be military movements during the night, the announcement said. As dusk fell, French vehicles closed the road that leads to Niono from the south.

Residents who’d escaped from rebel-held Diabaly seemed surprised at the sudden reversal. Many had predicted in the preceding days that the rebels wouldn’t be dislodged easily or soon.

At noon Friday, one group that had sneaked out of Diabaly the night before and just arrived in Niono had no idea about the events.

“Maybe we can defeat those people, but it will be very difficult,” said Fousseni Traore, 19. “I’m the son of a soldier. I’ve never seen such powerful weapons. One of them, when it shoots, the earth seems like it will collapse.”

“We will need outside help,” he said, unaware that the town he’d just left was now, for the moment, back in government hands.

McClatchy special correspondent Frederic Castel contributed from Paris.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) walks to the House floor on the first day of the 113th Congress in Washington, Jan. 3, 2013. (Photo: Luke Sharrett / The New York Times)Washington – Backing down from their hard-line stance, House Republicans said Friday that they would agree to lift the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months, with a requirement that both chambers of Congress pass a budget in that time to clear the way for negotiations on long-term deficit reduction.

The new proposal, which came out of closed-door party negotiations at a retreat in Williamsburg, Va., seemed to significantly reduce the threat of a default by the federal government in coming weeks. The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said he was encouraged by the offer; Senate Democrats, while bristling at the demand for a budget, were also reassured and viewed it as a de-escalation of the debt fight.

The change in tack represented a retreat for House Republicans, who were increasingly isolated in their refusal to lift the debt ceiling. Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio had previously said he would raise it only if it were paired with immediate spending cuts of equivalent value. The new strategy is designed to start a more orderly negotiation with President Obama and Senate Democrats on ways to shrink the trillion-dollar deficit.

To add muscle to their efforts to bring Senate Democrats to the table, House Republicans will include a provision in the debt ceiling legislation that says lawmakers will not be paid if they do not pass a budget blueprint, though questions have been raised whether that provision is constitutional.

That “no budget, no pay” provision offered Republicans a face-saving way out of a corner they had painted themselves into – and an effort to shift blame for any default onto the Senate if it balks. The House Republicans’ campaign arm quickly moved from taunting Democrats about raising the government’s borrowing limit to demanding that they sacrifice their paychecks if they fail to pass a budget.

“The Democratic-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget for four years. That is a shameful run that needs to end, this year,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement from Williamsburg. “We are going to pursue strategies that will obligate the Senate to finally join the House in confronting the government’s spending problem.”

House Democrats met the deal with scorn, indicating they would inflict maximum political pain by making Republicans either break a campaign promise to carry it to passage or defy their leaders. But other Democrats were more sanguine. The president had said he would not sign a short-term debt ceiling increase, but a senior administration official said that as long as there were no surprises, the White House was likely to accept the House’s offer. Most important, the official said, Republicans had broken from the “Boehner rule” imposed in 2011: any debt ceiling increase was to include a dollar-for-dollar spending reduction.

The decision represents a victory – at least for now – for Mr. Obama, who has said for months that he will not negotiate budget cuts under the threat of a debt default. By punting that threat into the spring, budget negotiations instead will center on two earlier points of leverage: March 1, when $1 trillion in across-the-board military and domestic cuts are set to begin, and March 27, when a stopgap law financing the government will expire.

Reordering the sequences of those hurdles was central to the delicate Republican deliberations that resulted in the new plan. In the days leading to the Williamsburg retreat, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman and former vice-presidential nominee, had been meeting with the leader and three past chairmen of the conservative House Republican Study Committee to discuss a way through the debt ceiling morass.

Those conversations led into Thursday morning, when Mr. Boehner and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, opened the retreat by going through the timeline for the coming budget fights, according to aides who were there.

They turned the floor over to Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the House Ways and Means chairman, who delivered a blow-by-blow description of the economic disaster that could be wrought by a government default. Mr. Camp also talked through the notion held by some Republicans that the Treasury Department could manage a debt ceiling breach by channeling the daily in-flow of tax dollars to the most pressing needs, paying government creditors, sending out Social Security checks and financing the military. His message was that it would not work, the aides said.

Then Mr. Ryan stood to talk over the options he had developed with the House conservative leaders. They could do a longer-term debt ceiling extension with specific demands, like converting Medicare into a voucherlike program. Or they could lower expectations, reorder the budget hurdles with a three-month punt, and add the “no budget, no pay” provision.

Persuading Republicans who adamantly oppose raising the debt ceiling took some time, and the ensuing discussion stretched on and on, breaking at noon for lunch on Thursday, resuming at 2:30, until 4 p.m., then concluding Friday.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority whip, met with freshmen early Friday to make sure they were on board. Mr. Boehner and Mr. Cantor joined Mr. Ryan for one last meeting with conservative leaders – Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Tom Price of Georgia – to make sure they were on board. Then the top four leaders sealed the agreement midmorning.

Mr. Obama will unveil his own 10-year budget plan in February, laying out his tax and spending plans for his second term. But Senate Democrats, for the past four years, have refused to move a budget blueprint to the Senate floor, in violation of the Budget Act of 1974, which laid out new rules for controlling deficits.

For the past two years, House Republicans have approved sweeping budget plans that would fundamentally remake Medicare and Medicaid, sharply reduce domestic spending, increase military spending and order a wholesale rewriting of the federal tax code. But without Senate negotiating partners, those plans, written by Mr. Ryan, have been more political statement than legislative program.

“This is the first step to get on the right track, reduce our deficit and get focused on creating better living conditions for our families and children,” Mr. Cantor said. “It’s time to come together and get to work.”

K.C. Boyd, author of ‘Being Christian,’ interviewed by Nicole Sandler last year.

is one of my favorite movies — and the Sinclair Lewis book on which it’s based is pretty damned good, too. So a friend recently referred this book, “Being Christian.” He said it was written by a woman who’d done a lot of research into the Dominionists (who are one of the biggest threats to our democracy and have always fascinated me because of their conviction that it’s perfectly okay to lie, cheat and steal, as long as you’re doing it to bring God’s kingdom on earth), and wrote about it as a satire. I wasn’t all that interested in reading it (if you saw my pile of unread books, you’d understand) — until he sent me this blurb by Mikey Weinstein, who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation as a watchdog organization to protect religious freedom in the military, and of course has been the target of death threats (because the baby Jesus would want it that way). I just love Mikey Weinstein:

Having raced through K.C. Boyd’s astonishing page-turner without being able to put it down, Being Christian — A Novel, I can say there is no fictional portrait of today’s evangelical right that I would recommend more highly. As it says on the back of the book, this is Elmer Gantry, but on mega-steroids.

The story, in its vivid portrayals–with attention to character and place – was emotional crack to me. From the first chapter, Boyd created a story so riveting that not only could I not put it down, but upon finishing it, I found myself, like an addict, craving more. Being Christian screams screenplay, if ever a book did. A totally emotional experience, by book’s end, I was left drained as well as disturbed by the true-to-life portraiture of John Christian Hillcox, Boyd’s main character. A man who all too closely resembles so many of today’s religious con-men we’ve come to know from sexual and financial scandals too many to enumerate. Being Christian – A Novel is brilliant theater of the mind.

It ain’t literature, but it’s a real page turner. Boy, does she know these people and how they operate. (I saw parts of every wingnut preacher I know in this book.)

And if you want an easy way to catch up on exactly how the End Timers are perverting our democracy, this book is right up your alley.

American college football star Manti Te’o has insisted he played no role in the hoax involving his ‘imaginary girlfriend’.

In his first interview since the scandal erupted, the Notre Dame linebacker said he was tricked by three people who have confessed they were behind the deception and apologised.

But Te’o accepted he did lie to his father about meeting the ‘girl’ because he was embarrassed they had never met – and to cover that up, he lied to everyone else.

“I wasn’t part of this,” he told ESPN . “When they hear the facts they’ll know. Two guys and a girl are responsible for the whole thing.”

Te’o’s virtual relationship began when a girl calling herself ‘Lennay Kekua’ sent him a friend request on Facebook. In the months that followed the pair had sporadic contact on the internet and over the phone.

But whenever he tried to speak to her on Skype, the picture was always blocked. On several occasions he arranged to meet her in person, but she would always call off the meeting or sent others in her place.

Te’o referred to Lennay as his girlfriend several times, but he denies creating ‘Lennay’ or her ‘death’ to boost his career.

After he received a message from someone who claimed ‘Lennay’ had died of leukaemia, Te’o admitted he misled the public about the nature of their relationship because he was too embarrassed to admit he had never met her in person.

He said: “That goes back to what I did with my dad. I knew it was crazy that I was with somebody that I didn’t meet so I tailored my stories so people would think, ‘yeah, he met her before she passed away’.”

Te’o insisted he did not know ‘Lennay’ was not real until two days ago, when he claims he was contacted by a 22-year-old man who confessed he was the perpetrator, along with one other man and a woman.

He said their relationship intensified after ‘Lennay’ told him her father had died.

“She told me her dad passed away, and I was there. I was that shoulder to cry on, and I kind of just naturally cared for the person,” he said.

He was also once told ‘Lennay’ had been in a car accident and was in hospital in a coma.

“I would ask to talk to her, and the only communication I had was through Noah, her brother,” he said. “He would put the phone right next to her mouth and I could hear the ventilator going and she would be breathing.

“They said every time I was on the phone the nurse noticed that she must have recognised the voice because she would breath quicker and I could hear it on the phone.”

When asked why he did not visit ‘Lennay’ in hospital, Te’o said: “It never really crossed my mind. I don’t know. I was in school.”

When asked what he thought should happen to the alleged perpetrator, Te’o replied: “I hope he learns, I hope he understands what he’s done. I don’t wish an ill thing to somebody. I think embarrassment is big enough.”

The new Canadian 20 dollar bill made of polymer is displayed at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa.(Reuters / Chris Wattie)

The Bank of Canada has found itself in the center of a leafy controversy after botanists claimed it placed the ‘wrong’ maple leaf on its new polymer bills — not the Canadian sugar maple leaf represented on the national flag.

Sean Blaney, a botanist who tracks plants for the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Center in New Brunswick, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that the Bank of Canada put the “wrong” maple leaf on the new version of the C$20 bill.

Though the differences between the Norway maple and Canada’s native sugar maple may not be obvious to everyone, the Norway leaf has more sections and a more pointed outline, he explained.

The Norway maple tree has been naturalized in Canada after it was introduced to the country in the 18th century.

“It’s a species that’s invasive in Eastern Canada and is displacing some of our native species, and it’s probably not an appropriate species to be putting on our native currency,” Blaney told CBC News.

Blaney suggested that the prevalence of the Norway maple in Canada could be the reason why its leaf was chosen for the latest version of the C$20 bill.

Bank of Canada has denied the charge, and stated that the image was specifically designed to represent a combination of various kinds of species instead of a particular one. “It is not a Norway maple leaf. It is a stylized maple leaf and it is what it ought to be,” Bank of Canada currency spokesperson Julie Girard said, adding that the Norway maple leaf is more rectangular.

Bank of Canada consulted a dendrologist, a botanist who specializes in trees and shrubs, during the making of the symbol, Girard added. “On the advice of this expert, steps were taken to ensure that the design of the leaf in the secondary window is not representative of a Norway maple,” she said.

But Blaney argued that the image looks nothing like any of the 10 maple trees native to Canada.

“It seems a bit like an after-the-fact explanation to me. The bottom line is that, the image on the bill looks exactly like a Norway maple, however it was derived,” he said.

Another Canadian expert, University of Ottawa professor and Canadian Museum of Nature research scientist Julian Starr, was earlier consulted by the Royal Canadian Mint about the botanical accuracy of the coins. Starr confirmed that the image is a Norway maple leaf.

“You can say it’s stylized. But it’s stylized to the point where it doesn’t look like any native species at all,” he told CTV News. “It basically looks like a Norway maple.”

Other organizations have confused the two types of maples trees as well, including the official logos of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, the FIFA under-20 World Cup of Soccer, the Canadian Television Fund and the Alliance of Natural History Museums of Canada, CBC reported.

The Bank of Canada has run into problems with its new polymer bills before. Currently, Canada is in the process of switching from cotton-paper bank notes to polymer ones. The new notes are deemed to be more secure and environmentally friendly.

Canada released its first polymer C$100 banknote on November 14, 2011, followed by the C$50 banknote on March 26, 2012, and the C$20 banknote on November 7, 2012. New polymer $5 and $10 bills are expected to be released by the Bank of Canada later this year.

Back in August, the Bank of Canada was accused of racism and forced to apologize after media revealed that the image of an Asian lab assistant on its new C$100 banknote had been replaced with a woman who looked more Caucasian, after focus groups responded that Asians should not be the only group represented.

A single economy for the island of Ireland would be good for prosperity, jobs and investment, Sinn Fein has claimed.

Party president Gerry Adams called on the Irish and British governments to set a date for a border poll and let the people of Northern Ireland vote on a united Ireland.

Delivering a keynote address almost 15 years since the Good Friday Agreement, he said a referendum in the next term of the Assembly and Oireachtas would be a key element in moving forward.

“Irish unity makes sense,” the Louth TD said in Dublin.

“It makes political sense. It makes economic sense. It is in the best interests of the people of these islands.”

Despite loyalists staging a protest in Belfast over the Union flag controversy for a seventh week and the economic crisis in the Republic of Ireland, Mr Adams maintained that it is time to legislate for the island to be united.

“Republicans believe that partition has been bad for the people of this island and for our economy. It has been bad for investment, bad for growth, bad for jobs,” Mr Adams said.

“A planned single-island economy would be good for prosperity, good for jobs, good for investment. It would benefit everyone. Together is stronger.”

Greater co-operation and harmonisation and unity would transform the economic and political landscape, Mr Adams said.

“Imagine the financial and efficiency benefits if there was one education system, one health service, one energy network and all-island investment practices.”

A 5-year-old girl was suspended from a Pennsylvania kindergarten after telling another girl that she was going to shoot her. The weapon she was going to use was a pink toy gun that blows soapy bubbles.

Mount Carmel Area School District officials questioned the student without her parents present, deemed the girl a “terrorist threat” and suspended her for 10 days, according to attorney Robin Ficker, who was hired by the family to fight the suspension.

The incident happened on January 10 as the preschoolers were waiting in line for a schoolbus, Ficker told news website PennLive.com.

The girl, who has not been identified, said something like “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself,” referring to the toy. She did not have the bubble gun on her person at the time.

School officials learned of the conversation and questioned the girl for over 30 minutes the next day, Ficker said. After the talk, she was suspended for 10 days, branded a threat and required to be evaluated by a psychologist, he added.

“This little girl is the least terroristic person in Pennsylvania,” he said.

The punishment has since been reduced to two-day suspension, the attorney said. He also argued that the girl’s permanent record should be expunged, and that she should be offered an apology.

Ficker said he was hired because the girl’s mother read that he had handled a similar case in Maryland. In that case, he represented a 6-year-old boy who was suspended by an elementary school for pointing at another student with his fingers folded like a gun and saying “pow.”

School authorities called it a “serious incident,” and said the boy “threatened to shoot” the other student.

Gun-related violence at schools is a painful issue in the US after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The shooting claimed 26 lives, including 20 children, shocking the nation and triggering a heated debate over tighter gun control.

The collapsed DVD and games rental firm Blockbuster is to close 129 of its 528 shops and axe 760 workers in the coming weeks.

Some 31 branches have already been put on notice of closure, according to the company’s administrators Deloitte.

The move means the chain is already planning to close a quarter of its branches and make 18% of its workforce redundant.

It was announced just days after the chain went into administration in a run of bad news for the British high street.

There will be fears that this is just the first step in taking apart a company that employs more than 4,000 people in the UK.

Lee Manning, of administrator Deloitte, said: “Having reviewed the portfolio with management, the store closure plan is an inevitable consequence of having to restructure the company to a profitable core which is capable of being sold.

“We would like to thank the company’s employees for their support and professionalism during this difficult time. We are also grateful to the customers for their continued support.”

An employee helpline and an “employee assistance programme” have been set up to help staff find other jobs.

The firm’s trading woes were blamed on competition from internet firms and digital streaming of movies and games.

Blockbuster had struggled to adapt to the changing market and rivalry from internet retailers including Netflix, Amazon’s LoveFilm and iTunes, which now offers a movie rental service.

Its collapse came after its own plans to break into film-streaming appeared to stall in recent months.

It follows the demise of camera chain Jessops and electricals group Comet, which also blamed competition from online players for their downfall.

Just a day before Blockbuster went into administration, the music and entertainment chain HMV went under following dismal Christmas sales.

At least 10 British nationals are unaccounted for in the “ongoing” Algerian hostage crisis, according to Sky Sources.

It follows an Algerian attempt to rescue gas workers taken hostage by al Qaeda-linked militants which ended in a number of deaths.

Prime Minister David Cameron warned of “further bad news” as he put off a high-profile speech on Europe to stay in London and oversee developments.

Mr Cameron is chairing a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee to discuss the hostage situation at a gas plant in eastern Algeria. He will make a statement in the House of Commons at 11am.

Algerian authorities announced there had been “some deaths and injuries” in the operation to free foreign workers from Islamist militants.

But it was unclear how many casualties or which nationalities there were, with conflicting reports from sources on the ground.

Foreign Secretary William Hague cut short a visit to Australia to return to the UK and there was also expected to be a ministerial statement to the House of Commons.

He said: “The responsibility for the tragic events of the last two days squarely rests with terrorists who chose to attack innocent workers, murdering some and holding others hostage.”

The UK government has not had confirmation from the Algerian government as to whether the crisis is over, and Foreign Office officials believe hostage takers could still be on the site.

Sky’s Sophy Ridge said: “There has been perhaps an assumption … that this is a now just a search operation but certainly that’s not the basis that the Foreign Office in the UK is working on.”

The rescue attempt was launched early on Thursday without consultation with the UK. Mr Cameron was only informed it was under way when he spoke to the Algerian prime minister.

Algerian communications minister Mohamed Said Belaid said the military operation succeeded in “neutralising a large number of terrorists and freeing a large number of hostages”.

He added: “But unfortunately, we are sorry to say, there were some deaths and injuries.

“We do not yet have a definitive figure. As soon as we have it, we will make it public.”

One British citizen has already been confirmed dead earlier in the hostage situation.

Among those confirmed freed include Irishman Stephen McFaul and three Japanese workers.

Speaking after cancelling his long-awaited Europe speech, Mr Cameron said: “We should be prepared for the possibility of further bad news, very difficult news, in this extremely difficult situation.”

The militant group believed to have carried out the raid on the In Amenas gas plant – Katibat Moulathamine or The Masked Ones – said it was retaliating for French military intervention against al Qaeda-backed rebels in neighbouring Mali.

The attack began on Wednesday morning when heavily-armed militants launched a dawn raid.

They claimed to have seized dozens of foreign workers, including Britons, Americans, Norwegians and Japanese.

After his much-publicised confessional interview with Oprah Winfrey, the story of Lance Armstrong is heading for the silver screen.

Paramount Pictures and producer J J Abrams’ company, Bad Robot, have announced they are planning a biopic about the disgraced cyclist.

The co-producers have secured the rights to the book Cycle Of Lies: The Fall Of Lance Armstrong by New York Times reporter Juliet Macur, which is due out in June.

MS Macur covered the career of the seven-times Tour de France winner for over a decade.

No director, writer, star or start date have been set for the project.

In a two-part interview with Winfrey on her fledgling OWN network, Armstrong has admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs to reach his historic victories, something he had defiantly denied for years.

Some 3.2 million viewers in the United States tuned in to see fallen cyclist’s confession that he was a drug cheat, the TV interviewer’s cable channel said .

It was the most-watched show ever on the network after Winfrey’s March 2012 conversation with the family of late singer Whitney Houston.

The figure does not include viewers in other countries, or the 1.1 million who watched a repeat immediately after the initial broadcast of the 90-minute special that was also streamed live on Oprah.com.

The first part of the much-anticipated interview ran against American Idol on the mainstream Fox network, which drew 16.2 million viewers during its two-hour broadcast, Variety reported.

Entertainment Weekly called the ratings “extremely strong”, but showbusiness trade journal Variety thought the numbers were “below what might have been expected considering the gravitas of the interview”.

US TV ratings authority Nielsen said the special “ranked among the top 20 most-watched primetime programmes for the night among all broadcast and cable networks”.

:: You can watch the full interview tonight (Saturday) on Discovery.

France, the former slave power of west Africa, has poured into Mali with a vengeance in a military attack launched on January 11. French warplanes are bombing towns and cities across the vast swath of northern Mali, a territory measuring some one thousand kilometers from south to north and east to west. French soldiers in armoured columns have launched a ground offensive, beginning with towns in the south of the northern territory, some 300 km north and east of the Malian capital of Bamako.

A French armoured convoy entered Mali several days ago from neighbouring Ivory Coast, another former French colony. French troops spearheaded the overthrow of that country’s government in 2011.

The invasion has received universal support from France’s imperialist allies. The U.S., Canada and Europe are assisting financially and with military transport. To provide a figleaf of African legitimacy, plans have been accelerated to introduce troops from eight regional countries to join the fighting (map here).

“Islamist terrorists” etc., etc.

The public relations version of the French et al invasion is a familiar refrain. “Islamic terrorists” and “jihadists” have taken control of northern Mali and are a threat to international security and to the well-being of the local population. Terrible atrocities against the local populace are alleged and given wide publicity by corporate media. Similar myths were peddled by the warmakers when they invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

It is true that Islamic fundamentalists have ruled northern Mali with an iron hand since taking over in 2012. But the reasons for this latest intervention lie in the determination of the world’s imperial powers to keep the human and natural resources of poor regions of the world as preserves for capitalist profits. West Africa is a region of great resource wealth, including gold, oil and uranium.

The uranium mines in neighbouring Niger and the uranium deposits in Mali are of particular interest to France, which generates 78 per cent of its electricity from nuclear energy. Niger’s uranium mines are highly polluting and deeply resented by the population, including among the semi-nomadic, Tuareg people who reside in the mining regions. The French company Areva is presently constructing in Imouraren, Niger what will become the second largest uranium mine in the world.

Notwithstanding the fabulous wealth created by uranium mining, Niger is one of the poorest countries on earth. As one European researcher puts it, “Uranium mining in Niger sustains light in France and darkness in Niger.”

Mali (population 15.5 million) is the third-largest gold producing country in Africa. Canada’s IAMGOLD operates two mines there (and a third in nearby Burkina Faso). Many other Canadian and foreign investors are present.

A key player in the unfolding war is Algeria. The government there is anxious to prove its loyalty to imperialism. Its lengthy border with northern Mali is a key zone for the “pacification” of northern Mali upon which France and its allies are embarked.

Further proof of the hypocrisy of the ‘democracy’ that France claims to be fighting for in Mali is found in the nature of the Mali regime with which it is allied. Often presented in mainstream media as a ‘beacon of democracy’ in west Africa, the Mali government was little more than a corrupt and pliant neo-colonial regime before last year when the U.S.-trained and equipped Mali army twice overthrew it — in March and again in December. The Mali army now scrambling to fight alongside its French big brother was condemned and boycotted by the U.S., Europe and Canada during a brief, sham interlude of concern following the first coup.

Today, the Mali government is a shell of a regime that rules at the behest of the Mali military, the latter’s foreign trainers, and the foreign mining companies that provide much of its revenue.

The Tuareg People

At the political heart of the conflict in Mali is the decades-long struggle of the Tuareg, a semi-nomadic people numbering some 1.2 million. Their language is part of the Berber language group. Their historic homeland includes much of Niger and northern Mali and smaller parts of Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Libya. They call themselves Kel Tamasheq (speakers of the Tamasheq language).

The Tuareg have fought a succession of rebellions in the 20th century against the borders imposed by colonialism and then defended by post-independence, neo-colonial regimes. They are one of many minority nationalities in west Africa fighting for national self-determination, including the Sahwari of Western Sahara, a region controlled by Morocco and whose Sahwari leadership, the Polisario Front, is widely recognized internationally.

The Tuareg were brutally subdued by colonial France at the outset of the 20th century. Following the independence of Mali and neighbouring countries in 1960, they continued to suffer discrimination. A first Tuareg Rebellion took place in 1962-64.

A second, larger rebellion began in 1990 and won some autonomy from the Mali government that was elected in 1992 and re-elected in 1997. A third rebellion in Mali and Niger in 2007 won further political and territorial concessions, but these were constantly reneged. A Libya-brokered peace deal ended fighting in 2009.

The Mali state and army constantly sought to retake what they had lost. Violence and even massacres against the Tuareg population pushed matters to a head in 2011. The army was defeated by the military forces of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA) and on April 6, 2012, the MNLA declared an independent Azawad, as they call northern Mali and surrounding region. The Tuareg are one of several national groups within the disputed territory.

The independence declaration proved premature and unsustainable. The MNLA was soon pushed aside by Islamist-inspired armed groups that oppose Tuareg self-determination and an independent state. The army, meanwhile, continued to harass and kill people. A group of 17 visiting Muslim clerics, for example, were massacred on September 22, 2012.

According to unconfirmed reports, the MNLA has renounced the goal of an independent Azawad. It entered into talks with the Mali regime in December for autonomy in the northern region. A January 13 statement on the group’s website acquiesces to the French intervention but says it should not allow troops of the Mali army to pass beyond the border demarcation line declared in April of last year.

Militarization of Mali and West Africa

Mali is one of the poorest places on earth but has been drawn into the whirlwind of post-September, 2001 militarization led by the United States. U.S. armed forces have been training the Mali military for years. In 2005, the U.S. established the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership comprising eleven ‘partner’ African countries-Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.

The ‘partnership’ conducts annual military exercises termed ‘Flintlock.’ This year’s exercise is to take place in Niger and according to the January 12 Globe and Mail, “Canada’s military involvement in Niger has already commenced.”

Canadian troops have participated in military exercises in west Africa since at least 2008. In 2009, Mali was named one of six “countries of focus” in Africa for Canadian aid. Beginning that year, Canadian aid to Mali leaped to where it is now one of the largest country recipients of Canada aid funds.

In 2008, Canada quietly launched a plan to establish at least six, new military bases abroad, including two in Africa. (It is not known exactly where the Africa part of the plan stands today.)

War Atrocities

Only days into the French attack, evidence is mounting of significant civilian and military casualties. In the town of Douentza in central Mali, injured civilians can’t reach the local hospital, according to Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders). “Because of the bombardments and fighting, nobody is moving in the streets of Douentza and patients are not making it through to the hospital,” said a statement by the agency’s emergency response co-ordinator Rosa Crestani.

The International Red Cross is reporting scores of civilian and military casualties in the towns coming under French attack.

Amnesty International is worried. Its West Africa researcher, Salvatore Saguès, was in the country last September and saw the recruitment of children into the Mali army. He is worried about retaliatory attacks by the army if it retakes control of the towns and cities it has lost, notably in the northern cities of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.

He also warned of the plans to bring neighbouring armies into northern Mali. “These armies, who are already committing serious violations in their countries, are most likely to do the same, or at least not behave in accordance to international law if they are in Mali,” he said.

According to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, the latest crisis has internally displaced nearly 230,000 Malians. An additional 144,500 Malians were already refugees in neighbouring countries.

UNHCR spokesperson Adrian Edwards says half the population of the town of Konna, some 5,000 people, sought as French bombs threatened to fall by fleeing across the River Niger.

In an ominous sign of more civilian casualties to come, and echoing the excuses for atrocities by invading armies against civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine in recent years, French military commanders are complaining of the difficulty in distinguishing fighters they are bombing from non-combatant populations. France’s army chief Edouard Guillaud told Reuters that France’s air strikes were being hampered because militants were using civilian populations as shields.

No to the War in Mali

The military attack in Mali was ordered by French President François Hollande, the winner of the 2012 election on behalf of the Socialist Party. His decision has been condemned by groups on the political left in France, including the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste and the Gauche anticapitaliste. The latter is a tendency with the Front de gauche (Left Front) that captured 11 per cent of the first-round presidential vote last year.

Shockingly, the Left Front leadership group has come out in favour of the intervention. Deputy François Asensi spoke on behalf of the party leadership in the National Assembly on January 16 and declared,

“The positions of the deputies of the Left Front, Communists and republicans, is clear: To abandon the people of Mali to the barbarism of fanatics would be a moral mistake… International military action was necessary in order to avoid the installation of a terrorist state.”

His statement went on to complain that President Hollande did not bother to seek the approval of the National Assembly.

A January 12 statement by the French Communist Party (PCF), a component of the Left Front, said,

“The PCF shares the concern of Malians over the armed offensive of the Jihadist groups toward the south of their country… The party recalls here that the response to the request for assistance by the president of Mali should have been made in the framework of a United Nations and African Union sponsorship, under the flag of the UN…”

Unlike the overthrow of Haiti’s elected government in 2004, which the PCF and Socialist Party supported at the time, France and its allies did not feel the need to obtain a rubber stamp of approval from the UN Security Council this time in Mali. But doing so would not have changed the predatory nature of this latest mission, just as it didn’t in Haiti.

A January 15 statement by the Canadian Peace Alliance explains:

“The real reason for NATO’s involvement is to secure strategic, resource rich areas of Africa for the West. Canadian gold mining operations have significant holdings in Mali as do may other western nations…

“It is ironic that since the death of Osama Bin Laden, the U.S. military boasts that Al-Qaeda is on the run and has no ability to wage its war. Meanwhile, any time there is a need for intervention, there is suddenly a new Al-Qaeda threat that comes out of the woodwork. Canada must not participate in this process of unending war.”

That’s a call to action which should be acted upon in the coming days and weeks as one of the poorest and most ecologically fragile regions of the world falls victim to deeper militarization and plundering. –

Roger Annis is an antiwar activist who lives in Vancouver, Canada.

An Iranian lawmaker has reaffirmed the country’s commitment to all international regulations, stressing the Islamic Republic will never retreat from its rights in the Caspian Sea.

“Tehran is committed to all international conventions and agreements while maintaining its national interests in the Caspian Sea,” spokesman for the Majlis (parliament) Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy Hossein Naqavi Hosseini said on Saturday.

He added that Iran would make its utmost efforts to establish the most amicable relations with its 15 neighboring states and prevent any tension.

Addressing the second national meeting on the legal regime of the Caspian Sea in northern Iranian city of Sari on Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said that commitment to international conventions and treaties is among the country’s absolute principles in the field of foreign policy, and the advancement of interests and the maintenance of national sovereignty are carried out in line with these treaties.

The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed body of water on earth by area, and is variously classed as the world’s largest lake or a full-fledged sea.

The maritime and seabed boundaries of the Caspian Sea have yet to be demarcated among the five countries bordering the sea.

Despite extensive negotiations, the legal status of the Caspian Sea has been unclear since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Currently, the Caspian Sea’s legal regime is based on two agreements signed between Iran and the Soviet Union in 1921 and 1940.

The littoral states have yet to come up with a final convention on the Caspian Sea, which will determine their territorial rights as well as other matters related to the sea.

SF/AZ/MA

Unknown gunmen have shot dead a journalist in Somalia in the latest of a string of fatal attacks targeting members of media in the lawless Horn of Africa nation, Press TV reports.

Abdihared Osman Aden, a veteran producer for Shabelle Media Network, was shot several times at around 7 a.m. local time (0400 GMT) on Friday when three assailants, armed with pistols, opened fire on him as he was walking to work in the Wadajir district of Mogadishu.

“He left his house on Friday morning to go to work, but was reportedly killed near his home. He was rushed to Mogadishu’s Medina Hospital, but pronounced dead upon arrival,” Mohamed Ali, one of his colleagues, told Press TV.

Meanwhile, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has deplored the attack, saying it was deeply concerned over the rampant attacks on journalists in Somalia.

“We condemn the unspeakable violence against media professionals in Somalia. We will stand firm in our demands on the Somali authorities to support the victim’s family,” Gabriel Baglo, the IFJ Africa Director, said.

Aden is the fifth Shabelle journalist killed over the past 13 months. Shabelle director Hassan Osman Abdi, better known locally as Hassan Fantastic, was gunned down outside his Mogadishu home on January 28, 2012.

Twelve journalists were killed in Somalia in 2012 — all of them targeted murders — making the country the most dangerous in Africa for journalists.

In November, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud called on Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdon to set up a task force to investigate the cases of journalist killings in Somalia.

Press rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders has called 2012 the “deadliest year” on record for journalists in Somalia, surpassing 2009 – when nine died.

MP/MA

Troubles with major American aviation corporation Boeing continues as the entire fleet of its newest 787 Dreamliner planes remain grounded world-wide following a series of mechanical faults causing fires and fuel leaks and leading to at least one emergency landing.

Despite the universal grounding of the fuel-efficient aircraft, Boeing’s Chief Executive Jim McNerney boasted the company’s “high confidence in the safety of the 787” in a Friday message to its employees posted on Boeing’s “internal website,” The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

McNerney further insisted that Boeing’s executives “stand squarely behind its integrity as the newest addition to our product family” while adding that the company was “working around the clock” to aid the Federal Aviation Administration probe of the aircraft, which first entered service about 15 months ago.

FAA’s decision to ground all Boeing 787 passengers in the US came on Wednesday after one of the planes operated by Japanese airliner, All Nippon Airways, made an emergency landing in southwestern Japan when the crew reported a “strange smell” in the cabin.

According to press reports, indicators in the cockpit told pilots there was a problem related to an onboard lithium-ion battery.

Such batteries were reportedly also involved in a fire last week aboard a parked 787 in Boston operated by Japan Airlines.

The two incidents prompted Japanese air carriers, which own 24 of the 50 Dreamliners currently in operation worldwide, decided to remove all of their 787s from service indefinitely for safety concerns.

The FAA’s extraordinary grounding order left US airliners struggling to accommodate delayed passengers, as the measure was described in press reports as a potentially “devastating setback” for the troubled aircraft.

The move was immediately followed by a similar decision by European air-safety authorities, who on Thursday ordered the grounding of the European fleet of the passenger plane, used only by Polish airliner LOT.

Following the grounding of the Dreamliner, Boeing’s stock dropped more than 3%, or $2.60, to $74.34 on Wednesday as it scrambles to resolve the mechanical issues with the aircraft.

Analysts say it’s too early to estimate the financial effect of the Dreamliner grounding.

“You’re talking a pretty significant impact, but not necessarily billions of dollars,” said analyst Ken Herbert who covers Boeing for Imperial Capital in San Francisco.

“If you start to see a cancellation of orders or a lack of interest from airlines in purchasing this plane in the future, then it’s a much more material impact,” he added.

The Chicago-based Boeing Company has taken 848 orders for Dreamliners from airlines and aircraft leasing firms around the world. Price tag for the planes ranges from $206.8 million to $243.6 million per jet, depending on various versions.

MFB/MFB

Residents of the Malvinas Islands are slated to vote in a referendum on whether the islands should remain under British rule or become part of Argentina.

The disputed islands’ government said on Saturday that the referendum would be held on March 10 and 11.

The government said in a statement that the result of the vote will demonstrate “in a clear, democratic and incontestable way” how the people of the islands wish to live their lives.

This is while as on January 3, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner published an open letter to the UK Prime Minister David Cameron in several British newspapers, calling on London to hand over the Malvinas Islands.

Tensions escalated between London and Buenos Aires in 2012 when both countries marked the 30th anniversary of the end of the UK and Argentina war over the islands.

The two countries fought a 74-day-long war in 1982 over the islands, which ended with the British side claiming victory over the Argentineans.

Located about 300 miles off Argentina’s coast and home to about 3,000 inhabitants, the islands have been declared part of the British Overseas Territories since Britain established its colonial rule on the territories in 1833.

Argentina, however, has repeatedly dismissed the British territorial claim.

MR/MA

Rape cases increased in the Indian capital New Delhi by 23 percent in 2012, compared with data from the previous year, a recent report says.

“The rate of conviction in rapes in Delhi is much higher than the national rate,” Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar said on Friday.

According to official figures released in an annual report, 706 rape cases were registered in 2012, showing a 23.43 percent rise from 572 cases in 2011.

This comes nearly a month after the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old Indian woman in New Delhi on December 16. Jyoti Singh Pandey was gang-raped and severely beaten on a moving bus in New Delhi.

After the attack, the woman and a male friend, who was also beaten, were thrown off the bus. She died on December 29 in a hospital in Singapore.

The horrific nature of the crime shocked Indians, who thronged the streets, demanding protection for women and capital punishment for rape, which currently carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Some 45 cases of rape and 75 cases of sexual molestation were reported in the two weeks following the incident.

New Delhi, a city of 16 million people, is known to be the least safe major city for women in India.

People accuse the officers patrolling the capital’s streets of being insensitive towards sexual crimes and ignoring related complaints. They say the country’s slow judicial system also discourages women from making complaints.

SZH/MA

The unit No.1 (L) and No. 2 reactor building of the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are seen through a window in a bus while Japan’s new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe inspects the nuclear power plant power plant in Fukushima Prefecture December 29, 2012.(Reuters / Pool New)

A fish containing over 2,500 times Japan’s legal limit for radiation in seafood has been caught in the vicinity of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the facility’s operator reported.

­A ‘murasoi’ fish, similar to a rockfish, was caught at a port inside the plant, according to AFP. Plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) indicated that the amount of cesium measured 254,000 becquerels per kilogram — 2,540 times Japan’s legal limit for radiation in seafood.

In October, TEPCO admitted that radiation leaks at the plant had not fully stopped.

In 2011, after a March earthquake and tsunami devastated the region, Japan barred beef, vegetables, milk, seafood and mushrooms grown near the affected area from both domestic markets and exports over safety concerns.

Science magazine published an article revealing that the levels of cesium in seafood around the disaster-battered area had not decreased since 2011. In October 2012, around 40 percent of bottom-dwelling marine species demonstrated elevated radiation levels, with cesium-134 and 137 levels above Japan’s legal limit. August samples collected by author Ken Buesseler had cesium levels 250 times what Japanese authorities consider safe.

Seafood from the area near Fukushima has turned out to be a health hazard abroad, as well as within the country.

In July, Russia expressed concern over fish caught off its coast near Japan. In May, a contaminated tuna was found near the California coastline. Japan stressed that they understood the numbers of contaminated seafood are “extremely high,” but also pointed out that radiation was detected only in the kinds of fish found closest to the plant.

In October 2012, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, announced that it would relax regulations on imports of Japanese food starting on November 1. The restrictions were introduced after the quake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011, with many countries such as the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, France and the UK either halting food imports or starting additional inspections of Japanese imports.

American military chief Leon Panetta has threatened that the US will take whatever moves necessary to protect “our people” from threats of al-Qaeda-linked militants in North Africa.

The outgoing US Defense Secretary issued the warning in a BBC interview in London, declaring that the United States would “take all necessary steps to protect our people” from the threat of militants in North Africa, who he alleged were tied to the shadowy al-Qaeda group.

“Whether or not that involves assisting others with military operations, whether it involves developing in a cooperative way operations there, those are areas that I think remain to be decided,” Panetta further said.

Panetta was interviewed by state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation on the recent hostage crisis in Algeria, where Americans are reported to be part of a group of foreign workers killed or still held in captivity in a gas field owned by British Petroleum.

The head of the Pentagon is currently visiting Britain as part of his ongoing tour of European countries.

Panetta has previously made clear that the US supports the French military intervention in the North African country of Mali with various forms of aerial reconnaissance, refueling and troop transport missions.

Other US officials have been quoted as saying in press reports that limited number of American forces have also been deployed in the African country to train and advice Malian military forces.

MFB/MFB

Millions of British women binge-eat, lie about how much they weigh and have a negative relationship with food, according to a new survey.

The study of 2,000 women also found that eating in secret is commonplace, with many refusing to tell family and friends the truth about how much they really consume.

Researchers said boredom, stress and feeling depressed are the biggest triggers causing women to eat more.

Three-quarters of UK women – 24 million – say they often feel guilty about how much they eat.

Women typically think about food 12 times a day, and those under 25 have it on their minds twice as much as those over 55, the poll found.

Six out of 10 told researchers they have lied about how much food they eat, almost half (43.74%) said they snack in secret, and more than a quarter (27.68%) confess to binge-eating – this rises to more than a third (36.72%) of those under 25.

Linda O’Byrne, chief nutritionist for New Atkins Nutritional, which organised the survey, said: “These are very worrying figures that reveal many women are ill at ease with food.

“Whether it is bingeing, lying about how much you weigh or eating in secret, you must do your best to stamp it out.

“We want everyone to have a happy and a wholesome relationship with food and believe this can be obtained by following a sensible and satisfying weight loss regime.

“Whether you are on a diet or not, food should never be the enemy.”

Sky News has uncovered shocking animal welfare conditions at a UK horse abattoir.

They include animals being beaten, neglected and illegal procedures in the process of slaughtering British horses destined for European food markets.

It comes amid public anger that some of our biggest supermarkets have been selling beef burgers and other products that contained horse meat .

Sky News visited the Red Lion Abattoir near Nantwich in Cheshire after concerns were raised by Animal Welfare Group Hillside Animal Sanctuary.

Investigators at Hillside  fitted secret cameras which filmed horses being beaten with an iron rod to encourage them into the pens. 

Some were then crammed into the slaughter pens in pairs and, on one occasion, a group of three, before being stunned together.

In harrowing images the horses fall on top of each other. Under The Welfare of  Anim als Act 1995 , horses should not be slaughtered in sight of one another because of the distress it causes.

Furthermore, Sky News found that sick or injured horses were left untended overnight rather than put down immediately.

As a result of the investigation, two slaughter men have had their licences revoked.

Craig Kirby, head of approvals and veterinary advice at the Food Standards Agency (FSA) told Sky News: “As soon as we got the footage and reviewed it we took immediate action to revoke the slaughter men’s licences.

“That means they cannot work to slaughter animals again. We will also look to gather further evidence to see if we can prosecute.”

Former government chief veterinary officer Keith Meldrum, who viewed the footage, said he was shocked by what he described as “appalling” welfare breaches.

“We see three animals stunned at the same time and it is totally illegal and contrary to welfare slaughter regulations,” he said.

“It’s a significant welfare problem for a number of reasons. It’s harder to render them unconscious in a group and they have a higher chance of regaining consciousness before you’ve completed the procedure.”

Another incident filmed included a horse that appeared to come round from the stun while being hung upside down before being bled. Mr Meldrum described it as “totally and completely unacceptable”.

FSA statistics released to Sky News show a dramatic increase in the number of UK horses slaughtered every year, from 3,859 in 2007 to 8,426 in 2012.

Depending on the size and breed they are bought for anything between £100 to £300 and can fetch around 700 euro on the European meat markets.

The animals come from a variety of backgrounds. Some are former pets, others come from show jumping or the race track.

A report last year from the British Horseracing Authority  (BHA) found: “The number of thoroughbreds reported dead to the Horse Passport Issuing Authority rose by 580 – an increase of 29% – from 1994 to 2574 horses.

“Of these, 1127 horses either in training, breeding or out of training were reported as killed in abattoirs – and reported to the Government Meat Hygiene Service – from 499 horses in 2010, an increase of 126%.”

However, in a statement to Sky News, the BHA added: “This is a wider equine issue and not an issue for the British racing industry, which is one of the country’s most highly regulated equine pursuits.

“However, if there are allegations that any horse, whether thoroughbred or not, is being inhumanely treated in an abattoir we would fully support any investigation and subsequent action, if appropriate.”

During the investigation, Hillside Animal Sanctuary rescued one racehorse called Underwriter by bidding against the abattoir at auction. They discovered it had a distinguished career.

John Watson, from Hillside, said: “It’s not just ill and old horses being killed. There are very many fit and healthy horses, horses with foals, pregnant mares, and thoroughbreds that are being treated badly.

“It blows away the myth of humane slaughter, and there is a misery in that place that is palpable.”

Hillside’s lead investigator, who did not want to be identified, added: “What we’ve found has shocked us deeply; animals left with horrendous injuries and horses shot on top of each other.

“In all the years I’ve been doing this work, without doubt it’s the most harrowing experience I’ve come across. All the horses in there had their heads hung down.”

The Red Lion Abattoir told us it views animal welfare and public health with paramount importance.

In a statement it said: “In attendance at the The Red Lion Abattoir are three full time Food Standards Officers comprising of an official veterinarian and full-time meat hygiene inspectors throughout production.”

It said the incidents were “not the norm, but of an isolated nature” and they have taken disciplinary action against the individual featured.

The statement continued: “I agree horses should individually enter the stunning area and most certainly not three at a time.

“However, small horses and ponies having spent years together as companions are difficult to separate. Horse lovers would understand that.

“My opinion and that of other veterinarians is it is better to keep those types together to reduce the stress, providing swift dispatch is achieved.”

The Red Lion Abattoir also insisted it meat was not part of the recent supermarket burger scandal.

The horses there are destined to be served in European food markets. The scandal this time is the way they are treated, in the last moments of their lives, in a licenced British abattoir. 

Roly Owers, chief executive of World Horse Welfare , viewed the footage and said: “The breaches, from what we’ve seen, are throughout; from the care of the animals to the slaughter process.

“Horses are intelligent animals. When they see an animal stunned in front of them you can only imagine the distress that animal is going through. There are, without doubt, welfare issues here and it is plain illegal.”

The RSPCA said “The footage is shocking and upsetting to watch.” They have requested a full copy of the film with a view to investigating.

Belgium plants to build a horseshoe-shaped artificial island off its North Sea coast to store energy generated by its wind farms. The project will also double as attraction for sea birds (and possibly flocks of tourists).

­The ambitious undertaking was unveiled this week by Belgian North Sea Minister Johan Vande Lanotte, as he reported on the implementation of marine special planning.

The island is planned to be built over the course of five years about three to four kilometers off the coast near the village of Wenduine in the province of West Flanders. It will be about three kilometers in diameter, and will have a giant water reservoir occupying most of its territory.

Energy will be stored by pumping seawater inside the reservoir. It is then recovered when needed by guiding the water back into the sea through a hydropower plant at the heel of the ‘horseshoe.’

­Storing excess energy is a common problem for electric grid management. Consumption of electricity varies greatly between daytime and nighttime, so balancing the load often requires generating and storing extra energy overnight and releasing those reserves during peak hours. This is a particular issue for many forms of green energy; for example, the output of a wind farm depends on whether there is enough wind to spin its turbines.

Pumping water uphill is the most widely used approach to storing this energy, and is a technique that has been used since the late 19th century. However, those reservoirs are usually built inland in a mountainous areas and store freshwater. The Yanbaru Seawater Pumped Storage Power Station — launched in 1999 in Okinawa, Japan — was the first facility to use seawater for this purpose.

A notable exception is tidal power plants, where extra seawater may be pumped up during the high tide and released during the low tide to boost the plant’s efficiency.

The Belgian island project is part of the country’s phase-out of nuclear energy and shift towards renewables. The country, which has for years received more than half of its electricity from its two nuclear power plants, Doel and Tihange, wants to shut down all its reactors by 2025; wind farms on the North Sea are an essential part of this strategy.

The country had just 1,078 megawatts of wind power connected to the grid in 2011, but the output is expected to expand to more than 4,000 megawatts by 2020, according to a European Wind Energy Association report.

The island will also double as a resting place for gulls and other sea birds, Minister Lanotte said. They will be fed there, and will be less inclined to bother people on the mainland, he explained.

Belgium is currently seeking potential members for a consortium that would operate the battery island. No detailed project has been penned yet, but the government estimates that its cost would be about the same as a wind farm, Lanotte said.

A World War II British Navy veteran shows his Arctic Convoy Commemorative medal during a medal presentation on board HMS Belfast, in London. (AFP Photo / Warren Allott)

Three thousand British sailors who braved arctic conditions and enemy bombers to deliver vital supplies to the Eastern Front during WWII have been denied medals for bravery offered by Russia for their outstanding service.

­The UK Foreign Office said this week that British veterans who served in the legendary Arctic convoy during World War II may not accept the Ushakov Medal for Bravery.

Officials stated that if the medals were accepted, it would violate the law as the service took place more than five years ago and the veterans are in line to receive British medals for their duty.

The Foreign Office added that it “very much appreciates” Russia’s bid to honor the Britons’ “brave and valuable” service.

The decision has been met with anger and scorn in some quarters. An e-petition has been created on the Downing Street website asking the government to reconsider, as many former navy men feel let down.

“The one the Russians are offering now is a special state award for outstanding courage during World War II,” eighty-five-year-old Ken Reith told the Courier, adding, “I would prefer to get the Russian medal, to be honest, because at least it is being given with heartfelt gratitude instead of the one we’ve been fighting for from British bureaucrats for almost 70 years.”

Despite promises from Prime Minister David Cameron last year to honor the Arctic Convoy troops, none have yet received medals.
Some of the veterans value Russian recognition over that of the UK. “The Russian government wants to give us a bravery medal, not a campaign medal. There is a big difference,” Lieutenant Commander Roy Francis told the Daily Mail.

“Arctic convoys were renowned to be the toughest voyages. In addition to the threat from U-boats, bombers and surface craft to all convoys, the main enemy was the bitter cold,” Francis explained.

Wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill described their voyage as “the worst journey in the world” as the ships took the freezing Arctic route to reach the Soviet Union’s northernmost ports in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk.

There were 78 Arctic convoys between August 1941 and May 1945. About 1,400 vessels delivered much-needed war supplies to the Soviet Union under a lend-lease program. The merchant ships were escorted by the Royal Navy, US Navy and Royal Canadian Navy. Sixteen Royal Navy warships were lost in the operation as well as eighty-five merchant vessels.

The Medal of Ushakov. (RIA Novosti / Sergey Subbotin)

LONDON — In March 2012, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne jetted off to the United States for a series of meetings at the White House.

“They should use the trip to ask President Obama for some economic advice,” Ed Balls, the Labour Party’s shadow chancellor, said at the time. “While Britain’s economy has stalled and unemployment has reached a 17-year high, the U.S. economy is strengthening and the jobless rate has come down to a three-year low.“

Since the formation of the Conservative-led coalition in May 2010, Tory and Labour politicians have tried to claim Obama, and his economic approach, as their own — for political reasons (the U.S. president is very popular with the British public) as well as economic ones (the U.S. economy has been growing much faster than the UK’s). To be economically credible in Westminster, it seems, is to be aligned with Barack Obama.

But for how much longer?

In speeches, interviews and press releases, Balls has repeatedly invoked Obama, and the latter’s fiscal stimulus and delayed austerity, in order to loudly denounce Cameron and Osborne’s fiscal strategy.

Meanwhile, the Tory claim on Obama is growing increasingly difficult to sustain, says David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. “Obama’s view [on austerity] is ‘later is better than sooner,’ while Osborne thinks ‘sooner is better than later,’” he told The Huffington Post UK. “The evidence suggests Osborne is wrong.”

Blanchflower says “the proof is in the pudding”: Since the coalition’s cuts-laden Spending Review in October 2010, the UK economy has grown by an anaemic 0.6 percent, compared to a much healthier 3.4 percent in the U.S. Despite the looming row over the debt ceiling, the IMF forecasts 2.1 percent growth for the U.S. in 2013 and just 1.1 percent for the UK.

In response, the Conservatives have stressed the president’s stance on the importance of reducing the deficit and balancing the budget by 2018. During Obama’s state visit to the UK in May 2011, Tory spin doctors even briefed the press that the leader of the free world would offer an implicit endorsement of the coalition’s deficit reduction plan.

They were left disappointed. Answering a question on the UK’s deficit reduction efforts at a joint press conference with Cameron, the U.S. president stressed that “every country is different” and highlighted the way that “concerted action” by the UK and the U.S. had “yanked the world economy out of recession” — a pretty clear nod to the previous Labour government’s fiscal stimulus.

However, the Obama administration has a record of mixed messages on the UK’s austerity measures. On a visit to London in February 2011, for example, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that he was “very impressed” with George Osborne’s fiscal plan, and said his British counterpart had been handed “problems not created by this government.” His Tory hosts were delighted.

So will Obama’s reelection help or hinder Osborne and Co., between now and the next election in 2015? The chancellor’s biographer, Janan Ganesh, has argued that the election of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan would have shifted “the international debate rightward, leaving the UK looking less like an austere outlier.”

“The U.S. is taking a more Keynesian approach to things,” admitted Tory MP Brooks Newmark, who sits on the Commons Treasury Select Committee. “So it’s not surprising that Balls admires it … [but] the shape of the U.S. economy is structurally very different to the UK economy.”

Newmark, one of the few Conservative politicians to have publicly backed Romney, views America’s national debt as “unsustainable” and — contradicting those Tories who argue that the coalition is on the same page, fiscally, as the Obama administration — thinks the president isn’t “cutting hard enough or deep enough.” This despite recent reports suggesting the U.S. is on pace to experience more austerity than most of Europe in 2013.

Senior Labour figures, who had been petrified by the prospect of a victory for the Romney-Ryan austerity ticket, breathed a sigh of relief on the morning of Nov. 7 — and then promptly set about spinning the president’s reelection as an endorsement for their own fiscal strategy.

“Obama’s win proved that voters will back a balanced and pro-jobs and growth economic policy,” a source close to the shadow chancellor told HuffPost UK. “A victory for Romney would have been a victory for the austerity-and-tax-cuts-for-the-rich approach that David Cameron and George Osborne have been cheerleaders for.”

But senior Tories haven’t given up on Obama — yet. In a column for the Times of London, published the week after Obama’s victory, Osborne praised the president’s “hard fought campaign.” He noted how “the incumbent government was re-elected despite a historically weak economic recovery” and claimed Obama had “made up lost ground once he stopped talking about stimulus and instead said ‘our debt has grown so large that we could do real damage to the economy if we don’t begin a process now to get our fiscal house in order.’” He added: “Here in Britain, the [Labour] Opposition are a million miles from understanding this crucial truth.”

Not all of Osborne’s Conservative colleagues agree with his approach. “I don’t think the British public sees the U.S. economy as a success story,” a senior Tory minister told HuffPost UK. Thus, Obama’s fiscal decisions, adds the minister, “don’t matter a jot to our message on the economy.”

Yet if the U.S. economy continues to motor ahead of the UK’s, expect to hear more from Balls about how the coalition’s cuts have failed and how Obama’s much slower, more moderate approach to deficit reduction should be the model for Britain.

“If we’re completely honest, there’s not a huge amount of distance between the U.S. and UK economies,” said Will Straw, associate director at the left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research. “Despite what we’re led to believe, all major parties [Labour, Conservative, Democrat, Republican] favour some form of austerity to reduce deficits. The debate is about the pace and the balance between spending cuts and tax rises.” On this, Straw said, “there’s little doubt that Obama is closer to Labour.”

The Labour leadership wants Obama to firmly resist the push from congressional Republicans to cut spending ahead of the looming debt ceiling deadline, and to continue to advocate a Labour-style 2:1 ratio of (delayed) spending cuts to tax increases. Cameron and Osborne, on the other hand, are keen for Obama to focus his rhetoric, if not his policies, on deficit reduction, balancing the books and cutting the debt.

Both sides will continue to scour the president’s statements, and his budget proposals, over the next four years for ammunition to use against their opponents here at home.

Yet, as Blanchflower notes, “the [U.S.] evidence suggests that if you delay austerity … then outcomes are better.”

This article is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post that closely examines the most pressing challenges facing President Obama in his second term. To read other posts in the series, click here.

….the fools do not realize,a population that can ,….. not paticipate ………….in the ‘economy’…,can not keep it viable!………..”we are listening,…….and we’re not blind.,……this is your life….this is your time.”

Student body ID cards with RFID-embedded chips (Image from Northside Independent School District)

A Texas high school banned a second-year student from classes after she refused to wear an ID badge containing an RFID chip. The school district uses the tags in order to game the attendance system for better funding.

Students at some schools in the Northside Independent School District, a public school district serving the San Antonio area, have been required to carry student IDs containing RFID chips since the schoolyear began last fall. John Jay High, where Angela Hernandez was enrolled, is one of the schools included in the initiative.

RFID, which stands for radio frequency identification, involves the use of radio and electromagnetic fields to disseminate information for the purposes of tracking and identification.

RFID is commonly used to keep track of livestock. At schools in the Northside Independent district, the chips monitor students’ movements on campus for attendance records, which are tightly linked to the amount of funding public schools receive each year.

After she refused to wear the tracking device, the district told 15-year-old Hernandez in November that she would have to find another school to attend that didn’t use the tags unless she chose to comply with John Jay’s rules.

Hernandez, a strict Christian, sued the district as a result, claiming that the device is the “Mark of the Beast” mentioned in the Revelation of John, an important part of the Bible held to describe the apocalypse.

“It’s obvious that John Jay High School has no interest in putting their students first, which is a sad reflection on our educational system,” said John Whitehead, president of the group that defended Hernandez in court, as quoted by Wired.

A Texas federal judge and a federal appeals court both ruled that the school’s decision had not violated Hernandez’s freedom of religion. That ruling was because the school eventually moved to allow Hernandez to go to class without the tracking device, while still insisting that she wear it. In any case, the district told Hernandez and her family that she would no longer be able to attend John Jay after January 22, when the next semester begins.

As is the case with most public schools in the US, each district’s funding is determined largely as a result of its daily attendance records. Traditionally, teachers take roll calls at the beginning of classes. If the student happens to be late, the school could lose funding because there is no record of his being there.

With the RFID tracking system, school administrators can count a student as being in attendance as long as he or she is somewhere on the school’s campus that day. By this method, the district gets its portion of funding linked to that student.

It doesn’t take much to raise the outrage I felt over Jerry Sandusky’s abuse of young boys while the Penn State football gang looked the other way, but at least there’s comfort in justice. Unfortunately, too many victims become victims twice when the crimes committed against them go ignored and silenced.

Notre Dame: Justice Ignored

In The Nation, Dave Zirin writes about the differences and similarities between Penn State and Notre Dame’s football program, and the silence surrounding what appears to be a rape culture inside a cone of silence:

At Penn State, revered assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was raping young boys while being shielded by a conspiracy of silence of those in power at the football powerhouse. At Notre Dame, it’s not young boys being raped by an assistant coach. It’s women being threatened, assaulted, and raped by players on the school’s unbeaten football team. Yet sports media that are overwhelmingly male and ineffably giddy about Fighting Irish football’s return to prominence have enacted their own conspiracy of silence.

As unbeaten Notre Dame prepares to play in tonight’s national championship game against Alabama, the sports media have chosen not to discuss the fact that this football team has two players on its roster suspected of sexual assault and rape; two players whose crimes have been ignored; two players whose accusers felt harassed and intimidated; two players whose presence on the field Monday night should be seen as a national disgrace.

In 2010, Lizzy Seeberg was a freshman at Notre Dame. Lizzy was, among other things, a brand-spanking new member of the College Republicans and a good conservative girl. She also suffered from anxiety attacks.

Only a month after her freshman year began, she was sexually assaulted by a Notre Dame football player. She reported the assault, and submitted to evidence collection. Then she waited. And waited.

NCR Online:

All their lives, women Lizzy’s age have been taught to report unwanted touching. But after she did, the same friend of the player who’d left her alone with him sent her a series of text messages that scared her as much as the player himself had. “Don’t do anything you would regret,” he wrote. “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea.” Over the next 10 days, Lizzy became convinced he was right about that. The player wasn’t hard to find on the practice field each afternoon, so what were investigators waiting for? It crushed Lizzy, said her therapist in Chicago, Dr. Heather Hale, that reporting a crime somehow made her a traitor to the school she’d grown up revering.

But she also couldn’t get past the idea that failing to follow through legally would make her party to any harm that came to other women on campus, either from the same man or others emboldened by her silence. In a Skype session with Lizzy the day before she died, Hale said, “the conflict was, ‘Do I do the best I can and get on with my life, versus the fear that if I do that, this could happen to someone else?’ “

Remarkably, Lizzy did everything she could to show her loyalty to the team between the time she reported the assault and her suicide. Zirin:

To show that she wouldn’t rock the boat, Lizzy was compelled by her peers to go to the next game, stencil the Notre Dame logos into her face and cheer her assaulter.

Gosh, that sort of reminds me of a case in Texas. The one where a court ordered the rape victim to cheer for her rapist?

Washington Post reporter and Notre Dame alum who has investigated the sexual assaults on campus extensively, wrote, “On Sept. 7, she wrote her therapist, ‘I can’t get out of this f*!#ing hole I’ve started to dig. I’m trying to go to sleep because I’m sick with a cold and need to get rest but I can’t stop thinking about taking all the pills I can find. I’m ready to check out because this sucks.’ She promised [her therapist] she would never follow through. But then, on Sept. 9, she had a panic attack during a mandatory freshman orientation on sexual assault.”

That panic attack preceded her suicide. If in life Lizzy Seeberg suffered at the hands of not only players on the team but the people in power who ignored her pleas, in death these forces have gone further and slandered her to a shocking degree. They have claimed Lizzy was a “troubled girl” who was “all over the boy”, as well as mentally unstable. As Henneberger wrote, “The damage to her memory since then is arguably more of a violation than anything she reported to police – and all the more shocking because it was not done thoughtlessly, by a kid in a moment he can’t take back, but on purpose, by the very adults who heavily market the moral leadership of a Catholic institution. Notre Dame’s mission statement could not be clearer: ‘The university is dedicated to the pursuit and sharing of truth for its own sake.’ But in this case, the university did just the opposite.”

Lizzy Seeberg wasn’t the only victim, in death and in life, as Henneberger chronicles. Football supremacy at the cost of a few sexual assaults is part of a long-standing tradition evidently, dating back years and years until it has become a regular part of the school’s culture. Not only the school’s culture, but South Bend’s culture, too. Zirin:

But this conspiracy of silence and slander is bigger than just the school. Deindustrialized South Bend, Indiana, is a company town, and the company is Notre Dame football. The football program in 2012 was valued by Forbes as the third “most valuable” in the country, behind far larger state universities in Texas and Michigan. This is just the formal economy. Informally, every hotel, every bar, every kid at the side of the road selling bottled water depends on Notre Dame football. Home games generate $10 million in local spending for a community of just 100,000 people. It is the beating economic heart of South Bend and women have become, in this sclerotic set up, the collateral damage.

The economic heart and soul of South Bend can’t be disturbed because some women are assaulted by testosterone-deranged football players, right?

Why the hell not? When did a sport supersede the rule of law? When did it become acceptable to turn the other way and ignore what is happening, or worse, shame the victims to protect the program?

Steubenville Occupied

Anonymous has been protesting in Steubenville after a sixteen-year old girl was used as two football players’ rape toy for a night. Either drunk or drugged or both, the young victim — an honor student at a private Catholic high school — woke up the next day with no memory of what happened until she signed onto her social networks and found tweets and pictures of the alleged assault.

Allison Kilkenny:

Occupy Steubenville is a particularly interesting phenomenon given that so much media interest has been devoted to the no-less-horrific gang rape of a young woman named Jyoti Singh Pandey in India. Establishment pundits rushed to condemn the rape, and the rape culture that permitted the attack, when it came to exotic Indian folk in a faraway land, but seem more hesitant to address rape culture within the United States, even though a shining example of women’s second-class status is on display in Ohio.

Men who rape–and rape culture contributors who laugh about it later on Twitter and YouTube–do so precisely because they either don’t think rape is wrong (or, at the very least, raping a drunk girl “doesn’t count”) and/or they know they can rape with impunity. The “justice system” can’t work if there’s a two-tier structure where someone people get punished for raping teenage girls, and others don’t simply because they happen to be football players.

In the case of Steubenville, it seems that everyone has an opinion and some of those opinions fall on the side of the players. Breitbart writer Lee Stranahan has suggested that the New York Times slanted their account with some sort of “agenda”, that she asked for it, that even if it was rape, it wasn’t necessarily brutal, and that there’s a manufactured vendetta against the entire town of Steubenville.

How is what Stranahan and those who deny anything happened any different than the posthumous sliming of Lizzy Seeburg? Is there any time to actually accept that these things do happen, that they are the product of a culture which values how men move a ball down a 100-yard field more than women?

There’s a double standard about pointing our fingers at the young lady who committed suicide in India after being raped and how we look at rape victims here. There’s always a way to slut-shame the victims. They were drinking, they were there voluntarily, they were throwing themselves at those poor boys, they were just poor judges of character, they were dressed in scanty clothing, and so on.

Rape is brutal, it can cause PTSD, and it can lead to suicide, depression, and self-harm. There is no such thing as gentle rape. They are all brutal, whether or not the rapist uses fists or whatever. Even more brutal is the aftermath, particularly if a victim challenges the establishment as in the revered football programs in Steubenville and South Bend.

A Texas cheerleader. A Notre Dame freshman. A high school honor student. They are all people, they are all worthy of receiving our society’s sympathy and justice for the wrongs done them. Yet none of them saw that justice, simply because they were on the wrong side of the football power structure and the culture that defends them.

Steve Doocy teamed up with Daily Caller’s Vince Coglianese this morning to dig up one of then-State Senator Barack Obama’s 1999 votes on gun violence and held it up as “proof” that Obama is more interested in cracking down on guns than gun violence. Even worse, the actual digging was done by Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate opponent. In other words, from GOP oppo research to Fox News airwaves.

Doocy began the Fox & Friends segment by saying that President Obama “sounds pretty emphatic” about curbing gun violence but “when he had the chance to be a part of legislation to crack down on school shooters while he was an Illinois State Senator — what did he do? He voted present.” Doocy deliberately sneered and sad trombone music underscored the “fail” meme.

Coglianese told us that in 1999, after the Columbine massacre, Illinois had a bill to try juveniles who commit school shootings as adults. Although the Illinois’ state senate passed it by a vote of 52-1, Obama was one of five who voted “present.”

Doocy prodded for more. “I see that the Daily Caller, you tracked down a long record of Obama voting against tough-on-crime legislation.”

Well, not exactly — unless your idea of “tracking down” means dusting off the work of an old Obama political foe and looking for ways to use it now. Coglianese said that he and a Daily Caller colleague “went to Chicago — and this was in the midst of the election — and picked up all this opposition research prepared by Jack Ryan, who was one-time Obama’s Republican Senate opponent.”

Somehow, both Doocy and Coglianese forgot to mention that Ryan might not be the most credible of sources to Fox News family values viewers, having dropped out of his U.S. senate campaign after divorce papers revealed his actress wife accused him of taking her to sex clubs.

Even worse, Doocy ignored how Coglianese revealed he had unquestioningly taken on Ryan’s slant as his own.

COGLIANESE: (Ryan) found all this information and the way that he framed it – and I think it’s probably right — is that Obama was always very soft on crime but very tough on guns. Every time Obama had a crime vote to take when he was in the Illinois state senate, he always voted present… for two reasons: One, he said that crime, criminal law disproportionately affected African Americans. He saw a racial component there.”

… And additionally, he said that I don’t want to clog the court system with all these cases. Well, what do you want to clog the court system with? And we thought that given his rhetoric on guns lately that it would be interesting to bring up this ’99 vote where he said, “You know what? I don’t want to give tougher prosecution to children who shoot at schools.”

Doocy murmured, “Sure,” approvingly as Coglianese spoke.

But as Media Matters pointed out, this attempt to paint President Obama as a hypocrite on gun laws was either disingenuous or half-baked (or both). Obama’s reasons for voting present in 1999 were his opposition to automatically transferring juveniles into the adult system and none of Obama’s current proposals call for trying juveniles as adults.

Fox must be getting pretty desperate for dirt to throw at Obama’s gun proposals if they’re stooping to this.

An example of a supposedly fossilized diatom (Image from www.journalofcosmology.com)

Fossilized algae recently discovered inside a Sri Lankan meteorite could finally prove the existence of extra-terrestrial life, claim the authors of the new paper.

­In a recently published article in the Journal of Cosmology titled “Fossil Diatoms in a New Carbonaceous Meteorite”, scientists from the UK and Sri Lanka claim to have found fossilized algae in a meteorite.

The paper alleges that “microscopic fossilized diatoms were found in the sample,” which fell in Sri Lanka in December last year. The finding, the work suggests is a “strong evidence to support the theory of cometary panspermia.” The theory argues that life across planets is spread by meteorites and asteroids. Panspermia suggests that life could have existed on another planet and moved to Earth.

The scientists concluded the paper by saying “the presence of structures of this kind in any extra-terrestrial setting could be construed as unequivocal proof of biology.”

Samples from the rock were collected immediately after a large meteorite disintegrated and fell in the village of Araganwila in Sri Lanka on 29 December 2012.

The scientific community, including Prof Francis Thackeray from the Institute of Human Evolution at Wits University welcomed the report as “very exciting” yet “very controversial”, as samples could have been contaminated on earth, Business Day reports.

Comparison of a Polonnaruwa meteorite structure with a well-known terrestrial diatom. (Image from www.journalofcosmology.com)

(Image from www.journalofcosmology.com)

(Image from www.journalofcosmology.com)

For anyone who missed it over the weekend, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry had a rather interesting segment to open her show on Sunday, where she said conservatives haven’t always been against gun control laws and the issue wasn’t necessarily a partisan one. She gave viewers a little history lesson about the days when the Black Panthers were taking up arms on the streets of California and none other than conservative icon St. Ronnie Reagan was signing legislation to disarm them.

So… if we want to get conservatives to go along with some sort of gun control legislation, do we need to try to bring back the Black Panthers and get them back out there advocating for open carry? They all loved it when we had these TeaBirchers out there bringing guns to rallies and town hall meetings protesting the health care law. If Fox was going crazy over just a few of these New Black Panthers standing outside of a polling place, imagine how they’d act if we had the old Black Panther Party back, ’60’s style, armed and ready to stand up for their Second Amendment rights.

For more on what Harris-Perry was talking about here and what went down with the Black Panthers in the ’60’s, check out this article from The Atlantic from back in Sept. of 2011: The Secret History of Guns:

The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership–and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers–the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.

Wolf Richter  www.testosteronepit.com  www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party went all out late last year to re-grab the power it had held for 50 years before getting booted out in 2009. Its platform: print and borrow with utter abandon to create asset bubbles and inflation, and to weaken the yen. It even threatened to wrest control over the printing press away from the Bank of Japan. That verbiage has been phenomenally successful: the stock market is surging, and the yen is crashing from historic–under normal circumstances, inexplicable–highs.

But now, US automakers are squealing. They want the government to fight back in the currency war. The American Automotive Policy Council (AAPC), a lobbying organization that represents only Ford, GM, and Chrysler, sent President Obama a letter, demanding retaliation against Japan’s NO EXIT strategy. Then it went public with it grievances.

“Here we go again,” said Matt Blunt, AAPC president and former Republican governor of Missouri. “Japan’s Liberal Democratic party is back in power and determined to repeat the ‘beggar thy neighbor’ policies that distort trade by cheapening the value of the yen to promote economic growth in Japan at the expense of its trading partners.”

He claimed that “these types of policies” had “inflicted tremendous harm” on manufacturing in the US. “We urge the Obama Administration to make it clear to Japan that such policies are unacceptable and will be met by reciprocal measures.”

The AAPC has been lambasting Japan, and rightfully so, for having “the most closed auto market in the developed world,” protected by “non-tariff barriers” that keep US automotive products out. But now it accused Japan of manipulating its currency “to boost its own exports at the expense of other nations, especially the United States.”

Alas, the biggest currency manipulator in the world is the Fed, not only with its verbiage but also with its endless and escalating waves of quantitative easing, to the point where it currently prints $85 billion a month to debase and demolish the dollar, or what is left of it, which isn’t much. It makes US wages more competitive with those in Mexico and China. It also makes imports more expensive for American consumers and exports cheaper for consumers elsewhere. Meanwhile, Japan’s infamous trade surplus has given way to a ballooning trade deficit (graph).

The automakers were whining to President Obama, ironically, as another announcement was made and received with hoopla: GM would invest $1.5 billion in plants in North America in 2013. While no further details emerged, hopes were swirling that this manna would rain down on Michigan.

Yet North America, in addition to Michigan, also includes among other places Canada and Mexico, and how much of this money will land in the US is uncertain. Embarrassingly, the $1.5 billion was just a fraction of GM’s planned investments of $8 billion for 2013, of which $6.5 billion will be sent to countries outside North America–not Europe where GM is bleeding to death, but Asia.

That has been the paradigm in manufacturing for decades. US corporations have invested prodigiously in China and other countries where labor is cheap and have thus contributed to their enormous economic growth, while only crumbs have fallen on US soil. In this manner, much of the US auto component industry has moved offshore.

Exhibit A: Delphi, formerly GM’s component division. GM spun it off in 1999. Two years later, Delphi axed 11,500 workers. In 2004, it got into hot water over its accounting practices. In 2005, it went bankrupt and closed 45 plants in the US, with much of the production moving to China. In 2009, it sold its chassis division to state-owned BeijingWest Industries, which now develops and manufactures brake and chassis components for US and European automakers.

Exhibit B: Visteon, formerly Ford’s component division. Always the laggard, Ford spun it off in 2000. In 2009, it went bankrupt, shuttered all but one of its 33 plants in the US, let go 25,000 workers, and shifted its center of gravity to Shanghai. It now has 171 plants and facilities in other countries. Its headquarters building in Van Buren Township, Michigan, was sold last year, though its headquarters is still officially located there.

Visteon is still “a US company at this point,” CEO Tim Leuliette said at the Automotive News World Congress on Wednesday. Yet globally, he added, only “about 4%, 5% of our employees are in the United States,” most of them supporting customers in North America. So, if the headquarters shifted to Asia, he said, it wouldn’t change much, jobs-wise.

Bitter irony: American automakers, after having sent their investments and manufacturing overseas, are using a Republican ex-governor to pressure the Obama administration to stop the Japanese from defending themselves in the currency war that the Fed has been waging relentlessly for years.

Meanwhile, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher is waging his own war–against TBTF banks. “Repression” is what he calls “the injustice of being held hostage to large financial institutions,” whose investors, executives, counterparties, and customers “believe themselves to be exempt from the processes of bankruptcy and creative destruction.” These banks “capture the financial upside” of their bets but are bailed out when things go wrong, he says, “in violation of one of the basic tenets of market capitalism.” Read…. How Big Is ”BIG”?

And for an easy, fun guy read, if you like cars and the rambunctious process of selling them, check out TESTOSTERONE PIT, the novel.

The hyper-correlation of Japanese stocks and the JPY have led many to believe that Abe’s miracle promise will be just the ticket to bring the nation’s two-decade slump to an end – a 2% inflation target is all you need. However, in a brief CNBC interview, Kyle Bass explains that not only are 99.9% of people wrong about the crisis (explaining the critical aspect of the abrupt turn of twenty years of the ‘procylicality of thought’ – that deflation is the norm), but Abe’s actions have actually brought forward the date of the “detonation of Japan’s Debt Time Bomb.

It is the Japanese institutions that own JGBs and they own them at meager rates of interest simply because of the ingrained belief in deflation; when the government begins to target 2% inflation, the swing in forward expectations (he notes to monitor inflation swap breakevens) will be the trigger for Japan’s implosion. Bass warns that “Japanese debt is around 24x central government tax revenue and when you sail into the zone of insolvency, nothing you can do will help,” though he realizes that calling the end of the 70-year debt super-cyle to a specific date is naive, he does expect the ‘bomb’ to explode within 18 month to two years.

All of the components for this [bomb] to go off ‘all of a sudden’ are in place. The clock has started on the qualitative shift in participants’ minds that the situation is untenable as the realization that Japan spends 25% of revenue on interest now – and with higher rates (via this supposed inflation) the entire situation becomes farcical as every 1% rise in their cost of capital (or rates) costs them another 25% of revenue!.

On JPY devaluation – The signs are already there that elites are exiting the JPY – with recent M&A transactions – he warns. 20% of exports go to China; this could be halved given the tensions, and a JPY devaluation is not going to restore the competitiveness of that secular decline.

On Japanese stocks – The people buying Japanese stocks, are picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

Bass goes on to discuss the US Housing stabilization, European stress, and China’s economic opacity.

A snapshot of the Real Democracy movement’s page on facebook.com

In a move of high-tech civil disobedience, thousands of Israeli citizens are donating their right to vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections to their Palestinian neighbors via Facebook.

­The political initiative, called Real Democracy, so far has over 1,400 followers and is allowing Israelis to “donate” their votes for the Palestinian cause, giving their second-class citizen compatriots an opportunity to participate in general elections on Tuesday.

The founders of the initiative call their campaign “an act of civil disobedience against … the undemocratic nature of Israeli elections … the election of a government which controls four million Palestinians without voting rights,” quotes The Guardian.

The goal is to take the action a step further and allow Palestinians a potential say in the Israeli government’s “de facto control over the United Nations Security Council.”

Around a one and a half million Palestinians have Israeli citizenship, the other roughly two and a half million living in the country fall under the sovereignty of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and of Hamas in Gaza — and do not have an opportunity to vote in the elections that ultimately influences their lives.

Participants in the campaign say they are willing to go to the polling stations on January 22 to cast their votes according to the decision of the Palestinian to whom they gave their vote.

In his video post supporting the campaign, Israeli Moriel Rothman says he is “ashamed” of how the Israeli government treats the Palestinian population, surrendering his vote, saying, “I will vote the way you tell me to vote.”

Haim Barack Cohen, a lawyer from Tel Aviv, urged in his post the destruction of all barriers, giving up his right to vote so that the Palestinian people can have “equal rights.”

One of the men behind the movement, Shimri Zameret, says real democracy should rise above borders. “Politics transcends borders but governments are national. This is an attempt to create a new form of politics,” Zameret was quoted by The Guardian as saying.

The Real Democracy movement follows a similar model, initiated in 2010 in the UK, when a number of Britons agreed to donate their votes to minorities in the country.

Israel will hold parliamentary elections on January 22. The latest polls show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc ahead of their center-left opponents, with the right claiming 63 seats against 57 for the moderates, according to Dialogue service poll numbers.

January 18, 2013  |  

According to a Swedish study from Lund University recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it takes a single daily can of soda to increase a man’s risk of prostate cancer by 40 percent, compared to a man who never touches the stuff. 

So where is the public outcry warning Americans, who are always in search of newer and better drugs anyway, off these lucrative yet carcinogenic vehicles for addictive substances like caffeine, sugar and perhaps worse? They are likely hiding, at least for now, from an industry loathe to let cold-hearted science and much-needed reason lead the way.

“When it comes to studies of soda consumption and chronic disease risk, the only superior alternative to a prospective cohort study would be to conduct a randomized, controlled trial, where you assign one group to drink high amounts soda over 20 years, and the other group to not consume soda,” senior researcher Isabel Drake, who led Lund University’s soda cancer study, told AlterNet. “This, of course, is unethical and never going to be feasible. There are situations like this one, to assess for causal associations between soda consumption and cancer or other chronic diseases, where observational studies are realistically the best study design to address causal associations.”

Causality is the central question when it comes to sodas, whose lineage leads to 18th and 19th century druggists, scientists and other whitecoats. Since then, sodas have metamorphosed from chemical experiments into ubiquitous commodities pounded out by powerhouse multinationals like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, who together lord over about 90 percent of the market. Clocking around $60 billion a year, soda competes for drug market share with cannabis and its godfather, cocaine.

You’ll notice that nowhere in that short history lesson did you hear anything about health and wellness. That’s because sodas have zero redeeming nutritional value.

But they have had lethal additives like 4-methylimidazole, the ammonia-sulfite caramel coloring that is also a known animal carcinogen. The flavorless die brought nothing to products like Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper and more that carried it, and was toxic enough to activate a new California law requiring disclosure of cancer risk — which, in turn, was enough to motivate Coke and Pepsi to quickly discard it while protesting the controversy as “scientifically unfounded.” An appeal to the FDA for ban from the Center for Science in the Public Interest likely helped. But 4-methylimidazole is just one soda headache among many.

“Caramel is one concern that the industry is in the process of largely solving,” CSPI co-founder and executive director Michael F. Jacobson told AlterNet. “Also, we have concerns about aspartame, acesulfame-potassium and saccharin, which is rarely used in drinks.”

Lund’s study is the latest in a roll-call of soda cancer flags. Drake and colleagues followed 8,000 men aged 45-73 for an average of 15 years, and found that 40 percent of those who downed barely 12 ounces of soda a day were likely to contract a disease that kills a million of them a year. Previous research has warned of increased risk of esophageal cancer. University of Minnesota School of Public Health professor of epidemiology Mark Pereira recently led a study finding that 87 percent of his over 60,000 test subjects were likely to develop pancreatic cancer, whose median survival for 80 percent of afflicted individuals hovers between six to 10 months. The soda cancer warning signs continue to siren.

“The important take away from our study is that habitual consumption of soft drinks may be linked to an increased risk of pancreatic cancer,” Noel Mueller, University of Minnesota School of Public Health Ph.D. student and first author on Pereira’s study, told AlterNet. “In response to any criticisms, I’d like to point out that our results align with a recent Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health meta-analysis of studies on this topic, including ours, which found that soft drink consumption was indeed positively associated with pancreatic cancer risk.”

On August 17, 2007, the Fed’s Board of Governors announced a key change to primary credit lending terms, whereby the discount rate was cut by 50 bp – to 5.75% from 6.25% – and the term of loans was extended from overnight to up to thirty days. This reduced the spread of the primary credit rate over the fed funds rate from 100 basis points to 50 basis points. News of the emergency measure was supposed to be kept secret from market participants as it was substantially market moving. It wasn’t. And just when we thought our opinion of the outgoing Treasury Secretary and former NY Fed head Tim Geithner, whose TurboTax incompetence is now legendary, couldn’t get lower, it got lower. Much lower.

From the August 16, 2007 transcript (page 13 of 37) of the conference call preceding this announcement.

MR. LACKER. If I could just follow up on that, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. Yes, go ahead.

MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, did you say that [the banks] are unaware of what we’re considering or what we might be doing with the discount rate?

VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Yes.

MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, I spoke with Ken Lewis, President and CEO of Bank of America, this afternoon, and he said that he appreciated what Tim Geithner was arranging by way of changes in the discount facility. So my information is different from that.

CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. Okay. Thank you. Go ahead, Vice Chairman Geithner.

VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Well, I cannot speak for Ken Lewis, but I think they have sought to see whether they could understand a little more clearly the scope of their rights and our current policy with respect to the window. The only thing I’ve done is to try to help them understand–and I’m sure that’s been true across the System–what the scope of that is because these people generally don’t use the window and they don’t really understand in some sense what it’s about.

At least we now know who the bankers’ mole on the FOMC was before, as gratitude for his services, he was promoted to Treasury Secretary of the US. Because if he leaked one, he leaked them all.

h/t Manal

Via Gordon T. Long,

The Fiscal Cliff theater was great ‘off Broadway’ drama, but the real show for traders took center stage Sunday December 16th in Japan. The curtain went up for the newly elected Prime Minister of Japan as the star actor in the unfolding global fiat currency drama. In the last 90 days the US, EU and now Japan have announced “unlimited”, “Uncapped” monetary policy with UK’s soon to be bank of England Governor, Carney indicating he wants inflation & growth targeting also when he assumes the reins. The goal has been to get interest REAL interest rates as low as possible, and the expected duration to be as long as possible. Market have reacted to this strategic and obvious debasement by stampeding, relentlessly into the Bond Market and creating a disturbing potentially destabilizing bond bubble. However, remember, Financial Repression is at work here and US Bond Yields and Interest Rates must be further reduced. We presently expect the 10 Year US Treasury Bill to eventually break below 1% and Equities will fall on the re-pricing of credit and risk, earnings revenue and margin issues and slowing real global growth.

GTL Bond Bubble by xxyyxxyy123123

January 18, 2013  |  

There’s nothing inherently wrong with high-calorie foods. We should all be able to eat whatever we want, and no one should ever be shamed for occasionally going to town on some junk food. Still, there are plenty of bad foods that are marketed to mislead consumers into thinking they’re one thing when they’re actually something else.

It’s especially unfortunate when companies market foods as healthy when in fact they aren’t. Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in, though, so we all have to become a bit savvier about how we make healthy food choices. 

1. Smoothie King’sPeanut Power Plus Grape Smoothie

This product came to our attention via Center for Science in the Public Interest’s 2013 Xtreme Eating Awards. In CSPI’s words:

Smoothie King combines peanut butter, banana, sugar, and grape juice in its Peanut Power Plus Grape Smoothie. Some may think that sounds healthy, but a 40-oz. large size has 1,460 calories and three-and-a-half days’ worth of added sugar (22 teaspoons). Make that six-and-a-half days’ worth, since the 17 teaspoons of naturally occurring sugar in the grape juice aren’t any healthier than added sugar. There’s an additional 12 teaspoons of sugar coming from the banana and nonfat milk.

That is…a lot of sugar, especially considering that one of these smoothies is likely purchased as a snack, or at most one meal. I wonder how many people know just how much sugar they’re getting?

2. Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad

We picked just one salad for this article’s purposes, but you should know that as of last summer, there were at least 15 salads for sale at major chain restaurants that were unhealthier than a Big Mac (which has 550 calories and 29 grams of fat).

But let’s talk about this Applebee’s salad in particular. Chicken plus salad plus what sounds like some sort of Asian cuisine-inspired preparation might lead many customers to think that this salad is one of the healthier options on the Applebee’s menu. But no. The salad has 1,380 calories and 99 grams of fat, of which 15 grams are saturated. That’s almost impressive for a dish whose most fundamental ingredient is lettuce.

3. Yoplait’s 99% Fat-Free Cherry Orchard

Oh, the irony of this yogurt having “fat free” in its name! Men’s Health named this product “worst yogurt” in its Supermarket Survival Guide, and it’s easy to see why: it has a whopping 27 grams of sugar. That’s more than the daily recommended amount for the average woman (20 grams) — all in one “99% fat-free” snack.

4. Red Mango Mixed Frozen Yogurt

With the frozen yogurt fad in full force, it’s worth noting that fro-yo, while a delicious treat, is not necessarily a whole lot healthier for you than ice cream. I’m not trying to take your Pinkberry away — by all means, eat it to your heart’s content — just have all the facts before you do.

At the popular frozen yogurt chain Red Mango, you can buy a mixture of flavors (plain tart, pomegranate, blueberry, and white peach) that, swirled together in the smallest cup, contains 85 grams of sugar. That’s still less than most ice cream, but it’s a far cry from “healthy,” if that’s what you think you’re getting with a small cup of fruit-flavored fro-yo.

5. McDonald’s Fruit and Maple Oatmeal

Mark Bittman wrote a widely shared takedown of McDonald’s Fruit and Maple Oatmeal when it was introduced in 2011, so let’s take it from him:

A more accurate description than “100 percent natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen”….

In the past, federal regulators have been known to include provisions that waived the ability of a company to write off the costs of a settlement. But since our banks are always considered Too Big To Fail, they are of course offered every consideration, and We the People will end up paying for this. That doesn’t sit well with me, and probably not with you, either:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Consumer advocates have complained that U.S. mortgage lenders are getting off easy in a deal to settle charges that they wrongfully foreclosed on many homeowners.

Now it turns out the deal is even sweeter for the lenders than it appears: Taxpayers will subsidize them for the money they’re ponying up.

The Internal Revenue Service regards the lenders’ compensation to homeowners as a cost incurred in the course of doing business. Result: It’s fully tax-deductible.

Now it turns out the deal is even sweeter for the lenders than it appears: Taxpayers will subsidize them for the money they’re ponying up.

The Internal Revenue Service regards the lenders’ compensation to homeowners as a cost incurred in the course of doing business. Result: It’s fully tax-deductible.

Critics argue that big banks that were bailed out by taxpayers during the financial crisis are again being favored over the victims of their mortgage abuses.

“The government is abetting the behavior by not preventing the deduction,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “The taxpayers end up subsidizing the Wall Street banks after the headlines of a big-dollar settlement die down. That’s unfair to taxpayers.”

Under the deal, 12 mortgage lenders will pay more than $9 billion to compensate hundreds of thousands of people whose homes were seized improperly, a result of abuses such as “robo-signing.” That’s when banks automatically approved foreclosures without properly reviewing documents.

Regulators reached agreement this week with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Last week, the regulators settled with 10 other lenders: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, MetLife Bank, PNC Financial Services, Sovereign, SunTrust, U.S. Bank and Aurora. The settlements will help eliminate huge potential liabilities for the banks.

I have to wonder: Does this do anything at all to help homeowners with zombie titles?

Many consumer advocates argued that regulators settled for too low a price by letting banks avoid full responsibility for wrongful foreclosures that victimized families.

That price the banks will pay will be further eased by the tax-deductibility of their settlement costs. Companies can deduct those costs against federal taxes as long as they are compensating private individuals to remedy a wrong. By contrast, a fine or other financial penalty is not tax-deductible.

Taxpayers “should not be subsidizing or in any way paying for these corporations’ wrongdoing,” said Phineas Baxandall, a senior tax and budget analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocate.

[…] At least one lawmaker, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, wants regulators to bar the tax deductibility of the lenders’ costs. Brown made his argument in a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, U.S. Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry and other top regulators. The Fed and the comptroller’s office, a Treasury Department agency, negotiated the foreclosure abuse settlements with the banks.

“It is simply unfair for taxpayers to foot the bill for Wall Street’s wrongdoing,” Brown wrote in the letter dated Thursday. “Breaking the law should not be a business expense.

New reports say twelve people have died in a botched operation to rescue workers being held hostage by militants at a gas plant in eastern Algeria.

On Friday, the Algerian Press Service quoted a security source as saying, “As well as the 18 terrorists who were killed, 12 Algerian and foreign workers died.”

On Thursday, the Algerian army launched an assault on the militants, who stormed the gas plant, which is located in the town of In Amenas, on Wednesday.

Reporters say that seven foreigners remain in captivity at the gas plant — three Belgians, two US citizens, one Briton, and one Japanese.

On Thursday, the militants blew up a part of the plant to keep the Algerian forces at bay.

Earlier reports said the army had freed 573 Algerians and around 100 foreign hostages. However, about 30 people remain uncounted for and it is still not clear how many hostages were freed and how many were killed.

An Algerian government source said the army had gone in under “extremely complex” conditions and had averted a “disaster.”

The militant group, which splintered off of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is known as the Signed-in-Blood Battalion, which could also be translated as Those who Sign with Blood Battalion, but has also used the names the Masked Men Brigade and the Khaled Abu al-Abbas Brigade.

The Signed-in-Blood Battalion said the hostage-taking incident was carried out in reprisal for France’s intervention in Mali’s internal affairs and has demanded an immediate end to the military offensive.

Sources close to the group’s leader, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, said the gunmen also want to exchange the US citizens for prisoners held in the United States.

On January 11, France launched a military intervention in Mali under the pretext of halting the advance of militants in the African country.

Four days later, France announced that it would more than triple the number of its troops in Mali from 800 to 2,500. French soldiers launched their first ground attack against the rebel forces on January 16.

GVN/HGL

Following the recent fall of the Swiss franc against the euro, there were paradoxical comments on the opportunity on both moving the Swiss National Bank’s floor lower (say to 1.25 for example) or on abandoning it altogether (or moving it higher). We believe both options are very unlikely, at least in the coming months. Moving the floor lower would be a bad idea in our view. As we have seen, the extent of the franc’s overvaluation is quite debatable and the lower the floor, the quicker a monetary policy dilemma may emerge. Moreover, in the event renewed upward pressures on the franc occur once again, a lower floor may prove more costly in terms of FX interventions. In any case, the SNB was relatively clear recently in saying that it has no plan to move the floor.

On the other hand, now that the euro is far higher than 1.20 francs, it could look tempting for the SNB to take the opportunity to simply abandon the floor. However, this would be quite a risky bet. As mentioned below, a new bout of the euro crisis may break out at some stage or another over the coming months, propelling the franc sharply higher once again. Then what would the SNB do? Reset a floor? In short, by abandoning the floor already now, the SNB would be playing dangerously with its credibility. In our view, we continue to believe the floor might be abandoned (or possibly raised substantially) at some stage, but most likely not before next year.

The franc has weakened sharply against the euro this year
Over the past week or so, the Swiss franc suddenly weakened significantly against the single currency, reaching almost CHF1.255 per euro, its lowest level since May 2011. Behind the scene, this sudden decline was linked to a further substantial reduction in the systemic risk associated with the euro crisis and the widespread practice of charging penalty rates on CHF deposits. However, the short-term trigger of the CHF fall was clearly last week’s surprisingly “not-so-dovish” ECB press conference.

#ccc;” />

What to expect for the future?
The first thing to keep in mind is that the stability that prevailed on the EUR/CHF during most of last year lies in the fact that the SNB had to sell huge amounts of francs. According to our rough estimates, between mid-May and mid-September 2012, SNB FX interventions reached a massive CHF190bn. A good part of the money invested in the franc during that period was probably “hot money” seeking protection from a potential euro breakup. This means that potentially substantial amounts may leave the franc if the euro area systemic risk is reduced further. Moreover, short-covering probably played a significant role in the franc’s recent downward move and this may continue, at least in the short run. The consequence is that it is extremely difficult to figure out up to what point the recent appreciation of the euro against the franc will go in the short run, but we believe the move may well extend further for a while.

Swiss franc weakness unlikely to last in our view
Nevertheless, we do not believe the franc’s recent depreciation against the euro will prove a lasting phenomenon. It is far from sure that risk aversion will continue to fall over the coming few months. Peripheral European countries are in a deep recession and even German economic activity contracted in Q4 2012. Austerity programmes are a powerful drag on growth and public budget rebalancing is far from being achieved. At some stage over the coming few months, a new bout  of the euro crisis may burst. And, even if it does not, the prolonged weakness of the euro area economy may well lead to more accommodative measures by the ECB. Moreover, a temporary surge in risk aversion is also possible around the looming US political challenges (the debt ceiling, the ‘Sequester’ and the continuing budget resolution).

#ccc;” />

From a longer-term point of view, things are also not that straightforward either. At first sight, it would seem reasonable to bet on a lower Swiss franc against the euro. First, although some downward euro correction is quite possible in the short run, we expect the single currency to appreciate further against the dollar during the course of 2013, on the back of improving world and European growth and further — although irregular — progress in resolving the euro crisis. Second, the Swiss franc still seems to be overvalued (see chart above).

#ccc;” />

However, we are not convinced by these lines of reasoning. The extent of the franc’s overvaluation is debatable. Swiss exports were surprisingly resilient to the strength of the franc. The Swiss export industry is currently not suffering so much from a lack of competitiveness but rather from a lack of demand.

Moreover, it’s worth noting that at current inflation differentials (around 2.5 percentage points less inflation in Switzerland compared to the weighted average of its trading partners), the estimated overvaluation of the real trade weighted value of the Swiss franc (around 2.5% currently) would be erased in a year or so, and all that with no further nominal exchange rate movements.

Toward a monetary policy dilemma at the SNB?
An even more important point playing to the advantage of the Swiss franc is the potential gradual building of a SNB “monetary policy dilemma” later this year. Already currently, the Swiss economy is not that weak. Employment is booming and the pace of house price increases remains quite elevated. In that context, the more world and European growth improves over the coming months, the more Swiss growth will accelerate, and growth prospects will brighten. This means that the same factors behind our rather bullish scenario for the euro against the dollar may well lead, later in 2013, to anticipations that a SNB ‘exit strategy’ is getting closer, which is likely to give some support to the Swiss franc.

Consequently, we believe by year-end the Swiss franc is more likely to be stronger than today, rather than weaker. We maintain our forecast of a euro at 1.20-1.22 franc in 12 months’ time.

#ccc;” />

The floor should remain in place and unchanged

Following the recent fall of the Swiss franc against the euro, there were paradoxical comments on the opportunity on both moving the floor lower (say to 1.25 for example) or on abandoning it altogether (or  moving it higher). We believe both options are very unlikely, at least in the coming months. Moving the floor lower would be a bad idea in our view. As we have seen, the extent of the franc’s overvaluation is quite debatable and the lower the floor, the quicker a monetary policy dilemma may emerge. Moreover, in the event renewed upward pressures on the franc occur once again, a lower floor may prove more costly in terms of FX interventions. In any case, the SNB was relatively clear recently in saying that it has no plan to move the floor.

On the other hand, now that the euro is far higher than 1.20 francs, it could look tempting for the SNB to take the opportunity to simply abandon the floor. However, this would be quite a risky bet. As mentioned above, a new bout of the euro crisis may break out at some stage or another over the coming months, propelling the franc sharply higher once again. Then what would the SNB do? Reset a floor? In short, by abandoning the floor already now, the SNB would be playing dangerously with its credibility. In our view, we continue to believe the floor might be abandoned (or possibly raised substantially) at some stage, but most likely not before next year.

Critically, as SNBCHF blog noted, while the SNB did make aprofit last year, Q4 saw them give a lot of it back – suggesting the deltas (or exposure) is very high (and senstivie to JPY and Gold):

The profit in foreign currency positions fell from 10.3 billion in the first three quarters to 4.7 billion in the whole year implying a loss of 5.6 billion in the last quarter. The loss was 4 billion higher than our estimate (possible reason: the IMF FX reserves data used for our estimate will be revised downwards). Especially the yen and gold depreciated in the last quarter. The latest monetary data showed that the SNB reduced sight deposits and liabilities by only 4 billion francs in Q4/2012 and they even increased by one billion francs last week.

I’m still a little skeptical, but whether it’s three months, or three years, a House Republican cave on the debt ceiling bodes well for our economy and dealings with Congress, wingnuts or no wingnuts.

According to The Hill, House Republicans are going to propose a three-month raise to the debt ceiling with some contingencies attached:

House Republican leaders on Friday announced a plan to condition a three-month increase in the debt limit on the Senate committing to pass a budget by the April 15 statutory deadline.

“Before there is any long-term debt limit increase, a budget should be passed that cuts spending,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told the Republican conference in remarks to close the party’s three-day retreat in Williamsburg. “The Democratic-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget for four years. That is a shameful run that needs to end, this year.”

The House will also seek to prevent members of Congress from being paid if the two chambers do not pass a budget resolution.“We are going to pursue strategies that will obligate the Senate to finally join the House in confronting the government’s spending problem,” Boehner said. “The principle is simple: no budget, no pay.”

The “no budget, no pay” piece of their proposal appears to be unconstitutional, according to ThinkProgress, but that’s a small thing compared to the fact that it looks as though they’re prepared to release the hostage, and once they do that, there’s no turning back.

Steve Benen points out that releasing the debt ceiling hostage simply exchanges one for another:

That said, it also appears the congressional GOP hopes to trade one hostage for another.

Even if Republicans now seem to realize they can’t follow through on their debt-ceiling threats — they really should have thought this through beforehand — GOP policymakers still appear committed to aggressive confrontations on automatic sequestration cuts and funding levels for the government itself.

To be sure, these threats carry a punch. The sequester includes deep cuts that neither side wants and a fight over spending levels may very well lead to a government shutdown, but neither pose the catastrophic dangers associated with a genuine debt-ceiling crisis — and even House Republicans seem aware of this, which is why they have no intention of shooting this hostage.

There’s apparently growing GOP support for a clean, short-term extension of the debt ceiling — which, as we discussed yesterday, doesn’t seem to make any sense at all — which would presumably set the stage for additional talks. This will play out soon enough, but at a certain level its impact is limited. Once everyone in Washington — Democrats and Republicans, the White House and Congress — realizes that GOP leaders aren’t prepared to allow a default on our obligations, the game is effectively over.

Greg Sargent:

Here’s why this matters: This increases the debt ceiling to authorize borrowing to pay the country’s bills well into April. That punts the debt limit deadline until after the deadline for funding for the government to run out, which is on March 27th. In other words, Republicans will now use the threat of a government shutdown along with the coming expiration of the sequester to extract the spending cuts it wants. Presuming this all gets resolved by then, or soon after, it means the threat of default is no longer a factor. This will all but certainly get resolved in advance of this three month deadline, and a long term debt limit hike will get attached to that agreement.

It’s that last bit that has me skeptical, though Krauthammer was pretty specific in his column about what the GOP will not get while this President is in office and while the Senate majority is a Democratic one. In that column, he’s blunt:

The party establishment is coming around to the view that if you try to govern from one house – e.g., force spending cuts with cliffhanging brinkmanship – you lose. You not only don’t get the cuts. You get the blame for rattled markets and economic uncertainty. You get humiliated by having to cave in the end. And you get opinion polls ranking you below head lice and colonoscopies in popularity.

There is history here. The Gingrich Revolution ran aground when it tried to govern from Congress, losing badly to President Clinton over government shutdowns. Nor did the modern insurgents do any better in the 2011 debt-ceiling and 2012 fiscal-cliff showdowns with Obama.

Obama’s postelection arrogance and intransigence can put you in a fighting mood. I sympathize. But I’m tending toward the realist view: Don’t force the issue when you don’t have the power.

Releasing the hostage is good, but it isn’t the end of the line by any means. It does, however, allow some breathing room to actually work through some kind of deal that ends the standoff over budget cuts and if Krauthammer’s words carry any weight, it seems that he’s signaling to Republicans that they take on more modest challenges and win smaller battles rather than trying to take on unwinnable large battles.

Jonathan Chait argues that a short-term debt ceiling increase seems somewhat pointless, and has similar concerns to mine:

Will it work? You have to ask yourself what the point is. If Republicans can’t threaten to shoot the hostage, what do they gain by holding new debt ceiling votes every few months? It’s either leverage or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then a new vote every few months won’t do anything for the GOP. Indeed, it will annoy Republicans, who will be forced to take more and more “he voted to increase the debt ceiling fourteen times!” votes.

Still. I don’t trust Republicans enough to call this a win. At best, it’s a stabilizing move, assuming it can pass the House without some Democrats tossing in their votes too. Or maybe they have come to the conclusion that holding the debt ceiling hostage is simply a losing strategy that would undo any hope of getting anything passed that is on their agenda, in which case they’d be better off doing one clean, long-term raise of the ceiling and moving on to the budget battles.

Stay tuned. They still have to vote on it.

Counterpoint: After writing this, I’ve seen more people weigh in. Nancy Pelosi will not accept a debt ceiling bill with contingencies, according to Greg Sargent. Jason Easley at PoliticusUSA weighs in with a warning that this is just an Eric Cantor bait and switch to force the Senate to pass the House budget without any changes.

Eric Cantor’s offer is totally bogus. Rep. Cantor was proposing that as long as the Senate will agree with the House on budget, the House will raise the debt ceiling for 90 days. Cantor expects the Senate to trade three months of debt ceiling for one year of spending cuts. Look carefully at what Cantor proposed. He didn’t propose that the Senate has to pass a budget. He said that the House and Senate both have to pass a budget. Rep. Cantor was referring to a budget that both the House and Senate agree to, not just a Senate budget.

It’s unclear right now whether the actual bill would be a clean raise for three months, or one with contingencies attached. If the latter, then yes, it’s simply a bait-and-switch.

A breast cancer patient in hospital. (Reuters / Eric Gaillard)

After taking leave to get a mastectomy, a breast cancer survivor was fired from her job the day before she was scheduled to go back to work, allegedly because she had taken too much medical leave.

Vivienne Parra, 39, is now suing her former employer for what she considers an unjust termination. The Oceanside, Calif., woman took three weeks of leave to undergo cancer treatment and a mastectomy in 2009, followed by three more weeks when she delivered a baby.

The woman claims she went to work whenever she was physically capable of it during those six weeks. She says always gave her employer advance notice and documentation whenever she had to take medical leave.

“I put all my effort into this job and even how sick I was I came in. I didn’t have my hair, I’d come in, and I worked hard and I was pregnant; tired from day one,” Parra told NBC News.

The woman’s boss at the Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center allegedly fired her by claiming that “she no longer desired employment,” the lawsuit states.

“Employers are using the fact that their employees are on leave as a way to get rid of them,” said David Scher, Parras’ attorney.

If Parra was indeed fired for seeking breast cancer treatment, then her employer may be in violation of federal laws that protect workers with disabilities from discrimination at the workplace, including the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, the latter of which requires employers to provide their workers with leave for personal and family reasons including illness and pregnancy.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an agency that enforces anti-discrimination laws, conducted a three-year investigation of Parra’s case and believes that she “was discharged based on her disability in violation of the [Americans with Disabilities Act],” the agency wrote in a letter obtained by the Washington Post.

Parra’s former employer is insisting that the woman did not file the paperwork to request time off and that she had run out of days to use. R. Scott Oswald of the Employment Law Group said that the post-recession economy has increasingly prompted employers to unjustly fire their workers.

In 2005, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed 14,893 charges of disability discrimination in the US. In 2011, it filed 25,742 cases — a record high.

“I hope the managers I worked for understand all I wanted was help from them so I could pursue what I needed to do to get better,” Parra told the Post.

A digital version of the Mona Lisa has been beamed to space using lasers. (Image courtesy: Xiaoli Sun, NASA Goddard)

A new experiment by NASA proving the effectiveness of laser communications has raised the prospect that beam technology could one day replace radio. That’s after NASA scientists successfully beamed an image of the Mona Lisa to the moon.

­NASA scientists usually use lasers to track the position of its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) — the robotic spacecraft that creates gravitational maps of the moon. It collects the information then transmits it back to earth at a rate of 50 Mbs.

Then NASA scientists had the bright idea of reversing the flow by beaming an image of the Mona Lisa to the LRO using lasers.

“This is the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances,” says LOLA’s principal investigator, David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use. In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide.”

The picture was transmitted to the LRO spacecraft, because it is the only satellite that has a laser receiver.  

An image grab taken from a video uploaded on http://www.nasa.gov

Precise timing was the key to transmitting the simplified black and white image, because the laser pulse has to hit a small target a very very long way away.

The first attempt to reassemble the image was not successful, the quality of the picture was significantly degraded. Atmospheric turbulence and a slight pause in transmission caused errors, making the resulting image grainy, distorted and incomplete. The scientists then applied the same kind of data correction methods used for CDs and DVDs, which substantially helped clear up the image.

A data rate of 300 bits per second is woefully slow compared to what is possible with cables or radio, so NASA has come up with a new experimental laser they hope will be capable of transmitting 600 million bits per second. This system will be carried by the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer satellite, which is to be launched in August. 

This is just one aspect of NASA’s planned research into laser communications. In 2017 it plans to start a new experiment called Laser Communications Radar Demonstration — a commercial satellite that is going to test beam-based communication systems. Theoretically the speed and volume of information that can the transferred by laser is an order of magnitude greater than the rates attainable with radio waves.

An image grab taken from a video uploaded on http://www.nasa.gov

The recovery since the 2008 financial crisis is just an illusion created by the papering-over of our insolvency by central-bank printing. Doug Casey adds that the current state is akin to being “in the eye of the hurricane thanks to this ‘cover'” and believes the printing which will ultimately lead to very high inflation once bank lending starts to pick up again. This excellent interview moves from Casey’s view of a looming loss of confidence in the dollar (and the impact of mass repatriation) to what must the Keynesians be thinking as the “apparency of prosperity” remains all that we have to lift animal spirits. With an eye to gold (and non-western central banks behavior towards it as they realize “the USD is just an unsecured liability of a bankrupt government”), he evaluates the likelihood of a western economic collapse in 2013 and what that would imply for an implicit gold standard in the world. From Austrian economist Hans Herman-Hoppe’s view of a post-Keynesian-crash era to his potential triggers for this collapse (such as gold-energy barter and non-dollar blocs), Casey succinctly reminds us that there is not just one asset-class bubble but that “we are living in the middle of the biggest bubble in history.”

The world’s largest offshore windmill farm, Middelgrunden Windmill Farm, located in the Oeresund, three km from Copenhagen harbour. (AFP Photo / Soeren Bidstrup)

Japan is to start building its ambitious wind farm project off the Fukushima coast in July. The farm is expected to become the world’s largest and produce 1GW of power once completed in 2020.

­The power-generating facility will be built 16 kilometers off the coast of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was critically damaged by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The 143 wind turbines, which are to be 200 meters in height, will be built on buoyant steel frames stabilized with ballast and anchored to the continental shelf.

Once completed in 2020, the project will generate 1 gigawatt of renewable electrical power. 

The project is part of Japan’s national plan to increase renewable energy resources following the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. After the quake, Japan shut down its 54 nuclear reactors, but due to energy shortages it has had to restart two reactors.

“This project is important. I think it is impossible to use nuclear power in Fukushima again,” project manager Takeshi Ishihara of the University of Tokyo told New Scientist weekly magazine.

Ishihara believes the area’s seismic activity won’t be a problem for the turbines. His team has carried out lots of computer simulations and water tank tests in order to verify the safety of the turbines in all possible extreme events, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons.

“All extreme conditions have been taken into consideration in the design,” he added.

There were some objections to the project by local people, who expressed concerns, in particular, over possible impact on the fishing industry, which was also hit by the nuclear disaster. But Ishihara is sure it’s possible to turn the farm into a ‘marine pasture’ that would attract fish.

Facility specifications of forward project. (Image from Fukushima Floating Offshore Wind Farm Demonstration Project, Takeshi Ishihara The University of Tokyo)

The project is also part of the prefecture’s plan to become completely energy self-sufficient by 2040, using only renewable sources.  

The Fukushima wind farm will produce double the amount of energy of the Greater Gabbard array, currently the world’s biggest, off the coast of Suffolk in the United Kingdom, which generates 504 megawatts from its 140 turbines. Although the title of biggest will soon pass to the London Array in the Thames Estuary, where 175 turbines will produce 630 megawatts of power when it becomes operational later this year.

Scientists and researchers believe Japan’s wind capacity could reach 7.6 gigawatts over the next three years.

Development phases and key success factors. (Image from Fukushima Floating Offshore Wind Farm Demonstration Project, Takeshi Ishihara The University of Tokyo)

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. The Center of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: publications@globalresearch.ca

www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

For media inquiries: publications@globalresearch.ca

Protesters from the Islamic Action Front and other opposition parties hold signs reading “Boycotting” during a protest in Amman January 18, 2013. (Reuters / Majed Jaber)

Around 2,000 people gathered on the streets of Jordan’s capital Amman to protest against “sham” elections scheduled for January 23. Many called for long-ruling King Abdullah to relinquish his powers.

­The young crowd, dominated by members of leading opposition party the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical Islamist groups, chanted angrily, but remained peaceful.

Cries of “Freedom, freedom. This is not a royal gift, but our right,” went around repeatedly. One banner read “We reject cosmetic elections and schemes against our demands for reform.”

In the wake of the Arab Spring protests two years ago that toppled many of Abdullah II’s neighbors, the King has offered a raft of reforms to enliven what was previously only a nominal democracy.

For the first time ever, the Prime Minister will be chosen as a result of the vote, and national vote lists and quotas for women have been introduced.

The protesters believe the reforms have not gone far enough.

Although, according to the US State Department, Jordanians of Palestinian origin make up more than half of the country’s 6 million population, they currently occupy less than a tenth of the country’s parliamentary seats.

This is largely a result of gerrymandering. Less populous Bedouin districts, which have traditionally formed the monarchy’s power base, are allocated proportionately more votes than densely inhabited and mushrooming Palestinian cities.

As well as redrawing electoral borders, protesters are demanding that the King take action against extensive vote buying which they believe is taking place. There have been recent reports that wealthy candidates are able to secure support in rural areas for as little as $30 a vote.

Many believe that whatever the outcome of the election, ultimate political control will be retained by the country’s powerful but shadowy security apparatus.

 “This would have been my first time to vote. But I won’t because it just seems like the same old game,” Hassan Sarhan, who was participating in a smaller simultaneous protest in the town of Mafraq, told AP.

The government has said the elections will go on regardless of street rallies.

“It’s a pity they are boycotting. We tried to dissuade them but they chose this path,” said Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour.

Political instability in the resource-poor country, which largely depends on aid from its Arab neighbors, is being exacerbated by the worsening economic climate.

The International Monetary Fund has told the debt-ridden nation to introduce austerity measures, including cutting electricity and fuel subsidies, to secure a new $2 billion loan,. A cut to fuel subsidies last November sparked widespread national protests that ended in violence.

Protesters from the Islamic Action Front and other opposition parties during a protest in Amman January 18, 2013. (Reuters / Majed Jaber)

Protesters from the Islamic Action Front and other opposition parties during a protest in Amman January 18, 2013. (Reuters / Majed Jaber)

A protester from the Islamic Action Front holds a sign reading “Boycotting” during a protest in Amman January 18, 2013. (Reuters / Majed Jaber)

Protesters from the Islamic Action Front and other opposition parties hold signs read “Boycotting” during a protest in Amman January 18, 2013. (Reuters / Majed Jaber)

The USD ends the week up over 0.6%, Treasury yields down 2-4bps, Silver up 4.6%, Oil 2%, and Gold 1.4%; but it is VIX that rules the waves of unreality this week as it collapsed from this morning’s unchanged on the week, played catch down to stocks (from yesterday) and then led stocks on a vol steepening/compression extravaganza down to 12.31% – its lowest since June 2007 as the ‘contingent’ extension of the debt-limit appeared the initial trigger and nothing at all the secondary trigger. AAPL wavered below and tested up to $500 (amid very large average trade size) but was the distinct loser once again with size sellers as S&P 500 futures surged (yet agin inferring the unwind of the long-AAPL, short-ES trade continues). Once the fire was lit, there was no stopping the stop-chasing momo run in stocks as ES chased all the way up above the week’s highs. VXX was crushed (as the curve also compressed) and high-yield credit and stocks tracked each other in the rampapalooza. Of course the moment the day-session close, ES cracked back lower but for now no one cares (ending up just 5 points in the S&P cash). Average trade size was high once again in the S&P as the USD, Bonds, and Stocks were bid.

Treasuries didn’t buy it but who cares – VIX led the way…

VIX recoupled then they were off to the races together…

S&P 500 futures are 4-5points off the day-session closing highs as futures close…but we have tested this upper range…

And Treasuries were not buying this risk-on thing…

Nothing is stopping stocks now… USD strength on the week…

Tech was the only loser on the week (thanks to AAPL) as Energy and Industrials led – with financials just eking out a gain by the close today.

The VIX term structure steepened notably once again to near 5-month steeps – and pushing it near a cyclical level that tends to mark short-term turning points in complacency in stocks…

What happened the last time VIX dropped this far this fast? It was July 2006…

Charts: Bloomberg and Capital Context

Jon Stewart took the hypocrites over at Fox apart again for their cries of tyranny over President Obama’s executive orders on gun violence in America — which, as Stewart pointed out, somehow the likes of Sean Hannity or Dana Perino had absolutely no problem with when their buddy Bush was issuing them.

He also gave a little history lesson to all of the wingnuts out there who believe that the 2nd Amendment gives them some protection from government tyranny and who are throwing out ridiculous hypotheticals like saying that the Jews having guns would have protected them from Hitler or that we wouldn’t have had slavery if African Americans were allowed to have guns.

Gary Loveman, CEO of Caesars Entertainment. (Reuters / Brian Snyder)

A group of CEOs is attempting to push the official US retirement age to 70, thereby making fewer Americans eligible to receive benefits such as Social Security and Medicare.

The Business Roundtable (BRT), a group of influential CEOs, on Wednesday unveiled its plan to partially privatize the health insurance program for older Americans and gradually reduce the benefits they currently receive by cutting entitlements. The plan calls for smaller annual Social Security increases, as well as reduced benefits for wealthy retirees.

“America can preserve the health and retirement safety net and rein in long-term spending growth by modernizing Medicare and Social Security in a way that addresses America’s new fiscal and demographic realities,” Gary Loveman, chairman, president and chief executive of Caesars Entertainment, told CBS News. Loveman is head of the Business Roundtable, which came up with the plan. The millionaire businessman hopes to convince Congress to enact the new measures in an attempt to cut US spending.

The BRT believes the eligibility age for both Medicare and Social Security should increase to 70. Some legislators have already proposed raising it to 67, but congressional Democrats have fought hard to prevent such an increase. Retirees can currently get reduced Social Security benefits starting at age 62, full Social Security benefits at age 66, and Medicare at age 65.

While the proposed changes would impact the younger generations, anyone who is currently over 55 would not be affected by those measures and could continue to receive their government benefits, regardless of the outcome of the decision.

The BRT believes that raising the age would help reduce the deficit. Its members also believe that the changes would cause traditional Medicare programs to compete with private insurance plans — something that Rep. Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee, has long advocated for.

But while raising the eligibility age would save the federal government money, it would also cause Americans’ expenses to increase dramatically, which would particularly devastate low-income individuals dependent on government assistance. CNNMoney reports that medical expenses would increase by $11.4 billion, even though federal spending would only drop by $5.7 billion.

“Raising the age doesn’t address the larger concern of reducing health care spending overall,” said Juliette Cubanski, associate director of Kaiser’s Program on Medicare Policy. “It just shifts costs from the federal government to other payers in the system.”

As Democrats and Republicans attempt to come up with a budget plan to avoid causing the country to fall into default, Medicare reform continues to be heavily debated. Although President Obama said he would support minor changes to Medicare, he would not support a plan as radical as that proposed by the BRT.

Increasing the eligibility age to 68 would put 435,000 seniors at risk of being uninsured — a number that would be higher if the eligibility age was set at 70.

“These ideas were soundly rejected in the last election only a few months ago,” said Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

But the US could soon be struggling to pay its bills, and the CEOS of the BRT believe their proposal could gain congressional support among those most adamant about cutting spending.

Night at Bab Al-Karamah. (International Solidarity Movement / Abir Kopty)Palestinian activists began constructing a new village in the West Bank on Friday in protest of the illegal Israeli occupation in Palestine and ongoing land grabs by Israeli settlers in the area.

The protesters said they were re-establishing Palestinian land in opposition to Israel–saying they have so far set up a mosque and several tents near the village of Beit Iksa near Jerusalem and have begun work on a permanent structure.

Locals said roughly 400 Palestinians gathered for Friday prayers in the open area.

The activists said the Israeli army recently announced a plan to take over roughly 124 acres of land in the area, which is located on the northwestern outskirts of Jerusalem, an area that is already riddled with Jewish settlements.

Saed Yakrina, an activist from Beit Iksa, told Ma’an News Agency the camp was “a message to Israel and all democratic societies that we are human, and we want peace.”

“We are looking for a life without checkpoints, walls and settlements,” he said.

“We pitched two tents and began building a new structure using concrete and stones in an area in Beit Iksa which Israel wants to take for settlement,” Said Yaqine told Agence France-Presse.

“This action is not limited to today but will go on for several days, to declare our refusal of the Israeli decision to take the land,” he said.

The group said they were naming the new village extension Bab Al-Karamah, Arabic for ‘Gate of Dignity’.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said Israeli soldiers have been “deployed in order to maintain the security in the area.”

The protest comes days after Israeli forces raided and forcefully evicted Palestinian and other multi-national activists from a similar hilltop protest camp in the E-1 corridor of the West Bank–similarly, an area slated for Israeli settlers. The Palestinian activists had also declared the space a newly founded Palestinian village, Bab Al Shams (Gate of the Sun).

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the raid, which resulted in several protester injuries, reports of police brutality, and the total eviction of the 150 inhabitants.

________________________

________________________

It is no secret to anyone that as we said some 3 years ago, the world is now engaged in all out currency warfare whose sole goal is destroying one’s own currency faster and more brutally than “the other guy” can. Because while devaluing one’s currency is imperative in order to return to a viable debt load, about $40 trillion less than where it is now (as per BCG) by pushing monetary inflation upon one’s people and inflating said debt away, just as important is to stimulate one’s economy and exports which, all else equal, can only be done by making them cheaper to one’s trading partners. It is, after all, a zero sum world.

This is precisely the tug of war that the developed world is caught in currently, where every attempt is made to talk down one’s currency, and when that fails, to dilute it by printing more of it (the Fed), to backstop it with collateral of every lower quality (the ECB, although in Europe’s case it is more of an involuntary phenomenon), or just to talk, and talk, ant talk (Japan).

Yet while every country with a self-respecting central bank (i.e., currency printer) hopes that they will be the ultimate winner of the currency debasement export race, what has become obvious over the past 30 years, is that when it comes to specializing in exports, there is just one true winner: a winner which is self-evident from the chart below.

So the question becomes: while everyone is scrambling for the peanuts and breadcrumbs of marginal exports while injecting trillions, then quadrillions, then quintillions and so on, to make their exports “attractive”, is China merely sitting on the sidelines and smiling, knowing well that when it comes to Ricardian dynamics, there is nobody who can ever catch up or slow down its momentum, benefiting from a (still) cheap labor force that is second to none, and an unprecedented work ethic (the lack of a social safety net does miracles for motivation), even if every country destroys their economy in the process of trying to catch up?

Of course, when every other country’s economy implodes, that means the traditional Chinese export partners will no longer exist, and the country will finally have no choice but ending its mercantilist ways, and actually focusing on internal growth. But China, like the US in so many other things, will only cross that particular bridge when it has no other choice.

Algerian special forces are still hunting Islamist militants who overran a BP gas plant as freed British hostages spoke of their fears for their colleagues still trapped on the site.

The Algerian state news agency, APS, reported that about 100 foreign workers had been released from a total of 132 seized by the militants when they stormed the remote desert facility on Wednesday.

At least 10 UK nationals were understood to still be “at risk” at the plant at In Amenas, close to the Libyan border, as the hostage crisis headed towards a fourth day.

Footage of several British workers said to have escaped the siege has been shown on Algerian state television. One man said: “The gendarmes did a fantastic job. They kept us all nice and safe and fought off the bad guys. I never really felt in any danger, to be honest.”

Another said: “I feel safe at the moment but I won’t feel 100% happy until I’m back in the UK. My heart goes out to the guys that are still there and hopefully everyone comes home safe because, at the end of the day, it’s only work.”

The Algerian government said that an unspecified number of foreigners had died during the military rescue operation, which began on Wednesday morning. Eighteen of the militants were also reported to have been killed – suggesting that around a dozen of the original group of about 30 could still be at large.

A Mauritanian news site reported that the remaining militants were demanding the release of two terrorists held in the United States, including 1993 World Trade Centre bombing mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman, in return for the release of two US captives.

Despite the casualties among the hostages, an Algerian government source quoted by APS strongly defended the military operation, saying it had prevented a “true disaster” which would have caused “immeasurable” human and material damage.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Britain would do “everything we can to hunt down” those behind the “brutal and savage” attack.

It was reported that two UK workers were among the casualties, which would bring the British death toll to three after one was killed in Wednesday’s initial raid by the militants.

Postal workers have intercepted a letter bomb addressed to a senior police officer in Northern Ireland.

The suspicious package, meant for Chief Inspector Andy Lemon, was discovered in a sorting office in Strabane, Co Tyrone.

Bomb disposal experts examined the package and said it was “a small viable device”, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said.

The device was made up of a battery pack and accelerant and was packed into a brown envelope. It was taken away for further examination.

Six roads around the sorting office were closed for several hours this morning but all have since been reopened.

Chief Inspector Lemon said the vigilance of postal staff had saved lives.

“This was a very dangerous device and I would like to praise the Post Office staff for noticing it. One of them, or one of my officers, could have been injured had they opened it,” he said.

He added: “I do not believe this is a personal attack but more a general attack on the police.

“Because I am area commander, a lot of mail would come into the police station addressed to myself, but I do not open any of it. That is done by other members of staff.

“This was an attempt to kill or injure police.”

Chief Inspector Lemon said the PSNI was keeping an open mind about who was responsible but said dissident republicans were the most likely suspects.

Northern Ireland’s first minister Peter Robinson and his deputy Martin McGuinness condemned the attempted attack.

“There can be no justification for this calculated and callous behaviour,” they said in a joint statement.

“This was not just a planned attack on a police officer but also on the postal workers involved and society as a whole.”

They urged anyone with information to contact police.

Last month, an explosive device was found under the car of a police officer in east Belfast.

Musicians in the west African nation of Mali–now the scene of a military intervention by the French military with backing from the US–have come together with a message calling for a peaceful end to the violent conflict that has recently engulfed their country.

Recording of a new song, called ‘Mali Ko’ (meaning For Mali), took place in the capitol city of Bamako where many of the country’s most accomplished musicians gathered just as the Malian Army, backed by French troops, escalated its fighting against Tuareg militias in the north of the country.

‘What has become of beautiful Mali?” the song’s lyrics ask.

“It is time for us artists to speak about our Mali. Malians, let us join hands because this country is not a country of war.”Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara performs in Rotterdam last year. (Photo: AFP/Getty)

“What’s happening in Mali? Dont forget that we are all of the same blood.”

“The only way out of this crisis is the way of peace.”

Organized by well-known female singer Fatoumata Diawara, more than 40 artists participated in the recording of Mali Ko, including Oumou Sangare, Bassekou Kouyate, Vieux Farka Toure, Djelimady Tounkara, Toumani Diabate, Khaira Arby, Kasse Mady Diabate, Baba Salah, Afel Bocoum, Tiken Jah, Amkoullel and Habib Koite and many others.

The Guardian reports:

Diawara launched the song at a press conference in Bamako on Thursday as the battle for control of the north of the country appeared to be drawing nearer to the capital.

“What is going on in Mali?” she sings. “Do we really want to kill each other? Do we really want to betray one another? Allow ourselves to be divided?”

Malian musicians are well known and admired throughout the world and Mali has hosted the now famous Festival in the Dessert since 2001, attracting musicians and music-lovers from all over the world to experience and celebrate the culture’s rich musical history.

Due to the internal violence this year, the concert and festival in Mali were cancelled, though organizers have plans to hold the festival ‘in exile‘ until they can peacefully return.

Diawara, speaking to PRI’s The World radio program, said recently: ““The Malian people look to us,” referring to the country’s musicians.

“They have lost hope in politics. But music has always brought hope in Mali,” she said. “Music has always been strong and spiritual, and has had a very important role in the country, so when it comes to the current situation, people are looking up to musicians for a sense of direction.”

“Music has always been strong and spiritual, and has had a very important role in the country, so when it comes to the current situation, people are looking up to musicians for a sense of direction.”

The song comes as reports from humanitarian organizations say that a refugee crisis is worsening and regional experts warn that the conflict will likely have a deeply destabilizing effect in the western Saharan Sahel.

The translated lyrics of the song follow (via The Guardian):

Refrain 1 :
Il est temps que nous nous exprimions.
Il est temps que nous les artistes parlions du cœur. Notre Mali
THE TIME HAS COME FOR US TO SPEAK UP ABOUT THE CRISIS IN MALI; WE, THE ARTISTS MUST NOW SPEAK FROM THE HEART ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR MALI.

Haira Harby : 2
Maliens et Maliennes, donnons-nous la main car ce pays n’est pas un pays de guerre. MEN & WOMEN OF MALI, STAND TOGETHER ! OUR MALI NEVER WANTED A WAR.

Fatoumata Diawara : 3
Que se passe-t-il au Mali ? Paraît-il que nous sommes en train de nous entretuer, de nous trahir, de nous diviser. N’oublions pas que nous sommes tous du même sang (Rouge), de la même mère. Le jour que nous nous donnerons la main, le continent africain sera plus fort.
WHAT’S GOING ON IN MALI ?
DO WE REALLY WANT TO KILL EACH OTHER? DO WE REALLY WANT TO BETRAY ONE ANOTHER? ALLOW OURSELVES TO BE DIVIDED ? REMEMBER, WE ARE ALL CHILDREN OF THE SAME MOTHER COUNTRY WHEN WE STAND TOGETHER, ALL OF AFRICA IS STRONGER

Amkoullel : 4
Mettons nous ensemble, Maliens, Maliennes pour être encore plus fort.
Maliens, Maliennes, unissons-nous pour être encore plus fort.
MEN & WOMEN OF MALI, LET US UNITE AND STAND STRONG!

Doussou Bakayoko : 5
Le Mali n’appartiendra pas à ces gens-là. Ce grand pays ne sera la proie de personne. OUR MALI WILL NEVER BELONG TO THOSE PEOPLE,
THIS GREAT NATION WILL NOT BE THEIR VICTIM.

Kasse Mady : 6
Montrons au monde entier que le Mali est un pays de paix.
Nous sommes tous du même père et de la même mère
WE’LL SHOW THE WORLD THAT OUR MALI IS A COUNTRY WHERE PEACE REIGNS. WE STAND TOGETHER, WE ARE ALL CHILDREN OF THE SAME MOTHER COUNTRY

Sadio Sidibé : 7 Le Mali mon beau pays, qu’est-il devenu ?
WHAT HAS BECOME OF MY BEAUTIFUL MALI?

Baba Salah : 8
Tu as été le soleil qui a illuminé les 4 coins du monde. Notre Mali, sèche tes larmes, nous t’aimons!!!
ONCE YOU WERE THE SUN THAT SHONE ‘ROUND THE WORLD. OUR MALI, WE ARE PROUD OF YOU -DRY YOUR TEARS! WE LOVE YOU !!!!

Refrain 1 : les artistes
Il est temps que nous nous exprimions.
Il est temps que nous les artistes parlions du cœur!!!! Notre Mali

THE TIME HAS COME FOR US TO SPEAK UP ABOUT THE CRISIS IN MALI ; WE, THE ARTISTS, MUST NOW SPEAK FROM THE HEART ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR MALI.

Soumaila Kanouté : 9
Je n’ai jamais vu de situation aussi désolante, de catastrophique. Ils veulent nous imposer la Charia. Allez leur dire que le Mali est indivisible mais aussi inchangeable!! NEVER HAVE I SEEN SUCH CATASTROPHE, SUCH DESOLATION. THEY WANT TO IMPOSE SHARIA LAW ON US. TELL THE NORTH THAT OUR MALI IS ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE!!

Master Soumi : 10
Hier, le Mali est devenu comme un mégot de cigarette qu’on jette politiquement, on a tous pleuré, on s’est tous inquiété. Chaque jour, on attend que de mauvaises nouvelles, c’est déplorable. Il faut se ressaisir, peuple malien, sinon on sera la risée du monde.
OF LATE, OUR MALI HAS BEEN LIKE A POLITICAL CIGARETTE BUTT THROWN IN THE GUTTER. WE CRY, WE WORRY. EVERY DAY WE AWAIT ONLY MORE BAD NEWS, THIS CANNOT LAST! WE MUST REACT OR MALI WILL BECOME THE BUTT OF THE WORLD’S BAD JOKE

M’baou Tounkara : 11
Le Mali est un pays hospitalier et accueillant, la guerre nous fait perdre toutes nos valeurs et aussi beaucoup de temps.
OUR MALI IS A COUNTRY OF WARM WELCOME, WAR DEPRIVES US OF OUR VALUES. WE ARE LOSING TIME
Oumou Sangare : 12
Ecoutez-moi bien! Prenons garde, sinon, nos petits enfants n’apprendront pas la vraie histoire de notre Pays. On risque de le perdre.
LISTEN TO ME :
WE MUST TAKE CARE NOW, OR OUR CHILDREN WILL NEVER KNOW THE REAL STORY OF OUR COUNTRY. WE MIGHT LOSE IT.
CAREFUL NOW, OR OUR CHILDREN WILL SUFFER TOMORROW.

Koko Dembelé : 13
Tant qu’il y a de la vie, il y a de l’espoir. Enfants du Mali, levons-nous!!!
AS LONG AS WE LIVE, WE SHALL HAVE HOPE. RISE UP, CHILDREN OF MALI !

Babani Koné : 14
Je suis inquiète, j’ai peur. Nous sommes du même sang donc ne parlons pas de guerre. Quel avenir pour les femmes et les enfants dans ce pays ?
I AM TROUBLED, I AM AFRAID. WE ARE ALL OF THE SAME BLOOD SO LET US NOT SPEAK OF WAR. WHAT FUTURE CAN THERE BE FOR OUR WOMEN, FOR OUR CHILDREN IN THIS COUNTRY?

Afel Bocoum : 15 Le seul chemin de sortie de cette crise est le chemin de la paix.
THE ONLY WAY OUT OF THIS CRISIS IS THE WAY OF PEACE

Iba one : 16
Soyons unis, peuple malien, l’union fait la force. Arrêtons tous nos divergences, la guerre n’a jamais été une solution.
UNITE AS ONE, MALIANS ! UNION MAKES US STRONG. STOP FIGHTING EACH OTHER, WAR HAS NEVER BEEN A SOLUTION

Tiken Jah : 17
Mali, tous ensemble, Mali indivisible, Mali tous unis, la paix n’a pas de prix!!!
MALI UNITED, MALI INDIVISIBLE, MALI UNITED, MALI INDIVISIBLE. PEACE HAS NO PRICE!

Fati Kouyaté : 18
La guerre ne connaît ni femme, ni enfant, ni les personnes âgées. Cela ne nous ressemble pas!!!
WAR KNOWS NO CHILD, NO WOMAN, NO ELDER. OUR COUNTRY DOES NOT ACT LIKE THIS!

Kisto Dem : 19
Qui pouvait imaginer une telle situation au Mal i? Au moment où les Maliens pensaient à leur stabilité, d’autres cherchent à nous bouleverser. Dans le nord, la population a faim, nos femmes sont devenues des marchandises, elles sont battues et violées!!!!
WHO WOULD HAVE IMAGINED OUR COUNTRY THIS WAY? JUST AS WE MALIANS WERE REACHING STABILITY, OTHERS TRY TO DESTABILIZE US. IN THE NORTH, PEOPLE ARE STARVING, WOMEN ARE GOODS TO BE TRADED, THEY ARE BEATEN AND RAPED!

Nahawa Doumbia : 20
Nous ne voulons pas de guerre!!!! Non, pas chez nous!!!! Elle détruit tout sur son chemin.
WE DON’T WANT WAR !!!!! NOT IN OUR MALI!!!! WAR DESTROYS EVERYTHING IN ITS PATH.

Mamadou Diabate « 21 DG » : Maliba, comme l’a toujours appelé nos ancêtres, ne reste pas à genoux, relève toi et bat toi pour honorer les ancêtres
“MALIBA” AS OUR ANCESTORS ALWAYS CALLED YOU, DON’T STAY ON YOUR KNEES, RISE UP AND FIGHT FOR THE HONOUR OF THOSE ANCESTORS

Amadou et Mariam: 22
Ensemble, l’Afrique ne sera que plus forte !!!!! Avec plus d’avenir!
WHEN WE STAND TOGETHER AFRICA IS STRONGER .WHEN WE STAND UNITED WE HAVE A FUTURE!

Tamachek: 23 Le Mali notre grand pays, qui a été toujours un pays de paix et d’hospitalité, soyons unis.
MALI OUR GREAT COUNTRY, WHICH HAS ALWAYS BEEN A LAND OF PEACE AND HOSPITALITY, LET US UNITE.

Oumou Sangare : 23
Faisons attention, pour ne pas perdre notre pays. Faites attention, sinon nos enfants et nos petits enfants ne pourront pas lever la tête. Je m’adresse aux politiciens et aux militaires !!!
WE MUST TAKE CARE, THAT WE DON’T LOSE OUR COUNTRY.TAKE CARE, OR OUR CHILDREN WILL HANG THEIR HEADS IN SHAME.

I’M TALKING TO YOU, MILITARY LEADERS!
I’M TALKING TO YOU, POLITICIANS !

Habib Koite : 24
Maliens, c’est l’union qui fait la force !!! Ne laissons pas notre grand pays nous échapper !!!! Terre des grands hommes !!!!
MALIANS, UNION MAKES US STRONG. WE CANNOT LET OUR GREAT COUNTRY SLIP THROUGH OUR FINGERS. OUR LAND OF GREAT MEN!

Djeneba Seck : 25
Maliens, Maliennes, le monde entier nous observe, unissons-nous pour retrouver notre stabilité dans l’harmonie.
MEN & WOMEN OF MALI, THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. UNITE TO BRING BACK STABILITY AND HARMONY.

Vieux Farka Toure: 26
Réveillons-nous ! Nous sommes du même sang, donnons-nous la main.
WAKE UP!!! WE ARE ALL FAMILY, LET’S STAND TOGETHER

Mylmo : 27
On est si apprécié dans du monde entier, pourquoi s’entredéchirer devant ces mêmes personnes ? Soundjata Keita et les héros de notre pays nous ont légué des valeurs, ne les bafouons pas.
THE WORLD ADORED OUR COUNTRY, SO WHY NOW ARE WE TEARING EACH OTHER APART BEFORE THEIR VERY EYES? SOUNDJATA KEITA AND OUR OTHER HEROES OF LORE TAUGHT US OUR VALUES WHICH SHALL REMAIN STEADY.

Amadou et Mariam : 27 L’union fait la force!!! Donnons-nous la main!!!
UNION MAKES US STRONG!!!!! LET US STAND TOGETHER!!!

Amadou Bakayoko : 28
Dans l’entente, le pays peut se développer!! Personne ne viendra nous déstabiliser et nos enfants auront un avenir.
IN HARMONY, OUR COUNTRY CAN DEVELOP. NOBODY CAN DESTABILIZE US, OUR CHILDREN WILL HAVE A FUTURE.

Nahawa Doumbia: 28
On veut la paix, la paix.
En Afrique la paix ! Dans le monde entier la paix !
WE WANT PEACE,
PEACE PEACE IN AFRICA !
PEACE IN THE WORLD!

La paix, la paix
PEACE, PEACE

Submitted by Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform blog,

I’ve put off writing an article about what is likely to happen in 2013 so I could peruse the thousands of other articles by reputable bloggers, paid pundits, Wall Street shills and captured charlatans to gather their wisdom. It’s essential that I make predictions for 2013 so I can write another article in December rationalizing why 90% of my predictions failed to materialize. Reading all of these 2013 prediction articles made things much clearer for me. I now know for sure:

• The stock market will reach an all-time high.
• The stock market will fall 42%.
• The economy will strengthen as the year progresses.
• The economy will descend into a depression.
• The USD will strengthen.
• The USD will collapse.
• Gas prices will set new highs.
• Gas prices will fall below 2012 levels.
• Gold will rise to $10,000 per ounce.
• Gold will drop below $1,000 per ounce.
• We will experience hyperinflation.
• We will experience horrific deflation.
• Obama will compromise with the Republicans and put the country on a path to prosperity.
• Obama will create a debt ceiling crisis and assume dictatorial powers as a result.
• Snooki will be a better mother than Kim Kardashian.
• Honey Boo Boo will beat I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant in the Neilson ratings.

The majority of 2013 prediction articles are written to support the agenda of the writer. Many are trying to sell newsletter subscriptions or investment services. Their predictions will match the theme of their newsletter. Others are Wall Street paid shills who will predict what they are paid to predict by their owners. Then there are the political hacks who tow the party line with their predictions. But no one can top the predictive powers of the CBO. They just put out their ten year updated forecast reflecting the fabulous fiscal cliff deal that saved the country. According to the CBO, the “compromise” to reduce our deficits will add a mere $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. I’m sure this will prove to be accurate. Just take a look at their 2002 projection, after passage of the Bush tax cuts:

The CBO predicted the FY2012 surplus would be $641 billion, the national debt would total $3.5 trillion, the debt held by the public would total $1.273 trillion, and GDP would total $17.2 trillion. They missed by that much.

The actual FY12 results were:

• The true deficit was $1.37 trillion (amount national debt increased — not the phony deficit number reported by the mainstream media).
• The national debt was $16.1 trillion.
• The debt held by the public was $11.3 trillion.
• GDP was $15.8 trillion.

Based on these results, I won’t be asking the CBO for help with my Super Bowl bet. Making ten year predictions is beyond worthless, but public policy in Washington DC is based on these useless CBO projections. The entire fiscal cliff kabuki theater fictitious crisis reveals the politicians and mainstream media pundits to be liars, fools and frauds. The tax the rich to cut the deficit storyline was sold to the public and won the day. Of course, the highly accurate CBO immediately revealed that the Orwellian named American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 adds $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. Based on the accuracy of their previous predictions, it’s a guarantee the national debt goes up by $8 trillion, as the rich take advantage of the thousands of loopholes in the IRS code they paid for to avoid paying the taxes expected by the CBO.

Hypocrisy abounds on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC and on the media company propaganda channels. As the national debt soared from $10.6 trillion on the day Obama took office to $16.4 trillion today, I heard shrieking liberal talking heads on MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the liberal media blame the debt on the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars. If the Bush tax cuts were so horrific, why did Obama and his minions just make 98% of these tax cuts permanent? Liberals held protest marches across the country against Bush’s wars and burned him in effigy. Obama’s defense budgets have been larger than Bush’s and he doubled down on our miserable failure in Afghanistan. You don’t hear a peep from the liberals about the warmongering Barack Obama who has kill lists and unleashes predator drones, killing women and children across the globe. Liberals pretend to be concerned about the welfare of the citizens, but continue to support a President that uses executive orders to imprison citizens indefinitely without charges, has expanded surveillance on citizens, has kept Guantanamo open, signs the continuation of the Patriot Act, and proposes overturning the Second Amendment by executive order. Liberals shriek about the evils of an unregulated Wall Street, while remaining silent as Obama hasn’t prosecuted a single banker for the greatest financial fraud in world history. You don’t hear a peep about Jon Corzine, who stole $1.2 billion from the accounts of farmers and ranchers. Liberals talk about regulation and then stand idly by while Wall Street lobbyists wrote the Dodd Frank law and insurance and drug company lobbyists wrote the Obamacare law. Liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds and is only matched by Neo-Con hypocrisy.

The Neo-Con controlled Republican Party is a pathetic joke. They have the guts to declare themselves the party of fiscal responsibility, after Bush’s eight year reign of error. He and his fiscally responsible party were handed a budget in surplus and managed to add $4.9 trillion to the national debt by waging undeclared wars, encouraging Wall Street to create the biggest fraudulent financial bubble in history, creating a new $16 trillion unfunded entitlement (Medicare Part D), cutting taxes without paying for them, and creating a massive new government agency (DHS) to take away our liberties and freedom. Federal government spending grew from $1.9 trillion to $3.0 trillion under Bush and the Republicans. Does that sound fiscally responsible?

Does anyone believe the Republican Party is serious about cutting anything? Tough guy Republicans like Big Chris Christie preach fiscal responsibility when going to war with teachers’ unions, but he squeals  like a stuck pig when a $60 billion pork filled, unpaid for, Sandy Relief bill is held up in Congress. The courageous fiscally responsible Congress critters passed the entire pork filled, unfunded, bloated, vote buying joke. It included $28 billion to mitigate future disasters, $3 billion to repair or replace Federal assets, and $6 billion for transportation projects completely unrelated to Sandy damage.  The hypocrisy of politicians who proclaim the $50 billion of 2013 fiscal cliff tax revenue as deficit cutting, and then immediately piss it away by paying people to rebuild their houses yards from the Atlantic Ocean while funding billions of non-disaster related projects is disgusting to behold. There is nothing like compromise to add another $60 billion to the national debt.

Our entire economic and political system is a farce. The American people are being played by the powerful interests that provide them with an illusion of choice. Both parties serve the interests of their masters and the fiscal cliff show and debt ceiling show are a form of reality TV to keep the masses alarmed, fearful, and believing there is actually a difference between the policies of the ruling class. The charade has played out in its full glory in the last few weeks with Obama convincing the masses he had stuck it to the rich, while in reality the working middle class got it good and hard when they got their January paychecks. This chart details the tax changes that went into effect on January 1.          

The funniest part this fiscal fiasco farce is watching the reaction of the sheep who believed Obama and the mainstream media storyline. Obama was able to raise the published top rate on people making over $400,000. The newly defined “rich” laughed heartily as they know only fools pay anywhere near the top rate. The rich just call their tax advisor and instruct them to use one of the thousands of tax loopholes in the 75,000 page IRS tax code to “legally” avoid the new Obama rates. Meanwhile, both parties and their mainstream media mouthpieces downplayed the 2% payroll tax increase on every working American. This tax increase has been a complete surprise to the reality TV zombies and Facebook aficionados. Even college educated professionals in my office had no idea their next monthly paycheck was going to be $150 to $200 lighter. This will wipe out most, or all, of the annual raise they received. The tax will fall heavily on the 75% of households that make less than the $113,700 Social Security cutoff. For a struggling family of four earning the median income of $50,000, the $1,000 less in their paychecks will mean less food, putting off trips to the doctor, driving on bald tires, or not taking the family on a vacation to the Jersey shore. The $2,274 increase in taxes (.57%) for the Wall Street banker making $400,000 probably won’t put too much of a crimp in his Hamptons lifestyle.

The joke is on the American people as the rich will ante up maybe $50 billion of taxes in 2013, while the working middle class will be skewered for $125 billion. How’s that “Tax the Rich” slogan working out for you?     

Only in the Orwellian capital of Washington DC would a bill that was supposed to provide tax relief to the middle class and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, actually increase the tax burden of a median household by $1,000 and perpetuate the pork spending payoffs to campaign contributors and friends of the slimy politicians that slither through the halls of Congress. The list of pork and bribes should be nauseating to hard working Americans across the country:

$30 billion extension of the 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, even though we are supposedly in the 3^rd year of economic recovery. Continuing to pay people to not work for two years will surely boost employment.

$14.3 billion for a two-year extension of the corporate research credit benefiting large technology companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard.

$12.2 billion one-year extension of the production tax credit for wind power.

$11.2 billion two- year extension of the active financing exception, which lets GE, Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and Citigroup Inc. (C), among others, defer taxes on financing income they earn outside the U.S.

$1.9 billion extension of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit for hiring workers from disadvantaged groups, benefitting mega-restaurant chains like McDonalds.

$1.8 billion extension of the New Markets Tax Credit for investments in low- income areas, benefitting JP Morgan and other Wall Street shyster banks.

$650 million tax credit for manufacturing energy-efficient appliances, benefitting mega-corps like Whirlpool.

$430 million for Hollywood through “special expensing rules” to encourage TV and film production in the United States. Producers can expense up to $15 million of costs for their projects. NBC thanks you.

$331 million for railroads by allowing short-line and regional operators to claim a tax credit up to 50% of the cost to maintain tracks that they own or lease.

$248 million in special expensing rules for films and television programs.

$222 million for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government on rum produced in the islands and imported to the mainland.

$78 million for NASCAR by extending a “7-year cost recovery period for certain motorsports racing track facilities.”

$59 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage production of “cellulosic biofuel” at up to $1.01 per gallon.

$4 million for electric motorcycle makers by expanding an existing green-energy tax credit for buyers of plug-in vehicles to include electric motorbikes.

So when you see the cut in your take home pay, just comfort yourself knowing that JP Morgan, Citigroup, GE and hundreds of mega-corporations were able to retain their tax breaks. As they have done for decades, Congress and the President agreed to address spending cuts at a future date. Of course, a government spending cut isn’t actually a cut. It’s a lower increase than their previous projection. Nothing is ever cut in Washington DC. The austerity storyline is a lie. Not a dime has been cut from the Federal budget. Intellectually dishonest ideologues try to peddle the wind down of the Obama $800 billion porkulus program as a cut in Federal spending. They sold this Keynesian “shovel ready” crap to a gullible public as stimulus to jumpstart the economy. Federal spending was $3.0 trillion before the Obama stimulus. After the two year stimulus was pissed away without helping the economy one iota, the baseline should have been back in the $3.2 trillion range. Instead, FY13 Federal spending will be $3.8 trillion. This hasn’t kept liberal ideologues like Krugman and his minions in the mainstream media from blaming crazy Tea Party Republicans for inflicting horrendous austerity measures on the poor and disadvantaged.

The chart above reveals a few truths:

• The country has been blessed with two of the worst presidents in U.S. history over the last twelve years.
• When Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is beyond two standard deviations over the normal range during the last sixty years, your problem is not lack of tax revenue.
• Obama and the current Congress are spending at a level of 24% of GDP versus the 18% of GDP when Clinton left office. This amounts to a nose bleed altitude $950 billion higher than the level Clinton was spending in his final year in office.

The Op-eds in liberal rags across the land decry the lack of civility in Washington DC and plead for politicians on both sides of the aisle to come together and compromise for the good of the country. This line of bullshit would be laughable if it wasn’t so wretched in its falsity. Compromise is what has left this country with a $16.4 trillion national debt, $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, and $1 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see. Democrats have compromised and let the Republicans create a warfare state. Republicans have compromised and let Democrats create a welfare state. The two headed monster living in the swamps of Washington DC just voted to increase taxes on all Americans. They voted to hand criminal Wall Street banks $700 billion. They voted to pass the Patriot Act. They voted to pass the NDAA. They’ve allowed the President to wage undeclared wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Iran. They voted for a $663 billion Defense bill that includes tens of billions the Secretary of Defense doesn’t even want. They will vote to raise the debt ceiling in the next two months. The last thing this country needs is more compromise. We can’t afford any more compromise. The chart above proves what can happen when gridlock ensues, spending restrictions are enforced, and confrontation displaces compromise. After the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, gridlock ensued for the next six years. PAYGO restrictions in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 didn’t allow unfettered spending increases. The result was Federal spending falling from 22% of GDP to 18% of GDP and a budget surplus. The Pay-Go restrictions expired in 2002 and Democrats and Republicans have compromised to the tune of a $10.2 trillion increase in the national debt in ten years. The hypocrisy of pandering deceitful politicians is boundless and shows utter contempt for the intelligence of the American populace.  

“Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. It simply allows the country to pay for spending that Congress has already committed to. If congressional Republicans refuse to pay America’s bills on time, Social Security checks, and veterans benefits will be delayed. We might not be able to pay our troops, or honor our contracts with small business owners. Food inspectors, air traffic controllers, specialist who track down loose nuclear materials wouldn’t get their paychecks. Investors around the world will ask if the United States of America is in fact a safe bet. Markets could go haywire, interest rates would spike for anybody who borrows money — Every homeowner with a mortgage, every student with a college loan, every small business owner who wants to grow and hire. We are not a deadbeat nation.

It would be a self-inflicted wound on the economy. It would slow down our growth, might tip us into recession. And ironically it would probably increase our deficit. So to even entertain the idea of this happening, of the United States of America not paying its bills, is irresponsible. It’s absurd. Republicans in Congress have two choices here. They can act responsibly, and pay America’s bills, or they can act irresponsibly and put America through another economic crisis. But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.” — President Barack Obama — January 14, 2013

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. The Senate continues to reject a return to the common sense Pay-go rules that used to apply. Previously, Pay-go rules applied both to increases in mandatory spending and to tax cuts.

The Senate had to abide by the common sense budgeting principle of balancing expenses and revenues. But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to lend us money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” — Senator Barack Obama — March 16, 2006

I could have shown quotes from George W. Bush during the 2000 Presidential campaign talking about a non-interventionist foreign policy and no need for the U.S. to get involved in nation building and then proceeding to pre-emptively attack sovereign countries while wasting trillions and impoverishing unborn generations trying to create “democracy” in the Middle East at the point of a gun as a cover to protect “our” oil. The point is that we are being given the illusion of choice. Everyone knows the debt ceiling will be raised after another episode of Washington DC Kabuki Theater, presented by the corporate mainstream media in breathtaking detail, because the politicians are beholden to their owners and those owners want more of our money. That is why spending will never be willingly cut by the spineless puppet congressmen, as their strings are pulled by the corporate puppet masters and they dance to the tune of the banking oligarchs that own this country.

After witnessing the fighting of undeclared never ending wars, passage of freedom destroying legislation like the Patriot Act & NDAA, approval of pork barrel spending to the tune of hundreds of billions, rule by Executive Order, using ZIRP to extract hundreds of billions from senior citizen savers and give it to criminal Wall Street banks, forcing the American people at gunpoint to replenish the Wall Street banks with $700 billion after they had committed the greatest financial fraud in history, and a continuing trampling of the U.S. Constitution, the American people continue to remain willfully ignorant of the truth. The American Dream is dead. We’ve allowed a rich, privileged, elite few to achieve hegemony over our economic and political system with their control of the media and manipulation of our financial markets. They will collapse the country because they will never be satisfied with the amount of wealth and power they’ve accumulated. Their voracious greed will be their downfall. The sooner we can channel the anger of George Carlin, the sooner we can put an end to this corporate fascist reign of terror.         

“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want–they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you in the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans are and will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” — George Carlin

A farmer holds a fistful of arid topsoil in Logan, Kansas. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)Droughts, it could be argued, are the opposite of news. By definition, they represent the absence of something (namely, adequate rain) happening. And they only occur when that something has already been not-happening for a very long time. As a result, droughts tend not to make the front page. When they do — as happened last summer, when headlines trumpeted the worst U.S. drought conditions in 50 years — the public gets concerned. But soon enough, droughts begin to feel like business as usual again, invisible in their very ubiquity.

It’s time to start paying attention.

Why?

Well, first off, the current drought — which is essentially the same one the U.S. has been experiencing since 2010, and which last year encompassed more than 65 percent of the country, more than at any time since the Dust Bowl in the 1930s — is having some eye-popping impacts that make it tough to ignore. In 2012, more than 9 million acres went up in flames in this country. Only dredging and some eleventh-hour rain kept the mighty Mississippi River from being shut down to navigation due to low water levels; continuing drought conditions make “long-term stabilization” of river levels unlikely in the near future. Several of the Great Lakes are soon expected to hit their lowest levels in history. In Nebraska last summer, a 100-mile stretch of the Platte River simply dried up. Drought led the USDA to declare federal disaster areas in 2,245 counties in 39 states last year, and the federal government will likely have to pay tens of billions for crop insurance and lost crops. As ranchers became increasingly desperate to feed their livestock, “hay rustling” and other agricultural crimes rose.

Still, it’s easy to dismiss even the worst impacts of drought as temporary problems — once some rain falls, we get to move on. It’s over. Right?

Sadly, no. Major droughts have effects that endure long after they’ve technically ended. Food production and food prices can suffer long-term disruptions. Drought-related culling and destocking has left the U.S. cattle herd at a 60-year low; beef prices hit an all-time high in November and are expected to increase. The current drought has also hit producers of staple crops from corn to wheat to hay. Furthermore, drought depletes water reserves in glaciers, aquifers and groundwater on which future growing seasons depend. Officials have reported rapidly declining water levels in the crucial, shrinking Ogalalla Aquifer, and some areas are seeing spikes in water violations as farmers and ranchers overdraw their permits.

Even more troubling, drought conditions are showing signs of becoming self-sustaining. Lack of rainfall today means less moisture is available to create future rainfall tomorrow. Even when it does rain, it doesn’t necessarily help much, as water runs off hard-baked ground in flash floods instead of being absorbed into soil or plant roots. A recent study in Nature explained that drought-stricken trees often die even after rainfall has returned, because their ability to suck up water has been fatally compromised. Even in the worst-affected areas, there has been rain — considerable storms, even — during this drought. But it hasn’t been enough to turn things around. Instead, for most of the drought-stricken U.S., this scary state of affairs is predicted to persist or intensify.

That brings us to the biggest reason not to ignore this drought: It’s a harbinger of things to come.

Last week, a newly released draft of the National Climate Assessment cited severe drought among other recent examples of extreme weather that prove that “climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.”

The report warns that the greatest consequences of climate change will come in the form of more extreme “extremes” — not just drought, but also intense heat, rains, flooding and storms. It predicts a future where drought is more severe, U.S. crop yields are lower and the ability of ecosystems to moderate the effects of drought is diminished.

“The Dust Bowl (in the 1930s) lasted for several years, but eventually the rains returned and the region recovered,” U.S. Representative Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) wrote in a recent letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Unfortunately, our current drought may be more than a passing natural phenomenon.”

“Unfortunately” is right. We simply can no longer think of drought as aberrant weather that we can ignore until it goes away. Instead, it’s part of our new, unpredictable normal.

© 2013 Rolling Stone

Brooke Jarvis, previously a staff writer and web editor for YES! Magazine, is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone.

Twelve more hostages have been killed in Algeria’s operation against hostage-takers at In Amenas gas plant, while other hostages including three Belgians, two Americans, one Briton and one Japanese are still being held at the facility.

TNP/SS

Iranian female tennis player Sadaf Sadegh Vaziri has managed to advance into the doubles quarterfinals of the 2013 International Tennis Federation (ITF) U14 Asian Championships – Division 2 in Vietnam.

Sadegh Vaziri and her Yemeni teammate overcame their Singaporean and Myanmarese opponents 6-0 and 6-1 at the Phu Tho Tennis Club in Ho Chi Minh City on Friday.

In the singles, however, the Iranian athlete was defeated in two sets (5-7, 3-6) by her Vietnamese opponent.

In her attempt to secure the third spot in the singles matches of the Asian tennis tournament, Sadegh Vazri will face another competitor from the host country on Saturday.

The 2013 International Tennis Federation (ITF) U14 Asian Championships – Division 2 opened on January 14 and will wrap up on January 25.

Some 61 young tennis players from countries across Asia, namely Bangladesh, Bhutan, Iran, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Syria, the UAE and Yemen, are participating in the 12-day event.

MP/HMV

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

12 Algerian and foreign hostages killed in gas plant rescue mission — state news

A mission to rescue workers being held by Islamist militants in an Algerian gas plant has resulted in the death of 12 hostages, according to Algerian state news. 30 foreign hostages remain unaccounted for amid reports the siege has come to an end.

DETAILS TO FOLLOW.

Sometimes it is useful to reflect back more than a nanosecond to check one’s anchoring bias. With US equities back at 2007 levels, we thought it may be instructive to look at what the Fed was thinking – and what the FOMC was looking at – to be better able to judge their ‘forecasts’ now. To wit Q4 2007, FOMC… “Economic growth was solid in the third quarter, and strains in financial markets have eased somewhat on balance.” The reflexivity of the use of market-based measures to preempt their actions is very clear from the presentation materials, as, just like now, there was falling current year EPS expectations but a phoenix-like resurrection due in 2008 based on analyst’s expectations. Furthermore, the expectations for rate changes from Q4 2007 to Q4 2008 was remarkably modest (even as they had all the data on subprime delinquencies soaring and monolines collapsing) – and of course, turned out to be absolutely and utterly incorrect. And yet, we listen intently to every forecast word they utter?

From Oct 2007 FOMC:

“Economic growth was solid in the third quarter, and strains in financial markets have eased somewhat on balance. However, the pace of economic expansion will likely slow in the near term, partly reflecting the intensification of the housing correction. Today’s action, combined with the policy action taken in September, should help forestall some of the adverse effects on the broader economy that might otherwise arise from the disruptions in financial markets and promote moderate growth over time.”

From Mr. Dudley’s Presentation Materials at the December FOMC:
Earnings are down but have no fear – they will rise again next year..

And the market is not expecting rate cuts so things can’t be that bad – or the efficient market would have priced it in?

And then finally, the 3 versions of the December 2007 FOMC statement – where the Fed seems to congratulate itself on noticing the weakness, and the proclaims that its actions will save the day (even though there are some ‘downside risks’.

Remind us again, why we pay any attention to the forecasts of this motley crew?

Israeli soldiers have shot and wounded two Palestinian youths, one near the West Bank city of Bethlehem and the other in the northern Gaza Strip.

Israeli security forces seriously wounded a 15-year-old Palestinian boy on Friday during a protest in the Aida refugee camp, north of Bethlehem.

The teenager was hit in the face by a bullet that bounced off the ground and was taken to hospital in Beit Jala, before being transferred to Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in al-Quds (Jerusalem) for further treatment.

At Aida, demonstrators were protesting against Tel Aviv’s expropriation of Palestinian lands for Tel Aviv’s illegal separation barrier that zigzags through the occupied West Bank.

On Tuesday, a 17-year-old Palestinian died after being hit by three bullets in the West Bank village of Budrus, the fourth Palestinian shot dead in the West Bank and Gaza since last Friday.

In the blockaded Gaza Strip, a 17-year-old boy was shot in the leg on Friday after he approached Israel’s separation fence east of Beit Lahiya, Palestinian medical officials said.

The death was the fourth such incident in Gaza since a November 21 truce between Tel Aviv and Hamas ended eight days of deadly Israeli strikes on the populated coastal enclave.

Under the truce agreement, Israel is required to allow Palestinians to enter what it had previously declared as a 300-meter deep no-go zone on the Gaza side of the border.

Farmers have been allowed to move up to 100 meters from the border, but Israeli troops open fire at Palestinians, claiming they have come closer than that.

MRS/JR/SS

As expected, as soon as the Obama administration released their list of executive orders to help curb gun violence, the right wing went into full blown hissy fit mode. It seems Michelle Malkin took a page straight out of Limbaugh and Drudge’s book on Fox this Thursday afternoon during this interview with Megyn Kelly.

Drudge And Limbaugh Misrepresent What Obama And The Affordable Care Act Say About Doctors And Guns:

As soon as President Obama’s new recommendations for gun violence prevention became public, right-wing media immediately claimed the president was issuing an executive action requiring doctors to ask patients about their guns. This is false. The president’s released proposals only clarify that nothing in the Affordable Care Act changes longstanding law: doctors are still free (but not required) to discuss with their patients any health hazards, including a lack of gun safety at home or elsewhere.

Among the White House proposals for gun violence reduction, the president announced that the administration will “[c]larify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.” Nowhere in his proposal did he instead require doctors to ask about guns. The Drudge Report, however, immediately splashed across its website this graphic:

Rush Limbaugh picked up on this flatly inaccurate claim that the president required doctors to ask their patients about “gun ownership.” Rather than explain the president’s executive action only indicated future orders, regulations, or guidance will clarify that no law – including the ACA – prohibits them from discussing gun safety with their patients, Limbaugh reported it as a new directive that “deputizes gun-snitch doctors“: […]

Limbaugh concedes that the executive action doesn’t literally say that doctors are required to ask about gun safety, but rather, in his interpretation, “the executive action today is almost essentially requiring it.” The president’s proposal was likely a direct response to these types of wildly erroneous interpretations of the health care reform law and executive orders that were already floating around the right-wing blogosphere, before Limbaugh added his analysis.

Go read the rest for more on how the right is lying about the language in the law. Malkin did the exact same thing during the interview above with Megyn Kelly and in a post at her blog the previous day. (Warning, link goes to Malkin’s site.)

The anti-gun doctors’ lobby has a friend in Obama:

Anyone with kids knows that the invasive, anti-gun doctors’ lobby has been around a long time.

Flashback October 2007: Is your pediatrician using your kid to spy on you?

Flashback July 2008: More nosy doctors who don’t like guns

The liberal leadership of the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have long been filled with notorious gun-grabbers – and they’ve promoted years of junk science to pursue their Nanny State agenda.

Now comes President Obama, who has deputized doctors to “help” snoop on law-abiding, gun-owning patients even further. Moreover, the White House has now lent federal support to doctors’ groups trying to fight state efforts to protect gun owners’ privacy: […]

Political malpractice plus medical malpractice in the name of saving the children is a recipe for authoritarianism. The Hippocratic Oath has been turned on its head.

Malkin seems to have a little trouble understanding the difference between “does not prohibit” and mandates. Who knew we had all of those evil liberal doctors out there who are more worried about taking away everyone’s guns than doing their job and providing health care to their patients. Be afraid… be very afraid!

In response to last month’s massacre in Newtown, a Michigan charter school hired a firearms instructor as a security guard — only to find that the armed guard forgot his gun in the school bathroom.

The school took the National Rifle Association’s advice in hiring an armed guard, but the retired Lapeer County Sheriff’s Dept. firearms instructor, Clark Arnold, endangered students less than a week after he was hired by forgetting his deadly weapon in the school bathroom.

The Chatfield School of Lapeer, Michigan, which has about 500 enrolled students, was fortunate that the security guard remembered to retrieve the missing gun before a student came across it. The school director reported the incident to local authorities, but the retired firearms instructor will face no criminal charges.

“If you left a gun unattended and a toddler finds it and shoots and hurts someone, it could be some kind of reckless use of a firearm,” Lapeer County Prosecutor Byron Konschuh told the Flint Journal.

But because no students were injured at the charter school, “it’s almost like no harm no foul,” Konschuh added.

Chartfield School Director Matt Young told TV5 that his school is proud of its safe learning environment. Last week, he admitted the need for several improvements, one of which he thought he was satisfying by hiring the armed guard. The school also installed new cameras and teachers received lockdown training.

Even Arnold, who recklessly forgot his weapon in the bathroom, said his presence would add to the safety of the school.

“It’s probably slim to next to none that someone’s going to be needed in the school, but it’s that slim you have to worry about,” he told WNEM TV. “It’s a tremendous asset to the safety of our students.”

But he himself could have provided that ‘slim’ chance for another Newtown-type massacre at the school of 500 — a mistake that Young recognizes, but refuses to talk about. The director called the incident “a personal matter” and told the Flint Journal that he would not discuss the officers’ actions or consequences.

“The school has put additional security procedures in place that follow local law enforcement practices and guidelines,” he said in a statement. “At no time was any student involved in this breach of protocol. We will continue to work on improving school security.”

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which left 26 students and faculty dead, the NRA recommended placing armed guards in schools across America to prevent further shootings.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre. But if the ‘good’ guy’s weapon falls into the wrong hands, a mistake like Arnold’s could trigger the country’s next deadly shooting.

Israeli troops have attacked a small village near the Palestinian city of Jericho, destroying several Palestinian buildings using bulldozers, Press TV reports.

According to witnesses, Israeli soldiers raided the village in al-Zour and al-Helgela areas of Jericho at 11 p.m. local time and destroyed at least six outhouses, which the villagers depend on for their livestock.

They said the Israelis did not even allow them to empty the structures.

Villagers said Israeli troops are destroying their outhouses since they want to establish a security area in the region and that they have turned the area into a closed Israeli military zone.

“We have lived in the area for 30 years, we have made outhouses, but Israelis destroy them because they want to build a security area. We can not live in an enclosed area,” a villager told Press TV correspondent.

Israelis are now stepping up their policy of occupying villages, towns and cities in various regions in order to eliminate the achievements of the Palestinian people.

They have also stepped up their procedures of demolishing homes and continue violence towards the Palestinian people.

HM/JR/SS

Submitted by John Aziz of Azizonomics blog,

The so-called recovery is built on sand, and as stock markets climb and climb, and more traders and investors turn bullish, we come ever-closer to a new 2008-style collapse.

Markets have already gone far, far higher than many expected on a drift of reinflationary central bank liquidity. Yesterday the DJIA hit a new post-2007 high:

The same day, it was revealed that the big Wall Street banks are gambling again with billions and billions of dollars of clients’ funds. Goldman Sachs are back to pre-crisis-style profits. Again and again – from the LIBOR scandal, to MF Global, to the London Whale, to Kweku Adoboli – the financial sector has illustrated that it has learned very little from 2008, and is still practising many of the same hyper-fragile ponzi finance practices that led to the subprime bubble and the 2008 collapse.

Soaring markets, and soaring speculation. Big finance using loopholes to speculate bigger and harder. Mainstream financial journalists becoming more and more complacent about the “recovery”.

We’ve been here before. Isn’t repeating the same behaviour and hoping for different results the very definition of insanity? 

I don’t know exactly how the next crash will occur – although there are many potential ignition spots including a severe trade or energy shock, or a Chinese real estate and subprime meltdown, or a natural disaster, or a new Western financial crisis.  I don’t know when the next crash will occur, or how high the markets will climb before it does (DJIA 36,000 maybe? That would be hilarious).

But I know that if markets and regulators continue to repeat the mistakes that led to 2008, we will be back in a similar or worse hole soon.

Disgraced John Galliano is returning to the fashion industry with a temporary role at Oscar de la Renta’s New York studio.

The British designer, who was once heralded as one of the most talented names in fashion, was fired in 2011 by fashion house Dior after being caught on camera making anti-Semitic remarks in a Paris cafe.

He will spend three weeks with de la Renta as he prepares for his forthcoming New York Fashion Week show.

“He has worked long and hard on his recovery, and I’m happy to give him the opportunity to re-immerse himself in the world of fashion and re-acclimate in an environment where he has been so creative,” de la Renta said.

He said he had known Galliano for many years and added: “I’m a great admirer of his talent.”

Galliano, 52, said an addiction to drugs and alcohol had caused him to lose control, and that he was determined to make amends.

A French court handed him a \$8,000 (£5,043) suspended fine after finding him guilty of anti-Semitic behaviour.

In a statement he said he has been in recovery for alcoholism for the past two years but that he had previously “descended into the madness of the disease. I said and did things which hurt others, especially members of the Jewish community.”

“I am grateful to Oscar beyond words for inviting me to spend time with him in the familiar surroundings of a design studio. His support and faith in me is humbling,” he added.

Dior has since hired Raf Simons as its head designer.

Road and rail users are being warned that heavy snow that is set to blanket Britain could chaos on transport networks in the coming hours.

Temperatures are expected to remain below zero in most parts, making it bitterly cold, while blizzards and strong winds are set to make conditions treacherous on the roads.

Rail operators South West Trains, Southern, Greater Anglia and Eurostar have already cancelled services or revised timetables to cope with any problems caused by the weather.

Passengers were advised to check with operators before travelling.

Airports and schools are likely to be closed as the snowfall sweeps into the country from the southwest through the day.

A rare “red warning” has been issued for parts of South Wales, meaning all non-essential journeys should be avoided. The Met Office said up to 30cm of snow could fall in the area with strong southeasterly winds causing blizzards.

Amber alerts were in place for parts of the Midlands, London and the South, the east of England, the North West and Northern Ireland.

London and East Anglia could see up to 10cm of snow.

The Highways Agency has issued an amber alert and has placed a 500-strong fleet of salt-spreaders, ploughs and snow-blowers on stand-by.

Greg Carstensen, service director for Hounslow Highways, told Sky News they were well-prepared with roads in some areas already gritted the night before snow was expected.

However, he still urged motorists to “listen to the advice being given out on television and radio and make sensible decisions and only make necessary trips if the snow is really that bad”.

The AA said the greatest risk of disruption would be in Wales, the West Midlands, southern England and Northern Ireland.

Darron Burness, the AA’s head of special operations, said the morning commute was “likely to test man and machine with potentially challenging driving conditions across many areas”.

“If the snow comes in quickly, it will cause problems, particularly drifting snow.”

Those who decided to travel have been urged to travel prepared with a fully charged mobile phone, warm waterproof clothes, boots and a blanket, some food and drink, and have a torch, ice scraper, de-icer and a shovel.

There were also reports of panic-buying in Derbyshire and Wales.

At a supermarket in Ripley every loaf of bread and all the bananas had been bought up. One customer reportedly went home with 20 loaves of bread.

The Algeria hostage siege debacle, coming hard on the heels of France’s intervention in neighbouring Mali, has heightened fears that a “third generation” of al-Qaida-affiliated jihadis is creating a new front in the war against US and western interests in the vast, ungoverned spaces of the Sahel and Saharan regions of north and west Africa.‘Captain Amadou Sanogo used the skills he was taught by the US to wreck years of careful American and European nurturing of Mali’s fragile democracy.’ (Photograph: Reuters)

But the crisis has also focused attention on unsuccessful and at times shambolic American efforts to counter the growing Islamist challenge there, and on the danger that military intervention will only make matters worse. Fearful of more Algeria-style attacks, US and European officials hold differing views about what to do next, ranging from direct engagement via special forces and drone strikes to enhanced regional diplomacy and alliance building.

Recent experience is chastening. US attempts to build up Mali’s military as a bulwark against the extremists, by training army officers and providing equipment including brand-new Land Cruisers and expensive communications equipment, backfired spectacularly last year after a rebellion in the north provoked a coup that unseated the elected government in Bamako.

When push came to shove, a senior officer said the Tuareg commanders of three of the four Malian units fighting in the north defected to the insurrection “at the crucial moment”, taking fighters, weapons and equipment with them. They were joined by about 1,600 other defectors from the Malian army, shattering the government’s hope of crushing the uprising.

“The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful,” another officer said. “They made the wrong choice,” by relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state.

The coup was a particular embarrassment to Washington as it was led by an army officer, Captain Amadou Sanogo, on whom it had lavished special favour. “Sanogo represents something of a US failure,” said veteran commentator Walter Pincus.

“He [Sanogo] had participated in the Pentagon’s international military education and training programmes, with basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia; English-language training at Lackland air force base, Texas; an intelligence course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and study at Quantico, Virginia, with the Marine Corps,” Pincus reported. The ungrateful Sanogo used his new skills to wreck years of careful American and European nurturing of Mali’s fragile democracy.

The multimillion dollar pre-coup assistance to Mali was part of an ambitious but flawed US regional policy embracing Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and several west African states, intended to strengthen defences against al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and like-minded groups. In 2002, the state department unveiled the so-called Pan-Sahel Initiative “to protect borders … combat terrorism, and enhance regional cooperation and stability”. This was replaced in 2005 by the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership, overseen by the grandly named but ineffectual US Africa Command.

In recent years the Pentagon and other US agencies have run annual joint military exercises called Operation Flintlock involving Mali, Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Morocco and Nigeria. Imaginary war scenarios involved a terrorist group being chased across national borders from Mauritania all the way east to Chad. The war games proved to be prescient, except now it is the terrorists who are doing the chasing, and in the other direction.

If Americans are confirmed among the Algeria casualties, pressure will grow on the Obama administration to get more directly involved. The Joint Special Operations Command is already operating covert, region-wide surveillance flights under a classified programme know as Creek Sand. Analysts say the next step may be to use existing bases in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and elsewhere to launch drone strikes and targeted assassinations, as in Somalia and Yemen. Since the Mali coup, the US has also upped military assistance to Niger and Mauritania.

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt reported for the New York Times: “Some Pentagon officials have long taken a more hawkish stance, and they cite intelligence reports that fighters with ties to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb … played a role in the deadly attack in September on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. They have pushed for targeted strikes against Islamist leaders in northern Mali, arguing that killing the leadership could permanently cripple the strength of the militants.”

At the same time there is a clear danger that an expanding war in Mali could start a wave of new attacks on “soft” western targets similar to that in southern Algeria, and that increased western intervention in the region will transform extremist groups that had only local importance into potent trans-national threats.

“While Pentagon lawyers claim al-Qaida is tipping into defeat, in fact we are seeing the emergence of the third generation of the terrorist movement,” said analyst Bruce Riedel. “Under siege by drones in Pakistan and Yemen, al-Qaida 3.0 has exploited the ‘Arab Awakening’ to create its largest safe havens and operational bases in more than a decade across the Arab world. This may prove to be the most deadly al-Qaida yet.”

The Algeria hostage siege debacle, coming hard on the heels of France’s intervention in neighbouring Mali, has heightened fears that a “third generation” of al-Qaida-affiliated jihadis is creating a new front in the war against US and western interests in the vast, ungoverned spaces of the Sahel and Saharan regions of north and west Africa.‘Captain Amadou Sanogo used the skills he was taught by the US to wreck years of careful American and European nurturing of Mali’s fragile democracy.’ (Photograph: Reuters)

But the crisis has also focused attention on unsuccessful and at times shambolic American efforts to counter the growing Islamist challenge there, and on the danger that military intervention will only make matters worse. Fearful of more Algeria-style attacks, US and European officials hold differing views about what to do next, ranging from direct engagement via special forces and drone strikes to enhanced regional diplomacy and alliance building.

Recent experience is chastening. US attempts to build up Mali’s military as a bulwark against the extremists, by training army officers and providing equipment including brand-new Land Cruisers and expensive communications equipment, backfired spectacularly last year after a rebellion in the north provoked a coup that unseated the elected government in Bamako.

When push came to shove, a senior officer said the Tuareg commanders of three of the four Malian units fighting in the north defected to the insurrection “at the crucial moment”, taking fighters, weapons and equipment with them. They were joined by about 1,600 other defectors from the Malian army, shattering the government’s hope of crushing the uprising.

“The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful,” another officer said. “They made the wrong choice,” by relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state.

The coup was a particular embarrassment to Washington as it was led by an army officer, Captain Amadou Sanogo, on whom it had lavished special favour. “Sanogo represents something of a US failure,” said veteran commentator Walter Pincus.

“He [Sanogo] had participated in the Pentagon’s international military education and training programmes, with basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia; English-language training at Lackland air force base, Texas; an intelligence course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and study at Quantico, Virginia, with the Marine Corps,” Pincus reported. The ungrateful Sanogo used his new skills to wreck years of careful American and European nurturing of Mali’s fragile democracy.

The multimillion dollar pre-coup assistance to Mali was part of an ambitious but flawed US regional policy embracing Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and several west African states, intended to strengthen defences against al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and like-minded groups. In 2002, the state department unveiled the so-called Pan-Sahel Initiative “to protect borders … combat terrorism, and enhance regional cooperation and stability”. This was replaced in 2005 by the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership, overseen by the grandly named but ineffectual US Africa Command.

In recent years the Pentagon and other US agencies have run annual joint military exercises called Operation Flintlock involving Mali, Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Morocco and Nigeria. Imaginary war scenarios involved a terrorist group being chased across national borders from Mauritania all the way east to Chad. The war games proved to be prescient, except now it is the terrorists who are doing the chasing, and in the other direction.

If Americans are confirmed among the Algeria casualties, pressure will grow on the Obama administration to get more directly involved. The Joint Special Operations Command is already operating covert, region-wide surveillance flights under a classified programme know as Creek Sand. Analysts say the next step may be to use existing bases in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and elsewhere to launch drone strikes and targeted assassinations, as in Somalia and Yemen. Since the Mali coup, the US has also upped military assistance to Niger and Mauritania.

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt reported for the New York Times: “Some Pentagon officials have long taken a more hawkish stance, and they cite intelligence reports that fighters with ties to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb … played a role in the deadly attack in September on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. They have pushed for targeted strikes against Islamist leaders in northern Mali, arguing that killing the leadership could permanently cripple the strength of the militants.”

At the same time there is a clear danger that an expanding war in Mali could start a wave of new attacks on “soft” western targets similar to that in southern Algeria, and that increased western intervention in the region will transform extremist groups that had only local importance into potent trans-national threats.

“While Pentagon lawyers claim al-Qaida is tipping into defeat, in fact we are seeing the emergence of the third generation of the terrorist movement,” said analyst Bruce Riedel. “Under siege by drones in Pakistan and Yemen, al-Qaida 3.0 has exploited the ‘Arab Awakening’ to create its largest safe havens and operational bases in more than a decade across the Arab world. This may prove to be the most deadly al-Qaida yet.”

French war reporter Yves Debay has been killed by sniper fire while reporting on Syria crisis in the northern city of Aleppo.

A Turkish official said on Friday that the Belgian-born Debay was taken to Turkey, where medical staff pronounced him dead, after being shot once in the head and once in the chest on Thursday, Reuters reported.

Photographs of Debay’s body and of his press card were posted online.

Debay, 59, was working for Assaut, a French magazine he founded and which specialized in defense matters.

“France condemns this odious act and expresses its condolences, its sympathy and its solidarity with the friends and family of Yves Debay,” French President Francois Hollande said in a statement.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders has said that at least 20 professional journalists, both foreign and Syrian, and 49 citizen journalists have died since the beginning of unrest in Syria.

In October 2012, Press TV’s correspondent in Syria, Maya Naser, was killed by sniper fire in Damascus while reporting live for Press TV.

Press TV and Al-Alam Damascus Bureau Chief Hosein Mortada also came under attack and was injured.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of army and security personnel, have been killed in the turmoil.

According to a UN report, militants from 29 countries have so far filtered into Syria to fight against the Damascus government, most of whom are extremist Salafists.

The Syrian government has repeatedly said that the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and that a very large number of the militants operating in the country are foreign nationals.

HM/JR

Norilsk. (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Russia has been hit by heavy snowfall over the past week, causing traffic accidents, flight delays, and cutting off some remote settlements entirely. Latest worldwide snow coverage maps show that the entire country is covered in snow.

Russia snowed under. (World Wide Daily Snow and Ice Cover Map, Source: NOAA)

­As more than 10 inches of snow fell in Moscow — more than half of the average snowfall for the whole of January — the already congested city is on the verge of a traffic collapse. Traffic measuring portal Yandex reported Grade 10 (out of 10) jams on Friday, as strong winds created blizzard conditions and built imposing snow drifts.

More than 12,000 de-icers and snow sweepers are out on the streets, working around the clock.

As the city has come to a standstill the chair of the Duma’s transport committee has called for local transport officials to face legal sanctions for failing to cope with the winter weather.

“Until local bureaucrats face the wrath of the law, winter will always be a surprise occurrence. They will continue to do nothing, as people suffer,” Mikhail Bryachak told Kommersant FM radio.

Several dozen flights have been postponed at the city’s major airports, with thousands of passengers stranded, many having to stay overnight.

A traffic jam at the Moscow Ring Road. Heavy snowfalls have caused traffic problems in the city on January 18, 2013. (RIA Novosti / Vitaliy Belousov)

A traffic jam at the Moscow Ring Road. Heavy snowfalls have caused traffic problems in the city on January 18, 2013. (RIA Novosti / Maxim Blinov)

Moscow (AFP Photo / Tverskoy Prospect)

While in the large population centers in western Russia the snowstorms have caused inconvenience, further east they have been life threatening.

The polar circle city of Norilsk has seen snowfall build to a height of more than 10 feet, and entire apartment blocks have been barricaded by snow overnight, requiring city workers to dig passageways through the snow banks.

Meanwhile, icicles up to three feet in length have formed off every building ledge, breaking at random and causing a lethal hazard for pedestrians below.

Nearly two hundred people have died throughout Russia as a direct result of weather-related accidents and hypothermia this season, according to official statistics, although the extreme conditions have likely contributed to many more fatalities.

However, meteorologists have promised some good news: the stormy conditions are expected to recede over the weekend.

Moscow (Reuters / Sergei Karpukhin)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)

The market ramped, modestly, on the earlier news that the House would push the debt ceiling by three months with an implied budget/spending cut provision. That the market actually moved on this headline shows front and center just how clueless the algos doing all the trading truly are, because one doesn’t need Politico to tell them that this proposal is absolutely DOA and is nothing but more theater. However, those who do need Politico to tell them just that, here it is.

House Republicans will vote next week on a bill that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling for three months and attach a provision that would stop pay for members of Congress if the Senate doesn’t pass a budget, GOP officials said Friday.

It’s an attempt to force the Senate to lay out a spending plan, but is sure to go nowhere in the Democratic controlled upper chamber.

This is not a final solution to the debt ceiling battle, or anything close. Lifting the nation’s borrowing cap, which must be done by the end of February or March, will be a lengthy battle between House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the White House.

This strategy – trying to shift blame to the Senate – is a tried and true House GOP tactic. And it also falls in line with a new mantra leadership has been trying to instill in its membership: we do not control Washington, and cannot force the president’s hand.

…

If anything, the tactic would put front and center the Democratic Senate’s resistance to lay out its spending priorities. They haven’t passed a budget in three years.

Back to square one.

WASHINGTON – January 18 – While many are drawing parallels between Martin Luther King Jr. and President Barack Obama, some activists and analysts state that many of Obama’s policies run totally counter to King’s activism.

The group RootsAction states: “Meticulous researchers have documented that U.S. drones are killing many innocent civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Drones are making the world less stable and creating new enemies. Their remoteness provides those responsible with a sense of immunity.”

The Washington Peace Center has a list of protests and other events around the inauguration.

In King’s 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? he wrote: “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.” That same year In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech [see text and audio], King said: “What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call ‘VC’ or ‘communists’? … Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

“I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. … When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. …

“With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just.’ It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

“Perhaps his [Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh] sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of ‘aggression’ as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. … True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.”

LEAH BOLGER, [email]
President of Veterans for Peace, Bolger said today: “King’s legacy is not upheld by increasing troops in Afghanistan and killing in so many other countries as the administration has done – it is violated. Obama put Social Security on the fiscal chopping block instead of the military budget. The main advocate of drone killings, John Brennan, was just nominated by Obama to be head of the CIA. We must clearly judge politicians by the content of their policies, not the effectiveness of their delivery.”

JARED BALL, [email]
Associate professor of journalism and mass communication at Morgan State University and author of I MiX What I Like: A MiXtape Manifesto, Ball said today: “Not even the Hollywood distortions of Lincoln and Django out-perform the political myths being planned for this week’s inauguration. One hundred and fifty years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 50 years after the March on Washington, Barack Obama will use both the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. as part of a ceremony that is as much about obscuring or preventing progressive change as were the real politics of Lincoln and those falsely ascribed to King. It is as doubtful that Lincoln meant by colonization [of blacks back to Africa] the eventual return of Africans to sit in this country’s highest offices as it is that King meant to fight for an equality that would allow black people the same right to perform drone strikes. Lincoln and King represent important dialectical, hostile and very unequal political opposites. Obama’s symbolic merging of the two in fact works to impose a false unity to what each represented and disrespectfully aligns King with a political tradition he was killed trying to eradicate.”

WASHINGTON – January 18 – While many are drawing parallels between Martin Luther King Jr. and President Barack Obama, some activists and analysts state that many of Obama’s policies run totally counter to King’s activism.

The group RootsAction states: “Meticulous researchers have documented that U.S. drones are killing many innocent civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Drones are making the world less stable and creating new enemies. Their remoteness provides those responsible with a sense of immunity.”

The Washington Peace Center has a list of protests and other events around the inauguration.

In King’s 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? he wrote: “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.” That same year In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech [see text and audio], King said: “What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call ‘VC’ or ‘communists’? … Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

“I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. … When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. …

“With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just.’ It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

“Perhaps his [Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh] sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of ‘aggression’ as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. … True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.”

LEAH BOLGER, [email]
President of Veterans for Peace, Bolger said today: “King’s legacy is not upheld by increasing troops in Afghanistan and killing in so many other countries as the administration has done – it is violated. Obama put Social Security on the fiscal chopping block instead of the military budget. The main advocate of drone killings, John Brennan, was just nominated by Obama to be head of the CIA. We must clearly judge politicians by the content of their policies, not the effectiveness of their delivery.”

JARED BALL, [email]
Associate professor of journalism and mass communication at Morgan State University and author of I MiX What I Like: A MiXtape Manifesto, Ball said today: “Not even the Hollywood distortions of Lincoln and Django out-perform the political myths being planned for this week’s inauguration. One hundred and fifty years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 50 years after the March on Washington, Barack Obama will use both the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. as part of a ceremony that is as much about obscuring or preventing progressive change as were the real politics of Lincoln and those falsely ascribed to King. It is as doubtful that Lincoln meant by colonization [of blacks back to Africa] the eventual return of Africans to sit in this country’s highest offices as it is that King meant to fight for an equality that would allow black people the same right to perform drone strikes. Lincoln and King represent important dialectical, hostile and very unequal political opposites. Obama’s symbolic merging of the two in fact works to impose a false unity to what each represented and disrespectfully aligns King with a political tradition he was killed trying to eradicate.”

We are not epidemiology experts, but something tells us the US flu (or is that communist?) epidemic is getting worse, not better.

A week ago:

And today (from Google):

In other news, from USA Today:

Flu activity remained high in the United States through Jan. 13 but is decreasing in some areas, numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday show. Twenty-nine children have died as a result of the flu since the season’s start.

Although there’s no national reporting system for adult flu-related deaths, the CDC said that 8.3% of deaths reported in its 122 Cities Mortality Reporting System were due to pneumonia and influenza. That’s above the epidemic threshold of 7.2%. The rate of deaths linked to pneumonia and flu the week before was 7.3%.

Forty-eight states reported widespread geographic influenza activity, but the wave is beginning to wane in some areas, CDC said.

In other flu news, the company that makes Tamiflu, an antiviral drug used to lessen the severity of flu in those exposed to the virus, has released reserve stocks to lessen shortages in some parts of the country.

“With the addition of these reserve supplies, we anticipate having sufficient supply of Tamiflu capsules to meet demand for this flu season,” spokeswoman Tara Iannuccillo said.

The liquid form of the drug, given to children because they can’t easily swallow pills, has been difficult to find. Genentech, of South San Francisco, has worked with the Food and Drug Administration to get more 75-milligram capsules of the drug on the market in the United States, Iannuccillo said. Pharmacists can mix the contents of the capsules with a sweet liquid to make a drug that children can easily take.

South Korean president-elect Park Geun Hye has hailed her country’s longstanding relations with Iran, stressing that Seoul attaches great significance to the expansion of ties with Tehran in all fields.

In a meeting with Iranian Ambassador to Seoul Ahmad Ma’soumifar on Friday, Park described the Islamic Republic to be among South Korea’s major commercial partners in the Middle East.

Pointing to the historical and friendly ties between Tehran and Seoul, Park noted that 2012 marked the 50th year of the establishment of diplomatic ties between Iran and South Korea.

Park also called for stronger Seoul-Tehran relations in the cultural, educational and sports spheres.

During the meeting, Ma’soumifar extended Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s message of congratulations to Park on winning the presidential election in South Korea.

He said relations between Iran and South Korea over the past half century have always been “friendly and constructive.”

Ma’soumifar also expressed hope for the further expansion of ties between Iran and South Korea during Park’s tenure.

MP/HMV/SS

Have you ever asked yourself why, whenever we have these battles over reasonable gun safety laws, the gun nuts huddle around the Second Amendment as if it were the Holy Grail? Say the word “militia” today and everyone thinks about those folks up in Idaho building their little fortresses, not anything resembling the “well-regulated militia” defined in the amendment. Thom Hartmann’s been doing some research and surprisingly, the reasons behind it are not what everyone thinks:

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the “slave patrols,” and they were regulated by the states.

[…]

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy. By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband – or even move out of the state – those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.

These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves).

So tell me again: Why do we have a bunch of people who practically worship at the altar of a constitutional amendment which was put there to protect slave owners — when slavery has been outlawed for 150 years?

Oh, I see. Because there was some tension and mistrust between the states and the federal government.

Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.

This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. “Liberty to Slaves” was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington’s army.

Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.

Ultimately, it took a bloody war with guns and emancipated slaves to end the slavery in the South. But the Civil War is not quite completely in the past. We may not be fighting on open battleground with muskets, cannons and bayonets, but we are still fighting one, verbally and politically.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The velocity of money is in free-fall, and borrowing, squandering and printing trillions of dollars to prop up a diminishing-return Status Quo won’t reverse that historic collapse.

M1 includes funds that are readily accessible for spending. M1 consists of: (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) traveler’s checks of nonbank issuers; (3) demand deposits; and (4) other checkable deposits (OCDs). 

M2 includes a broader set of financial assets held principally by households. M2 consists of M1 plus: (1) savings deposits (which include money market deposit accounts, or MMDAs); (2) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000); and (3) balances in retail money market mutual funds (MMMFs). 

Money Zero Maturity (MZM) is M2 less small-denomination time deposits plus institutional money funds.

The correlation of deficit spending and money velocity is especially striking in the chart of M2 velocity.
 

Here is MZM velocity:
 

And M1 velocity:
 

Since correlation implies causation, ideologically unbiased observers will wonder: does declining money velocity lead to more deficit spending, or does deficit spending depress money velocity?
 

Alternatively, both declining money velocity and soaring deficits reflect a contracting, post-credit-bubble economy. It is interesting to compare when the various measures of money velocity bottomed and topped out:
 

— M1 velocity rose straight through the inflationary 1970s (no surprise there), chopped around the expansionary 1980s and then climbed along with the Bull market in stocks from 1994 to a peak in 2007, matching the peak in stocks and housing almost perfectly.
 

— M2 velocity first peaked during the height of inflation in 1981 (when interest rates also peaked), bottomed in 1987 and then tracked the stock market and economy higher, reaching a much higher peak in 1997, much earlier than M1 velocity. M2 fell substantially to a low in 2002 and then rebounded modestly to a lower peak in 2007, after which it collapsed.
 

— MZM velocity topped out in the inflationary surge of the early 1980s, like M2, but unlike the other measures, it did not ascend to new heights in the 1990s or 2000s; rather, it has fallen steadily for 30 years since its 1982 top.
 

The most striking feature of these charts is the complete collapse of money velocity. MZM and M2 have collapsed to historic lows, while M1 has fallen back to 1982 levels.
 

In this context, we can view unprecedented Federal deficit spending as a misguided attempt to compensate for the implosion of money velocity. I say “attempt” because the Treasury borrowing and blowing $6 trillion over the past five years and the Federal Reserve printing $2 trillion, backstopping the parasitic financial cartel with $16 trillion and buying over $1 trillion each of mortgage securities and Treasury bonds has only kept the economy stumbling along at essentially zero growth while real wages have declined by 7% to 9%.
 

This stupendous creation of money and unprecedented fiscal stimulus has had zero effect on money velocity. This conclusively shows that fiscal and monetary stimulus are not fixing what’s broken with money velocity.
 

Please see these entries for more on why this is so:
 

Keynesian stimulus policies (deficit spending and low-interest easy money) create speculative credit bubbles. As the above charts illustrate, post-bubble economies do not respond to additional stimulus because the economy is burdened by impaired debt and phantom collateral.
 

In sum, the U.S. economy is a neofeudal debt-serf wasteland with few opportunities for organic (non-Central Planning) expansion. As a result, the velocity of money is in free-fall, and borrowing, squandering and printing trillions of dollars to prop up a diminishing-return Status Quo won’t reverse that historic collapse.
 

Put another way: we’ve run out of speculative credit bubbles to exploit.

Missoula, MT – January 18 – Montana medical marijuana patient, cultivator and former University of Montana Grizzlies quarterback Jason Washington was convicted yesterday in federal court of two felonies, “conspiracy to manufacture and distribute marijuana” and “possession with intent to distribute marijuana,” but was acquitted of another felony possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug-related crime. Washington claimed to be in compliance with Montana’s medical marijuana law but, as is typical with such federal cases, defendants like Washington are routinely denied a defense. He is facing a 5-year mandatory minimum sentence, up to 40 years in prison, and more than $10 million in fines and forfeitures.

Washington and six others were arrested and similarly charged in November 2011, after the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided his Big Sky Health dispensary in Missoula. Five of his six co-defendants pleaded guilty and cooperated with the government’s case against Washington. Illustrating the government’s prosecutorial disparity, Washington’s co-defendants received far more lenient sentences than what he’s facing, the longest of which was only 125 days. Charges against the sixth defendant were thrown out by U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen, who presided over the cases. Twenty other people in the case were never charged, and were offered immunity by the government to testify against Washington.

“Jason Washington is the latest casualty in President Obama’s effort to undermine the implementation of state medical marijuana laws,” said Kris Hermes, spokesperson with Americans for Safe Access, the country’s largest medical marijuana advocacy organization. “Several Montana cultivators have been unnecessarily imprisoned recently, some with fatal consequences.” Sixty-eight year-old medical marijuana cultivator Richard Flor died last year while serving out a 5-year prison sentence after being convicted in federal court, despite no evidence of state law violations. “When is the Obama Administration going to answer for its aggressive enforcement practices against state-compliant medical marijuana providers?” asked Hermes.

The DEA raid on Big Sky Health followed a series of federal raids in March 2011, at the same time the Montana legislature was considering a law that would have repealed the state’s original medical marijuana law, Initiative 148, adopted in 2004. Shortly after the initial raids, in April 2011, U.S. Attorney Michael Cotter sent a letter to the legislative leadership indicating that the Justice Department maintains the authority to enforce federal marijuana laws “even if such activities are permitted under state law,” and that “investigative and prosecutorial resources will continue to be directed toward these objectives.” The governor vetoed the repeal bill, but the raids and threats made by U.S. Attorney Cotter spawned another restrictive proposal, Senate Bill 423, which ultimately was signed into law.

Notably, yesterday’s conviction comes on the same day that a Helena district judge issued a second preliminary injunction, blocking the implementation of SB 423. In June 2011, Judge James Reynolds issued a temporary injunction against the restrictive law, but the injunction was reversed in September 2012 by the Montana Supreme Court. After hearing testimony from numerous patients and using a different standard to determine the extent of one’s rights under state law, Judge Reynolds issued a more thorough but similarly conclusive ruling yesterday.

The Obama Administration has indicted more than 80 patients and providers since he took office in 2009, a number of whom were recently sentenced and incarcerated. Chris Williams, the only other Montana medical marijuana cultivator to endure trial, recently accepted a rare post-conviction plea deal for a mandatory minimum of 5 years and will be sentenced February 1st. Washington is currently released and does not yet have a sentencing date.

The great American torture debate has been rekindled by the nationwide release of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the hot new movie about the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden.The US military’s “Shock and Awe” campaign began by bombing targets in Baghdad, March, 2003. (Image: Corbis via BBC)

But all the fussing over whether or not the movie condones, glorifies, and/or misrepresents torture is trivial, because the United States’ use of torture after 9/11 is trivial in the context of larger U.S. crimes.

Let me be clear: I don’t support torture. I think torture is immoral. I think government officials who ordered or condoned torture should be held accountable. Torture crosses a line that should not be crossed.

But when I look at the decade since 9/11, torture is hardly the greatest crime of the U.S. war machine. Since 9/11, the United States has helped destroy two countries with, at best, sketchy moral and legal justification. The invasion of Afghanistan was connected to the crimes of 9/11, at least at first, but quickly devolved into a nonsensical occupation. The invasion of Iraq, which was clearly illegal, was a scandal of unprecedented scale, even by the standards of past U.S. invasions and covert operations.

While the Iraq war is over (sort of) and the Afghanistan war is coming to an end (sort of) the United States is also at war in Pakistan and Iran. The U.S. routinely unleashes murderous drone strikes in Pakistani territory, and we can assume that covert operations against Iran, such as the cyber-attack with a powerful computer virus, continue even though Iran poses no serious threat to the United States.

“The problem with “Zero Dark Thirty” is that … it tells the story that Americans want to hear: We are an innocent nation that has earned its extraordinary wealth fair and square.”

All of this was, or is, clearly illegal or of dubious legal status. None of it makes us more secure in the long run. And if one considers human beings who aren’t U.S. citizens to be fully human, there is no moral justification for any of it.

The problem with “Zero Dark Thirty” is that it ignores all of that, as do most of the movies, television shows, and journalism about the past decade. It tells the story that Americans want to hear: We are an innocent nation that has earned its extraordinary wealth fair and square. Now we want nothing more than to protect the fruits of our honest labor while, when possible, extending our superior system to others. Despite our moral virtue and benevolence, there are irrational ideologues around the world who want to kill Americans. This forces our warriors into unpleasant situations dealing with unpleasant people, regrettable but necessary to restore the rightful order.

A less self-indulgent look at the reality of the post-World War II era suggests a different story. Whether in Latin America, southern Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, the central goal of U.S. foreign policy has been consistent: to make sure that an independent course of development did not succeed anywhere, out of a fear that it might spread to the rest of the developing world and threaten U.S. economic domination. In the Middle East, the specific task has been to make sure that the flow of oil and oil profits continues in a fashion conducive to U.S. interests.

This is not is a defense of terrorism but rather a consistent critique of terrorism, whether committed by nation-states or non-state actors. The solution to the problem is not more terrorism by one side to counter the terrorism of the other. The solution is not torture. At this point, there are no easy and obvious “solutions” available, given the hole into which we’ve dug ourselves.

But there are things we can do that would help create the conditions under which solutions may emerge, ways to support real democracy around the world and a just distribution of resources. The first step is for those with more wealth and power to tell the truth about how that wealth was accumulated and how that power has been used.

The real problem with “Zero Dark Thirty” is not that it takes artistic license with some of the facts about torture. The film’s more profound failure is that by reinforcing the same old story about American innocence, it helps obscure the larger truths we don’t want to face about ourselves.

The great American torture debate has been rekindled by the nationwide release of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the hot new movie about the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden.The US military’s “Shock and Awe” campaign began by bombing targets in Baghdad, March, 2003. (Image: Corbis via BBC)

But all the fussing over whether or not the movie condones, glorifies, and/or misrepresents torture is trivial, because the United States’ use of torture after 9/11 is trivial in the context of larger U.S. crimes.

Let me be clear: I don’t support torture. I think torture is immoral. I think government officials who ordered or condoned torture should be held accountable. Torture crosses a line that should not be crossed.

But when I look at the decade since 9/11, torture is hardly the greatest crime of the U.S. war machine. Since 9/11, the United States has helped destroy two countries with, at best, sketchy moral and legal justification. The invasion of Afghanistan was connected to the crimes of 9/11, at least at first, but quickly devolved into a nonsensical occupation. The invasion of Iraq, which was clearly illegal, was a scandal of unprecedented scale, even by the standards of past U.S. invasions and covert operations.

While the Iraq war is over (sort of) and the Afghanistan war is coming to an end (sort of) the United States is also at war in Pakistan and Iran. The U.S. routinely unleashes murderous drone strikes in Pakistani territory, and we can assume that covert operations against Iran, such as the cyber-attack with a powerful computer virus, continue even though Iran poses no serious threat to the United States.

“The problem with “Zero Dark Thirty” is that … it tells the story that Americans want to hear: We are an innocent nation that has earned its extraordinary wealth fair and square.”

All of this was, or is, clearly illegal or of dubious legal status. None of it makes us more secure in the long run. And if one considers human beings who aren’t U.S. citizens to be fully human, there is no moral justification for any of it.

The problem with “Zero Dark Thirty” is that it ignores all of that, as do most of the movies, television shows, and journalism about the past decade. It tells the story that Americans want to hear: We are an innocent nation that has earned its extraordinary wealth fair and square. Now we want nothing more than to protect the fruits of our honest labor while, when possible, extending our superior system to others. Despite our moral virtue and benevolence, there are irrational ideologues around the world who want to kill Americans. This forces our warriors into unpleasant situations dealing with unpleasant people, regrettable but necessary to restore the rightful order.

A less self-indulgent look at the reality of the post-World War II era suggests a different story. Whether in Latin America, southern Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, the central goal of U.S. foreign policy has been consistent: to make sure that an independent course of development did not succeed anywhere, out of a fear that it might spread to the rest of the developing world and threaten U.S. economic domination. In the Middle East, the specific task has been to make sure that the flow of oil and oil profits continues in a fashion conducive to U.S. interests.

This is not is a defense of terrorism but rather a consistent critique of terrorism, whether committed by nation-states or non-state actors. The solution to the problem is not more terrorism by one side to counter the terrorism of the other. The solution is not torture. At this point, there are no easy and obvious “solutions” available, given the hole into which we’ve dug ourselves.

But there are things we can do that would help create the conditions under which solutions may emerge, ways to support real democracy around the world and a just distribution of resources. The first step is for those with more wealth and power to tell the truth about how that wealth was accumulated and how that power has been used.

The real problem with “Zero Dark Thirty” is not that it takes artistic license with some of the facts about torture. The film’s more profound failure is that by reinforcing the same old story about American innocence, it helps obscure the larger truths we don’t want to face about ourselves.

And the game continues as Speaker Boehner appears to be kicking the can across the corridor to the Senate (and implicitly the Democrats) as he quite specifically advises them that with no budget, there is no talk of debt-ceiling extensions. The principle is simple, he notes, “no budget, no pay.” As Dow Jones reports, the ‘compromise’ deal is that the House will propose a three-month extension of the debt-ceiling in exchange for a budget (i.e. spending cuts from the Senate) – which of course is all but impossible given the years of inability to pass a budget anyway. Check to Obama (though we know the response)…

Following are excerpts of House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) closing remarks as at the House Republican members retreat today, as prepared:

“Before there is any long-term debt limit increase, a budget should be passed that cuts spending. The Democratic-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget for four years. That is a shameful run that needs to end, this year.

“We are going to pursue strategies that will obligate the Senate to finally join the House in confronting the government’s spending problem. The principle is simple: no budget, no pay. …

“A long-term increase in the debt limit that is not preceded by meaningful and responsible reductions in government spending might avert a default, but it would also invite a downgrade of our nation’s credit that damages our economy, hurts families and small businesses, and destroys jobs.”

Via Dow Jones:

• DJN – DJ U.S. HOUSE TO SEEK THREE-MONTH EXTENSION OF DEBT CEILING
• DJN – DJ U.S. REP CANTOR: IF HOUSE AND SENATE DON’T PASS BUDGET IN 3 MONTHS LAWMAKERS WON’T GET PAID

In a reasonable world, in which we recognized the culpability of big-time D.C. politicians and bureaucrats who allowed Wall Street hyper-speculation to run wild and eventually cause the 2008-09 crash and Great Recession, Jacob Lew would be understood as a terrible choice as President Obama’s second-term Treasury Secretary, replacing Timothy Geithner. The outstanding journalist Robert Sheer gives us the basic background in a recent Nation article. Sheer writes:

I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary. Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who unfettered Wall Street greed and then took his own considerable cut of the action.

But because we are not living in a reasonable world, at least in terms of D.C.-insider debates on economic policy, Lew’s nomination apparently faces opposition from Republicans because he appears insufficiently committed to an austerity budget that could push the economy back into recession while also devastating spending for Social Security, education, health care, family support, and unemployment insurance.

It is clear that debate over the fiscal deficit and austerity will dominate Lew’s confirmation hearings and at least his initial period in office, if he ends up getting confirmed. But without pursuing any deep explorations about who should be taxed more or less, or whether 47 percent of U.S. citizens are indeed freeloaders, I would just propose that Lew be willing to recognize three sets of very simple, irrefutable facts about the current U.S. fiscal condition. Here they are:

Fact #1: The U.S. government is not facing a fiscal crisis.

In any common sense meaning of the term “fiscal crisis,” we would be referring to the government’s inability to make its forthcoming payments to its creditors. By that common sense definition, the U.S. federal government is in just about the best shape it has ever been. Figure 1 below tells the story.

According to the most recent data from the third quarter of 2012 (which we term “2012.3”), the federal government spent 7.7 percent of its total expenditures on interest to its creditors. As the figure shows, that figure is less than half of the average figure under the full 12 years of Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush, when the government paid, on average, 16.8 percent of the total budget to cover interest payments. Right now, as we see, government interest payments are at near historic lows, not highs. As Treasury Secretary-designate, Lew needs to just state this obvious, and highly relevant point. To my knowledge, it has been heretofore completely left out of the insider-D.C. fiscal cliff debates, by Lew, Obama, and Geithner, to say nothing of the Republicans.

Fact #2: Interest rates on government bonds are at historic lows.

Figure 2 tells this story, which is well-known, but is not being given proper recognition in the deficit debates. As the figure shows, at the end of 2012, the U.S. government was borrowing at 0.7 percent on its 5-year Treasury Bonds.

It is precisely because the federal government can borrow so cheaply that our interest payments are corresponding low. Deficit hawks–economists and politicians alike–have been insisting for years that the rates are about to spike back up. Of course, interest rates will rise back up, at some point. We need to be vigilant about that. But this hasn’t happened over the full four year period since the onset of the Great Recession. This enables the U.S. government to maintain stimulus levels of spending, to get the economy onto a healthy growth trajectory. In other words, we have no reason to submit to an austerity agenda now. We should expect Jacob Lew to at least state the obvious here: that the deficit hawks have been wrong about an impending interest rate spike for four years running.

Fact #3: Current large government deficits are due to the recession, not out-of-control spending.

This is so obvious it should be barely worth mentioning. But simple facts are ignored repeatedly in the fiscal deficit debates. No doubt during the Lew hearings, there will be more discussion about the current crisis being due to the 47 percent freeloading population who, as Mitt Romney put it after his defeat, “want stuff” from the government. As we see in Figure 3, the government’s fiscal deficit spiked at 10.1 percent of GDP in 2009, immediately after the onset of the recession.

But does anybody want to seriously claim that the pattern of fiscal deficits that we see in Figure 3 is due to the fact that people didn’t want too much stuff as of 2007 or 2008, then all of the sudden, that demand for stuff soared in 2009, which was just coincidentally exactly when the Wall Street crash brought the economy to its knees?

The deficit has fallen modestly since 2009, to 8.5 percent of GDP in 2012. But the single most important thing we can do to lower the fiscal deficit further is to push unemployment down. This will generate increased government revenues with people paying more in income and sales taxes, and it will reduce government payments on unemployment insurance and supplemental aid for health care and family support. The U.S. has the capacity to pursue a stimulus agenda now quite easily, precisely because interest rates and interest payments to creditors remain historically low.

It shouldn’t be any stretch at all for Jacob Lew to acknowledge these three simple, irrefutable points. But will he do it? My guess is that he will not. If I am right in this guess, it will provide only further evidence as to the dismal state of the economic policy debate in official Washington, including Democrats like Lew here as well as Republicans.

© 2013 Political Economy Research Institute (PERI)

Robert Pollin, a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, is co-author of Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy.

In a reasonable world, in which we recognized the culpability of big-time D.C. politicians and bureaucrats who allowed Wall Street hyper-speculation to run wild and eventually cause the 2008-09 crash and Great Recession, Jacob Lew would be understood as a terrible choice as President Obama’s second-term Treasury Secretary, replacing Timothy Geithner. The outstanding journalist Robert Sheer gives us the basic background in a recent Nation article. Sheer writes:

I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary. Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who unfettered Wall Street greed and then took his own considerable cut of the action.

But because we are not living in a reasonable world, at least in terms of D.C.-insider debates on economic policy, Lew’s nomination apparently faces opposition from Republicans because he appears insufficiently committed to an austerity budget that could push the economy back into recession while also devastating spending for Social Security, education, health care, family support, and unemployment insurance.

It is clear that debate over the fiscal deficit and austerity will dominate Lew’s confirmation hearings and at least his initial period in office, if he ends up getting confirmed. But without pursuing any deep explorations about who should be taxed more or less, or whether 47 percent of U.S. citizens are indeed freeloaders, I would just propose that Lew be willing to recognize three sets of very simple, irrefutable facts about the current U.S. fiscal condition. Here they are:

Fact #1: The U.S. government is not facing a fiscal crisis.

In any common sense meaning of the term “fiscal crisis,” we would be referring to the government’s inability to make its forthcoming payments to its creditors. By that common sense definition, the U.S. federal government is in just about the best shape it has ever been. Figure 1 below tells the story.

According to the most recent data from the third quarter of 2012 (which we term “2012.3”), the federal government spent 7.7 percent of its total expenditures on interest to its creditors. As the figure shows, that figure is less than half of the average figure under the full 12 years of Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush, when the government paid, on average, 16.8 percent of the total budget to cover interest payments. Right now, as we see, government interest payments are at near historic lows, not highs. As Treasury Secretary-designate, Lew needs to just state this obvious, and highly relevant point. To my knowledge, it has been heretofore completely left out of the insider-D.C. fiscal cliff debates, by Lew, Obama, and Geithner, to say nothing of the Republicans.

Fact #2: Interest rates on government bonds are at historic lows.

Figure 2 tells this story, which is well-known, but is not being given proper recognition in the deficit debates. As the figure shows, at the end of 2012, the U.S. government was borrowing at 0.7 percent on its 5-year Treasury Bonds.

It is precisely because the federal government can borrow so cheaply that our interest payments are corresponding low. Deficit hawks–economists and politicians alike–have been insisting for years that the rates are about to spike back up. Of course, interest rates will rise back up, at some point. We need to be vigilant about that. But this hasn’t happened over the full four year period since the onset of the Great Recession. This enables the U.S. government to maintain stimulus levels of spending, to get the economy onto a healthy growth trajectory. In other words, we have no reason to submit to an austerity agenda now. We should expect Jacob Lew to at least state the obvious here: that the deficit hawks have been wrong about an impending interest rate spike for four years running.

Fact #3: Current large government deficits are due to the recession, not out-of-control spending.

This is so obvious it should be barely worth mentioning. But simple facts are ignored repeatedly in the fiscal deficit debates. No doubt during the Lew hearings, there will be more discussion about the current crisis being due to the 47 percent freeloading population who, as Mitt Romney put it after his defeat, “want stuff” from the government. As we see in Figure 3, the government’s fiscal deficit spiked at 10.1 percent of GDP in 2009, immediately after the onset of the recession.

But does anybody want to seriously claim that the pattern of fiscal deficits that we see in Figure 3 is due to the fact that people didn’t want too much stuff as of 2007 or 2008, then all of the sudden, that demand for stuff soared in 2009, which was just coincidentally exactly when the Wall Street crash brought the economy to its knees?

The deficit has fallen modestly since 2009, to 8.5 percent of GDP in 2012. But the single most important thing we can do to lower the fiscal deficit further is to push unemployment down. This will generate increased government revenues with people paying more in income and sales taxes, and it will reduce government payments on unemployment insurance and supplemental aid for health care and family support. The U.S. has the capacity to pursue a stimulus agenda now quite easily, precisely because interest rates and interest payments to creditors remain historically low.

It shouldn’t be any stretch at all for Jacob Lew to acknowledge these three simple, irrefutable points. But will he do it? My guess is that he will not. If I am right in this guess, it will provide only further evidence as to the dismal state of the economic policy debate in official Washington, including Democrats like Lew here as well as Republicans.

© 2013 Political Economy Research Institute (PERI)

January 18, 2013  |  

A new study from a think tank connected to the West Point Military Academy highlights the threat of violent far-right movements in the United States, leading to the conclusion that, while diverse in in their causes, they are similar in their use of violence to achieve their aims.

West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center was founded in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and has primarily focused its research on international terrorist threats. Titled “ Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right,” this new report instead looks as the risk that domestic groups pose to the U.S. Breaking down these groups into three categories – the Racist/White Supremacy Movement, the Anti-Federalist Movement, and the Christian Fundamentalist Movement – allows the study to examine the background ideologies and methods of each subset thoroughly, opposed to lumping them all together as most studies have.

Each of the groupings in the study represent competing ideological views, with none of them likely to cooperate in achieving their aims. The chances that each of these groups will use violence also varies. What they share, however, is a use of violence against their chosen targets – be it minority races or abortion clinics – to draw attention to and emphasize their given ideology. After charting out the various instances of violence carried out by each of the categories, the paper offers up several policy recommendations on responding to their actions:

From a theoretical perspective, this constitutes a further indication of the perception among some parts of the academic community that terrorism is an instrument of symbolic discourse which is shared by violent groups and their adversaries. Target selection is thus not based just on operational considerations, but is one component, among others, which allows violent groups to shape their message using violent practices–timing, weapons used and target locations, are only a small measure of the other components which contribute to the shape of the symbolic message conveyed via the attack.

In this context, policy implications are clear. If the numerous far right groups are driven by different ideological sentiments, and are thus also engaged in distinguishing tactics, then the response in terms of counterterrorism policies must be flexible and group/movement oriented.

The study is already coming under attack by Republicans for not properly defining what constitutes a member of the “far right.”

A Republican congressional staffer who served in the military told The Washington Times: “If [the Defense Department] is looking for places to cut spending, this junk study is ground zero.

“Shouldn’t the Combating Terrorism Center be combating radical Islam around the globe instead of perpetuating the left’s myth that right-wingers are terrorists?” the staffer said. “The $64,000 dollar question is when will the Combating Terrorism Center publish their study on real left-wing terrorists like the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and the Weather Underground?”

This pushback is unsurprising, given the unwelcome response a 2009 report on the same topic received. Titled “ Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” the Department of Homeland Security-commissioned report drew attention to the fact that right-wing groups have proved more of a threat than Islamic extremists during a similar period. Secretary Janet Napolitano withdrew that report under harsh criticism from conservatives at the time, but there is no sign that the CTC will pull this study any time soon.

Debris set adrift by the 2011 Japanese tsunami has made its way to Hawaii, triggering concerns over the unknown effects of the radiation it may carry from the meltdown of the Fukushima reactor.

Debris has washed ashore the islands of Oahu and Kauai and the state’s Department of Health has been asked to test some of the incoming material for radiation levels. Refrigerator parts, oyster buoys, housing insulation, storage bins, soda bottles, toys, fishing nets, plastic trash cans and even Japanese net boats have all washed up on Hawaiian sands in the past few weeks, triggering serious environmental concerns over both water pollution and radiation exposure.

Long-term exposure to radiation can cause cancer, gene mutations, premature aging and in severe cases, death. The consequences of the influx of debris are unknown, causing local agencies to advocate precaution in picking up the Japanese debris.

After a Kona fisherman discovered a 24-foot Japanese net boat floating along the Hawaiian coast early this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began an investigation to trace where some of the items have come in from and possibly find its owners.

“On behalf of NOAA and the State of Hawaii, we ask that anyone who finds personal items, which may have come from the tsunami, to please report them to county, state and/or federal officials,” William J. Aila, Jr., Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) chairperson, told Hawaii 24/7 News.

Depending on an object’s weight, density and other physical characteristics, it can take months or years to travel from Japan to Hawaii, which explains why many of the same type of items are floating ashore at the same time. Although an estimated 70 percent of the tsunami debris sank offshore, millions of tons of wreckage are still adrift and slowly making landfall, reports LiveScience.

Aside from the unknown radiation risks, some of the debris is bringing invasive species to Hawaii, thereby threatening the island chain’s ecosystem and introducing the possibility of consuming contaminated seafood. The 24-foot boat found by the fisherman was covered in blue mussels, which are native to Japan and harmful to Hawaii’s marine life — especially the corals.

“If it does take hold, the concern is that they will just be able to populate at a fast rate and out compete some of our native species,” Jono Blodgett, the aquatic species program leader at DLNR, told the Honolulu Civil Beat. And even if Hawaiians attempt to kill the invasive mussels, their attempts might be fruitless.

“When species are stressed out and about to die, they might release their eggs or sperm,” he said. The fisherman who discovered the abandoned Japanese boat saw the mussels as an opportunity for a tasty meal, raising additional concerns about Hawaiian locals’ exposure to radiation found in seafood. Blodgett believes the boat likely drifted to sea before the Fukushima reactors had a meltdown, making the attached mussels safe to consume — but the possibility of contamination remains, especially if the creatures are found on some of the other debris.

Even though Hawaiian officials have minimized panic by assuring residents that radiation risks are low, their investigations and detection programs indicate that the concern is still there. The state of Hawaii purchased a $15,000 portable radiation detection device in September, while the Hawaii Department of Health has conducted quarterly shoreline surveillance since the tsunami hit in 2011. This monitoring has increased since the debris began to wash upon the Hawaiian shoreline.

But some of the debris is so small that it becomes quickly buried in the sand on the beach, making it impossible to clean up or even detect.

“Many places on the beach, it’s hard to differentiate the sand from the plastics on the surface,” Nicholas Mallos of the Ocean Conservancy group told LiveScience.

And as long as the radiation risks are unknown, Hawaii residents should avoid collecting floating refrigerator parts or consuming Japanese mussels they might find on washed up debris.

Actually that title was misleading: there will be no disclosure of “how“, because we don’t know. What we do know is that thanks to the magic of JPM’s definition of “Mark-To-Market” accounting, a $5 million prop trading loss (and thus forbidden by the Volcker Rule) funded by depositor cash as it took place in the infamous CIO unit whose job was to manage “excess deposits” in a prudent manner, became a $400 million prop trading loss in the span of 88 minutes. But not during trading – the market was long closed. The adjustment was purely on paper.

From the JPM Task force report on the CIO “London Whale” fiasco, as referenced yesterday:

April 10 was the first trading day in London after the “London Whale” articles were published. When the U.S. markets opened (i.e., towards the middle of the London trading day), one of the traders informed another that he was estimating a loss of approximately $700 million for the day. The latter reported this information to a more senior team member, who became angry and accused the third trader of undermining his credibility at JPMorgan. At 7:02 p.m. GMT on April 10, the trader with responsibility for the P&L Predict circulated a P&L Predict indicating a $5 million loss for the day; according to one of the traders, the trader who circulated this P&L Predict did so at the direction of another trader. After a confrontation between the other two traders, the same trader sent an updated P&L Predict at 8:30 p.m. GMT the same day, this time showing an estimated loss of approximately $400 million. He explained to one of the other traders that the market had improved and that the $400 million figure was an accurate reflection of mark-to-market losses for the day.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how “mark-to-market” is implemented in the current commercial bank prop trading units – through a “confrontation between traders.”

We learn all this in the Task Force report. What we don’t learn is why there was a confrontation, what was the basis for the mismarking, and most importantly, how it is possible that in JPM’s wacky Schrodinger world, a Marked to Market loss can be $5 Million and $400 Million at the same time, depending on who a “confrontation” takes place between. Perhaps in JPM, Mark to Muscle is a more appropriate estimation of what is going on.

Why should readers care? Because this 80-fold delta in potential losses is funded, and thus impacts, something dear to all those who have savings at JPM. Their money. Money, which should not be used to speculate in fashion that means an a full wipe out of capital is purely in the eye of the beholder.

What it also means for all other “mark to market” estimates of JPM, and all other banks’ profitability, we leave to readers to infer.

Finally, some much more deserved criticism of the JPM’s Task Force “report” comes from Bloomberg’s Jon Weil:

[H]ow did JPMorgan’s chief investment office, which manages deposits that the bank hasn’t lent, go from being a conservatively run risk manager to a profit center speculating on higher-yielding assets such as credit derivatives? The company’s report, conveniently, said this pivotal question was outside the inquiry’s scope. It’s worth noting that it was Dimon who pushed for the transformation several years ago, as Bloomberg News reported last spring.

“Although the task force has reviewed certain general background information on the origin of the synthetic credit portfolio and its development over time, the task force’s focus was on the events at the end of 2011 and the first several months of 2012 when the losses occurred,” the report said.

The head of the task force that produced the report, Michael Cavanagh, is the co-CEO of JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank. So it isn’t as if there was a pretense that this was some sort of independent review. The company didn’t disclose the task force’s other members.

The report dodged important disclosure issues. The facts in the report suggest there were serious shortcomings before 2012 in the internal controls over JPMorgan’s valuation processes. Some employees manipulated the numbers to make the trading losses look smaller. And when JPMorgan restated its first- quarter 2012 results last summer, the company acknowledged it had a material weakness in its controls as of March 31. Yet the bank hasn’t amended past disclosures to show control weaknesses in any earlier periods. Why not? This week’s report didn’t address the question.

Another example: During an April 13 call with analysts, about a month before JPMorgan began acknowledging the magnitude of its losses, Douglas Braunstein, JPMorgan’s since-demoted chief financial officer, said “those positions are fully transparent to the regulators” and that the bank’s regulators “get the information on those positions on a regular and recurring basis as part of our normalized reporting.” The statement wasn’t credible then. There’s no reason to believe he had any basis for the remark. Yet the task force’s report didn’t touch it.

The report also included this bizarre disclaimer: “This report sets out the facts that the task force believes are most relevant to understanding the causes of the losses. It reflects the task force’s view of the facts. Others (including regulators conducting their own investigations) may have a different view of the facts, or may focus on facts not described in this report, and may also draw different conclusions regarding the facts and issues.” In other words, we haven’t been told the whole story.

And this is the opacity that one gets when a firm sets off to expose what should otherwise be perfectly public information in the first place. One does start to wonder: if America’s banks go to such great lengths to mask how ugly the behind the scenes truth really is, is the true undercapitalization of the US banking sector in the trillions… Or tens of trillions?

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Transcript

Voiceover: A series of protests have erupted across Chile over the past year regarding a law that will impact the country’s fishing industry. Proponents say the law is needed in order to protect depleted fish reserves and ensure the sustainability of the industry, but opponents say the law seeks to privatize the Chilean sea and its resources to the benefit of 7 powerful families that control a handful of large fishing businesses.

David Dougherty, Valparaiso, Chile: Many small-scale fishermen in Chile say that a way of life is at stake with the new fishing law. Fishermen in coastal towns and cities across Chile, like here in Valparaiso, are raising fundamental questions about whether the Chilean sea and its fish should be considered private property.Gabriel Valenzuela Andaur, President, Caleta Membrillo Fishermen’s Union, Valparaiso: As small scale fishermen, artisanal fishermen, we don’t really approve of this new law, it’s going to be more of the same law, which has treated us very poorly…(why, how has it treated you bad, what has been the impact)…because it has enabled the large fishing businesses, they are destructive pillagers, they’ve damaged the ocean floor, they haven’t let the species regroup and reproduce and this has resulted in the collapse of fishing resources.Miguel Angel Maureira, Artisanal Fisherman, Caleta Membrillo, Valparaiso: The ships that go after all the large fish, they have radar they have everything they need to capture the big ones and follow the schools of fish, they always take the biggest ones and leave the smallest ones, these are what they leave, the fish for the people, the rest are for foreigners, they are industrial fishermen, we are artisanal fishermen, and these are the only fish left for us.Voiceover: Chile’s current Minister of Economy Pablo Longueira, a founding member of the rightwing Independent Democratic Union party presented the law, which opponents have named the Longueira Law. Longueira is one of a number of current members of President Sebastian Piñera’s administration who were early supporters of and later collaborators with General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled the country under a military dictatorship after grabbing power in a US-backed coup in 1973 that ousted democratically elected leftwing president Salvador Allende. Longueira and other officials pushing for the law, which essentially seeks to consolidate and expand a shorter-term law approved in 2002, say the measures are necessary in order to ensure the sustainability of the fishing industry, which has faced severely diminishing yields in recent years due to overfishing.Pablo Longuiera, Minister of Economy, Chile: What this project does, which makes it difficult to implement, I fully understand that this is not an easy project, what it establishes in the first article is that the object of the Chilean Fishing Law is the sustainability of these resources.Voiceover: The 2002 law established a quota system that essentially divided up what’s left of the remaining depleted fishing stocks; the new law would extend the quota system for an additional 20 years and make it renewable and transferable, which critics say essentially enables the future generations large scale fishing industry giants to be born into ownership of the quotas several decades down the road. A number of species targeted by the fishing industry have faced near total collapse since the 90’s, like the jurel, or jack mackerel, having declined 90% in the past 20 years in the southern Pacific, with stocks diminishing from 30 million tons annually to less than 3 million. Some marine biologists like Gonzalo Araya have warned against the potential harmful environmental impacts of the law, which he says have already manifested themselves after 10 years under the existing quota system.Gonzalo Araya, Marine Biologist: If we do an analysis of the past 10 years of the implementation of this system that they want to extend for an additional 20 years, I think there is no doubt that the majority of the resources subject to the quota system are in collapse, they are in a state of full exploitation and decline…they need exclusive rights to the exploitation of the fish, for what they hope is indefinitely, to improve their economic efficiency, which is not conditioned on the sustainability of fishing resources.Voiceover: The Chilean fishing industry is estimated to be the 6th largest in the world and a major pillar of the national economy. Several decades of monopolization and mergers have resulted in the establishment of 4 major conglomerations controlled by 7 families, who also have major investments in other critical sectors of national the economy and abroad. Juan Carlos Cárdenas is the director of the Ecoceanos Center, a citizen’s organization that works with a number of community organizations and coastal communities on issues surrounding maritime resources and environmental sustainability. He explains how historically strong ties between the fishing industry oligarchs and elected officials have encouraged a system where the political process and public policies are influenced and driven by powerful economic interests.Juan Carlos Cárdenas, Director, Ecoceanos: It’s important to note that they obtained and gained access to a large number of resources during the period of the dictatorship, later during the end of the dictatorship and the start of the civilian governments, they conditioned the first fishing and aquaculture laws in a way that would maintain their control … there is not a deputy or senator from a coastal region who was elected without funding from the fishing and aquaculture companies.Voiceover: At least 4 senators have been accused of conflicts of interest due to investments and ties with the fishing industry, although their votes were not voided. The law was made a priority for discussion in parliament, with aspirations for a quick approval before the expiration of the existing fishing law at the end of 2012. However, the law’s passage was temporarily paralyzed after it was determined that the indigenous communities involved in the fishing economy were not properly consulted as required by law. Cardenas explains how the fishing law and its quota system seek to consolidate a market model open to speculation, which he describes as among the most privatized in the international fishing industry.Juan Carlos Cárdenas, Director, Ecoceanos: The system is based on eliminating the property of the state, along with access and use of the fishing resources, and transferring them to the market through an individual quota system of fish, they are transferable, which means the quotas can be sold, purchased, rented, or leased. They are also applying this quota system to the artisanal fishermen, and most likely they will have to leave the system within a matter of years because their quotas are small and they would have to sell them to the industry, this system makes it so that in the future, the fishing quotas on paper are going to have more value than the physical resources that actually exist in the water. Voiceover: Ironically for a country characterized by its extensive coastline, fish is considered a luxury for many Chilean families due to high prices that make it out of reach for regular consumption. The overwhelming majority of fish captured by the large-scale industry is destined for export to international markets, with most of it converted into fish oil or powder to be used as animal feed in aquaculture and factory farming. The fishing law has ignited questions over national food security and whether the majority of fish should be destined for domestic consumption as a national resource, or exported to foreign markets under the current industry model.Gabriel Valenzuela Andaur, President, Caleta Membrillo Fishermen’s Union: The large businesses have always been those who benefit the most, we have always denounced that fishing in the country is generally in the hands of 7 families…Here it’s worth much more to protect the interests and pockets of a few people than the benefit of the people who feed themselves with this product.Voiceover: Some divisions have arisen among more than 73,000 artisanal fishermen regarding the new law. A classification system based on boat size has led to ambiguities where some producers considered to be small-scale artisanal fishermen have been found to be operated by or working directly with the large-scale businesses. Minister Longueira signed an accord with 2 federations representing artisanal fishermen, but other fishermen like Gino Bavestrello of the national council for the patrimonial defense of Chilean fishermen, say that the groups consulted constitute a minority and do not represent the interests of the majority of small-scale fishermen in Chile.Gino Bavestrello, National Director, Condepp¬¬¬¬¬: In order for the law to be approved, Minister Longueira called upon a group of artisanal fishermen who represent their own interests. Our organization, the Council for the Defense of the Patrimonial Fishermen of Chile, is the largest group of artisanal fishermen, and they’ve never called on us to ask how we feel about this law…We think that artisanal fishing is going to disappear, because they’re basically handing over the fishing resources to a handful of businesses that are going to exploit them commercially.Voiceover: While the fishing law currently remains held up due to the failure of legislatures to consult indigenous communities, many are concerned that it will only be a speed bump to the eventual passage of all or most of its major provisions. Fishermen opposed to the measures have announced that they intend to not comply if they are signed into law, saying they are struggling to protect their way of life.

Comments

Our automatic spam filter blocks comments with multiple links and multiple users using the same IP address. Please make thoughtful comments with minimal links using only one user name. If you think your comment has been mistakenly removed please email us at contact@therealnews.com

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore.

I’ve been wondering for a while what is in the minds of German bankers, who seem willing to let Europe go into a deep recession and do not seem to be having any flexibility on how they collect their debts. Now joining us to try to unpack all of this is Michael Ash.Michael is a professor of economics and chair of the economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Thanks very much for joining us, Michael.MICHAEL ASH, PROF. ECONOMICS, UMASS: Thanks for having me, Paul.JAY: So German banks look at this situation. They see Greece going into deep recession, Spain, Portugal. Even France is starting to teeter, in a sense. What is in the minds of these German bankers?ASH: Well, I think you’ve asked the question just the right way. And it’s really important that we focus our attention on the German banks. I mean, a fish rots from the head down. And really, if you want to look at the [unintel.] causes of the European problem and have good predictions about what’s going to happen next, it’s essential to think about what’s going on in the German banking system. This is really the birthplace of the crisis. So asking what next from them is a really valuable question. You’ve asked: how can they let things slide this far? Well, to be honest, I’m shocked at how far they have let things go. I think at this point an ideology has taken hold that, hey, we’ve been paying the bills for Southern Europe for so long, we’re going to stop. That ideology’s completely backwards. I can explain why, if you’re interested.JAY: Yeah, sure. Yeah, go ahead. Explain.ASH: So, well, the ideology is, we’ve been writing–we the Germans have been writing the checks for these profligate Southern Europeans. And in fact, it’s almost the opposite situation. In fact, it’s Southern Europeans who have been buying the German goods that have kept the German economy afloat until now.So I think you’ve got kind of a collision coming between this growing Northern European ideology that they’ve been paying the bills and the fact that much of their reasonably good times before the crisis were made possible by the earning and spending of Southern Europeans. I mean, you really have a circular-flow economy in Europe, and it’s been very badly disrupted in the south. And I think that, you know, there’s going to be some unpleasant consequences as they spread from the south up through France and Germany.JAY: So German banks are essentially undermining, weakening, destroying their own best markets. Most of German exports have been going to these quote-unquote “peripheral” countries of Europe. So, you know, what is this a strategy about? I mean, whether it’s a strategy or not, what they’re going to end up with is much lower wages in all these countries. They’re going to try to unravel, and probably will, in Greece and Spain, at least, and Portugal, unravel much of the social safety net. And Italy, I should say, as well. So they’re going to have this big pool of skilled, cheap labor who can’t buy as much product. So what is the objective here? To better compete in the developing world? In Asia and China and India, Brazil, and such?ASH: I think strategy is overstating what we’re seeing from the German banks. I think it helps if you think about the German banks as kind of a four-faced statue or four-faced monster, that there isn’t–nobody is at the wheel. And so it’s a mistake to think somebody old and sensible is in charge. There’s really nobody in charge at the German banks. There are just kind of fragments of several systems.So, you know, there’s this one German banker who’s incredibly inflation-o-phobic. We’re told, oh, the memory of the Weimar inflation–90 years ago at this point–haunts this banker so much, couldn’t possibly imagine an expansionary monetary policy. So that’s one of the faces of the German banker. And this guy is dead-set against any sort of expansionary activity. It might cause inflation–very, very scary. And then you’ve got this other guy who seems nothing like his very conservative anti-inflationary counterpart. He’s the gambler who went down to the Spanish Riviera looking for some action and just loved rolling the dice and was willing to take these very large gambles on Southern European real estate, on, you know, coastal real estate in Spain, float the Greek sovereign debts because it seemed really profitable. So this was the kind of let the good times roll German [crosstalk]JAY: And you could add to that their plays in the American real estate market, and not just subprime mortgage. I mean, I think Deutsche Bank now owns one of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas.ASH: Yeah. So, right. So it wasn’t just playing their own real estate markets. I mean, I think they picked up the lesson. I think you can–you know, there’s kind of a lesson here that bad banking drives out good, that this German banker, the high-roller, looked across the Atlantic, saw the American cousin, his cowboy cousin, making out like a bandit, so he said, I want to take some of those big bets too, and then did, on Southern European real estate, Greek sovereign debt, but also buying CDSs (credit default swaps) and other exotic derivatives straight from the U.S. market. So that high-roller was really a newcomer to German banking.The inflation-o-phobe and the kind of really very careful German banker were one wing of German banking. Then we got these high-rollers. Their combination–the high-rollers brought on the immediate crisis. And their combination has led to the, you know, stern, nasty bill collector German banker, who says, ah, the bill must be paid, and is really insisting that the bills be paid even if that collection effort is going to, you know, ultimately drive the German economy into the ground. And it’s already done a very–it’s done very serious damage to the Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, and Irish economies. And really, I think, you know, Italy is kind of teetering on the brink. You’ve got these three.Let me tell you about the last German banker, the one who’s been kind of shoved into the corner, who was actually the first one I learned about, and he’s a fairly likeable fellow. That’s the benevolent social planner. That’s the German banker from the ’60s and ’70s who owned a lot of stock in German companies and was therefore willing to make long-term plans for the future, wasn’t too averse to talking to labor, would invite labor to the table, would even invite labor to be on the board of directors. So that was kind of the good face. So you’ve got these four faces. The good face has kind of been crammed into the corner, and these other three are sort of staring at each other, not really in full agreement, but kind of paralyze because they don’t know what to do next.JAY: I mean, is part of this that they kind of all buy into this Austrian school of economics, that there needs to be a catharsis, there needs to be a cleansing, capitalism needs to go through these periods where it gets rid of excess capacity and better disciplines the workforce? I mean, do they not just believe that capitalism just is resilient, and to go through, quote-unquote, the pain, and out the other side will come a vibrant Europe? But I don’t know what the evidence for that is. But is that what they believe? They’ve got to believe something here.ASH: I don’t know that there’s such a Randian fellow at work in the German banks. I mean, I think that the stern bill collector simply has a–the bills must be paid; we made the loans, you must pay back the loans; you know, kind of a very–you know, sort of the you must pay the rent landlord who comes to the door, you know, the evil drooping mustache.So I don’t think that, you know, the cleansing, a cleansing dose of capitalism, liquidate, liquidate, liquidate is really what these bankers have in mind. I think that they’ve more kind of hit a number of contradictions and that they sort of don’t know which of these bankers is bought. They know that the high-roller got them into very serious trouble, so they’re not willing to start lending. The inflation hawk and the stern bill collector are maybe of a piece, that they are unwilling to try anything too expansionary. You know, I think it’s–nobody is planning enough for this to be a kind of a well-coordinated strike on the European welfare state. I think that the European bankers are willing to sweep up a couple of chips along the way if they fall on the table and they’re easy pickings. But I think it’s sort of–too much planning would be involved to say, oh, this was an engineered crisis that allowed [crosstalk]JAY: But whether it’s an engineered crisis or not, they’re certainly taking advantage of the crisis. And, I mean, what you’re seeing is massive amounts of privatization, you know, in Greece and some of these other same countries. You’re going to see lower wages. They’re–you’re–enormous pressure on the social safety net. And years–I don’t see how it’s anything but years of deep recession and high unemployment. I mean, that much is objective, is it not?ASH: Yeah. I think these are good points, and they bring to mind a couple of thoughts. The first is that capitalists can’t live with stagnation either. So taking advantage of the recession, as I said, to sort of pick up a couple of quick hits, you know, some chips have fallen on the table, some free $20 bills on the sidewalk. I can see that well and good.But I really think that the extent to which the bankers have allowed the European situation to really at this point spiral out of control is self-destructive, but they can’t do anything about it. They are really–it is not in their constitution. It’s really going to take, I think, a new political political movement, a kind of a new political orientation in Europe to do something about this. I think the bankers have hit the end–you know, sort of hit the end of their bag of tricks, and they simply cannot envision themselves overseeing a Keynesian-type expansion. But they also–I don’t think it’s planned for a fully stagnated economy [crosstalk]JAY: This has to come back and bite them in the bum. I mean, how can this not lead eventually to much more serious stagnation in Germany itself?ASH: Well, it has to. I mean, as you pointed out, they’ve cut off the fuel to their main markets. They are not–they’ve cut off the fuel to their main markets. They are not–I do not think they can realistically expect to make up the sales, even with the burdgeoning elite in China, in number, if not in percent. So I really think that they have backed themselves into a rough corner.Now let me make a couple–I want to take a step back and make a couple of other observations. The first is that it’s interesting to think about where the German working class has been during this period. The German working class on the one hand has stayed employed. So they don’t have the problems of mass unemployment that the Spanish and Portuguese and Greek working class. On the other hand, the German working class has really taken it on the chin in the last generation. They’ve been kind of an unwilling or a semi-willing participant in the Germans’ euro-based plan. So they’ve accepted increasingly low wages. And the German wage share has fallen something like 10 percentage points, which is a massive redistribution from labor to capital in Germany over the last generation. The German working class has been told that’s the price of staying employed. So you won’t be as rich, you know, you won’t have as big a share of the pie, but you at least won’t be in the same boat that the Southern Europeans have found themselves in.So it’d be very interesting to see what happens as this promise becomes increasingly untenable, the promise of, well, at least you’re employed, even if you’re not paid as much. That becomes increasingly untenable. It’d be very interesting to see if there is mobilization by the German working class and other working class, other union labor movement in Northern Europe.JAY: Alright. Well, thanks for joining us, Michael.ASH: Well, thanks very much for having me.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

Comments

Our automatic spam filter blocks comments with multiple links and multiple users using the same IP address. Please make thoughtful comments with minimal links using only one user name. If you think your comment has been mistakenly removed please email us at contact@therealnews.com

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week’s edition of The Black Financial and Fraud Report with Bill Black, who now joins us from Kansas City.

Bill is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri—Kansas City. He’s a white-collar criminologist, a former financial regulator, and author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Thanks for joining us, Bill.BILL BLACK, ASSOC. PROF. ECONOMICS AND LAW, UMKC: Thank you.JAY: So you’ve been talking in many of our interviews and you’ve been writing about what you thought was the likelihood of a coming grand betrayal, in other words, President Obama making deals for cuts to the social safety net and various other kinds of austerity measures, as part of a deal dealing to get the fiscal cliff done, and then to get the debt ceiling deal done. But President Obama recently has been saying he’s not going to, he says, negotiate under the gun of the debt ceiling. So isn’t that what you want to hear?BLACK: Well, it may be. I certainly agree that you certainly shouldn’t make concessions to people who engage in extortion, ’cause if you do, they’ll simply extend the debt limit for only a very short time period, and they’ll keep coming back, and it’ll be the death of 1,000 cuts. So Obama, if he has any competence as a negotiator, should be refusing to give in to the extortion.Problem is that he’s been engaged in unilateral disarmament as a negotiator leading up to these talks. He had a couple of ways, clear ways, that he could have completely defused what Donald Trump called his “nuclear weapon” of threatening to use the debt limit to extort concessions from Obama. One is the requirement under the Fourteenth Amendment to pay U.S. debt, and the second was the idea of minting this $1 trillion platinum coin.JAY: Okay. Let me just ask you about the coin thing, ’cause John Stewart on The Daily Show went after Paul Krugman–~~~JOHN STEWART, HOST, THE DAILY SHOW: If somebody’s ruining their brand with a $1 trillion coin idea, I don’t think it’s the non-economist. [snip] So I stand by our research on the topic, the due diligence, and my ignorant conclusion that a $1 trillion coin minted to allow the president to circumvent the debt ceiling, however arbitrary that may be, is a stupid [bleep] idea.~~~JAY: –’cause Krugman apparently in one of his articles took this as a serious idea that he could do this, and Stewart was kind of ridiculing him about it. I mean, this is a serious thing he could do. I mean, do you think it’s a legitimate policy alternative? And let’s explain to everybody this is the idea the Treasury mints a $1 trillion coin, deposit it–the Fed mints it, is that it? Who mints this coin, anyway?BLACK: The Mint mints the coin.JAY: The Mint mints the coin. Under whose direction? Treasury Department.BLACK: Under the Treasury, and which is to say the president’s direction. And they could–and the law expressly says you can make it in whatever denomination you want. So if people are trying to extort you using the debt limit, make it a $1 trillion coin, or $2 trillion, $4 trillion. It doesn’t matter. And then you deposit it at the Federal reserve, and, poof!, all of the leverage goes away by the House Republicans and the Tea Party in particular that’s trying to use this nuclear weapon of extortion where they hold hostage the U.S. economy. So it was actually a very good idea. And, you know, it would have required all of about $0.80 worth of platinum–that’s literally how much platinum would have been required, because you just make it a clad, you know, coin. And for reasons that, you know, make perfect sense as a humorist, you know, John Stewart’s had a lot of fun with this. And then Paul Krugman, I think, made the tactical mistake of playing in John Stewart’s garden by saying, hey, this is, you know, a serious idea, and you didn’t research it at all; it just sounded funny to you, so you made fun of it. And, you know, John Stewart says, yes, that’s what we do; we make fun of ideas. But then Stewart added: and obviously it’s a stupid idea. Well, no, obviously it isn’t a stupid idea. And if Stewart knew more about economics, he wouldn’t think it was a silly idea. But, you know, he is a humorist.JAY: But that being said, President Obama, I think, has said he won’t do it.BLACK: Well, Obama has said he won’t do either of these things that would remove the leverage of the Tea Party to extort America and threaten to destroy our economy. So that’s really completely imprudent on Obama’s part. When you have somebody like the Tea Party threatening the U.S. economy and you have the ready ability to defuse that nuclear weapon, you should use that authority. And so this is at best an irresponsible action.JAY: Now, is this partly because Obama knows that the corporate backers of the Tea Party, for example, the Koch brothers, don’t want this to happen, in the sense they don’t want another paralyzed economy, they don’t want the debt ceiling legislation not to be enacted, and so that Obama’s kind of calling their bluff?BLACK: I wish that were true. I mean, you can certainly see a much harder politician saying this is just going to hurt the Republican brand, that they’re going to threaten to ruin the U.S. economy, and if they ever did it, in fact it would cause such economic devastation that it might destroy the Republican Party. So that, of course, is a possibility, that Obama is that, you know, strategic and trying to bait the Republicans into doing their worst, with the idea that it will hurt the Republican brand.Another possibility, though, of course, is that he wants the excuse to give in. And remember, we just had him propose to make concessions to the Republicans in which he was going to make very sharp cuts in social spending, and sharp cuts in the safety net as well. And we were saved only by Harry Reid, who took the Obama instrument of surrender and literally threw it in the fireplace and burned it up rather than to make that proposal. And before that, in the broader discussions in the fiscal cliff, Obama was very much in favor of an austerity package–back in July 2011 and November 2011, Obama was very much in terms of an austerity package. And even now, Obama is saying, once we get past this extension of the debt limit, we’re open to doing the grand betrayal. So I think all he’s saying is, I’m going to fight you on the debt extension, but then I’ll give you the deal anyway. The Republicans, of course, are saying that they are going to demand austerity as the price of doing anything on the debt limit.And so the column I just did today looked at what were the–you know, how did we get here? How did this austerity idea that has repeatedly caused recessions and depressions, where did it come from in recent times? And it turns out it’s the Pete Peterson Institute. And Pete Peterson, of course, is the Republican billionaire who’s said that he’s going to spend his fortune trying to unwind the safety net in America, that he wants a combination of lower taxes and dramatically reduced social spending, and then, you know, to really go after–his ultimately goal, he has said, is to privatize Social Security. And, of course, this is the great dream of Wall Street in terms of their fees.So I look back, and the Pete Peterson Institute is the place–and it still employs the senior fellow, an economist named John Williamson, a Brit, at least originally, who proposed the Washington consensus. So I went and looked at the original document, which he published in 1990–it was a speech he actually gave in 1989–in which he coined the phrase Washington consensus, ’cause, of course, there’d been a lot of reinventing history in his writing since. The original piece is entirely in the context of the Latin American debt crisis, and it starts out right at the first paragraph and says, hey, here’s the deal: we’re going to give some delay in the South American debt, Latin American debt, and in return we’re going to require them to agree to strong conditionality, which is code for whatever we tell them to do, right? And the very first thing on his list–and he called it central to the whole idea of the Washington consensus was austerity.So austerity, deregulation, privatization, the whole neoliberal agenda–although he objects to that term–is there in the first document as a way of forcing Latin American nations to agree to a completely new governance structure imposed by Washington, D.C., for the benefit of American banks and the IMF to collect debts from Latin America.Now, that of course was a terrible experience in much of Latin America and accounts for why we have so many Latin American leaders elected over the last ten years on a platform of rejecting the Washington consensus–in other words, elect me ’cause I am going to fight against the Washington consensus. Go forward in time and this is the same mindset that caused Europe to adopt austerity. And I have another recent column about, you know, Germany has just announced that in the fourth quarter, growth went sharply negative, probably by 0.5 percent, which is a lot. That would be, like, the equivalent, if you straight-lined it out, of -2 percent growth for a year. And the Eurozone has been as a whole forced into recession. This news on Germany means that that recession is getting far worse in the Eurozone. And as I’ve stressed before, places like Spain, Italy, and Greece have Great Depression levels of unemployment. And so we have an idea, a terrible idea, austerity, that makes recessions worse, that creates Great Depression levels of unemployment in many countries, that will not die, no matter how much damage it causes to the world. And, of course, when really bad ideas refuse to die, even though they’re proven to be bad ideas time after time, then you know you’re dealing with dogma, not with science. So that which is called neoliberal economics is one of the only areas that I know of that purports to be a science in which we have gone dramatically downhill in the science content over the last 50 years, such that it isn’t a science at all anymore, it’s a weird religion of austerity that actually takes pleasure in causing suffering in other nations.JAY: Alright. Thanks a lot for joining us, Bill.BLACK: Thank you.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

Comments

Our automatic spam filter blocks comments with multiple links and multiple users using the same IP address. Please make thoughtful comments with minimal links using only one user name. If you think your comment has been mistakenly removed please email us at contact@therealnews.com

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. (Courtesy: Anthony Quintano)The 600 residents of Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, have done a laudable job of keeping the vulgarities of modern life at bay. There are no fast-food restaurants, no neon signs. Instead, the former iron-mining town has rambling country inns and a main road lined with Victorian and Arts and Crafts houses. Locals gather for breakfast, as they have since 1938, at Polly’s Pancake Parlor, which grinds its own corn and wheat and uses syrup from the sugar maples that give the town its name. With tourism driving the economy, the village’s biggest assets are its fall foliage, fields of lupines and uninterrupted views of the snow-capped White Mountains.

Each March, Sugar Hill’s voters gather at the white meetinghouse–a converted church built in 1830 with a trio of gold-leaf clocks on its steeple–for their annual town meeting. Anyone who collects enough signatures can place an item on the agenda to be voted into law. That New Englander impulse toward self-government, combined with the feistiness that led Sugar Hill to secede from a neighboring town in 1962, might explain its residents’ sweeping response when they learned in 2010 that an international electric consortium has proposed a high-voltage transmission line that would slice through the village like a giant zipper.

The Northern Pass, if built, would enter New Hampshire at the Canadian border and bisect some of the state’s most intact forestland as it connects Quebec’s hydroelectric dams with New England’s power grid. Steel towers, some exceeding thirteen stories in height, would line the 180-mile route, which snakes through ten miles of protected national forest and seven miles of Sugar Hill. Conservationists say the project is unneeded and could degrade waterways and fragment wildlife habitats. 

But what New Hampshirites fear most is that the Northern Pass will disfigure the state’s visual landscape. “It could destroy our economy,” says Dolly McPhaul, a lifelong Sugar Hill resident. “If people don’t build their second homes here, where are the builders going to get their money? The plumbers? The grocery store that feeds these people?” McPhaul and her neighbors were particularly disheartened to learn that the Northern Pass required federal and state permits–but no local permits at all.

“You’re shocked to find out you have no say,” says Nancy Martland, a retired child-development researcher who moved to Sugar Hill in 2007. “Even your whole town. Even at town meeting. Even your Select Board. You have no power. People in New Hampshire–maybe everywhere, I don’t know–we want to stand up for ourselves.”

So they did. Last year, Martland and McPhaul campaigned for a local ordinance that would ban corporations from acquiring land or building structures to support any “unsustainable energy system.” The ordinance stripped those corporations of their free-speech and due-process rights under the Constitution, as well as protections afforded by the Constitution’s commerce and contract clauses. Judicial rulings that recognized corporations as legal “persons” would not be recognized in Sugar Hill. Any state or federal law that tried to interfere with the town’s authority would be invalidated. “Natural communities and ecosystems”–wetlands, streams, rivers, aquifers–would acquire “inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish,” and any resident could enforce the law on their behalf. “All power is inherent in the people,” the measure stated.

Sugar Hill’s attorney suggested this was folly; local governments can’t override state or federal law, much less the Constitution. Such an ordinance could attract a lawsuit, which the village could ill afford. McPhaul, a Republican and a charity volunteer and self-described “goody two-shoes,” also worried about litigation. “But what is your option?” she asks. “To lie down, play dead and let them destroy your town?” After a two-month public-awareness campaign, Sugar Hill’s residents took up the ordinance at their 2012 town meeting. It passed by a unanimous voice vote.

Thus, Sugar Hill became one of dozens of communities nationwide–mostly villages but also the city of Pittsburgh–that have reacted to environmental threats by directly challenging the Constitution and established case law. The leading champion of this confrontational strategy–which has its share of critics, even among progressives who share the sense of desperation that is driving it–is a bearish 43-year-old attorney named Thomas Linzey. These skirmishes, Linzey believes, are the first steps in a long campaign to wrest power from corporations and strengthen American democracy. He refers to the strategy as “collective nonviolent civil disobedience through municipal lawmaking.”

* * *

Linzey runs the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that advocates for local self-government and the rights of nature. CELDF comes into threatened communities, educates residents about US legal history, and trains them to advocate for “rights-based ordinances” like Sugar Hill’s. About thirty municipalities in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and New Mexico have enacted such measures, according to Linzey, following an earlier round of over 100 more modest laws. CELDF’s organizers have helped citizens fight frackers, coal companies, factory farms, big-box stores, water bottlers and sewage-sludge dumpers. They’ve campaigned to overhaul the city charter in Spokane, Washington. And they aided the successful effort to confer rights on nature in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution. Linzey, whose baritone voice is filled with populist fire, has crafted a message whose appeal brings together liberals distrustful of big business and conservatives distrustful of big government.

Linzey’s approach has evolved dramatically since 1995, when the organization he co-founded started assisting Pennsylvania communities that were battling polluters and developers. Newly admitted to the bar, the young Alabaman initially put his faith in the regulatory system. “It seemed to us at the time that people needed lawyers,” he recalls. “The problem was not that we didn’t have good environmental laws. The problem was, the world has gone to shit because we didn’t have enough people enforcing those laws.” So Linzey applied what he’d learned in law school. Faced with a proposed incinerator or landfill, “we would take the 400-page application and try to find places where it was deficient–gaps, omissions, those types of things.” Based on these bureaucratic challenges, CELDF’s clients often won their first rounds.

“Then the community group would have a victory party,” he recalls. “Everybody would pat each other on the back and say the system works. Meanwhile, thirty, sixty days from then, the corporation would come back and submit a new and improved permit application, and the project would move forward. So we weren’t stopping anything.” 

The attorney wondered what he was accomplishing by working within the system. “In many ways, the regulatory process is intended to exhaust communities, because it does not recognize–and neither does the broader structure of the law recognize–that communities have any power to make those fundamental decisions about energy or transportation or agriculture.” Citizens could delay but not stop projects; the law was “merely regulating the rate at which the environment was being destroyed.”

Behind Linzey’s epiphany is almost 200 years of jurisprudence giving both constitutional rights and legal personhood to corporations. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which used the First Amendment to permit corporations unlimited independent political spending, is just the latest in a chain of such rulings. Most famous is the 1886 case Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific, in which a railroad company argued that a particular tax law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the [clause] applies to these corporations,” Chief Justice Morrison Waite said from the bench. “We are all of opinion that it does.” Since then, courts have also used the Constitution’s Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and its commerce and contract clauses, to expand corporate rights. Linzey believes these rulings are rooted in the very structure of the Constitution, which he says “puts the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities and nature.”

The Constitution also concentrates power by declaring itself, along with federal statutes, “the supreme law of the land.” And starting in 1868, a judicial doctrine known as Dillon’s Rule held local governments subservient to state legislatures, which “breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist,” Linzey adds.

With communities holding so little authority, Linzey and his colleagues decided that the only way to fight environmental threats was through open defiance. He compares this to Northern jurors who refused to convict defendants in fugitive slave cases, suffragists who risked arrest to vote and African-Americans who sat down at segregated lunch counters. “Change does not happen by silver-tongued lawyers going into courthouses,” he says. “The only way law changes is through disobedience.” There was no reason, he concluded, that disobedience couldn’t come from local governments–and he found eager allies in Pennsylvania’s Republican-leaning farm country. 

* * *

Linzey had started receiving calls from elected supervisors worried about the arrival of factory hog farms in their rural townships. The officials had tried to stave off the invasions by strictly regulating manure disposal, only to find their efforts pre-empted by Pennsylvania law. Now some were willing to butt heads with the state government. Linzey drafted an ordinance that would ban corporate farming altogether, drawing from similar laws passed by nine Midwestern states. About twenty townships enacted the measure, he estimates, followed by eighty that banned the importing of corporate-hauled sewage sludge for use as fertilizer on farm fields. (Despite industry assurances, some scientists consider the noxious sludge toxic. Two Pennsylvania teens had recently died after exposure to such sludge.) A few townships went further, refusing altogether to recognize the personhood of corporate sludge haulers.

Predictably, Pennsylvania’s state government invoked its supremacy. It passed a law in 2005 empowering the attorney general to sue local governments that restrict “normal agricultural operations,” then took legal action against two townships, East Brunswick and Packer. Both withdrew their sludge bans, though Packer’s supervisors voted not to recognize the attorney general’s authority to restrict their autonomy. A court voided that measure.

News of the Pennsylvania rebellion reached other places. In Barnstead, New Hampshire (population 4,600), a home-schooling mother named Gail Darrell, who lives in a Revolutionary War—era cabin with her piano-tuner husband, watched with alarm as a water bottler called USA Springs announced plans to extract 310,000 gallons a day from three bedrock wells in nearby Nottingham. A report by civil engineer Thomas Ballestero warned that the operations could deplete and contaminate the local water supply. Yet the project seemed to be moving forward. 

Darrell had never been involved in local politics. But her children were getting older, leaving her with free time. So she volunteered to sit on a committee studying how Barnstead could protect its own water. There she learned about CELDF and invited Linzey to speak to the town’s selectmen. Linzey’s call to outlaw corporate privilege found a receptive audience in freedom-loving New Hampshire. (The state constitution authorizes its citizens to form a new government when the existing one starts serving private interests.) “It’s always been a bit ornery up here,” says Gordon Preston, who chaired the board of selectmen at the time. Preston had reservations about CELDF’s approach: “The biggest fear of a small town is that they get their asses hauled into court and have little or no money to defend themselves.” But he also shared Linzey’s concern about corporate power and supported the principle of local self-government.

Darrell worked with the selectmen to put an anti-bottling ordinance on the 2006 town meeting agenda. Shortly before the vote, Linzey and historian Richard Grossman came to Barnstead to teach CELDF’s Democracy School, an intensive seminar that traces the history of corporate and government power. It was a clarifying moment for Darrell. “I didn’t really understand about the Constitution till I went through the school–that it wasn’t about freedom,” she says. “We grow up with that IV drip in our arm that tells us that we live in the greatest democracy that ever was.” The seminar gave Darrell the momentum she needed to defend the ordinance, which passed overwhelmingly at the town meeting and was strengthened two years later. Barnstead not only banned corporate water withdrawals and stripped bottling companies of their presumed constitutional rights; it also threatened secession from any government that tries to overturn the ban or “intimidate the people of Barnstead.” The measure was among the first to confer civil rights on natural systems like aquifers and rivers. Nottingham, which had initially rebuffed CELDF, followed suit with a similar measure.

“New Hampshire has always had an independent spirit,” Darrell says. “The soil here is crap, and you really have to work hard to farm. When people came up here to settle, they were coming into no-man’s land. You had to have enough gumption to stick it out, to stand up for yourself, and to make it through the winter. That spirit has carried out into the way we treat government. We believe that we have the inalienable right to govern ourselves. So to hear the language of the ordinance–that didn’t seem foreign to people.”

USA Springs later filed for bankruptcy, so it is hard to know whether these ordinances had any impact. But Darrell, who became CELDF’s New England organizer, claimed a more tangible victory in Shapleigh, Maine, where residents passed a rights-based ordinance in 2009. Their target, the Nestlé subsidiary Poland Spring, pulled up its test wells and left four months later. “Without the town’s permission to proceed on that project,” says Mark Dubois, the company’s natural-resource manager, “we had no project.”

Nestlé’s withdrawal felt particularly sweet because Shapleigh’s citizens had defied both the company and their own elected officials. When the board of selectmen refused to put the rights-based ordinance to a public vote, calling it unconstitutional, bottling opponents convened their own town meeting and passed it 114-66. “Nobody is covering our asses out here,” says Charles Mullins, a retired machinist who later served one term as selectman. “When the people up high don’t do their jobs, then we’ve got to get out in the streets and do it ourselves.”

Victories like Shapleigh’s have inspired other threatened communities, but they’re not really part of CELDF’s long-term game plan. For Linzey, disobedient lawmaking is an organizing tactic, not a legal one. He knows municipalities violate the law when they assert supremacy over state and federal governments. He expects “lawsuits galore” and assumes judges won’t permit these affronts to the Constitution. But he also believes that every courtroom defeat will trigger a bigger backlash against the status quo, leading to more municipal defiance. Over time, he expects to build the critical mass necessary to amend state constitutions and eventually the federal one. 

CELDF considers this the only path to environmental sustainability, and its leaders freely criticize liberals who believe otherwise. “We’re seen as not able to play well with others,” says Ben Price, who leads the nonprofit’s efforts in Pennsylvania. He admits that CELDF’s uncompromising style can be off-putting, but he doesn’t care. “Frankly, I’m not willing to suggest that the traditional progressive strategy is just as good” as the one CELDF is pursuing, and “we’re just giving another tool in the toolbox–I don’t agree with that. If trying to regulate the rate of destruction was working so well, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in environmentally.”

Price says that when he chats with mainstream environmentalists, “what I constantly hear is, ‘We need to have a seat at the table. If we’re not sitting down when they’re talking about these rules and regs, we’re left out. Is that what you want?’ My answer is yes. We need to stop legitimizing what they’re doing by being invited to the table of power, and then having no power.”

The criticism, though, runs both ways. Some progressives call CELDF’s tactics pie-in-the-sky at best, dangerous at worst. “I’m concerned about how this can suck energy out of other avenues for change,” says Jon Snyder, a Spokane City Council member who believes the resources spent on a CELDF-sponsored ballot initiative cost his council the chance for its “first progressive majority.” The 2011 measure would have amended the city charter to strip rights from corporations and give them to waterways, neighborhoods and workers. It lost by 1,000 votes out of 58,700 cast. That’s a thin margin, but wider than the eighty-nine votes that would have elected a fourth progressive to the seven-member council. The liberal bloc has lost 4—3 votes on marriage equality, saving union jobs, utility rate reform, historic preservation, alternatives to incarceration and job-placement services for the poor, Snyder says.

Constitutional scholar Kent Greenfield believes CELDF’s shortcomings go beyond misplaced energy. “I totally understand people’s revulsion against corporations’ misdeeds,” says the Boston College law professor. “I think, though, that we shouldn’t be squandering this political moment on organizational tools that, if implemented, would be a disaster. The reason we have a national government is because there are certain things we ought to decide at the national level and we can’t let people opt out of.” America’s racial history, he says, is exhibit number one; if Barnstead can threaten to secede, so can a town that wants to resegregate its schools. “This is what we fought the Civil War over, for goodness’ sake. This is what the civil rights movement was about. We cannot let the George Wallaces of the world stand in the schoolhouse door and say, ‘Our community norm of segregation is going to control here in the face of the national norm of equality.’ The assertion of power to rewrite the Constitution within one’s own community is a nonstarter–and ought to be.” 

Linzey has heard the racial analogy before and rejects it. He argues that CELDF’s ordinances expand rights, at least to flesh-and-blood humans. The Constitution and federal laws should be used, he says, to overturn local restrictions of rights. “Vehicles are only as good,” he says, “as the values that animate them.”

* * *

In the decade since it first took aim at corporate privilege, CELDF has jumped beyond its rural roots. It crossed the Rubicon in 2010, when Pittsburgh’s City Council unanimously passed a rights-based anti-fracking ordinance. “It was a very, very assertive bill,” says sponsor Doug Shields, who has since retired from the council. “It didn’t mince words. And there was talk that if you do this, you’ll be challenged the day after your vote.” Sure enough, last year Pennsylvania’s legislature passed a bill nullifying almost all local regulation of oil and gas extraction. (The state’s Public Utility Commission says this includes the Pittsburgh ordinance.) The new law is currently in litigation.

Even before the Pittsburgh foray, CELDF started working internationally. After a handful of townships had given civil rights to “natural communities and ecosystems”–an idea floated forty years ago by legal scholar Christopher Stone in an essay titled “Should Trees Have Standing?”–CELDF was invited by an NGO to help draft a similar provision in Ecuador’s Constitution. “Ecuador has been treated by multinational corporations as a cheap hotel,” says associate director Mari Margil. “They come in, they make a giant mess, and then they leave.” The new Constitution, adopted in 2008, gives nature the right to “respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles.” Courts have used that provision to crack down on illegal mining and road construction. Yet resource extraction continues, including the opening of 8 million acres of unspoiled rainforest to oil drilling. Margil and Linzey have also talked with activists in Nepal, Italy, India and New Zealand. 

The heart of CELDF’s work, though, remains in small American communities like those affected by the Northern Pass. Besides Sugar Hill, two other towns outlawed unsustainable energy projects by popular vote last year. Three others rejected or tabled the ordinance. For all of New Hampshire’s iconoclasm, not everyone wants to register dissent through a vehicle that could be overturned in court. “Unfortunately, the state trumps anything the towns do,” says Tom Mullen, developer of a resort that lies in the transmission line’s path. “I want to focus on things that will stop this project now.” For Mullen, that means working with the state government, which in 2012 led to a victory: legislators banned the use of eminent domain to obtain right-of-way for unneeded transmission projects.

Still, CELDF keeps minting activists who want nothing to do with government as usual. Alexis Eynon, a middle-school art teacher, started attending Democracy Schools–following them around New England–when she learned the Northern Pass would come within a mile of her home in Thornton. Eynon built her house from straw bale, framing it with salvaged timber from her five wooded acres and heating it with a geothermal pump and a wood stove. “The original concept was to disturb the land as little as possible,” she says, which makes the nearby utility corridor that much harder to bear. “It takes a spectacular treasure that to me seems so rare in our country–these untouched places–and makes it mundane. It becomes like every other place that’s been destroyed by some kind of industrial project.”

Hearing Linzey speak, and attending the Democracy Schools, convinced Eynon that “nobody’s going to help us here. We have to help ourselves.” In March, she plans to present the rights-based ordinance at Thornton’s town meeting in the hope that it will follow the lead of Sugar Hill, thirty miles away. Eynon knows that some of her neighbors are wary of a lawsuit and that others support the Northern Pass outright. She still considers such ordinances New Hampshire’s only hope.

“The whole regulatory business feels like being a hamster in a hamster wheel,” she says. “I want to put my track shoes to the pavement and just start running.”

© 2012 The Nation

Barry Yeoman is a freelance journalist living in Durham, North Carolina. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone and Discover, among other publications, and won numerous awards.

Comments

What does it take to be a very serious person these days?

China has released statistics on the income gap between rich and poor after keeping the figures secret since 2000. The wealth gap remained ‘relatively large’ according to officials.

­The China’s Gini coefficient, a measure of income disparity used by economists, was 0.474 in 2012, still “relatively large”, though down since peaking in 2008, according to Ma Jiantang, the head of the National Bureau of Statistics.

“China’s Gini coefficient has narrowed from a peak of 0.491 in 2008 and from 0.477 in 2011 and stood at 0.474 in 2012. But still the situation is not a rally,” Ma Jiantang told journalists at a news conference as reported by Reuters.

“It reflected the urgency for our country to speed up reform of the income distribution scheme to narrow the disparity,” Ma added.

China kept silent about income gap figures since 2000, when the index stood at 0.412. The country’s officials had been saying that it was too difficult to calculate incomes, particularly those of the wealthy. The index is viewed as the point at which social dissatisfaction may get out of government control.

The Gini index shows how much of a country’s income goes to each economic level of society. The figure ranges from 0 for complete equality to 1 for perfect inequality. It also can be represented on a 100-point scale.

Official figures made public on Friday are lower than those calculated independently by a research center founded by the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and the Institute of Financial Research and published last month. Their research showed that China’s Gini index for 2010 was 0.61. It would put China at the top of a list of 16 countries by Gini coefficient on the World Bank website.

This past year I’ve had the opportunity to cover the antipoverty movement–and I do believe it’s a movement–it’s just a little too much of a well-kept secret right now. (Photo via equityblog.org)

But I think in 2013, the people and groups at the forefront of antipoverty thinking and action are poised to reach a much wider audience, and gain far greater popular support.

That’s in part because the movement is led by organizations and individuals who have been fighting poverty for decades, and they offer solutions that are grounded in empirical data and the every day experiences of millions of working Americans and families.

In contrast, the opposition to antipoverty reform relies largely on tired stereotypes, myths, and prejudices–that low-income people are lazy and don’t want to work; that they only want handouts, or to live off of welfare; that antipoverty policies have failed; and, most recently, that we can’t afford these investments. 

But an economy that is short on opportunity and concentrates wealth in the hands of a few is coming into focus. The interests of low-income people and a shrinking middle-class are converging–everyone wants fair pay, a shot at a good education, and an economy defined by opportunity and upward mobility.

People are beginning to recognize that we have a proliferation of low wage work– over 25 percent of the jobs in the nation pay less than the poverty line for a family of four, and 50 percent pay less than $34,000 a year. It’s no wonder that 28 percent of all workers last year earned wages below the poverty line, and that more than 70 percent of low-income families and half of all families in poverty were working in 2011. (Low-income defined as living on less than 200 percent of the poverty line, or less than approximately $36,000 annually for a family of three–which now constitutes 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans; poverty defined as living on less than $18,000 annually for a family of three, which now describes more than 46 million Americans.) People are looking for answers.

Currently, the antipoverty movement is largely in sync as it tries to protect programs that are vital to basic human needs during the fiscal debate. But I think there are things it can do in 2013–after the budget debate–to reach a wider audience and bring more people into its fold.

One possible change–or more like a tweak: many seem to focus on the lack of will in our political leadership to fight poverty; instead the primary focus might be on what the movement itself is doing to create political will. 

What is it doing to make itself more visible? How is it creating new relationships between low-income and higher-income people? At any given conference on poverty-related issues, are the people who know poverty first hand presenting, leading, educating, and organizing? At a Congressional or local hearing on food stamps, TANF, SSI, or childcare–is the movement doing whatever it can to ensure that the people who have actually experienced the system are testifying? Are the more “white collar” organizations in the movement going into low-income communities to join people and groups who are organizing on the ground? Are these organizations showing up and also providing resources to protect homes, strengthen schools and neighborhoods, and stand with low-wage workers for better jobs? How are we coming together–rich, poor, and in between–and how are we working in silos? How are we speaking–or failing to speak–with a unified voice? 

I also believe if the movement can coalesce around a simple, clear and concise antipoverty agenda–an Antipoverty Contract for 2013–it can engage new audiences and grow significantly. Choose four or five key policies that are easily grasped and in sync with most people’s values, and forge new alliances around them. Whether or not the contract includes a group’s particular issue, hopefully groups will take a leap of faith and help push it forward, knowing that it might lead to a stronger movement and broader and deeper reforms down the road.

Below is one possible Antipoverty Contract for 2013. I have no idea if these are the right choices–and there are some notable absences–on full employment, housing and education, to name a few.

But I hope this draft serves as a conversation starter among organizations, community groups, and people at the forefront of these fights–and that a core might emerge to coalesce and organize around a clear, focused antipoverty contract this year that might serve as a compelling organizing tool.

Raise the Minimum Wage

Americans generally believe that people who work hard should be able to pay for the basics, including food, housing, healthcare, and education.

As Peter Edelman notes in his book, So Rich, So Poor, for most of the 1960s and 70s the minimum wage paid enough to lift a family of three above the poverty line, about $18,000 today. Not so anymore.  It has been raised only three times in the past thirty years and now stands at $7.25 per hour, which results in sub-poverty earnings of approximately $15,000 for a year-round, full-time employee.

The minimum wage for tipped workers is even worse–a stunning $2.13 per hour, and it’s been locked there since 1991. As a result, food industry servers in the US are three times more likely than the general workforce to be paid sub-poverty wages and twice as likely to need food stamps.

If Congress had indexed the minimum wage to inflation–as they did for, say, individual campaign contribution limits or the new estate tax threshold–it would be $10.58 per hour today. 

Of course, any attempt to raise the wage floor is met with claims from opponents that it will result in massive job losses. This has been shown repeatedly to be complete bunk. Further, a recent report by the National Employment Law Project found that 66 percent of low-wage employees work for large companies, not small businesses, and that more than 70 percent of the biggest low-wage employers have fully recovered from the recession and are enjoying strong profits.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2012, introduced by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller, would raise the federal minimum wage to $9.80 by 2014, index it to inflation, and boost annual earnings to $19,600–above the poverty line for a family of three. It would also raise the tipped minimum wage to $6.85 over five years, and it would be fixed to 70 percent of the full minimum wage.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates the Harkin-Miller proposal would generate more than $25 billion in new consumer spending, which would lead to the creation of more than 100,000 new full-time jobs. It would also increase wages for nearly 30 million Americans–roughly one-fifth of the workforce–because raising the wage floor improves pay for workers who earn at or just above the minimum wage.

Paid sick and family leave for all workers

Americans know that someone should not have to choose between their own health–or caring for a sick child or relative–and a job. They believe that paid sick days are “a basic worker’s right.”

More than 40 percent of people in the private sector workforce–including 81 percent of low-wage workers–don’t receive a single paid sick day. Millions more lack paid leave to care for a sick child or family member. Nearly 25 percent of workers polled said that they have lost a job or were told they would lose a job for taking time off to deal with a personal or family illness.

The US is virtually alone among other high-income countries in not setting a minimal standard for paid sick days, and is in the minority in not providing paid leave to care for a family member. For families in or near poverty, this is especially critical, since a few days’ lost pay makes the struggle to provide the basics–like food–that much harder.

Across demographic and political backgrounds, 75 percent of Americans favor a law providing a “minimum number” of paid sick days for all workers, including 69 percent who strongly favor providing workers with 7 paid sick days per year.

The Healthy Families Act would allow workers in businesses with 15 or more employees to earn up to seven job-protected paid sick days each year–to recover from their own illnesses, access preventative care, or provide care for a sick family member. 

This would be a significant leap forward in protecting all workers and their families.

Affordable Child Care for Working Families

Americans believe that parents should be able to work without spending exorbitant amounts on childcare. 

Half in Ten recently reported that the average cost of full-time child care ranges from $3,600 to $18,200 annually per child. Since there are 7.8 million families with children under age 6 that live below 200 percent of the poverty line–on less than about $36,000 annually for a family of three–that’s just unacceptable (and it’s unacceptable for the middle-class too). 

Edelman reports that federal child care assistance currently reaches about one in seven children who qualify for it, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) puts the number at one in six–either way it’s bleak. Last year, only 1.7 million children received a federal child care subsidy, and Helen Blank, director of Childcare and Early Learning at NWLC, predicted that the number would fall to 1.5 million–the fewest children served since 1998.

The economy can’t afford this lack of investment in working people and children.

“Child care plays two critical roles that support our economy,” said Blank. “It helps children access the high-quality early learning environments they need to succeed, and it helps parents work.”

In fact, in 2010 poverty rates for families headed by a single mother dropped from 40.7 percent to 14 percent when the mother had full-time, year-round employment–and child care is key to that equation.  Research shows that low-income mothers who receive childcare subsidies are more likely to be employed, work more hours, and work standard schedules compared to mothers without subsidies.

But instead of bolstering childcare assistance we are moving in the opposite direction. It’s funded primarily through the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBC)–a fixed federal block grant so funding hasn’t risen with increased demand–and it now faces serious cuts. Blank points to growing waiting lists–75,000 children in Florida, over 20,000 in Maryland, and 36,000 in Massachusetts. She said that in North Carolina, about one out of four families on the state’s waiting list had lost or needed to quit their jobs while waiting for child care assistance.

Blank said child care needs a reauthorization with “significant new funds” so that children are in the kind of early-learning settings they need and deserve, and parents are able to work. Peer countries are able to provide affordable childcare, why can’t we?  

End Childhood Hunger

Americans intuitively recognize that there is no excuse for any child to go hungry in the wealthiest nation in the history of forever.

In a 2011 poll commissioned by Tyson Foods and the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), 80 percent of respondents said they “strongly agree” with the statement that “in the United States of America, no one should go hungry.”

And yet it is our most vulnerable population–children– that are particularly suffering from hunger. More than 16 million live in food insecure households, including nearly 25 percent of all children under age 6, despite the fact that the parents of hungry children typically have full-time jobs. Hunger has a tremendous impact on young children’s health, future potential, and cognitive, social and emotional development.

“There are lifelong implications,” says Dr. Mariana Chilton, associate professor at Drexel University School of Public Health and co-principal investigator for Children’s HealthWatch. “Children in food insecure households have more health problems, are more likely to be hospitalized, and have developmental delays. Young kids who are food insecure may arrive at kindergarten unprepared and never catch up with their peers.”

In 2009, FRAC laid out seven steps to ending childhood hunger by 2015 that are still relevant today. They include a range of measures such as: raising the minimum wage; creating jobs with better wages for lower-income workers; improving the SNAP benefit (which averaged $4.30 per person per day in 2010); increasing participation in the school lunch, breakfast, after school and summer meal programs; improving WIC; engaging all federal agencies that interact with low-income children–whether it’s the DOJ which funds afterschool programs, Treasury which does outreach to families regarding the Earned Income Tax Credit, or others; and creating a national stream of grants and loans to make sure there are decent grocery stores in low-income communities. 

TANF: a path to good jobs for those who can work, assistance for those who can’t

Americans are told TANF is a program that leads to self-sufficiency. It isn’t.

The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program created in 1996 was touted as assistance that would help families on a path towards self-sufficiency. It’s tough to overstate what a bill of goods the American people are being sold when both parties claim it has been a success.

If success means reducing the number of families with children in poverty that receive cash assistance–from 68 for every 100 families in poverty, to 27 for every 100 over the past 16 years–then, yeah it was successful. But then why not just throw everyone off?

If it means not indexing TANF assistance to inflation, so that the benefit is now less than 30 percent of the poverty level in most states (less than $6000 annually for a family of three)… then it was successful. 

If it means keeping TANF recipients in any kind of job in order to receive this meager TANF benefit and no actual wage–whether it’s cleaning toilets, working in a cemetery, sweeping a county garage, or filing folders at an office–rather than helping people acquire the education and skills needed to secure family-supporting wages… then it was successful.

If it means cutting people with significant barriers to employment off of assistance because they reached an arbitrary, state-determined time limit or failed to meet a work requirement (no matter their individual circumstances)–then indeed the program has been successful. It has directly contributed to the fact that 20.4 million people are now living in deep poverty–at less than half of the poverty line, or less than $9,000 for a family of three–up from 12.6 million people in 2000. This number includes over 15 million women and children (nearly 10 percent of all children). 

If success means virtually 50 different welfare systems–for the purpose of “state flexibility”–so that Wyoming provides assistance to just 4 families for every 100 with children in poverty, Mississippi reaches 10, and California 66… then it was successful.

The antipoverty community should fight for a TANF that meets some basic standards regarding who should receive it; supports people in work or education programs that lead to family-supporting rather than dead-end jobs (including through a vehicle like the TANF Emergency Fund that placed 260,000 unemployed low-income parents and young adults in subsidized jobs during the recession and enjoyed bipartisan support from governors); and that addresses the needs of families living in deep poverty–which are usually headed by people with the most significant barriers to employment, including mental and physical health challenges, lack of a high school diploma, caring for a child with special needs, or living with domestic violence–rather than simply throwing families off of assistance.

One possible piece of legislation to rally around is Wisconsin Congresswoman Gwen Moore’s RISE Act. Among the changes it calls for are adjusting each state’s block grant for inflation so it’s no longer frozen at 1996 funding levels; allowing education to count towards work requirements; providing childcare for all work-eligible parents; and prohibiting time limits of less than 60 months. 

Even if the antipoverty community were to win on subsidized jobs alone that would be a significant victory.

Conclusion

An Antipoverty Contract for 2013 wouldn’t guarantee a win on one or any of these five issues this year. But it could engage people who currently aren’t being reached by the antipoverty movement; demonstrate why the movement’s policies are good for the entire nation; and offer an opportunity for people to work together for these and deeper reforms moving forward. I would be interested in constructive comments below, as well as in emails to weekinpoverty@me.com.

© 2012 The Nation

Greg Kaufmann is a Nation contributor covering poverty in America. He has been a guest on NPR, including Here & Now and Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, and various local radio programs including the Matthew Filipowicz Show. His work has also appeared on Common Dreams, Alternet, Tikkun.org, NPR.org, CBSNews.com, and MichaelMoore.com. He previously worked as a staffer for the Kerry campaign, a copywriter and speechwriter for various Democrats in national and local politics, and as a screenwriter. He serves as an advisor for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Iran and Armenia have discussed the latest issues concerning the establishment of a joint economic zone to facilitate bilateral trade interactions.

During a meeting between managing director of Iran’s northwestern Aras Free Trade Zone, Sadeq Najafi, and Governor General of Armenia’s Syunik Province Suren Khachatryan earlier this week, the two sides exchanged views on the creation of a joint economic zone at Nordouz border crossing.

Since Armenian businessmen and manufacturers do not require a visa to enter the Aras Free Trade Zone via Nordouz border crossing, they can explore investment opportunities in the Iranian trade zone, Khachatryan pointed out.

On December 23, 2011, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad paid an official one-day visit to Yerevan. The visit took place upon the invitation of his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan and in response to his earlier trip to Tehran in March, 2011.

Ahmadinejad and Sargsyan discussed the promotion of relations between Tehran and Yerevan, Iran’s oil exports to Armenia and the construction of connecting routes. Iran and Armenia also signed five cooperation documents and memoranda of understanding on the sidelines of Ahmadinejad’s visit to Armenia.

The agreements included cooperation on the construction and launch of hydro-electric power plants on the Aras River, joint cooperation between the Institute of Standards and Industrial Research of Iran and Armenia’s National Institute of Standards, cooperation in social welfare and affairs as well as bilateral environmental cooperation.

The value of trade between Iran and Armenia reached USD270 million in 2010. The figure now reportedly stands at USD300 million. The two countries have taken major strides over the past 20 years toward the expansion of economic ties, particularly in the energy sector.

MP/HMV/SS

(Photograph by Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty)In Algeria, at least 22 foreign hostages remained unaccounted for in what has been described as one of the biggest international hostage crises in decades. Islamist militants opposed to the French air strikes in neighboring Mali seized a gas facility near the Libyan border. It remains unclear how many people died on Thursday when Algerian forces stormed the desert gas complex to free the workers. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has acknowledged it is now directly aiding France’s military operation in Mali.

In the interview below, Democracy Now! speaks with Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, for insight and perspective:

© 2012 Democracy Now!

In the latest discovery revealing the ongoing and devastating effects of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, a fish contaminated with over 2,500 times the legal amount of radiation has been caught off the coast of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, officials announced Friday.

Japanese fishermen unload their catch at the Hirakata fish market in Kitaibaraki, Ibaraki prefecture, close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on April 6, 2011. (TEPCO) Plant operator TEPCO stated that the radioactive element caesium was detected in a murasoi fish at levels “equivalent to 254,000 becquerels per kilogramme — or 2,540 times more than the government seafood limit,” Agence France-Press reports.

Radioactive contamination has remained consistent in the after-life of the crippled nuclear plant. In October, a group of scientists discovered that the plant was likely still leaking radiation into the sea, with up to 40% of bottom feeding fish near the site of the nuclear disaster still showing elevated levels of radiation.

“The fact that many fish are just as contaminated today with caesium 134 and caesium 137 as they were more than one year ago implies that caesium is still being released to the food chain,” Ken Buesseler, senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of the United States reported at that time.

“The (radioactivity) numbers aren’t going down. Oceans usually cause the concentrations to decrease if the spigot is turned off,” he added. “There has to be somewhere they’re picking up the cesium.”

This week’s alarming discovery reveals that the situation for the ecosystems surrounding the plant remain dire.

TEPCO has come under fire for neglecting essential safety measures ahead of the disastrous nuclear meltdown, and the Japanese government has been cited for malfeasance regarding issues of public safety and contamination surrounding the nuclear disaster. Critics have continually highlighted ‘unreliable‘ radiation monitoring, under-reported leakage, and other transgressions.

Malian army gains ground in conflict as UN warns of mass refugee exodus

The Malian army has beaten back Islamist rebels entrenched in 2 strategically important towns in central Mali. The UN has predicted a potential exodus of up to 700,000 refugees amid fears the conflict could spill into neighboring countries.

New research shows that the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is just the tip of the iceberg (Photo:Lindsey Hoshaw via Spot.us.)Floating patches of humanity’s garbage have become a permanent feature in the world’s oceans and a new discovery in the South Pacific shows that this woeful trend has worsened, not improved, since the phenomenon was first discovered nearly two decades ago.

As new research by the 5 Gyres Institute shows, the existence of a new plastic island has been found swirling with junk in ocean currents running near Easter Island in the South Pacific, marking the first documented garbage patch in the Southern Hemisphere.

The new study, published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, documents the first evidence of a defined oceanic “garbage patch,” an accumulation zone of plastic pollution, floating in the area designated as the South Pacific subtropical gyre.

Conducting the first ever sampling of the southern gyre, the research team, led by 5 Gyres Institute Executive Director Dr. Marcus Eriksen, “recorded increased density of plastic pollution with an average of 26,898 particles per square kilometer, and a high of 396,342 km/m2 in the center of the predicted accumulation zone [based on ocean current models].”

“Without a doubt, we have discovered a previously unknown garbage patch in the South Pacific Subtropical Gyre,” said Dr. Eriksen.

Also, a recent investigation by a team of Australia researchers found that “humans have put so much plastic into our planet’s oceans that even if everyone in the world stopped putting garbage in the ocean today, giant garbage patches would continue to grow for hundreds of years.” No matter where plastic garbage enters the ocean, the group said, it will inevitably end up in any of the five ocean basins.

These findings were the result of research done by the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Climate System Science who employed drifter buoys to determine how these giant ocean garbage patches form as a result of ocean currents.

“There are five known garbage patches in the subtropical oceans between each of the continents. Each contains so much plastic that if you were to drag a net through these areas you would pull up more plastic than biomass,” said lead author Dr. Erik van Sebille.

The 1997 discovery of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch,’ brought initial attention to the severe problem of plastic and plastic waste, particularly in how it affects our ocean ecosystems, but these findings show that “plastic pollution isn’t just a North Pacific phenomenon but rather a global problem with global implications for fisheries, tourism, marine ecosystems and human health.”

In the video below, Dr. Erik van Sebille discusses his research on oceanic plastic polllution with animations that illustrate the movement of plastic through the oceans:

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Thomas Hawk, Rob Shenk / flickr)Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, doesn’t know what a fascist is.

Speaking with NPR this week, multimillionaire Mackey tried to express how much he hates Obamacare. Back in 2009, he hated Obamacare so much that he called it “socialism.” But now, in 2013, Mackey thinks Obamacare is “fascism.”

“Technically speaking, [Obamacare] is more like fascism,” he said. “Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it, and that’s what’s happening with our healthcare programs and these reforms.”

Mackey has since walked back this description saying he “regrets using that word now” because there’s “so much baggage attached to it.”

But, whether Mackey meant to or not, it’s about time someone injected the word fascism back into our political debate. Especially now that corporations wield more power today than they have in America since the Robber Baron Era.

First, let’s take on Mackey’s definitions of socialism and fascism, which he likely procured from the Google machine after typing in, “What are the differences between socialism and fascism?”

Yes, socialism encourages more democratic control of the economy. Or, if Mackey insists, more government ownership of the economy — in particular, ownership of the commons and natural resources.   

Fascism, on the other hand, is something completely different. Reporter Sy Mukherjee, who blogged about this story over at ThinkProgress.org notes, “Although fascist nations do often control their ‘means of production,’ Mackey seems to have forgotten that they usually utilize warfare, forced mass mobilization of the public, and politically-motivated violence against their own peoples to achieve their ends.”

The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary defined fascism as: “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
Fascism originated in Italy, and Mussolini claims to have invented the word itself. It was actually his ghostwriter, Giovanni Gentile, who invented it and defined it in the Encyclopedia Italiana in this way: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

In other words, fascism is corporate government — a Libertarian’s wet dream. It’s a government in which the Atlas’s of industry are given free rein to control the economy, just how they’re regulated, how much they pay in taxes, how much they pay their workers. It should be noted here that, ironically, John Mackey describes himself as a Libertarian.  

In 1938, Mussolini finally got his chance to bring fascism to fruition. He dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the “Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni” – the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Members of the Chamber were not selected to represent particular regional constituencies, but instead to represent various aspects of Italian industry and trade. They were the corporate leaders of Italy.

Imagine if the House of Representatives was dissolved and replaced by a Council of America’s most powerful CEOs — the Kochs, the Waltons, the Blankfeins, the Dimons, the Mackeys, you get the picture.

Actually, that’s not too difficult to imagine, huh? But, that’d be similar to what Mussolini defined as fascism.

As we know, fascism was eventually defeated in World War 2. But just before the end of the war, with the fascists on the ropes, the Vice President of the United States at the time, Henry Wallace, penned an op-ed for the New York Times warning Americans about the creeping dangers of fascism — or corporate government.

He defined a fascist as, “those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.”

Under that definition we can throw those CEOs who’ve decided to evade Obamacare’s mandate to provide health insurance to their employees, like New York City Applebee’s franchise owner Zane Terkel, Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter, and executives at Darden Restaurants.

Or, perhaps, Wallace is referring to the banksters at Goldman Sachs who knowingly evaded laws and sold investors “shitty deals” or scammed entire cities into bankruptcy or illegally foreclosed on thousands of Americans through fraudulently robo-signing all in the name of short term profits and all in the name of preserving their monopolistic, too-big-to-fail status.

Either way, evading laws meant to protect the public in order to pad your own pockets has become the name of the game in Corporate America today.

Wallace goes on to write, “The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.”

Can anyone say Fox News, or the rest of the Conservative media complex? Or, those on the Right who divide working people and turn them against each other: makers versus takes, public sector workers versus private sector workers, and white people versus brown people.  

“They use every opportunity to impugn democracy,” wrote Wallace. Does that sound familiar after months of Republican efforts to disenfranchise large swaths of the electorate with voter suppression ID laws, as well as restrictions on early voting and voter registration in largely Democratic areas?

Or what about what Republicans in Pennsylvania are doing right now to rig the next Presidential election by changing how Electoral votes are counted in the state?

Wallace continues, “They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

We often hear of free enterprise from the likes of Wall Street, Big Oil, and the defense industry. Yet these are the same corporations that also lobby to keep generous taxpayer subsidies, bailouts, and no-bid contracts in place that allow them to reign supreme over the markets and crush their smaller, more independent competition.

And the common man suffers as a result. Wages as a percentage of GDP are lower than they’ve ever been. Unionization rates are lower than they’ve ever been in more than a half-century. And yet, corporate profits as a percent of GDP are higher than they’ve ever been in American history.

At the time Wallace was writing this op-ed, he was confident that the fascists had been adequately held in check in America by the Roosevelt Administration. As he wrote, “Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion.”

But, he went on to warn that in the future, “[Fascism] may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac.”

Sure enough, the bastions of fascism can be found on Wall Street. Main Street, which used to be lined with local independent businesses, is now lined with predatory, transnational giants. And along the Potomac, we find politicians who are more than happy to do the bidding of their corporate overlords.

Today in America, we are dangerously close to seeing Wallace’s fascistic, dystopic America come into fruition. We see the traces of it everywhere.

Unfortunately, too many Americans just didn’t have a word to define what’s happening. But, thanks to John Mackey, and thanks to the foresight of Vice President Henry Wallace, we do have the right word now: Fascism.

Given the compression in realized volatility and surge in stocks, it is not totally surprising that spot VIX would see some catch down compression. Sure enough, spot VIX just plunged to 13.00 (for the first time in almost 6 years). Stocks are falling as VIX is falling though – in a convergence from yesterday’s gap-open. Longer-date VIX futures are also falling but not as much – implying further debt-ceiling deadline steepeners being laid out.

VIX vs SPX…

Implied vol has tracked realized vol almost prefectly (lower pane) for the last few weeks…

Niger’s ambassador to Belgium and his wife have been found dead at their residence in Uccle-Ukkel, Brussels, after what police sources announced carbon monoxide poisoning.

The Nigerien Embassy announced the death of Issaka Djibo, 61, and his wife Fatouma, 50, on Friday, AFP reported.

The bodies of the two were found in their bedroom by their daughter, alerted by an embassy employee who had not heard from the ambassador.

Initial findings suggested the couple died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty heater, the Belga news agency cited police officals as saying.

Djibo, took up his post in January 2012, also represented Niger to the European Union.

MRS/JR

According to Bloomberg’s rankings (based on wealth disparity, average unemployment benefits, and overall unemployment pool), and somewhat confirming the food-divide discussion we had last night, the following states are the worst to live in if you are unemployed. Connecticut tops the list with its massive wealth disparity – more than one $200,000 household for every household earning less than $10,000. New York, California, and D.C. are close behind with Oregon and Alabama in 19th and 20th ‘worst’ place to be unemployed. Welcome to the bifurcated un-recovery.

Methodology

Bloomberg Rankings used three criteria to identify the worst states to be unemployed: income replacement, or average unemployment benefits (as of the 2Q 2012) as a percentage of median state income per capita; unemployment pool, or how states stack up on unemployment, using October 2012 rates; and wealth disparity, the ratio of households with incomes of at least $200,000 to those with incomes of less than $10,000, according to the most recently available data from 2009. Each state was ranked on the three criteria and the ranks were averaged.

Source: Bloomberg Briefs

The Italian central bank says the country’s economy is likely to contract by 1.0 percent this year, far worse than a previously expected downturn.

The Bank of Italy said in its economic bulletin on Friday that the country’s gross domestic product will probably decrease 1 percent this year.

“In our country, internal demand still hasn’t reached an inflection point,” the bank said adding that the lower GDP forecast was “due to the worsening of the international scenario and the continuation of the weakness in business activity in recent months.”

Italy’s central bank had estimated a 0.2 percent reduction in the European country’s 2013 GDP.

Italy started to experience recession after its economy contracted by 0.2 percent in the third quarter and by 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011.

According to data, released by Italy’s National Institute for Statistics (ISTAT) on Monday, the country witnessed a 1.0 percent drop in its industrial output in November.

The fall follows a 1.1 percent drop in October, marking the country’s third steep consecutive monthly decline.

The eurozone’s third-largest economy also faced a 2.1-percent decline in its energy production and a 1.3-percent drop in investment goods output in November.

Italy also has the second-highest debt level in the eurozone. Greece holds the worst eurozone GDP debt level.

Europe plunged into financial crisis in early 2008. The worsening debt crisis has forced EU governments to adopt harsh austerity measures and tough economic reforms, which have triggered incidents of social unrest and massive protests in many European countries.

TE/JR

Tehran’s Interim Friday Prayers Leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami says the United States’ support for the Syrian militants belies Washington’s claims to fighting terrorism.

“The United States breeds terrorists and sends those terrorists into Syria to commit crimes with its own and its allies’ money,” Ayatollah Khatami said.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of security forces, have been killed in the raging turmoil.

The Syrian government says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants in Syria are foreign nationals.

Ayatollah Khatami also stressed that the United States is backing those who have already massacred Muslims in several countries including Pakistan and Iraq.

“Who commits such crimes? The answer is clear. They are the ones on whom the United States spends money to kill Muslims,” the senior cleric noted.

He further pointed out that some Arab traitors are also involved in the killing of Muslims and are spending large sums of money on massacring and dividing Muslims.

TNP/HMV/SS

Paul Jay, Senior Editor, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore.

I’ve been wondering for a while what is in the minds of German bankers, who seem willing to let Europe go into a deep recession and do not seem to be having any flexibility on how they collect their debts. Now joining us to try to unpack all of this is Michael Ash.

Michael is a professor of economics and chair of the economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Thanks very much for joining us, Michael.

Michael Ash, Erof. Economics, UMass: Thanks for having me, Paul.

Jay: So German banks look at this situation. They see Greece going into deep recession, Spain, Portugal. Even France is starting to teeter, in a sense. What is in the minds of these German bankers?

Ash: Well, I think you’ve asked the question just the right way. And it’s really important that we focus our attention on the German banks. I mean, a fish rots from the head down. And really, if you want to look at the [unintel.] causes of the European problem and have good predictions about what’s going to happen next, it’s essential to think about what’s going on in the German banking system. This is really the birthplace of the crisis. So asking what next from them is a really valuable question.

You’ve asked: how can they let things slide this far? Well, to be honest, I’m shocked at how far they have let things go.

I think at this point an ideology has taken hold that, hey, we’ve been paying the bills for Southern Europe for so long, we’re going to stop. That ideology’s completely backwards. I can explain why, if you’re interested.

Jay: Yeah, sure. Yeah, go ahead. Explain.

Ash: So, well, the ideology is, we’ve been writing–we the Germans have been writing the checks for these profligate Southern Europeans. And in fact, it’s almost the opposite situation. In fact, it’s Southern Europeans who have been buying the German goods that have kept the German economy afloat until now.

So I think you’ve got kind of a collision coming between this growing Northern European ideology that they’ve been paying the bills and the fact that much of their reasonably good times before the crisis were made possible by the earning and spending of Southern Europeans. I mean, you really have a circular-flow economy in Europe, and it’s been very badly disrupted in the south. And I think that, you know, there’s going to be some unpleasant consequences as they spread from the south up through France and Germany.

Jay: So German banks are essentially undermining, weakening, destroying their own best markets. Most of German exports have been going to these quote-unquote “peripheral” countries of Europe. So, you know, what is this a strategy about? I mean, whether it’s a strategy or not, what they’re going to end up with is much lower wages in all these countries. They’re going to try to unravel, and probably will, in Greece and Spain, at least, and Portugal, unravel much of the social safety net. And Italy, I should say, as well. So they’re going to have this big pool of skilled, cheap labor who can’t buy as much product. So what is the objective here? To better compete in the developing world? In Asia and China and India, Brazil, and such?

Ash: I think strategy is overstating what we’re seeing from the German banks. I think it helps if you think about the German banks as kind of a four-faced statue or four-faced monster, that there isn’t–nobody is at the wheel. And so it’s a mistake to think somebody old and sensible is in charge. There’s really nobody in charge at the German banks. There are just kind of fragments of several systems.

So, you know, there’s this one German banker who’s incredibly inflation-o-phobic. We’re told, oh, the memory of the Weimar inflation–90 years ago at this point–haunts this banker so much, couldn’t possibly imagine an expansionary monetary policy. So that’s one of the faces of the German banker. And this guy is dead-set against any sort of expansionary activity. It might cause inflation–very, very scary.

And then you’ve got this other guy who seems nothing like his very conservative anti-inflationary counterpart. He’s the gambler who went down to the Spanish Riviera looking for some action and just loved rolling the dice and was willing to take these very large gambles on Southern European real estate, on, you know, coastal real estate in Spain, float the Greek sovereign debts because it seemed really profitable. So this was the kind of let the good times roll German [crosstalk]

Jay: And you could add to that their plays in the American real estate market, and not just subprime mortgage. I mean, I think Deutsche Bank now owns one of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas.

Ash: Yeah. So, right. So it wasn’t just playing their own real estate markets. I mean, I think they picked up the lesson. I think you can–you know, there’s kind of a lesson here that bad banking drives out good, that this German banker, the high-roller, looked across the Atlantic, saw the American cousin, his cowboy cousin, making out like a bandit, so he said, I want to take some of those big bets too, and then did, on Southern European real estate, Greek sovereign debt, but also buying CDSs (credit default swaps) and other exotic derivatives straight from the U.S. market. So that high-roller was really a newcomer to German banking.

The inflation-o-phobe and the kind of really very careful German banker were one wing of German banking. Then we got these high-rollers. Their combination–the high-rollers brought on the immediate crisis. And their combination has led to the, you know, stern, nasty bill collector German banker, who says, ah, the bill must be paid, and is really insisting that the bills be paid even if that collection effort is going to, you know, ultimately drive the German economy into the ground. And it’s already done a very–it’s done very serious damage to the Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, and Irish economies. And really, I think, you know, Italy is kind of teetering on the brink. You’ve got these three.

Let me tell you about the last German banker, the one who’s been kind of shoved into the corner, who was actually the first one I learned about, and he’s a fairly likeable fellow. That’s the benevolent social planner. That’s the German banker from the ’60s and ’70s who owned a lot of stock in German companies and was therefore willing to make long-term plans for the future, wasn’t too averse to talking to labor, would invite labor to the table, would even invite labor to be on the board of directors. So that was kind of the good face.

So you’ve got these four faces. The good face has kind of been crammed into the corner, and these other three are sort of staring at each other, not really in full agreement, but kind of paralyze because they don’t know what to do next.

Jay: I mean, is part of this that they kind of all buy into this Austrian school of economics, that there needs to be a catharsis, there needs to be a cleansing, capitalism needs to go through these periods where it gets rid of excess capacity and better disciplines the workforce? I mean, do they not just believe that capitalism just is resilient, and to go through, quote-unquote, the pain, and out the other side will come a vibrant Europe? But I don’t know what the evidence for that is. But is that what they believe? They’ve got to believe something here.

Ash: I don’t know that there’s such a Randian fellow at work in the German banks. I mean, I think that the stern bill collector simply has a–the bills must be paid; we made the loans, you must pay back the loans; you know, kind of a very–you know, sort of the you must pay the rent landlord who comes to the door, you know, the evil drooping mustache.

So I don’t think that, you know, the cleansing, a cleansing dose of capitalism, liquidate, liquidate, liquidate is really what these bankers have in mind. I think that they’ve more kind of hit a number of contradictions and that they sort of don’t know which of these bankers is bought. They know that the high-roller got them into very serious trouble, so they’re not willing to start lending. The inflation hawk and the stern bill collector are maybe of a piece, that they are unwilling to try anything too expansionary.

You know, I think it’s–nobody is planning enough for this to be a kind of a well-coordinated strike on the European welfare state. I think that the European bankers are willing to sweep up a couple of chips along the way if they fall on the table and they’re easy pickings. But I think it’s sort of–too much planning would be involved to say, oh, this was an engineered crisis that allowed [crosstalk]

Jay: But whether it’s an engineered crisis or not, they’re certainly taking advantage of the crisis. And, I mean, what you’re seeing is massive amounts of privatization, you know, in Greece and some of these other same countries. You’re going to see lower wages. They’re–you’re–enormous pressure on the social safety net. And years–I don’t see how it’s anything but years of deep recession and high unemployment. I mean, that much is objective, is it not?

Ash: Yeah. I think these are good points, and they bring to mind a couple of thoughts. The first is that capitalists can’t live with stagnation either. So taking advantage of the recession, as I said, to sort of pick up a couple of quick hits, you know, some chips have fallen on the table, some free $20 bills on the sidewalk. I can see that well and good.

But I really think that the extent to which the bankers have allowed the European situation to really at this point spiral out of control is self-destructive, but they can’t do anything about it. They are really–it is not in their constitution. It’s really going to take, I think, a new political political movement, a kind of a new political orientation in Europe to do something about this. I think the bankers have hit the end–you know, sort of hit the end of their bag of tricks, and they simply cannot envision themselves overseeing a Keynesian-type expansion. But they also–I don’t think it’s planned for a fully stagnated economy [crosstalk]

Jay: This has to come back and bite them in the bum. I mean, how can this not lead eventually to much more serious stagnation in Germany itself?

Ash: Well, it has to. I mean, as you pointed out, they’ve cut off the fuel to their main markets. They are not–they’ve cut off the fuel to their main markets. They are not–I do not think they can realistically expect to make up the sales, even with the burdgeoning elite in China, in number, if not in percent. So I really think that they have backed themselves into a rough corner.

Now let me make a couple–I want to take a step back and make a couple of other observations. The first is that it’s interesting to think about where the German working class has been during this period. The German working class on the one hand has stayed employed. So they don’t have the problems of mass unemployment that the Spanish and Portuguese and Greek working class.

On the other hand, the German working class has really taken it on the chin in the last generation. They’ve been kind of an unwilling or a semi-willing participant in the Germans’ euro-based plan. So they’ve accepted increasingly low wages. And the German wage share has fallen something like 10 percentage points, which is a massive redistribution from labor to capital in Germany over the last generation. The German working class has been told that’s the price of staying employed. So you won’t be as rich, you know, you won’t have as big a share of the pie, but you at least won’t be in the same boat that the Southern Europeans have found themselves in.

So it’d be very interesting to see what happens as this promise becomes increasingly untenable, the promise of, well, at least you’re employed, even if you’re not paid as much. That becomes increasingly untenable. It’d be very interesting to see if there is mobilization by the German working class and other working class, other union labor movement in Northern Europe.

Jay: Alright. Well, thanks for joining us, Michael.

Ash: Well, thanks very much for having me.

Jay: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Most people reaching state pension age in the coming 40 years will receive a higher pension over their retirement due to planned reforms of the system, the Government maintained today.

Ministers said an assessment of the proposals also showed that more than half of over-25s will receive more state pension income during retirement than they would under the current system.

Experts warned the Government on Monday, when it published a White Paper, that the vast majority of people would be worse off under the pensions shake-up.

The respected Institute of Fiscal Studies said the main effect in the long run will be to reduce pensions for the vast majority of people, while increasing rights for some particular groups, notably the self-employed.

But the Government said that in the 2020s, three-quarters of all new people retiring will receive a higher state pension and in the 2040s around two-thirds will be better off as a result of the introduction of a single-tier pension.

Pensions Minister Steve Webb said: “We’re doing the right thing by today’s workforce with our reforms. The majority of over-25s will get more, not less, income during their retirement under single-tier.

“We’re also doing the right thing by younger people, giving them a simple, clear state pension, and the right to a workplace pension on top, with a contribution from their employer and the Government.”

The reforms, planned for April 2017 at the earliest, will particularly benefit women taking time out to bring up a family, low earners, and the self-employed whose National Insurance contributions will count for the first time towards a full single-tier pension of £144 a week, said the Government.

Ministers added that without the reforms, spending on state pensions and pensioner benefits will rise from 6.9% of GDP (economic output)in 2012/13 to 8.5% in 2060/61. The changes mean the increase will slow to reach 8.1% in 2060, ensuring the state pension remains “sustainable for future generations”, said the Government.

“Since the first Gulf War of the 1990′s US security policy has been one described as the “Lily-Pad” policy of keeping small military presence in very large numbers of places around the world, but no large military bases in any particular area. The land based Lily-Pads are complemented by the US navy on the high Seas. Yes, US already has many small military contingents in Central Asia and may add to them, but will not ask for establishing long-term military bases in the region including in Afghanistan. With the widespread use of drones, long-range missiles and extremely mobile US military force, establishing large military bases are not cost effective, so small lily pads-i.e., a military foothold in various places in Central Asia will suffice”, Shahrani said.

As he mentioned, most but not all of US troops will leave Afghanistan by 2014 for a number of reasons. First of all, the cost of keeping every American service men in Afghanistan is very high-estimated now at $1.2 million a year per soldier — and President Obama is searching for ways to reduce the cost to the US tax payers who are getting tired of the longest US war, especially in light of very unpromising accomplishment in Afghanistan during the last eleven years. More importantly the country is facing trillions of dollars budget deficit in the midst of economic crises.

According to Shahrani, the second reason is increasing cost of the Afghan war in blood-over 3000 dead so far in battle and some are killed by the so called “Blue on Green” (Afghan soldiers killing their US trainers). More importantly it is reported today that in 2012 suicide among US military personnel in Afghanistan has surged to the record number with some 349 US army personnel taking their own lives in Afghanistan. This number far exceeds American combat deaths according to Associated Press in Afghanistan during last year.

“The numbers of seriously injured, both physically and mentally, among the Afghan war casualties are also very high and they require long term care and there are estimates that the long-term cost of US-Afghan war may run more than two trillion dollars in decades to come,” the professor said.

“The third reason is that US want to Afghanize the war and that is why they have established security force of more than 350,000.00 for the Kabul regime. Now they have to take over from the US. Some Afghans, especially President Karzai wants reduction in the US troops because he will not be the President after 2014. If the conditions should deteriorate under his successor, he could then argue that his role as leader of the country was and is indispensable. He has always thought of himself and hardly ever of the country or the nation,” the professor mentioned.

According to Shahrani, in Afghanistan there are a range of reactions to the talk about US ending combat role for the US-ISAF/NATO forces and pulling out by the end of 2014. The range includes-denial by some that US will never completely leave the country or the region because of her own interest in CA; extreme anxiety by many that after US withdrawal Afghanistan government will fold and another round of regional proxy wars may return to Afghanistan and the region.

As he mentioned, these include women and the non-Pashtun ethnic groups in western central and northern parts of the country.

“However, the US and Europeans are unlikely to allow such a disaster from happening; and great many in Afghanistan whose expectation of the international community bringing better and more effective governance and economic reconstruction have been thoroughly crushed, they are disappointed and no longer see the presence of US and European armies and promises of any consequence to them,” Shahrani mentioned.

Currently, there are 50,000 U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan. In early May of last year, U.S. President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a long-term strategic partnership between the two countries. The document provides for the signing of an agreement on safety, better known in diplomatic circles as the “protocol on troops.” It is this agreement that will govern the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan after 2014.

The author can be contacted at agency@trend.az

The logo of Gazprom.(Reuters / Charles Platiau)

Gazprom`s plans to transfer gas shipments from Ukraine to the Nord Stream pipeline are turning out unexpectedly expensive.

­The price of moving gas through both Ukraine and Nord Stream significantly increased by 20 % in just first six months of 2012, Kommersant daily reports. At the same time the volume of Russian gas going through Ukraine decreased by 15% by the end of last year. 

Once the second stretch of the Nord Stream was opened at the end of last year it reached its full capacity of 55 billion cubic meters per year. However, the head of East European Gas Analysis Michael Korchemkyn says the pipeline is currently only using about one-third of its capacity. He believes switching gas export away from Ukraine to Nord Stream will mean not only higher delivery costs but also other expenses, Kommersant daily reports. Many transit contracts with European countries have ship-or-pay condition and lower volumes mean fines for Gazprom.

There is another challenge for Russia`s gas monopoly— the company`s sales are predicted to fall in 2013 due to weak gas demand in Europe, which is still struggling to overcome the consequences of the global economic recession.

Gazprom`s European partners, including French GDF Suez, Austrian Econgas and German Wingas and WIEH, have asked to review gas prices for 2013. In 2012 Gazprom decreased its prices by around 10% for some of its major European partners as well as to Slovenia’s SPP and Turkey’s Botas.

While Gazprom is experiencing difficulties and has posted its worst results in a decade, its closest European rival Norway is moving to overtake its primary position. Norway reported record high exports last year, around 107.6bn cubic meters, getting very close to the level of Russian gas exports to Europe. The Scandinavian rival has what Gazprom can’t afford — lower prices. Competitive pricing in times of weak economic conditions and the EU`s desire to diversify away from Russian gas supplies represent now the main challenges faced by the Russian gas supplier.

The EU has accused Gazprom over alleged unfair competition and price fixing in the natural gas markets of Central and Eastern Europe. In September the European Commission launched an anti-trust probe against Russia’s gas major Gazprom. If Gazprom is found to have broken the rules it could be fined 10% its annual revenue or $1.1-1.4bn. Gazprom hasn’t admitted any wrongdoing, but decided to divide its European assets to meet the requirements of EU’s “third energy package” and avoid anti-trust claims. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree that prohibits companies deemed strategic, with Gazprom among them, from disclosing information, disposing of assets or amending agreements without ratification by the Russian authorities in the case that the claims are initiated by foreign states or companies.

All commentary at this point on the infinite monetary sinkhole of Southern Bavaria, f/k/a Greece (whose lack of privatization efforts have angered Mother Merkel, who is now demanding more Greek assets be sold to “willing buyers”) is now worthless:

• IMF SEES GREECE NEEDING EXTRA EU5.5-9.5 BILLION IN 2015-16
• GREEK GDP TO SHRINK 4.2% THIS YEAR, GROW 0.6% IN 2014, IMF SAYS
• IMF RECOMMENDS HAIRCUTS ON BILATERAL GREEK LOANS FROM EUROPE
• IMF RECOMMENDS RATES `CLOSE TO ZERO’ ON BILATERAL GREEK LOANS

Has the IMF hired Armstrong yet?

From Boris the blonde gorilla to actual, real gorillas – via royalty, celebrity and No Pants Day – check out our round-up of this week’s silliest snaps

January 18, 2013  |  

If you have to bring big, dangerous guns to a store to prove that “they are not dangerous in the hands of law abiding citizens,” then that pretty much proves that they are dangerous… in anyone’s hands.

If you have to scare the pants off of shoppers with your intimidating AR-15, your Glock, and your abundance of ammo to prove they’re not scary, then they’re scary.

Just ask Cindy Yorgason, who was shopping at a Utah JC Penney store when she glanced up and saw Mr. 22-Year-Old Gun Guy standing in front of her schlepping a big ol’ rifle. Then she noticed his ammunition clips and another firearm in his holster. So what’s an unnerved woman to do? She grabbed a couple of photos and posted them on Facebook.

They went viral.

The Salt Lake City Tribune (link isn’t working, sorry) is reporting that a clerk refused him service and all nearby customers wanted to “get away” from him. Gee, can’t imagine why.

Gun Guy had been in the military, had a concealed-carry permit, and had checked with police dispatch prior to his little outing. They confirmed to him that he had the right to parade around with his oh-so-harmless portable arsenal, which he says he carries to protect his kids and everyone else from “criminals, cartels, drug lords” and other “evil men.”

As Olive Oyl would say, “What a man!”

At least that’s what he seems to think of himself.

Wait… so there are no evil women? And who knew drug lords shopped at JC Penney?

Yorgason said the following about The Self-Appointed Protector: “ I thought that he was pretty much an idiot. You do not need to do something like this even if you are against any potential bans.”

A political commentator says Tehran is ready to answer International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) questions provided that when they are answered the process comes to an end.

“I have talked to Iranian diplomats and they told me that Iran has constantly expressed its willingness to answer all the questions that have been raised [by IAEA], provided that when the questions are answered, the process comes to an end,” Hamid Reza Emadi said in an interview with Press TV on Friday.

He went on to say that the United States has stopped the IAEA from fulfilling its duties, making the agency unwilling to end its questioning process with regards to Iran.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is clearly working under a US-dictated mandate that has prevented it from performing its professional obligations, wants to maintain the pressure on Tehran. The agency, as the diplomats told me, does not want the case to be closed any time soon and they want to raise more questions, to raise more issues once the existing questions are fully answered by Iran. So this is going to be an endless process,” Emadi pointed out.

The political commentator further noted that the past dealings of the IAEA with the Islamic Republic show that the atomic agency is not willing to reach an agreement on any framework for mutual cooperation.

“Just take a look at the history of IAEA’s dealings with Tehran, they first raised the issue of a laptop that they got from nowhere and focused on it for several years and then totally forgot about it and moved on to a different issue which is the Parchin military site.”

Emadi stated that Iran is ready to give access to Parchin once a structured framework for cooperation is finalized and signed by the two sides.

“But the IAEA, under pressure from the West, does not want anything to be finalized at this point in time and they want to prolong the issue for an unspecified period of time,” he added.

Referring to reports quoting Western diplomats as saying that Iran has put “unacceptable conditions on the table,” Emadi said, “The bottom line is [that] Iran wants to resolve all the so-called outstanding issues once and forever, provided that the agency wants to do the same thing.”

“This is what those Western diplomats, who I believe most probably work for the IAEA, are rejecting as unacceptable conditions,” Emadi concluded.

TNP/HMV/SS

Disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong has admitted he took performance-enhancing drugs and used blood transfusions as he won his seven Tour de France titles.

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, the 41-year-old said it was “not possible” to win the the gruelling race so many times without doping.

Armstrong confessed that he doped during all seven Tour victories from 1999 to 2005, using blood-boosting agent EPO; blood doping; testosterone, cortisone or human growth hormone.

“My cocktail was EPO, transfusions and testosterone,” he said.

“I made my decisions. They’re my mistake. And I’m sitting here today to acknowledge that and to say I’m sorry for that,”

The Texan, who won the world road race title in 1993, added that his drug use began in the “mid-90s”.

“I suppose earlier in my career there was cortisone and then the EPO generation began,” he said.

However, he said at the time he did not believe what he was doing was cheating.

“I looked up the definition of cheat. The definition of cheat is to gain an advantage over a rival or foe,” Armstrong said. “I didn’t do that. I viewed it as a level playing field.”

Armstrong, who has already had his Tour wins taken away and been banned from the sport for life, acknowledged his admission was probably “too late” for most people.

“I view this situation as one big lie, that I repeated a lot of times. It wasn’t as if I just said no.”

He had repeatedly previously denied all accusations made against him, despite the United States Anti-Doping Agency found him to be a central figure in “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen”.

Although Armstrong acknowledged the doping, he rejected some of USADA’s claims about his US Postal team, saying: “It was definitely professional and it was definitely smart, if you can call it that. But it was very conservative, very risk averse.”

“But to say that that programme was bigger than the East German programme in the mid-80s, it’s not true.”

Although he denied forcing others on the team to take banned substances, he said he led by example and admitted being a “bully”.

Armstrong was adamant he did not dope or perform blood transfusions in 2009 or 2010, when he made his comeback to the sport, saying: “The last time I crossed that line was 2005.”

He said that allegations he did take banned substances during this comeback period were the only thing in the USADA’s detailed report that “really upset” him.

It was out-of-competition testing and the so-called biological passport, which collates biological markers of doping and doping tests, that forced him to stop.

The interview was recorded in Armstrong’s hometown of Austin, Texas, three days before it was broadcast.

British designer John Galliano.(Reuters / Jacky Naegelen)

The “wild child of British fashion” John Galliano is returning to fashion for the first time after he was kicked out of Christian Dior over his anti-Semitic remarks in a Parisian cafe.

The famed designer has been hired by Oscar de la Renta studio in New York, and promises a comeback to the top of the fashion industry.

“John and I have known each other for many years and I am a great admirer of his talent,” Vogue quotes de la Renta as saying. “He has worked long and hard on his recovery and I am happy to give him the opportunity to re-immerse himself in the world of fashion and re-acclimate in an environment where he has been so creative.”

Galliano will reportedly present his new collection in at New York fashion week in February.

Galliano was fired from Dior in March 2011 after anti-Semitic remarks. The designer faced legal action and was ordered by a French court to pay a €6,000 fine on charges of “public insults based on the origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity”.

About the same time of the Parisian incident another video featuring the designer saying “I love Hitler” came to public attention. Galliano’s remarks sparked an international outcry.

Galliano has been out of the business for the past two years. Since designing Kate Moss’s wedding dress in July 2011, he hasn’t been professionally involved in other projects.

The bad boy of fashion used the time to deal with his personal problems and attended a rehab to be treated for the alcoholism that led to the Parisian incident and ruined his career.

“I am an alcoholic,” Galliano told WWD. “I have been in recovery for the past two years. Several years prior to my sobriety, I descended into the madness of the disease. I said and did things which hurt others, especially members of the Jewish community. I have expressed my sorrow privately and publicly for the pain which I caused, and I continue to do so. I remain committed to making amends to those I have hurt,” he said.

“I am grateful to Oscar beyond words for inviting me to spend time with him in the familiar surroundings of a design studio,” Galliano told British Vogue. “His support and faith in me is humbling.”

Back in late August, we presented a chart whose foresight and accuracy turned out to be so spot on, it scared even us. We asked: “With Apple overtaking Microsoft’s ‘peak-market-cap’ and becoming the most ‘valuable’ company ever traded, we thought a reflection on what humans (as opposed to machines programmed by humans) did the last time a world-changing technology company went ubiquitous. Comparing AAPL’s last few years to the run-up in MSFT’s peak in 1999…” Or, in other words, “is it different this time?”

This is the chart we presented five months ago:

Turns out, the answer is, No. It was not different this time. It never is.

This, despite what a certain Jim Cramer said two weeks later, just as the stock hit its all time high:

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop trading Apple and start owning it... Is this an average stock with average growth? No, it is among the greatest wealth creators in the world with a vastly superior growth-and-balance sheet. Do you want to flit in and out of Apple to catch the latest review or day’s sale? Or do you want to own a stock that’s just too cheap not be owned, one that money managers all over the country have to own to show that they are in the game or to beat the game going into the fourth quarter. I think owning it has it all over trading it. Nothing I heard yesterday changes my mind.“

Here is the same chart as above, updated for what has transpired since:

The chart above also means that there is much more gravity to come for this particular fruit.

Harold Myerson, over at the Washington Post, points out a new report by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine contains some bad news about about the America’s health. The title pretty much says it all: “U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.” The summary of the report goes into more detail. 

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. A growing body of research is call- ing attention to this problem, with a 2011 report by the National Research Council confirming a large and rising international “mortality gap” among adults age 50 and older. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people, since recent studies suggest that even highly advantaged Americans may be in worse health than their counterparts in other countries.

Either Billy Joel was onto something when he sang “Only the good die young,” or America’s health care system still has some serious problems. 

Compared to 16 other high-income “peer” countries America is almost always dead last (no pun intended). Every single one of these countries –  Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom – get more bang for their health care bucks than we do. We’re only tops in how much we spend on health care. (Well, that and violent deaths. We’re number one in that category too.)

What gives? Meyerson hones in on a likely factor.

But a funny thing happens to Americans’ life expectancy when they age. The U.S. mortality rate is the highest of the 17 nations until Americans hit 50 and the second-highest until they hit 70. Then our mortality ranking precipitously shifts: By the time American seniors hit 80, they have some of the longest life expectancies in the world.

 

What gives? Have seniors discovered the Fountain of Youth? Do U.S. geriatricians outpace all our other physicians?

 

Part of the answer is Darwinian: Those Americans who have been less able to access reliable medical care, maintain good diets and live in neighborhoods that are not prey to gun violence have disproportionately died off before age 80. That isn’t natural selection but social selection – the survival of the economically fittest in a nation that rations longevity by wealth.

 

But the larger part of the answer is that at age 65, Americans enter a health-care system that ceases to be exceptional when compared with the systems in the other 16 nations studied. They leave behind the private provision of medical coverage, forsake the genius of the market and avail themselves of universal medical insurance. For the first time, they are beneficiaries of the same kind of social policy that their counterparts in other lands enjoy. And presto, change-o: Their life expectancy catches up with and eventually surpasses those of the French, Germans, Britons and Canadians.

 That, as Meyerson points out, puts the defenders of private health insurance in a bit of a bind. That bind may get even tighter. Thanks to a bill introduced by Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the “public option” is back in the mix.

 A group of House Democrats are surfacing the health care public option as a way of reducing the deficit, revisiting an approach suggested by President Obama’s debt commission in 2010.

 

According to a Tuesday statement from Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s (D-Ill.) office, Schakowsky, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and 43 other House members have introduced the Public Option Deficit Reduction Act, which would “would offer the choice of a publicly-run health insurance plan, an option that would save more than $100 billion over 10 years.”

 

“As Congress looks to reduce the deficit, it is important to remember the one policy that could save billions of dollars is the public option. I hope that my colleagues will take a fresh look at this in the months ahead,” Waxman said in the statement.

 

The public option, hotly debated during negotiations over Obama’s health care reform law, was left out of the legislation after it repeatedly failed to gain enough traction in Congress.

The statement from Shakowsky’s office points out that a public option would cut the country’s health care spending by more than $100 million, and lower health care costs for families by putting pressure on private insurers to lower their rates in order to compete. Not only would it save money, but according to this report, it would also save lives.

Let’s face it, we weren’t really done with health care after the Affordable Care Act, and this report tells us that we’ve still got a long way to go. 

Raging bushfires continue to burn out of control across Australia, threatening several towns in the southwestern state of Victoria and New South Wales in the east.

Eighty-four fires were devouring through the state, with more than a dozen still raging as of Friday.

Australian police have confirmed the death of a man in Victoria’s southeast as the two-week forest fire emergency claimed its first civlian fatality.

The victim’s body was reportedly found in a burnt-out vehicle near Seaton as blazes rage across the area.

Last week, a 61-year-old firefighter died of a suspected heart attack while trying to contain a fire in Tasmania.

The flames have also sparked fears of a new escalation as temperatures are soaring over 45 degrees Celsius.

A blaze burning around 200 kilometers east of Melbourne has affected a number of communities in the Gippsland region and is feared to spread to residential buildings there.

Reports say the small town of Licola has been surrounded by flames.

Fire officials in New South Wales also say a blaze there has destroyed 51 homes and broken the containment lines.

MRS/JR

Iranians are now beginning to die for lack of medicines kept out by U.S.-imposed sanctions. I recently questioned (and videoed) former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about her notorious defense of sanctions that killed over a half million young Iraqi children. She said she’d been wrong to say what she’d said. She did not comment on the appropriateness of what she’d done. I asked her if what we were doing to Iran was also wrong, and she replied, “No, absolutely not.”

So, somehow it is good and proper for us to be killing Iranian children — although perhaps not to be talking about it.

I suspect that some of the reasons why we imagine there is a greater good being served by such actions are the same reasons no U.S. president will go to Iran in the manner in which Nixon went to China. Of course, the common political wisdom in the United States holds that the president who went to China had to be a Republican. By the same logic, the president who goes to Iran must be a militarist power-mad servant of the corporate oligarchy from the Republican party and not a militarist power-mad servant of the corporate oligarchy from the Democratic party. That wouldn’t do at all. And yet, U.S. conduct toward Iran has varied little from Bush to Clinton to Bush Jr. to Obama/Clinton, H. A hopeless spiral of delusional counter-productive approaches toward the Islamic Republic of Iran needs to be broken by a 180 degree turn, and it won’t make much substantive difference who does it, as long as it doesn’t come too late.

Whether the authors intended exactly that or not, the above is the lesson I take away from an excellent new book by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett called “Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

It has been U.S. policy for decades not to engage with Iran, and — misleading rhetoric notwithstanding — it still is. “More than any of his predecessors, in fact, Obama has given engagement a bad name, by claiming to have reached out to Tehran and failed when the truth is he never really tried.” 

The Leveretts trace official U.S. policy on Iran to a trio of myths: the myths of irrationality, illegitimacy, and isolation. 

IRRATIONALITY:

The evidence of irrationality on the part of the Iranian people or the Iranian government is very slim. I can find much more irrationality in the U.S. public and government. Iranians, in fact, are better at distinguishing between our people and our government than we seem to be at making that distinction on their side. Iran has funded Hizballah and HAMAS, and we call those groups terrorists. But we call any militants opposing Pentagon interests terrorists. Iranian leaders have made comments verging on anti-Semitic (and routinely distorted into outrageous anti-Semitism), but nothing approaching the things Anwar Sadat or Mahmoud Abbas said or wrote before they were deemed rational actors with whom the U.S. and Israel could (and did) work. 

Iran’s policies have been defensive, not aggressive. Iran has not threatened to attack or attacked others. Iran has refused to retaliate against chemical weapons attacks or terrorism or our shooting down a commercial jet or our funding efforts within Iran to manipulate its elections or our training of militants seeking to overthrow Iran’s government. Iran has refused to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Unlike Britain, Russia, or the United States, when provoked Iran has refused to invade Afghanistan, choosing wise reflection over hot-tempered anger. Look at the polling across the Middle East: people fear the United States and Israel, not Iran. 

Iran’s approach to the United States over the years has been rational and forbearant. In 1995 the Islamic Republic of Iran offered its first foreign oil development contract to the United States, which turned it down. Iran aided President Clinton by shipping arms to Bosnia, which Clinton turned around and condemned Iran for when the story became public. In 2001, the President of Iran requested permission to pray for 911 victims at the site of the World Trade Center and offered to assist in counterterrorism plans, but was turned down. Iran assisted the United States with its invasion of Afghanistan and was labeled “evil” in return. The current president of Iran wrote long friendly letters to President Bush and President Obama, both of whom ignored them except to allow their staffs to publicly mock them. The Iranian government repeatedly proposed substantive dialogue, offering to put everything on the table, including its nuclear energy program, and was turned down. The Obama administration gave Turkey and Brazil terms it was sure Iran wouldn’t agree to; Iran agreed to them; and the White House rejected them, choosing instead to grow outraged at Brazil and Turkey.

Iran tried to believe in the change in Obama’s (no doubt domestically intended) rhetoric, but never encountered any substance, only fraud and hostility. That Iran attempts civil relations with a nation surrounding and threatening it, imposing deadly sanctions on it, funding terrorism within its borders, and publicly mocking its sincere approaches is indication of either rationality or something almost Christ-like (I’m inclined to go with rationality).

ILLEGITIMACY:

War is immoral, illegal, and counter-productive. That doesn’t change if the people bombed are living or suffering under an illegitimate government. Here in the United States an unaccountable Supreme Court rewrites our basic laws, unverifiable privately owned and operated machines count our votes, candidates are chosen by wealth, media coverage is dolled out by a corporate cartel, presidents disregard the legislature, and high crimes and misdemeanors are not prosecuted. And yet, nonetheless — amazing to tell — we’d rather not be bombed. I don’t give a damn whether this scholar or that scholar believes the Iranian government is legitimate or not; I don’t want any human beings killed in my name with my money.

That being said, common claims of illegitimacy for Iran’s government are myths. Western experts have predicted its imminent collapse (as well as its imminent development of nukes) for decades. Iranian elections are far more credible than U.S. ones. A government need not be secular to be legitimate. I might favor secular governments, but I’m not an Iranian. I’m a citizen of a government that has been seeking to control Iran’s government for over a half century since overthrowing it in 1953; I don’t get to have a voice. Iranians are gaining in rights, in education, in health, in life expectancy (the opposite in many ways of the course we are on in the United States). Iranian women used to be permitted to dress as they liked but not to pursue the education and career they liked. Now that has largely been reversed. Iranian women are guaranteed paid maternity leave that outstrips our standards. Iran’s approach to drugs is more rational than our own, its approach to homosexuality more mixed than we suspect, its investment in science cutting edge. 

All of that being said, the Iranian government abuses its people in ways that need to be addressed by its people and should have been directly addressed by the Leveretts’ book.

I also want to quibble with the Leveretts’ account of the 1979 revolution in light of the views of some who were there at the time. I’m not convinced that Khomeini led and directed the revolution from the start. I’m willing to believe that secular pro-democracy activists did not represent the views of all Iranians. There’s no question that significant support swung to Khomeini and the mullahs who claimed power. But Khomeini’s supposed leadership was news in the West before it was ever heard of in Tehran. The Shah was not opposed for his secularism, but for his surveillance, imprisonment, torture, murder, greed, expropriation of wealth, and subservience to foreigners. The Leveretts admit that Khomeini originally proposed a government with less power for himself and then revised his plans, but they claim that he only did so in response to secularists’ insistence that he hold no power at all. Not the strongest defense of tyranny I’ve ever encountered. 

The authors then cite a public referendum of December 2-3, 1979, in which, they say, “the new constitution was approved by 98 percent of participating voters.” Sounds impressive, right? Guess what choices the voters were offered: an Islamic republic or the Shah! Of course they chose the Islamic republic! But to turn around and claim that 98% voted against a secular republic is misleading. During the 2003-2013 U.S. war on Iraq, a U.S. Democratic-Party group called MoveOn.org polled its membership. Did they support House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan for more war or President George W. Bush’s? Of course, they overwhelmingly chose Pelosi’s. MoveOn then turned around and claimed that their people opposed Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s proposal to end the war. Such votes should be given no more dignity than they deserve.

How the government of the 1980s came to be does not tell us everything we should know about today’s government, but nothing you could tell me about today’s government would have any relevance to the morality of bombing the people of Iran.

ISOLATION:

The United States has sought to isolate Iran and failed dramatically, with Iran now chairing the Nonaligned Movement. It has sought to use economic and other pressures to overthrow the government, and instead strengthened it. In 2011, Obama opened a “virtual embassy” to propagandize the Iranian people for “regime change.” In 2012 it removed the terrorist designation for an opposition terrorist group called the MEK. Imagine if Iran did such things to us, rather than just being Muslim or whatever it is that it’s actually done to us. The Leveretts present a long and unrelenting history of incompetence and irrationality . . . from the U.S. side. They have been reduced, reasonably enough, to something that sounds ridiculous: longing for Richard Nixon.

With Spanish and Italian sovereign bond spreads back at 19-month lows (admittedly driven by OMT ‘promises’ and self-referential buying from any and every domestic fund possible), many are arguing that all is well, crisis averted and the world can go on its merry way to Dow 30,000. However, the reality is extremely different in the real economy – and the optics of the spread compression have done nothing but armor the politicians to stall any needed reforms for now. The ultimate cognitive dissonance is highlighted nowhere better than in Italian GDP (whose 2013 forecast was just slashed further to -1% – and remember in Jan 2012, the 2012 GDP forecast was -0.4% and it is currently running at a 6x miss around -2.4%); and Spanish bad loans, which are now running at ever-new record highs of 11.6% and accelerating year-over-year. The chasm between the facts on the ground (reality) and the market’s optics have never been wider as data point after data point indicates stagnation at best (core and periphery) and depression at worst.

Everything is fixed in Europe – as Italy and Spain bond spreads compress to post-crisis lows…

In Jan 2012, Italy’s government ‘believed 2012 GDP would come in at -0.4% (via Reuters), only a 6x miss…

and the forecast for Italy’s GDP in 2013 is being pegged lower every month (will they be as accurate this time?)…

and in Spain, things are going from worst to worsterer, as bad loans continue to accelerate to massive new record highs…

Charts: Bloomberg

Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky.(RIA Novosti / Iliya Pitalev)

Russian lawmakers have approved the first reading of a bill that imposes large fines on media outlets over the use of foul language – even for citing obscene quotes in classic literature.

Under the amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses, the media will be fined up to 200,000 roubles (US $6,600) for using obscenities. The document, initiated by the majority United Russia party, was supported by 390 out of 450 State Duma deputies.

According to the lawmakers, people often complain about the bad language used on television and radio, as well as in newspapers.

At the moment, only swearing in public places is considered an administrative offense and punishable with a fine.

In the event that obscene comments are made by participants in live radio programs, the stations are obliged to report such behavior to the proper officials.

Normally, before permitted to participate in radio broadcasts, contributors leave their personal contact information with the radio station. Thus, identifying violators of the law would not be a problem, according to Deputy Duma speaker Sergey Zheleznyak.

“It makes me sick to hear some radio programs, where words that people never utter are being used,” commented the leader of Liberal-Democratic party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. “It should be stopped. We should preserve the richness of our language — it’s beautiful.”

Zhirinovsky believes that lawmakers should go even further than banning obscene language and outlaw the usage of foreign words as well whenever they can be replaced by Russian synonyms.

Meanwhile, Russian journalists oppose the new legislation, saying it is a waste of time and money.

Rafael Akopov, the former head of the ProfMedia group, compared the imposition of fines for bad language to punishing individuals for wearing mini-skirts.

Duma legislators, however, argued that broadcasters have failed to control the language issue on their own.

“It’d be great if the media — thanks to their inner culture and self-control — could reject obscene language,” but in reality people are bombarded with such language on a regular basis in newspapers or on the television, concluded top Duma official Sergey Zheleznyak.

Two car bombs have exploded in front of a mosque in the southern Syrian city of Dara’a, killing many civilians, local sources say.

According to Syria’s official news agency, SANA, the bombs went off near al-Hassan mosque in al-Balad district of the city on Friday as worshippers were leaving.

The blasts also caused huge material damage. Syrian media blamed the al-Qaeda linked al-Nusra Front for the bombings.

The twin blasts came shortly after a rocket fired by foreign-backed, hit the Muhafaza Sakaniya neighborhood in the northern city of Aleppo, leaving unknown number of casualties.

Video from state television showed the side of a building collapsed into rubble that spilled into nearby streets. A crowd sifted through the wreckage as medics pulled bloodied bodies onto stretchers.

It was not immediately known how many people were killed or wounded in the two cities

Meanwhile, a number of militants were killed in a blast at a bomb making factory in the northwestern province of Idlib.

Government forces also destroyed several terrorist hideouts in Idlib suburbs.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of army and security personnel, have been killed in the turmoil.

According to a UN report, militants from 29 countries have so far filtered into Syria to fight against the Damascus government, most of whom are extremist Salafists.

The Syrian government has repeatedly said that the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and that a very large number of the militants operating in the country are foreign nationals.

HM/JR

What is it with these Republicans who just can’t stop themselves from coming just a hair shy of calling the President of the United States “uppity?” Last week, Bill-O was calling him “cocky” during his Talking Points Memo segment on Fox. Now we’ve got Lady McCheney Mary Matalin on Mrs. Greenspan’s show calling him too “self-reverential” and “self-righteous” and that he wants Republicans to go along with him and pretend they care about doing their jobs and legislating, he’d better start acting nicer to them.

Andrea Mitchell reminded her that he didn’t exactly have much good will from the other side, what with them immediately plotting on how to obstruct everything he tried to do from the day he got elected –during that now-famous meeting with Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich. We also had Mitch McConnell out there just stating openly that his “single most important” goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Matalin feigned ignorance and pretended she had no idea what Mitchell was talking about. She said the GOP leadership didn’t attend meetings and the last time she checked, neither Luntz nor Gingrich were in office at the time of that meeting.

Thankfully, Mitchell did remind her that a good deal of the leadership was there, but that didn’t stop her from going right back after President Obama and complaining that he wasn’t talking nicely enough to those poor sensitive Republicans.

Here’s a little reminder of just what went on during that meeting from James Wolcott: The Conspiracy to Commit Legislative Constipation:

In a scene reminiscent of the summit meeting of mob bosses in The Godfather, Republican House leaders were summoned by evil marshmallow and message-crafter Frank Luntz to hash out a strategy to cope with the defeat of their party in 2008 and the election of the newly inaugurated President Obama, according to Robert Draper’s just published book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

From a report on Draper’s revelation by Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian UK (the bolding is mine):

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

In his book, Draper opens with the heady atmosphere in Washington on the days running up to the inauguration and the day itself, which attracted 1.8 million to the mall to witness Obama being sworn in as America’s first black president.

Those numbers contributed to a growing sense of unease among Republicans as much the defeat in the White House race the previous November. The 15 Republicans were in a sombre mood as they gathered at the Caucus Room in Washington, an upscale restaurant where a New York strip steak costs $51.

Attending the dinner were House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. From the Senate were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl. Others present were former House Speaker and future — and failed — presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who organised the dinner and sent out the invitations.

The dinner table was set in a square at Luntz’s request so everyone could see one another and talk freely. The session lasted four hours and by the end the sombre mood had lifted: they had conceived a plan. They would take back the House in November 2010, which they did, and use it as a spear to mortally wound Obama in 2011 and take back the Senate and White House in 2012, Draper writes.

“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” said Keven McCarthy, quoted by Draper. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”

The Republicans have done that, bringing Washington to a near standstill several times during Obama’s first term over debt and other issues.

Their locked-shut buttocks will unclench of course should Mitt Romney be elected, at which point they’ll be passing legislation like street hawkers handing out strip-club flyers. Every bill will be named after Reagan or some other sentimental favorite.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve about had it up to here with these Republicans and their supposed hurt feelings as an excuse for obstruction when they’ve disrespected President Obama and called him every name in the book for years. Matalin’s pearl clutching is growing tiresome –to put it mildly.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is slated to visit the African Union chief Thomas Boni Yayi to discuss the military operation in Mali.

Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert announced the news on Friday saying that the Benin President would be received with military honors in Berlin on Wednesday.

According to Seibert, the two officials will discuss “bilateral relations, the role of the African Union in Africa’s peace and security set-up as well as current security developments on the continent, especially the situation in Mali.”

Benin, which currently holds the rotating AU presidency, has promised to send 300 troops to help the Malian Army fight against the militants controlling the northern parts of the West African country.

Germany has also sent two military transport aircraft with 14 crew members to transport to Mali soldiers from one of the 14 West African states of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

The aircraft would first stop in France to be loaded with medical material and then fly to the Malian capital of Bamako.

Meanwhile, the European Union foreign ministers have agreed to back up France in its operations in Mali by launching a military mission to train and restructure the West African country’s embattled army.

On January 11, France launched a military intervention in Mali under the pretext of halting the advance of militants in the African country.

Four days later, France announced that it would more than triple the number of its troopers in Mali from 800 to 2,500. French troops launched their first ground attack against rebel forces on January 16.

TE/JR

The legendary secret tax haven status of the Cayman Islands is coming to an end. The islands’ financial authorities are going to begin scrutinising the companies and hedge funds set up there.

Thousands of enterprises and financial institutions in the British overseas territory that kept a low profile will soon come into the spotlight. The Cayman Island Monetary Authority (CIMA) wants to set up a database of funds registered in the island which will include the names of the bosses, according to the Financial Times (FT).

Between $8.19tn and $12.6tn has leaked out of countries into such secret jurisdictions as the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, according to the Guardian.

Since the onset of the financial crisis, some of the key financial institutions have amended their operation rules to allow a clearer picture of their activities.

“In the 24 months subsequent to the onset of the financial crisis, the BVI Financial Services Commission, the Central Bank of Ireland, the Jersey Financial Services Commission, the Bahamas Financial Services Board and the Isle of Man Supervision Commission all updated their corporate governance codes, laws and/or regulations,” FT quotes a CIMA paper.

On Thursday, EU Tax Commissioner Algirdas Semeta offered an ultimatum to Switzerland, saying the country has six months to make its tax legislation more transparent in terms of disclosing data on companies and enterprises, and make it comply with EU laws.

The Caymans have long been a subject of anger and criticism by both politicians and investors. While the US and UK policymakers are struggling to keep pace with fast-moving new global regulations, investors have been complaining on the uncertainty around the entities they were considering as investment destinations.

“We have been screaming for more transparency for some time now,” Vincent Vandenbroucke, head of operational due diligence at Hermes BPK, told FT. “It’s no longer acceptable for [offshore] directors to act as rubber stamps.”

Hermes BPK makes hedge fund investments on behalf of some of the UK’s biggest pension funds.

Bill Moyers: Welcome. Just before the holidays, we asked you, our viewers, to recommend the one book you thought President Obama should read as he prepares himself for his second term in office. As ever, your suggestions were thoughtful, provocative and eclectic — from books by authors who have appeared as guests on this broadcast, to works by the late John Steinbeck and A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. You can see a list at our website, BillMoyers.com.

Many of you asked for my choice, too. This is it — Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! It’s both prescription and warning: our current obsession with slashing the deficit and avoiding that well-known and worn fiscal cliff is killing us, Krugman writes, getting in the way of what really needs to be done — which is dedicating government to creating jobs and getting us back to full employment. He blames not only Congress but the White House.

Paul Krugman is professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. Since 1999, he’s been an op-ed columnist at The New York Times and now also writes a blog for the paper titled “The Conscience of a Liberal.” According to the search engine Technorati, it’s the most popular blog by an individual on the internet. Author or editor of some twenty books and more than 200 professional papers, Krugman is a thinker so esteemed and widely known in his field he’s become an icon. Not only has he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he’s also the subject of this song by the balladeer Loudon Wainwright III…

Loudon Wainwright III: I read the New York Times that’s where I get my news Paul Krugman’s on the op-ed page that’s where I get the blues ‘Cause Paul always tells it like it is we get it blow by blow…

Bill Moyers: As if being immortalized by the blues isn’t enough, there was even an unofficial campaign and petition in the last few days urging President Obama to make Paul Krugman the next Secretary of the Treasury. It was an honor, as Shakespeare would say, that Mr. Krugman dreams not of.

Paul Krugman, welcome.

Paul Krugman: Hi there.

Bill Moyers: So, like William Tecumseh Sherman you refuse to be drafted.

Paul Krugman: Well, you know, fortunately it hasn’t come to that point. But I think I probably would.

Bill Moyers: But you remember what General Sherman said when there was a movement to run him for president. “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” That was the Sherman like statement you issued.

Paul Krugman: That’s, well, I’m not quite up to Sherman’s standards and I don’t think I’m quite ready to lay waste to Georgia either. But a good, good man I admire actually.

Bill Moyers: But the grassroots campaign in your behalf, unofficial, was serious. I mean, over 235,000 people signed on. You broke their hearts. Any regrets?

Paul Krugman: No, because I probably have more influence than I, doing what I do now than I would if I were inside trying to, you know, do the court power games that come with any White House, even the best, which I don’t think I’d be any good at. So no, this is fine. And what the president needs right now is he needs a hardnosed negotiator. And rumor has it that’s what he’s got, so.

Bill Moyers: In Jack Lew?

Paul Krugman: That’s right. The president can’t pass major new legislation. He can’t formulate major new programs right now. What he has to do now is bargain down or ride over these crazy people in the Republican Party. And we what we need now is not deep thinking from the treasury secretary. If the president wants deep thinkers, he can call Joe Stiglitz, he can call other people. What he needs from the Treasury secretary is somebody who’s going to be very effective at dealing with these wild men and making sure that nothing terrible happens.

Bill Moyers: I understand that Jack Lew has Depression art on his, the wall of his office, art done by the Works Progress Administration. Which would be a good sign for someone like you who believes the Depression is back.

Paul Krugman: That’s, I have to say, the most reassuring thing I’ve heard about him. WPA, you know, they produced a lot of art, which I think it’s almost inconceivable now. But also the WPA was one of the really good moments in American policy. In a time of economic disaster, hiring people, giving them jobs to do things that are good, much of which survives and is an important part of our physical planet today. This is great. And the fact that he thinks well of and admires what the WPA did, that’s a very hopeful sign.

Bill Moyers: What could Jack Lew do as Treasury secretary that would make you think he’s a kindred spirit?

Paul Krugman: Campaign against this austerity obsession. We’re not going to get a big new stimulus package, much as I would like to see it. No, we’re not going to get it this year, anyway. But I’d like to see him saying when somebody says, “Well, we need to slash here, we need to slash there.” And he would say “Why would we want to be doing that now? That’s actually going to hurt the economy.”

Bill Moyers: But hasn’t our economy changed so much since Franklin Roosevelt simply put people on the government payroll?

Paul Krugman: It’s, economics, the underlying rules change a lot more slowly than people imagine. People look and they say, “Oh, you know, back then they were taking ocean liners and now we fly jet airplanes.” Or, “Back then we didn’t have a global economy.” Actually, we did. It’s a little bit fancier now. But the basic rules are not are not much changed. It takes hundreds of years for those to change a whole lot. And this is, I can pretty easily assemble a bunch of headlines from the 1930s and they will sound like they’re right out of today’s headlines. This is the same kind of animal that we confronted in the ’30s. This is depression economics. And the nature of the solution is not really very different now from what it was then.

Bill Moyers: What do you mean, depression economics?

Paul Krugman: Well, two things really. One is, a recession is when the economy’s going down. A depression is when the economy is down. So, you know, the U.S. economy was actually expanding through most of the 1930s, after a terrible big slump at the beginning and another slump later in the ’30s. And then it was expanding in between. But we call that whole episode the Great Depression because it was all a period of high unemployment and a lot of suffering.

And, of course, we’re in that now. It’s not as bad as the Great Depression. You know, it’s a great recommendation. Not as bad as the Great Depression. It’s terrible. We have a persistently depressed economy, persistent lack of jobs. So in that sense, it’s a depression. And there’s also a more technical meaning. Depression economics is when the normal things you do to boost the economy, have the Federal Reserve cut interest rates a little bit, are no longer available or effective. It’s a situation where the normal rules of what you– of economic policy, have to be put on hold, and you really need to do extraordinary stuff.

Bill Moyers: Well, the Fed has kept the interest late very low. And it has made a big difference, has it?

Paul Krugman: I think it actually has. If they hadn’t kept the interest rate low, things would be much, much worse. Meaning–

Bill Moyers: More people out to work.

Paul Krugman: That’s right. We, you know, this is not as bad as the Great Depression. Again, our famous last words. But part of the reason is that the Fed did learn something from the 1930s. It’s learned that raising interest rates to stabilize the price of gold is a really bad idea in times like this. But the trouble is that zero, which is as low as it can get, is not low enough. And we actually know pretty well what you need to do.

Bill Moyers: The other side of it is that people have been told so long, “Save money. Save money. Americans were not saving.” Now if they save money, they make no money from their savings.

Paul Krugman: That’s right. And, actually the truth is right now saving hurts us. It’s because what, another way, yet another way to think about depression economics, depression economics is a situation where the total amount that people want to save is less than the amount that businesses are willing to invest. You can think of that as being the result, a lot of it is because of this overhang of personal household debt from the past.

We had a housing bubble that burst, leaving us with too much construction. We have a financial system that’s disrupted. But all of that leads to the fact that there’s, the amount that businesses are willing to invest is less than the amount that collectively we all want to save, including corporations that are trying to retain earnings.

Which means that we’re awash in excess savings. And if you decide to save more, it’s not actually going to help society. I mean, things add up. If there’s a crucial, one crucial thing to understand about all this it is that the global economy, money moves around in a circle. And my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. And if all of us try to spend less because we want to save more, we don’t succeed. All we end up doing is creating a global depression.

Bill Moyers: So your prescription in this book, and the book is an argument for the prescription, is that the government should spend more so that people can buy more. In other words, creating demand that will drive the economy. That’s the chief argument in here.

Paul Krugman: That’s right. There are some other things you can do. Debt relief, where you can do it, will help because it will make people able to spend more. There’re some things that the, maybe the Federal Reserve can do, even though interest rates are zero. But the core thing, the thing that we know works, the thing that all the evidence of history says works in a situation like this is the private sector won’t spend, government can step in and provide the spending that we need in order to keep this economy afloat.

Bill Moyers: As you know, there is an argument on the other side that says that Roosevelt, in spending in the ’30s, did not really bring us out of the Depression. It was, and you acknowledge this in the book, the war, in which so much money was spent, you couldn’t help but put people to work.

Paul Krugman: That’s right. But the fact that it was a war that finally got the U.S. government to spend enough is not an argument against spending. It’s an argument about politics. It’s saying that then, as now, lots of people were saying, “Oh, it would be irresponsible to spend,” and it wasn’t until something external came along that the political restraints were released.

And then, we didn’t, we actually were, we had recovered from the Great Depression before Pearl Harbor, because the U.S. economy really went to war in 1940. And presto. I mean, lots of people said, “Oh, spending more can’t produce recovery.” And then we started our military buildup because war had broken out in Europe. And suddenly, we had recovery.

I made it as a joke, but if we discovered a threat from space aliens and decided that to deal with that threat, we needed to actually, somehow or other we needed to do a lot of infrastructure spending. We needed to build roads and high-speed rail. We would have full employment.

Bill Moyers: By full employment, you mean?

Paul Krugman: Something like 5 percent unemployment.

Bill Moyers: There essentially will always be a certain number of people who are not working for one reason or another.

Paul Krugman: Yeah. It’s a dynamic economy. There’s always going to be companies failing. There’s always going to be people quitting a job and taking some time to find a new one. There’s a lot of friction in the economy. So the fact of the matter is that normal, a normally pretty full employment economy is still going to have 5 percent measured unemployment. That’s okay. But there’s a world of difference between that and right now the official number is in the high sevens. But a lot of measures suggest it’s a lot worse than that. I mean, and most important, we have four million who’ve been out of work for more than a year, which is unprecedented since the 1930s.

Bill Moyers: Yeah, you write that we are in a depression that is essentially gratuitous. We don’t need to be suffering so much pain and destroying so many lives.

Paul Krugman: Gratuitous in the sense that there’s nothing, the only obstacles to putting people to work, to having those lives restored, to producing hundreds of billions, probably 900 billion a year or so of extra valuable stuff in our economy, is in our minds.

If I could somehow convince the members of Congress and the usual suspects that deficit spending, for the time being, is okay, and that what we really need is a big job creation program. And let’s worry about the deficit after we’ve had a solid recovery, it would all be over. It would be no problem at all, which is what, that’s the lesson of 1940, 1941.

Bill Moyers: Which is?

Paul Krugman: You can find all kinds of people explaining what was fundamentally wrong with the U.S. economy in 1940, that technology makes it impossible, workers don’t have the right skill. Then along came a war in Europe and we started spending. Actually, at that point, spending a lot on infrastructure because we were getting ready for a war. And all of a sudden–

Bill Moyers: Building harbors, building all kinds of–

Paul Krugman: And camps, training camps, there are a lot–

Bill Moyers: –training–

Paul Krugman: The first thing that happened actually was a lot of construction spending on the giant new camps that the Army was going need. And all of a sudden, all of those unemployable workers turned out to be extremely productive, if you gave them a job. All of those, you know, total inability to get the economy moving turned out to be totally easy to get the economy moving. And we’re basically in that situation right now. All the productive capacity is there. All that’s lacking is the intellectual clarity and the political will.

Bill Moyers: You make this so clear in the book, that’s why I recommended that President Obama read this book as the one book I would like to see him read before the inauguration next week. If he read it, what would you hope he would fasten on?

Paul Krugman: I would hope that he would fasten on the notion, you know, he faces real political constraint. So we understand, he can’t just pass legislation. But that the most important thing, his policy priority right now should be doing whatever he can to at least move in the direction of the kinds of policies that we want for full employment, that we need for full employment. And that the obsessions of Washington about a grand bargain on the deficit are really pretty much beside the point right now. That, if given a choice between doing something that will help the economy in the next two years, and something that will allegedly settle our budget problems for all, you know, for all time, which is wouldn’t, that he should go for the stuff that will help the economy now. That he should not bend on that point.

Bill Moyers: I can imagine that if you were sitting across the table with him, he might reply, “Look, Krugman, we’ve got a recovery coming on. Jobs are being created more steadily than ever. Measured unemployment is falling. Households are shaking off their burden of debt. I can see light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t think this is the time to do what you’re saying.”

Paul Krugman: I think he might have said that two, three years ago. I don’t think that president, you know, we happen to have a very intelligent man as president. He’s for real. And he does understand. You can have real discussions with him. And I think he understands that, although things have improved some. We actually have had some progress on the economy in the past year. It’s a glacial pace, compared with the way we should be. You can do this various ways. But if you think about the plunge that we took and you look at measures like the labor force, a fraction of prime age workers employed, whatever, we have maybe made up a quarter of the ground we lost in that great plunge in 2008, 2009. And it’ll take years and years to get back to anything that looks like prosperity at this rate.

Bill Moyers: What makes this a depression? You know, my generation remembers the photographs of those long lines of people looking for jobs, men and women both. Remembers the sad eyes, the hungry stomachs. Remembers that men were becoming so desperate they were becoming militant. But today, even though you say the situation, in terms of joblessness, is like the 1930s, you can’t obviously, you can’t transparently look around and see the evidence of a depression.

Paul Krugman: That’s right. It’s, and partly that it’s not as bad. So by modern concepts the Great Depression had unemployment rates that were as high as 20something percent by modern measures. And even in 1937, when things had improved, before we went into the second leg of the Great Depression, it was still probably about a nine percent unemployment rate by modern standards. And we’ve got a seven point something, eight percent, whatever. So things are not as bad. But I think a lot of it is just that the optics have changed.

Bill Moyers: Optics?

Paul Krugman: The optic, the misery is there. I mean, is there anybody, I guess if you live in very rarified circles you don’t know people who are desperate right now. But I live in pretty rarified circles and I do. I know, I have relatives, friends people I know who have, men my age who’ve lost jobs and see no prospect of getting another job and are just desperately trying to hang in there until they can collect their social security and get on Medicare. There are young people whose lives have collapsed. You know, they graduate and there’s nothing there.

Bill Moyers: Yeah, you make a very powerful point in here of the impact of being out of work now on the lifetime career of a young person who has no job at the moment.

Paul Krugman: We have pretty good evidence on, you know, how long does it take to make up for the fact that you happen to graduate from college into a bad labor market. And the answer is forever. You will never recover.

Bill Moyers: How so, what do you mean?

Paul Krugman: You will never get, you’ll miss years getting onto the career ladder. By the time you get a chance to get a job that makes any sense, you know, that makes any use of your skills, you will already be tarred as somebody, “Well, you’re 28 years old and you haven’t held a responsible position?” “Well, yeah, I couldn’t because there were no jobs.” It just shadows your whole life. And it’s very clear in the evidence from past recessions, which have been nowhere near as bad as this one.

The other thing I think I want to say here is that we have, in some ways, made things more civilized but also more invisible. Somebody said that food stamps are the soup kitchens of the modern depression. That there’re a lot of people who would be standing in line to get that soup, who are instead, and it’s a good thing, who are instead getting, I guess it’s now called SNAP, Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program, but who are getting those debit cards, and are getting essential food stuffs. And they’re at the grocery store and they look like anybody else. But the fact of the matter is they are still as desperate, they’re getting by day to day with the aid of a trickle of government aid, just like the people who were on, standing in line at the soup kitchens in the ’30s, but they’re not visible. They, we don’t have guys selling apples in street corners partly because, you know, the city licensing wouldn’t allow that anymore.

But we do have, again, we’ve got four million people who’ve been out of work for more than a year. The U.S. social system is not designed to take care of somebody who’s been out of work. We have unemployment insurance that’s intended to deal with short spells of unemployment. So there’s an enormous amount of misery, but it is mostly hidden.

Bill Moyers: So that’s why you refer to it, even though the optics have changed, as a quote “Vast, unnecessary catastrophe”?

Paul Krugman: Yeah. The amount of damage that’s being done is enormous. The amount of suffering of people is enormous. And if it isn’t out there, visible on the streets, if it’s dispersed across a suburban you know, if you see a house with a for sale sign that’s been sitting there for a while, you may not know the story about the family that was driven from its house because they, one or both spouses lost jobs and couldn’t find others. Or, and they were foreclosed on. But it’s a real story, all the same. And there’s lots of that going around. And none of this needs to be happening.

Bill Moyers: And you argue that this could actually be solved in two years?

Paul Krugman: That’s right. And that’s not a number plucked out of thin air. That’s a guess at how long it would take to get a serious spending program going. And we could actually make a lot of difference in it even quicker than that because the fact of the matter is, far from having effective job creation program, we’ve actually been pulling back. We’ve seen state and local governments lay off hundreds of thousands of school teachers. We’ve seen public investment in basic stuff like road repair cut way back. If we just went back to normal rates of filling potholes and normal rates of employment of school teachers, that could be done in months.

Bill Moyers: You wonder why, given the suffering, Congress and the White House haven’t acted.

Paul Krugman: Well, there are I think two, two levels of opposition. And one of them is just raw politics. We have a powerful political movement in this country that has a longstanding goal of rolling back all of the social programs, all the safety net that we’ve created. They want smaller government. They want reduced public services. Even the idea of public schools is very much under attack. They want it all to be switched to a system of vouchers. And they see this, you and I see a disaster, they see an opportunity. Here we have cash strapped state and local government. Good. Forced to cut back in government. They don’t want to do anything that will make it easier for them to, for government as we know it to continue. That movement controls one political party. And that political party controls one house of Congress. And that is enough to stand in the way of a lot of things we ought to be doing. Then there’s the second level, which is this odd coalescence of, I picked up the phrase from other people. Actually, from the blogger Duncan Black. “Very Serious People,” capital V, capital S, capital P.

Bill Moyers: You’re always writing that these Very Serious People. Who are they?

Paul Krugman: Yeah. The notion that someone, well, you can look are your random set of, you know Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson would be the quintessential Very Serious People. The editorial, practically the whole op-ed page, not all of them, but most of “The Washington Post.” People for whom this, it’s axiomatic that the budget deficit is the most important problem. And that what we really, really need to do right now at a time of mass unemployment is worry about the debt to GDP ratio ten years from now. And it’s a very hard thing to crack, partly because it’s not actually a rational argument. You very rarely, very rarely see on the Sunday talk shows, people asking, “Why exactly are you so concerned about the deficit right now?” That’s sort of a given. That’s a starting point. Everybody serious understands that, except that if you ask them why exactly, they can’t give you a very good answer.

Bill Moyers: What is the answer?

Paul Krugman: It’s partly that this is, it sounds serious. Never you know, never underestimate the importance of just plain what comes across. Start so it’s partly just it sounds serious, it’s the kind of thing that people who wear good suits are likely to talk about. Partly it is actually, of course, a deliberate pressure campaign.

Bill Moyers: For example, Pete Peterson, Nixon’s Secretary of the Commerce, billionaire several times over has set up this Fix the Debt campaign and is said to be putting half a billion dollars into trying to influence the public.

Paul Krugman: Yeah, actually it’s not just Fix the Debt, that’s just the latest incarnation. There’s also the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, there’s the newspaper “The Fiscal Times,” there’s several others. It’s a whole portfolio. They all are Peterson Foundation money at the roots, but they’re all out there. And yeah, serious attempts to influence public debate are not, by and large, a very lavishly funded enterprise.

Bill Moyers: But in this case?

Paul Krugman: But in this case, you’ve got so half a billion dollars, $500 million of spending with one agenda is going to have a huge impact. You know, policy intellectuals, by and large come cheap. A few hundred thousand in consulting contracts could do a lot there.

Bill Moyers: Do you think some of them are serious about the debt leading to a loss of confidence on the part of investors in foreign governments? I mean, even three years ago Barack Obama expressed concern about the long term debt and the confidence of people in the U.S. government. Take a listen.

Barack Obama: There may be some tax provisions that can encourage businesses to hire sooner rather than sitting on the sidelines. So we’re taking a look at those. I think it is important, though, to recognize that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.

Paul Krugman: I remember that well. And at the time it was going on, I do occasionally find myself in meetings with Very Serious People myself. I guess I am personally one now and then. There was this widespread view among people, and not all of it venal, not all of it self-interested, that somehow things were hanging by a thread. That any day now we could have a run on U.S. government debt, which was wrong.

But, okay, I can see how people could for a while have believed that. But a lot of time has gone by since then. And I hope that at least some people have learned better. But it’s amazing how little the continued failure of these warnings to actually be vindicated by anything has…how little of that’s actually affected the debate.

And there’s a special issue here, which I’ve actually tried to get across now, and I find that I get resistance even from people who are, I would’ve hoped were more flexible. It’s even very hard to tell the story about how this loss of confidence is supposed to work. I mean, it’s the United States is not like a European country that doesn’t have its own currency.

The U.S. government cannot run out of cash unless Congress prevents it, you know creates an entirely self-inflicted shortage through the debt ceiling. How is it exactly that we’re supposed to have this crisis that leads to a double dip recession? It really doesn’t even make sense as a story. And yet it is one of those things that people say and by and large, are not contradicted on.

Bill Moyers: We keep hearing from the right that we’re here on the path to becoming Greece, and you say that that’s impossible?

Paul Krugman: Yeah. We, even if, suppose that people decided, investors decided they don’t like U.S. government debt, it can’t cause a funding crisis because the U.S. government prints money. It’s even hard to see how it can drive up interest rates because the Fed sets interest rates at the short end, and why exactly would the long run rates go up if you don’t expect the Fed to raise rates? It could lead to a weakening of the U.S. dollar against other currencies.

But that’s actually a good thing. That would make U.S. exports more competitive. That would actually boost our economy. So it’s, actually impossible to tell that story, as far as I can tell. And yet, it’s not, again we’re mostly not in the realm of rational discourse here. It’s one of those things where people say it, they hear other people saying it. And they don’t actually try to work it through.

And it plays a big role, I’m sorry, in influencing our public discussion. Interestingly, people who actually have money on the line, that is people who are buying bonds, just keep on driving U.S. interest rates ever lower. So actual investors don’t care about this stuff. But our political class does.

Bill Moyers: Why don’t they care?

Paul Krugman: Because first of all, because I think at some level investors understand what I’m saying. That it’s very difficult to see any reason why the Fed would raise short term rates, which is controls for years to come. And in that case, long term debt even at a pretty low interest rate is a reasonable investment. Hard to see how a financial crisis actually develops against the United States, U.S. government, which is in this you know, has all the luxury of printing its own currency.

And investments are always about compared to what, right? If you if you say, “Well, the U.S. is a dangerous place to invest,” I don’t think it is, but particularly where is the safe place that people are going to invest? You know, what is this other asset that they’re going to buy? And it doesn’t really exist.

Bill Moyers: You say we’re in a liquidity trap. I don’t understand that.

Paul Krugman: Basically, a liquidity trap is we’re, back up for a second. How do we normally deal with a recession? How do we deal with a garden variety recession like the 2001 after the dot com bubble burst, or 1991? The answer is that basically the Fed, the Federal Reserve goes out there and prints money.

Or strictly speaking credits banks, you know, credit banks with that extra reserves and buys treasury bills. And that normally starts a chain of events where, okay, the banks have got extra reserves, they lend them out. They, that drives down interest rates, leads to a whole series of events, which ends up with the economy picking up some steam. And what the Fed is doing in that case, it’s supplying extra liquidity to the system.

Paul Krugman: But now we’re in a situation, we’re awash in liquidity. We’ve already got, I mean, interest rates are zero. And so anybody you say, “Well, we’re going to give you some more cash and you’re going to go lend it out,” and banks, everybody’s going to say, “Well, why would I want to do that? I mean, interest rates are zero. It’s, there’s no particular incentive for me not to just sit on this cash.”

So you pour this extra liquidity into the economy and it just sits there. And that’s the liquidity trap. It’s a situation in which the ordinary monetary policy thing doesn’t work.

A side consequence of that is it also means that if the government goes out and borrows more, it’s not going to drive up interest rates because there’s all this cash sitting out there looking for a place to go.

So the rules change. And liquidity traps are really rare. I mean, we had one in the 1930s and we’ve had another one since 2008. And aside from that, we had one in Japan in the 1990s, and that’s about it. But when they happen, boy, they change all the rules. You find yourself in a different universe for economics.

Bill Moyers: And they’re not putting people to work.

Paul Krugman: That’s right. A liquidity trap is a situation where the economy can stay depressed and there’s no natural, certainly no fast natural route to recovery.

Bill Moyers: So why would you be calling for more spending, given that reality?

Paul Krugman: Oh, but that’s the point, then the equation, what we’re looking for always, the problem…Basically all recessions are a problem of not enough spending in the economy. There are a few exceptions, basically, what we call a recession is, a case where there’s not enough spending, and so there’s not enough jobs. Normally, however, you can deal with that in a very narrow technocratic fashion, which is that the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates and stuff happens.

Now that doesn’t work because we’re in a liquidity trap. And so, this is where you say, “Okay, we need something else that’s going to work, and it’s very hard to come up with anything that is clearly effective, other than having the government go out and spend the money that the private sector won’t.” And this is why it, you know, this is, monetary policy is the aspirin of economic ailments. Take a couple whenever you’re feeling that you have a headache. Now we had the over the counter remedy doesn’t work and we need the, the heavy duty prescription medicine, and that’s what I’m arguing for.

Bill Moyers: Interesting you say that because I tried to condense to one sentence the message and argument of your book. And I wrote down, “The answer is simple. Increase spending and boost consumption because the fundamental problem at the root of this crisis is a lack of demand.”

Paul Krugman: That’s it. Now you can say that all crises’, or most crises’ anyway, most recessions are a lack of demand. But this is an intractable lack of demand. And so, we, we need we need government action of a type that most, at any point during the past 70 years, except this one, I would have said, “No, let’s leave it up to my former colleague, Ben Bernanke.” But he can’t do the job right now. And so, we need the government.

Bill Moyers: And if the president were sitting across the table from you and asking, “Where would you spend this money, Paul?” What would your answer be?

Paul Krugman: Right now it’s easy because right now we can do it very quickly simply by restoring the spending cuts that have already happened. If you gave me unlimited carte blanche in terms of spending, I would want to go beyond that. I’d want to talk about and pretty straightforward things, even so. We have you know, fix the sewer lines. I mean, we have, we have a lot of, a lot of basic infrastructure needs that are worth doing in any case.

But right now you can get a quick boost just by rehiring those school teachers and filling those potholes. We are something like $300 billion a year short of the spending that we should be undertaking just for the normal business of government. And that extra $300 billion a year would be a really big deal for the economy if we could do it right now.

Bill Moyers: Would it bring us to what you call full employment?

Paul Krugman: Probably not. Probably bring us down to an unemployment rate that was more in the 6 to 6.5 percent.

Bill Moyers: How much would it add to the long term deficit?

Paul Krugman: Actually, nothing to the long term deficit, or almost nothing because this would not be a permanent set of measures. This would be something we’d do now. It would add headline suppose we spend $300 billion a year right now, additional. That’s not $300 billion a year in extra debt because it’s, the economy will be stronger, which means more revenue, which means less spending on unemployment benefits.

So it’s probably under $200 billion a year in immediate borrowing. And there’s a lot of reason to think that would actually, having a stronger economy now would actually strengthen the economy in the long run as well. Or put it this way, the other way, that having a really weak economy now is damaging our future and not just our present. Think about all college graduates who will never get the job they all should get.

That’s not just harm for them, that’s a future economy that is weaker than it should’ve been because it’s wasting a lot of our talent. And there’s a pretty good case, actually a pretty strong case, that if you think about the long run fiscal impact, spending more right now is actually positive even in terms of the long run budget situation because a stronger future economy will mean stronger revenue down the pike.

And the debt we incur right now, well, you know, the interest rate on U.S. long term debt is under 2 percent. Inflation protected U.S. long term debt has a negative interest rate. There’s almost no, there’s even, on purely fiscal terms, it’s arguable that we should be spending more just to strengthen our long run budget position.

Bill Moyers: Is there a limit to how much we can keep borrowing?

Paul Krugman: There may be, although all that we know, all of the evidence says it’s a lot further away than conventional wisdom has it. I mean, like a lot of people, including Ben Bernanke, I got into all of these things by looking at Japan in the ’90s. And Japan famously has run deficits year after year. And it has a level of debt that is about twice what we’ve got as a share of GDP.

And people have been predicting financial catastrophe for Japan year after year for ten years or more. They’ve had downgrades. Their debt was downgraded in 2002 by the major rating agencies. And everybody who believed those warnings and everybody — has lost a lot of money. So it turns out that if you’re an advanced country with its own currency and a reasonably stable government, you have a lot of running room on these things.

So am I worried? Yeah, I mean, I am worried about the U.S. fiscal situation 20 years from now. We do have a problem of health care costs and so on. But, you know, I’m worried about a lot of other things 20 years as well. I’m not sure that even if you take that long term perspective, that the budget should be at the top of your list of things to be afraid of.

I’m a lot more afraid, actually, of the great — the entire southwest of the United States turning into a dustbowl because of climate change, right? So sure, by all means, let’s think about it. But it should not be dominating our policy discussion now.

Bill Moyers: As you know, we’re heading toward another knockdown, drag out, shoot it out at the O.K. Corral fight over raising the debt ceiling in a few weeks. President Obama has already said he will not negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. Here’s what he said.

Barack Obama: I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed. Let me repeat. We can’t not pay bills that we’ve already incurred.

Bill Moyers: And here’s the response he got the next day from Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Pat Toomey: Our opportunity here is on the debt ceiling. The president’s made it very clear; he doesn’t even want to have a discussion about it, because he knows this is where we have leverage. We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean, and insist that we get off the road to Greece, because that’s the road we’re on right now. We only can solve this problem by getting spending under control and restructuring the entitlement programs. There is no tax solution to this; it’s a spending solution. And if this president doesn’t want to go there, we’re going to have to force it and we’re going to have to force it over the debt ceiling.

Paul Krugman: This is a guy walking into a crowded room and saying, “I have a bomb strapped to my chest, and if you don’t give me what I want, I’m going to blow up everybody, including myself.” And is that a credible threat? Well, there’re some pretty crazy people there. And it might be that they’re willing to do it.

But by the same token, Obama cannot get into this because then you have government in the hands of — never mind the Constitution, the government is run by whoever is most willing to wreak havoc with our whole system of — with the nation. We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed into spending cuts, partly because blackmail should not be part of how the U.S. operates, and partly because spending cuts would be disastrous right now. So Obama’s right to say he doesn’t negotiate. I’d like to know exactly what he will do if it turns out that there is not a quorum of sane people in the Republican party.

Bill Moyers: If you were Secretary of the Treasury, what would you recommend he do?

Paul Krugman: I’m for whatever gimmick works. So the most dignified is to say, “Look, this is ridiculous. You are giving the president — effectively Congress is giving the president inconsistent instructions. It’s passed bills mandating spending. It’s passed bills that give us inadequate revenue to cover that spending which requires that we borrow. And then you’re saying, ‘I can’t borrow.’ Well, you know.

And my reading of the Constitution is I have to obey the due legislative process and go ahead and do this borrowing to meet the bills that we’ve already incurred, as the president said.” That’s sort of what people are calling the Fourteenth Amendment solution, that basically it’s unconstitutional to give into this debt limit thing. I guess that’s your best solution. They don’t think that that’s workable then you go for anything at hand. And there is this wonderful bit about the platinum coin.

Bill Moyers: I don’t understand that.

Paul Krugman: In a 1997 act amended in 2000 which covers issuance of coins and stuff like that. There’s one clause that says that the Secretary of the Treasury shall have the right to mint and issue platinum coins in any denomination that he so chooses. Clearly, the intent was commemorative coins. You’re going to strike a coin to commemorate whatever, Mother’s Day.

But it doesn’t say that. And as far as legal scholars have been able to make out, there’s no reason why the Secretary of the Treasury can’t order the minting of a coin that says this coin is worth $1 trillion, which need bear no relationship to the actual value of the platinum in it. It has to be platinum, however. And walk that coin over to the Federal Reserve.

Deposit it in and have the Federal Reserve create a bank account for the federal government based on that coin of whatever. It could be one coin for $1 trillion, it could be a thousand coins of a billion each, whatever. And then the government can pay its bills by drawing on that bank account. And it’s crazy, it’s an accounting gimmick, but then this whole thing is crazy. And if that lets you bypass this nonsense about the debt limit, fine.

There are other routes. I mean, it’s possible the government could issue coupons that look like debt and function like debt, but says, “No, they’re not debt.” They could say, “This — we have no legal obligation to pay this. We are, in fact, going to pay it, but we have no legal obligation to pay it.” That’s another alternative. They could–

Bill Moyers: This is what you’d call–

Paul Krugman: I’d call it moral obligation coupons.

Bill Moyers: Moral obligation because the government is morally obligated to pay that at some point, right? That’s what–

Paul Krugman: That’s right.

Bill Moyers: –you mean by that?

Paul Krugman: Yeah. So, but it’s a moral obligation. We can say it’s not a legal obligation so that — you know, all of this is of course, this is all word games. But then that’s not to play games would be irresponsible at this point.

Bill Moyers: So you would encourage, if you were Secretary of the Treasury, the president to call the Republican bluff?

Paul Krugman: Yes. I think, now, I think you probably don’t commit to doing that until we actually hit the limit. You say what the president is now saying. There is no alternative but for Congress to do the responsible thing and raise this debt limit.

But you don’t rule out these alternatives and you make sure that the Republicans know you haven’t ruled it out so that it stands ready, and in fact it’s what you do. Hostage negotiations, you have to — you have to have some credible alternative to giving into the hostage takers demands, and that’s where we are right now.

Bill Moyers: You’ve confessed before to an occasional sinking feeling that you can count on President Obama to wimp out. And that’s your term, “to wimp out” when it matters.

Paul Krugman: Yeah. The 2011 debt ceiling fight was deeply disheartening because he should not have negotiated on the debt ceiling at all. Same argument as now. This is not how you do it. It is not a legitimate tactic of politics to threaten to destroy the country if you don’t get what you want. And people who make that demand have no standing. You should not give them anything.

But he did. He actually did, in fact, make some significant concessions on spending, in order to get a rise in the debt limit. He blinked a little bit on the fiscal cliff. Not as badly as some of us feared, but he did not, in fact, hold out for the full revenue package. And so, some of us are worried. Now, I have to say, I mean, I’m reading my own stage directions here.

People like me are, in part, going after him, warning about the wimping out thing in order to turn that into a self-denying prophesy. That the idea is to make a situation where the president will be aware what people will say about him if he does give in here so it doesn’t happen.

Bill Moyers: More than many economists I read, you keep politics at center stage in writing about the economy. Those are two different narratives in one sense. And yet, you intertwine them as you keep writing and analyzing our situation today. Why is that?

Paul Krugman: I think we’ve reached a moment in our history where the extreme nature of our politics and the extreme nature of the economic situation has converged. You know, here we are, on one side we have a once-in-three-generations economic crisis. Right, this is — starting in 2008, we’ve been experiencing the crisis that has haunted the nightmares of macro economists since the 1930s. And here it is again.

And this is as dramatic as it gets. It’s a situation where you really have to throw out the business as usual. And on the other side, you have this extreme political situation, where a radical movement has taken over one of our two great political parties. And does not– does not practice politics as usual. Anyone who talks about, “Well, we should make deals the way we used to. What about the Tax Reform of 1986? Why can’t we do that again?” And the answer is, well, that might make sense to you if you’ve been in a Buddhist monastery for the past 20 years.

But that’s not today’s Republican party. You can’t make that kind of deal with them. And so, how can you write about the economics? If you write about economics right now and implicitly adopt the perspective, “Well, let’s get reasonable people together in Washington and reach a solution here,” you know, you’re paying no attention to reality. And, of course, if you talk about the politics without talking about the economics, you’re also missing everything. So how could I not be writing about both?

Bill Moyers: You begin one chapter of your book with a quote from your intellectual mentor, John Maynard Keynes, who writes in his masterpiece The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, “The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live–” and this was the ’20s and ’30s, “are its failure to provide for full employment. And its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.” Well, we don’t have full employment today and we have gross inequality in income. So which is failing us, capitalism or democracy or both?

Paul Krugman: I guess I have a — here’s where I guess I am an optimist, which is that I believe that you can fix both capitalism and democracy. Not to produce a utopia, but to produce a workable solution. And the reason I believe that is we did that for a pretty long stretch.

Western economies in 1933 and western societies in 1933 were in a pretty horrible state. Mass unemployment, gross inequality, collapse of democracy in a number of places. And in the end, by the time 1950 had rolled around, we had managed to create a more equitable, not totally equal, but a more equitable society, with reasonably full employment.

And that solution lasted for half a century, which is all you can ever expect in human affairs. Nothing is permanent. So I do believe that we can do that again. So it’s not that we have to ditch capitalism. I think a market economy is — this is probably Churchill, right, it’s the worst solution except for all the others. And democracy is the worst system, except for all the others.

But it’s going to take some work. It’s not — the idea that you can just let markets rip and that you don’t need to worry about the state of your democracy, that’s wrong. But I’m actually, in a way, a conservative on these things. But a conservative, not — what we now call conservatives are actually radicals who want to tear down the structure that we built, starting with FDR. And I want to rebuild something like that, a modernized, a twenty-first century version of that system. But it’s not out of reach. It’s not something that can’t be done.

Bill Moyers: Paul Krugman, “End This Depression Now.” Thank you very much for this conversation.

Paul Krugman: Thank you.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has warned that the Western-led war in Mali could leave hundreds of thousands of people homeless.

“We believe that in the near future there could be up to 300,000 people additionally displaced inside Mali, and over 400,000 additionally displaced in the neighboring countries,” UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said on Friday.

The figures do not include the existing 229,000 people already displaced inside the country and 147,000 refugees who have fled to neighboring nations, she told reporters in Geneva.

The spokeswoman also noted that many have been unable to leave the violence-hit country due to the high costs.

The wave of displacements came after France aircraft started airstrikes in the country on January 11, with 2,744 Malians fleeing for Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Niger.

France and several European and African countries have sent troops to the West African state to help the Malian government stop the advance of rebels who have been occupying the country’s north Mali since April.

The Malian Army has announced progress in blocking the rebels’ advance beyond their stronghold in the north, but the UNHCR remained skeptical the conflict would come to an end any time soon.

“Nobody thinks this is going to be over tomorrow,” she said, pointing to pre-existing differences and reports of growing ethnic tensions in the country.

MRS/JR

For 20 years, Mali was considered a model of democracy in Africa. Then, in March of 2012, junior officers, dissatisfied with the government’s way handling of a rebellion by Tuareg tribes, staged a coup d’état. Mali’s 20-year-old democracy fell and Tuareg rebels and Islamists took over the northern part of the country, an area as big as France. An alliance of jihadist groups, including Ansar Dine, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) imposed the rule of Islamic law on northern Mali – reports have emerged of people stoned to death for public displays of affection – and retook Timbuktu, vowing to destroy its storied mausoleums.

The Malian government have been indecisive about receiving international aid to fight the jihadists. Then, on January 10, jihadists made a sudden advance into the southern part of Mali and seized the central village of Konna. Last week, French President Francois Hollande sent in 2,500 ground troops and launched an air attack.

By January 12, French troops had retaken Konna. But the intervention of the French – who fought against the jihadist Tukulor Empire in the 19th century – has set off a new crisis, the taking of more than 40 hostages, including citizens of Japan, Norway, the U.K. and the U.S., from an oil facility in Algeria on Wednesday.  Initial reports said that a Briton and an Algerian had been killed in an ambush on a bus bringing workers to an airport. The media have since said that 34 hostages and 14 kidnappers have been killed, though there has not yet been official confirmation of any deaths, says the BBC.

The gas field is operated jointly by BP, Algerian state oil company Sonatrach and Norwegian firm Statoil.

Northern Mali: Now “the largest al Qaeda-controlled space in the world”

According to Algerian Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia, the kidnappers are Algerian and under the command of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who was a senior commander of AQIM until last year. A statement said to be from the kidnappers calls for an end to the French military intervention in neighboring Mali.

Peter Chilson writes in an article entitled “Al Qaeda Country: Why Mali Matters” in Foreign Policy:

If Mali feels somewhat far away or less than important, consider this: Northern Mali is currently the largest al Qaeda-controlled space in the world, an area a little larger than France itself. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that Mali could become a “permanent haven for terrorists and organized criminal networks.” In December, Gen. Carter F. Ham, commander of the U.S. Africa Command, warned that al Qaeda was using northern Mali as a training center and base for recruiting across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Jihadists operating in northern Mali have been linked to Boko Haram, the violent Islamist group based in northern Nigeria, and to Ansar al-Sharia, a group in Libya which has been linked to the attack on the U.S. consulate at Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The French government has said that the Malian government requested its help after the jihadist incursion on January 10. But behind this is a “less selfless reason,” says Chilson, a “fear that a growing al Qaeda presence in West Africa will make France itself more vulnerable to terrorist attack.” France has said it will remain in Mali until it is stable again; Chilson says that will not be any time soon:

Taking back Mali’s northern cities, such as Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal, may be the easiest task. Mali’s vast northern desert is a hard place to live, not to mention wage war. For eight months a year, the daytime temperature exceeds 120 degrees Fahrenheit in a vast and unpopulated land that is easy to hide in, especially for the jihadist forces who know the territory well. Any army, no matter how large and well equipped, will have a tough time driving them out.

The jihadists – who Chilson describes as well-trained, well-funded from ransom from kidnappings and armed with weapons captured from the Malian army last spring and Libya –  have counteracted and taken another village in Segou province that is some 300 miles away from the Malian capital, Bamako.

The recent rush of events in Mali and Algeria has revealed that U.S. officials have “only an impressionistic understanding of the militant groups that have established a safe haven in Mali” and are “divided about whether some of these groups even pose a threat” to the U.S., says the New York Times. Asked if AQIM poses an “imminent threat,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the top American commander in Africa, responded “probably not,” though Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has said he sees the group as a more serious threat. As Gen. Ham points out, Malie and the entire region are “tough to penetrate.”

Troops from the Algerian army are currently surrounding the facility where the hostages are being held. At least four hostages have been freed but there have also been a number of victims.

At least four people have been injured after gunmen ambushed the convoy of Lebanese Minister of Youth and Sports Faisal Karami in the northern city of Tripoli, Press TV reports.

The attack occurred on Friday in Tripoli’s Azmi street as the ministerial convoy passed through.

According to a statement issued by Karami’s office, the minister was not hurt in the attack and that the four who were injured were his bodyguards.

One of the convoy’s patrol cars burst into flames after gunmen threw a grenade at the convoy.

Voice of Lebanon radio (93.3) said that the incident took place after Karami’s bodyguards exchanged fire with protesters who were participating in a sit-in to demand the release of Islamist detainees held at Roumieh prison, which is located northeast of Beirut.

Following the attack, Lebanese army was deployed near Karami’s house in al-Maarad area and began checking the identification papers of passers-by.

Shortly after the attack Karami told local TV channel OTV that he felt he was not the target of the attack, but rather that “the unrest aims at targeting the country’s security situation”. The minister, however, said that the incident represented an attack on his life.

Hundreds of members of Fatah al-Islam, a violent extrimist group that in 2007 fought deadly gun battles with the Lebanese Army in the northern Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, are being held at Roumieh prison for years without trial.

HM/JR

Context: As yet there are no context links for this item.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week’s edition of The Bennis Report with Phyllis Bennis, who now joins us from Washington, D.C.

Phyllis is a fellow and the director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, author of many books, including Before and After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the War on Terrorism and Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer.Thanks for joining us, Phyllis.PHYLLIS BENNIS, FELLOW, INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES: Great to be with you, Paul.JAY: So 2013, what are one or two of the things you’re going to be looking for?BENNIS: This is coming on to the second anniversary now of the Arab Spring. And I’m one of maybe only a few left that are still calling it a spring, because I think that despite the horrors that are right now facing people, especially in Syria, I think that what we’re seeing across the Middle East, throughout the Arab world, has been a just incredible rising of peoples claiming their citizenship in a way that they just have never done for the last 40 or 50 years. And that’s still going on. It’s going to take a very long time. None of it’s going to be easy. We’re seeing, you know, five steps back for every one step forward. But still I think there’s new developments that are important. If we start perhaps with Bahrain, which has been off the pages of major newspapers in the U.S., because Bahrain, of course, is a key U.S. ally–the Fifth Fleet is stationed there–but the conditions in Bahrain, where the uprising was smashed early on and continues to face horrific human rights violations, is now coming back. We saw a New York Times editorial by one of the leaders of that movement, Zainab al-Khawaja, a terrific young woman. I spent some time with her a few months ago in South Africa. We toured together doing a little speaking tour, and she’s fantastic. She’s 24 years old. Her father is one of the leaders of this movement. He’s in prison for life. Her sister has just been imprisoned. She works in exile in Norway to get the issues of the human rights crisis in Bahrain out, and they’re now having success. They’re reaching people in this country. They’re reaching the pages of The New York Times. And the question of the Fifth Fleet is not preventing that. So that’s huge at the level of influencing the discourse in this country. If we look at the conditions in Syria, of course, there’s not much good to talk about. The UN’s latest report indicates that the overall conflict in Syria has become overwhelmingly a sectarian conflict. And that means it’s going to be much harder to bring it to an end. The UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has just completed another visit to the region. He’s gone off to Moscow to talk with officials there. He’s talking again about the possibility of a transitional government.So far, both sides are pretty opposed to that. There’s no clarity about how a ceasefire–the first thing that has to happen–would take place. So the Syrian opposition now has come together with a new coalition that’s being recognized by the U.S., and leading European governments as well. But at the same time, the United States has said that one of the most important organizations within that coalition, the one that has the most power militarily on the ground, that’s won the most victories against the regime’s army, is in fact what the U.S. calls a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda. So it’s a very uneven level of support that the U.S. is offering. The arms are still coming in via Turkey, primarily from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. There’s big debates about whether it’s even possible to provide arms for what the U.S. and the Europeans would like to think are the good guys in the opposition, meaning Western secular types like us, versus those who are actually getting the weapons from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which tend to be the Islamist forces that aren’t like us. So it’s a very messy situation in which the opposition, writ large, is winning real victories on the ground. But who is speaking for the opposition, how to take into account the needs of the original opposition movement, which was largely a secular, very democratic, open-minded kind of opposition whose voices, in their commitment to nonviolence, their commitment to not making this a civil war, as it has become, they have been largely squelched. Their voices have been silenced by the sound of the guns.At the same time, the regime is losing credibility. It’s suffered significant losses of high-ranking officials, including military officials, including recently the major general of the Syrian army whose job it was to head up the division charged with preventing defections. He was the most recent defector. So it’s a very uncertain question, how this is going to be resolved. The top supporter of the regime, Russia, has pulled back from its once all-sided support for Assad and is now saying, well, we’re not supporting anybody, but we don’t want to have a situation like we have in Libya. Libya, of course, remains completely chaotic, without a viable government that’s capable of providing security for the people of Libya. The weapons that are flooding countries like Mali and elsewhere in North Africa are largely coming from Libya in the wake of this U.S.- and NATO-backed overthrow of the Gaddafi regime.And in Syria it’s becoming more and more sectarian, with even those generals that are defecting tend to not be the Alawites’ generals that are the most closely tied to Assad’s inner circle. So this is going to be a very, very difficult and, I’m afraid, continuing very bloody scenario in Syria.But the one thing that I think: the optimism has to come back when we look at Egypt. Even though there’s been this horrific political debate going on over the Egyptian constitution and some significant losses for the secular and democratic components of the opposition forces with the consolidation of power by President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood that backs him, I still think that what we’re seeing in Egypt is a very exciting moment that over the long and even medium term is going to transform that country into a place where people claim their rights as citizens of their country and not subjects of a U.S.-backed dictatorship, as they were for so many years. I don’t exactly know how that’s going to play out. I think that the elections that are going to come for the lower house of Parliament are likely to once again lead to a Islamist-dominated Parliament. But I think that the secular opposition, the Christian opposition, the Muslim opposition, who just doesn’t want as big a role for religion in the government, all of those opposition forces are beginning to cohere much more than they were before. They were really very diverse and divergent before. They’re coming together. And I think they’re showing themselves to be an important player in society. And Morsi has to recognize that despite the fact that in both days of the election or the referendum over the Constitution, despite the fact that he won, he won, his constitution won, by a fairly narrow margin. It was 52 one day and about 60 percent the next. But on both days, there was less than a third of the potential voters, less than a third of the eligible voters actually participated. So if you do the math, it ends up that only about 15 percent of eligible voters supported the Constitution. And that’s not very many.JAY: When you look at the Palestinian-Israeli situation, there are some things happening there which are kind of new in a way–Qatar’s involvement in Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt’s role in sort of managing the resolution of the Gaza war, and then the Fatah-Hamas kind of unity front (we’ll see how long that lasts). And then, apparently, just now, recently, President Abbas has said if the paralysis with Israel–negotiations continues to be so paralyzed, he’s going to disband the P.A.BENNIS: Yeah, there’s a lot of developments there, some of which are optimistic. But, again, the situation on the ground continues to be very grim. What we saw with the most recent Isreali assault on Gaza in November-December, just like what happened four years ago during Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day Israeli war on Gaza, there’s been a real transition of political realities in the aftermath. So it isn’t only about public awareness of the brutality of the Israeli occupation. What the assault on Gaza meant in terms of the killing of civilians, particularly the killing of children, but as well, on the political front, that’s where you saw the new reality of the post-Arab Spring governments moving towards Palestine in a way that they never did before. So even while the Israeli assault was under way, you had–I think the total was somewhere like 14 or 15 Arab foreign ministers visiting not the Israelis to make sure that the U.S. saw they were on the Israeli side, and not even going to the West Bank, where the Israeli assault was not happening, but going right to Gaza under the bombs. You had the prime minister of Egypt, you had the foreign minister of Turkey, you had the foreign ministers of half the Arab League showing up. So this is a very important development in terms of not so much the rhetoric, because those governments all had the rhetoric of being pro-Palestinian for years, but they were never willing to do anything that would challenge the U.S. This time around, at least on the political front, they were willing to. Now, we saw the large grant from Qatar to the Palestinian authorities in Gaza led by Hamas. We see the break of Hamas with the Syrian government. And to a large degree it’s beginning to break with Iran as well. And the result of that is that right now the key allies of Hamas in the region are not Syria and Iran, the key enemies of the United States, but they are Turkey and Qatar and Saudi Arabia, arguably among the most important allies of the U.S. in the region. So it’s a very different scenario that we’re working with. And then you have Egypt, where the Egyptian shift means–and, again, here, in terms of relations with Hamas, Egypt’s role as well as–perhaps even more than Turkey and Qatar, becomes critical, because Egypt has emerged as the interlocutor between Israel and Hamas on the one hand–after all of Israel’s claims that we’ll never talk to Hamas, they’re talking to them through the Egyptians–as the interlocutor between Hamas and Fatah, bringing the possibility of a Palestinian unity process more likely to be something that could happen sooner. And at the end of the day, you have the possibility that with an opening of the Gaza crossing into Egypt, at least a possibility for the people of Gaza to breathe.Overall, I think that we’re moving into a period where the Arab Spring has enormous possibilities. Syria remains a disaster, and it’s going to take a great deal of diplomacy to bring that to a halt. But elsewhere in the region I think that things are more hopeful than we’ve seen. On the ground, particularly for Palestinians, as well as Syrians, it’s a disaster. But we have to look forward, and 2013 could be a year when we see some real changes.JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Phyllis.BENNIS: Thank you, Paul. Always a pleasure.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

Comments

Our automatic spam filter blocks comments with multiple links and multiple users using the same IP address. Please make thoughtful comments with minimal links using only one user name. If you think your comment has been mistakenly removed please email us at contact@therealnews.com

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

At last, someone calls the NRA what they are: trolls. Rachel Maddow is absolutely right. They’re just playing the “how can I get a reaction” game while the rest of us are actually trying to have an adult discussion. This is characteristic of trolls: They intend to disrupt and disturb rational conversations in order to put the attention on themselves. In the case of the NRA, they’re hoping their disruption will not only slow momentum building for reasonable gun safety laws, but also focus attention on them and their stupid fearmongering about losing their guns.

We all know how to treat trolls, right? Repeat after me: We don’t feed the trolls. We don’t pay attention to the trolls, we don’t give them any attention whatsoever. We keep having our adult conversation, which even Joe Scarborough and Michael Steele are involved in, while ignoring the lunatics over there on the sidelines trolling for attention.

Alrighty then. Back to work.

A wolf hunter in Hasselforsreviret, Sweden. (Photo: Anders Wiklund/AFP/Getty Images)

If, as she has threatened, Brigitte Bardot moves to Russia in protest at the treatment of animals in France, she’s in for a major shock.

A couple of weeks ago, the former actress warned that if two circus elephants thought to be carrying tuberculosis are killed as a result of a ruling by a French court, she will follow Gérard Depardieu by applying for a Russian passport:

“If those in power are cowardly and impudent enough to kill the elephants … then I have decided I will ask for Russian nationality to get out of this country which has become nothing more than an animal cemetery”.

As a general principle, I think anyone who threatens to move to another country if they don’t get their way should be obliged to do so. This, for example, would rid the United Kingdom of some of its greediest and most demanding bankers who, despite their promises, are still here. And Tracey Emin.

But if Bardot does move to Russia, which I reckon is about as likely as Vladimir Putin being elected to the board of Amnesty International, she’ll find that France’s record on the treatment and protection of animals, while often brutal, is almost exemplary by comparison to her adopted country’s. Take for example the decree on Tuesday by the president of the Sakha Republic (also known as Yakutia) in Siberia.

There are 3,500 wolves in Sakha, which sounds like a lot until you discover that the republic is the size of India. President Yegor Borisov wants to reduce the population to 500 through an intensive three-month hunt, supported by a state of emergency, bounties for every wolf shot and a prize of 1m roubles for the hunters who kill the most.

This “emergency” massacre is necessary, he claims, because wolves are killing too many domestic animals. Last year, apparently, they incurred 5m roubles’ (£103,500) worth of losses – considerably less than the likely cost of the wolf hunt. Would it not make more sense to use the money to compensate the farmers? Would it not make more sense to protect the wolves’ natural prey: animals such as hares which are currently being overhunted by people, driving the wolves to look elsewhere for food?

In November, when I wrote about plans to exterminate wolves in Norway, some of those who supported the killings wrote to me to explain that there are plenty of wolves in Russia, so why bother protecting them in Scandinavia? Doubtless the Russian supporters of Borisov’s bloodbath will respond that there are plenty of wolves left in Canada, so why bother protecting them in Russia?

Well they too are likely to be disappointed, as similar massacres are being planned there, on the most cynical of premises.

In Alberta, the province systematically corrupted and brutalised by the oil curse, and whose polluted politics are now corrupting public life throughout Canada, the government plans to carry out a mass killing of wolves by shooting them from helicopters and poisoning them with strychnine.

The reason, ostensibly, is to protect the woodland caribou, a subspecies of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus caribou), whose numbers have been diminishing rapidly. This, according to the Alberta Caribou Committee, is because wolves have been killing them.

So what is this Alberta Caribou Committee? As you might expect, it represents all the usual environmental organisations, such as, er, PetroCanada, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Koch Petroleum, TransCanada Pipelines, Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries and the pulp company Daishowa Marubeni.

Between them they have decided – and apparently convinced both the provincial and federal governments – that the problem afflicting the province’s caribou is not the fragmentation of their habitat by seismic lines, pipelines, roads, oil platforms, timber cutting and the transformation of pristine forest into wasteland by tar sands operations, but the natural predator with which the species has lived for thousands of years.

Never mind that analysis of wolves’ feces show that they eat very few caribou, as they prefer to hunt deer. Never mind that the woodland caribou is highly susceptible to disturbance, and that all the evidence points to the destruction of their habitat as the major factor causing their decline. Something other than the smash and grab exploitation now raging across Saudi Alberta must be to blame. And what better scapegoat could there be than the animal demonised for centuries on both sides of the Atlantic?

Wolf killing is the excuse the federal government needs to remove protection from all but 5% of pristine woodland caribou habitat. As Cliff Wallis of the Alberta Wilderness Association points out “The plan gives the appearance of doing something, but the details read ‘business as usual’ for Alberta oil sands, oil and gas and forestry.” Killing wolves suggests that the caribou are being protected, even while they are being driven to extinction by scarcely regulated industry. Already, hundreds of wolves have been shot and poisoned: now the government intends to intensify this effort.

Something similar is happening in British Columbia. In November a wolf-killing competition, sponsored among others by the Peace River Rod and Gun Club, was announced. It will take place across the winter, and offers cash prizes for the hunters who kill the biggest and smallest wolves. The wolves are driven to exhaustion by snowmobiles, then shot.

Like Alberta’s, the provincial government of British Columbia plans to relax the regulations governing the killing of wolves and to wipe them out in some parts of the province. Again, the excuse is to protect caribou; which again are threatened primarily by human activities.

So I wonder what the advocates of the wolf massacres in Canada will say: don’t worry about our populations, because they’re thriving in Russia, I mean Norway, I mean Edinburgh zoo?

You cannot rely on other countries to do what you refuse to do at home. There’s only one place in which a government can be sure of protecting wildlife, and that’s the place over which it has jurisdiction.

© 2013 George Monbiot

George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. Visit his website at www.monbiot.com

© Copyright 2010 Press TV. All rights reserved.

The Spanish government has ordered the satellite service provider Hispasat to take the Iranian Spanish language channel, Hispan TV off the air in a blatant assault on the freedom of speech.

The move comes a month after the Spanish satellite company – Hispasat – terminated the terrestrial broadcast of Hispan TV.

Back then, the move was immediately welcomed by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which called it an important development in worldwide efforts to contain Iran’s media influence.

AJC Executive Director David Harris has acknowledged that the committee had for months been engaged in discussions with the Spaniards over taking Iranian media off the air.

Hispan TV, along with Iran’s 24-hour English language news channel Press TV, has already been targeted by Hispasat’s fellow European satellite providers Eutelsat and Hotbird.

Hispasat is partly owned by Eutelsat, whose French-Israeli CEO is blamed for the recent wave of attacks on Iranian media in Europe.

MP/HMV/SS

A couple wept in court as they were convicted of the manslaughter of their two-year-old son who died from drinking methadone.

Riley Pettipierre died in hospital after drinking the heroin substitute from a beaker left in a bedroom at his family’s flat in Belper, Derbyshire, last March.

A jury at Nottingham Crown Court found his parents, Sally Dent, 33, and Shaun Binfield, 45, guilty of his manslaughter.

During the two-week trial, the jury heard that Dent had a history of drug use going back many years and was prescribed methadone to try to rid her of the habit.

Dent regularly sold some of her methadone to other drug addicts to make extra money and was struggling to kick her addiction.

The jurors heard that a green and yellow child’s beaker of the drug was left in the bedroom on March 12 last year so Dent could drink from it during the night if she needed it.

The next morning Dent, who had taken heroin the night before, woke to find Riley unconscious next to her in bed after the toddler drank the drug from the beaker.

The couple told the court a cup was usually kept on top of the wardrobe in their bedroom but had been moved on that occasion because it was more convenient for Dent.

Binfield told the court he forgot to move the cup because he had got caught up with putting the family bins out and the childcare routine after getting up on March 13.

He fought back tears as he admitted he missed three opportunities to move the cup, which the child must have managed to get hold of and drink from.

Dent called 999 and paramedics arrived at the house to find Riley lifeless. His heart had stopped beating and his lips were blue, the court heard.

The child was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead shortly after arriving and a post-mortem showed that Riley had enough methadone in his blood, stomach and urine to prove fatal.

He is believed to have consumed between 10ml and 20ml of methadone, the court heard.

The jury took just four hours to convict Dent and Binfield of manslaughter.

Dent was also found guilty of a separate charge of cruelty to a child under the age of 16 for failing to keep methadone out of the reach of her child.

Following her conviction, the court heard Dent had previous convictions for possessing Class A drugs with intent to supply, assault and prostitution.

Judge Milmo adjourned sentencing until February 19.

He thanked the jury for dealing with such an “emotionally charged” case. “This has been a distressing case and I’m afraid it has fallen to you to deal with it,” he said.

It’s time to stop moneyed conservative interests from trying to buy or steal our democracy. We know the problem–let’s get to the solutions.

Since the 1880s we’ve seen how money shouts, and since the 1980s we’ve watched regressives seek to restrict the freedom to vote, culminating last year in the explosion of Super PAC spending and voting rights restrictions. This time, the efforts of the Adelsons, Kochs and Roves largely failed (at the federal level). But the economic elites will be back to attempt their hostile takeover of our democracy with even more money and sophistication.

Hence MoneyOut/VotersIn Day in some sixty cities on January 19. That’s when a large coalition of public interest, labor, voting rights and faith groups are aspiring to a “more perfect union” on the confluence of the third anniversary of Citizens United, the weekend celebration of MLK and the Presidential Inauguration.

Generations of traditional campaign finance groups have worked against a democracy-for-sale. And heroic voting rights groups have long sought to fulfill Dr. King’s plea at the Washington Monument in 1957: “Give us the ballot! Give us the ballot!” But rarely have these two communities worked together to stop the rigging of the political system. Until we ensure that popular majorities become public law, it will be hard to accomplish so much of what is urgent–a more progressive tax code, immigration reform, climate change legislation, a living wage, labor reform and gun violence reduction.

So on January 19, scores of groups and thousands of people around the country will organize around a three-part Democracy-for-All program: a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United; public funding of public elections, in Washington and state capitols; and guaranteed voting rights so potentially 50 million more Americans can vote before or on a National Holiday in November.

First, reverse Citizens United. A momentary five-justice majority in this case tried to assure that a plutocracy of donors supplant a democracy of voters. As for the view that, well, both capital and labor will now be able to spend without limit in elections, the reality is that capital has 3,000 times more wealth than labor, the Koch brothers alone with a net worth more than all unions in America. Senator John McCain is right when he calls the decision the worst in a century. How can “originalists” like Justices Scalia and Thomas ignore the historical reality that the founders intended the First Amendment apply to actual people, not corporations, which never appear in the Constitution? How can Justice Kennedy make believe that “the appearance of influence or access…will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy” if Sheldon Adelson spends, say, $40 million on someone’s behalf and then calls the winning candidate with his ideas on lowered capital gains rates? How can big interests and their apologists hide behind the First Amendment when money is literally property, not speech?

But then, like segregationists who hid behind “property rights” and “states rights,” today’s powerbrokers pretend that they are merely the modern equivalent of silenced minorities. Walmart is not Tom Paine or Fannie Lou Hamer.

It’s one thing for money to buy companies in a system of capitalism based on the private pursuit of profit–but quite another for money to buy congressmen with trillions in shareholder wealth collected for commercial, not political, purposes.

There is an almost comical irony in the law creating corporate charters to raise private capital for business purposes…and then allowing these creations to use that privilege to privatize democracy itself. Surely the Supreme Court can figure out how to condition a privilege, so that corporations can contract and enjoy police protection, but not vote, marry or drown out other voices with an ocean of paid political commercials.

By lopsided margins, the public opposes the current system of purchased politicians and supports overturning Citizens United by amendment or a new Court decision. (Eighty percent favor one and 70 percent would make Super PACs illegal.) While the exact language of an amendment might vary, one version could simply state that money isn’t speech and can, in the electoral context, be regulated like excessive decibels and pollution are by sound/place/manner laws and environmental rules.

There are currently 125 members of Congress, eleven states and 350 cities and towns that have called for a constitutional amendment. Obviously, no state resolution can force a constitutional conclusion, but together they can help create a climate for change, the way hundreds of local referenda for a nuclear freeze in the early 1980s spurred nuclear arms reductions in later Reagan-Gorbachev summits.

True, it’s not feasible today to get a two-thirds majority of each chamber and three-fourths of state legislatures to vote for an amendment–which has happened seventeen times since the Bill of Rights–but a growing movement has taken the idea from pipe dream to mainstream. President Obama told one of the authors in the spring that it was something he wanted to consider in a second term. In his Reddit AMA in October, Obama said, “Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”

Next, enact “Democracy Funding.” There are successful versions in New York City, Maine and Arizona. Essentially, either a critical mass of small donations generate a multiple of public matching funding (in New York City, donations from city voters of $175 or under are matched six to one) or candidates can voluntarily opt in to a system where, if they reach a minimum threshold of donors, they receive a fixed amount of public funds to run for office.

Compare the New York City system with matching “democracy funding” and the New York State system without it. Small donations (under $250) account for 55 percent of campaign funds raised in City races but only six percent of State races. Forget 1 percent vs. 99 percent. Given the ethic that you don’t bite the hand that funds you, who is in charge when .5 percent of eligible voters comprise 100 percent of all campaign treasuries in NYS? That’s why a Fair Elections Act creating publicly financed state elections is about to be debated in Albany.

Yes, public funds are involved. But either we have a system of the private funding of public elections–with the hundreds of billions in corporate welfare that result–or we have the public funding for public elections just as we now pay for voting machines and election personnel to administer that Tuesday. New York State has learned that two dollars a voter would pay for a program covering statewide races. Is not our democracy more valuable than one aircraft carrier?

Then there’s Universal Voter Registration. Voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. Meanwhile, some state laws have seven-hour lines for people to exercise their right to vote. As used successfully in many Western European countries and as prominently advocated by the Brennan Center for Legal Justice at NYU, a system of universal registration based on various data bases, like Social Security at birth, could automatically enroll people at 18, creating some 50 million more voters.

Many states–led by Oregon and Washington–have shown that a mix of voting-by-mail, early voting, and same day registration can boost participation by 20 percent points or more. As part of a federal Voter Empowerment Act, it would be also ideal if Congress could create a National Democracy Day on a Saturday in November rather than a working day.

* * *

There are many important steps to save our democracy, from filibuster and gerrymander reforms to the DISCLOSE Act, from the IRS finally investigating tax-deductible groups spending massively in political campaigns, to requiring shareholder resolutions before a company politically spends over a certain amount. But if the three essential elements of a Democracy-for-All Act were enacted, they would fundamentally forever alter who runs, who wins and whom they respond to once in office.

But the only way any or all of this can occur is for candidates to fear and hear from voters more than donors. That’s precisely what happened right after the Watergate scandal, when Congress enacted strong new laws limiting spending and corruption. Now is another opportune moment. After the recent backlash to secret Super PACs and to voter suppression laws–and the election of Obama, who denounced Citizens United to the justices at this 2010 State of the Union and who election night 2012 said of long lines of voters, “We have to fix that”–we demand democracy! If not January 19, then when…and if not us, then who?”

Learn more about MoneyOut/VotersIn Day here.

© 2012 The Nation

Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.

Mark Green is the former Public Advocate for New York City and author/editor of a couple dozen books, including Who Runs Congress and Losing Our Democracy. He’s the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, Both Sides Now.

Protecting natural watershed areas is considered a sustainable and cost-effective approach to ensuring a supply of potable water. Above, the Ashokan Reservoir in New York state. (Credit: ScubaBear68/CC by 2.0)UXBRIDGE, Canada – After Hurricane Sandy swept through the northeast of the United States late October 2012, millions of New Yorkers were left for days without electricity. But they still had access to drinking water, thanks to New York City’s reliance on protected watershed areas for potable water.

Instead of using electric-powered water treatment plans, New York City brings its high-quality drinking water through aqueducts connected to protected areas in the nearby Catskill/Delaware forests and wetlands — just one example of how protecting watersheds can provide residential areas with drinking water and flood and pollution protection at bargain basement prices.

New York saved between four and six billion dollars on the cost of water treatment plants by protecting forests and compensating farmers in the Catskills for reducing pollution in lakes and streams.

In 2011, countries around the world invested more than eight billion dollars in similar watershed projects around the world, according to the State of Watershed Payments 2012 report released Thursday. That year, China led the way, accounting for 91 percent of watershed investment.

“Whether you need to save water-starved China from economic ruin or protect drinking water for New York City, investing in natural resources is emerging as the most cost-efficient and effective way to secure clean water and recharge our dangerously depleted streams and aquifers,” said Michael Jenkins, president of Forest Trends, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the United States, which compiled the report.

Previous studies have shown that pollution, the building of dams, agricultural runoff, conversion of wetlands, and waterworks engineering have severely affected global river systems. The wealthier the country, the bigger the threat to river systems, primarily because of expensive waterworks engineering, according to the first-ever health assessment of river ecosystems around the world, as previously reported by IPS.

Promoting a new approach

Given the water engineering mentality of the 1990s, it wasn’t easy to convince health and safety officials that a “green waterworks” approach would work for New York City, said Genevieve Bennett, lead author of the Watershed Payments report and a research analyst with Ecosystem Marketplace.

But trees, grasses and plants are extremely effective at cleaning and retaining water, as well as reducing sedimentation that clogs water reservoirs, Bennett told IPS. “The benefits from these watershed programs extend far beyond water: they support biodiversity, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and provide income for the rural poor,” she said.

In watershed protection programs such as those in New York, farmers are paid to use soil and water conservation techniques — payment for good stewardship that benefits the public, Bennett added.

Government regulations, however, remain a major constraint to similar projects in many countries. New York’s well documented and highly successful strategy has not been emulated by many other cities, including those in China or India, where engineering expertise is highly prized and huge engineering works are a matter of national pride.

Investing in sustaining existing ecosystems is better than destroying them and attempting to engineer solutions, Charles Vörösmarty, an expert on global water resources, previously told IPS. Water management costs will skyrocket if developing countries adopt the approach of developed nations, he added.

China is one country that has begun to change its approach, according to the report. About 108,000 residents in struggling communities upstream of the southern coastal city of Zhuhai are receiving new health insurance benefits in exchange for adopting land management practices to improve drinking water in the region.

“There are lots of different ways watershed investments are being made in China, some good and some bad. There’s lots of learning happening,” said Bennett.

Beginning of change

In Latin America, the trend in water programs is to offer compensation other than cash for protecting water resources. In Bolivia’s Santa Cruz valley, for example, more than 500 families receive beehives, fruit plants and wire, which can be used for fencing to keep livestock away from rivers and stream banks, in return for their water protection efforts.

A Swedish local water authority found it cheaper to pay for a program to establish blue mussel beds in Gullmar Fjord to filter nitrate pollution than to build a new treatment facility on shore. In Uganda, a beer brewer is paying for the protection of wetlands to retain their valuable capacity to maintain a steady and abundant supply of clean water.

The vast majority of investments in watersheds are with public money. The private sector still thinks providing good quality water is up to governments, Bennett said. However, the public sector is unlikely to be able to invest the 17.7 trillion dollars needed for water infrastructure by 2030, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

A green infrastructure is by far the cheaper option and provides a host of other benefits, Bennett concluded.

© 2012 IPS North America

A TSA agent waits for passengers to use the TSA PreCheck lane being implemented by the Transportation Security Administration at Miami International Airport.(AFP Photo / Joe Raedle)

The US Transport and Security Administration (TSA) will remove all 174 of OSI Systems Inc. (OSIS)’s Rapiscan body scanners from airports, following serious concerns over their inability to protect the privacy of passengers.

­The $5 million contract Rapiscan had with the TSA will come to an end, leading to the removal of the invasive machines from all US airports. The contract has been terminated as a result of the company’s inability to meet TSA requirements that their machines develop software to produce less invasive images of passengers.

The need for a speedy adjustment intensified in November 2012, when Wired reported that Rapiscan may have been manipulating the results of tests on integrated privacy software that they were supposed to have been implementing. In a letter quoted by Bloomberg, Rep Mike Rogers (R-AL) claimed that Rapiscan “may have attempted to defraud the government by knowingly manipulating an operational test.”

As a result of the outcry that followed these accusations about the then-current software, the TSA ordered the manufacturer to adjust the machines so that an avatar of a miscellaneous body was displayed in place of the individual being searched.

Rapiscan indicated that they would not be able to meet the TSA’s demands until 2014. TSA Assistant Administrator Karen Shelton Waters said that it “became clear to TSA they would be unable to meet our timeline.”

As early as August 2010, the TSA had required that software be developed to make body scans of airline passengers less revealing, after the administration was criticized for essentially stripping their travellers naked. However, their airport scanners have continued to be a source of controversy — in 2012, a Texas woman was sent through a scanner three times, and told she was ‘cute,’

The TSA has been using two companies to conduct the searches, outsourcing to both Rapiscan and L-3 Communications Holdings to produce the machines. While the Rapiscan machines have been utilizing weak X-rays to create what appears to be a naked image of the subject, the machines of L-3 Communications Holdings use radio waves to depict concealed objects on an avatar image on a screen, and will continue to be used by the TSA.  

The Rapiscan machines will be replaced by 60 units supplied by L-3.

The White house has released the second official presidential picture of Barack Obama following his victory in the general election in November.

Obama’s first and second official portraits

Although smiling, the 44th president of the United States boasts a few more grey hairs than the previous portrait, while his faced is etched with the strains of a first -term that in which a bellicose opposition pushed against the Democrat at every turn.

And with the debt ceiling debate due to become increasingly prominent in the run up to the March deadline, perhaps Michelle should prepare herself for a bit more silver atop the “leader of the free world”.

Anatoly Serdyukov.(RIA Novosti / Sergey Guneev)

Investigators plan to open a criminal case into conscript soldiers’ participation in road building and forestation at a country resort owned by Anatoly Serdyukov’s brother-in-law, a newspaper reports.

The Kommersant business daily quoted an unnamed source in Russia’s top law enforcement agency, the Central Investigative Committee, as saying that the criminal case was opened as a result of a preliminary probe into Serdyukov’s work as the Defense Minister. Investigators suspect some yet unidentified top officials of the ministry of abuse of power. The newspaper adds that the ex-minister could become a ‘participant’ in the case, which suggests charges will be laid against him.

According to law enforcers, in 2011 the unidentified defense ministry officials sent a group of conscript soldiers to the Zhitnoye country resort located in Southern Russia’s Astrakhan Region. The soldiers built a road and planted some lawns and trees in Zhitnoye, which is described as a top-level holiday home offering Volga fishing trips. Zhitnoye reportedly belongs to Anatoly Serdyukov’s brother-in-law, Valery Puzikov.

Investigators claim that the troops sent to work at the resort belonged to a local air force unit and used helicopters to fly to work.

The estimated cost to the defense ministry amounts to 18 million roubles (just under $600,000), but Kommersant quoted a representative of the Investigative Committee as saying that further calculation could multiply the cost five times. The source added that a separate criminal case could be launched into the road building project and this case would also involve the former defense minister.

Serdyukov’s lawyer admitted the road building was real, but said it would not have cost the Defense Ministry as the road became the ministry’s property. As for the forestation and lawns, the lawyer called them “charity or sponsor aid”.

A criminal case into a major embezzlement had already cost Anatoly Serduyukov his Defense Minister’s post. At least four people, including Serdyukov’s close friends, were arrested over the Rosoboronservis affair — a suspected scheme in which top Defense Ministry officials picked valuable real estate assets and sold them to friendly businessmen at lower than market price.

Serdyukov has been summoned to the Investigative Committee twice over the Rosoboronservis case. The first time the questioning was canceled because Serdyukov’s lawyer was ill and could not attend it. At the second meeting the ex-minister refused to give testimony quoting the article of the constitution that allows a witness not to incriminate himself.

• Foreign Hostages Die in Algeria’s Battle With Terrorists (Bloomberg)
• The latest bank to soon join the currency wars: McCafferty Says BOE Must Keep Open Mind on New Policy Tools (Bloomberg)
• US debt talks complicated by timing (FT)
• BOJ eyes open-ended asset buying, agrees new inflation goal (Reuters)
• AmEx Says U.S. Card Income Fell 42% as Loss Provisions Increased (BBG)
• Call to raise age for US’s Medicare (FT)
• Obama Promise to Raise Middle Class Living Already Seen in Peril (BBG)
• China Exits Slowdown as Quarterly Growth Tops Forecasts (BBG) – actually, as new Politburo says to make it appear that way
• Britain to drift out of European Union without reforms (Reuters)
• Republicans weigh interim debt-limit hike (FT)
• Abe’s aide says Japan shouldn’t fret if yen falls to 100 vs dlr (Reuters) … and it was 90 just a few days ago
• PBOC May Seek More Liquidity Operations (Dow Jones)

Overnight Media Digest

WSJ

* Former professional cyclist Lance Armstrong told the world Thursday
evening that he used performance-enhancing drugs to win seven Tour de
France titles.

* Algeria’s military launched a raid on Thursday
to free about 40 foreigners held by militants at a remote natural-gas
complex, leaving some hostages dead, surprising and angering several
governments and putting leaders across the world at a loss to determine
the fate of their citizens.

* In his final days as U.S. Treasury
secretary, Timothy Geithner reflected on the financial crisis and the
response he helped craft, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Among other things, he said the government’s rescue of the financial
system was doomed to be unpopular.

* In approving Boeing Co’s
787 Deamliner to start carrying passengers in 2011, the Federal Aviation
Administration relied extensively on data generated by Boeing that
indicated the plane’s advanced lithium-ion battery systems — never used
before on a big jetliner — featured redundant safeguards that were
essentially foolproof.

* Rio Tinto Chief Executive Tom Albanese
agreed to step down on Thursday, the latest in a string of leaders
toppled by shifting fortunes at the world’s biggest mining companies.

*
Quarterly earnings reports released on Thursday underscore the
lingering illnesses afflicting some of the largest, best-known U.S.
banks and the comparatively ruddy health of some smaller regional
lenders.

* Sony Corp has reached a deal to sell its U.S.
headquarters at 550 Madison Avenue for $1.1 billion, the company said on
Thursday, a strong price that shows how investors are bidding
aggressively for top Manhattan properties.

* Toyota Motor Corp
has settled what was to be the first in a group of hundreds of pending
wrongful death and injury lawsuits involving sudden, unintended
acceleration by Toyota vehicles.

FT

In a drive for transparency, authorities in the Cayman Islands are planning on creating a public database of funds domiciled in the British territory for the first time.

Videogames seller Game Group is interested in acquiring stores from collapsed music retailer HMV, the CEO said.
 
As their mega-merger continues to go through regulatory clearance, Glencore and Xstrata are set to extend the deadline for the deal for a third time.

The British banking industry wants a deadline of May 2014 to be imposed for claims from customers who say they were mis-sold payment protection insurance, says one senior executive.

Barclays is considering whether it should recoup some or all of the 290 million pounds it was fined for Libor-rate rigging from the bonuses it is due to pay investment bankers in 2012.

NYT

* Hours after Algerian forces raided a gas facility, there was still no official word on the number of hostages freed, killed or still held by their Islamist kidnappers.

* In a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong admitted to using banned substances but did not say how he did it or who helped him.

Thomas Weisel, who bankrolled Lance Armstrong through seven Tour de France wins, said in his first public comment on the matter that he never personally saw an instance of doping on the team.

* Most banks have recovered from the recent financial collapse, but two companies, Bank of America and Citigroup have reported continuing effects on earnings.

* AT&T warned that it would take a fourth-quarter charge of about $10 billion because of bigger-than-expected pension obligations.

* The Chinese economy picked up steam during the last few months of 2012, closely watched data from Beijing on Friday confirmed. But at the same time the figures underlined the view that the pace of future growth is likely to remain well below that seen in recent years.

* E*Trade Financial named Paul Idzik, a former executive at Barclays, as its new chief, ending a five-month search for a new leader.

* Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings has sold shares in itself at $19 apiece, a person briefed on the matter said, reaping about $446.5 million in proceeds.

Canada

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

–The State Electricity Regulatory Commission of China (SERC) said China’s power consumption could reach above 9 percent in 2013 from 5.5 percent in 2012.

CHINA DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)

–Fears over intellectual property lawsuits by foreign train technology companies will not derail exports of Chinese bullet trains, Vice Minister of Science and Technology Cao Jianlin said in an interview, dismissing copycat claims by Japan’s Kawasaki as “nonsense.”

–A former Japanese leader visited a memorial site to victims of Japanese wartime aggression, but analysts were quick to reject ay suggestion that Tokyo will change its policies toward China.

PEOPLE’S DAILY

–China’s Railway Ministry said investment in railway could hit 650 billion yuan and that it will set a National Railway Development Fund as soon as possible.

China

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

* Two class action lawsuits were filed against the federal government in Canada after the human resources and skills development department lost a portable hard drive containing personal information about more than half a million people who took out student loans.

The department said last week the device contained data on 583,000 Canada Student Loans Program borrowers from 2000 to 2006.

* The federal ethics commissioner wants to talk to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty about his letter to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) after it was revealed that he wrote to the arm’s-length broadcast regulator in support of a constituent’s bid for a radio licence.

Reports in the business section:

* More Canadians went online to do their Christmas shopping this year, according to a new report by MasterCard Advisors.

Canadian consumers spent C$2.8 billion ($2.84 billion) shopping online in December, up 26 percent over the previous year and representing about 6.6 per cent of the month’s total retail sales.

NATIONAL POST

* Three Quebec City teens have been arrested over charges of planning a shootout at their high school.

The three teens, two boys aged 14 and 15 and a 16 year old girl, who have pleaded not guilty, face charges of conspiracy to commit murder and will remain detained until a bail hearing on Monday.

FINANCIAL POST

* The blowout in price between Alberta’s heavy oil and the North American benchmark price is a “longer term issue” with no quick fix, Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMCo) CEO Leo de Bever said.

Fly On The Wall 7:00 Market Snapshot

ANALYST RESEARCH

Upgrades

Amazon.com (AMZN) upgraded to Outperform from Sector Perform at Pacific Crest
Cornerstone OnDemand (CSOD) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Goldman
Credit Suisse (CS) upgraded to Overweight from Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley
Expeditors (EXPD) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Fabrinet (FN) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JPMorgan
Las Vegas Sands (LVS) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Wells Fargo
Movado (MOV) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup
Netflix (NFLX) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Janney Capital
Qlik Technologies (QLIK) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Goldman
Research in Motion (RIMM) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Jefferies
Tyson Foods (TSN) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at BMO Capital
Wynn Resorts (WYNN) upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Wells Fargo

Downgrades

Alterra Capital (ALTE) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Sterne Agee
Ball Corp. (BLL) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies
CSX (CSX) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse
Capital One (COF) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Janney Capital
Carrizo Oil & Gas (CRZO) downgraded to Underperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse
Clarcor (CLC) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at William Blair
Finisar (FNSR) downgraded to Underperform from Hold at Jefferies
MGM Resorts (MGM) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at Wells Fargo
NetSuite (N) downgraded to Neutral from Conviction Buy at Goldman
Ultimate Software (ULTI) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Goldman
Visa (V) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at RW Baird
Westamerica (WABC) downgraded to Underperform from Market Perform at BMO Capital

Initiations

Geron (GERN) initiated with an Overweight at Piper Jaffray
Halcon Resources (HK) initiated with a Hold at Stifel Nicolaus
Harry Winston (HWD) initiated with a Buy at Nomura
Inovio Pharma (INO) initiated with an Overweight at Piper Jaffray
Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) initiated with a Buy at Janney Capital
Marathon Oil (MRO) initiated with a Buy at Stifel Nicolaus
Oncothyreon (ONTY) initiated with an Underweight at Piper Jaffray
Threshold Pharmaceuticals (THLD) initiated with a Neutral at Piper Jaffray
Tronox (TROX) initiated with a Buy at B. Riley Caris
Ziopharm (ZIOP) initiated with a Neutral at Piper Jaffray

HOT STOCKS

GE (GE) on target to achieve dougle-digit earnings growth in 2013
Said outlook for developed markets remain uncertain
Sees growth in China, resource rich countries
Weiss family raised American Greetings (AM) offer to $17.50 from $17.18 per share
Moody’s changed Rite Aid (RAD) outlook to positive from stable
Schlumberger (SLB) said global macroeconomic environment remains uncertain
Sees 2013 global oil demand similar to 2012
Liberty Media (LMCA) bought 50M shares of Sirius XM (SIRI), control above 50%
Intel (INTC) ”excited about strong pipeline of products coming to market”
Sees little growth in wireless in 2013
Capital One (COF) sees average quarterly revenue levels in 2013 like Q412
Sees reduction in loan balances in 2013
Sony Corporation of America (SNE) sold 550 Madison Avenue building for $1.1B
AZZ Inc. (AZZ) sees FY14 margins remaining strong
ONEOK Partners (OKS) announced $465M-$500M project investments through 2015
NuPathe’s (PATH) Zecuity approved by FDA

EARNINGS

Companies that beat consensus earnings expectations last night and today include:
General Electric (GE), Schlumberger (SLB), Xilinx (XLNX), Bank Mutual (BKMU), Intel (INTC), Wintrust Financial (WTFC)

Companies that missed consensus earnings expectations include:
Matthews (MATW), People’s United (PBCT), Capital One (COF)

Companies that matched consensus earnings expectations include:
Wipro (WIT), Associated Banc-Corp (ASBC), American Express (AXP)

NEWSPAPERS/WEBSITES

GE (GE) is the world’s top producer of aircraft engines and medical-imaging equipment, but as far as its profits are concerned, it’s very much a bank. GE Capital is expected to account for nearly half the company’s 2012 profit, the Wall Street Journal reports
Dell’s (DELL) potential $23B leveraged buyout could also be the deal that finally gets the leveraged-buyout machine going again, showering financiers in fees and potentially yielding big returns for investors, the Wall Street Journal reports
Americans are more confident in the future and are increasingly striking out to set up their own homes, a move that is helping propel the housing recovery, Reuters reports
When U.S. natural gas producers release their 2012 annual reports, many companies may have to significantly reduce a key indicator of their financial health: reserves. The SEC
requires companies to calculate and report year-end oil and gas reserves using 12-month average prices, Reuters reports
With the worst flu outbreak since 2009 gripping the U.S., vaccine makers (GSK, AZN) are determined to do better next season. They’re developing powerful vaccines that hold the promise of cutting incidences of flu by the thousands, Bloomberg reports
Franklin Templeton Investments (BEN) reduced its holdings of Apple (AAPL) last year to 4.2% from 7% in 2011 on concern the maker of the iPhone lacks a strategy to sell cheaper smartphones in emerging markets such as China and India, Bloomberg reports

SYNDICATE

CyrusOne (CONE) 16.5M share IPO priced at $19.00
Northern Tier (NTI) Energy 10.7M share Secondary priced at $24.46
Norwegian Cruise Line (NCLH) 23.529M share IPO priced at $19.00
SunCoke Energy (SXCP) 13.5M share IPO priced at $19.00
Trius Therapeutics (TSRX) files to sell common stock

Spanish government has ordered the communications satellite service provider Hispasat to take Iranian channel Hispan TV off the air in a clear assault on the freedom of speech.

MP/

From “My Lidl Pony” to #horsemeatgate, the week on Twitter – at least if you were a. British and b. looking for funnies – was dominated by the Tesco horsemeat burgers scandal. (Although we have to say: if people are worried about burgers being 29% horsemeat, wait until they find out their lettuces are 90% water.)

And apart from horse burgers there was, of course, snow. Still is. And more to come*.

Plus: the demise of two (count ’em!) high street stores – HMV and Blockbuster – Lance Armstrong’s doping confession, the Golden Globes (including that Jodie Foster speech. You know: that one), the announcement of new gun control laws in the States and the subsequent muted response of the NRA.

And here were just some of the tweets about all of the above – and more – that made us smile this week:

*Apparently. Please note: we are not official Met Office staff.

Rocket hits Aleppo residential area, multiple casualties reported

A large explosion reportedly caused by rockets has hit a central neighborhood of the Syrian city of Aleppo, local state-run television said, blaming the violence on a ‘terrorist group’. A TV report showed a building collapsed into rubble.

­The number of casualties was not immediately known, though the TV report showed crowds of people pulling bloodied bodies from the rubble, Reuters said.

The most talked about story of the last week was undoubtedly the relentless chatter about that massive $18 billion in equity fund inflows as reported by Lipper (not ICI), which tracks primarily institutional and ETF flow of funds, and which, as we explained even before the Lipper data came out, was driven exclusively by a surge in bank deposits into the year end, to be recycled for risk investment purposes by the commercial banks’ own prop desks. The details, however, were largely ignored by the mainstream media which took that inflow as an indication that the tide has finally turned and that the great rotation out of bonds into stocks is on. Turns out that just as we expected it was a year end calendar asset rebalancing. As Lipper reported earlier, the enthusiasm for US stocks appears to have abruptly ended, with a whopping $4.2 billion pumped out of domestic equities, offset by some $4.5 billion invested in non-domestic equities. The blended flow? Just $286 million going into equities. Now our math may be a little rusty, but $18 billion followed by $0.2 is not really indicative of an ongoing rotation out of bonds and into stocks, and is more indicative of a one-time, non-recurring event, just the opposite of all the Bank of America addbacks.

To summarize:

Sector                    Flow    Chg %       Assets    Count
                           ($Bil)   Assets 

 All Equity Funds    0.286 0.01    3,042.918 10,145
 Domestic Equities        -4.181   -0.19   2,255.468 7,523
 Non-Domestic Equities    4.467 0.57    787.450    2,622
 All Taxable Bond Funds   4.625 0.30    1,531.942 4,824
 All Money Market Funds  -9.603   -0.40 2,402.327 1,363
 All Municipal Bond Funds 1.443    0.45    324.824  1,348

From Reuters:

When combined, the sizeable inflows into stock mutual funds and the big outflows from stock ETFs produce a total figure of just $286 million into equity funds overall, which is sharply lower than the previous week’s total inflow of $18.32 billion, which was the most net new cash into equity funds since 2008.

The S&P 500 rose a slight 0.8 percent over the reporting period. Federal Reserve Presidents James Bullard, Charles Plosser and Charles Evans voiced their optimism about U.S. growth for 2013, while upbeat U.S. retail sales for December and strong corporate earnings for major banks JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs also boosted markets.

Investors remained cautious, however, in light of Republican opposition in Congress to increase the $16.4 trillion U.S. debt ceiling. A failure to raise the government’s borrowing limit could cause the United States to default on its debt in coming months.

With regard to the $3.75 billion inflow into stock mutual funds, those that specialize in U.S. stocks attracted $1.41 billion of that sum, while mutual funds that hold international stocks attracted the remaining $2.34 billion.

The enthusiasm for stock mutual funds did not apply to stock ETFs, which suffered outflows of $3.5 billion. The outflows are the first losses for the funds in eight weeks, and mark a reversal from the previous week’s big gains of $10.78 billion. Investors turned particularly cold toward the SPDR S&P 500 ETF fund, from which they pulled $4.21 billion.

Sadly for the prepared talking points, the flows into bond funds are back.

Investors in bond funds favored higher quality and gave $2.02 billion to investment-grade corporate bond funds. The figure represents the total amount pumped into both mutual funds and ETFs that hold investment-grade bonds.

Lemieux of Lipper said that consistent inflows into investment-grade corporate bond funds show that investors are still opting for some safety.

High-yield “junk” bond funds attracted just $571 million overall, indicating the decreased appetite for risky bonds compared with the previous week, when the funds attracted $1.11 billion in new cash.

We, for one, can’t wait to see how much non discussion this latest weekly fund flow update gets on the mainstream financial media, or whether last week’s flow aberation will be locked in time and referred to by the pundits on an ongoing basis indefinitely