20 Jul 2012

Syria Might Now Meddle in the Golan - Ahmed Versi

Morris: If Israel enters the conflict the Arab and Muslim World Will Support Syria
Also there are many Palestinians in Syria. Iran is unlikely to offer any overt support but it will provide covert support. Ahmed is the Editor and Publisher of http://muslimnews.co.uk
... the oldest and most well established and respected Muslim newspaper in the UK. The only independent monthly Muslim newspaper in the UK which is neither backed by any country nor by any organisation or party... Source

Israel assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists

Iran condemns the US and Israel for the strings of deadly attacks mounted against its nuclear experts. Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was assassinated in January 2012 after an unknown motorcyclist attached a magnet bomb to his car in Tehran.

What's So Bad About Deflation? Nothing, If You Own the Debt - Charles Hugh Smith

Perhaps all the assumptions about inflation being good and deflation being bad miss the key question: 
cui bono (to whose benefit?)


One of the most widely accepted truisms of our time is that deflation is bad: bad for debtors, bad for the indebted government, and therefore bad for the economy.

What all this overlooks is how wonderful mild deflation is for those who owe no debt but who own the debt and the income streams that flow from debt. What the "deflation is bad" argument ignores is who controls the financial and political systems, and what set of conditions benefits them.

The entire Survival+ critique is based on one simple but revealing question: cui bono--to whose benefit? The "deflation is bad" view naively assumes the Federal government wants inflation to lower its own debt burden. But since the machinery of governance is directed not at what's good for the government, but at what's good for the financial Elites that influence policy, then the only meaningful question is: what's best for the financial Elites?

Mild inflation won't bother the Elites much as long as their leveraged returns exceed inflation by a substantial measure, but deflation is much more lucrative: why mess around with potentially volatile inflation when deflation works better? As knowledgeable correspondent James B. recently explained, the financial Elites' are skimming their take regardless of inflation or deflation.

DOW Chemicals Sponsor Scandal Rocks UK Olympics of Woe

December 2, 1984. One of the world's worst industrial catastrophes takes place in Bhopal, India. A gas leak at an American owned pesticide plant. Between 7 and 10 thousand people were killed instantly. Over the next 20 years, another 15 thousand die. Source 
(A. DOW chemicals joins G4S, traffic congestion and our own government created war zone for UK Olympics of Woe!)

Debt crisis: UK housing slump will deepen, warns IMF + The Bankster Doomsday Kit

By Despite sharp falls in property prices following the banking crisis, the IMF believes they are still too high and could drop by a further 10-15pc relative to Britons’ salaries.
The bleak forecast was part of a report by the IMF in which it urged the Government to ease austerity measures and deploy a ‘Plan B’ in early 2013 if economic recovery fails to materialise.
Britain’s recovery has stalled with no growth over the past two years, and the Coalition should prepare new growth policies or risk permanent damage to the economy according to the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF said that the British economy may not be able to cope with the scale of austerity planned for 2013-14. It argued in its latest staff report on the UK that the Government has room to relax its deficit cutting programme with targeted tax cuts and increased infrastructure spending should it prove necessary.
“In particular, fiscal adjustment for 2013-14 would need to be scaled back if growth does not build momentum by early 2013.
“Such an acceleration [of austerity] may be difficult for the economy to handle if it remains very weak.”
Ajai Chopra, the IMF’s deputy director of the European department, said the obvious time to address a shift in policy would be spring next year, when George Osborne presents his next Budget.

Fascistic Technocracy: Sicily today, all of Europe tomorrow: the onward march of the managers

By Richard Cottrell: Building on their huge successes in wrecking the economies of Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy, the EU Politburo is off on a rapturous new adventure.
Breathtaking in his latest display of sheer daring, the technocrat dictator of Italy, Mario Monti, is planning to reverse the historic Risorgimento which created the modern united state of Italy in the 1860s.
Ever a man with a sense of history, he’s aiming to kick the Sicilian football with that famous boot which represents the Italian mainland.
Garibaldi and his thousand-strong legion first seized the Sicilian capital Palermo and then set out to Occupy Italy, in the now fashionable parlance. Monti has a similar idea. He and his legions of bureaucrats are planning to depose the island’s government and replace it with a technocrat provincial administration cast in his own image.
Monti just held an emergency meeting with the country’s president, the aging old tortoise Giorgio Napolitano, to persuade him to trash the constitution yet again and sweep away the elected island administration, just as Monti staged his own putsch against Silvio Berlusconi last autumn.
The pretext is identical. According to this reincarnation of Mussolini in a grey business suit, Sicily is about to default on its public debts to the tune of €7 billion (£5.49 billion) unless the poorest region of Italy is immediately subjected to sweeping austerity cuts. Since no elected politician on the island will go along with this, it will be necessary to install a technocrat government.
There is no doubt that Sicily’s finances are in a bad shape. The island government is close to running out of money to pay public servants or fund schools, hospitals and other essential services.
The New World Order’s favorite nanny, the Moody’s rating agency, answered a 999 emergency call from Rome by downgrading a whole string of provincial governments in southern Italy aside from Sicily: Piedmont, Abruzzo, Calabria, Lazio, and Campania all felt the edge of the icy blade. Naples was chopped to junk status, which came as no surprise to anybody who knows Italy’s legendary, fascinating dystopian city.

Charles Ferguson on the Financial Landscape after 2008's "Inside Job"

 It's been roughly four years since the 2008 financial crisis, and it doesn't feel like a whole lot has changed on Wall Street. Too Big to Fail Banks are bigger, 650 trillion dollars of over the counter derivatives are still out there, and financial scandals abound. Bloomberg reports Wall Street may face a formidable foe in the Libor scandal if investors and firms sue. That foe is Wall Street itself. And the Financial Times also reports regulators are narrowing in on at least four of Europe's biggest banks in the rate rigging probe: HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole and Societe General. But will Libor mark a turning point in authorities' serious pursuit and punishment of Wall Street crime? Lauren interviews director of "Inside Job," Charles Ferguson about this, and what has or has not changed since 2008's epic financial crisis.

This Is The Government: Your Legal Right To Redeem Your Money Market Account Has Been Denied - The Sequel

Tyler Durden's picture: Two years ago, in January 2010, Zero Hedge wrote "This Is The Government: Your Legal Right To Redeem Your Money Market Account Has Been Denied" which became one of our most read stories of the year. The reason? Perhaps something to do with an implicit attempt at capital controls by the government on one of the primary forms of cash aggregation available: $2.7 trillion in US money market funds. The proximal catalyst back then were new proposed regulations seeking to pull one of these three core pillars (these being no volatility, instantaneous liquidity, and redeemability) from the foundation of the entire money market industry, by changing the primary assumptions of the key Money Market Rule 2a-7. A key proposal would give money market fund managers the option to "suspend redemptions to allow for the orderly liquidation of fund assets." In other words: an attempt to prevent money market runs (the same thing that crushed Lehman when the Reserve Fund broke the buck). This idea, which previously had been implicitly backed by the all important Group of 30 which is basically the shadow central planners of the world (don't believe us? check out the roster of current members), did not get too far, and was quickly forgotten. Until today, when the New York Fed decided to bring it back from the dead by publishing "The Minimum Balance At Risk: A Proposal to Mitigate the Systemic Risks Posed by Money Market FUnds". Now it is well known that any attempt to prevent a bank runs achieves nothing but merely accelerating just that (as Europe recently learned). But this coming from central planners - who never can accurately predict a rational response - is not surprising. What is surprising is that this proposal is reincarnated now. The question becomes: why now? What does the Fed know about market liquidity conditions that it does not want to share, and more importantly, is the Fed seeing a rapid deterioration in liquidity conditions in the future, that may and/or will prompt retail investors to pull their money in another Lehman-like bank run repeat?

Where Is The Line For Revolution? - Brandon Smith

Brandon Smith: The subject of revolution is a touchy one.  It’s not a word that should be thrown around lightly, and when it is uttered at all, it elicits a chaotic jumble of opinions and debates from know-it-alls the world over.  The “R” word has been persona non grata for quite some time in America, and until recently, was met with jeers and knee-jerk belligerence.  However, let’s face it; today, the idea is not so far fetched We have a global banking system that is feeding like a tapeworm in the stagnant guts of our economy.  We suffer an election system so fraudulent BOTH sides of the political spectrum now represent a hyper-rich minority while the rest of us are simply expected to play along and enjoy the illusion of choice.  We have a judicial body that has gone out of its way to whittle down our civil liberties and to marginalize our Constitution as some kind of “outdated relic”.  We have an executive branch that issues special orders like monarchical edicts every month, each new order even more invasive and oppressive than the last.  And, we have an establishment system that now believes it has the right to surveil the citizenry en masse and on the slightest whim without any consideration for 4th Amendment protections. (A: Sounds like the UK)

Syrian - Hezbollah Bombings and Coincidences

All sides are preparing for war - it looks like. Mobilisation by Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley, Israel declares the Golan Heights a restricted zone, And the bombing of the Busses with Israelis may not have had just ordinairy Israelis aboard.... Source

We've (U.S.) Decoupled, Alright - From Reality - Charles Hugh Smith

Forget decoupling from Europe--we've been decoupled from reality since 2008.

Have we decoupled from the global slowdown? Doubtful. Have we decoupled from reality? Undoubtedly--and have been since 2008. One key attribute of reality is feedback: actions have consequences, and various forces reinforce or resist each other in a dynamic interplay of positive and negative feedback.
Another key attribute of reality is risk. Risk is as ever-present as gravity, and it cannot be eliminated; it can only be shared or transferred.
When you overwhelm feedback with massive interventions that mask risk, you decouple from reality. With feedback suppressed and risk hidden, the system's resilience and resourcefulness both atrophy. Participants start making decisions not on risk assessment and feedback from reality but on the results of the intervention.
Pharmaceutical intervention offers an apt medical analogy. Various risk factors such as high blood pressure and high levels of LDL cholesterol have been correlated with increased risk of heart disease. Medications can lower these metrics, and so these interventions are now ubiquitous.
Sometimes these result from genetic propensities, but other times they are consequences (feedback) of an unhealthy lifestyle: obesity, poor diet, lack of fitness, etc. If we suppress a single feedback from a spectrum of health-related feedbacks and consequences, have we restored health or simply masked the risk of an unhealthy lifestyle?
Clearly, complex systems do respond to critical thresholds or "pivot points" that trigger cascading responses. It is wise to identify key metrics and manage the risks they present or elevate. But it is unwise to assume that manipulating one metric will necessarily restore a system that is wobbling out of equilibrium to a dynamic equilibrium.