All these wars are about oil and control!

Even if Iran were to acquire nuke weapons (which is very unlikely), they are probably the last country that would use them in an aggressive manner - unlike the US or the menace in the region Israel that did not sign the NNPT (nuclear non-proliferation treaty) and actually got caught trying to sell an atomic weapon to South Africa.

The EU banking system is in big trouble. Many of the Union's largest banks are sitting on hundreds of billions of Euros in dodgy sovereign bonds and non performing real estate loans.

But writing down their losses will deplete their capital and force them to restructure their debt. So the banks are concealing their losses through accounting sleight-of-hand and by borrowing money from the European Central Bank. This has helped to hide the rot at the heart of the system.  Read more »

Self-defeating Austerity.

The WSJ’s economics blog has an interesting piece about how failing to extend unemployment benefits may actually end up increasing the deficit in the longer run, by pushing marginal older workers into disability.

But this is actually a much broader point. There’s a quite good case to be made that austerity in the face of a depressed economy is, literally, a false economy — that it actually makes long-run budget problems worse.  Read more »

When the Finance Ministers of the Advanced States set up the G7 in 1974-75, their tongues quivered with the taste of centuries of power. The Soviet Union had begun its plummet into obsolescence.

Its collapse was held off by a decade through the rise of oil prices and the cannibalization of the remarkable achievements of an earlier generation.  Read more »

As I write at 5 p.m. on Monday, May 31, all day has passed since the early morning reports of the Israeli commando attack on the unarmed ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, and there has been no response from President Obama except to say that he needed to learn "all the facts about this morning's tragic events" and that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu had canceled his plans to meet with him at the White House.

Thus has Obama made America complicit once again in Israel's barbaric war crimes. Just as the US Congress voted to deep-six Judge Goldstone's report on Israel's war crimes committed in Israel's January 2009 invasion of Gaza, Obama has deep-sixed Israel's latest act of barbarism by pretending that he doesn't know what has happened.  Read more »

Can a real Globalism based on Truth and Honor save the Word?

I was asked during an interview on Al Jazeera the question that every Muslim lives with every day, "How can a small country like Israel control America." My answer was simple. Imagine a friend comes to you screaming, "Someone stole my house!" You ask him what happened. His response; "I put my house up for sale, I asked $200,000 dollars. A man came to the door and said he wanted my house. He gave me $200,000 bucks and now I have no home."  Read more »

Heiner Flassbeck wrote an open letter to European policymakers:

We call for a coordinated economic policy response around the following five elements:  Read more »

No need to add anything to this :-)

Down on the Euro Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others, finds Eric Walberg.

Two million people took to the streets of Athens last week in the country's second general strike this month, protesting the austerity measures proposed by their socialist government. All of Greece came to a 24-hour standstill and the airport was closed as a result of the action. The only public transport was the commuter train so that protesters could reach the demonstration.  Read more »