Merkel’s CDU Loses Power in Hamburg, Suffers Worst Postwar Defeat in State
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party suffered its worst defeat in Germany’s richest state since World War II, the first of seven state elections this year that threaten to limit her scope to tackle Europe’s debt crisis.
The loss in Hamburg, the city-state of Merkel’s birth, underscores the challenge she faces trying to balance public opposition to bailouts for debt-wracked states against pressure from investors and fellow euro countries to lead the way in stemming the debt contagion.
Beleaguered French foreign minister Michèle Alliot-Marie has resigned after weeks of criticism over her links with the former regime in Tunisia.
She was replaced by the defence minister, Alain Juppé, a former prime minister convicted in a corruption scandal six years ago, in an unplanned but widely predicted government reshuffle.
Religious Tension Builds in Germany’s Relationship With Turkey
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sparked anger in Germany on February 27 as he suggested that Turks resist assimilation and learn Turkish, not German, as their first language.
“You must integrate, but I am against assimilation,” Erdogan told Turkish immigrants during a visit to Germany.
“No one should be able to rip us away from our culture,” he said.
The day before, Erdogan was quoted in the Rheinische Post saying that forced integration is against international law as it requires immigrants to suppress their culture and heritage.
His comments come as Germany is re-thinking its position on immigration and multiculturalism. Last year German Banker Thilo Sarrazin stirred the controversy by publishing a best-selling book claiming that Muslims and their failure to assimilate were the cause of many of the nation’s problems.
Renewed “Chatter” About a Possible U.S. Military Attack on Iran
WMR’s sources in the national security establishment are reporting on “chatter” that they are hearing about a possible U.S. military attack on Iran in the autumn, with October or November the likely months.
Although such chatter about U.S. military action against Iran has been heard before, the current talk comes amid two significant developments.
First, U.S.-backed regimes in the Middle East and North Africa have either already been ousted or are in danger of being overthrown. With U.S. clients Bahrain and Saudi Arabia under domestic pressure, talk of a U.S. attack on Iran, which would be popular with the Bahraini and Saudi regimes, tends to bolster those regimes.
Second, WMR has been informed that U.S. oil companies are drilling 1200 new oil wells in west Texas to raise U.S. domestic oil production. The companies have been told by the government that they have a 12 to 18-month window to drill new wells and a 24-month window to achieve maximum oil production. In the event of a U.S .military attack on Iran, oil exports from the Persian Gulf would be severely impacted.
WMR has been told that oil storage containers are currently being built in west Texas to hold the oil extracted from the new wells. Within the last three months, a number of oil exploration and support services personnel have arrived in towns all over west Texas. More significantly, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) personnel have also arrived in west Texas in support of the oil drilling operations.
Milfuegos | February 24, 2011
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An Israeli-Arab Alliance: Inevitable Reality or Illusion?
In June, the Saudi government reportedly granted Israel use of Saudi airspace, should Israel decide to conduct air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Combined with Iran’s burgeoning nuclear program, Turkey’s flexing of political and diplomatic muscle in the region, and Egypt’s recent tacit support of an Israeli warship’s passage through the Suez Canal, there are rumbles of tectonic shifts in the Middle East’s geopolitical plates.
Despite these moves, some political dynamics in the Middle East remain fixed. Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are stalled, and anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab street is rampant. However, a convergence of Israeli and Sunni Arab strategic imperatives, spurred by the regional emergence of Iran and Turkey, could pave the way for a tacit alliance of unlikely bedfellows.
[...] Strategic imperatives similar to those guiding Israel’s “alliance of the periphery” could now compel an “alliance of the interior” between Israel and its key Sunni Arab neighbors – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The elevation of clandestine military and intelligence cooperation between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors could buffer Iran.
Iran-Turkey-Syria-Egypt Bloc Moves Closer With Profound Global Effect
[...] The fate of the societies of Christians and Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea region — in Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Cyprus, Greece, and Lebanon in particular — now becomes critically threatened. In particular, Egypt’s Christian population, which is now claimed to be at around 10 percent of the total but which in reality has been (and probably remains) larger, is likely to be severely compromised as Islamists gain political ascendancy over the traditionally moderate Egyptian Muslim society.
A Coptic Priest was found killed in his home in the Southern City of Assiut on Monday. Reverend Dawood Boutros had been dead for two days before relatives found him after failing to get in contact with him for two days.
Following the announcement of his death, around 3,000 Copts protested in Assiut in front of the Priest`s house, chanting: “We sacrifice our life for the crucifix.”
[...] The Islamic group in Assiut, Gama`a Islamiya, a Salafist Group, issued a statement condemning the murder and called for restraint and not rushing to hurl accusations before the investigations take place. The group called upon everyone to stand together and to confront any targeting of any life or property of any Egyptian Muslim or Christian. It also called on all parties to be patient, calm, and reasonable, and not to rush to indict without evidence.
For hundreds of terrified Christian families who fled attacks in Baghdad and Mosul in recent months, an ancient Christian town in Iraq’s north has offered a safe haven from violence.
[...] While most families fled from the capital and Mosul, Iraq’s two biggest cities, others arrived here from the ethnically mixed oil city of Kirkuk and even as far south as the Shiite Muslim majority port city of Basra, according to Bishop Georges Casmoussa, Qara Qosh’s top Christian leader.
[...] Most fled to the Kurdish region, which is regarded as safer than the rest of the country, notably for the Christian minority. Turkey, just north of Kurdistan, has also seen an influx, with the UN refugee office there saying asylum applications from Iraqi Christians more than doubled in three months — from 183 in October to 428 in December.
Christian Pakistani Minister Shot Dead in Islamabad
Pakistani Minister for Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti, who had called for changes in the country’s controversial blasphemy law, was killed in a gun attack in Islamabad Wednesday.
[...] On January 4 the governor of the most populous province of Punjab, Salman Taseer, who had strongly opposed the law and sought presidential pardon for the 45-year-old Christian farmhand, was gunned down by one of his bodyguards.
The anti-blasphemy law has its roots in 19th-century colonial legislation to protect places of worship, but it was during the military dictatorship of General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s that it acquired teeth as part of a drive to Islamize the state.
Liberal Pakistanis and rights groups believe the law to be dangerously discriminatory against the country’s tiny minority groups.
Roman Catholic Salesian missionary Father Marek Rybinski was found dead with his throat cut in Tunis on Friday. The Tunisian interior ministry says it believes he was murdered by “fascist terrorists”.
[...] Police say that the priest is the second Christian religious figure to be killed during the social unrest which led up to and followed the ousting of President Ben Ali in January.
The leader of Tunisia’s centuries-old Jewish minority told AFP meanwhile he had informed Ghannouchi (Islamist Leader) of an anti-Jewish demonstration by extremists outside the main synagogue in the capital Tunis.
“About 40 religious people gathered Friday in front of the main synagogue in Tunis and started chanting ant-Jewish slogans and inappropriate words,” Roger Bismuth told AFP.
[...] Across the Middle East, it is the same story of despairing – sometimes frightened – Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions. Almost half of Iraq’s Christians have fled their country since the first Gulf War in 1991, most of them after the 2004 invasion – a weird tribute to the self-proclaimed Christian faith of the two Bush presidents who went to war with Iraq – and stand now at 550,000, scarcely 3 per cent of the population. More than half of Lebanon’s Christians now live outside their country. Once a majority, the nation’s one and a half million Christians, most of them Maronite Catholics, comprise perhaps 35 per cent of the Lebanese. Egypt’s Coptic Christians – there are at most around eight million – now represent less than 10 per cent of the population.
The congressionally appointed panel assigned to probe the origins of the 2008 credit crisis heaped blame on “reckless” Wall Street firms and “weak” federal regulators, concluding the meltdown could have been avoided.
“The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public,” the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrote in a 545-page book outlining its conclusions. “Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble.”
A copy of the book obtained by Bloomberg News, a paperback emblazoned with a U.S. seal, faults the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve for failing to clamp down on the banks they supervised. It singles out former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan for backing “30 years of deregulation.”
Nasdaq Hacked: World’s Second Biggest Exchange Admits to Finding ‘Suspicious Files’ on Computer Servers
The Nasdaq stock exchange operator has been attacked by hackers after ‘suspicious files’ were discovered on its US computer servers.
Bosses have called in the FBI and US Department of Justice to carry out an urgent investigation, but insist its trading platforms – allowing shares to be bought and sold in companies including Google, Apple and Amazon – have not been hit.
Nasdaq’s internet-based programme, Director’s Desk, which allow directors of major companies to share information was ‘potentially affected’, the operator said.
U.S. Intelligence Fears Al-Qaeda Plotting to Strike Wall Street
U.S. intelligence officials are informing the heads of some of the country’s most powerful financial entities that Yemeni-based al-Qaeda operatives could be plotting terrorist strikes against Wall Street banks or their top managers, NBC News reported on Tuesday.
Security sources are emphasizing the danger is not specific and that there “is no indication of a targeted assassination plot” toward any banking leaders. Officials, though, worry that foreign-based extremists have talked about targeting specific individuals.
Intelligence researchers said there is a nonspecific but increasing fear that extremists in Yemen could make another attempt at shipping hidden explosive devices or chemical and biological weapons materials to New York financial institutions.
The Chinese President Hu Jintao is enjoying the red-carpet treatment in Washington DC against a backdrop of increasing tension between his country and the US.
As the two leaders meet, a number of US lawmakers are demanding again that China allow its currency to float against the dollar – arguing that a weak yuan is hurting American business.
But is China really listening? Its global expansion takes in every corner of the globe. And its influence is growing. Will this be China’s century? Will the US have to live in China’s shadow? Inside Story, with presenter David Foster, discusses.
Why is official Washington so obsessed with the idea of overthrowing these governments? The answer has everything to do with Iran, China, and Russia. As regards Iran, the State Department policy is notoriously the attempt to assemble a united front of the entrenched Arab and Sunni regimes to be played against Shiite Iran and its various allies across the region. This had not been going well, as shown by the inability of the US to install its preferred puppet Allawi in Iraq, where the pro-Iranian Maliki seems likely to hold onto power for the foreseeable future. The US desperately wants a new generation of unstable “democratic” demagogues more willing to lead their countries against Iran than the current immobile regimes have proved to be. There is also the question of Chinese economic penetration.
We can be confident that any new leaders installed by the US will include in their program a rupture of economic relations with China, including especially a cutoff of oil and raw material shipments, along the lines of what Twitter revolution honcho Mir-Hossein Mousavi was reliably reported to be preparing for Iran if he had seized power there in the summer of 2009 at the head of his “Death to Russia, death to China” rent-a-mob. In addition, US hostility against Russia is undiminished, despite the cosmetic effects of the recent ratification of START II. If for example a color revolution were to come to Syria, we could be sure that the Russian naval presence at the port Tartus, which so disturbs NATO planners, would be speedily terminated. If the new regimes demonstrate hostility against Iran, China, and Russia, we would soon find that internal human rights concerns would quickly disappear from the US agenda.
The U.S. administration has unveiled the biggest defence cuts in years. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said that the “extreme fiscal duress” requires him to call for the cuts.
The moves reverses the significant growth in the military spending that followed the 9/11 attacks.
Does this decision reflect a political shift in Washington? And what about the many global security threats America says it’s facing?
Inside Story, with presenter James Bays, discusses.
Guests:
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, assistant secretary of state for political and military affairs under George W. Bush and also held a post at CENTCOM as Deputy director for strategy.
Ambassador Richard Murphy, former assistant secretary of state for near east and south Asia.
Shuja Nawaz, Director of South Asia Centre at the Atlantic Council, a bi-partisan think tank in the US.
Steve Kroft Reports on the Country That is Poised to Become the Fifth-Largest Economy in the World.For decades, the joke about Brazil has been that it’s the country of the future – and always will be. Despite enormous natural resources, it has long displayed an uncanny ability to squander its vast potential. Now it’s beginning to look like Brazil may have the last laugh.
For the first time ever, the US national debt has topped $14 trillion, officially passing the threshold on the last day of 2010.
In a mere seven moths the debt jumped from $13 trillion to $14 trillion, which means the debt is approaching the ceiling of $14.294 trillion set by Congress and President Barack Obama this past February.
This means the US will either have to raise the ceiling, make sever spending cuts and/or default on its financial obligations. Over the past three years that ceiling has been raised six times.
Paraguay tops the list as the region’s winner, with almost 10 percent of economic growth, followed closely by Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela, according to the United Nations Economic Report, a recently released document detailing world financial activity over the past year. Press TV’s Melissa Abalo reporting from Buenos Aires.
The corporatists and fascists who have steered Europe into bankruptcy are now using their media assets to morph their favorite threat over the last two decades — Islamist terrorism — to a combined menace of Islamist terrorists teamed up with an international network of anarchists. The change of threat was necessary with corporatists and fascist-led governments in Europe besieged by workers and students who are militantly opposed to severe cuts in social spending that were dictated from supranational institutions in order to financially bail out greedy bankers and their lackeys in governments.
In Greece and Italy, where governments are under street pressure to resign over corruption and austerity moves, there are already signs that the paradigm shift from Islamist terrorism to leftist anarchism is already occurring, with highly-suspicious and likely false flag bombings taking place at embassies and other facilities.
Europe has seen such false flag terrorist attacks in the past blamed on leftist revolutionary groups like the Italian Red Brigades and the West German Red Army Faction, but actually carried out by a network of CIA and fascist operatives, supported by local police and intelligence agencies, to blame leftists for such attacks. The operation, known generally as “Gladio,” was a ploy to damage the reputation of the Communist parties of Western Europe in order that they were not invited to join in any leftist government coalitions, particularly in Italy and France.
Gladio has raised its head again in the last decade, especially in Turkey, where the Gladio successor, “Ergenekon,” has attempted coups and plotted and carried out false flag terrorist attacks in an effort to undermine the Justice and Development (AKP) government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Bombings at embassies in Athens and Rome followed massive street demonstrations directed at the Greek government’s draconian budget and pension cuts on behalf of the international banking elite and similar moves, as well as corruption, by the Italian government. European law enforcement, which now serves as a virtual arm of the European Union bureaucrats and their banking allies, is pointing to a network of anarchists who may be carrying out the bombings. The same psychological operation is being used to lump together all Muslim groups opposed to neocon European policies in the Middle East, as well as Israeli human rights violations, as somehow being linked to a worldwide network of Islamic “jihadists.”
Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization joins us to discuss Argentina’s status in the economic new world order and how that country has served as a testing ground for the neoliberal economic policies that have ravaged countries around the globe.
Rising fuel and food prices in India are reviving inflation fears. During the past year, the nation’s food price index rose 12.13 percent. Basic vegetables are of main concern as consumers complain about being unable to afford certain dietary staples. The price of onions, for example, has risen by 350%. Up-scale restaurants have also seen a steady increase in prices these last six months, effecting their profit margins. Although they are able to absorb the price hike right now, the question that remains is: for how long? In an effort to ease the sting, India’s embattled government banned onion exports and scrapped import duties. High food inflation has dislodged state governments in the past. India’s Congress party that leads the ruling coalition has to come up with a solution before the partial state elections later this year.
The Christmas shopping season has arrived in Tokyo, but there is little good news to be heard when it comes to the Japanese economy. Two new economic surveys paint a picture of weakening growth: Core machinery orders fell a greater-than-expected 1.4% in October; and bank loans to companies fell 2.0% in November. And Slower growth in key overseas markets has cooled export demand.
Vermont Senator Sanders describes the increasing disparity between the upper and lower classes and the disappearance of the middle class, tax benefits for the upper echelons of American society, the dangers involved with the privatization of social services and the effects of the collapsing economy on all Americans.
Does the average American know more about Lindsay Lohan or The Jersey Shore than the Iraq war? The United States military accounts for nearly half the defense spending in the entire world; it funds two wars along with hundreds of bases tactically positioned worldwide. Author David Vine says the impacts of war and the US military bases abroad are so far removed from US citizens, many times being kept secret, that people don’t understand their impact.
The Army, through training exercises, is actively pursuing strategies to deal with a variety of scenarios including large scale economic breakdown, domestic order amid civil unrest and ways to deal with fragmented global power.
Tens of thousands of students marched through London on Wednesday against plans to triple university tuition fees, and violence erupted as a minority battled police and trashed a building containing the headquarters of the governing Conservative Party. Organisers said 50-thousand students, lecturers and supporters demonstrated against plans to raise the cost of studying at a university to 9-thousand pounds a year – three times the current rate – in the largest street protest yet against the government’s sweeping austerity measures.
What is happening in Europe is heading to America’s shores soon.
A top economic adviser to the Democratic Party, speaking on deep background, told WMR that the domino-like collapse of the economies of Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and, now, possibly Spain, is coming also to the United States.
One of the triggering mechanisms will be at the end of this month when two million idled workers, now collecting unemployment, will be dropped from the rolls. At the end of December, another two million workers will join the ranks of those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and a total of 4 million Americans will be without unemployment checks and face destitution.
Four million Americans will put financial pressure on municipalities and state governments already facing bankruptcy. Unlike Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and, to some extent, Spain, which have strong central government control, the United States is a federal republic and, as such, the collapse of the economy will be state-by-state and begin at the municipality level, according to our source who has contacts within the Obama White House and the Democratic leadership of the Congress.
Municipalities, which guarantee the pensions of their retired employees through the issuance of municipal bonds, will find themselves faced with bankruptcy and the “Muni” bonds will be rated at junk status. Municipalities unable to pay out pensions will discover their pension funds can be bailed out by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) in Washington, a federal corporation set up by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.When the first municipality declares bankruptcy and seeks a bailout from the PBGC, there will be a domino effect, with others seeing it as a quick way out. Soon, the PBGC will, itself, be forced into bankruptcy. WMR has been told by our source it is doubtful that a Republican Congress will be interested in bailing out the PBGC.
The wildfire of municipality bankruptcies will then spread to the states, with California and Illinois likely to be the first two states to default on their debts and declare bankruptcy.
In order to raise quick cash for a financially-desperate state government, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to sell 24 state buildings, including the Earl Warren Building in San Francisco, headquarters for the California Supreme Court, and then rent them back from the new owners. However, such desperate moves by states, including the selling off of their turnpike systems and state buildings — with parks maybe next on the auction block — is not enough to forestall bankruptcy. Unlike the federal government, which can print as much cash as it likes and needs, states do not have that luxury. However, given the imminent collapse of the national economy, some states may decide to print their own currency, an act that would lead to the dissolution of the present 50-state union.
As far as bank accounts are concerned, our source recommended avoiding large national and regional banks that have a high percentage of toxic assets, especially in the commercial real estate area. The next major bust, after the residential real estate plunge, will be commercial real estate, where values of buildings and shopping centers have been halved. Our source sees smaller, state-based banks, as safer for account holders. Also, as more and more large shopping malls begin to close across the country, the unemployment numbers will also skyrocket.
WMR was also informed that President Obama will not seize the bully pulpit and level with the American people about who and what caused the present economic crisis. “Obama is subservient to his teleprompter,” the White House insider source said, “if he’d scrap the teleprompter and speak directly to the American people, he might help things, but right now, he’s a disaster.”
Robert Naiman is Director of Just Foreign Policy. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois and has studied and worked in the Middle East. Naiman edits the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and writes a blog on Huffington Post.
In a letter to the Times a group of five former British Navy admirals, including the former commander of the fleet, Sir Julian Oswald, warn of the tragic consequences of David Cameron’s proposed defense cuts, particularly the decision to scrap the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the Harriet Jet fleet:
“In respect of the newly valuable Falklands and their oilfields, because of these and other cuts, for the next 10 years at least, Argentina is practically invited to attempt to inflict on us a national humiliation on the scale of the loss of Singapore. One from which British prestige, let alone the administration in power at the time, might never recover.”
They move into Godwin’s law territory as well:
The admirals invoked the threat from Hitler to warn about the cuts, saying: “The government has, in effect, declared a new ’10-year rule’ that assumes Britain will have warning time to rebuild to face a threat. The last Treasury-driven ’10-year rule’ in the 1930s nearly cost us our freedom, faced with Hitler.”
Of course, the RAF will still maintain an airbase in the Falklands and just in case Argentina should get any ideas, even with an 8 percent cut the British will still exceed them in military spending by about 24 times.
Just ahead of the G20 summit, there is a new report which came out recently stating the United States’ economy will be overtaken by China in the next two years. Should the American people be worried about their livelihoods? Economist Max Fraad Wolff says Americans should take a look at their clothes and see where they are made, that should give people an idea of what is happening.
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