Send in the clowns
US-Israeli Relationship In Jeopardy, Kerry “Ruined Everything”
Tyler Durden’s pictureSubmitted by Tyler Durden on 07/28/2014 13:51 -0400
Another red line crossed? As AP reports, Obama administration officials were fuming Monday over a torrent of Israeli criticism of Secretary of State John Kerry’s latest bid to secure a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Israeli media commentators have leveled almost nonstop criticism at Kerry in recent days over his attempts to bring Qatar and Turkey — two countries viewed by Israel as strong Hamas supporters — into the cease-fire negotiations – “U.S. Secretary of State of State John Kerry ruined everything.” The White House is not happy – in unusually harsh language, officials said the criticism of Kerry could put the relationship between the U.S. and Israel in jeopardy. They also said the personal attacks on Kerry crossed a line.
cont. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-28/us-israeli-relationship-jeopardy-kerry-ruined-everything
It’s About Time!!
GMO pushers horrified at idea of being held responsible for their role in farmer suicides, crop failures and environmental devastation
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/046195_GMO_pushers_legal_liability_whistleblowers.html#ixzz38mxOGg8O
Wanka
Not necessarily that it won’t be fixed today, but plague you from time to time it will. Interesting that you would use the word “plague” because Pluto rules plagues, lol.
Definitely send Vito.
Augirl @ 12:23
You go, girl, frogs to the left of you, frogs to the right of you, lol. 😀
R640
$370 million fine on profits of what, probably $3.7 billion?
I’d say that’s a pretty good risk/reward. I want to commit that crime!
Ho Hum…so what else is new? Read any good books this summer?
Lloyds Bank fined $370 million for rigging Libor
Submitted by cpowell on 08:18AM ET Monday, July 28, 2014. Section: Daily Dispatches
By Matt Scuffham and Huw Jones
Reuters
Monday, July 28, 2014
Britain’s Lloyds Banking Group has agreed to pay fines totaling $370 million to U.S. and British authorities investigating its part in a global interest rate rigging scandal and manipulating fees for a UK government lending scheme.
The settlement is the seventh joint penalty handed out by American and British regulators in connection with the attempted manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and other similar benchmarks used to price around $450 trillion of financial products worldwide. The misconduct related to Libor rates for sterling, the U.S. dollar, and Japanese yen. …
Kunstler today
Excuse Me For Living
Israel has all the proof it needs that world opinion will never consider its right to exist important. The Obama White House, and a lot of the US News Media, portray the Hamas-Israel conflict as something like an amateur soccer match, with the uneven score (40-odd Israeli soldiers killed versus 1000-plus Palestinians, mostly civilians) showing that the contest is unfair, that Israel has “gone too far,” that they have entered the same moral zone as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, carrying out a “genocide.”
Of course, this is a real hot war, not a diversity training exercise, or a self-esteem course, or any sort of the kindergarten psychotherapy that has come to form the basis of American thought and policy. And a vicious world opinion uses America’s own moral fecklessness the way Hamas uses women and babies to shield its rocket installations.
Apparently world opinion also doesn’t take seriously Israel’s founding maxim, “never again,” meaning that Israelis will not passively wait for world opinion to save them from an enemy that plainly and clearly seeks to annihilate them, as happened 1933-45. The Hamas organization is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That is not a rhetorical gimmick; it is its declared unwavering primary goal.
The claim that Israel seeks to annihilate the Palestinians is simply a lie. Israel seeks to stop rocket attacks and tunnel invasions, and as long as Hamas is dedicated to those actions, they can expect a forceful Israeli reaction. The sealed border of Gaza has been part of that reaction, to counteract the traffic in war materials and the ready supply of suicide bombers who, Hamas declares, “love death more than the Israelis love life.”
The Hamas war leaders are killing their own people to score public relations points. The particulars of the Hamas arsenal embedded among the civilian Gaza population are so firmly established that the facts are hardly worth rehearsing. Anyway, the world doesn’t care about those facts. Israel’s will to exist is an annoyance to it.
Of course, Gaza is just one flash point in an Islamic region much more broadly inflamed in conflict between different Islamic brands and their political subsidiaries. The main reason (unacknowledged) is overpopulation of the region due to short-term wealth from oil. With oil production peaking across North Africa and the Middle East, the world can expect at least a generation of violent conflict over the table-scraps of Modernity. Even the Islamic nations with scant oil reserves have been hugely affected by a half-century of this regional oil wealth. The crack-up in the shadow of this brief historical episode has been easy to anticipate. World opinion is not going to stop it.
By the way, where was world opinion a month ago when ISIS was crucifying and beheading its way out of Syria into central Iraq? World opinion took those horrors in stride because that’s exactly the kind of behavior that world opinion now expects from radical Islamic maniacs.
Israel is a sideshow to all that, really, but one that attracts a lot of attention, with the memory of the Nazi “final solution” lingering on in the atrophying moral organs of what has been loosely called “the West,” where the last great world conflagration played out. It is ridiculous, of course, to compare the lot of the Gaza Palestinians to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Jews locked in the Warsaw ghetto were not firing rockets out of it, nor did they ever declare that Germany had no right to exist.
The Palestinians will find justice when they find a leadership that is willing to grant Israel a right to exist and when they stop firing rockets and sending tunnel commandoes into Israel to wreak havoc. If they started with that, they could expect a conversation to begin with Israel over new terms of coexistence. But they have to demonstrate an interest in coexistence. There’s no evidence of that so far. Why this simple equation is not understood by world opinion is an abiding mystery.
Floridagold @ 11:08 re: Italy
If it wasn’t for their black market and tax avoidance they’d probably already have folded up! 🙂
Buygold
“I know Argentina recently had some ruling against them by US courts that they had to pay hedge funds $2 billion or something. Why on earth would they comply?”
The only reason Argentina would pay is because they’re paying off bonds that they issued previously and tried to default on. If they want to keep borrowing money then they have to pay off their old debts. Argentina is between the devil and the deep blue sea. They used to have a prosperous country before the socialists got ahold of them.
Like you I don’t see the Russian gov paying that $50 billion. Yeah right!
PM Shares solid again
Led by none other than NEM. Go figure.
Imagine if the metals were up.
You know it’s a bad day for Obama when CNN has this poll out
Americans really wish they had elected Mitt Romney instead of Obama
Mitt Romney 2014?
Americans are so down on President Obama at the moment that, if they could do the 2012 election all over again, they’d overwhelmingly back the former Massachusetts governor’s bid. That’s just one finding in a brutal CNN poll, released Sunday, which shows Romney topping Obama in a re-election rematch by a whopping nine-point margin, 53 percent to 44 percent. That’s an even larger spread than CNN found in November, when a survey had Romney winning a redo 49 percent to 45 percent.
Two years ago, Obama won re-election with about 51 percent of the vote.
Of course, the poll should be taken with a grain of salt. While Obama is actually taking on the tough task of leading the nation, Romney is sitting comfortably on the sidelines. Still, the finding comes as foreign and domestic crises have sent Obama’s approval rating tumbling back to 40 percent, per Gallup.
Also in the CNN survey, a record-low 46 percent say Obama “shares [their] values,” while only 49 percent say he is “sincere in what he says,” also a record-low.
What The World Needs Is More Tolerance
“I am truly perplexed that so many of my friends are against another mosque being built in Toronto . I think it should be the goal of every Canadian to be tolerant regardless of their religious beliefs. Thus the mosque should be allowed, in an effort to promote tolerance.
Wanka…” as they say ‘birth’ sure has its pains! “
The communication difficulties will be something that will occur from time to time because the Oasis was born with Pluto in the 3rd house of communications opposing Mercury, planet of communications and both are being squared by Moon in the 6th house of computers. Computer software comes under the influence of the 3rd house, the hard drive under the influence of the 6th house.
So folks will need to have patience because the Oasis is worth it.
Floridagold, Ipso and good morning Farmboy and portugeezer
F & I – ““It’s now a question of enforcing it.” (the $50 billion) Gee, ya think?
Why would any sovereign country give a rat’s backside what some corrupt court in the Hague says?
I know Argentina recently had some ruling against them by US courts that they had to pay hedge funds $2 billion or something. Why on earth would they comply?
Wanka
Yep, I posted that “just for information” message at poster’s paradise. Why not?
No way to run a government
The Italian Government Owes Over $100 Billion To Private Suppliers
Tyler Durden’s pictureSubmitted by Tyler Durden on 07/27/2014 18:12 -0400
Much has been said in the popular press about Italy’s surprising economic recovery (which based on recent data is starting to lose steam), as well as its much improved fiscal picture (even if the country’s public debt hits record highs quarter after quarter and the bad debt within its banking system just rose by 24% from the prior year, to €169 billion the highest since 1998). Little has been said about just how Italy managed to pull this economic miracle off. The answer: robbing private suppliers to pay Paul, or rather, the public sector.
According to Reuters, the Italian state owes some 75 billion euros ($102 billion)to private suppliers, as reported by the Bank of Italy. The unpaid bills have starved companies of cash and triggered layoffs, factory closures and bankruptcies.
Italy will settle the debt arrears it owes to private sector suppliers by the end of this year, Economy Minister Pier Carlo Padoan said in a newspaper interview on Sunday, pushing back previous commitments. “We will ensure that the arrears are paid off by the end of the year,” Padoan told Corriere della Sera daily.
That’s funny, because back in March, PM Renzi promised all debt would be paid back by, well, right now. One week later, he said September. We look forward to September to learn that not only will the debt not be paid back by the end of the year, but the total amount of money due to the private sector from the government has in fact, growtn.
Remember when they said Italy is undergoing an unprecedented economic recovery? They lied:
The government is finding it hard to tackle the problem because of public finance constraints, inefficiency, uncertainty over exactly how much is owed and a reluctance on the part of some public bodies to acknowledge their debts.
In June, the European Commission opened a formal infringement procedure against Italy because of its failure to comply with the Late Payments Directive, which orders governments to reduce payment delays to no more than 60 days.
Well, yes: if one starves the private sector to pretend that the public one is doing ok, that works. For a few months. Then everyone remembers that aside from the Europe’s epic ECB-sponsored Ponzi scheme where bond yields no longer reflect anything at all, a properly functioning economy starts always and only from the private sector. Sadly, in this case it is the cancer that is Italy’s corrupt government that will certainly be the reason for what is already shaping up as a triple dip recession. We give it 6-9 months.