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Syrian Dissidents Declare Creation of 'National Alliance'
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Page 6: Politix
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Economy
Video: Keiser Report: Möbius Strip of Fraud
Posted by: tipper || 12/16/2011 06:57 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  HOLY SHIT.
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 12/16/2011 10:25 Comments || Top||

#2  Oh I get it! Eureka. I've just been hit in the head with the magic meatball. You steal someone else's money and then make wild ass gambles with it. And then you say you can't remember or don't know where it went. It is likely that you are also a Democrat.
Posted by: JohnQC || 12/16/2011 16:33 Comments || Top||

#3  Redneck Jim is a master of understatement.

I'm sending a link to this Keiser report to all of my friends.

Now we know what happened to MF Global...they reobligated all of the money...

What about these off books derivatives that all of these clowns are holding that are backed by this stuff. No wonder they don't want to loan out the stimulus money, they're holding it if the roof falls in (P.S. to Wall Street, the roof has already fallen in).

When will someone anyone call B.S. on all of this and start the full prosecution of these people.
Posted by: Bill Clinton || 12/16/2011 16:45 Comments || Top||

#4  It gets even worse.
The special bankruptcy treatment given repos and derivatives means that repo lenders and parties to derivative contracts can keep the collateral if their trading partner becomes insolvent. This exempts them from the “automatic stay” rule in bankruptcy, which prohibits most creditors from trying to collect ahead of others.
So in a banking bankruptcy derivitave holders get priority over even bond holders or depositors.
Posted by: tipper || 12/16/2011 21:37 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
Harvard's Jihad
The Harvard administration need to be taken out and strung up from the nearest lampposts. Then the site needs to be razed to the ground and salted so that it cannot be occupied for the next thousand years. The politically correct cancer that has afflicted it is terminal and there is no point in trying to treat it. Pity, Harvard used to be a prestigious university, now no more.
The cited source isn't exactly trustworthy. Let's see a hard news link before we jump to conclusions. AoS.
Posted by: tipper || 12/16/2011 19:43 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


India-Pakistan
Crimes of `honour`
PAKISTAN, where the regularity with which honour killing is reported is matched only by the frequency with which the perpetrators go unpunished, would do well to take a leaf out of Belgium`s book. On Monday, a court in Mons handed down lengthy sentences to the parents and siblings of Sadia Sheikh, rubbed out in 2007 after moving in with a Belgian man and refusing to submit to an arranged marriage. Her brother Mudusar, who confessed to killing her, was sentenced to 15 years in prison, her sister Sariya to five and her parents Tarik Mahmood Sheikh and Zahida Parveen -- who are believed to have ordered the killing -- 25 and 20 years respectively. While the sentences were lesser than those asked for by the prosecutors, the latter neverthe- less consider their case successful, given that Mudusar had repeatedly said his family had nothing to do with the murder. Most importantly, the sentences are long enough to be prohibitive. In contrast to Pakistain, where the honour-killing debate is still at that mediaeval stage where the practice is defended by some in the name of custom, the Belgian state has said that it will vigorously pursue any such case.

With the conviction comes also the need for Paks to reflect on how adherence to archaic logic in matters of tradition shames them. This is not the first time that people of Pak extraction have been accused of such a crime. In June last year, Canadian courts sentenced Muhammad Parvez and his son Waqas Parvez to life imprisonment for killing 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez in 2007 because she refused to wear the hijab. Other countries, too, have seen such cases and while the crime is not limited to the Pak community, we seem to almost head the list. Perhaps this is because in Pakistain, the state`s stance on honour killings has been too soft. Most such cases either do not reach the trial stage, or the prosecution`s case collapses for want of thorough planning and investigation. Ridding Paks of the notion that honour killing is a defendable crime entails coming down hard on the perpetrators.
Posted by: Fred || 12/16/2011 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan


Save the sinking ship
[Dawn] SO preoccupied are we with political, security, military and foreign policy matters these days that the leadership has almost forgotten that the real threat to survival is the fast-deteriorating economy.

Political uncertainty, unsettling internal security and rising tensions on the western borders do indeed pose a threat and should attract attention. Similarly, loadshedding, gas shortage and the rising cost of agricultural and industrial inputs are taking their toll on the economy and must be attended to. However,
a good lie finds more believers than a bad truth...
the more serious problem is that of macro-economic imbalances.

There is a wide imbalance between the potential and the actual growth rate, investment requirements and domestic savings, government expenditure and its revenue, imports and exports, current account receipts and payments, living standards of the people in the small and larger provinces, and the lifestyle of those residing in bungalows and that of the majority subsisting in surrounding urban ghettos and rural villages.

Unmindful of the dangerous consequences of the widening macroeconomic imbalances, both the government and the opposition are engaged in political gamesmanship and personal mudslinging in their bid to outwit each other to win the next elections.

Macroeconomic problems have been put on the back burner with neither the government nor the opposition giving any specific action plan to get the economy moving again on a path of high growth, relative price stability and balance-of-payment viability, with equitable distribution of the fruits of development across all provinces and all people.

There is no realisation that to preside over the country, the need is to ensure a flourishing, and not a sinking, economy.

Unfortunately, both the government and the opposition appear to rely chiefly on slogan-mongering and symbolic steps to hoodwink the public into believing that the economy is engaging their attention.

The advertisements of the Benazir Income Support Programme by the federal government, the launching of a new yellow cab scheme by the Punjab government and even lofty speeches to eradicate corruption by the newly emerging Pakistain Tehrik-i-Insaaf are not of any consequence without addressing the deep-rooted macroeconomic imbalances.

Economists hired by the government appear to be doing little to save the economy. But there seems to be an almost unanimous view of all non-government economists that macroeconomic indicators clearly show the economy is headed in the wrong direction. A low growth rate, rising inflation and potential external debt default are an explosive combination that should scare any economist of substance.

At present, the economy has been put on automatic pilot heading downwards.

In the domestic sector, the government, with the connivance of an indifferent State Bank of Pakistain (SBP), is borrowing from the banking system at an alarming rate to meet its expenditures -- a large part of it must also be going into personal pockets.

In the external sector, it is relying on unpredictable foreign remittances and reserves to meet its foreign exchange requirements. This can only lead to economic disaster.

The government cannot run out of rupees so long as there is paper available to print them, and the SBP is led by those who show no sense of responsibility entrusted to them by the legislature. The process will ultimately stop itself when the rupee loses the people's trust, and they move increasingly towards the 'dollarisation' of their economic dealings.

But the country will soon run out of dollars which neither the SBP nor the government can print. It will not only disrupt the foreign trade of the country but also lead to external debt default and additional domestic misery.

Such a situation is frightening. Cash foreign exchange will be the only payment acceptable for imports and that is what will be in short supply in the country. Unemployment, hunger and disease will increase and so will lawlessness. People may be on the streets and the governments may stand toppled but the economy will not head towards recovery without hard economic policy choices.

The phase of empty slogans will be over. Even if the country does survive the social and political turmoil, ordinary people will have to pay through their nose a heavy economic price for a long time to restore some semblance of normality.

There is not enough space to spell out the major components of a policy package that will be needed to address the problems.

However,
corruption finds a dozen alibis for its evil deeds...
it is essential to state the obvious. Government borrowing from the domestic banking system will need to stop and an export-led and domestic-saving based growth strategy must be worked out and put in place to change the direction of the economy. This is not possible without a national consensus on a long-term economic policy package.

The only sensible and patriotic move for the government and the opposition is to agree on an economic policy programme to be implemented by whichever government is, and will be, in power for years to come. Given the political history of the country it may be wishful and naive thinking, but a national consensus is what is required to rescue the sinking ship.

It is time that the politicianship and other stakeholders realised the gravity of the economic situation and got together to address the deeply troubling macroeconomic imbalances. Everything else, including the election campaign, should be subordinated to the task of saving the economy from freefall and collapse.

If the politicianship and other stakeholders do not act to save the economy, the people might be tempted to take matters into their own hands.

The writer is a former governor of the State Bank of Pakistain.
Posted by: Fred || 12/16/2011 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan

#1  If the politicianship and other stakeholders do not act to save the economy, the people might be tempted to take matters into their own hands.

The thought of which is keeping the world's ruling elites up at night.
Posted by: Pappy || 12/16/2011 10:18 Comments || Top||

#2  I still say that Pakistan is a collection of places no one else wanted.
Posted by: Bill Clinton || 12/16/2011 15:23 Comments || Top||

#3  Nah, that's Afghanistan.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 12/16/2011 16:03 Comments || Top||


Jawed Naqvi: The growing lure of barbarism
[Dawn] IT was several years ago that Prof Eric Hobsbawm cautioned us about the revival of barbarism in the 20th-century West and its spread to the rest of the world.

His profound and worrying prescience has only become more forbidding with each passing day.

Be it in warfare, which has progressed from the holocaust of Ypres to the precision-driven callousness of pilotless planes, or an ever-present readiness to annihilate the opponent with nuclear weapons, or be it the well-funded experiments in torture to deal with adversaries from an ever-widening definition of terrorism, barbarism has acquired a prescriptive legitimacy of its own.

And though he illustrated his thesis by showing up a penchant for bloody methods applied by the all too briefly civilised West, there is hardly a region including South Asia today where Prof Hobsbawm's argument falters.

'Disappearances' is routinely another word to define possible cold-blooded murder by state agencies of individuals they fear fighting frontally. Terrorists equally viciously partake of the methods invented by the nation states in the early 20th-century Europe.

Pakistain, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh are firmly in step with brutal methods used by the region's largest democracy to get even with perceived foes. Indian security forces are not averse to courting barbarism to tame the restive regions of Kashmire and the predominantly tribal north-eastern states.

In New Delhi, just a few weeks ago, a woman teacher suspected of being a tribal conduit for Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh was ordered by a court to be handed over to her state police. Soni Sori pleaded she would be tortured in Chhattisgarh but was assured it wouldn't happen.

In the event the state police mercilessly battered her. Her gruesome torture according to her medical reports involved pushing large stones into her. Meanwhile,
...back at the Council of Boskone, Helmuth had turned a paler shade of blue. Star-A-Star had struck again...
Anna Hazare, the self-styled messianic Indian apparently fighting corruption, has decreed that those drinking alcohol should be strapped to a tree and whipped till they promise to give up.

His barbaric advice earned him the sobriquet of an Indian Ziaul Haq not the Gandhi his followers project him to be. Do Pakistain's human rights
...not to be confused with individual rights, mind you...
activists and other assorted admirers of Mr Hazare detect a hint of fascism
...a political system developed in Italia symbolized by the Roman fasces -- thin reeds, each flimsy in itself but unbreakable when bound into a bundle. The word is nowadays thrown around by all sorts of people who have no idea what they're talking about...
he is feared to be leading the country into?

Prof Hobsbawm suggests that barbarism results from the disruption and breakdown of the systems of rules and moral behaviour by which all societies had regulated relations among their members and, to a lesser extent, between their members and those of other societies.

It denotes "the reversal of what we may call the project of the 18th-century Enlightenment, namely the establishment of a universal system of such rules and standards of moral behaviour, embodied in the institutions of states dedicated to the rational progress of humanity: to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, to Equality, Liberty and Fraternity or whatever."

Where are we headed then? India's tryst with its intellectually shored up barbarism offers a glimpse. An entire school of right-wing ideologues has the tacit blessing of the state in promoting a callous polity. Not that the Maoists on their day are any better even without state patronage.

The soufflé rose twice -- first in the vendetta lynching of thousands of Sikhs in 1984. It rose again in 1992 with the destruction of the Babri Masjid by a frenzied mob looking to elusively reclaim national honour against alleged historical injustices blamed on Babar possibly the most romantic and misunderstood 16th-century king to rule India.

It was the 13th of December on Tuesday, a day observed in memory of the security personnel killed when five Kashmiri gunnies tried to attack the Indian parliament. Calls to hang Afzal Guru, a convicted conspirator, rang through the news media again.

To ask how the former Kashmiri myrmidon who had surrendered to the security forces and was under regular surveillance after that had got involved in the heinous plot would leave you open to charges of sedition. The fact that his former captor boasted on TV how he tortured Guru was virtually treated as the right thing to do.

It is no secret that those who see torture as a legitimate tool to fight the enemies of state belong mostly to the right-wing; its practitioners are more evenly spread and include mainstream communists.

Possibly the most ardent advocate of India's reliance on questionable methods in the war on terror is Arun Shourie, respected in right-wing circles as an intellectual par excellence. A former minister and journalist Mr Shourie, like Anna Hazare, was an icon in the fight against corruption.

Prof Hobsbawm gave his lecture in 1994. Mr Shourie published his landmark piece in the Indian Express, curiously on Dec 12, 2001, a day before parliament was attacked!

"No war has been won by deploying 'minimum force' -- the quantum that liberals concede when the terrorist leaves them no
option but to allow that something just has to be done. Wars are won by overpowering the opponent with overwhelming force.

And so it must be in the case of terrorism, and of the states that sponsor it: not 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'; for an eye, both eyes, for a tooth, the whole jaw."

The questionable way the Indian state dealt with the allegedly Pakistain-backed Sikh insurgency draws a prescription from him: "It is a fatal error to judge what needs to be done in an area or in times infested by terrorists, by standards honed from normal places and quieter times."

The soft Indian state -- a right-wing description of the country's not yet completely vanquished liberal ideals -- may not be quite ready to accept all of Mr Shourie's prescriptions. Still, countries like Pakistain, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh appear to have not let him down in the lure of barbarism.
Posted by: Fred || 12/16/2011 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan

#1  “No war has been won by deploying ‘minimum force’ — the quantum that liberals concede when the terrorist leaves them no option but to allow that something just has to be done. Wars are won by overpowering the opponent with overwhelming force.

And so it must be in the case of terrorism, and of the states that sponsor it: not ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’; for an eye, both eyes, for a tooth, the whole jaw.”


Hat off Mr Shourie. Drop dead Jawid.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 12/16/2011 4:33 Comments || Top||

#2  Odd that he defines "barbarism" as meaning "not communist".
Posted by: Rob Crawford || 12/16/2011 9:48 Comments || Top||

#3  Hobsbawm is a good read concerning the topic of "social banditry" and its resistance to the state's monopoly on "violence". Yes he is a Marxist, but one with some interesting ideas.
Posted by: borgboy || 12/16/2011 13:08 Comments || Top||


Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Bibi to the NY Times: Pound Sand
Posted by: Beavis || 12/16/2011 17:02 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


The Truth About Palestinian Immigration
h/t Gates of Vienna
Writing in Israel Hayom yesterday, Yoram Ettinger supported Newt Gingrich's statement that Palestinians are an "invented" people by offering statistics to show that far from having lived in the Holy Land for millennia, most Palestinians descend from immigrants who came from throughout the Muslim world between 1845 and 1947. Simon Sebag Montefiore provides similar data in his new book, Jerusalem: The Biography, as a New York Times reviewer noted: From 1919-38, for instance, 343,000 Jews and 419,000 Arabs immigrated to the area,
The disparity of numbers is because the British did everything they could to hamper Jewish immigration while encouraging Arab
One might ask why this should matter: Regardless of when either Jews or Palestinians arrived, millions of both live east of the Jordan River today, and that's the reality policymakers must deal with. But in truth, it matters greatly -- because Western support for Palestinian negotiating positions stems
uses an excuse
largely from the widespread view that Palestinians are an indigenous people whose land was stolen by Western (Jewish) interlopers.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 12/16/2011 05:21 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:



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Two weeks of WOT
Fri 2011-12-16
  Syrian Dissidents Declare Creation of 'National Alliance'
Thu 2011-12-15
  U.S. War in Iraq Declared Officially Over
Wed 2011-12-14
  33 Civilians, 7 Regime Troops Killed
Tue 2011-12-13
  Mexican Army bags 11 bad guys in Tamaulipas state
Mon 2011-12-12
  Mysterious explosion kills 7, injures 16 in Iran
Sun 2011-12-11
  Syrian Opposition Reports Deputy Defense Minister Killed
Sat 2011-12-10
  Rival Yemeni forces said to quit streets of Taiz city
Fri 2011-12-09
  Twenty trucks torched in attack at Nato terminal in Quetta
Thu 2011-12-08
  Yemen's unity government announced
Wed 2011-12-07
  New coalition government formed in Yemen
Tue 2011-12-06
  Afghanistan: Kabul shrine attacks 'kills 34'
Mon 2011-12-05
  France Reduces Tehran Embassy Staff after Attack on British Mission
Sun 2011-12-04
  Iran police arrest 12 over embassy rally
Sat 2011-12-03
  US Hands Over Camp Victory to Iraq
Fri 2011-12-02
  Syria Sanctions Target Assad Brother, 16 Other Senior Figures

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