Posted by seumasach on May 12, 2009
That the Brit’s defence of the “sovereignty”of the Falklands Islands was more than just symbolic is now patently clear. Our response must be equally forthright:
Las Malvinas son de Argentina!
11th May, 2009
A vast tract of the South Atlantic seabed – rich in oil and minerals – was formally claimed by the United Kingdom today in defiance of Argentinian opposition.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Las Malvinas son de Argentina | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on May 12, 2009
>By MICHAEL HUDSON May 11, 2009
Last month the G-20 authorized the International Monetary Fund to increase its loan resources to $1 trillion. It’s not hard to see why. Weakening currencies in the post-Soviet states threaten to raise default rates on foreign-currency mortgages as collapse of the Baltic real estate bubble drags down Swedish banks, while the Hungarian property plunge threatens Austrian banks. It seems reasonable to infer that creditor-nation banks hope to be bailed out. The IMF is expected to lend the Baltic, central European and other debtor-country governments money to pay them. These hapless debtor economies are then to follow IMF “conditionalities” to squeeze enough money out of their populations to pay foreign creditors – and repay the Fund by imposing yet more onerous taxes on their labor and industry, making them even more high-cost and therefore pushing them even further into trade and credit dependency. This is why there have been so many riots recently in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine, as was the case for so many decades throughout the Latin American countries that introduced the term “IMF riot” to the global vocabulary. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Battle for Europe, Revolution in Iceland | Tagged: bankrupt iceland, Defend Iceland!, iceland and IMF, Revolution in Iceland | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on May 12, 2009
Posted in Financial crisis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on May 10, 2009
Bit of News
Tuesday, 05 May 2009 Written by Garrett Johnson
Paul Krugman recently pointed out that wages are falling across America. A week earlier the Treasury Department reported that tax revenue was collapsing at a 14% rate.
It’s easy to see the correlation between these two trends. But what do they have to do with this statement? Everything.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has been battling the banks the last few weeks in an effort to get 60 votes lined up for bankruptcy reform. He’s losing.
“And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place,”
The first thing to understand is that the banking industry adds nothing to the economy. It doesn’t sow crops, make widgets, build homes, or fix your computer. The financial industry sits on top of the real economy in the same way a fungus grows on a tree. In fact, as famous investor John Bogle said a few years before the massive bailouts, the financial sector actually subtracts from the economy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: the new slavery | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on May 10, 2009
Richard C. Cook
Global Research,
Sunday, May 10, 2009 Prison planet
What impresses me in the current financial crisis is the near-total failure of so-called progressives to appreciate the magnitude of what is going on or the level of intelligence behind it. How many will say, for instance, that the crash was deliberately engineered by the creation, then destruction, of the investment bubbles of the last decade? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: the new slavery | Leave a Comment »
Posted by alfied on May 10, 2009
Rumours, spread by the medical community and big pharma, that Tamiflu can treat the Flu are just that, rumours.
Tamiflu is not here to help us fight the war on swine flu, bird flu or any other flu. It’s just another weapon being used in the war on humanity.
A new warning label has been added to the influenza drug Tamiflu following reports of delirium and hallucinations among people – mostly children – taking the medication. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Ecological and Public Health Crisis | Tagged: Population control, Tamiflu side effects | 2 Comments »
Posted by smeddum on May 9, 2009
Afghanistan: Heroin-ravaged State
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, May 8, 2009
Why one should think of Afghanistan, not as a “failed state,” but as a heroin-ravaged state
One of the most frustrating features of observing American foreign policy is to see the gap between the encapsulated thinking of the national security bureaucracy and the sensible unfettered observations of the experts outside. In the case of Afghanistan, outside commentators have called for terminating current specific American policies and tactics – many reminiscent of the US in Vietnam. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Afghanistan | Tagged: afghanistan heroin savaged state | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on May 9, 2009
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: dollar collapse, Jim Willie | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on May 9, 2009
By Paul Anderson
May 9th 2009
“First of all, most agricultural crop production does not depend on pollinators. On top of that, while honey bees may be dwindling in some parts of the world, the number of domesticated bees world-wide is actually on the rise, their new report shows.
“The honey bee decline observed in the USA and in other European countries including Great Britain, which has been attributed in part to parasitic mites and more recently to colony collapse disorder, could be misguiding us to think that this is a global phenomenon,” said Marcelo Aizen of Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Argentina. “We found here that is not the case.”
says this recent report from Science daily
This plays down their earlier findings.
“Claire Kremen, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, is co-author of this new study.
“There’s a widely stated phrase in agriculture that you can thank a pollinator for one out of three bites of food you eat,” said Kremen, who is also a member of the Committee on Status of Pollinators that produced the NRC report and leader of a group at the National Center for Ecological and Analysis and Synthesis that co-sponsored the work. “However, it wasn’t clear where that calculation came from, so we set out to do a more thorough and reproducible estimate, and we wanted to look at the impact on a global scale.”
What the researchers found fell in line with the dictum to which Kremen referred. Out of the 115 crops studied, 87 depend to some degree upon animal pollination, accounting for one-third of crop production globally. Of those crops, 13 are entirely reliant upon animal pollinators, 30 are greatly dependent and 27 are moderately dependent.
The crops that did not rely upon animal pollination were mainly staple crops such as wheat, corn and rice.”. Science daily
The list of foods bees pollinate is here.
It includes alfalfa primary used as feed for dairy cattle—because of its high protein content and highly digestible fiber—and secondarily for beef cattle, horses, sheep, and goats.
Three quarters of food production (76%) is dependent on bees and 84% of vegetables grown in Europe depend on pollination.”
According to a National Geographic report accepted by the European parliament.
We are told by Science Daily that despite the problems of the US and Europe, the rest of the world is fit for bees. Yet this contradicticts this report from Argentina, which reports the problem is indeed global.
One wonders if the first piece of misinformation on the extent we use pollination is as false as the misinformation on how widespread the problem has become.
We are also in the last day of bee week in New Zealand.
Posted in Colony Collapse Disorder, Ecological and Public Health Crisis | 2 Comments »
Posted by smeddum on May 9, 2009
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: Banking crisis, Bernanke, CDOs, China, Credit default swaps, derivatives, Federal reserve, Interest rate swaps, JP Morgan, Phony flight to quality, weaponized swine flu | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on May 9, 2009
By MARK WEISBROT
May 8-10, 2009 Counterpunch
Three years ago I wrote an article arguing that the political changes sweeping across Latin America were epoch-making and probably irreversible, and that they would fundamentally alter the relationship between the region and the United States. Some of the most important economic causes of the region’s shift to the left – including the unprecedented long-term growth failure since 1980 – were unrecognized then and remain mostly unacknowledged to this day. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Multipolar world | 1 Comment »
In These New Times 