Posted by seumasach on October 27, 2008
4th September, 2008
MEXICO CITY (AFP) — A private jet that crash-landed almost one year ago in eastern Mexico carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine had previously been used for CIA “rendition” flights, a newspaper report said here Thursday, citing documents from the United States and the European Parliament.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CIA Narcotic Trafficers | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 27, 2008
“The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men (who) felt no responsibility to the nation.” From the 1945 UK Labour manifesto Let Us Face The Future
Mike Whitney
October 25, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse“ — -There are signs that the credit crunch is easing. Interbank lending in dollars has fallen for a ninth straight day. The various indicators of stress in the market–Libor, the TED spread, and the Libor-OIS spread–are all gradually returning to normal, but the damage to the broader economy has been substantial. Major corporations have had to stretch their credit lines just to get the money they need to cover routine operating expenses and a lot of retailers have not been able to get funding for their inventories for the holiday season, so they’ll either have to hire fewer workers or simply shut their doors for Christmas. Also, corporate defaults have increased as businesses have been unable to turn over their short-term debt. According to Fitch Ratings, the “crisis will cut growth in credit this year by 50 percent as financial firms reduce leverage, investors’ appetite for risk declines, and the worldwide economy slows.” When credit is less available, there’s less business activity and the economy slows. Unemployment goes up and quarterly earnings go down. It’s a vicious circle that starts with speculation and ends in panic. The financial system has to reestablish its equilibrium by purging the excessive credit that developed through low interest rates and lax lending standards. Financial institutions everywhere are in the process of deleveraging which is putting downward pressure on the main stock indexes and creating turmoil in the currency markets.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: financial collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 27, 2008
“responsibility on people to do all they can to help themselves”
Well, the bankers have helped themselves: now it’s our turn.
Helene Mulholland
27th October, 2008
Gordon Brown will use a speech to business leaders to defend his economic plans. Photograph: Leon Neal/PA
Welfare reforms must be “intensified” to help deal with the fall-out from the looming recession, Gordon Brown will declare today.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: Financial crisis, stop the bailout | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 27, 2008
David Piling
26th October, 2008
Western banks may still not have produced reliable accounts of their balance sheets, suggesting more write-downs and capital injections could be necessary, according to Heizo Takenaka, the former Japanese economy minister often credited with ending the country’s 10-year banking crisis.
Mr Takenaka, who from 2001 forced banks aggressively to write down bad loans and to repair balance sheets by raising capital, said “more intellectual effort” was needed by western institutions to flush out the full extent of toxic assets. These were more complicated and harder to identify than in Japan’s more straightforward banking crisis, he said. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: asia crisis, financial collapse, yen | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 26, 2008
All of this only confirms that it is nonsense to talk of the government nationalising or part-nationalising the banks.
Time for government to insist that loopholes are closed
Ian MacWhirter
It has always been a scandal that banks connived with wealthy clients to use offshore tax havens to avoid paying income tax. But the use of offshore vehicles by banks such as Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland has had far more profound consequences than loss of tax revenue.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: financila collapse, off-shore tax havens | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 26, 2008
Click on above link to see video.
Christopher King links the Anglo-American financial crisis to the same lack of morality that underlies US-UK-NATO murder in Iraq and Afghanistan. He calls on Europe to “reject the aggressive economic and foreign relations models” and the “fraudulent financial practices that have arisen from the failing social experiment” that is the USA.
Posted in Multipolar world | Tagged: Britain into Europe-Europe out of NATO | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 26, 2008
Nesojsa Malic
Almost eight months after the US – followed by most NATO members –recognized the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo as a dependent state, the Serbian government finally did something about it. On October 8, the UN General Assembly approved Serbia’s request to seek the opinion of the International Court of Justice about the legality of Kosovo’s separation. Albania, the US and four Pacific island nations in its orbit were the only votes against. For a moment, Belgrade basked in victory, no matter how feeble or immaterial.
Posted in Drive to Global War | Tagged: Kosovo | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 26, 2008
26th October, 2008
Senior Iraqi politicians have warned that a crucial deal between Baghdad and Washington governing the presence of American troops in the country is doomed to failure after eight months of talks.
Posted in Iraq | Tagged: End of empire, status of forces agreement | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 25, 2008
22October, 2008
RESIDENTS of a West Dublin housing estate, which lies next to a phone mast, are calling on the HSE to conduct a full health assessment in the area after an apparently large number of cancer diagnoses.
Posted in Ecological and Public Health Crisis | Tagged: EM radiation health hazard, no more masts | Leave a Comment »
