In These New Times

A new paradigm for a post-imperial world

Posts Tagged ‘End of empire’

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US, Karzai split over Taliban talks

Posted by seumasach on February 3, 2010

Gareth Porter

Asia Times

4th February, 2010

On the surface, it would seem unlikely that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who presides over a politically feeble government and is highly dependent on the United States military presence and economic assistance, would defy the United States on the issue of peace negotiations with the leadership of the Taliban insurgency.
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Lord Rifkin advocates for a new «Entente cordiale» with France

Posted by seumasach on February 3, 2010

Voltairenet

3rd February, 2010

Through a column in The Times, Sir Malcolm Rifkin has called for a new “entente cordiale” with France within the NATO structure.[1]

As former British Minister of Defence and of Foreign Affairs, he considers that only a Franco-British military pact would make it possible to harmonize expensive military equipment. This would result in significant savings that would enable the United Kingdom to continue to rank as a great power.

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‘US plan to reintegrate the Taliban is doomed’

Posted by seumasach on January 28, 2010

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Engdahl-The Gods of Money and the Death of the American Century Interview with Corbett Report

Posted by seumasach on January 28, 2010

F.William Engdahl

Click on link below to hear audio:

The Gods of Money and the Death of the American Century
Interview with Corbett Report

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The Sanctity of Military Spending

Posted by seumasach on January 27, 2010

Since much of that overall spending is mandatory, military spending — all of which is discretionary — accounts for over 50% of discretionary government spending. Yet it’s absolutely forbidden to even contemplate reducing it as a means of reducing our debt or deficit.  To the contrary, Obama ran on a platform of increasing military spending, and that is one of the few pledges he is faithfully and enthusiastically filling (while violating his pledge not to use deceitful budgetary tricks to fund our wars)

Glen Greenwald

Global Research

27th January, 2010

Administration officials announced last night that the President, in tomorrow’s State of the Union address, will propose a multi-year freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs.  This is an “initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit,” officials told The New York Times.

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Rule by the Rich

Posted by seumasach on January 27, 2010

“The enormous damage done to the U.S. economy by jobs offshoring, work visas, and financial deregulation cannot be offset by government stimulus plans, which expand the debt burdens that are crushing Americans. The federal government’s massive budget deficits and the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy are setting the stage for an inflationary depression to follow a deflationary depression.”

Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research

27th January, 2010

The election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate by Democratic voters in Massachusetts sends President Obama a message. Voters perceive that Obama’s administration has morphed into a Bush-Cheney government. Obama has reneged on every promise he made, from ending wars, to closing Gitmo, to providing health care for Americans, to curtailing the domestic police state, to putting the interests of dispossessed Americans ahead of the interests of the rich banksters who robbed Americans of their homes and pensions.

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Troop surge ‘supports peace deal’

Posted by seumasach on January 27, 2010

Gareth Porter

Asia Times

28th January, 2010

General Stanley McChrystal’s cautiously worded support for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban leadership is only the first public signal of a policy decision by the Barack Obama administration to support a political settlement between the Karzai regime and the Taliban, an official of the McChrystal’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has revealed in an interview with Inter Press Service (IPS).
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Circles within circles around the Taliban

Posted by seumasach on January 27, 2010

In an extraordinary interview timed for the London Conference, the commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, said: “As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there’s been enough fighting.”

“After eight years of war, it’s clear that domestically many [Western] political leaders are having to answer questions, this [war] has gone on a long time and it’s no better than it was in 2004, so why are we maintaining it, will it get better?” he told the Financial Times on Monday.

M.K.Bhadrakumar

Asia Times

28th January, 2010

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s attention is likely to be divided as hosts long-awaited international deliberations in London on the war in Afghanistan on Thursday. To be or not to be in the British capital was the question as Brown rushed to Belfast on Monday to “talk through the night” to save the Ulster power-sharing process from collapse.
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Defeat of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution”: Yanukovich — Man for all Seasons

Posted by seumasach on January 20, 2010

Ukraine’s new president — unless there is another Orange Revolution — has fashioned a comeback worthy of Nixon.

Eric Wallberg

Global Research

20th January, 2010

Ukraine’s presidential elections Sunday were remarkable in more ways than one. The winner of the first round and favourite to lead Ukraine at a crucial moment in its history is the one politician observers long ago dismissed as a has-been. Viktor Yanukovich is mocked by his opponents as an illiterate bumpkin, a puppet of Ukrainian business magnates, a former criminal and communist, a conspirer against the brave democrats of the legendary Orange Revolution of 2004. Have I left anything out? Does he kick dogs or beat his mother?

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Kabul anxiously beckons Obama

Posted by seumasach on January 13, 2010

M.K.Bhadrakumar

Asia Times

14th January, 2010

A tipping point comes when confusion arises about the identity of the adversary on the battlefield. Who is the United States’ number one enemy in the Hindu Kush: the Taliban and al-Qaeda or Afghan President Hamid Karzai?
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The Wealth of Nations 2010

Posted by seumasach on January 10, 2010

Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
rense.com
9th January, 2010
1. Adam Smith (http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/y6402.html )wrote about the above title a long time ago (1757). He talked about invisible hands which were instrumental in growing the wealth of nations.
2. In the latest financial crisis in the United States the invisible hands certainly played a big role. It took the form of abuses of the banking, monetary and financial system.
3. Pushed out of the international market place by the cheaper and better manufactured goods of the East Asian countries the West turned towards the financial system in order to enrich themselves. The opportunities for abuses were abundant.
4. They discovered that banks could create money out of thin air; without Government control (free market) any amount of loans of non-existent money could be given by the banks; the sale of commodities need not involve the commodities at all. It is the same with selling shares and currencies; having physical possession is not necessary. Sell and buy imaginary shares and make tons of profit.
5. Their fertile brain soon gave birth to hedge funds, short selling, leveraged purchases, junk bonds, currency trade, free markets etc etc.
6. All these systems promised great wealth to speculators and manipulators without the need to produce or possess anything. Better still they need not employ substantial number of workers who may make demands and threaten business with industrial action.
7. A good example is the trade in commodities. Without possession of the physical commodity, a speculator may sell huge quantities of it. The effect of this dumping is to depress the price of the commodity. When the price reached a low level the sellers would buy the commodity to deliver to the buyers that they had sold to earlier at a higher price. Thus without ever touching or seeing, much less possessing the commodity, the manipulators would make handsome profits. They call this short selling and the public is persuaded that this is fair trade.
8. Individuals cannot do this. The amount of money involved is too big. So funds were set up and managed by smart people.
9. The fate of the real producers is not the concern of these fund managers. As the price of the commodity become depressed the producer countries and their people would suffer.
10. If the producer country bought the non-existent commodity from the speculators at the low prices for future delivery, and if at the delivery date the speculators could not deliver the commodity, they would be forced to buy the physical commodity at prices higher than they had sold. They would lose money. This is as it should be. But no. Their market controllers would save them by declaring that they need not honour their contracts.
11. This was what happened when tin prices were depressed through the short selling of non-existent tin by the speculators. In desperation Malaysia bought the tin knowing that the sellers had no physical tin, whereas Malaysia had. When the delivery date arrived the sellers would be forced to buy physical tin from Malaysia at Malaysian prices in order to deliver. The price of the physical (real) tin would of course be higher. The sellers would lose money having to purchase at the higher prices in order to deliver to the buyers (Malaysia) at the lower prices.
12. When the short sellers faced this threat of losing a lot of money from their short selling price depressing activities, the London Metal Exchange which controlled the market ruled that the sellers need not honour their contract to deliver physical tin, allegedly because the purchasers were trying to corner the market.
13. Clearly the players in the financial market are protected. They can make tons of money selling non-existent commodities but they need not deliver if they have no physical commodities.
14. And so the financial market expanded until it became much bigger than the real market. The trade in currencies for example is twenty times bigger than total world trade. Hedge funds, through mysterious investments pay as much as 30% to their investors. Pyramid schemes gave huge returns and banks calculate their earnings on the amount of money they lent out, whether the borrowers were able to pay or not.
15. There were numerous schemes which gave huge profits to the investors, far more than investments in the production of goods and services.
16. With these financial schemes the wealth of these developed countries and their rich investors appeared to grow at a high rate every year and the people appeared to have the capacity to buy unlimited amounts of imported goods. These countries were apparently the locomotives of growth for the whole world.
17. Then the balloons bursts.
18. The wealth of the West, acquired through the financial market is not real wealth. Their Per Capita and GDP figure are not based on reality. Their money also has a bloated value, guaranteed by no reserves or gold. (Their money is truly fiat money).
19. Their Governments were forced to bail out their banks and companies with trillions of dollars. It can be said that their Presidents and Prime Ministers are all responsible for the trillions of dollars lost by their countries.
20. I am waiting for a good unemployed journalist to investigate and write a book on these leaders who presided over the trillion-dollar losses by their countries

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