St. Petersburg, Russia – China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.
Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies.”About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies,” Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg.
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Premier Wen Jiabao shakes hands with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on a visit to St. Petersburg on Tuesday.ALEXEY DRUZHININ / AFP
The documents covered cooperation on aviation, railroad construction, customs, protecting intellectual property, culture and a joint communiqu. Details of the documents have yet to be released.
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Wen said at the press conference that the partnership between Beijing and Moscow has “reached an unprecedented level” and pledged the two countries will “never become each other's enemy”.
Hint: if you are in lower 90% of income earners, just look in the rear view mirror — because S-B is about to sell you the same ideological snake oil that got America into its current economic mess.
My good friend Jeff Madrick, a old fashioned liberal in the best sense of the term, dissects the Simpson-Bowles cape-job in the article attached below.
In my opinion, the litmus test for measuring the seriousness of the Simpson – Bowles recommendations will be what if anything the commission recommends for containing the Pentagon's out-of-control budget. At a minimum, the defense budget should be frozen (for reasons cited here) in current dollar terms until the Pentagon can pass the audits legally required by the Chief Financial Officer Act of 1990, not to mention the the letter and original intent of the Accountability and Appropriations Clauses of the Constitution — a document that every officer in the US government has taken an unconditional oath to protect and uphold.
My personal view is that the Pentagon's budget can and should be placed on a downward path glide path of 2-3% reduction per year in current dollars. One way for doing this, while forging a more sensible and responsive national military strategy, is described here. But, of course, that kind of hard decision making is simply not going to happen in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac. Indeed, even the generous constraint of a current dollar freeze to a defense budget, which is now at the highest level since the end of WWII, is likely to be a pipe dream, because as Jeff points out, the evidence to date suggests that Simpson – Bowles is likely to give the Pentagon a free ride … again. Maybe we will be surprised, but don't bet your diminished net worth on it.
Below is just one of a number of short (YouTube) videos that are gaining traction as the American people begin to understand the reality of Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve being allowed to blow up the US economy and now the world economy, with the full blessing of President Barack Obama. This is change we can believe in?
This article by Bill Gertz needs to be seen in perspective. During the Cold War the Soviet Union as well as a number of other countries, including China were constantly engaged in trying to acquire U.S. Technology of all types through various means from industrial espionage to bribery. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) was extremely concerned about this and the subject of illicit ‘international technology transfer’ to the Soviet Bloc (as well as a few other countries) generated numerous DOD requirements to such agencies as NSA and CIA. Much of the urgency of these requirements was downgraded precipitously when the Cold War ended. Also the number of incidents of foreign powers trying to acquire U.S. technology has declined in the 21st Century for a very sinister reason: the U.S. is no longer the sole leader in the research and development of advanced technologies that it was after WWII. Although incidents still occur, as the Chinese Huawei example shows, they are much less common than once was the case. So DOD no doubt does not see the need for the same emphasis on loss of U.S. origin technology.
Yet financial intelligence is more than technology loss it also involves major illicit financial operations, such as money laundering, and financial operations in support of espionage and terrorism against U.S. interests. This of course includes the financial infra-structure supporting al Qaeda. If Ferguson is shutting this effort down as well he is making an unbelievable mistake.
This incident is symptomatic of an Intelligence System that is indeed out of control. In the absence of a viable strategic plan for intelligence collection, analysis, and production, every time some new crises occurs the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) resembles an ant hill that somebody has just stepped on. In the absence any real leadership or clearly defined purpose, the big four of the IC (CIA, DIA, NGA, and NSA) will continue to waste billions of dollars for minimal returns while resisting an efforts at meaningful reforms. At the same time the IC institutional bias against using non-classified (open) source information will ensure that they will only be able to provide very small windows that are of only limited usefulness to decision makers. What a way to go!
Phi Beta Iota: We are truly surprised that someone of Jim Clapper's caliber would allow an Acting Undersecretary no one has ever heard of to be named Acting in the first place; or that such an individual would do something this dumb without clearance from the DNI. There are a couple of variations on a theme: a) Clapper wants to make it obvious that Treasury is in enemy hands and DoD wants nothing to do with Treasury intelligence which does not exist–Treasury, like Energy and the other non-national security departments are patronage stove-pipes receiving direction from ideological idiots–they don't do “evidence-based” policy; b) Clapper is finally thinking about holistic intelligence in support of Whole of Government, and having DoD drop financial intelligence is a preamble to elevating the Financial Intelligence Center in some manner. On balance, as much as we admire the DNI, we think he has blown it–he will not accomplish anything consequential in the next few years by continuing to do the wrong things righter, and that is a shame, because so much could be accomplished in a mere 90-180 days, if he would empower those with the right mind-set to do the right things, which is to say, M4IS2 simultaneously with Whole of Government intelligence-support operations and the creation of a Smart Nation.
The Pentagon's intelligence directorate is killing off one of its most strategically important mission areas: monitoring efforts by foreign governments to buy U.S. firms and technology, such as the multiple efforts by China's military-linked equipment company Huawei Technologies to buy into the U.S. high-technology sector.
Defense officials tell Inside the Ring that Thomas A. Ferguson, acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence (USDI) and a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) space analyst, initiated the dismantling of the financial-threat intelligence monitoring.
Phi Beta Iota: US Intelligence is out of control–as good as some of the leaders are in terms of diversity of experience within the OLD system, they simply do not have the mind-set nor the authorities to restructure intelligence to the point that it can meet all appropriate needs. The person ostensibly responsible for strategy, a CIA body, has just been made deputy director of DIA, and we have no doubt that a “strategy” exists that might ultimately turn DIA into the analysis center and CIA into a collection management center (while NSA becomes the all-source processing center, all as outlined in Chapter 13 of ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World) as well as all subsequent books such as INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, this is all too little, too slow, too incoherent, and too expensive. An Open Source Agency (OSA) under diplomatic auspices, and a voluntary shift of $200 billion from Program 50 to Program 150 as a lure for Newt Gingrinch coming into the 2012 coalition cabinet under Obama running as an Independent (miracles do happen), are both essential.
