Germany financial architecture is under stress. If Germany fractures, Euro is gone. Could the US alleged theft of 1500 metric tons of German gold be part of the problem? Could this make the IMF August 2012 working group memorandum on The Chicago Proposal Revisited a “must do”?
The USA is a great nation for entrepreneurship and innovation, it has the best science in the world, the most creativity in the arts, it is the number one economy in the world, it has an energy unrivaled by other nations and we have chosen to move to this great nation with our family. So everything that follows must be seen as friendly criticism from a person who loves this country.
Now most of my friends in the USA agree on what is great about this nation. But when I speak to some American friends they seem to be unaware of the shortcomings of the USA compared to others, and this is what I would like to focus on. Here are some quick examples.
The USA ranks 38th in life expectancy which is shocking considering that it has the best medical science in the world. And this generation is the first one that will live less than the previous generation. The average American is expected to live two years less than, say, the average Spaniard. This is partly because the USA has a medical system that leaves 50 million people uninsured and many others under-insured or worried about losing their insurance (my wife Nina, for example, can’t get medical insurance to have our next baby because pregnancy is considered a pre-existing condition and we moved to USA when she was already pregnant). It is also partly because the USA is the nation with the highest percentage of its population obese, over 30%. The WHO studied overall level of health and concluded that Americans rank 72 in the world. Family structure is also weak as the USA has the highest divorce rates in the world. Moreover inequality is on the rise: as this Wikipedia article argues, the top earning 1 percent of households gained about 275% over a period between 1979 and 2007, compared to a gain of just under 40% for the 60 percent in the middle of America's income distribution.
A secret report by Germany's Federal Audit Office leaked to the public last week states that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York refuses to allow Bundebank staff to even view the gold, triggerin suspicions that the vaults are empty as well as calls for the gold to be shipped back to Berlin.
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The leaked report has now led to calls from some of Germany's leading politicians for the nation's stateside gold hoard to be shipped back to Berlin. Heinz-Peter Haustein of the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) was quoted by German newspapers as saying that “all the gold has to be shipped back.”
Bundesbank board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele has urged calm, however, referring to some of the debate surrounding the gold to be “rather grotesque” and stating that the hoard is in the care of “highly respected central bankers” as opposed to “dubious business partners.” Read full article.
In no way does this look like a consulate. Rather, it looks like a high end CIA villa. Bearing in mind image comes from Fox, needs validation, but it seems authentic.
Despite a carefully narrated version of events rolled out late this week by the CIA claiming agents jumped into action as soon as they were notified of calls for help in Benghazi, security officials on the ground say calls for help went out considerably earlier — and signs of an attack were mounting even before that.
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The accounts, from foreign and American security officials in and around Benghazi at the time of the attack, indicate there was in fact a significant lag between when the threat started to show itself and help started to arrive.
Phi Beta Iota: If validated, this photograph shows that the consulate is not, as most would assume, in a high-density urban area. From a military point of view, this is a piece of cake for a helo evacuation and/or a curtain of fire. This looks more and more like a mix of incompetent CIA operations and inattentive political appointees detached from reality.
A federal judge in Washington today ordered the U.S. Justice Department to justify the continued need for secrecy over certain Watergate-era wiretap and grand jury records that remain sealed in a high-profile criminal prosecution.
Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia told the government to send him copies of documents placed under seal in the criminal case against G. Gordon Liddy, charged in connection with the burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The sealed records include grand jury information and “documents reflecting the content of illegally obtained wiretaps.”
Government lawyers oppose the public disclosure of any papers about illegally obtained wiretaps tied to the Watergate scandal. The Justice Department this summer, in response to a demand for those records, argued there's no First Amendment or public right of access to illegally obtained wiretaps. Historical or scholarly interest, the government said, doesn't justify discretionary disclosure.
DOJ lawyers said in their brief to Lamberth that “we are unaware of any court that has unsealed previously undisclosed illegal wiretap content for reasons for historical interest.”
Lamberth's ruling today was issued in a case in which a historian of the presidency of Richard Nixon requested access to court documents that were sealed in the Liddy case in Washington's federal trial court. Liddy was convicted in 1973 on charges that included burglary and conspiracy rooted in the Watergate Hotel break-in.
Syria-US: US can no longer support the Syrian National Council (SNC) as the “visible leader” of opposition forces. US Secretary of State Clinton and other U.S. officials reportedly are fed up with infighting among the SNC leaders and have become convinced that the group does not represent the interests of all ethnic and religious groups in Syria. Ms. Clinton said there is a need for an official opposition umbrella which rejects “efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution.
Comment: More than 18 months into a rebellion of sorts, this is an astonishing admission of poor judgment and faulty political intelligence on multiple levels. It seems to have taken a year and a half for the US government to appreciate that the Syrian expatriates have no influence over the fighting in Syria. No fighting groups respond to their direction. No fighting groups depend on their dispensation of American funds.
Spokesmen for various Syrian fighting groups have been denouncing the expatriate politicians and the SNC as venal and out of touch for 18 months, openly and sometimes bitterly. The SNC has experienced repeated desertions by its most capable leaders, who also denounced its feckless venality.
The fighting will not stop in Syria because the SNC gets cut off. Even were the Free Syrian Army, which operates in Syria as one of many fighting groups, to lose its funding and supplies, fighting would continue because the rebellion appears to have been hijacked by the jihadists. They do not rely on the West or the US for support, though they will purloin it if given the opportunity.
Libya: Update. On 1 November, about 100 Libyan fighters have circled and occupied the Libyan national assembly to protest the new cabinet lineup.
Comment: Judging from the large number of documents about security in Benghazi that have been leaked or found in Benghazi, the cabinet in Tripoli does not govern Libya beyond parts of Tripoli. The fragmentation of the state actually worsened with the killing of Qadhafi.
If the news and leaked reports may be trusted, Libya has become a political fiction, like Somalia. Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, is an al Qaida base, training location and arms depot for jihadists in Syria and Mali. The rest of Libya is a mélange of competing tribal territories. Libya seems to have devolved as a nation-state – gone backwards.
The nature of the Benghazi disaster is now clear. Ambassador Stevens was engaged in smuggling sizable quantities of Libyan arms from the destroyed Gaddafi regime to the Syrian rebels, to help overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. Smuggling arms to the so-called “Free Syrian Army” is itself a huge gamble, but Obama has been a gambler with human lives over the last four years, as shown by the tens of thousands of Arabs who have died in the so-called Arab Spring — which has brought nothing but disaster to the Arab world.
For the last four years, the Obama policy has been to offer aid and comfort violent Islamic radicals in the delusional belief that their loyalty can be bought. We therefore betrayed Hosni Mubarak, our 30-year ally in Egypt, so that the Muslim Brotherhood led by Muhammed Morsi could take over. Obama indeed demanded publicly that Mubarak resign, for reasons that never made any sense at all. Egypt went into a political and economic tailspin, and the Muslim Brotherhood were elected. The Muslim radicals have now purged the only other viable political force, the army and police, to protect their monopoly on power. We have colluded in that betrayal.
