The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Huh?
Israel digging own grave, its death very close: Kevin Barrett
Video 24.49 Transcript Below
What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.
Christine Lagarde in court charged with embezzlement and fraud
It was when she was President Nicolas Sarkozy’s finance minister that she is said to have authorised a 270 million pounds payout to one of his prominent supporters, so abusing her government position. The money went to Bernard Tapie, a convicted football match fixer and tax dodger who supported Lagarde and Sarkozy’s UMP party. It came after Dominque Strauss-Kahn, another senior French politician, was sacked as IMF chief following allegations that he attempted to rape a chambermaid in a New York hotel. Ms Lagarde began campaigning to succeed Mr Strauss-Kahn soon after his arrest for the alleged crime.
But now it is Ms Lagarde, a lawyer and retired synchronised swimming star, who is facing a long court process of her own, as well as a possible jail sentence. The scandal will not only pile further shame on France’s political class, but worry politicians and bankers desperately trying to resolve the global financial crisis. Mr Tapie, the former head of adidas in France, claims he was cheated out of millions by Credit Lyonnais bank when the sports kit empire was sold in 1993. In 2007, Ms Largarde ended the epic dispute by ordering a panel of judges to arbitrate and, in turn, they awarded Tapie the damages. Opposition MPs were furious, with former presidential candidate Francois Bayrou accusing Ms Lagarde of ‘dipping into the taxpayers’ pocket for a private beneficiary.’
Mr Strauss-Kahn’s Socialist Party also accused Ms Lagarde of improper conduct, pointing to the fact that Mr Tapie was a vocal supporter of Sarkozy. Ms Lagarde’s lawyer, Yves Repiquet, said the inquiry was ‘in no way incompatible’ with her new job, and expected the case to be dismissed. Ms Lagarde denies any wrongdoing, saying before today’s court appearance: ‘If it’s decided to continue with this inquiry it won’t be particularly surprising. Personally, it doesn’t worry me at all – I didn’t benefit personally’. But it has been widely reported in the French media that investigators intend to charge her with fraud and embezzlement. Le Monde said that magistrates had already written to Mrs Lagarde to tell her that she should not expect any special treatment because of her high-profile international job.
Phi Beta Iota: If a panel of judges approved the payment amount, it would appear Madama Lagarde was simply acting as a government agent in settling the claim. When combined with the new Russia-Berlin-French axis, and the new plans of the BRICS to create their own development bank that by-passed the World Bank and the IMF (and all of their predatory inter-locked “conditions,” one has to wonder if we are at the beginning of a global campaign to destroy the Western financial system that has been so nakedly amoral — legalized crime.
See Also:
BRICS Nations Plan New Bank to Bypass World Bank, IMF
Bloomberg, 26 May 2013
The biggest emerging markets are uniting to tackle under-development and currency volatility with plans to set up institutions that encroach on the roles of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
The leaders of the so-called BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are set to approve the establishment of a new development bank during an annual summit that began today in the eastern South African city of Durban, officials from all five nations say. They will also discuss pooling foreign-currency reserves to ward off balance of payments or currency crises.
“The deepest rationale for the BRICS is almost certainly the creation of new Bretton Woods-type institutions that are inclined toward the developing world,” Martyn Davies, chief executive officer of Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory, which provides research on emerging markets, said in a phone interview. “There’s a shift in power from the traditional to the emerging world. There is a lot of geo-political concern about this shift in the western world.”
The BRICS nations, which have combined foreign-currency reserves of $4.4 trillion and account for 43 percent of the world’s population, are seeking greater sway in global finance to match their rising economic power. They have called for an overhaul of management of the World Bank and IMF, which were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, and oppose the practice of their respective presidents being drawn from the U.S. and Europe.
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African Leaders
National Defense University’s New Directions
I recently finished NDU’s Convergence, which is a collection of monographs on illicit networks. Queued up right behind it New Directions in U.S. National Security Strategy, Defense Plans, and Diplomacy: A Review of Official Strategic Documents, which I finished a first review of last night.
The book collects seven important strategic studies and provides some commentary on each. These include, in chronological order of release:
Quadrennial Defense Review Report – DoD, February 2010. 128 pages.
Ballistic Missile Defense Report – DoD, February 2010. 61 pages.
Nuclear Posture Review – DoD, April 2010. 72 pages.
National Security Strategy – White House, May 2010. 60 pages.
NATO 2020: Assured Security; Dynamic Engagement – NATO experts, May 2010. 58 pages.
Quadrennial Defense Review Perspective Report – United States Institute of Peace, at the behest of SecDef, July 2010. 159 pages.
Leading Through Civilians Power: The First Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review – State Department, December 2010. 242 pages.
A broader context is required here. Barack Obama was elected in November of 2008. There is an end of year lull, then these reports are started in January of 2009, after Hillary Clinton was approved as Secretary of State. Obama left Robert Gates in place as Secretary of Defense. The QDR comes in first, closely followed by two companion reports. The White House then releases their National Security Strategy, advised in part by the DoD studies.
The NATO document involves the U.S. but it’s May release was timed to provide six months of review before the NATO summit that November in Lisbon. The July QDR Perspective was done at the behest of the Secretary of Defense in response to criticisms leveled at the QDR itself. The State Department issued it’s first Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review in December.
Obama’s win in November of 2012, then the nomination and approval of Secretary of Defense Hagel in February 2013 and Secretary of State John Kerry in March of 2013 are what set the stage for the next round of updates, due in the spring of 2014.
New Directions is just 178 pages and I chose to not read the nuclear and missile report portions, counting that as excess detail at this time. The seven reports themselves total 780 pages. I also noticed and curated the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, which was released concurrent with the QDR in February of 2010. Since DHS is internal their report has no place in the assessment of our outward facing strategy.
I have roughly a nine month window to read and understand 958 pages of dense, high level material before the next update begins to arrive. I immediately see the usual set of issues that arise with any of our strategic planning.
PDF 39 Pages: 2013-05-23 Fusion Centres – Lessons Learned_ENG
Phi Beta Iota: The report is so narrow as to be virtually useless. What we really need is not lessons from past failures, but rather the embrace of new ideas that cross all boundaries.
How the U.S. Government Hacks the World
Michael Riley
BloombergBusinessWeek, 23 May 2013
EXTRACT:
The men and women who hack for the NSA belong to a secretive unit known as Tailored Access Operations. It gathers vast amounts of intelligence on terrorist financial networks, international money-laundering and drug operations, the readiness of foreign militaries, even the internal political squabbles of potential adversaries, according to two former U.S. government security officials, who asked not to be named when discussing foreign intelligence gathering. For years, the NSA wouldn’t acknowledge TAO’s existence. A Pentagon official who also asked not to be named confirmed that TAO conducts cyber espionage, or what the Department of Defense calls “computer network exploitation,” but emphasized that it doesn’t target technology, trade, or financial secrets. The official says the number of people who work for TAO is classified. NSA spokeswoman Vaneé Vines would not answer questions about the unit.
The two former security officials agreed to describe the operation and its activities without divulging which governments or entities it targets. According to the former officials, U.S. cyberspies, most from military units who’ve received specialized training, sit at consoles running sophisticated hacking software, which funnels information stolen from computers around the world into a “fusion center,” where intelligence analysts try to make sense of it all. The NSA is prohibited by law from spying on people or entities within the U.S., including noncitizens, or on U.S. citizens abroad. According to one of the former officials, the amount of data the unit harvests from overseas computer networks, or as it travels across the Internet, has grown to an astonishing 2 petabytes an hour—that’s nearly 2.1 million gigabytes, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of text.
