The economic war is now in full swing. I fear the kinetic war will begin soon.
Swift, the body that handles global banking transactions, says it will cut Iran’s banks out of the system on Saturday to enforce sanctions.
The move will isolate Iran financially by making it almost impossible for money to flow in and out of the country via official banking channels.
It will hit its oil industry, but may also have a heavy impact on Iranians who live abroad and send money home.
The move follows EU sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme. (Read more)
Statement from SWIFT: Following an EU Council decision, SWIFT is today announcing it has been instructed to discontinue its communications services to Iranian financial institutions that are subject to European sanctions.
The new European Council decision, as confirmed by the Belgian Treasury, prohibits companies such as SWIFT to continue to provide specialised financial messaging services to EU-sanctioned Iranian banks. SWIFT is incorporated under Belgian law and has to comply with this decision as confirmed by its home country government.
The FDA has won its two-year fight to shut down an Amish farmer who was selling fresh, raw milk to eager consumers in the Washington region, after a judge this month banned Daniel Allgyer from selling his milk across state lines, and he told his customers he’ll shut his farm down altogether.
The decision has enraged Mr. Allgyer’s supporters, some of whom have been buying from him for six years and who say the government is interfering with their parental rights to feed their children. But the Food and Drug Administration, which launched a full investigation complete with a 5 a.m. surprise inspection and a straw-purchase sting operation against Mr. Allgyer’s Rainbow Acres Farm, near Lancaster, said unpasteurized milk is unsafe and said it was exercising its due authority to stop its sale from one state to another. (Read more)
Markets do not correct their own excesses. Either there is too much demand or too little. This is what the economist John Maynard Keynes explained to the world, except that he is not listened to by some people in Germany. But Keynes explained it very well — when there is a deficiency of demand, you have to use public policy to stimulate the economy.
In the rest of the interview, I think he says that Germany should bailout the Euro Zone, but as is usually the case with Keynsians, it isn’t completely clear.
They may just be the hardest drugs on the market, if the FDA are to be believed.
A company which sells walnuts has been told they are dealing in drugs because their packaging suggests health benefits which the Food and Drug Administration has not approved, it has been reported.
A fiercely-worded letter from the agency allegedly insisted Diamond Foods, from Stockton, California, remove the health claims or send off for a new drug application if it did not wish to be closed down.
The nut company has been selling its products with packaging which states the omega-3 fatty acids in walnuts have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease and some types of cancer.
But while the claims are backed up by research, including 35 published medical papers supporting assertions that eating walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce risk of heart attacks, the FDA is said to have insisted the company is ‘misbranding’ its foods because the ‘product bears health claims that are not authorised by the FDA’. (Read more)
This borrowing adds to the national debt, which has recently surpassed $15 trillion and is rising every second. The amount of debt is quickly approaching the federal debt ceiling, a legal limit to borrowing that currently stands at $16.4 trillion.
Much of that debt is held by private sector, but about 40 percent is held by public entities, including parts of the government. Here’s who owns the most. Foreign countries listed include private and public investors, according to monthly U.S. Treasury data.
1. Federal Reserve and Intragovernmental Holdings
U.S. debt holdings: $6.328 trillion
. . . .
2. China
U.S. debt holdings: $1.132 trillion
. . . .
3. Other Investors/Savings Bonds
U.S. debt holdings $1.107 trillion
With the most recent numbers from June 2011, this extremely diverse group includes individuals, government-sponsored enterprises, brokers and dealers, bank personal trusts, estates, savings bonds, corporate and noncorporate businesses for a total of $1.107 trillion.
As the sport of Mixed Martials Arts (MMA) continues to grow at a rapid pace, marked improvements have been made in all areas of the industry with only one exception that stands as a potential impediment to MMA’s continued meteoric rise – judging and refereeing. Not surprisingly, judges and referees are both aspects of the various state athletic commissions that sanction MMA, and as such, no competition is allowed in this area. One of the many cumbersome regulations the state athletic commissions mandates is that you must use the judges/referees assigned to you.
The atrocious judging, which UFC president Dana White has said is the greatest threat to the continued growth of the sport, is due to two factors: the incompetency of the judges assigned to MMA events (many are simply recycled boxing judges with little to no understanding of the sport of MMA) and the nonsensical 10 point must scoring system imposed upon MMA. It should not be too surprising that mandating the use of another sport’s scoring system for the sport of MMA may not produce the most desirable results.
Even worse than judging, is the refusal to allow the many free market solutions that have already cropped up, to provide competent referees. As referees are literally tasked with protecting the fighter from serious injury, or even death, one would think that refereeing competency would be set at the highest level, with little to no tolerance for inadequate performance. The reality is almost the exact opposite. Here is the most recent example (of which there are so many) of gross referee incompetency that directly endangers the safety and welfare of the fighter: From popular MMA website, Cage Potato’s recap of last night’s fight, Strikeforce: Tate vs Rousey – The good, the bad, and the ugly under the section for “the bad”:
– The referee in Tate vs. Rousey not stopping the fight until about eight seconds after Tate’s arm had grown a new elbow. Tate showed her warrior heart by not tapping until the pain was overwhelming; the ref showed his ignorance by not stopping the fight until that moment. (Read more)
1) His statements are vague and rambling. What I hear him saying is: “everything sucks, so you need me (and people who think like me) to set up a benign dictatorship.” He does not explain WHY things suck. That’s where I can educated him.
2) He speaks from two typical paradigms: profits and business vs. workers, and white vs. black. The first is Marxism the second is cultural Marxism, which, as a Ukrainian, I’m largely immune to :).
Both see not individual human beings but only “classes” — a vague, never-defined term at the center Marxism. There is no solidaridy within any class. Everybody struggles to be the best employer, the best customer, the best worker. Look closely, and his paradigm falls apart.
3) Inequality. Only if you accept the Marxist paradigm of class war, and stop seeing people as individuals can you make inequality a leading issue.
Rallying behind the idea of inequality is dangerous for three reasons: it calls for state-sponsored violence as a equalizing force, it inspires emotions useful to politicians — jealousy and hatred, it is impossible — thus lending it to what Lenin called “permanent revolution.”
No society in the history of the world has ever improved itself by taking money from one “class” of people and giving it to another. Many who’ve tried it turned into gigantic meat grinders. The Cambodian attempts at an agrarian based communist society slaughtered almost 1/3rd of the population.
Don’t believe the leftist claim that they simply didn’t do it right, and that we need to try again.
Inequality is also a very, very small price to pay for liberty and prosperity. Without exception, conditions for poor people have been best in the countries with the free-est economies.
4) He, quickly and loosely, attributes our economic crisis to freedom. Bullshit. The economic crisis was caused by inflating the monetary supply, a long history of bailouts which enouraged recklessness, and laws which **** REQUIRED **** banks to make bad loans. The only regulation that works is the free market regulation of letting people go the hell bankrupt when they’re irresponsible.
5) Quickly and loosely, he says that the people want gov’t insurance and that it’s opposed by big pharma and big insurance companies. I don’t want gov’t insurance. Don’t I count? I’ll remind you that one of the first things Obamacare did was REQUIRE people to buy medical insurance. That’s not exactly sticking it to the insurance industry. And no, finding a better, stronger, kinder, more benevolent dictator will not work. The search for one is called “the road to serfdom.”
6) His faith in democracy is charming. Reminds me of when I was a child.
7) When the hell were intellectuals on the side of free markets? It’s always been a heterodox movement.
The signs of better times are easy to spot downtown: the picturesque marina on the San Joaquin Delta, the gleaming waterfront sports arena, and the handsome high-rise that was meant to house a new city hall. But those symbols are now bitter reminders of how bad things are here today: on Tuesday this city of almost 300,000 moved a step closer to becoming the nation’s largest city to declare bankruptcy.
During a contentious meeting that stretched late into the night, the City Council decided, nearly unanimously, to begin mediation with public employee unions and major bond creditors in what is widely seen as the city’s last-ditch attempt to restructure its finances outside of bankruptcy.
. . . .
The city has already drastically cut back municipal staff, including the Police and Fire Departments. With nearly 100 fewer police officers than there were just four years ago, many residents fret about rising crime rates; there were 58 murders last year, an all-time high for the city.
. . . .
Stockton, about an 80-mile drive east of San Francisco, boomed a decade ago, as eager buyers from Silicon Valley bought up homes in the area. But in the past several years, housing values have plummeted, and the city has steadily had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country.
During the boom times, the city eagerly began development projects to improve the area, transforming the waterfront and refurbishing several buildings that had fallen into disrepair. City officials lured a Sacramento restaurateur to open an upscale bistro, in part by offering space in a historic downtown building rent-free for five years. But the restaurant struggled and closed after just two years, and the space has sat empty and shuttered for the past year.
In 2007, after Washington Mutual shut down operations in an eight-story building here, the city bought the space for $35 million, reasoning that the price was a bargain, less than the cost of construction. Officials planned to move out of the crumbling old City Hall building and into the Washington Mutual building, but it soon became clear that the city did not have the money for the move. (Read more)
As tensions between the US and Iran heat up, author Michael T. Winter believes the main reason behind America’s harsh stance is Tehran’s move to seek an alternative to the dollar as an oil currency.
Economic sanctions, spearheaded by the US and, less willingly, the EU could have a disastrous effect on both of their respective economies. If Iran cannot sell their oil to Europe, there are plenty of customers waiting in the wings, and if they come bearing not petrodollars, but gold and sovereign currencies, then all the better for Iran. These sanctions, if enforced, will in effect place a serious dent in the power of the petrodollar.
Any rhetoric regarding Iran’s nuclear program and the insistence on crippling it is nothing more than a US attempt to force regime change for one more receptive to maintaining the hegemony of the petrodollar.
The world now knows the truth about the US and how they conduct their affairs. US hostilities toward Iran have nothing to do with nuclear weapons development. If that were the case, then North Korea and Pakistan would be facing similar sanctions and threats, but they aren’t. The difference of course is in what lies beneath the ground – oil. Iran has it and the other guys don’t.
At the heart of the issue is not Iran’s dubious attempt to build nuclear weapons, or even oil, but how that oil is paid for. In 1973, Richard Nixon promised King Faisal of Saudi Arabia that the US would protect Saudi Arabian oilfields from any and all interested parties seeking to forcefully wrest them from the House of Saud. It’s important to remember that in 1973, Saudi Arabia didn’t have a fraction of the military and ground forces it possesses today (almost exclusively US manufactured weapons) and the USSR was very much a threat.
In return Saudi Arabia, and by extension OPEC, agreed to sell their oil in US dollars only. As if that weren’t sweet enough, as part of the deal, they were required to invest their profits in US treasuries, bonds and bills. The real zinger is that all countries purchasing oil from OPEC had to do so in US dollars, or ‘petrodollars’. (Read more)
Swift, the body that handles global banking transactions, says it will cut Iran’s banks out of the system on Saturday to enforce sanctions.
(Read more)