Politics and Legislation
Rep. Black’s healthcare prescription doesn’t include the government
By Sterling C. Beard
Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) is a woman of firsts.
She was the first member of her family to receive a degree in higher
education, an A.D. in nursing from Anne Arundel Community College in
1971.
She was the first freshman member of the 112th Congress to have a
bill become law, and she was one of only two freshmen appointed to the
House Ways and Means Committee.
There’s one thing she’s already experienced ahead of many others,
though, that she has no desire to see again: universal healthcare.
Black got into politics because of her opposition to TennCare, a
statewide pilot program for universal coverage that was launched in 1994
as the Clinton White House was pushing for healthcare reform.
Its goal was to expand coverage to Tennesseans who were uninsured and
those who had preexisting conditions. It was also supposed to help rein
in the Tennessee Medicaid budget.
The program, still in existence today, covers approximately 1.2
million Tennesseans under a budget of $8 billion, according to the
TennCare website.
But Black, who worked as a full-time nurse until her election to the
Tennessee state Senate, says that the system has been plagued with
issues like overuse since its launch.
One of her biggest issues with TennCare was its lack of limitations.
The program’s initial 3-tier structure provided coverage for those
eligible for Medicaid, for the uninsured, and for uninsurable people
with preexisting conditions. Almost exactly one year after TennCare went
into effect, the second tier was temporarily closed off to new
enrollees because of massive enrollment.
Black says she saw the problems firsthand in her nursing work.
“People would consistently use an emergency room when they could have
gone to either a walk-in clinic or waited to see a family practice
doctor for minor things [such as] a sore throat, which really clogs up
an emergency room,” she said.
“I’d say, ‘You know, you maybe don’t need to be in the emergency
room. You could see your doctor tomorrow about this.’ And they [would
say], ‘Well I got to work tomorrow,’ or ‘I got somewhere to go tomorrow
so I really need to be seen today.’
“If you don’t have skin in the game, then those are the kind of [decisions] you will make.”
Unnecessary emergency room visits weren’t the only problems that Black had with TennCare.
Read Full Article Here
Scalia: Future cases could establish new ‘limitations’ on guns
By Russell Berman
Justice Antonin Scalia said there “are some limitations that can be
imposed” on the purchase of guns but would not say whether a legislature
could ban semi-automatic weapons or 100-round magazines.
“We’ll see,” the Supreme Court justice said Sunday when asked in an
interview on Fox News whether a legislature could restrict the purchase
of those items in the wake of the movie massacre in Aurora, Colo.
Scalia authored the high court’s 2008 opinion in District of Columbia
v. Heller, which ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual
right to bear arms and invalidated a D.C. ban on handguns.
Scalia noted that as to more specific restrictions on gun purchases,
his opinion said those will have to be decided “in future cases.”
“Some undoubtedly are [permissible], because there were some that
were acknowledged at the time” of the writing of the Constitution, he
said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So yes, there are some limitations that can
be imposed. What they are will depend on what the society understood
were reasonable limitations at the time.”
Scalia pointed out that the Second Amendment did not apply to “arms that cannot be hand-carried,” such as cannons.
The conservative justice described, as he has many times before, his
“textual” approach to interpreting the Constitution, which requires that
its provisions be read according to their meaning at the time of its
drafting. New gun restrictions, he said, would be weighed “very
carefully.”
“My starting point and probably my ending point will be what
limitations are within the understood limitations that the society had
at the time,” he said. “They had some limitations on the nature of arms
that could be bought. So we’ll see what those limitations are as applied
to modern weapons.”
In the wide-ranging interview, Scalia defended his view that “there’s
simply no way to interpret” the individual mandate at the center of the
2010 healthcare law as a tax – the finding by Chief Justice John
Roberts Jr. that prevented the law from being overturned.
“You don’t interpret a penalty to be a pig. It can’t be a pig,”
Scalia said of the ruling. “You cannot give the text a meaning it will
not bear.”
He would not describe the internal deliberations of the Supreme Court
on the landmark case and demurred when asked if Roberts changed his
mind on the decisions, as has been reported.
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him,” Scalia said. “I don’t talk about internal court proceedings. Never ever.”
He did say that not only had he changed his own mind on certain
decisions after the initial deliberation but that he had even changed
his mind on majority opinions that he was assigned to write.
Read Full Article Her
Opinion: Capitalism works in the Capitol
By Judd Gregg
There are three Senate office buildings.
They stretch up Constitution Avenue running away from the Capitol itself.
It is a considerable distance from the farthest office building, the
Hart building, to the actual Capitol. This distance can be covered
either by walking outside when the weather is nice, or by taking a
tramcar that runs between the buildings.
If you prefer, you can walk underground through a labyrinth of tunnels and hallways.
In one of these hallways, across from the Senate barbershop, is a little coffee and sandwich shop called “Cups.”
For years the Senate food service — which was run and owned by the Senate at the time — attempted to operate this coffee shop.
It lost money. It served lousy coffee, and few people went there.
Someone in the Senate management, to their credit and the benefit of the American taxpayer, decided to lease the location.
Kathy and Charlie Chung won the contract, and have been running the
business since 2001. They are first-generation immigrants from Korea who
had run another coffee shop on Capitol Hill, but not as part of the
Capitol complex.
“Cups” is difficult to find. It is in the middle of one of the
endless basement corridors, which weave through the Senate office
buildings — somewhere in the Russell building — and it has no
significant signage or easy accessibility.
Still, Charlie and Kathy have managed to take a place that had lost money when it was run by the Senate and turn it around.
It is a successful and, one presumes, rather profitable business.
Kathy is irrepressibly friendly and upbeat — and there all the time.
Charlie, who has a degree in architecture, works incessantly to make
sure the coffee shop is supplying what customers want, for food and
atmosphere.
Sometimes, but not often, Kathy lets Charlie take a day off and go fishing.
He has never caught anything, at least according to Kathy. Wives say things like that.
They have two very talented children. Their son went to Johns Hopkins
and is becoming a lawyer. Their daughter went to Virginia Tech.
It is a simple coffee shop in the basement of the Russell Senate Office building.
It is also a definitive statement that President Obama, when he says
small business-people do not create their success, when he says
government does, is wrong.
Read Full Article Here
By Meghashyam Mali
The Hill
Two Democratic lawmakers on Monday will announce new legislation to regulate the online and mail-order sale of ammunition.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (N.J.) and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (N.Y.) said
the new law would make the sale of ammunition “safer for law-abiding
Americans who are sick and tired of the ease with which criminals can
now anonymously stockpile for mass murder,” in a statement released
Saturday.
The lawmakers cite the recent movie massacre in Aurora, Colo. for spurring their bill.
“The shooter who killed 12 and injured 58 in an Aurora, Colorado
movie theater this month had purchased over 6,000 rounds of ammunition
anonymously on the Internet shortly before going on his killing spree,
according to law enforcement officials,” the statement reads. “The
shooter used a civilian version of the military’s M-16 rifle with a
100-round drum magazine, a shotgun and two .40-caliber semi-automatic
handguns commonly used by police officers.”
Lautenberg and McCarthy, who will unveil their new proposal at New
York’s City Hall say they intend to “make it harder for criminals to
anonymously stockpile ammunition through the Internet.”
Lautenberg and McCarthy are two high profile advocates of gun control legislation, but they face an uphill struggle in Congress.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said last week that he
does not intend to bring gun control legislation to the floor and
President Obama has been reluctant to press lawmakers to act on the
issue in an election year.
Democratic senators though have offered an amendment to the
cybersecurity bill that would limit the purchase of high capacity
magazines by some consumers. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) defended it
last Thursday as a “reasonable” gun control measure.
The amendment is identical to a separate bill proposed in January
2011 by Lautenberg also banning the sale of high capacity ammunition
magazines.
After the shootings in Colorado, the New Jersey senator urged lawmakers to reconsider his bill.
“We need to start today on efforts to prevent the next attack,” he
said in a statement. “We should begin by passing my legislation to ban
the sale of high-capacity gun magazines. No sportsman needs 100 rounds
to shoot a duck, but allowing high-capacity magazines in the hands of
killers like James Holmes and Jared Loughner puts law enforcement at a
disadvantage and innocent lives at risk.”
Loughner, the gunman charged in the shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle
Giffords (R-Ariz.) and Holmes, who is the lone suspect in the Aurora
theater shootings are both believed to have used high-capacity
magazines.
Pentagon warns sequester cuts will lead to ‘unready, hollow’ force
By Jeremy Herb
A top Pentagon official warned Congress on Wednesday that
sequestration would be a “major step” to creating “an unready, hollow”
military force, as lawmakers and the Obama administration spar over a
plan to avert the looming automatic spending cuts.
Testifying at a long-awaited House Armed Services Committee hearing
on sequestration cuts, Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter began laying
out some of the impacts of the $55 billion cut facing the Pentagon in
2013 if the sequestration cuts are not reversed.
Carter said the across-the-board cuts would require the Pentagon to
“substantially modify and scale back the new defense strategy,” which
was crafted last year as the Defense Department prepared for $487
billion in budget reductions already scheduled for the next decade.
Carter and acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director
Jeffrey Zients told the committee Wednesday that sequestration would be
devastating and should never go into effect, bluntly telling Congress to
fix the cuts before they hit on Jan. 2, 2013.
Republicans have been critical of the Obama administration, accusing
them of not preparing for the impending cuts, part of what prompted
Wednesday’s hearing.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said
in his opening statement that failing to plan for sequestration would
“make a terrible situation worse.”
Zients pushed back, however, chiding Republicans in Congress for not
proposing realistic solutions to find alternate deficit reduction.
“The root cause of the problem here is the Republican refusal to
acknowledge that the top 2 percent have to pay their fair share,” Zients
said, repeating a common Democratic argument for higher taxes on the
wealthy to pay for defense and other programs.
But Republicans challenged President Obama to share his own plan to actually avert sequestration.
“I want to commend you on your broken record of partisanship with
respect to your fiction of the fact that this administration has a
budget or a plan,” said Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio).
In a committee that prides itself on its bipartisanship, there were
numerous testy exchanges between Republicans and Zients, with the two
sides often speaking over each other.
During one exchange between Turner and Zients, ranking member Adam
Smith (D-Wash.) angrily interrupted Turner and accused him of badgering
the witness.
The hearing was reflective of the deep divide between Democrats and
Republicans over how to solve sequestration — even if all sides agree
that it would be devastating for the cuts to actually go into effect.
Read Full Article Here
Ethics Committee finds Rep. Laura Richardson guilty on seven counts
By Jordy Yager
The House Ethics Committee issued a blistering report on Wednesday
finding Rep. Laura Richardson guilty of improperly pressuring her
official staff to campaign for her, destroying evidence and tampering
with witness testimony.
In an unusually scathing 16-page report, the Ethics panel depicted
the California Democrat as acting with “utter disdain” for the secretive
committee, which Richardson has accused of evincing racist overtones in
its investigation of black members.
The Ethics Committee recommended that the House adopt its report and
approve a formal reprimand of Richardson, who agreed to pay a fine of
$10,000 within four months and require staffers who work on her campaign
to sign a waiver stating that they haven’t been pressured to do so.
The punishment comes just three months before Richardson faces off
against fellow Democratic Rep. Janice Hahn (Calif.) in one of the
toughest member-versus-member elections this year.
Many of Richardson’s staffers painted a “horrendous picture” when
speaking of their employment experience, which was fraught with
“attempts to intimidate them on a regular basis,” according to the
committee’s report, issued by Chairman Jo Bonner (R-Ala.) and ranking
member Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.).
A 22-page objection that Richardson recently delivered to the
committee, in which she contends that the Ethics Committee acted in a
prejudicial manner against her, was also made public on Wednesday.
In it, Richardson said she agreed to resolve the ethics allegations
with a fine and a reprimand, because the alternative — an adjudicatory
hearing, also known as an ethics trial — would waste taxpayer dollars
and take up too much time.
But the panel rebuffed her submission, stating that her arguments
were “without merit,” lacked remorse and were pointless because she had
already admitted to her wrongdoings. “Richardson’s views weave an
elaborate fabrication out of threads of decontextualized evidence and
outright prevarication, in an absurd attempt to rebut the majority of
the tremendous evidence against her,” the report states.
“[Richardson’s statement of views conveys] an utter absence of true
remorse for her misuse of official resources and, equally as
significant, for what she has put her staff through, as well as a
near-total deflection of responsibility for this matter.”
Richardson argued that investigators with the committee “improperly
influenced witnesses” by suggesting that an investigative subcommittee
was likely, even though it was one year before that decision would
eventually be reached.
This “clearly [signaled] that the Ethics Committee staff at least
already believed that Rep. Richardson was guilty of misconduct,” stated
Richardson in her response to the committee’s charges.
The Richardson ethics probe began in 2010 when several of her
official staffers complained to the committee that they were being
forced to work on her campaign. After probing the matter for more than a
year, an investigative subcommittee was launched in November 2011, to
look more seriously at the charges.
In one instance, Richardson’s communications director, Makeda Scott,
told the committee that she took comments her boss made “as a threat.”
Richardson allegedly told Scott that she felt “uncomfortable” working
with her because Scott hadn’t volunteered on Richardson’s campaign.
“If you don’t volunteer on my campaign, you are not going to continue
working here; that is how I took it,” said Scott in an interview with
the Ethics panel.
After delaying her interview with the committee because of the timing
of her primary race, Richardson finally agreed to sit down with panel
investigators in June and answer their questions.
But Richardson soon began complaining about how long the interview
was taking and “ultimately demanded that it end so she could participate
in an annual congressional softball game,” according to the report.
Richardson never rescheduled a follow-up interview with the committee.
Read Full Article Here
House votes to extend current tax rates after shooting down Obama plan
By Michael O’Brien, NBC News
The House on Wednesday evening rejected a proposal to allow tax cuts
on the wealthy to expire, instead passing an alternative bill to
preserve existing tax rates for a year, an act of political theater
setting up a contentious post-election fight.
The Republican-controlled House voted 256 to 171 to preserve current
tax rates, which were first enacted by President George W. Bush in 2001
and later extended in 2010 for another two years with President Barack
Obama’s support.
In a separate vote, the House shot down, 170 to 257, a Democratic
bill to extend current tax rates past the end of this year only for
households earning less than $250,000 per year and individuals earning
less than $200,000 per year. This plan has the current backing of the
president, and was approved last week by the Senate. Nineteen Democrats
joined a unanimous GOP conference on the vote.
The vote virtually ensures that the fate of the expiring tax cuts
won’t be decided until after the election. Though House GOP leaders
wrote Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday to say
they “stand ready to bring the House back into session for the purpose
of enacting solutions” as it relates to taxes or the automatic defense
cuts set for Jan. 1, leaders in both parties have conceded that a truce
unlikely.
The House is set to break for recess after Thursday’s votes, leaving
few legislative days left on the calendar before the election.
Rather, leaders in both parties have generally acknowledged that the
fate of the tax cuts are likely to be determined as an outgrowth of the
election. That factor has only heightened the political positioning of
these votes, which were orchestrated more as a messaging instrument than
as a legislative solution.
To that end, the result in the House was the reverse of what happened
last week in the Senate, which approved a version of the Democratic
bill and rejected the Republican alternative to extend all the expiring
tax cuts for a year and require Congress to work on tax reform in the
meanwhile.
Read Full Article Here
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Economy
Ayotte: Dems using military as ‘bargaining chip’ in fight over cuts
By Vicki Needham
A freshman Republican senator accused the White House and
congressional Democrats of using the military as a bargaining chip in a
debate over spending cuts.
“It makes me sick that some in Washington, particularly some of the
Senate Democrats want to play, and even our president unfortunately,
want to use our military as a bargaining chip,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte
(R-N.H.) told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
Ayotte said House and Senate GOP leaders have asked President Obama
to come to the table to figure out how to resolve the issue of
sequestration, a plan passed by Congress a year ago that would cut $1
trillion in spending over 10 years, including $500 billion from defense.
Lawmakers have expressed concern over the volatile mix of spending
and tax hikes that could put the U.S. economy over the so-called “fiscal
cliff.”
Republicans and Democrats are also at odds on the expiring Bush-era
tax rates, with Democrats and the White House looking to extend the
lower rates for those couples making below $250,000 a year. Republicans
however want the rates extended across the board, a move the White House
has threatened to veto to force the wealthier to pay higher rates to
offset cuts.
Ayotte, who has been named as a possible vice presidential nominee
for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said the choice is not
between whether to extend tax breaks for those earning at least $250,000
a year or slashing defense spending.
“That’s not the choice and where is our commander-and-chief on this,” she said.
“Why isn’t he right now at the table with members of both sides of
the aisle resolving this. He could lead this effort and he has been AWOL
on this.”
Waiting until after the election would be “undermining our national security and cost nearly 1 million jobs,” she said.
Read Full Article Here
By Joshua Zumbrun and Jeff Kearns -
Play
Fed Says Economy Has Slowed
The
Federal Reserve said it will pump fresh stimulus if necessary into the weakening economic expansion to boost growth and reduce an
unemployment rate that’s been stuck at 8 percent or higher for more than three years.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Capitol Hill. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/The New York Times via Redux
The
Federal Open Market Committee
“will provide additional accommodation as needed to promote a stronger
economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions
in a context of price stability,” it said today in a statement at the
end of a two-day meeting in Washington. “Economic activity decelerated
somewhat over the first half of this year.”
Stocks fell on disappointment Fed Chairman
Ben S. Bernanke refrained from taking action even as
consumer spending
flagged, job growth slackened and manufacturing cooled. Before its next
meeting Sept. 12-13, the FOMC will assess unemployment reports for July
and August, and the
European Central Bank may take steps to ease Europe’s debt crisis at a meeting tomorrow.
“They were as blunt as you can get without actually pulling the trigger,” said
Dan Greenhaus,
chief global strategist at BTIG LLC in New York. “They’re saying, ‘Hey,
things are not good and we’re an inch away from easing.’”
The
Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX)
erased gains after the statement, falling 0.3 percent to 1,375.32. The
yield on the 10- year Treasury note rose to 1.52 percent from 1.47
percent yesterday. Gold futures for December delivery slid 0.7 percent
to $1,603.10 an ounce in electronic trading at 4:47 p.m. in New York.
The dollar rallied 0.7 percent to $1.2226 per euro.
‘Accepting’
“The best news we got is the Fed doing nothing and the market accepting that,”
Michael Shaoul,
the chairman of New York-based Marketfield Asset Management, whose
$2.29 billion Marketfield Fund has outperformed 96 percent of rivals in
the past five years. “It shows that the market is more resilient than we
would have expected going into today.”
The FOMC said in today’s statement that “household spending has been rising at a somewhat slower pace than earlier in the year.”
The Fed said it will continue swapping $667 billion of short-term
debt with longer-term securities to lengthen the average maturity of its
holdings, an action dubbed Operation Twist. The central bank will also
continue reinvesting its portfolio of maturing housing debt into agency
mortgage-backed securities.
‘Late 2014’
The Fed left unchanged its statement that economic conditions would
likely warrant holding the benchmark Fed funds rate near zero “at least
through late 2014.” The committee said it “will closely monitor incoming
information on economic and financial developments.”
Under former Fed Chairman
Alan Greenspan
the phrase “closely monitor” was sometimes used before the Fed took
action between its regular schedule of meetings, according to
Eric Green, head of global foreign exchange and rates research at TD Securities in New York, and a former New York Fed economist.
“We still have to think the odds are low for intermeeting ease,
they’re just higher than they otherwise would be,” said Green. “What
would get the Fed to move I think is if conditions deteriorate in Europe
to the point that stocks begin to get hit hard.”
Policy makers said inflation would run “at or below” their goal of 2
percent for the personal consumption expenditures index, the same as in
the last statement.
Consumer prices in June rose 1.5 percent from a year earlier, the
Commerce Department reported yesterday. Excluding food and energy,
prices increased 1.8 percent.
Fifth Dissent
Richmond Fed President
Jeffrey Lacker
dissented for the fifth consecutive meeting, saying he preferred to
omit the 2014 time horizon. Lacker opposed the FOMC’s June decision to
extend Operation Twist through the end of the year and has said he
expects interest rates will need to be raised in 2013.
Twelve percent of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News predicted
that the FOMC would announce a new round of large scale asset purchases
today, while 48 percent forecast such purchases would be announced at
the Fed’s Sept. 12-13 meeting.
At the September meeting, policy makers will update their forecasts
for growth, unemployment, inflation and interest rates before Bernanke
holds a press conference. He doesn’t plan a press conference today.
Bernanke in congressional testimony last month said the central bank
may ease further should U.S. employment fail to steadily improve. A
Labor Department report on Aug. 3 will probably show that the economy
added 100,000 jobs in July, while the jobless rate was unchanged at 8.2
percent, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of
economists.
Steady Progress
“It’s very important that we see sustained progress in the labor
market and avoid deflation risk,” Bernanke said in July. “Those are the
things we’ll be looking at as the committee meets later this month and
later this summer.”
The Fed is also watching “two main sources of risk,” Bernanke said.
The first is the so-called fiscal cliff, about $600 billion of spending
cuts and tax increases that will go into force in January and impair
growth unless Congress acts.
Congressional leaders said yesterday they will vote in September on a
$1.047 trillion, six-month stopgap measure that would keep the
government operating after the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1. The
extension would give lawmakers more time to debate how to avoid the
fiscal cliff.
The second risk is that the European debt crisis will create turmoil in global financial markets, Bernanke said.
Build Consensus
ECB President
Mario Draghi
is attempting to build consensus among governments and central bankers
for a plan to ease borrowing costs in Spain and Italy before policy
makers convene tomorrow. Also tomorrow, the
Bank of England in a statement will probably maintain its bond purchase program.
Draghi sparked a global market rally last week with a pledge to do
“whatever it takes to preserve the euro.” Last month, the ECB cut its
benchmark
interest rate to a record low of 0.75 percent.
U.S. stocks rose before today on speculation the Fed will continue to
add stimulus and as corporate earnings have beaten estimates. The
S&P 500
has rallied 9.4 percent this year and remains near a three-month
closing high of 1,385.97 on July 27. All 10 industry groups have
advanced.
The U.S. two-year
interest-rate swap spread,
a measure of stress in bond markets, traded today at about 20.25 basis
points, about the lowest in a year and down from 2012’s high of almost
60 basis points in October. The gauge, which dropped 4.4 basis points in
July for the second straight monthly decline, widens when investors
seek the perceived safety of government securities and narrows when they
favor assets such as corporate bonds.
Splitting the Financial Giants It’s Time To Break Up Massive Banks!
AFP
A demonstrator at a 2011 day of global protest in London: Banks should not be allowed to get too big to fail.
For decades, America’s Glass-Steagall Act
ensured a clean division of commercial and investment banking. But its
repeal paved the way for the global financial world. Today politicians
should restore the dual banking system to help ensure that banks that
are too big to fail do not exist in the future.
The banks are blackmailing us, Sigmar Gabriel, the head of Germany’s
center-left Social Democratic Party wrote in a position paper for his
party. But with the fuss over Gabriel’s partly justified and partly
exaggerated claim, one hopes that the most important words spoken last
week will not get lost in the noise.
Those words were from Sandy Weill, who for eight years was the
decisive figure at Citibank, the major American bank. This is the same
Sandy Weill who forged a financial empire and successfully fought
against just about every regulation that has been thrown at the banking
sector. His
messagetoday? Split up the massive banks.
What Weill is calling for is a return to rules that already once
served the world well. They were conceived during the 1930s financial
crisis and then disposed of during the liberalization frenzy of the
1990s.
The Glass-Steagall Act is the name of the law that divided the banking world into two categories.
The first is banks that are dedicated to the classic business of
managing customer deposits and issuing loans making them systemically
relevant. These banks must be protected and, in an emergency, rescued by
the state.
The second is investment banks, which too often have no problem at
all with any risky business that comes its way as long as it promises to
deliver profits. Weill believes that if things go awry at the
investment banks that no one should be too quick to bail them out. These
banks would be smaller and no longer the financial Goliaths that they
are today. What is deemed too big to fail, would be deemed too large to
even be allowed to exist in the future.
America, as well as the entire financial world, is discussing Weill’s proposal.
And not without reason, either — after all, the US banker was one of
the people who pushed Bill Clinton in 1999 to repeal Glass-Steagall. He
even has a plaque in his office celebrating himself as “The Shatterer of
Glass-Steagall.”
The proposal still doesn’t have enough backing, despite support in
many quarters including those in a number of Germany’s top boardrooms,
such as reinsurance giant Munich Re, whose chairman, Nikolaus von
Bromhard, also wants to eliminate the design flaw. The SPD’s Sigmar
Gabriel wants to as well.
Read Full Article Here
Begging for the Bazooka Europe’s Dangerous Dream of Unlimited Money
An Analyisis by
David Böcking
dapd
Some countries argue that the euro zone rescue umbrella isn’t big enough to cover the euro crisis.
This week, some euro-zone members have
been calling for the permanent bailout fund to be provided with a
banking license that would provide it with unlimited access to money
from the European Central Bank. The “bazooka” option might help crisis
countries in the short term, but it would entail massive risks in the
long run.
The bazooka isn’t just the name of a portable American antitank
weapon. Recently it has also become the synonym for a financial super
weapon that is supposed to end the euro crisis once and for all. There
also used to be a chewing gum called Bazooka that was sold in German
supermarkets until the 1980s. Once the pink stuff got stuck somewhere,
it was hard to get rid of — not unlike the current discussion about a
euro crisis bazooka.
The bazooka debate heated up after a
suggestion
from some countries, including Italy and France, that the permanent
euro rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), should be
equipped with “unlimited firepower” through a banking license. In
concrete terms, it would enable the ESM to borrow unlimited amounts of
money from the
European Central Bankand use it to shore up euro-zone member states threatening to buckle under the weight of the crisis.
Given that billions of euros have already been deployed in the euro
crisis, the idea of unlimited credit seems risky to say the very least.
Not surprisingly, the reactions have been intense. “A banking license
for the ESM would mean firing up the money printing machine, which means
inflation and nearly unlimited liabilities,” Patrick Döring, the
general secretaty of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, the
junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government coalition, told
SPIEGEL ONLINE. “That is why the FDP cannot and will not allow a banking
license to be issued.”
So how is it that the supporters of a bazooka have come upon their
demands? Ultimately, it goes back to the basic problem of the euro
crisis: Countries like Spain and Italy are suffering from mounting debt
and worsening economic prospects. To borrow fresh money they have to
offer investors higher interest rates to buy their bonds. That further
increases their debt and uncertainty over the future, which in turn
continues to increase the risk premium they must pay to investors.
For two and half years now, euro-zone countries have tried to break
this vicious cycle. First they created rescue plans such as the European
Financial Stability Facility and its successor, the ESM, which are
intended to provide countries like Greece and Portugal with loans until
they are able to borrow money independently on the markets again. To
prevent the need for further emergency bailouts, the European Central
Bank has also sprung into action several times. It bought large
quantities of bonds from distressed euro-zone countries to place
downward pressure on interest rates. In addition, the central bank made
loans of more than €1 trillion ($1.23 trillion) available to European
banks in the hope that the institutions would in turn invest at least
part of that sum in government bonds.
But all of these efforts have been met with limited success — and
interest costs have risen sharply recently, especially in Spain. The
reason is that many investors are worried that the bailout funds will
prove to be too small if other euro-zone countries ultimately need to be
rescued. Spain and Italy alone could require around €1 trillion if they
have to seek a bailout, estimates Bantleon, a fund company that
specializes in bonds. Currently, however, the euro bailout funds are
only capable of providing a total of €750 billion.
Switzerland Leads the Way
Supporters of the bazooka solution say that pressure on euro-zone
countries won’t relent as long as a concrete number is affixed to the
scope of the bailout funds. Regardless whether the view comes from
genuine conviction or pure speculation, the idea is that time and time
again investors might decide that support is insufficient and thus drive
interest costs up again. Only a safety net with unlimited scope — at
least so it is hoped — would put an end to that kind of speculation.
Most recently, the Swiss national bank proved that such a deterrence
strategy can work. After the Swiss franc rose sharply as a result of the
crisis, monetary authorities pledged to defend the franc at a rate of
1.20 francs to the euro through unlimited foreign exchange purchases.
They were largely successful with the strategy.
An ESM that has greater leeway could also mean freeing the ECB from a
Catch 22. The central bankers’ work should actually be limited to price
stability because they are forbidden from financing states. With its
euro-zone relief efforts, however, the ECB has moved into a legal gray
area that is threatening its very independence. It would therefore make
sense for the ESM to take over government bond purchases in the future.
Nevertheless, the newly introduced plan would not truly limit the
ECB’s liability given that it would allow the ESM to submit its newly
purchased sovereign bonds as collatoral to the ECB in exhange for
additional loans. The ESM could use that credit to support crisis
countries with loans or further bond purchases. In other words, the ESM
would be nothing more than an intermediary for state financing through
the ECB.
Read Full Article Here
An IMF deal would help Egypt stave off a budget and balance of
payments crisis and add credibility to economic reforms needed to
restore the confidence of investors who fled the country after a popular
uprising last year. (AFP)
By Reuters
CAIRO
Egypt’s new Prime Minister Hisham Qandil will hold a meeting with
members of his government on Saturday to discuss the next steps on
seeking an International Monetary Fund loan, Qandil said.
An IMF deal would help Egypt stave off a budget and balance of
payments crisis and add credibility to economic reforms needed to
restore the confidence of investors who fled the country after a popular
uprising last year.
“We will have a meeting on Saturday headed by me to look into our next steps,” Qandil told reporters in Cairo on Thursday.
- The ECB in Frankfurt: investors expect it to do more to save the euro (Photo: Valentina Pop)
- By Valentina Pop
BRUSSELS – The European Central Bank (ECB) board is meeting on
Thursday (2 August) in Frankfurt amid high hopes from investors that it
will deliver on what its chief suggested last week: a forceful
intervention to help out Italy and Spain.
But Germany’s central bank is against the move.
ECB chief Mario Draghi last week said the bank would do “whatever it
takes” to support the euro, adding “Believe me, it will be enough.”
He specifically mentioned a controversial bond buying programme that
last year helped bring down Spain and Italy’s borrowing costs.
Both countries are again struggling to sell government bonds, as
their interest rates are too high to be considered “sustainable,”
meaning investors are asking extra premiums for fear the countries may
default.
Jens Weidemann, the head of Germany’s central bank who also sits in
the ECB governing council comprising of all central bankers from the 17
euro countries, is fiercely against such a move, however.
The ECB should not “overstep its own mandate” he said in an interview
published on the Bundesbank website on Wednesday, just after the German
banker met Draghi. Weidemann also underlined that the Bundesbank is
“the largest and most important central bank in the Eurosystem and we
have a greater say than many other central banks.”
Last week, the Bundesbank also stressed it opposes bond purchases
because they are an indirect way of helping governments, something that
is forbidden under ECB rules.
A compromise solution may be found, however. Sueddeutsche Zeitung on
Thursday reported that a majority of the board members are in favour of
resuming the bond purchasing programme, which so far has put more than
€200 billion into acquiring distressed government bonds.
The German paper said a plan may be put forward for a co-ordinated
bond purchasing action of the ECB and the upcoming bailout fund (ESM) in
September, after Germany’s constitutional court rules on challenges
brought against the ESM.
“He will really disappoint if he doesn’t deliver,” Carsten Brzeski, a senior economist with ING Bank told this website.
He noted that Draghi had raised expectations several times before and came out with much smaller moves than expected.
“It will probably be a collection of smaller things hinting at bigger
moves between the lines. They could resume buying bonds like it was
done last year, when ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet said ‘I never said
the programme stopped’ and at the same time the ECB was active on the
markets,” the economist recalled.
One of the “big moves” pushed forward by Italian Prime Minister Mario
Monti is to give the ESM bailout fund a ‘banking licence,’ meaning
unlimited borrowing from the ECB.
Speaking in Finland on Wednesday, Monti said he was confident such a
move would “help” countries. “I think this will in due course occur,” he
said.
But Germany also opposes the big-bang option.
“A banking license for the ESM rescue fund is absolutely not our
way,” German deputy government spokesman Georg Streiter told reporters
on Wednesday.
Press Article
- Sueddeutsche Zeitung
- Seville statues. Grinan: ‘We are taking resources away from health care and education to save the banks’ (Photo: Lochaven)
- By Andrew Rettman
BRUSSELS – An escalating dispute between Madrid and Spain’s regional
authorities risks undoing its austerity pledge to EU authorities.
The conflict erupted on Tuesday (31 July) when Jose Antonio Grinan,
the President of the Andalucia region, walked out of a meeting of
Madrid’s Council of Fiscal and Financial Policy when it told him to cut
another €3 billion from his 2012 budget.
Catalonia boycotted the meeting in the first place, saying it already
cannot pay some hospital, child-care and elderly-care centre workers.
Asturias and the Canary Islands voted against the council’s demands. The Basque region also raised heckles.
Regional spending was the main reason why Spain last year missed its
deficit targets under EU rules: Andalucia and Catalonia between them
have a GDP of €346 billion, or 32 percent of the country’s total
economy.
Andalucia’s Grinan renewed his attack on the government on Wednesday.
He said at a press conference in Seville, the Andalucian capital,
that he would challenge Madrid’s demands in Spain’s Constitutional Court
if need be.
The Socialist also fired a political broadside against conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
“This [the proposed cuts] could close 19 hospitals, all of the
Andalucian health service, or get rid of 60,000 public workers, one in
four of the local governments workforce,” he said at the press event,
according to local news agency Europa Press.
“We are taking resources away from health care and education to save the banks, that is intolerable.”
The rebellion comes at a sensitive moment for Spain, which is trying
to convince markets that it can stick to a debt limit of 3 percent of
GDP by 2014 and avoid asking for a full-blown state bailout.
The government is to auction €3 billion of bonds maturing between 2014 and 2022 on Thursday.
The sale is to take place a few hours before a European Central Bank
(ECB) meeting in Frankfurt in order to capitalise on pre-meeting
optimism.
The ECB is expected to say whether or not it will buy more Spanish
bonds in future, but German opposition to the move hinges on lack of
faith in southern countries’ austerity promises.
Investors in any case are voting with their feet: the Bank of Spain
noted capital flight of €41.3 billion in May, compared to €9.2 billion
the same month last year.
For their part, ratings agency S&P and US bank Citibank in
separate notes published on Wednesday said Spanish regions pose a threat
to solvency.
S&P said its outlook will “be influenced by any large and
persistent budgetary deviations by the regions … as these deviations
would increase net general government debt.”
Citibank said Spain’s “recently passed Budgetary Stability Law looks formidable on paper, but has yet to prove effective.”
It added: “Political tensions between the centre and the regions may
make the application of the Budgetary Stability Law more difficult,
particularly in regions with strong regional identities, such as
Catalonia.”
Saudi Aramco unexpectedly shut a secondary unit at its 305,000 barrels-per-day joint venture refinery in Jubai. (Reuters)
By Reuters
State oil giant Saudi Aramco unexpectedly shut a secondary unit at
its 305,000 barrels-per-day joint venture refinery in Jubail, which
caused the refiner to offer a rare high sulphur gasoil cargo, industry
sources said on Wednesday.
The Saudi Aramco Shell Refinery Company (SASREF) in Jubail shut its
hydrotreater unit about two or three days ago due to a “glitch” two
sources familiar with the matter said. But details of the hydrotreater’s
capacity or the reason for the shutdown were not clear.
Hydrotreaters are used to remove sulphur from high sulphur gasoil to make it a more environmentally friendly fuel.
Saudi Aramco offered about 60,000 tonnes of 0.5 percent sulphur
gasoil from the Jubail refinery for loading over August 18-20 through
private negotiations, traders said.
Bids for the cargo have to be submitted by Wednesday, they added.
Saudi Arabia is a net importer of lower sulphur diesel during summer
when the fuel is used for power generation. The country has bought at
least 750,000 tonnes for the whole of June and July this year.
SASREF, which is a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Shell Saudi
Arabia Refining Ltd., last shut a hydrocracker unit at the Jubail
refinery in late June-early July for a couple of days, traders have said
earlier.
The KRG export halt had cut Kirkuk shipments by a quarter to below 300,000 bpd. (Reuters)
By Reuters
Iraq’s semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan plans to halt oil exports
on Aug. 31 if the central government does not make all outstanding
payments, which could mean the proposed increase in Iraq’s overall
shipments to world markets will be brief.
Kurdistan said on Wednesday it would restart exports this week in a
bid to end the payments dispute with Baghdad. The Kurdistan Regional
Government says the central government has withheld payment of $1.5
billion.
Natural Resources Minister Ashti Hawrami made the statement giving
the end-August deadline in a letter posted on the KRG’s website and
addressed to oil companies DNO, Genel Energy and Kar Group.
“What I have in mind is to restart the oil export for only one month,
i.e. for all of the August period,” Hawrami wrote in the letter, dated
July 28.
“If the payments are not released by the end of this period, then we
agree to halt all the export at the midnight of 31st August.”
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Baghdad are locked in a
long-running feud over oil and land rights that have shut in exports for
the past four months from the oilfields being tapped by foreign oil
companies in the northern region.
Letters released on the KRG website show the companies were initially reluctant to go along with the export restart.
Genel Chief Executive Tony Hayward said in a letter to Hawrami the
company had not been paid for the majority of oil exported in 2009 and
2011. “This has had a very significant impact on our operations,” the
letter said.
The KRG statement on Wednesday said exports would remain at 100,000
barrels per day (bpd) for a month and if payments were forthcoming,
could move swiftly up to 200,000 bpd.
Under Iraq’s budget, the KRG is to supply 175,000 bpd of crude for
export, but the KRG halted the trade in early April, saying Baghdad owed
it a backlog of payments.
The central government is required to route 50 percent of the KRG’s
export earnings to Kurdistan to cover producing companies’ previous
costs. Baghdad issued two payments in 2011, totaling $514 million; the
KRG said it is owed $1.5 billion.
Crude produced in Kurdistan is fed into Iraq’s Kirkuk export stream
and sold onto world markets via the Turkish Mediterranean port of
Ceyhan. The KRG export halt had cut Kirkuk shipments by a quarter to
below 300,000 bpd.
Iraq is boosting oil sales from its southern ports following an
increase in export capacity earlier this year. Adding another 100,000
bpd to northern exports would bring Iraq’s overall shipments to around
2.6 million bpd, a postwar record.
Iraq’s oil dispute with Kurdistan has escalated after Baghdad
threatened to cancel a contract with France’s Total for signing Kurdish
deals and a unit of Russia’s Gazprom also entered the autonomous area.
Total and Gazprom followed U.S. majors Exxon and Chevron in signing oil accords with Kurdistan.
***********************************************************************************
Wars and Rumors of War
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by Finian Cunningham
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When Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip fatally
shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, archduke Franz Ferdinand,
in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the assassination is seen as the event that
ushered in the First World War. Within a month, the Great Powers of
Europe would become embroiled in a four-year war owing to a web of
alliances and treaties: Russia, France, Britain on the one hand;
Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires on the
other. The US would eventually enter the maelstrom in April 1917 on the
side of Britain and the Entente allies against the Central Powers.
The eventual death toll was between 10 and 16
million, making it one of the biggest cataclysms in human history. The
war was, of course, not the consequence of a mere single act on that
fateful day in Sarajevo. It was the culmination over many years of
diplomatic and political skirmishing stemming from economic rivalry
between the European capitalist powers. Although some later historians
dispute the role of economics as the determinant, it is hard not to
conclude as many others have done that the First World War was the
classic outcome of imperialist rivalry.
In particular, the then top European power Britain
had long seen the rising star of Germany as its nemesis for the control
of markets and resources. For its part, the newly formed German Empire
arising from the unification of Prussia in 1871 felt that its economic
development was being unfairly thwarted by London.
This latent conflict over resources was underscored
by several concomitant trends at the turn of the 20th century: the
economic decline of Britain compared with the technological powerhouse
of Germany; the “scramble for African colonies”; the encroachment of
German industrialists upon newly discovered Persian oil fields; and the
perceived threat to the eastward trade routes with India – the jewel in
the crown of Britain’s Empire.
The First World War can thus be seen as proof of the
maxim conceived by military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
that “war is but the continuation of politics by other means”. The
political and economic rivalry between Britain and Germany was in that
way a powder keg that exploded into war upon a Serbian spark.
Turning to the present world situation and potential
for conflict, it is likewise incumbent to see the bigger picture beyond
immediate tensions and events. We need to see beyond the trees and
branches in order to survey the entire forest; and not only the forest,
but the historical road that leads up to the forest.
It is also critical for the appreciation of the scope
for war in the present day to accept the premise that the capitalist
economic system is at root “wired for war”. Or as Karl Marx put it: “War
is inherent in capitalism”.
This premise of war as an integral part of capitalism
holds because, under the iron law of the profit motive, nations will
always be driven by an intense demand for natural resources and markets
beyond national boundaries. As a result, nation states will always be
thrown into competition for the control of resources and dominance in
markets. This tendency towards conflict and eventually war may be held
off for some time under conditions of quasi “peace” by international
trade pacts and regulations, but eventually the do-or-die imperative of
securing economic advantage will over-ride all supposedly civilised
constraints.
The political and economic slide towards the headlong
collision of the First World War is proof of that dynamic. By way of
further proof, only 20 years after “the war to end all wars”, following
even deeper economic turmoil between nations, the world was plunged into
the even greater conflagration of the Second World War, which involved
for the first time the deployment of nuclear weapons and a death toll
exceeding 50 million.
Of utmost concern is that the contradiction between
national antagonisms in the realm of international relations as dictated
by capitalist economics is still far from resolved.
Granted, under the process of globalisation, nation
state capitalism has expanded over recent decades to take on,
increasingly, a transnational character and function. This has resulted
in networks of global capital in the form of multinational banks and
corporations. In that way, nation states can appear to be cooperating
seamlessly in the function of global capital. The US can be seen as the
executive power in the world capitalist system that also appears to
seamlessly benefit Britain, France, Germany, Japan, China among others.
Also because of historic institutional ties some nations are closer than
others in the functioning of the capitalist order. Washington and
London, for example, are closely aligned in the sphere of finance
capitalism and consequently share overlapping national interests.
Nevertheless, despite the global character of
capital, there is still a powerful demarcation of and competition
between national interests among the capitalist powers.
One constant factor in the source of rivalry between
nations is the control of oil, the lifeblood of the capitalist system.
Indeed, the control of oil has become an even greater determinant today
for international hegemony. This was well understood by US planners in
the aftermath of the Second World War. With less that five per cent of
the world’s population, but consuming more than 25 per cent of the
world’s oil production, US planners have long been aware of the crucial
importance of controlling global oil production for the preservation of
America’s economic power. This vital national interest far outweighs any
much-vaunted American ideals of democratic values.
With more than 60 per cent of the world’s proven oil
and gas reserves located in the Middle East, this region is the ultimate
key to continuing US global power. It was for this reason that the
former US secretary of state James Baker candidly revealed in an
interview on America’s PBS Frontline programme in mid-October 2001 that
Washington would always be ready and willing, as a matter of national
security, to go to war in order to protect its ally Saudi Arabia and the
other oil-rich Arab allies. The despotic, dictatorial nature of these
regimes is a virtue, not a vice, for guaranteed American oil supply and
the continued dominance of the US dollar as the world’s reserve
currency.
This is why today Washington remains silent on the
crackdown by the House of Saud against pro-democracy protests in Saudi
Arabia and Bahrain. It is also the reason why Washington is allied with
the Sunni dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the covert campaign
for regime change against perceived recalcitrant governments in Syria
and Iran, as it did in Libya with the overthrow and murder of Muammar
Gaddafi.
At around the same time that Baker gave his interview
outlining the unconditional support by Washington for the oil
sheikhdoms, the Pentagon had then concocted a plan for redrawing the
political map of the Middle East region and beyond, as the former NATO
commander Wesley Clark was to later disclose. Over the ensuing years
from late 2001, the Pentagon had designated regime change for seven
countries: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Sudan and Somalia.
Subsequent events and interventions by Washington and
its allies in these aforementioned countries – albeit under a guise of
defending democracy, human rights and international law – indicates that
the Pentagon’s plan is being implemented methodically. The plan
evidently holds whether the US president is a Republican or a Democrat,
which points up the secret elite nature of government in Washington for
which elections are mere window dressing.
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A large military convoy was passing by the town and as the troops
moved past, the rebels opened fire. Now the city is paying for it,
bodies lining the streets. On Wednesday, President Obama signed an order
that allows mostly clandestine forces to support the rebels in Syria.
NBC’s Richard Engel reports.
By NBC News
President Barack Obama has signed a so-called “intelligence finding”
authorizing covert aid to the Syrian rebels seeking to depose Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad and his government , NBC News has confirmed.
White House and intelligence officials declined to comment on a Reuters report about the aid.
A U.S. official also said that while Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has said the U.S., is providing non-lethal aid and
communications to the rebels, the presidential finding provides more
intelligence resources than had been previously known.
The administration has been under constant criticism for months from
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others who say the administration should
be arming the rebels.
Obama’s order, approved earlier this year, broadly permits the CIA
and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels
oust Assad, Reuters reported.
NBC News
People resisting the army of President Bashar al-Assad in northern Syria cope with loss and prepare for fighting.
This and other developments signal a shift toward growing, albeit
still circumscribed, support for Assad’s armed opponents — a shift that
intensified following last month’s failure of the U.N. Security Council
to agree on tougher sanctions against the Damascus government, Reuters
reported.
The White House is for now apparently stopping short of giving the
rebels lethal weapons, even as some U.S. allies do that, Reuters said.
But U.S. and European officials have said that there have been
noticeable improvements in the coherence and effectiveness of Syrian
rebel groups in the past few weeks. That represents a significant change
in assessments of the rebels by Western officials, who previously
characterized Assad’s opponents as a disorganized, almost chaotic,
rabble, Reuters reported.
Precisely when Obama signed the secret intelligence authorization, an
action not previously reported, could not be determined, Reuters said.
Residents face shortages as Syrian army hits Aleppo
The full extent of clandestine support that agencies like the CIA might be providing also is unclear, Reuters said.
Read Full Article and Watch Video Here
Saudis mum on aid center in Turkey for Syrian rebels
The Syrian foreign minister while visiting Iran Sunday said the
Syrian rebels are part of an Israeli plot, but in northern Syria, people
support the opposition to the current regime. NBC’s Richard Engel
reports.
By Reuters
Updated at 5:30p.m. ET: Saudi Arabia said
Syrians should be enabled to protect themselves against government
attacks but declined direct comment on a report that it had helped set
up a secret liaison center in Turkey to aid a rebellion against
President Bashar al-Assad.
Assad on Sunday claimed victory in a hard-fought battle for Syria’s
capital, Damascus, and pounded rebels who control of parts of its
largest city, Aleppo.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Sunday that the attacks
on Aleppo are putting the nail in the coffin of Assad’s government.
Gulf sources told Reuters on Friday that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and
Qatar had established a center in Adana, southeastern Turkey, to help
the rebel Free Syrian Army with communications and weaponry as it
battles in major cities against forces loyal to Assad.
Zohra Bensemra / Reuters
A Free Syrian Army member walks past the body of an alleged member of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s shabiha militia at Aleppo’s
disctrict of al-Sukkari.
“The very well-known position of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is to
extend to the Syrian people financial and humanitarian assistance, as
well as calling upon the international community to enable them to
protect themselves at the very least if the international community is
not able to do so,” a foreign ministry spokesman said by text message on
Saturday, answering a Reuters query about the base.
“The Syrian regime is importing and using all kinds of weapons to
fight and oppress its own people in a fierce war as if it’s launched
toward a foreign enemy — not against its disarmed population”, the
spokesman added.
The Gulf sources had also said the Adana center, which is near the
Syrian border and a U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik, was set up at the
suggestion of Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin
Abdullah during a trip to Turkey.
Read Full Article And Watch Video Here
Fahed al-Freij was described as solid with a ruthless personality. (Reuters)
By Reuters
Beirut
When Sunni officer Fahed al-Freij was promoted to replace Syria’s
defense minister, slain in a bomb attack two weeks ago, few people paid
much attention and rebels dismissed him as inconsequential.
But Lebanese officials close to the Syrian government said his
appointment was a clear indication that President Bashar al-Assad, taken
aback by the assassination of four of his top security officials, had
decided to respond savagely.
They said Freij, a staunch Assad supporter, was known for brutality and shoot-to-kill tactics.
Upon his appointment he gave orders to “wipe out” the rebels. “Even
if it is my father who is carrying weapons against Syria, treat him as a
traitor and kill him,” pro-Assad websites quoted him as telling
soldiers on the night of his appointment.
Freij, born in 1950, comes from the Hadeedy tribe from a village in
Hama province, which saw the worst violence under Bashar’s father,
President Hafez al-Assad, who sent troops in the 1980s to crush an armed
Islamist revolt against his rule.
In his appointment speech hours after the bombing, Freij looked
determined to fight back. Instead of ceremonial uniform he wore dark
green fighting colours and a frown on his face, vowing to go on the
offensive as he mourned the slain officials.
Unlike his late predecessor Daoud Rajha, who kept a low profile,
Freij has issued several statements urging the soldiers to fight.
“Brothers in arms and doctrine, the Syrian people have put their
trust in you and it is well deserved … Your battle is the battle of
right against wrong,” he said in his latest speech on Wednesday, Syria’s
armed forces day.
“Terminate them (the rebels) wherever you find them.”
Soon after his appointment, rebels were celebrating the capture of
several districts in the capital, part of an operation they called
‘Damascus volcano’, and parts of Aleppo and border crossings with Turkey
and Iraq.
But Freij turned the tables. Right after he took over, the Syrian
army launched a major offensive in Damascus, recapturing the central
Midan district from rebels before moving to other rebel strongholds like
Hajar al-Aswad.
For the first time since the 17-month-old revolt against Assad
started, the military used fighter jets to strafe rebel areas in Rastan,
Deraa and Aleppo.
On Sunday the government declared victory in a hard-fought battle for
Syria’s capital, and pounded rebels who control parts of its largest
city Aleppo. Government forces are now massing around Aleppo for another
“decisive battle.”
“BURN THEM”
Rebels seems to have changed their opinion of Freij.
“We did not know who he was at first. We have checked now. He is a
Bedouin from Hama, commander of the operations (to crush opposition in)
Deraa and Homs during the revolution,” said a rebel commander in
Damascus.
“He is a military officer one hundred percent. He is…known to be
savage. He is known since he was a student in the military college as
tough and firm,” he added.
Last year the army crushed Deraa, the cradle of revolt against Assad
and a major attack on Homs left the city in in ruins and almost empty.
A Lebanese security source described Freij as solid with a ruthless personality.
“Before when a bullet was fired (by rebels) the orders were given to
cut the electricity from that area and go after the rebels but with this
man the orders are different – burn them,” said a Lebanese official
close to the Syrian government.
But the rebels are now better equipped and determined to fight back. A
group of gunmen posted a Youtube video after his appointment saying
that his tribe disavow him and that he will be their target.
“We inform him that he will be our coming target..we tell him that victory is coming. God is Greatest.”
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Articles of Interest
The Obama White House: in apology mode
The Obama presidency is fond of issuing
apologies for America on the world stage, but very rarely makes them at home to Americans. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer
has just issued one to
Washington Post columnist and
Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, who last week wrote
an op-ed berating
the Obama administration for removing a bust of Sir Winston Churchill
from the Oval Office when it came to power. Pfeiffer had issued
a stinging attack
on Krauthammer, alleging that his Churchill bust reference was “100
percent false.” Krauthammer was of course 100 percent correct, and the
British Embassy in Washington
even issued a statement contradicting Pfeifer’s remarks.
Here is
the full text of Pfeiffer’s
mea culpa, published on the White House blog in the form of an open letter to Mr. Krauthammer:
Charles,
I take your criticism seriously and you are correct that you are owed
an apology. There was clearly an internal confusion about the two busts
and there was no intention to deceive. I clearly overshot the runway in
my post. The point I was trying to make – under the belief that the
Bust in the residence was the one previously in the Oval Office– was
that this oft repeated talking point about the bust being a symbol of
President Obama’s failure to appreciate the special relationship is
false. The bust that was returned was returned as a matter of course
with all the other artwork that had been loaned to President Bush for
display in his Oval Office and not something that President Obama or his
Administration chose to do. I still think this is an important point
and one I wish I had communicated better.
A better understanding of the facts on my part and a couple of deep
breaths at the outset would have prevented this situation. Having said
all that, barring a miracle comeback from the Phillies I would like to
see the Nats win a world series even if it comes after my apology
Thanks,
Dan Pfeiffer
It is good to see Mr. Pfeiffer finally issue a formal apology, after
his juvenile and remarkably ignorant rebuttal of Mr. Krauthammer’s
Post
column generated a media storm. But this does not by any means end the
controversy over the decision by the White House to return the Churchill
bust. There is still an air of defiance in Pfeiffer’s words, and he
categorically claims that the bust was sent back “as a matter of
course,” and its return to the British government was “not something
that President Obama or his Administration chose to do.”
As I noted in
my previous blog on the subject, however, both
The Sunday Telegraph and
The Times of
London ran major articles back in early 2009 revealing that British
officials had made it clear to the White House that President Obama
could keep the Churchill bust in the Oval Office. In other words, it was
the White House’s firm decision to return the bust, and no request was
made by the British to have it back. This looks awfully like a
deliberate snub of America’s closest friend and ally, and it would be
good for the White House to acknowledge the truth, rather than continue
to spin a blatantly false and misleading line.
The Cartel Behind the Scenes in the Libor Interest Rate Scandal
There have been plenty of banking
scandals, but none quite like this: Investigators and political leaders
believe that the manipulation of the Libor benchmark interest rate was
the result of organized fraud. Institutions that participated could face
billions in fines and penalties. By SPIEGEL Staff
Eduard Pomeranz and Rolf Majcen are small fish in the shark tank of
international high finance. Their hedge fund, FTC Capital, is
headquartered in tranquil Vienna and manages only €150 million ($189
million) in assets. But now Pomeranz, the founder, and Majcen, the head
of the legal department, have been able to strike fear in the hearts of
the big fish.
“The Libor manipulation is presumably the biggest financial scandal
ever,” says Majcen, a man with slightly disheveled-looking hair and
Viennese sarcasm. Yes, he says, it did shock him that something like
this was even possible, namely that a group of international banks had
been manipulating interest rates for years. But Majcen takes a
matter-of-fact approach to it all. As a financial professional, he is
only one of many who want to get back the money that they feel they’ve
been cheated out of.
At the end of June, British and American regulators imposed a $500
million fine on Barclays, the major British bank, and forced its CEO Bob
Diamond to resign. Since then, a war of sorts has erupted in the
financial sector. Investigators are attacking presumed offenders, banks
that are involved are denouncing others in the hope of mitigating their
own penalties, and small investors like Majcen are inundating Libor
banks with lawsuits.
Deutsche Bank and more than a dozen other financial giants have come
under sharp criticism due to the alleged manipulation of the Libor
( London Interbank Offered Rate),
a benchmark interest rate. Some are even referring to the banks that
are instrumental in calculating that rate a cartel, the sort of
vocabulary not normally associated with the financial industry.
Regulators are using terms like “organized fraud.” European Justice
Commissioner Viviane Reding has suggested that bankers ought to be
called “banksters.” But in the case of some agencies, especially in New
York and London, the outcry is also convenient; it diverts attention
away from their own failures. For years, regulators overlooked what was
happening right in front of their eyes.
Now that the authorities have woken up, they are aggressively
pursuing the offenders — and are reaching all the way up to the
boardrooms. More than half a dozen government agencies, from Canada to
Japan, are investigating the case.
German authorities are also involved. A dozen employees of Germany’s
central bank, the Bundesbank, have paid several visits to Deutsche Bank
in recent weeks. They work for BaFin, the German federal financial
supervisory authority, which has ordered a special audit, and are poking
around the bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt, traveling to London, where
its money market traders are based, and flying to Tokyo. Even the
bank’s two new co-CEOs, Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, are expected to
sit down for a question and answer session with the auditors. This is
particularly unpleasant for Jain, who, as head of the investment banking
division during the period in question, was ultimately responsible for
money market transactions.
Libor, Anchor of the Financial World
The Libor and Euribor (Euro Interbank Offered Rate) are used
worldwide as the benchmark rates for financial transactions worth
hundreds of trillions of euros. When a savings bank issues a loan to a
business at a variable interest rate, the loan agreement is based on the
Euribor. “In many cases, the Euribor is even the key guideline for the
structuring of call money,” says Falko Fecht, a professor at the
Frankfurt School of Finance, referring to overnight and other such
short-term loans. In Spain, in particular, tens of thousands of
construction loans are based on the Euribor, while millions of mortgage
loans in the United States are pegged to the Libor rate.
But the bankers in the cartel initially had their sights set on a
completely different business. They wanted to influence the giant market
for interest rate and foreign currency derivatives in their favor. The
volume of outstanding transactions in this area amounted to €567
trillion at the end of 2011 alone. Changes of as little as 0.01
percentage points can translate into hundreds of millions in profit or
loss for some banks. This makes the lax approach to the calculation of
rates taken for years by banks and regulators alike seem all the more
astonishing.
A total of no more than 18 banks, including Deutsche Bank, are
involved in the calculation of the Libor. Every morning, they submit
estimates of the costs at which they believe they could borrow money on
the markets without collateral. Using the resulting data, financial
services provider Thomson Reuters calculates averages — for 10 different
currencies and 15 different borrowing periods.
A similar method is used to calculate the Euribor, except that there significantly more banks — 43 — involved in the process.
Nevertheless, it is hardly a rigorous calculation. The averages are
based on rule-of-thumb estimates; the market supposedly reflected in the
data sent to Thomson Reuters has been dead since the financial crisis.
Only very few banks can borrow money today without furnishing
collateral.
Furthermore, neither bank executives nor regulators have shown much
interest in how the important benchmark rate is determined. Inputting
the data was often left to ordinary money market traders, who had
serious conflicts of interest and acquired a dangerous amount of
influence on the financial world. “The Libor interest rate was
practically an invitation to manipulate,” says BaFin head Elke König.
The Cartel Emerges
In 2005, a young trader with Moroccan roots came to Barclays:
Philippe Moryoussef, who is now 44. For him, it was only one station of
many: Société Générale, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Morgan Stanley
and, finally, Nomura. The Japanese had let him go when it became clear
what role Moryoussef allegedly played in the interest-rate cartel.
In the London financial district, Moryoussef was seen as cool and
unassuming. He liked diving, read books and didn’t put on airs in
public, even when he moved into a £2.5-million ($3.9 million) apartment
in London’s St. John’s Wood neighborhood with his wife and two children.
Moryoussef traded in interest rate derivatives during his time at
Barclays. He and his fellow traders knew exactly how much money they
stood to lose or gain if the Libor or Euribor changed by only a fraction
of a percentage point in one direction or the other.
And they apparently did everything they could to eliminate
happenstance. Moryoussef communicated by phone or email with colleagues
inside and outside the bank almost daily to steer interest rates in the
right direction. To do so, they sent inquiries to the people who were
responsible for inputting the Libor rates: the money market traders.
In the glitzy world of investment banking, money market traders were
at the bottom of the pecking order before the financial crisis. They
were not involved in major deals, and they could only dream of the kinds
of bonuses stock and bond traders received. “They were always at the
bottom of the food chain,” says a former investment banker.
It was a conspiratorial group of underdogs who worked for various
banks and met at least once a month for a beer or a mojito in New York,
London or Frankfurt. By the middle of the last decade, when there seemed
to be a surplus of money at the banks, they all had the same problem:
They were derided or, worse yet, ignored by their colleagues in the
trading rooms of major banks.
But what if it were possible to know where interest rates were headed
at the end of the day, or even in the next hour? What if a few traders
could manipulate the ups and downs of interest rates?
By 2005 at the latest, the traders would seem to have begun realizing
just how much power they had were they able to collaborate within their
small group. There was no need for formal contracts between large
institutions, merely agreements among friends. A pointer here, a few
traders meeting for lunch there, and soon the group had formed a global
cartel that, according to investigators, reached from Japan to Europe to
Canada.
“Come on over; I’ll open a bottle of Bollinger,” a trader, inebriated
with his success, wrote to a colleague after the Libor rate had been
set. Adair Turner of the British regulatory agency quotes the email as
evidence of “a culture of cynical greed in the trading rooms.”
The Organized Fraud
“If the rate remains unchanged, I’m a dead man,” a trader emailed to a
colleague who was responsible for Libor in October 2006. The traders
sent at least 173 inquiries of this nature between 2005 and May 2009 for
the dollar Libor alone. They were often successful.
Moryoussef, listed in the files of Britain’s Financial Services
Authority (FSA) as “Trader E,” specialized in the Euribor. He reportedly
bet €30 billion on certain movements of the interest rate, a normal
dimension in the fast-paced money market. “The trick is that you can’t
do it alone,” he bragged to outside colleagues at HSBC, Société Générale
and Deutsche Bank, who allegedly cooperated with him.
While the traders were initially out to increase their bonuses, the
manipulation took on a different dimension during the crisis. When the
first banks began to wobble in 2007, it became more difficult for many
financial companies to borrow money — a problem that would normally be
reflected in higher Libor rates.
Now even top managers at Barclays, alarmed by media reports, were
instructing the Libor men to input lower rates. In October 2008, the
manipulation became a question of survival for Barclays. On Oct. 29, a
concerned Paul Tucker, now the deputy governor of the Bank of England,
contacted Barclays CEO Diamond. Tucker wanted to know why the bank was
consistently inputting such high interest rates into the daily Libor
report.
Diamond told a parliamentary committee that Tucker had suggested to
report lower interest rates for the Libor, which Tucker staunchly
denies. Diamond, for his part, prepared a transcript of the telephone
conversation he had had with Tucker on that day, in which he had
mentioned political pressure. After that, his chief operating officer
spoke with the money market traders. The underdogs were suddenly being
heard on the executive board, and had become the bank’s potential
saviors.
Barclays wasn’t the only bank that was having trouble gaining access
to money in the fall of 2008. UBS, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of
Scotland, now prime suspects in addition to Barclays, had to be bailed
out by their respective governments. Germany’s WestLB, which was
involved in the Libor calculation at the time, was also seen as a
problem case, although this wasn’t reflected in the Libor rates it was
reporting.
Deutsche Bank
As early as the fall of 2011, Deutsche Bank’s chief risk officer at
the time, Hugo Bänziger, ordered an internal audit. Millions of emails
had to be reviewed and chat minutes read. Bänziger hired an outside
auditing firm, and soon there were 50 people on the team responsible for
the scandal. But it was a deeply frustrating task for the auditors;
they didn’t even know where to begin.
Only when British investigators released the names of two suspicious
traders was the audit team able to report success to then CEO Josef
Ackermann. Seemingly sensing what was in store for his bank, he inquired
about the progress of the audit on a weekly basis. Two traders were
fired.
Since the departures of Ackermann, Bänziger and former Supervisory
Board Chairman Clemens Börsig, Börsig’s successor Paul Achleitner has
managed the bank’s handling of the Libor scandal. He is reportedly
firmly convinced that the bank never tried to push down the Libor to
improve its own position. Financing problems? Not at Deutsche Bank, says
Achleitner. He also notes that there are no indications that executive
board members, or even Anshu Jain, were directly involved in the
scandal.
But is it possible that only two wayward traders took part in the
cartel? Why were no supervisors and no compliance officers aware of
their activities? Deutsche Bank prides itself on being a world leader in
the trade in foreign currencies and interest rates. It is part of all
panels involved in determining the Libor. And yet Deutsche Bank merely
sees itself as a bit player in the Libor-fixing scandal.
But why then was Alan Cloete, thought to have been responsible for
the money market business and other areas during the wild Libor years,
unaware of the manipulation? And why did Jain promote the stocky South
African to the expanded executive board in March, while the
investigations and internal audits in the Libor matter were already
underway? There are those associated with the bank who think this is
odd, while others see it as proof that Cloete is blameless in the Libor
case.
The Failure of the Regulators
On April 11, 2008, a member of the Barclays money market team called
Fabiola Ravazzolo, an employee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Barclays employee: “LIBORs do not reflect where the market is
trading, which is, you know, the same as a lot of other people have
said.”
Ravazzolo: “Mm hmm.”
A few moments later, the Barclays man, according to the transcript of
the conversation released by the bank, said: “We’re not posting, um, an
honest Libor.”
Ravazzolo: “Okay.”
Barclays-Mann: “We are doing it, because, um, if we didn’t do it it draws, um, unwanted attention on ourselves.”
Ravazzolo: “Okay.”
There was no sense of outrage, nor did Ravazzolo question the
Barclays employee about the details. A similar conversation transpired
with another Fed employee a few months later.
These are transcripts of failure. Barclays employees also contacted
British regulators 13 times to report possible misconduct among the
competition in determining the Libor, FSA chief Adair Turner admitted in
a hearing before the British investigative committee. No one sounded
the alarm.
In the United States, the issue ultimately did make it further up the
ladder, reaching the desk of Timothy Geithner, who was chairman of the
New York Fed at the time before becoming US treasury secretary. At the
end of May, he sent an email on the subject of the Libor to the governor
of the Bank of England, writing: “We would welcome a chance to discuss
these and would be grateful if you would give us some sense of what
changes are possible.” Attached to the message were two pages of
“Recommendations for Enhancing the Credibility of LIBOR”. It was
anything but a warning about manipulations.
At first, there was no reaction from the other side of the Atlantic,
and Geithner’s office had to send a reminder email on June 1. Two days
later, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King finally responded, writing
that the recommendations seemed “sensible” and that he would be happy to
discuss the matter further with Geithner.
But nothing further happened in the ensuing months. The financial
crisis was coming to a head with the bankruptcy of investment bank
Lehman Brothers. The central bankers had other worries. This remains the
regulators’ line of defense today. If the world hadn’t happened to be
on the edge of an abyss, they say, the Libor scandal would certainly not
have slipped through their fingers as easily.
Meanwhile, the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) had
been investigating the issue since 2008, and its efforts eventually led
to a worldwide investigation.
Read Full Article Here
According to the video, students practice the Shiite rituals and
perform the chants related to Shiite beliefs. (A grab from the video
aired by Dream TV)
By Al Arabiya
A video shown on an Egyptian satellite channel revealed the
establishment of the first Shiite school in Egypt, amid doubts about the
authenticity of the news and denial on the part of the owner of the
place.
The video, aired Tuesday on one of the Egyptian talk shows on Dream
TV, showed that the new school has students from different Arab and
foreign countries, on top of which were Algeria, Qatar, Iran, and the
United States.
An Algerian girl said in the video that she had come from Algeria
especially to attend the new school in which, according to her, students
practice the Shiite rituals and perform the chants related to Shiite
beliefs.
For Walid Ismail, member of the Muslim Coalition for the Defense of
the Prophet’s Companions and Offspring and researcher in Islamic
affairs, the new school is part of a plan to divide Egypt along
sectarian lines.
“If this school continues, it will be the biggest threat Egypt could face in the coming phase,” he said.
The school, he added, took advantage of the security vacuum in Egypt
as well as post-revolution rifts between several factions to promote the
Shiite faith.
Islamic researcher Alaa al-Said expressed his surprise at the establishment of the school for logistic reasons.
“How can the school start classes without obtaining the necessary
approvals from the Ministry of Education and other relevant bodies?” he
said.
On the other hand, Shawki Ahmed, a Shiite who was hosted in the same
show that aired the video, denied reports about the establishment of a
Shiite school.
“The place shown in the video is my house and I do receive students
there, but it’s not a school and their number does not usually exceed
15.”
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