Auditor: TARP rescue failing to meet key goals
AFP | February 1, 2010
Washington – The 700-billion-dollar US government effort to rescue the financial system has failed to meet key goals such as sparking lending and curbing risky activities by banks, a special auditor said Sunday.
The special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said in a report to Congress that it is too soon to measure the overall success of the program passed at the height of the financial crisis in October 2008.
The quarterly report said that because of TARP, “there are clear signs that aspects of the financial system are far more stable than they were at the height of the crisis in the fall of 2008.”
But the report also stated that “many of TARP’s stated goals… have simply not been met” and that the potential for a new crisis looms without major reforms.
“Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car,” the report said.
The program has fallen short in key areas such as boosting credit, curbing home foreclosures and deterring the risky behavior of financial firms that are considered “too big to fail,” said the report from inspector general Neil Barofsky.
Despite the explicit goal to increase financing to US businesses and consumers, “lending continues to decrease,” said the report from inspector general Neil Barofsky.
It also noted that TARP has failed to live up to the “explicit purpose” stated by Congress of “preserving homeownership and promoting jobs.
“The TARP foreclosure prevention program has only permanently modified a small fraction of eligible mortgages, and unemployment is the highest it has been in a generation,” it said.
“Whether these goals can effectively be met through existing TARP programs is very much an open question at this time.”
The report said that by coming to the aid of the troubled housing market, the US government effectively “has become the mortgage market, with the taxpayer shouldering the risk that had once been borne by the private investor.”
More broadly, the report said the underlying problems that led to the financial crisis remain, including the continued existence of financial firms that are “too big to fail” and engaging in practices that can destabilize the system.
“The substantial costs of TARP — in money, moral hazard effects on the market, and government credibility — will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or 10 years’ time,” the document said.
“It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.” – AFP
Haiti arrests 10 US citizens for child smuggling
Press TV – January 31, 2010
The Haitian police have arrested 10 US citizens after they tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the earthquake-stricken nation.
One of the suspects, who says she is the leader of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children’s Refuge, denied they had done anything wrong.
The suspects were detained at Malpasse, Haiti’s main border crossing with the Dominican Republic, after Haitian police conducted a routine search of their vehicle.
The Haitian authorities said the 10 US citizens had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the 33 children — aged 2 months to 12 years old — through any embassy and no papers showing they were made orphans by the quake in the impoverished Caribbean country.
In addition to outright trafficking in children, Haitian officials have also expressed concern that legitimate aid groups may have flown children believed to be orphans out of the country for adoption before efforts to find their parents had been exhausted.
As a result, the Haitian government halted many types of adoptions earlier this month.
Swine Flu Didn’t Fly
By Niko Kyriakou | January 27, 2010
For makers of the swine flu vaccine, 2009 was a year to remember. By June, CSL Limited’s annual profits had risen 63 percent over 2008. GlaxoSmithKine’s 2009 earnings spiked 30 percent in the third quarter alone, to $2.19 billion. Roche made a stunning 12 times more in the second quarter of 2009 than of 2008. But in 2010, drug companies may get their comeuppance.
On Tuesday, the Council of Europe launched an investigation into whether the World Health Organization “faked” the swine flu pandemic to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers. The inquiry, held in Strasbourg, France, vindicates a worldwide movement of insiders, experts, and elected officials who accuse the United Nations organization of misleading the world into buying millions of unnecessary vaccines.
“I have never heard such a worldwide echo to a health political action,” Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an epidemiologist who formerly led the health committee for the Council of Europe, said at Tuesday’s hearing.
Dr. Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, hammered his own organization and WHO’s flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda, for “producing angst campaigns”.
“With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don’t we learn from history?” Keil said. “It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.”
Last year the World Health Organization predicted that H1N1 could infect two billion and claim hundreds of thousands of lives, while President Obama’s science advisers said the outbreak could infect up to 120 million Americans and kill 90,000. But thankfully, H1N1 turned out to be a mild flu. The type-A influenza has taken around 14,000 lives worldwide, according to World Health Organization numbers from January 22. The CDC said in December confirmed US deaths had reached 4,000, although it recently estimated that due to underreporting, the true death toll could be as high as 16,500 – a tragic sum, but less than half of what the CDC attributes to seasonal flu-related illness. In most of the northern hemisphere, hog flu has been on the decline for some about three months. New transmissions are largely contained to North Africa and South Asia, according to the WHO.
Signs swine flu wasn’t much of a killer grew throughout 2009, but WHO and most domestic health agencies around the globe chose instead to man the war bugles at full volume. The result was that governments poured tens of billions of dollars into vaccines. The US alone has spent $2 billion on the drugs and has allocated $7.5 billion in supplemental spending for H1N1 preparedness.
With the disease basically over, however, countries are stuck with millions of unused doses. French and German governments have had to cancel millions of orders of the vaccines due to falling demand and late-breaking news that European health authorities had recommended twice the necessary dosage. The CDC has dealt with the glut in another way. It now says all Americans should go and get the shot – a shift from its earlier recommendation that at-risk groups such as the young, sick, pregnant, and nurses seek injections first. But why should everyone get a shot when that the disease is petering out?
On January 22, WHO issued a statement calling allegations that it irresponsibly stoked H1N1 fears, “scientifically wrong and historically incorrect.” The statement defends figures WHO publicized on transmission rates, mortality, and the virulence of swine flu.
“The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible. We welcome any legitimate review process that can improve our work.”
At the hearing, WHO’s flu director, Dr Keiji Fukuda, denied the accusations against WHO.
“Let me state clearly for the record – the influenza pandemic policies and responses recommended and taken by WHO were not improperly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.”
Previously, WHO had offered scant response to allegations of corruption, but deigned to defend itself after the Council of Europe meeting was announced. The public meeting to examine accusations against WHO was set up by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which represents 800 million people in 47 countries. The Council’s January 26 meeting involved WHO officials, European drug-makers, and medical experts. PACE’s findings are expected to be announced January 29 and will likely be followed by an in-depth study and recommendations to European governments.
The hearing is just latest in a series of investigations into WHO’s propriety, which also include a 2009 Danish Parliamentary review of links between WHO expert – Albert Osterhaus – and makers of the swine flu drugs. Russian lawmaker Igor Barinov has also started an inquiry into WHO’s ties to H1N1 drug makers. In France, Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot was forced to a Paris court on January 4th over swine flu campaign irregularities – including ordering millions unnecessary vaccine doses. Demonstrations over statistical improprieties have taken place in Scotland and Canada.
Inquiries into WHO misdoing are likely to plunge deep into the statistical methods for data collection, however, it takes no expertise to see that health agencies’ data about H1N1 was wildly misleading.
In addition to bad guesses about how many would be infected, a study released December 7 by the Harvard School of Public Health found that the WHO also estimated the deadliness of H1N1 to be 40 to 250 times higher than it was.
Proving the drug industry squeezed WHO into selling swine flu is very difficult to establish, but the string of clues which points to this corruption is not hard to follow.
Pandemic or just plain Panic?
Swine flu took center stage in June of 2009, when WHO declared H1N1 the first “pandemic” in 42 years. This move caught the eye of every health authority from Tampa to Timbuktu and revved drug company engines. But to do it, WHO had to redefine the word.
One month after swine flu appeared in April, WHO rewrote the definition of “pandemic”. Under the new meaning, a pandemic does not need to cause high numbers of death or illness. A month after changing the definition, with just 144 people dead from H1N1, the flu was given the WHO’s highest threat classification: a “stage-six pandemic alert”. By comparison, the mildest 20th Century pandemic killed a million people.
Before the change, WHO had classified a pandemic as a disease that has “simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” After the alteration, the organization’s website stated that, “Pandemics can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause.” In May, WHO spokesperson Natalie Boudou told CNN that the original definition was an error.
The Los Angeles Times writer Michael Fumento called the redefinition “bizarre”. “Such a declaration could render the term “flu pandemic” essentially meaningless — risking lethal public complacency if a bona fide one hits,” Fumento wrote.
Tom Jefferson, Formerly a general practitioner in the British Army who has worked for the well-respected Cochrane Collaboration for 15 years, Jefferson asked in July: “Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic?”
“The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies… They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic,” Jefferson told Der Spiegel, a German magazine with a weekly circulation of 1 million. “There’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions. And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.”
Yet the WHO stands by its decision to label H1N1 a pandemic, citing geographic spread and the virus’ novelty as its primary reasons. Moving ahead, Fukuda said his organization “will definitely consider whether we can define things better.” But some participants in Tuesday’s meeting wondered what the WHO is waiting for, since complaints have poured in from all sides.
The Associated Press reported on May 19, 2009, that China, Britain, Japan and other countries had urged WHO to “be very cautious about declaring the arrival of a swine flu pandemic, fearing that a premature announcement could cause worldwide panic and confusion.”
Critics say what was needed was not a frightful label, but hard scientific data to show how many people were getting swine flu. But on July 10, the WHO quit tracking cases of infection and told governments they should stop testing for individual cases, ostensibly because the speed of H1N1’s spread had already been confirmed.
“Rational scientific independent advice should be supreme, but there was an imperative behind this which was a financial one,” said Paul Flynn, a parliamentary representative in the UK who spoke at the Council of Europe’s hearing.
Corruption in Health Organizations?
Critics of the WHO say they promoted bad data to help drug makers get rich selling vaccines. This attack implies drug makers have a network of influence within the decision-making structure of the organization, a suggestion various officials confirm.
One high-level, long-term WHO employee who preferred to remain anonymous for job security, described the WHO as follows: “WHO is infested by corruption. There is big corruption, like the management of H1N1, and there is small corruption; and between the big and the small corruption there is [corruption] in all imaginable forms. Unfortunately, it’s not only the WHO.”
William Aldis, a retired senior WHO official who worked on the bird flu crisis, said in a Huffington Post article from September 24:
“I am concerned WHO’s communications is corrupted by the fact they push the buttons in the public’s brains that will raise the most funds. That is incompatible with what the organization should be doing: serving the public with technically correct factual information, pure and simple.”
Louise Voller, a journalist at the Danish Daily Information newspaper, has reported that pharmaceutical companies are present at meetings of WHO experts, and, that purportedly independent scientists hired by the WHO are also consultants to the drug companies that make the vaccines.
On Tuesday, WHO’s Fukuda insisted that its swine flu scientists’ were not tainted by their private sector associations. The reason, he said, is that before each meeting, scientists are asked to declare all possible conflicts of interest. “These documents are gone over and examined. If there is some potential conflict of interest we go back and talk with them.”
WHO was initially set up to rely on funding from UN member countries, in recent years, this source has been rapidly overtaken by “voluntary contributions”, which are provided by the private sector, national governments, and NGOs. According to WHO’s 2008-2009 budget, $958 million was supplied by the UN, while three times as much — $3.2 billion — came from voluntary donations.
Dr. Wodarg told the Council on Tuesday that the shift towards public-private partnership which began in earnest in 2001 puts WHO officials under extreme pressure.
“Already then there were very critical voices against the influence. [WHO’s] administration is made of people not well paid who can’t fight against the pay of people in and from the industry – they are simply swept aside…[private] influence is rampant and that is why we can’t understand why the WHO we used to love…has become unrecognizable to us.”
Whether or not WHO officials are being bought off, clearly, the capacity and incentive of drug makers to lean on science are enormous.
Pandemic Profit
All US contracts for H1N1 vaccines went to just five companies: CSL Limited, Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and MedImmune. All five also produced shots for either SARS or avian flu. When swine flu took full flight in the third quarter of 2009, these firms’ earnings skyrocketed. But according to British MP, Paul Flynn, that was part of drug-makers plan.
Prior to winning any contracts, drug makers invested $4 billion in preparations for swine flu, he said. That investment may have gone to developing and patenting new, super-fast methods to create vaccines, such as using a bio-reactor to grow viruses, said Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former health expert for the Council of Europe. These patents were key to drug industry profits, since companies can charge much more for patented drugs than un-patented ones, Wodarg said.
“If you have a patent you can monopolize…and this is what industry did…The alternative is not to have vaccines patented…By decentralizing the production you could be as fast and you wouldn’t have this small way you have to pass negotiating with one enterprise that has monopoly, or with four enterprises.”
Food and Drug agencies in Canada, the UK, France, the US and elsewhere guaranteed vaccine manufacturers that they would be shielded from any lawsuits connected to the vaccines. This enabled companies to fast-track the testing process, reducing some trials to as little as 5 days.
Wodarg and others have also voiced concern that the hastily developed vaccines are not entirely safe. Adjuvanted vaccines, which contain a kind of immune booster shown to produce auto-immune responses in some children, were sold in parts of Europe and Canada, but banned in the US.
The private research group, Markets and Markets, estimated that the global, H1N1 vaccine market will be worth over $7 billion a year by 2011.
The incredible profits associated with outbreaks have sparked a wider shift in medicine from care to profit, according to Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
“Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.”
Angell reports that the drug industry spent around 14 percent of sales profits on research and development in 2000, while spending closer to 35 percent on “marketing and administration”. How that expenditure breaks down is not public knowledge, but 35% comes out to a lot of money. For instance, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Merck alone made $287 billion in 2007, according to the 2008 Pharma Report by IMS, a market intelligence firm.
The larger question begged by health agencies’ bad data, and the media’s dutiful reporting of it, is this: if fears are overstated every time there’s a flu outbreak, when the public really does need a vaccine, who will believe the boys who cried wolf?
What’s more, should the European investigations conclude that the WHO deliberately incited H1N1 paranoia to levels beyond reason in order to help drug makers, the implication is that both the private and public sectors need better oversight before being given any greater control over health care.
Beyond the praise for Paul Kagame
By Andrew Oxford | Pulse Media | January 29, 2010
Rwandan Tutsi leader turned President Paul Kagame is a popular man in the West. And why not? In his ten years in office he has lead his war-ravaged nation through a period of unprecedented economic growth which has turned Rwanda into a playground for foreign investors. At the same time, he emphasizes self-reliance and efficient government while supporting populist spending programs that could make Rwanda the only African nation to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals (not that he is a fan of the UN, which he frequently criticizes for its response to the 1994 civil war). His administration in Kigali has admittedly wracked up a deficit that would ordinarily draw frowns from World Bank bureaucrats but in the case of Rwanda, the organization that usually demands drastic budget cuts is underwriting a litany of government programs. It helps that some of Kagame’s greatest admirers are Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Starbucks magnate Howard Schultz (1). American evangelist Rick Warren (2) considers him something of an inspiration and even Bill Gates has invested in what has been called Africa’s success story. Yes, Western liberals, reactionary evangelicals, and capitalist carpetbaggers alike tout Paul Kagame as the herald of a new, self-reliant African prosperity.
Of course, nothing in Rwanda is ever so clear cut. Kagame’s regime has benefited from more than its fair share of political repression. This prompted his challenger in the 2003 election, Faustin Twagiramungu, to denounce the poll citing harassment and restrictions that inhibited any effective campaign efforts (3). An earlier opponent, Pasteur Bizimungu (who Kagame replaced as Prime Minister) attempted to form a party at the beginning of the last decade which was promptly banned. What’s more, the formation of new groups is often hampered by Kigali authorities. Reporters Without Borders has also expressed concern at the restrictions on the press which have included the shuttering of critical newspapers and new fees for launching media outlets (4). Even The Economist took exception with his heavy-handed domestic policies and accused the new hero of Clinton and Blair as being more repressive than Robert Mugabe (5).
Most alarming is the integral roll that Kigali has played in the Second Congolese War (6) which has claimed upward of three million lives. The Rwandan government has been lending significant support to rebels within the Congo, especially in the mineral-rich north. There, the objective is widely considered to be securing the valuable resources of the region which have been trafficked through Rwanda during the conflict. While some press attention has been given to the horrendous plight of women in the area and the massive and mounting casualty figures, little connection seems to be drawn between Kagame and his complicit fans in Europe and North America.
Kagame, however, maintains innocence. While never outright denying his support for murderous combatants in the Congo or his imposition of restrictive policies on journalists, he counters that his critics are merely stoking ethnic divisions. That, of course, is a serious charge in Rwanda. It is also a strange one coming from a man who boasts that he has put the past behind him. Not far enough, as it would turn out, to trust the democratic process with criticisms or challenges. Nor far enough to shut down the parasitic black-market trafficking of minerals and resources — reminiscent of the lecherous European occupations of other centuries — that have enriched some foreign and local entrepreneurs while leaving little more than funeral bills for the Congolese (7).
There are bigger issues at play in Rwanda and the DRC than this one man but what is remarkable about Paul Kagame is the support he has received from both conservatives and liberals in the West. It is no surprise that foreign investors have so embraced a man who is willing to put aside the rule of law or the mandate of the ballot. What is surprising is how quiet the left has been in challenging the blatantly backward praise Kagame has so vocally received while stoking one of the most tragic and violent conflicts of the present day and rolling out plans to sell his nation to the highest bidders. It is time to connect the dots in Africa.
NOTES
(1) “Rwanda Rising: A New Model of Economic Development.” Fast Company, Wednesday, March 18, 2009. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/134/special-report-rwanda-rising.html
(2) This comes on the heels of reports that Rick Warren and his reactionary cohorts where involved with neighboring Uganda’s efforts to execute homosexuals. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/11/rick-warren-silent-enabler-of-hatred.html
(3) This BBC report is from the end of the election when Twagiramungu called on Kagame to “accept freedom of speech and association and also to accept democracy.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3104092.stm
(4) Reporters Without Borders profile of Paul Kagame (http://www.rsf.org/en-predateur13640-Paul_Kagame_.html) and also a brief report on the issue of fees for free press (http://www.rsf.org/Government-to-demand-exorbitant.html).
(5) “A Flawed Hero”, The Economist, August 21, 2008
(6) The New York Review of Books printed an extensive article on the matter by Howard W. French in their September 24, 2009 issue (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23054). The UN has also issued annual reports on the Second Congo War every year which allude to the influence Kagame has played in the conflict.
(7) “Looted Wealth Fuels Congo Conflict”, Financial Times, November 30, 2009. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8ae76ab0-dde6-11de-b8e2-00144feabdc0.html
Image: UN Photo/Mark Castro
Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows
By David Reilly
Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.
Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.
We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system — apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout — deserves further congressional scrutiny.
The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.
That move came a few weeks after the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department propped up AIG in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s own mid-September bankruptcy filing.
Saving the System
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time of the AIG moves. He maintained during Wednesday’s hearing that the New York bank had to buy the insurance contracts, known as credit default swaps, to keep AIG from failing, which would have threatened the financial system.
The hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform also focused on what many in Congress believe was the New York Fed’s subsequent attempt to cover up buyout details and who benefited.
By pursuing this line of inquiry, the hearing revealed some of the inner workings of the New York Fed and the outsized role it plays in banking. This insight is especially valuable given that the New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve.
This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed’s bailout programs. It’s as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation’s central bank.
Geithner’s Bosses
The New York Fed is one of 12 Federal Reserve Banks that operate under the supervision of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, chaired by Ben Bernanke. Member-bank presidents are appointed by nine-member boards, who themselves are appointed largely by other bankers.
As Representative Marcy Kaptur told Geithner at the hearing: “A lot of people think that the president of the New York Fed works for the U.S. government. But in fact you work for the private banks that elected you.”
And yet the New York Fed played an integral role in the government’s bailout of banks, often receiving surprisingly free rein to act as it saw fit.
Consider AIG. Let’s take Geithner at his word that a failure to resolve the insurer’s default swaps would have led to financial Armageddon. Given the stakes, you might think Geithner would have coordinated actions with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Yet Paulson testified that he wasn’t in the loop.
“I had no involvement at all, in the payment to the counterparties, no involvement whatsoever,” Paulson said.
Bernanke’s Denials
Fed Chairman Bernanke also wasn’t involved. In a written response to questions from Representative Darrell Issa, Bernanke said he “was not directly involved in the negotiations” with AIG’s counterparty banks.
You have to wonder then who really was in charge of our nation’s financial future if AIG posed as grave a threat as Geithner claimed.
Questions about the New York Fed’s accountability grew after Geithner on Nov. 24, 2008, was named by then-President- elect Barack Obama to be Treasury Secretary. Geither said he recused himself from the bank’s day-to-day activities, even though he never actually signed a formal letter of recusal.
That left issues related to disclosures about the deal in the hands of the bank’s lawyers and staff, rather than a top executive. Those staffers didn’t want details of the swaps purchase to become public.
New York Fed staff and outside lawyers from Davis Polk & Wardell edited AIG communications to investors and intervened with the Securities and Exchange Commission to shield details about the buyout transactions, according to a report by Issa.
That the New York Fed, a quasi-governmental body, was able to push around the SEC, an executive-branch agency, deserves a congressional hearing all by itself.
Later, when it became clear information would be disclosed, New York Fed legal group staffer James Bergin e-mailed colleagues saying: “I have to think this train is probably going to leave the station soon and we need to focus our efforts on explaining the story as best we can. There were too many people involved in the deals — too many counterparties, too many lawyers and advisors, too many people from AIG — to keep a determined Congress from the information.”
Think of the enormity of that statement. A staffer at a body with little public accountability and that exists to serve bankers is lamenting the inability to keep Congress in the dark.
This belies the culture of secrecy obviously pervasive within the New York Fed. Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns noted during the hearing that the bank initially refused to disclose even the names of other banks that benefited from its actions, arguing this information would somehow harm AIG.
‘Penchant for Secrecy’
“In fact, when the information was finally released, under pressure from Congress, nothing happened,” Towns said. “It had absolutely no effect on AIG’s business or financial condition. But it did have an effect on the credibility of the Federal Reserve, and it called into question the Fed’s penchant for secrecy.”
Now, I’m not saying Congress should be meddling in interest-rate decisions, or micro-managing bank regulation. Nor do I think we should all don tin-foil hats and start ranting about the Trilateral Commission.
Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil.
(David Reilly is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
NATO and Kazakhstan Reach Transit Pact for Afghanistan
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
New York Times
January 27, 2010
MOSCOW — NATO and Kazakhstan completed an agreement Wednesday that will permit NATO allies to ship cargo through Kazakh territory to Afghanistan, providing an important alternative to vulnerable routes elsewhere.
Kazakhstan was the final holdout in the so-called northern supply line, which will allow cargo to pass overland from Europe to NATO troops in Afghanistan. Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan have signed similar agreements.
“This allows supplies for our forces to start moving from Europe to Afghanistan, beginning in the coming days, complementing the very important transit route through Pakistan,” NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in a statement in Brussels.
The American-led NATO coalition has been seeking to reduce its reliance on supply routes through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, where attacks by the Taliban have been frequent.
The accord with Kazakhstan will allow NATO forces to ship only nonlethal cargo by rail through the country’s territory. The cargo will then pass through Uzbekistan into Afghanistan, where the coalition is fighting a growing Taliban insurgency.
The agreement comes as NATO allies prepare to meet Thursday with representatives from Afghanistan and its neighbors in London. The conference, hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, will seek to map out strategies for continued international involvement in the war in Afghanistan.
NATO and the United States have been pushing Central Asian countries near Afghanistan to become more involved in the war effort. Last year, the Obama administration persuaded Kazakhstan’s neighbor, Kyrgyzstan, to reverse a decision to close a United States military base that is an important transit hub and refueling stop for troops en route to Afghanistan.
The alliance has also been working with Russia to open up more supply routes. The United States signed an agreement with Russia last summer to allow flights of troops and weapons through Russian airspace to Afghanistan, though bureaucratic wrangling has so far prevented all but a few shipments.
Russian and NATO military officials met on Tuesday in Brussels to further discuss Russian involvement in Afghanistan, among other issues. It was the first formal meeting between military officials from both sides since diplomatic relations broke down after Russia’s war with Georgia in August 2008.
In Washington, the White House welcomed the agreement, calling it “another signal of the commitment of the government of Kazakhstan to support” the international effort in Afghanistan.
The separate American agreement with Russia permitting overflights of soldiers and weapons has had a slow start but is beginning to ramp up, American officials said.
Six months after President Obama and President Dimitri A. Medvedev sealed the agreement, an administration official said 12 flights have passed through Russian airspace and eight are planned in coming days. The Russians have cleared all flights except one, a chartered commercial carrier with hazardous material on board, the official said.
Sentence Geithner To Prison For Lying To We The American People
John Mica slams Treasury Secretary’s “lame excuses” during fiery hearing
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s denial that he played any role in the AIG cover-up is contradicted by emails which confirm that Geithner and the New York Federal Reserve were both intimately involved in keeping details about payments to banks including Goldman Sachs from the public.
Geithner told lawmakers today that he had no involvement in withholding information about the bailout of AIG, much to the chagrin of House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa, who wasn’t buying it for a second.
“He has asserted complete ignorance of the Fed’s efforts to cover up the bailout details,” said Issa, R-Calif. “Many Americans, including members of this Committee, have a hard time believing that Secretary Geithner entered an absolute cone of silence on the day that his nomination was announced.”
Russia Today report on Geithnergate – AIG attempted to hide bailout documents
John Mica of Florida went further, calling for Geithner to quit as a result of the scandal.
“Why shouldn’t we ask for your resignation?” Mica asked Geithner. “We’re not getting the whole story, we’re getting the blame story. You’re either incompetent on the job or you knew what was taking place and you tried to conceal it, and I think that’s grounds for your review.”
Mica characterized Geithner’s denials as “lame excuses” as the Treasury Secretary became visibly angry.
In November and December 2008, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, headed up by Geithner, instructed the bailed out AIG to hide from the public details regarding payments the insurance giant made to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA.
Using Fed secured taxpayer bailout money, AIG paid several banks 100 percent of the face value of credit-default swaps, as other financial institutions were negotiating deep discounts for the unregulated paper assets that do not have to be backed by cash.
The decision to pay the banks in full may have cost AIG, and therefore taxpayers, at least $13 billion over the odds.
The “backdoor bailout” of the banks, as it has been dubbed was exposed in March 2009 after the SEC challenged AIG’s filing, however, e-mails obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, reignited the situation after they conclusively exposed a collusion between AIG and the Fed to deceive the public.
The e-mails between company and regulator show that The New York Fed crossed out reference to the payments and that AIG also omitted the details when the Securities and Exchange Commission filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008.
The emails, the content of which are highlighted in this Bloomberg News article, also show that the Fed wanted numerous other details about the AIG bailout withheld or delayed from public oversight.
“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, adding that taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”
Geithner’s denial that he, even as President of the New York Fed, had no involvement with the AIG case is contradicted by fresh revelations this week in a new report issued by Issa that show Geithner was “at a minimum, engaged personally in reviewing what information about the AIG bailout would be revealed to Congress and the public.”
On November 6, 2008 Geithner received an email from Sarah Dahlgren, the FRBNY’s lead staff member in AIG’s operations, seeking Geithner’s approval for a proposed statement regarding AIG’s upcoming equity capital raise. The fact that Geithner’s approval had to be obtained merely for putting out statements concerning AIG clearly indicates that he was deeply involved in the matter.
On November 13, Geithner was sent a report on AIG’s restructuring that would be sent to Congress. Sophia Allison, a staff member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, asked that Geithner point out any information that he believed should not be “publicly disclosed”.
In addition, records of who Geithner met with during his tenure as President of the FRBNY “show that he was regularly engaged with top AIG officials and the FRBNY officials directly responsible for AIG’s disclosures to the SEC. Geithner’s schedule shows that he had at least six formal meetings with top FRBNY staff members about AIG-related issues between November 4, 2008, and November 21, 2008.”
Watch the clip from today’s hearings where Mica demands Geithner’s resignation.
Big Banks Have Already Figured Out The Loophole In Obama’s New Rules
By John Carney | Jan. 21, 2010
Big banks have already begun poking the holes in Obama’s new rules—holes they expect their banks to pass through basically unchanged.
The president promised this morning to work with Congress to ensure that no bank or financial institution that contains a bank will own, invest in or sponsor a hedge fund or a private equity fund, or proprietary trading operations unrelated to serving customers for its own profit.
But sources at three banks tell us that they are already finding ways to own, investment in and sponsor hedge funds and private equity funds. Even prop trading seems safe.
A person familiar with the operations of one big Wall Street bank said it expects that new regulation will affect less than 1% of its overall business.
The key phrase is “operations unrelated to serving customers.” The banks plan to claim that much of the business in which it engages is related in one way or another to serving customers. Even proprietary trading, for instance, can become related to customer service if it is done through internal hedge funds in which some outside clients are permitted to invest.
One insider at a bank pointed to JP Morgan Chase’s ownership of the hedge fund Highbridge Capital. It is thought that under a strict “no hedge funds” rule, Highbridge would have to be sold off. But under the rule proposed by the Obama administration, Highbridge can be retained by JP Morgan because outside clients are permitted to invest in it.
A still more devious way is to have a banks own employees be the customers who are invested in the internal hedge funds. That way trading operations can remain closed to outsiders while the regulatory requirement of relating the trading to customer service is met. Goldman Sachs is rumored to be considering this approach. (Goldman isn’t commenting on the regs right now.)
“This thing is about showing the public that Obama is standing up to Wall Street. So the rhetoric is heated. But the implementation will require far less change than people think right now,” a person familiar with the thinking at the upper echelons of one of our largest banks said.
“The market is getting this wrong by selling off the megas,” a person at another bank said.
Confirmation of Bernanke feared as kiss of death for Senate Democrats
By Edwin Chen and Scott Lanman
Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was undecided on whether to back Ben S. Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, even as President Barack Obama expressed confidence he will win Senate approval.
“For right now, yes he is” undecided on whether to vote for confirmation, Jim Manley, a spokesman for the Nevada Democrat, said in an e-mail. Obama “continues to think he’s the best person for the job and will be confirmed,” Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton told reporters traveling with Obama in Ohio.
Democrats Barbara Boxer of California and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, both facing re-election this year, said today in Washington they’ll oppose Bernanke, whose term ends at the end of the month. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat, and Judd Gregg, a Republican member of the banking committee, said there’s enough support for Bernanke to secure his Senate confirmation.
Bernanke, while navigating the economy through the worst slump since the Great Depression, has drawn fire from lawmakers for lax regulation prior to the financial crisis and for putting taxpayer dollars at risk through the rescues of Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc.Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, renewed his support for the Fed chief today.
Rejecting Bernanke would send the “worst signal to the markets right now” and produce an economic “tailspin,” Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, told reporters. “This is the most important central banker in the world.”
Obama Bank Plan
U.S. stocks fell, extending the biggest weekly drop since October, as financial shares slumped for a second day on Obama’s plan to rein in banks and results at Google Inc. disappointed investors. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was down 1 percent to 1,105.49 at 2:10 p.m. in New York.
The Banking Committee voted 16-to-7 on Dec. 17 to recommend Bernanke’s nomination to the full Senate, with 12 Democrats and four Republicans in favor. Six Republicans and one Democrat, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, were opposed.
Dodd reminded Republicans today that they initially named Bernanke to his post — and that rejecting his nomination would amount to replacing him with a Democratic pick.
“Remember this was George Bush’s choice as well,” Dodd told reporters today. “Do they want to have the president make his choice for the chairman of the Federal Reserve? Do the Republicans really want that? That would be rather interesting to see.”
The Fed chief will probably need 60 votes in the Senate to break procedural holds from at least four lawmakers. Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, said that while Bernanke is likely to be confirmed, the vote may not come before his term expires at the end of the month.
No Date Certain
“I can’t give you a date, but clearly he will get confirmed,” Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, said. Asked if Bernanke’s confirmation is in trouble, Baucus said, “No.”
The loss in the Massachusetts election this week to fill the seat left vacant by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy has shaken Democrats, making it harder for party leaders to rally support for Bernanke, said Norm Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
“It’s more than procedural now because you have this populist surge out there that’s been intensified and reinforced by the Massachusetts election,” he said. “It doesn’t kill the Bernanke reconfirmation but it means for Reid to get to 60 is going to take a greater effort.”
Dorgan Opposition
Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who is retiring this year, said he will oppose Bernanke because the Fed chief rebuffed Dorgan’s request to identify firms that received loans from the Fed during the financial crisis.
“I just think that’s unacceptable,” Dorgan said. “I don’t think his nomination should come up until he provides the information that’s requested.”
The Fed is appealing a federal judge’s August decision in a lawsuit filed by Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, to release names of firms that received central bank loans.
Traders at Intrade, a Web exchange for futures contracts based on political outcomes, see an 80 percent chance Bernanke will be reconfirmed, down from 93 percent yesterday. The contract has traded as high as 85 percent today. The bid- ask spread on contracts is currently 6.1 percentage points, indicating uncertainty about the odds of reconfirmation.
‘Really Rattle’
A failure to confirm Bernanke “would really rattle the market,” said Karl Mills, who helps manage about $30 million as chief investment officer for Jurika Mills & Keifer LLC in Oakland, California. “The Fed chair you know is better than the one you don’t. In this political environment, we’re not presuming anything anymore.”
Under Senate rules, a motion to limit debate on Bernanke’s nomination would set up a procedural vote after two legislative days to curtail additional debate to 30 hours. Bernanke’s supporters need 60 votes to limit debate and clear the way for a final vote on whether to confirm him for another term.
Dodd and Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the panel’s senior Republican, have said the Fed failed to adequately supervise banks. Dodd has also said Bernanke deserved “substantial credit” for helping avert “utter economic catastrophe.”
“It is time for a change — it is time for Main Street to have a champion at the Fed,” Boxer said today in a statement. “Our next Federal Reserve Chairman must represent a clean break from the failed policies of the past.”
The Fed chairman has increased government backstops to banks and other firms and used the Fed’s balance sheet to revive credit, including through the purchase of $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities.
“Under Chairman Bernanke’s watch, predatory mortgage lending flourished, and ‘too big to fail’ financial giants were permitted to engage in activities that put our nation’s economy at risk,” Feingold said in a statement.
To contact the reporter on this story: Edwin Chen in Cleveland at echen32@bloomberg.net
About that bank tax Obama touts
By Dean Baker | The Guardian | January 18, 2010
President Obama proposed a tax on the country’s largest banks to help recover the money lost under the Troubled Assets Relief Programme (Tarp). This tax is a positive step. However, it will not come close to recovering the losses incurred in the bailouts and it will do almost nothing to change the way that the banks do business. For this we will need a larger financial speculation tax.
First, it is necessary to be clear on the extent of the losses incurred in the bailouts of the financial system. The losses in the Tarp are currently pegged at close to $120bn, mostly due to the bailout of AIG, the giant US insurance company. This money was virtually a direct handout to several large banks, as the government’s money allowed AIG to make payments to Goldman Sachs and other large banks that would not have been possible if it had fallen into bankruptcy.
But these losses are far from the complete picture with the Tarp. On the night before Christmas, the Treasury department lifted the $200bn cap on the amount that both the mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can draw on the Treasury. They both now have unlimited lines of credit.
No one knows how much their bailouts will eventually cost taxpayers, but it is almost certain that their losses are not entirely attributable to the portfolio that the mortgage giants held on 7 September 2008 when they were put into government conservatorship. Many of the losses incurred by Fannie and Freddie are almost certainly due to losses on mortgages they purchased from banks after they went into conservatorship. In other words, Fannie and Freddie were paying too much for the mortgages they purchased from the banks. This is exactly what the Tarp was originally supposed to do.
In effect, the treasury department has run a version of Tarp through Fannie and Freddie. If we want to calculate the money taxpayers lost through from the Tarp programme we should certainly include the money lost bailing out these mortgage giants, which can now exceed $400bn if events turn out badly. This means that if the point is to recover the money lost in the Tarp, the bank tax is likely to fall short by a large margin.
The other key consideration in making the banks pay should be to structure a tax that changes the way the banks do business. This money lost in the Tarp programme is just a small fraction of what the banks’ greed cost the country. We will likely lose more than $4tn in output in this downturn, more than 40 times the projected revenue from the tax over the next decade.
The $9bn that is projected to be collected each year is equal to about 5% of their annual profits and bonuses. It is unlikely to have any noticeable impact on the way they do business. In other words, we can still expect them to be pursuing short-term profits and giving little consideration to long-term investments.
A tax on financial speculation more generally, which will also apply to hedge funds and other financial institutions, would be a far more effective mechanism in changing behaviour. It could also raise very substantial revenue. In the UK, a tax of 0.25% on the purchase and sale of shares of stock raises the equivalent of $30bn annually in the US relative to the size of its economy. A broadly based transactions tax – that would apply not only to stock, but also to options, futures, credit default swaps and other financial instruments – could raise more than $150bn a year in the US.
Such a tax would also make the financial sector more efficient by reducing the volume of short-term trading that serves no productive purpose. The share of the private sector that is devoted to investment banking and commodities trading has nearly quadrupled in the last three decades.
By reducing the volume of trading this tax would make the financial sector more efficient, freeing up resources for productive uses. This would be comparable to improving the trucking sector by reducing the number of trucks and drivers it takes to deliver goods to wholesalers and retailers. Industries are supposed to become more efficient as the economy develops. It is only finance that is becoming less efficient due to its ever-growing complexity.
In short, a tax on financial speculation is a win for just about everyone but the speculators. President Obama’s bank tax is a good start but we have to go much further.
Laughing all the way to the bank
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs
Lee Sustar looks at the farcical hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on the factors that led to the economic meltdown.
January 19, 2010
THE TIMING couldn’t have been better for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which held its first public hearings on January 13-14.
With their top employees set to enjoy huge bonuses thanks to taxpayer bailouts, the CEOs of the country’s big banks should have been in the hot seat for their role in the financial panic of 2008. The Obama administration’s proposed levy on banks seemingly would have upped the pressure, too.
Instead, the bankers got away with a few sharp words and some finger-wagging by commission members. Commission Chair Phil Angelides, a Democrat and former state treasurer of California, sparred a bit with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and hectored other bank executives. But Angelides was only posturing. His commission has failed to make use of the few tools that it has to investigate the banks reckless practices that helped cause the meltdown.
Even the New York Times editorial board was taken aback by the commission’s failures:
[T]he commission–which is supposed to file a final report by December 15–has not issued a single subpoena for documents. Instead, investigators have apparently been relying on voluntary cooperation, public records and information-sharing agreements that have been negotiated with federal agencies. A thorough investigation requires source documents that reveal what people were thinking and doing at the time of the events, and that illuminate, buttress or contradict testimony.
Instead of a serious inquiry, Angelides settled for giving the bankers a tongue-lashing, even as his party quietly tends to Wall Street’s interests.
That’s in keeping with the Democrats’ approach to the financial crisis since it broke in the fall of 2008. It was the Democratic Congress that worked with the Bush administration to pass the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bill that funded the bank bailout.
And it was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who insisted that the nationalized insurance company AIG pay its debts at 100 cents on dollar–which meant that tens of billions in U.S. taxpayer money flowed through AIG into the coffers of big U.S. and European banks. AIG paid $12.9 billion of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs–and now, Goldman is set to pay out around $22 billion in bonuses.
But the AIG-Goldman scam is only the most obvious of the Obama administration’s giveaways to Wall Street. So far, the U.S. government has loaned or guaranteed up to $13 trillion to financial institutions and other businesses–a figure nearly the size of the entire annual economic output of the U.S.
The rationale for this aid, we were told, is that it would prevent a total economic collapse and get credit flowing to businesses and consumers once again. The bailouts did pull the financial system back from the brink. Thanks to near-zero interest rates set by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the banks can borrow cheaply and use the money to finance investments where a higher return seems certain.
For example, some banks are borrowing from the government at virtually no interest and buying U.S. Treasury bills that pay much higher interest. That is, the banks are borrowing from one part of the U.S. government and profiting by lending it back to another part of the government at a much higher rate. Many financial institutions are also using funds borrowed from the Fed to invest in foreign currencies to gain higher returns–the so-called carry trade.
But when it comes to helping hard-pressed working people, the bankers aren’t interested. Despite a ballyhooed government program to spur banks to help homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages, the federal Home Affordable Modification Program has permanently helped only 66,000 homeowners out of 4 million that may be eligible–even as foreclosures rise from 2.8 million in 2009 to an expected 3 million in 2010.
Instead, the banks are using government money to pad their balance sheets and help them absorb losses resulting from risky investments in complex financial instruments tied to mortgages. [Losses which their officers may have been profiting from as indirect counter-parties over the past decade]
GIVEN THE banks’ egregious role in the crash and their hoarding of government cash amid the recovery, one might have expected that financial reform legislation would be inevitable. Instead, Wall Street lobbyists have spread enough money around both sides of the aisle in Congress to kill any meaningful reform. Even the weak proposed consumer financial protection agency has been pronounced dead.
As journalist Chris Hedges put it:
These corporations don’t make anything. They don’t produce anything. They gamble and bet and speculate. And when they lose vast sums, they raid the U.S. Treasury so they can go back and do it again.
Never mind that $50 trillion in global wealth was erased between September 2007 and March 2009, including $7 trillion in the U.S. stock market and $6 trillion in the housing market. Never mind that the total amount of retirement and household wealth trashed was $7.5 trillion, or that we saw $2 trillion in 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts evaporate. Never mind the $1.9 trillion in traditional defined-benefit plans and the $2.6 trillion in non-pension assets that went up in smoke. Never mind the job losses, the foreclosures and the 35 percent jump in personal and small-business bankruptcies.
There are bundles of new money, taken again from us, to make deals and hand out outrageous bonuses. And when these trillions run out they will come back for more until our currency becomes junk.
So what about President Barack Obama’s plan to squeeze the banks with a special tax to recover $117 billion from the bailout?
At first glance, it seems like a delayed, but welcome, bid to claw back taxpayer funds. But the proposed tax would be just a 0.15 percent levy on assets beyond the banks’ core capital–and it would be paid over a decade. All that does is turn a taxpayer giveaway into a loan at rock-bottom interest rates. As the Washington Post noted, “At a projected $9 billion per year, the fee would be a mere sliver of the banks’ estimated quarter-trillion-dollar pre-tax profits.”
Congressional Democrats, who are already panicking over their prospects in the November elections, will pick up the banner of Obama’s proposed bank tax to try to get in front of voters’ anger. But the Wall Street-White House axis has already provided the Republicans with an incredible political gift.
Suddenly, right-wing politicians who usually serve as a mouthpiece for big business are railing against the injustice of bailing out bankers while working people have nowhere to turn. Of course, these Republican hacks are only playing to the right-wing populist “tea party” crowd. They’d never seriously challenge the business agenda.
But thanks to the Democrats’ devotion to the bankers, the Republicans can loudly denounce government bailouts to big business even as they further Corporate America’s agenda.
Whichever party is in office, the bankers win.
Berlusconi trial postponed until February
Press TV – January 15, 2010
|
|
Berlusconi’s lawyer, Niccolo Ghedini |
The trial of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who is charged with corruption and bribery has been postponed until February 27.
Prime Minister Berlusconi is accused of bribing British tax lawyer and offshore consultant, David Mills, with $600,000.
Mills lied about Berlusconi’s offshore companies during the trials that took place in 1997 and 1998. He was indicted on corruption charges and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison and has appealed the verdict.
Italy’s constitutional court overturned a law last year that granted Berlusconi legal immunity while serving as the prime minister.
The three presiding judges for the trail have postponed it until after Mill’s appeal case is concluded.
Berlusconi has had an extensive record of criminal allegations including mafia involvement, false accounting, tax fraud, corruption and bribery of police officers, lawyers, and judges.
Featured Video
Deep Dive Intel Briefing 6/20/2026 Lt Col Daniel Davis
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
As Hillary Clinton kisses up to Henry Kissinger, RT looks at 4 of his most heinous acts
RT | September 3, 2016
… While Clinton retains the ultimate warmongering seal, RT examines some of Kissinger’s most memorable acts… Read full article
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Terms of US capitulation to Iran presage new era for the region
- Strategic Oil Reserve Nears Collapse… US Must Choose: Guns or Butter
- The Story the Media — and the Government — Don’t Want You to Hear
- Deep Dive Intel Briefing 6/20/2026 Lt Col Daniel Davis
- The Targeted Assassination of Studies Showing Vaccines Cause Injury
- BMJ Probe Into Excess Mortality Study Drags On for Two Years With No Resolution
- Securing Peace with Iran Compels Trump to Divorce Israel
- Old Iraq war architects rise up to wag finger at Trump’s Iran deal
- Strait of Hormuz closed over Israeli aggression on Lebanon
- Keir Starmer arson mysteries multiply
- If Americans Knew
- ‘Reproductive genocide’ in Gaza; death toll in Lebanon tops 4,000 (during a ceasefire) – Daily Update
- Israelis Invaded Lebanon And Then Cried Victim When Their Soldiers Got Killed
- FARA Docs: Israel is Spying On Millions Of Christian Americans In Their Churches
- Why US presidents from both parties end up cursing Benjamin Netanyahu
- Israel Asked Facebook to Censor Iran War Content, Internal Documents Show
- Deaths in Gaza undercounted, possibly by 100s of thousands; “Psychopath” Ben-Gvir talks trash – Daily Update
- UNICEF: “Trauma is woven into the very fabric of childhood in Gaza”
- 15 articles a day: The extent of the Israeli army’s media interference
- Greek Orthodox Patriarchate denounces Israeli seizure of church land in Jerusalem
- How Hillel International uses antisemitism training and ‘campus climate’ concerns to attack Palestine solidarity
- No Tricks Zone
- THE TRANSCEIVER PARADOX: Why Organoid Intelligence (OI) Could Become Our Ultimate Alien Predator
- German Wind Turbines Face Regulatory Shutdown Due To Excessive Noise
- New Study: Chile’s Relative Sea Level Was 3.2 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
Aletho News 