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International Developments
❖ Turkey conducted nine air strikes in Iraq against the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) which had attacked a Turkish outpost near the border leaving “eight Turkish soldiers dead and 16 wounded.”
❖ “Turkey has called a meeting of Nato member states to discuss its response to the shooting down of one of its warplanes by Syrian forces on Friday.”
❖ Tunisia has extradited the former Libyan Prime Minister under Ghadafi back to Tripoli where he is being held in prison.
Global Economics
❖ Iceland shines! “Booming Iceland makes second early loan repayment to IMF.”
❖ “Bernanke bails out Europe“. Despite its charter to “promote full employment” (presumably in the USA), the fed has been taking steps “to prop up the staggering banks in Europe.”
❖ “Greece’s new coalition government has proposed an extension to the deadline for it to reduce its budget deficit by at least two years, to 2016″. The government’s aim is to meet the budget reduction, but “without further cuts to salaries and pensions.”
❖ “Chinese Economic Data Is Looking Horrible, And The Government Is Lying About It”.
Money Matters USA
❖ Jamie Dimon wore presidential seal cufflinks to the House hearing last week. Where did he get them? Nobody’s saying’, yet.
❖ “Members of Congress trade in companies while making laws that affect those same firms”. Specifically, 133 Congress members or families “have traded stocks collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars in companies lobbying on bills that came before their committees.” And this is all A-OK, given current ethics rules.
Politics USA
❖ The MI Board of State Canvassers had a very heated meeting about a petition to be placed on the ballot repealing MI’s Emergency Manager Law. Petition opponents were from the Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility “which shares an address with the Sterling Corporation consulting” firm among whose partners is the Republican member of the State Canvassers who just resigned.
❖ Santa Clara County CA’s Board of Supervisors took back $30 million in funds supposed to be used to build and furnish a new 49ers stadium. They want to use the money for education instead.
❖ Representative Vern Buchanan (R-FL), who is on the House Ways & Means Committee and chief of fundraising for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, is also under federal investigations (four to them) for his “business practices, his campaign finances and his alleged attempt to try to stop a witness from talking.”
❖ “The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s execution law Friday, calling it unconstitutional.” 10 death row inmates brought suit that “only the Legislature can set execution policy. Legislators in 2009 voted to give that authority to the Department of Correction.” The Court agreed with the inmates.
❖ Must’ve been a coincidence. “A Democratic operative snapped photos of a jet registered to [Bain Capital] that was parked at an airport near Romney’s fundraising retreat in Park City, Utah.”
❖ LA Gov. Bobby Jindal’s huge shift of education from public schools to voucher programs is generating a lawsuit “being put together by the Louisiana School Boards Association . . . that could be filed as early as the end of next week.” This lawsuit joins ones already filed by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and the Louisiana Association of Educators.
❖ CA Democratic leaders are “still filling out major details of cuts to welfare-to-work and health care for low-income children that will determine exactly how the budget will impact programs.” Taking on the Healthy Families program is turning out to have many pitfalls.
Working for a Living
❖ “. . . what if the logic behind viewing retail labor as an expense to be cut, rather than as an asset to be invested in, is unsound?” Research by Zeynep Ton, Professor of Operations Management at MIT, shows “that by underinvesting in their employees, retailers are actually making their operations much more inefficient, and therefore much less profitable.”
❖ “Corporate Profits Just Hit An All-Time High, Wages Just Hit An All-Time Low” Three charts emphasize that headline.
❖ A few phrases from the New York Times editorial about that US Supreme Court decision last week about use of non-members’ union dues for other than collective bargaining purposes: “how defiantly the five justices act in advancing. . . aggressive conservatism”, “majority’s willingness to breach court rules in pursuit of its agenda”, and “to insert itself into that political controversy when there was no reason to do so.”
Heads Up!
❖ From Occupy Sacramento: Big Statewide Moratorium on Home Foreclosures Rally & March: Monday, June 25th, State Capitol, Sacramento
❖ “Quebec students renew protests after two weeks of calm”
War on Women
❖ The last abortion clinic in MS may be gone July 1st. Becoming too clever by half, the MS legislature passed a law that any abortion clinic physicians must have hospital admitting privileges. None of the three physicians at the MS clinic have such privileges.
❖ Surprise, surprise, the Violence Against Women Act is going nowhere. The Senate and House just can’t agree and since there is “no hard deadline” [no pun intended, of course] they’ve turned to other matters.
Latin America
❖ “Ousted Paraguayan President Lugo addressed thousands of citizens . . . and assured there had been a ‘coup against democracy’ . . .” Lugo was given 2 hours to prepare his defense, rather than the customary 18 days. His situation will be presented to the Organization of American States Inter American Human Rights Commission and Paraguay’s Supreme Court. Mafia-drug traffickers-right-wing politicians are suspected. Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela objected to Lugo’s ouster. Update: Also Ecuador, Brazil and Uruguay. Update 2: Thousands of Lugo supporters took to the streets, met by police in riot gear, and using water cannons. Cuba, Chile and Colombia have also criticized the “coup”.
❖ President Evo Morales cut short his Rio+20 visit and returned to Bolivia due to violent protests by police officers around the country. The police are demanding pay parity with soldiers of the same rank. Update: Bolivian military has been ordered “into the streets of major cities Saturday following a police mutiny that the government said appeared to be setting the stage for a coup attempt.”
❖ At the World Trade Organization in Geneva on Friday the US “demanded that Argentina ‘immediately’ end an import licensing regime and other curbs that have frustrated foreign suppliers, and expressed concerns about a ‘sweeping new import restriction’ Indonesia has imposed.”
❖ “The Colombian Prosecutor General’s Office of Human Rights issued an arrest warrant Friday . . . against an army captain accused by former paramilitaries of participating in a 2001 massacre against civilians . . ..” Somewhere between 24 and 200 residents of the town of El Naya were killed and more than 3,000 displaced.
❖ Despite their having “failed to impress veteran military, Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency officers”, drones are being introduced by the US Department of Homeland Security “to fight drug smuggling” in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
❖ “A US Drug Enforcement Administration agent has shot and killed a suspected drug trafficker during a raid near a tiny Honduran town . . ..” The DEA is claiming this “is the first time a DEA agent has killed someone during an operation . . . ” but there is suspicion it is not (the Patuca River incident of a few weeks ago).
Break Time
❖ New Yorker covers we were never supposed to see.
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About FDL News Desk
Former sensible centrist James Fallows joins the shrill and uses the c-word:
Oooh, allan. That is something else, all right. Many thnx.
ubetchaiam, if you’re still having problems, please try what Elliott suggested Friday evening:
“There must be some mistake – write to MyFDLEditor AT firedoglake dot com
meanwhile, I’ve let them know also”
We hope to “see” you soon
It would be nice to think that USG would join the nations speaking out against the ouster of Pres. Lugo of Paraguay, especially since our Sec. of State knows a little something about kangaroo impeachments.
And Jamie’s cufflinks: what better symbol of why the man is so offensive? I bet he’s not the only bankster who has a set, but he’s the only one to shoot them when standing before a camera.
USA out of Iraq
coup in Paraguay with it’s social minded President
coup attempt in Bolivia with its social minded President.
I smell the CIA.
what does this mean? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-21/brazil-china-to-sign-30-billion-currency-swap-accord-soon-1-.html
Brazil and China will sign an agreement in the coming weeks to swap as much as $30 billion in their two currencies, Brazil Finance Minister Guido Mantega said.
The currency swap, worth 60 billion reais or 190 billion yuan, will be the first step in a broader agreement with Russia, India and South Africa to allow members of the so-called BRICS group of emerging markets to pool resources to better weather the global financial crisis, Mantega told reporters yesterday in Rio de Janeiro.
What Turkey’s beef with Assad?
And this is surprising ??
The Don’s favorite capo.
Or lack there of.
Can’t have anybody horning in on the pharmaceuticals territory, can we.
.
Best get used to wages falling as a component of total compensation. The mandates for things like covered 26 year olds, no copays for this and for that means that funds available for wage growth get diverted to pay for mandated benefits.
As long as total compensation is rising a decline in the wage component may not be a serious problem. Is a $19.99 an hour job with eight weeks of paid vacation really worse than a $20.00 an hour job with only two weeks paid vacation?
OTOH if total compensation is declining along with declining wages that is quite serious.
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“Members of Congress trade in companies while making laws that affect those same firms”. Specifically, 133 Congress members or families “have traded stocks collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars in companies lobbying on bills that came before their committees.” And this is all A-OK, given current ethics rules.
No appearance of impropriety here? No conflict of interest here? Now we know why it took a civil war to end slavery! The US Congress is a compromised institution where the undue influence of corporate money in the political process rapes the republic and the governed, as the convicted pedophile Sandusky raped the innocent and violated the innocence of children. Jefferson and Madison where correct in the desire to have the original 11th amendment address corporate scum buggery at the expense of life and liberty. Congress is the alcoholic’s version of enablers. Enabling corporations to rape Americans as a King and his corporate cohorts in crime, the East India Tea Corporation et. als., screwed the colonist. America needs a history lesson as we approach the 4th of July, Independence Day celebration…………..
I’m a huge 49 fan, but this is the right thing to do. Way to go, Santa Clara County ISD.
Lester R. Brown on water in the middle east:
“In neighboring Yemen, replenishable aquifers are being pumped well beyond the rate of recharge, and the deeper fossil aquifers are also being rapidly depleted. As a result, water tables are falling throughout Yemen by some 2 meters per year. In the capital, Sana’a—home to 2 million people—tap water is available only once every 4 days; in Taiz, a smaller city to the south, it is once every 20 days.
Yemen, with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, is becoming a hydrological basket case. With water tables falling, the grain harvest has shrunk by one third over the last 40 years, while demand has continued its steady rise. As a result, the Yemenis now import more than 80 percent of their grain. With its meager oil exports falling, with no industry to speak of, and with nearly 60 percent of its children physically stunted and chronically undernourished, this poorest of the Arab countries is facing a bleak and potentially turbulent future.”
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2011/update95
Water table falling two metres a year?
better send some extra drones, that will help.
Yup. The one thing he gets wrong — repeating the myth that Nixon never contested the 1960 election results — is, alas, an all-too-common mistake thanks to decades of Republican propaganda:
The key reason they gave up pushing it was that they didn’t want Nixon’s shenanigans with downstate votes and voters to be discovered — they wanted to pretend that all the electoral hanky-panky was on the Kennedy side:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=105&topic_id=297394&mesg_id=297663
Even Larry Sabato admitted that the Nixon camp did large-scale fraud in downstate Illnois:
“At the World Trade Organization in Geneva on Friday the US “demanded that Argentina ‘immediately’ end an import licensing regime and other curbs that have frustrated foreign suppliers, and expressed concerns about a ‘sweeping new import restriction’ Indonesia has imposed.”
re above: wonder if the “frustrated foreign suppliers” are u.s. weapons merchants …
re china-brazil currency exchange: it’s how countries used to operate; buying and selling using the sellers currency and local price. $ only became the world currency when it became an oil measure: petro$
i think one of the reasons saddam was removed was him talking ’bout using euro for oil. quaddifi was setting up african union with potential african monetary fund … so he ticked off both the banksters and petro$ gang.
Thank you, fatster, for another 5*-AAA roundup!
You’re the best ratings agency there is, karenjj2. Many thnx!
Thnx for that link, mafr. How awful.