http://www.scoopit.co.nz Submit and vote on the news you care about Tue, 21 May 2013 01:24:42 NZST en http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/weisbrot180513.html
There is a lot wrong with this report -- most of it reads like a statement from the Venezuelan political opposition, rather than a neutral third-party observer. But the most ugly and pernicious thing is the report's insistence that "the validity of the election result [in Venezuela] needs to be clarified" and that a "full and transparent audit result" is necessary, or else the government's "rule will increasingly come to be seen by many as an imposition, with unpredictable, possibly violent consequences."

These statements strongly imply that the Venezuelan government is to blame if the opposition returns to violence, as it has in the past, in its ongoing refusal to accept the results of a democratic election.

For the governments of Latin America, and almost all of the world, there is no doubt about the "validity of the election result." It is really only the Venezuelan opposition and the U.S. government that has questioned it. ]]> Tue, 21 May 2013 01:24:42 NZST TeKarere World 7 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=international-crisis-group-vs-venezuela http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/socialhousing-landlords-training-staff-to-spot-tenants-at-risk-of-suicide-8621669.html
“We do have some of the very most deprived people in the whole country. These people have more or less just given up. Some of them are just starving to death. It’s very distressing when someone stops paying their rent, and you go and find them in these circumstances. It’s going to back to something like Victorian times.”

As well as putting greater strain on housing staff, cuts to community services that local people rely upon are also increasing the risk of isolation for residents. “This increases the misery of our tenants. Many of them just can’t cope with change.” ]]> Sun, 19 May 2013 18:17:18 NZST Diogenes Commentary 11 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=social-housing-staff-diagnosing-suicide-risk http://www.mfi-miami.com/2013/04/is-bank-of-americas-im-with-stupid-policy-causing-a-squatting-problem-in-detroit/
For the record, it’s not some secret Obama conspiracy to turn America into Islamic colony as one “prominent” attorney in Idaho tried to convince me it was or one of Alex Jones’ conspiracies involving the Illuminati or the Freemasons. It’s the banks and the government trying to fix this problem on the cheap.

What most people don’t understand is that when you call Bank of America about a loan modification or to negotiate terms to stop a foreclosure, you’re not really talking to an actual employee of Bank of America who can make a decision on your particular situation. You’re speaking with a contractor who has authority to use the Bank of America name, take your documents, go through a check list provided by Bank of America and then enter the information into a computer and see if can go for further processing at Bank of America in Texas or California. In many cases, these Bank of America contractors use unskilled workers who are paid minimum wage and forced to work 50-60 hours a week. As you can imagine and this reflective when you talk to them, they hate their jobs.

]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 18:37:54 NZST brolga Business 6 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=boas-i%E2%80%99m-with-stupid%E2%80%9D-policy-causing-a-squatting-problem http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/16/gree-m16.html Fri, 17 May 2013 18:20:56 NZST hypatia Education 6 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=greek-teachers-defy-military-mobilisation-1 http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/05/americas-cup-boat-crash/
The real unknown, he says, is whether the damage caused by the Oracle crash was, as Coutts argues, an exception, a bad accident compounded by severe tides — or something closer to the norm when an AC72 capsizes in the rough waters of the bay. “The Oracle capsize is a bit of an anomaly,” Cayard says. “But it could happen again.” Oracle and Artemis have a full contingency plan — a second complete boat. New Zealand has just a single complete boat and some spare parts. Prada is the most vulnerable, because it has only one boat. “If Prada did what Oracle did closer to June,” Cayard says, “they’d probably be out of the competition.” ]]> Thu, 16 May 2013 21:12:10 NZST Skua Sport 6 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=the-boat-that-could-sink-the-americas-cup-1 http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/nuclear-strike-tehran-israel
This could be Tehran, or what's left of it, just after an Israeli nuclear strike.

Iranian cities—owing to geography, climate, building construction, and population densities—are particularly vulnerable to nuclear attack, according to a new study, "Nuclear War Between Israel and Iran: Lethality Beyond the Pale," published in the journal Conflict & Health by researchers from the University of Georgia and Harvard University. It is the first publicly released scientific assessment of what a nuclear attack in the Middle East might actually mean for people in the region. ]]> Thu, 16 May 2013 20:30:25 NZST TeKarere Commentary 9 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=study-if-tel-aviv-nuked-teheran-- http://www.cnbc.com/id/100725955
According to data from Japan's Ministry of Finance, Japanese investors became net buyers of foreign bonds in the last two weeks, buying 309.9 billion yen ($3.1 billion) in foreign funds in the week to May 4. They purchased 204.4 billion yen worth of foreign bonds in the previous week.

While the data is only for two weeks, if this trend of capital flight continues, the yen could see more downward pressure in the months ahead, say analysts.

That capital outflows data pushed the yen to a record low in early Asian trade after it broke through the psychologically-key 100 barrier overnight on strong weekly U.S. jobless claims numbers. ]]> Thu, 16 May 2013 20:30:22 NZST Austral.Asian Commentary 6 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=capital-flight-from-japan-yen-downfall- http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/artemis-crew-member-labels-yachts-death-traps/1865289/
That statement from a crew member - on the condition of anonymity for himself and the team - summed up the general reaction to the death of 36-year-old Artemis sailor Andrew Simpson when the hulls of his America's Cup team's training yacht snapped in relatively mild wind conditions on San Francisco Bay on Friday.

Members of all the teams competing in the America's Cup qualifying regatta have stayed silent, publicly at least, as they contemplate how to react to one of the biggest crises faced by the event in its 162-year history.

Privately, one reflected the view of many when he said, "I hope after all of this, the only place people see these yachts is in museums and pictures."

America's Cup organisers have yet to decide what happens next, but the series, scheduled to be contested against defending champion Oracle from July 7, is definitely in doubt. ]]> Wed, 15 May 2013 19:23:53 NZST Skua Sport 6 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=artemis-crew-member-labels-ac72s-death-traps- http://atimes.com/atimes/Japan/JAP-01-100513.html
That nation is Japan, which is threatening to frustrate the US plan for a new paradigm in Asia, and replace it with the dismal Middle Eastern model of confrontation and containment, one that the Obama administration is desperate to escape.

]]> Wed, 15 May 2013 19:22:07 NZST quokka Politics 5 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=usa-hoist-by-its-own-pivot--1 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/09/bank-m09.html
Major British banks have led the way. Barclays announced in February plans to cut 3,700 jobs, while HSBC recently carried out 3,160 lay-offs. Lloyds, 39 percent controlled by the government, announced 550 redundancies in the middle of March after 1,340 positions were eliminated in January. The cuts are linked to an expansion in the use of agency workers earning much lower salaries, as well as plans to outsource jobs to low-wage centres in Asia.

The mass lay-offs at the banks are a refutation of claims made by politicians that the finance industry can be a driving force for the British economy. They come as the economy continues to struggle, and the government presses ahead with austerity measures. A recent study by the Poverty and Social Exclusion project estimated that 33 percent of the population were living in various forms of deprivation. ]]> Wed, 15 May 2013 19:21:09 NZST kaarangaranga Commentary 5 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=thousands-of-finance-jobs-cut-in-uk http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/american-foreign-policy-no-good-options?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130508&utm_term=Kweekly&utm_content=readmore&elq=74690075ff2b47d9b912190f05
Indeed, Obama has onerous calculations: If I intervene, which group do I arm? Am I assured the weapons won't fall into the wrong hands? Am I assured the group or groups I choose to help really are acceptable to the West, and even if they are, will they matter in Damascus in the long run? And, by the way, what if toppling Syrian leader Bashar al Assad through the establishment of a no-fly zone leads to even more chaos, and therefore results in an even worse human rights situation? Do I really want to own that mess? And even were I to come out of it successfully, do I want to devote my entire second term to Syria? Because that's what getting more deeply involved militarily there might entail.

]]> Wed, 15 May 2013 19:21:07 NZST new.urbanist World 5 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=stratfor-no-good-us-options-in-syria http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/01/opinion/chertoff-wearable-devices/index.html?iid
That is almost precisely the vision of the future that lies directly ahead of us. Not, of course, with wearable drones but with wearable Internet-connected equipment. This new technology -- whether in the form of glasses or watches -- may unobtrusively capture video data in real time, store it in the cloud and allow for it to be analyzed. ]]> Thu, 09 May 2013 23:28:08 NZST Honest.John Commentary 6 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=google-glass-beginning-of-wearable-surveillance http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/30/obama-guantanamo-hunger-strike-worsens
"Now that is a hard case to make because I think for a lot of Americans the notion is: out of sight, out of mind. And it is easy to demagogue the issue. That's what happened the first time it came up. I am going back it because I think it is important."

The promise of action was welcomed by campaign groups, who urged Obama to appoint someone to his administration to act immediately. But they also claimed that there was no need for the president to go to Congress to get political support.

"The president can order the secretary of defense to start certifying for transfer detainees who have been cleared, which is more than half the Guantánamo population," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ]]> Sun, 05 May 2013 21:41:00 NZST Skua Commentary 9 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=obama-guantanamo-not-in-our-best-interests http://ebookee.org/Cultural-Cleansing-in-Iraq-Why-Museums-Were-Looted-Libraries-Burned-and-Academics-Murdered-Repost-_2175811.html Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:06:08 NZST Askance World 14 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=cultural-cleansing-in-iraq http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. ]]> Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:06:02 NZST Hecate Commentary 9 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=the-new-libor-scandal- http://www.goldtrends.net/FreeDailyBlog?mode=PostView&bmi=1267250
Well it isn’t because everything is going just fine. Put it this way. They must figure when you have 50 million people on food stamps and the Dow Jones is going up a few hundred points a week and making all time highs and you have 16 trillion dollars in debt and interest rates are zero, its best to have a communiqué every month before someone asks you to explain what is going on. It’s called staying ahead of the curve if you will. If you tell them what’s going on it makes it look like you know what you’re doing. Otherwise all we have is the statistics and by themselves they tell you something is wrong, something is terribly wrong. So they have become transparent.

During the last communiqué the chairman made it abundantly clear that QE was here to stay until the unemployment rate reached acceptable levels.
....
There's even a term for this in the trading world. It's called "Beat the Beehive." You smash the nest and then watch the total confusion feed on itself. By the next day all the bees are gone and all that's left is a smashed up beehive.

There has been a lot of speculation on the markets and manipulation that is going on. What I've offered in this report using the fact that gold crashed on Friday is a scenario on how it could have been orchestrated. I leave it to the reader to pass judgment on the potential.
]]> Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:04:11 NZST Askance World 11 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=how-the-gold-market-was-crashed http://johnpilger.com/articles/dance-on-thatcher-s-grave-but-remember-there-has-been-a-coup-in-britain
The corruption and inhumanity under Thatcher knew no borders. When she came to power in 1979, Thatcher demanded a total ban on exports of milk to Vietnam. The American invasion had left a third of Vietnamese children malnourished. I witnessed many distressing sights, including infants going blind from a lack of vitamins. "I cannot tolerate this," said an anguished doctor in a Saigon paediatric hospital, as we looked at a dying boy. Oxfam and Save the Children had made clear to the British government the gravity of the emergency. An embargo led by the US had forced up the local price of a kilo of milk up to ten times that of a kilo of meat. Many children could have been restored with milk. Thatcher's ban held.

In neighbouring Cambodia, Thatcher left a trail of blood, secretly. In 1980, she demanded that the defunct Pol Pot regime - the killers of 1.7 million people - retain its "right" to represent their victims at the UN. Her policy was vengeance on Cambodia's liberator, Vietnam. ]]> Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:04:05 NZST Kaahu Commentary 11 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=pilger-dance-on-thatchers-grave-there-has-been-a-coup-in-uk http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-230413.html Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:03:10 NZST Grapes.Of.Wrath World 7 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=escobar-chechens-in-an-orwellian-america http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/04/23/299764/margaret-thatcher-and-the-decline-of-west/
In reality, the emergence of Thatcher was the work of a formidable political syndicate. One of Thatcher’s most important handlers was by any measure Lord Victor Rothschild (1910-1990), the third Baron Rothschild. Lord Vic was nominally a Labour peer in the House of Lords, but much of his influence derived from his work between 1963 and 1970 as worldwide head of “research” - meaning intelligence - for Royal Dutch Shell, the policy flagship of the seven sisters oil cartel. During much of this time, Lord Vic was a key security adviser to Thatcher. For a number of years Lord Vic also ran the Central Policy Review Staff, the de facto think tank of the British government. Lord Vic was also closely associated with Sir Keith Joseph, a Tory government minister and Thatcher’s top political brain truster.

Thatcher was for many years elected to parliament from the safe Conservative seat of Finchley. However, intelligence reports from the 1980s sometimes noted that Thatcher’s hold on this rotten borough or pocket borough had been consolidated with decisive help from Lord Vic.
]]> Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:39:12 NZST critical.analyst Commentary 8 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=margaret-thatcher-and-the-decline-of-the-west http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2013/04/17/no-rogoff-and-reinhart-this-time-is-different-sloppy-research-and-no-understanding-of-sovereign-currency/?utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_cam
But it was all a lie. Yes, a lie. They screwed up their data analysis. Like so many times before—think Larry Summers at Harvard, Chicago’s Gene Fama, or Charles Plosser at the University of Rochester—the economists reach results counter to intuition and the real world.

Their work doesn’t pass the smell test: if it smells like nonsense it probably is nonsense.

Yeva Nersisyan (my brilliant student and coauthor) and I critiqued their book soon after it came out; see here: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_603.pdf. To put our conclusions as simply as possible, we concluded that they didn’t know what they are talking about.

They argued that “high” government debt ratios—say, 90% of GDP—nearly invariably lead to slow growth and to financial crisis. Our debt hysterians took that and ran—using their book as justification for austerity.

]]> Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:38:40 NZST post.austrian.economics World 6 http://www.scoopit.co.nz/story.php?title=rogoff-reinhart--and-the-smell-test