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It's becoming an annual tradition: Spring rolls around, and while nobody is looking, Wall Street quietly lays siege to Washington and reaches a hand out to yank the last remaining teeth out of the government's financial regulatory head.

In the last two weeks, we've seen two major developments here. There was a wave of deregulatory bills that snuck through the House with surprisingly bipartisan support, and a series of regulatory decisions by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that will seriously weaken the already-weak Dodd-Frank reform legislation, particularly with regard to derivatives trades.

If a story about a wave of bills designed to prevent the meager derivatives reforms passed in Dodd-Frank from being enacted sounds familiar, that's because it is. I wrote almost exactly the same story a year ago, in the middle of May, 2012, when a herd of Wall Street-friendly congresshumans teamed up in the House Financial Services Committee to push through a wave of nine ambitious bills targeting derivatives reform. This is from last spring:

The nine bills being contemplated by Congress take a variety of approaches to gutting Dodd-Frank. Two bills, H.R. 1840 and H.R. 2308, are essentially stalling tactics, requiring reg

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/deja-vu-on-the-hill-wall-street-lobbyists-roll-back-finance-reform-again-20130521#ixzz2Txh5Usvr ;
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lmost 18 months ago (Dec. 11, 2011), then Defense Minister Ehud Barak predicted that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered and that his situation was dire. Albeit that his assessment, which he kept reiterating, was based on intelligence information, it was also wishful thinking — he believed Assad’s downfall would be a blessing for the Middle East and good news for Israel. His opinion was shared by nearly all of the senior defense echelons in Israel. 

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/veteran-labor-knesset-member-assad-is-preferable-for-israel.html?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7287#ixzz2TvpoU8Zb

KAIROUAN, Tunisia — The third annual meeting of Ansar Al-Sharia (Supporters of Shariah Law) was supposed to be a huge gathering — organizers had said 40,000 would turn out to support the installation of an Islamic state in Tunisia. With authorities having banned the congress, many feared confrontation, even bloodshed.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/tunisia-salafists-suppression.html?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7287#ixzz2Tvpa2aGo

The Obama administration has investigated a reporter with Fox News as a probable "co-conspirator" in a criminal spying case after a report based on a State Department leak.

The Justice Department named Fox News's chief Washington correspondent James Rosen "at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator" in a 2010 espionage case against State Department security adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. The accusation appears in a court affidavit first reported by the Washington Post.

Kim is charge

H&M (Hennes & Mauritz), a major Swedish “fast fashion” retailer, led 30 international companies this week to commit to a new $3 billion fund to improve the safety of garment factories in Bangladesh. Watchdog organizations say the companies acted only because of external pressure by activists and workers.

The announcement came weeks after Rana Plaza, a building that housed five garment factories, collapsed in Bangladesh last month leaving over 1,100 dead. While H&M was not among the many international buyers that were found to have contracts with the factories, the disaster sparked an activist campaign that put an enormous amount of pressure on the company which is the second biggest garment retailer in the world and the biggest buyer of clothes from Bangladesh.

Changes in labor and safety practices generally occur "not for philanthropic reasons but because protests were starting to disturb the supply chain" Nayla Ajaltouni, coordinator of the French branch of Clean Clothes Campaign told Agence France Press after riots in Bangladesh in 2010 led to an increase in the minimum wage there. Two years later the story is still the same.

Responding to Disaster

In the days following the Rana Plaza collapse, even as emergency workers dug bodies out of the rubble and families of missing workers fought police in heated street demonstrations, the Walt Disney company, which sources production of toys and clothes from low wage countries around the world, announced it was planning to leave Bangladesh by March 2014.

But H&M said it had no plans to move.

Hanging in the balance are the jobs of over four million workers in Bangladesh who depend on the $20 billion garment industry for their living. The company had the tacit support of many la

n May 16, Maha, the Palestinian woman on the left in the above photograph,tweeted this photograph of meeting her friend Walaa from Gaza in Jerusalem. A friend in Gaza sent it along to me with this note: 

Walaa made it to Jerusalem for the first time in her life. Here is a picture with her Palestinian friend Maha. They only met for five minutes, full of tears. Injustice!

Walaa is Walaa Al Ghussein. She wrote about the cruel restrictions on travel from Gaza for us last month, and I wrote to her to ask her about the meeting above. At first she politely turned me down, explaining it was "indescribable". But I persisted, and she provided the following explanation.

It's not easy for a Gaza resident to get a permit to enter the occupied lands of Palestine, or even to leave Gaza through Erez checkpoint. And it's impossible for anyone from there to enter Gaza.

Our permanent dream is to meet, one day, in our own land. And we never gave up this dream. But I almost did when I was there, in Jerusalem, not having time to meet one of my friends because of my permit and some restrictions. But my friend refused to give up and managed to follow me to the Gas station while I was on my way back to Gaza.

My friend, Maha came from Umm Al-Fahem to Jerusalem, just to see me for 5 minutes in the Gas st

People who deny the Holocaust are despicable!

What should we call the people who deny the Catastrophe (known as Al-Nakba)  that occurred only three years after the Holocaust?

I knew nothing of نكبة  Al-Nakba until recently (perhaps the past 10 years) and confess I feel ashamed of my ignorance. My world history classes in the 1960s in Minnesota certainly taught me about the Holocaust in WWII but the lessons about the Middle East always focused on the founding of Israel (Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion), never about the horrific ethnic cleansing that occurred.

The Nakba is a crime of historic proportions, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinian

Miguel Blesa, the former executive chairman of Caja Madrid, has become the first prominent Spanish banker to go behind bars since the start of the financial crisis. He is accused of leaving the company saddled with huge losses because of an ill-advised takeover of a bank based in Miami in 2008.

The project has already involved the construction of the skyscraper headquarters of Italy's biggest bank UniCredit by Argentine architect Cesar Pelli.

"Porta Nuova is one of the most prestigious urban renovation projects in Europe," real estate giant Hines Italia and Qatar Holding said in a statement. Texas-based Hines' Italian arm leads the project. "Land is Italy's most important natural resources and we are confident it can be a strategic engine for development and economic growth," said Manfredi Catella, chief executive of Hines Italia.

"The agreement i

If physical access is an important requirement for good journalism, the ability of Palestinians and Israelis to cover their ongoing conflict is largely compromised. This is one of the issues raised by a delegation of the International Press Institute (IPI) that visited Palestine and Israel in February.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/ipi-report-press-freedom-israel-palestine.html?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7287#ixzz2Tvq38bkI

Syria’s civil war has forced more than a million Syrians to flee their homeland in search of protection and shelter in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon. Palestinian refugees from Syria are particularly vulnerable as a result of the lack of recognition and support they receive from the international community.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/palestinian-refugees-syria.html?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7287#ixzz2TvpgZFu8

Famously, 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura was killed in the second intifada, during a shootout in Gaza in September 2000; haunting footage of the boy's cowering with his father, first broadcast on French public television, became a symbol of the brutality of the occupation. But this weekend the Israeli government produced a report asserting that the boy and his father may well have escaped the shootout unscathed.

The Guardian emphasizes....

NABI CHIT, Lebanon — At the entrance to this village in Hezbollah’s Bekaa Valley heartland, under a sign welcoming visitors to “The Citadel of Resistance,” workers on Monday hoisted a freshly printed banner honoring a young man described as one of Hezbollah’s latest martyrs — killed in battle not with Israel, the foe the group’s guerrillas train to fight, but with Syrian rebels.

Candidate Obama promised a different kind of culture in Washington, but it's looking similar to the Bush era

Launching a lawsuit against the very company that is responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes, 5 million farmers are now suing Monsanto for as much as 6.2 billion euros (around 7.7 billion US dollars). 

The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the ‘suicide belt’, Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges. 

The farmers state that Monsanto has been unfairly gathering exorbitant profits each year on a global scale from “renewal” seed harvests, which are crops planted using seed from the previous year’s harvest.

The practice of using renewal seeds dates back to ancient times, but Monsanto seeks to collect massive royalties and put an end to the practice. Why? Because Monsanto owns the very patent to the genetically modified seed, and is charging the farmers not only for the original crops, but the later harvests as well. Eventually, the royalties compound and many farmers begin to struggle with even keeping their farm afloat. It is for this reason that India slammed Monsanto with groundbreaking ‘biopiracy’ charges in an effort to stop Monsanto from ‘patenting life’.

Jane Berwanger, a lawyer for the farmers who went on record regarding the case, told the Associted Press: - See more at: http://www.whydontyoutrythis.com/2013/03/5-million-farmers-sue-monsanto-for-7-billion.html#sthash.jfaGVl8f.gmamVGi8.dpuf

CORRUPTION is a growth business.

Bribery scandals have dominated headlines in several countries in recent months, among them India and Nigeria. International enforcement of antibribery laws has been increasing in the United States and major European countries.

A new survey of corporate officials and employees in 36 countries — in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, as well as India — indicates that there is plenty of corruption that needs investigating.

Over all, 20 percent of the respondents said they knew of incidents at their own companies within the previous year that could be construed as cooking the books — moves to either understate expenses or overstate revenue. Among senior managers and directors, the figure was 42 percent.

The survey was conducted late last year by Ipsos, a market research firm, on behalf of Ernst & Young, a major accounting firm.

Ernst did not break down responses to the cooking-the-books question by country, but indicated that managers from emerging markets were more likely to say that had happened than were managers from more developed economies.

The firm did provide country-by-country results for some questions, as can be seen in the accompanying charts. Asked if companies in their countries “often report their financial performance as better than it is,” more than half the respondents in nine countries — Nigeria, Slovenia, Russia, Spain, Croatia, India, Serbia, Kenya and Austria — said that they did.

At the other end of the scale, fewer than a quarter of respondents in eight countries — Finland, Norway, Switzerland, France, Romania, Sweden, Hungary and the Netherlands — said that happened.

The survey was commissioned by Ernst’s fraud investigation and dispute services group, which does not perform standard corporate audits but instead is hired by companies to look for signs of corruption or fraud in their own operations. It did not include either China or the United States.

David Stulb, the global leader of that group, said it was growing in part because many companies were worried about enforcement of the American Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars the bribing of foreign officials, and of similar laws in other developed countries. Those surveyed included employees and officials of overseas subsidiaries of multinational companies. The respondents were promised anonymity, Ernst said.

The survey revealed what Ernst called a “corruption perception gap” in many countries, where respondents said bribery and corrupt practices were far more common in other parts of their country than they were in their own industry. At the extreme, 94 percent of respondents in Kenya thought corruption was widespread in the country, but only 34 percent thought it was a problem in their own industry.

The responses indicated that corruption and bribery are rare in the Scandinavian countries, but common in some Southern and Eastern European countries, as well as in India, the Middle East and Africa.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

considerer quelqu'un comme un raciste car il ne supporte pas Obama est aussi crétin que de considérer quelqu'un comme antisémite car il ne supporte pas Israël
Obama est un larbin, je suis d'accord avec ce cher Jello

"A verbal confrontation with obama supporters that think its racist not to support him because of his policies!"