DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria’s Greek Orthodox Church enthroned a new patriarch during a ceremonial mass in Damascus on Sunday amid civil war.
John Yazigi, 57, replaces Ignatius Hazim as the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East. Hazim died in December.
Some observers are mystified by Chuck Hagel’s
pathetic showing at his Senate Armed Services Committee hearing,
but as Sheldon Richman explains, there should be no mystery about
it. He performed as he did for one simple reason: He wants to be
the next secretary of defense, and he (along with the White House)
must have calculated that standing up for his past positions would
have harmed his chances.View this article. … Read More
Some observers are mystified by Chuck Hagel’s pathetic showing
at his Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, but there should be
no mystery about it. He performed as he did for one simple reason:
He wants to be the next secretary of defense, and he (along with
the White House) must have calculated that standing up for his past
positions would have harmed his chances.Only by establishment standards did the old Hagel look like a
radical critic of U.S. foreign policy. For example, he once
criticized the 2007 military surge in Iraq, but he voted to
authorize President George W. Bush to send troops there.He previously expressed concern about the drive to war with Iran
over its alleged nuclear-weapons program. But he supported
multilateral economic sanctions against the Iranian people,
although he criticized unilateral sanctions and made favorable
statements about negotiating with the Islamic republic.Hagel also criticized Israel and what he called “the Jewish
lobby” in the United States. Among his statements on this subject,
he said the Israelis “keep Palestinians caged up like animals,”
complained that the lobby “intimidated” members of Congress, and
accused his congressional colleagues of doing “dumb” things as a
result. Yet in the Senate he voted for every aid bill for
Israel.But during his Senate hearing, Hagel retracted or considerably
watered down every one of these statements. To many questions, he
responded
along these lines: “I’ve said many, many things over many
years.… If I — if I had a chance to go back and edit it, I would. I
regret that I used those words.”The message that came out of the hearing is unfortunate:
Deviation from the narrow range of opinion authorized by the ruling
elite is forbidden. If you want respect from that elite, you’d
better toe the line. (Whether one should want respect from the
ruling elite is another question entirely.)Bear in mind that Hagel is no
critic of the American empire. During his two terms in the U.S.
Senate, his actions rarely reflected the remarks that caused him so
much trouble at his confirmation hearing. To his credit, Hagel had
been in the wing of the establishment that fears the consequences
of war with Iran. But now that the only thing that stands between
him and the Pentagon is a Senate that includes neoconservative
Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others, Hagel feels
compelled to say that “all options are on the table.” “All options”
logically includes, not only a conventional military attack, but
also nuclear weapons. But as the hearing brought out, “all options”
actually excludes one option: containment of a nuclear Iran. Some
who believe that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon have suggested
that the same policy the U.S. government followed throughout the
cold war with the old nuclear-armed Soviet Union would be a better
way to deal with the Islamic Republic than war. But Hagel felt
compelled to say that containment is an unacceptable alternative to
insistence, backed by a military threat, that Iran abandon its
nuclear program. Here he echoed the Obama administration, as well
as McCain and Graham. Since containment would forswear a military
attack, the dominant wing of the establishment rejects it.Unfortunately, the “independent” Hagel has never shown any
skepticism about the unproven allegations that Iran’s rulers are
developing a nuclear weapon. As a signer of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is subject to inspections and has
complied with the terms of the treaty. The wrangling with the U.S.
government is over Iran’s wish to do what that treaty says it may
do: enrich uranium for medical and energy purposes.Finally, Hagel was grilled over his previous criticism of the
surge in Iraq. Again he backed away from it. The surge has become
part of the empire’s sacred faith, and doubting its success won’t
be tolerated.In fact, the success is a myth. What diminished the violence in
Iraq was the Shi’ite completion of sectarian cleansing in Baghdad
and U.S. payments to Sunni leaders to wipe out the local al-Qaeda
militants. The political goals of the surge were largely
unachieved, and sectarian violence continues to this day.Dissidents beware. Hagel’s treatment and performance indicate
that even a little dissent from the establishment foreign policy
can be a bad career move.This article originally
appeared at The Future of Freedom Foundation. … Read More
http://www.youtube.com/v/Zi9qAQir–c?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Link - Syrian rebels make major gain in Aleppo
Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into
Prosperity, by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne,
Berrett-Koehler, 288 pages, $27.95.In the charming town of Great Barrington, among the hills of
Berkshire County in western Massachusetts, you can buy antiques,
organic produce, and gourmet pizza. If you want, you can pay for
them with the most successful local currency in the United States,
the “Berkshare.” Denominated in U.S. dollars and accepted at more
than a hundred establishments in and around the county, Berkshares
are issued by a local non-profit group and can be exchanged for
dollars at the branches of local banks. Anyone who recognizes that
money is naturally a creature of commerce, not government, has to
admire the way that the Berkshares project keeps some of the profit
on currency from going to the Federal Reserve System and the U.S.
Treasury. Private banknotes circulated just about everywhere in the
19th century. Like the private notes that continue to circulate
today in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Hong Kong, Berkshares show
by example that privately issued currency remains feasible in the
21st century as well.In Rethinking Money, economist Bernard Lietaer and
journalist Jacqui Dunne offer interesting accounts of community
currency projects more or less like Berkshares around the world.
But they admire them for rather different reasons. The dominant
monetary system is problematic, in their view, because it
“perpetuates scarcity and breeds competition,” stifles cooperation,
makes life stressful, concentrates wealth at the top, causes
financial instability, and threatens the environment. It does so
chiefly because the need to pay interest is “structurally embedded”
in the system. In many ways their new book is a popular restatement
of the message of Lietaer’s 2001 book The Future of Money.
A reader who approaches either book hoping to find common ground
with modern arguments for free banking will unfortunately find very
little.Today’s government-dominated
monetary and financial systems do of course exhibit instability.
But the book’s other indictments of them are more dubious.
Any monetary system “perpetuates” (does not abolish)
“scarcity,” as economists use the term, and so too does any barter
system. Scarcity, meaning that we do not have enough time and
resources to accomplish all of our imaginable goals, is an
ineluctable feature of human life. Competition is not a problem:
Indeed, to bring about greater prosperity we need more
competition, not less, and especially so in money and banking.
Freer competition promotes rather than stifles greater social
cooperation. Free-market banking and money-issue would end the
government’s monopoly on basic money and its control over the
interbank transfer system. It would end both special privileges for
commercial banks and special restrictions on their activities.
Greater efficiency, stability, and prosperity would follow. But to
think that “monetary scarcity can be a thing of the past” is to
engage in wishful thinking.The book’s greatest conceptual problem is its confused thinking
about interest rates. It gives only passing lip service to the key
non-monetary reasons that interest rates are positive apart from
risk. It fails to understand the vital role that interest rates
play as signals of the time-value of resources. To the authors,
interest is “a built-in feature of the monetary system.” They write
that the discounting of future goods “is due only to the interest
feature of the money used,” as though interest—and its flip side,
discounting—would not exist under barter or in a monetary economy
using only coins (as in the centuries before money-issuing banks).
In place of an economic argument they offer a parable suggesting
that interest is due to the scarcity of money, and that the
scarcity of money is an artificial contrivance, even a conspiracy,
to force people to pay interest. From this staring point they
proceed to a number of false conclusions.The authors declare ruefully: “Debt-based money requires endless
growth because borrowers must find additional money to pay back the
interest on their debt.” This sentence harbors multiple confusions.
“Debt-based money” refers to checking account balances, which are
spendable IOUs owed by banks to their checking depositors. There is
no 1:1 correspondence between checking accounts (one kind of bank
liability) and bank loans (one kind of bank asset). Banks use only
some of the funds given to them by depositors to make loans; the
rest they mostly use to purchase securities and to hold reserves.
Meanwhile “borrowers” in our economy have many debts to non-bank
lenders, such as consumer and car loans from finance companies and
home mortgages held by investors in mortgage-backed securities.
What borrowers must do to repay their loans is independent of
whether the loans are funded by bank deposits.The notion that bank lending creates a shortage of income needed
to repay the loans with interest (the point of the above-mentioned
parable) is a very old fallacy. It implies that banks burn their
interest income. In fact they recycle it by paying out interest to
depositors, wages to employees, and (to the extent that profit is
left over) dividends to shareholders. There is no need to print
extra money each period so that borrowers can pay their debts.Even without bank-issued money, risk-free interest rates are
normally positive. They are positive even in an economy that is not
growing. They are positive so long as savers are impatient at the
margin (preferring one more unit now to one more unit later) when
given a zero reward for waiting, and investors have opportunities
to produce more output by taking more time. People who want shelter
(say) are naturally willing to pay more to get 1,000 board-feet of
lumber delivered today than to get 1,000 identical board-feet
delivered 10 years from now.It only discredits a case for monetary reform to found it on the
paranoid notion that it is sinister to pay a premium for present
stuff when borrowing, or receive one when lending. We do need
decentralizing monetary reform, but it is vain to hope that
monetary reform would abolish the premium on present goods.The authors’ account of how fractional-reserve banking works is
about half correct, half erroneous. They correctly note that banks
fund their loans partly with the money lent to them in the form of
checking account balances. But they commit a non sequitur when they
say that if all bank loans were repaid then “money would simply
disappear.” Not only would the basic circulating currency still
exist, but banks could and presumably would use checking account
funds (to a greater extent than they already do) to purchase and
hold securities instead of making loans.The fourth chapter begins with an epigraph suggesting that any
scarcity of money is artificial, attributed (but with no specific
publication cited) to the American poet and fascist Ezra Pound. I
could not find the quotation in Pound’s works. Pound did denounce
interest as “usury” and issued a booklet entitled Social
Credit: An Impact promoting the crackpot ideas of the
inflationist Major C.H. Douglas. Ezra Pound and Major Douglas are
not reliable sources for understanding or reforming money.But Lietaer and Dunne have little use for orthodox economics.
They declare that economists share a “collective blindness” because
they “define money by what it does…rather than what it
is.” This is a curious charge given that they themselves
tacitly adopt the same approach some pages later, defining money as
“not a material object” but anything commonly accepted as a medium
of exchange. They assert that textbooks and “traditional economics”
have “never decoupled” the various roles of money (conventionally
listed as commonly accepted medium of exchange, unit of account,
and store of value) and have never questioned “the assumption that
the same monetary tool is needed to play all three roles.” It is a
shame that the authors are unaware of the
large economics literature since 1980
that has in fact debated the feasibility and
desirability of payment systems that decouple the media of
exchange from the unit of account and the medium of redemption.The authors create a conceptual muddle when they characterize
the status quo system as grounded on “fiat, scarcity-based,
interest-bearing national currencies.” Fiat, yes. Scarcity-based?
Economic reality is scarcity-based, so in that sense all workable
kinds of money are scarcity-based. Interest-bearing, no. Federal
Reserve notes do not pay interest, nor do any nation’s fiat
currency notes. (The Fed has begun paying interest on bank
reserves, but the authors never refer to that.) Elsewhere they
write of “the monopoly of one type of money, namely, national
currencies, all created through bank debt.” National currencies
like Federal Reserve notes are irredeemable fiat currencies,
created by slapping ink on paper, and not debt. Checking
accounts are bank debt, but their creation is not a monopoly.The book embraces community currency projects that charge a
“demurrage fee” for holding a currency note too long, to penalize
its use as a store of value and thereby to confine its use to that
of a rapidly circulating medium of exchange. This idea is
historically associated with Silvio Gesell, not cited in the book,
another monetary crackpot.In sum, Rethinking Money misses the opportunity to
mount an effective critique of our monopolistic monetary system and
propose reforms that can appeal to both progressive and libertarian
critics of central government domination. Lietaer and Dunne could
have developed an interesting critique and positive program from
their correct observations that conventional economists fail to
critically examine the government’s present monopoly issue of basic
money, and that such a system has the fragility of an undiversified
ecosystem. They unfortunately never mention F.A. Hayek’s
unconventional work The Denationalization of Money, nor
any of the literature of the last 30 years concerning non-fiat,
redeemability-based free banking. They might also have drawn on
Nassim Taleb’s very relevant observations on the fragility of our
financial system due to one-size-fits-all regulation and
“too-big-to-fail” policies. The path to greater prosperity that
they offer is paved with sincere intentions but illuminated by
moonbeams. … Read More
Turkish officers are resigning en masse to avoid arrest and sentencing for conspiracy against the government. The cabinet of PM Erdogan is winning the decade-long battle with country’s once almighty generals, journalist Andrew Finkel tells RT.Mass detentions of both serving and retired officers have been taking place in Turkey over the last decade. The country’s media is closely following a number of trials against top brass accused of plotting against the ruling government. Over at least the past half a century, the Turkish armed forces have been notorious for regular interference in domestic politics, organizing several coups to displace governments and generally having great influence on the political landscape.Turkish high brass has always been proud of staying guard of the secular nature of the Turkish state, the legacy of the founder of modern Republic of Turkey, the iconic first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.But when in 2002 Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) won nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament, the situation changed dramatically.The new prime minister of Turkey and his party, considered moderately Islamist, felt vulnerable towards an armed forces with traditionally strong political positions. The power struggle between Erdogan’s government and the military was predetermined, Andrew Finkel, journalist and author of “Turkey: What everyone needs to know”, told RT. In the eyes of the military the AKP symbolized the threat to Turkey’s secularism, whereas Erdogan’s party eyed the armed forces as a dictator that has been telling the country what to do for too long.The ruling party and its leader began a gradual consolidation of power which, in several years’ time, ended with the initiation of a massive legal assault on the recent determiners of the country’s fate.The first was heard in Turkey in July 2011, when navy, army and air force commanders stepped down over a rift with the Erdogan government. This was a result of multiple arrests of officers accused of plotting a coup against the government, with proven Islamic roots, reports at the time said.Despite that, Turkey continued arresting officers and initiating a number of conspiracy trials against the top brass.In September 2012, after a 21-month trial, a court sentenced three former army generals to 20 years (initially lifetime sentence) each in prison for plotting a coup. The court stated that the defendants were planning to wage a war with neighboring Greece and organize explosions in Turkish mosques to justify a coup d’état against Erdogan’s government almost a decade ago.Together with the generals, nearly 330 officers, including senior ones, were convicted for the would-be coup. All the defendants denied the charges as unfair and unlawful, claiming the evidence had been fabricated.Hundreds more Turkish officers remain on trial right now on a number of conspiracy cases against the state.“Altogether, about 15 per cent of the top brass, that is colonels and generals, actually are on trial,” Finkel told RT. “This is the main cause of this major disillusionment within the army.”According to media reports, around 10 per cent of all Turkish 348 generals and admirals are currently locked behind bars.Exodus revitalizedIn late January 2013 the exodus of Turkish officers from the army was given a new push. Turkey’s number-two naval commander Admiral Nusret Guner resigned, allegedly over the detention of hundreds of his colleagues. His premature voluntary retirement sparked yet another wave of resignations.“In the past few years my comrades in arms, some of whom I know very closely and about whose patriotism I have never felt the slightest doubt, have been found guilty through verdicts handed down by courts in the name of the nation,” Nusret Guner said, delivering a farewell speech to his colleagues. He also said he had demanded to be allowed to resign last September, immediately after the sensat
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ional coup d’état trial, but his submission was not granted.Among other reasons, the admiral explained he wanted to retire as soon as possible because “a series of plots involving me could be constructed,” he said.According to reports, some 110 Turkish Air Force officers followed the example of the commander’s resignation.“I think these pilots have decided ‘well, no one really loves us, we’ve served the 10 years minimum time, let’s just take our pensions and get a better job in a private sector’,” Finkel supposed.In the meantime Erdogan’s Turkey has been actively supporting the rebel side in the Syrian civil war, though traditionally Ankara maintained good relations with Damascus.Turkey has even been considering a military interference into the Syrian national affairs, but in the end opted not to do so.Still, Ankara’s support to Syrian rebels promises to backfire on Turkey rather soon, as Kurdish separatists dreaming of the state of their own got much more active in both Turkey and Syria. And since the heaviest burden of confronting the armed attacks of the Kurdish militants lay on the Turkish army, the worsening personnel policy in Turkish army might create serious problems of directing troops in the nearest future.In November 2012, Syrian President Bashar Assad told RT in an exclusive interview that Turkish PM Recep Erdogan believes “he is a caliph and the new sultan of the Ottoman Empire.” Back then Assad noted that Erdogan’s policies led to “zero friends”. … Read More
http://www.youtube.com/v/umD6BVNCTmQ?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Visit site: Syrian rebels make gains in Aleppo city
