Europe: Prison of Nations

Riots swept across Eastern Europe this winter. In Latvia 100 were arrested when they attacked the Finance Ministry with cobblestones from the quaintly restored tourist area protesting unemployment, budget and wage cuts. In Lithuania, riot police fired rubber-bullets and tear gas on a trade union march. A demonstration in the Bulgarian capital turned violent leading to the arrest of 150 protesters. These three states are all members of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM2), the euro’s pre-detention cell. They must join.

Polish economy tumbles as global investors take flight

The international economic crisis is having a devastating impact on eastern European countries. Poland and the Czech Republic, whose economies until recently had been considered stable, are both being hit by mounting unemployment. Although the economic upturn over the last decade was achieved mainly at the expense of the working class, the government is moving to impose the cost of the current economic crisis completely onto the shoulders of the population.

Balkans: Staging Ground For NATO’s Post-Cold War Order

The world hasn’t begun to recover from the events of 1991, a true annus terribilis whose watershed nature was insufficiently appreciated at the time and has been practically ignored since.

The year initiated the first attempt in history to enforce worldwide military, political, economic and cultural unipolarity; the advent in earnest of neoliberalism with all the devastating economic and social consequences it has wrought since then; the genesis of US-led and Western-supported air, ground, counterinsurgency and proxy wars against defenseless targets from the Middle East to the Balkans, South Asia to Africa.

Polska Została Sprzedana

Polska została sprzedana. To co już nastąpiło i to co nadchodzi jest dokładnym przeciwieństwem celów, jakie na początku lat 80-tych stawiała sobie “Solidarność”.

Next Wave of Banking Crisis to come from Eastern Europe

European banks face an entirely new wave of losses in coming months not yet calculated in any government bank rescue aid to date. Unlike the losses of US banks which derive initially from their exposures to low-quality sub-prime real estate and other securitized lending, the problems of western European banks, most especially in Austria, Sweden and perhaps Switzerland arise from the massive volumes of loans they made during the 2002-2007 period of extreme low international interest rates to clients in eastern European countries.

Israel ready to launch a military offensive against Iran

On February 14, Australian News Agency “The Age” reported:

A SENIOR Israeli diplomat has warned that Israel is ready to launch a military offensive against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

In an interview with The Age, Dan Gillerman, who was Israel’s permanent representative at the United Nations from 2003 until last September, said time for diplomatic efforts to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear capability might have already expired.

“The world cannot afford to live with a nuclear Iran,” Mr Gillerman said.

Washington morons are steering the Ship of Fools into the vortex

Is there intelligent life in Washington, DC? Not a speck of it.

The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his government of neconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, America’s largest creditor. 

Moscow, Tehran force the US’s hand

It may seem there could be nothing in common between the blowing up of a bridge in the Khyber, the usage of an air base nestling in the foothills of the Pamirs and the launch of a 60-pound satellite into the night sky that will circle the Earth 14 times a day. But band them together and they trigger the political and diplomatic equivalent of what is known in the game of chess as zwischenzug, which means an intermediate move that improves a player’s position.