TheJoker
August 8, 2011, 1:08am
83
WASHINGTON (AFP) - President Barack Obama’s former top economic advisor warned Sunday of a new recession, attacking the recent US credit downgrade as an unwarranted piling on atop an already weak economy.
Larry Summers, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, joined the Obama administration in criticizing Standard & Poor’s first-ever downgrade of the US credit rating from AAA to AA+.
Summers insisted the country could pay its bills and repeated allegations from administration officials that S&P’s decision to downgrade was linked to a $2 trillion error in its calculations and its use of a faulty baseline.
“S&P’s track record has been terrible and its arithmetic has been worse,” he told the CNN political talk show “State of the Union.”
Summers said the major credit ratings agency acted out of “unhappiness with the solutions that are coming out of Congress for critical economic problems,” but added that “the United States is going to pay its debts.”
He went on to say, however, that rather than blame the S&P, US leaders should focus on speeding up the economic recovery, getting Americans back to work and avoiding a dreaded double-dip recession.1
He also defended Obama’s $800 billion 2009 stimulus package, saying: “There’s certainly a risk of recession, but God knows if we had not pursued these policies, we would be looking at another version of what happened in the 1930s,” referring to the Great Depression.
The United States has struggled to recover from its worst downturn in decades, the 2008-2009 recession triggered by the burst of a housing bubble.
S&P argued that the direction of the country’s debt load and rising fiscal deficits meant it could no longer be included among the world’s most risk-worthy sovereign borrowers.
Critics have cited S&P’s various upbeat assessments of companies and debt instruments weeks before they failed – including the packaged mortgage securities that sparked the 2008 financial collapse.
activistpost.com/2011/08/ex- … .html#more
Moreno
August 8, 2011, 1:12am
84
For conspiracy interested…
Now at least many of the people who were in the raid that supposedly killed him are now dead…
forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/08/ … 06117.html
TheJoker
August 8, 2011, 1:26am
85
Moreno:
For conspiracy interested…
Now at least many of the people who were in the raid that supposedly killed him are now dead…
forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/08/ … 06117.html
Weird, right? That doesn’t strike me as conspiracy at all…
TheJoker
August 8, 2011, 2:04am
86
Even as it finds itself still embroiled in Libya, NATO is preparing to launch a military assault on Syria in order to create a beachhead for a future attack on Iran, claims Russia’s envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin.
“The planning [of the military campaign] is well underway. It could be a logical conclusion of those military and propaganda operations, which have been carried out by certain Western countries against North Africa,” Rogozin said in an interview with the Izvestia newspaper published on Friday.
The envoy added that attacks on Syria and Yemen were part of a build-up focused around regime change in Iran.
“The noose around Iran is tightening. Military planning against Iran is underway. And we are certainly concerned about an escalation of a large-scale war in this huge region,” Rogozin said.
Rogozin has been known to make embellished statements about NATO’s military adventurism in the past, so whether there will actually be an intervention in Syria remains to be seen.
Moscow has consistently warned NATO not to meddle in Syria, saying the country should be left to resolve its own problems as violence that has killed 1,600 civilians since March continues to plague the country.
Speculation surrounding an attack Iran, which Rogozin claims is the long term goal of the assault on Syria, has peaked in recent weeks.
Efforts by Palestinian leaders to achieve full statehood, set to be heard by the United Nations in early September, has prompted speculation that Israel is planning a surgical strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities in September as a means of distracting from and ultimately derailing the prospect of such an agreement.
Last month, former CIA agent Robert Baer said that comments made by former Mossad head Meir Dagan “tell us with near certainty that Netanyahu is planning an attack, and in as much as I can guess when it’s going to be, it’s probably going to be in September before a vote on the Palestinian state.”
infowars.com/russian-envoy-n … yria-iran/
Regarding the helicopter attack, that was also my first reaction (and I agree with the interpretation of “Osama” being buried at sea) but now they’re claiming that the people who did kill , eh, whoever it was, were not in the helicopter.
Let’s consider though that war is per definition dirty, secretive and has nothing to do with noble government representing social virtues. It’s one big sacrifice of life and truth in order to gain resources and sell weapons.
Whatever it was that they did or didn’t do in Abottabad, it’s hopefully an excuse to begin to withdraw some troops and close a chapter. All the pipelines are in place it seems.
oh…yeah