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Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 20 February 2020 07:20.
Salvini quotes Ezra Pound, “If a man is not ready to fight for his ideas, either his ideas are worthless, or he is,”
Italian ethnonationalist leader Matteo Salvini is to stand trial on charges of illegally detaining migrants at sea after senators voted Wednesday to strip him of his parliamentary immunity.
A court in Sicily recommended that former interior minister Salvini stand trial for blocking migrants from disembarking from a coast guard boat last July.
But ministers cannot be tried for actions taken while in office unless their parliamentary immunity is revoked.
The Senate’s decision sends the chief of the anti-immigrant League party to trial for abuse of power and illegal detention, charges for which he faces up to 15 years in jail.
“I have defended Italy. I have full and total faith in the justice system,” Salvini told ANSA news agency after the vote.
“I am not worried at all, and I’m proud of what I’ve done,” he said, adding he would “do it again when I get back into power.”
Salvini had refused to allow 116 rescued migrants to leave the Gregoretti coast guard boat – where they had been languishing for about a week in insalubrious conditions – until a deal was reached with other European states to host them.
A Catania court accused him of “abuse of power” in blocking them on board from July 27 to July 31 last year, and of illegally detaining them.
Salvini insists the decision had the backing of the government and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
‘Head Held High’
Before the debate began, Salvini took to Facebook to say he had his “head held high, with the calm conscience of those who have defended their land and people.”
“If a man is not ready to fight for his ideas, either his ideas are worthless, or he is,” Salvini wrote, quoting Ezra Pound, a 20th-century American poet known for his fascist sympathies.
The Gregoretti on July 25 took on board 140 migrants who were trying to make the perilous crossing from war-torn Libya to Europe – the same day 110 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 19 February 2020 07:13.
Prior to his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky (in photo with first Russian President Boris Yeltsin) funded several Russian parties, including the Communist Party, most of which were in competition with each other. Voltairenet.org
A Dutch appeals court on Tuesday (18 February) overturned the annulment of a $50 billion award to shareholders in the now defunct Russian oil giant Yukos, a surprise ruling 13 years after the assets came under control of the Kremlin.
Yukos Oil went bankrupt in 2006 after its former chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky fell out with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the government began demanding billions of dollars in back taxes that ultimately resulted in its being expropriated by the state.
Tuesday’s verdict reinstates a decision by The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ordering the Russian state to compensate shareholders in the company once headed by fallen oligarch Khodorkovsky. That decision had been overturned in April 2016 by The Hague District Court.
Russia’s Justice Ministry has said it will challenge the appeals court ruling at the Dutch Supreme Court.
“The (lower) court ruled in favour of the Russian Federation, but the court of appeal in The Hague today ruled that the court’s verdict is incorrect. This means that the arbitral award is again in force,” the appeals court said in a statement.
Most of Yukos’ assets were absorbed by the Kremlin’s flagship oil producer Rosneft, and its former owners have for years been trying to recover their possessions.
Legal proceedings seeking damages have been brought by GML, formerly known as Group Menatep Ltd., which held around 70% of shares in Yukos.
Rule of law
Tim Osborne, GML’s chief executive, said the latest ruling was “a victory for the rule of law.”
“The independent courts of a democracy have shown their integrity and served justice. A brutal kleptocracy has been held to account,” he said.
The PCA had ruled in July 2014 that four plaintiffs – not including Khodorkovsky – were entitled to compensation for the loss of their holdings, enabling them to go after Russian state assets.
Russian government assets in France and Belgium including bank accounts have been frozen in a row over compensation for shareholders of defunct oil giant Yukos, officials and a claimant representative said yesterday (18 June).
After refusing to sign a pledge of allegiance to the state of Israel, the state of Georgia shut down a media literacy conference featuring journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin at Georgia Southern University. Martin had recently released a documentary critical of the Israeli government called “Gaza Fights for Freedom.” Now she is suing the state, claiming the decision is a violation of the First Amendment. Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), today she filed a federal free speech lawsuit against the university system of Georgia.
Martin was dismayed by the university’s decision: “This censorship of my talk based on forced compliance to anti-BDS laws in Georgia is just one level of a nationwide campaign to protect Israel from grassroots pressure. We must stand firmly opposed to these efforts and not cower in fear to these blatant violations of free speech,” she said.
Abby Martin
✔
@AbbyMartin
After I was scheduled to give keynote speech at an upcoming @GeorgiaSouthern conference, organizers said I must comply w/ Georgia’s anti-BDS law & sign a contractual pledge to not boycott Israel. I refused & my talk was canceled. The event fell apart after colleagues supported me
Twenty-eight states have already mandated loyalty pledges to Israel as a means to outlaw dissent. But in December, President Trump passed legislation effectively criminalizing the Boycott Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to put pressure on the Jewish state through economic action, along the lines of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. The law mandates that any public institution would be subject to losing all funding if the government deems that they are not doing enough to stamp out anti-Semitism, which, it explicitly states, includes any criticism of the Israeli government. In December, MintPress reported that the British government under Boris Johnson is planning to introduce similar legislation.
“The hyperbolic notion that conservatives are the ones being persecuted on college campuses has made blatant censorship campaigns against people for criticism of Israel, or other progressive protests, go completely ignored,” Martin wrote:
CAIR’s Legal Defense Fund Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas said,
“There is no place where free speech is more important than on campus. And this attempt to suppress Abby’s views – denying students, academics, and others from hearing her lecture – is as brazen as it is illegal. In adopting this anti-BDS law, Georgia has prioritized the policy preferences of a foreign country over the free speech rights of Americans, like Abby, who speak on this state’s college campuses.”
Note: This blog is based on my notes for a speech at the Harvard Class of 1957 55th reunion in Cambridge, Mass. on May 22nd.
Armageddon was threatening the financial system on Wednesday, September 17, 2008. The largest bankruptcy in American history, that of investment bank Lehman Brothers on Monday, September 15, had roiled global markets, accelerating the stupendous decline in values of every possible investment vehicle—common stocks, corporate bonds, real estate, commodities like oil, copper and gold, private equity and hedge funds alike. In the midst of the chaos Merrill Lynch, the firm that had brought Wall Street to Main Street, was absorbed in a shotgun marriage by Bank of America BAC +0%.
Only days earlier came the recognition at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the US Treasury that AIG, the largest insurance company in the world was running out of money. This required an immediate injection of $85 billion in bail-out funds. And later another $100 billion, still not paid back to Uncle Sam.
That day, Sept 17, an even greater crisis was pending. All day long the chairman of General Electric, a company recognized across the globe as a leading industrial giant, was calling the Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson to warn that the next day, Sept. 18, that GE would no longer be able to roll over its short term debt. The American business system was on the cusp of faltering mightily. The US economy was on the brink of a precipice into the unknown.
Messrs Paulson and Bernanke, at the Fed, knew the nation could not suffer the risk of a total breakdown in industry and finance. So, they decided to instantly guarantee the $600 billion commercial paper market, which is widely used to finance day-to-day operations of all major firms. This guarantee became part of the total cost of bailing out Wall Street, which totaled over $7 trillion—when you added guarantees to loans, investments and outright grants. The bailouts were key to raising the Fed’s balance sheet from $1 trillion to $3 trillion—and to upping the nation’s total amount of debt some $5 trillion to a record $15 trillion.
Conversely, the household wealth of the nation, measured by losses in financial markets and the historic drop in residential real estate—was reduced by a sickenly humungus $12-$14 trillion at the very bottom of the whole process in March, 2009. You take that money—$12-14 trillion away from the asset side of the ledger and add another $5 trillion in debt—- and you are bound to experience a decline in the nation’s GDP and a very much slower rate of recovery from such a trauma. A recovery that could take 10 years or more according to Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. That brings us to 2018. Need I say more?
How did we reach this very near call on a total systemic breakdown?
Firstly, there were no cops on the beat. Laissez-faire free market economics was the prevailing public policy. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan spoke of irrational exuberance but took no steps to cool off markets in the late 1990s. In fact, he was asked by Loews chairman Larry Tisch and former Goldman Sachs co-chairman John Whitehead to raise the margins on trading, and refused, claiming falsely that such a move was up to the SEC—and not the Fed. Not true.
In 1999 the Glass-Steagall Act—which had separated commercial banking from investment banking for 66 years, was overturned—a move that opened the door to more speculative trading on the part of Wall Street firms.
Then, in 2000 Messrs. Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Rubin and his successor Lawrence Summers pressed to pass a bill that would prohibit the regulation of derivatives—the fastest growing and most complicated and murky new financial product. This was an incredible mistake, as derivative contracts like mortgage backed bonds and credit default swaps mushroomed in across the globe without any oversight, strict capital requirements and on an organized exchange where buying and selling were handled daily.
The result of this vacuum; no one anywhere knew who owed what to whom across the world. Despite the danger lurking in the rapid depreciation of these contracts, Bernanke publicly stated the absurd amount of sub-prime mortgages being sold to unsuspecting buyers would not spread to a much wider, deeper crisis. He didn’t know what he was talking about, sadly..
Lastly, in 2004 the major firms convinced the SEC to let them value certain assets on their balance sheet at values they chose—rather than marking them t o market—which would reveal what losses they were carrying. This added another dangerous laxity to financial regulation. The system was falsifying its accounts believing the investments would bounce back.
The entire catastrophe’s underlying theme was summed up later by this admission from former Fed chairman Greenspan . ” I made a mistake,” he admitted in a hearing, “in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.” And we made this man into the wise parental guardian of American capitalism for 18 years. We journalists, that is.
Pressed again later on, Greenspan admitted to “shocked disbelief, (because his whole) intellectual edifice had collapsed.” Naive at minimum. At worst, locked into a narrow limited ideological viewpoint that set the stage for the meltdown. Let Goldman Sachs and Citigroup master their own appetite for profits. So much for reining in animals spirits.
Secondly, the banks and investment banks were using reckless amounts of leverage. They borrowed, in many cases, $30 to $40 of debt for every dollar of capital they had. In truth, this was a recipe for disaster, since a decline of only 4% in their capital put them on the road to insolvency. It was as if you bought a million dollar house, put down a payment of $30,000 and borrowed $970,000. What sense of irrational optimism allowed this mad way of doing business.
By the fall of 2008 the decline in the value just of subprime mortgage backed bonds—which lost up to 80% of their value in the market—meant that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, Washington Mutual and Wachovia were in a state of peril. The only way to make money in bank stocks was to short them. My favorite day trader told me after it was all over that I should be worth $50 million. With the run on Lehman Bros. both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were in danger of experiencing a run on their accounts.
Perhaps AIG is the most extreme example of leverage as financial hari-kari. It had sold protection to banks and insurance companies across the globe by issuing $540 billion of credit default swaps, which meant AIG promised to make good on any losses in value of their mortgage holdings.
Salvini quotes Ezra Pound, “If a man is not ready to fight for his ideas, either his ideas are worthless, or he is,”
Prior to his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky (in photo with first Russian President Boris Yeltsin) funded several Russian parties, including the Communist Party, most of which were in competition with each other. Voltairenet.org
