GEAB - Global Systemic Crisis: Decimation of the Western banks

By GEAB 

Global Research, November 16, 2011

Global Europe Economic Anticipation Bulletin (GEAB) No 58 

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27706

As anticipated by LEAP/E2020, the second half of 2011 is seeing the world continuing its unstoppable descent into global geopolitical dislocation characterized by the convergence of monetary, financial, economic, social, political and strategic crises. After 2010 and early 2011 which has seen the myth of a recovery and exit from the crisis shattered, it's now uncertainty that dominates the States’ decision-making processes just like businesses and individuals, inevitably generating increasing apprehension for the future. The context singularly lends itself: social explosions, political paralysis and / or instability, return to the global recession, fear over banks, currency war, the disappearance of more than ten trillion USD in ghost-assets in three months, widespread lasting and rising unemployment... 

Besides, it’s this very unhealthy financial environment that will cause the "decimation (1) of Western banks" in the first half of 2012: with their profitability in freefall, balance sheets in disarray, with the disappearance of trillions of USD assets, with states increasingly pushing for strict regulation of their activities (2), even placing them under public supervision and increasingly hostile public opinion, now the scaffold has been erected and at least 10% of Western banks (3) will have to pass that way in the coming quarters. 

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Mizuho Aoki - Cesium Fallout From Fukushima Plant Widespread

Published on Thursday, November 17, 2011 by the Japan Times

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20111117x2.html

by Mizuho Aoki

Radioactive cesium from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may have reached as far as Hokkaido, Shikoku and the Chugoku region in the west, according to a recent simulation by an international research team.

Large areas of eastern and northeastern Japan were likely contaminated by the plant, with concentrations of cesium-137 exceeding 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of soil in some places, says the study, which was posted Monday on the website of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers for the U.S.-based organization said the study, which was based on partial data readings, is the first to estimate potential cesium contamination across the country. But they also played down the incident's impact on the three distant regions.

"The levels are not something that should raise concerns over agricultural production or human health," Ryugo Hayano, chairman of the physics department at the University of Tokyo, said in an email interview with The Japan Times.

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Robert Scheer - The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_villain_occupy_wall_street_has_been_waiting_for_20111117/

Posted on Nov 17, 2011

By Robert Scheer

In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the top. What is so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed, and benefited as much as anyone from it, has no compunction about ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” that he helped to create.

You would think that a former partner at the investment bank Solomon Brothers, which originated mortgage-backed securities, a man who then partnered with Merrill Lynch in the high-speed computerized trading that has led to so much financial manipulation, would have some sense of his own culpability. Or at least that someone whose Wall Street career left him with a net worth of $19.5 billion would grasp the deep irony of his being the instrument for smashing Occupy Wall Street, the internationally acknowledged symbol of opposition to corporate avarice.

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Rousbeh Legatis - A Rising Sea Threatens Pacific Islands

Wednesday 16 November 2011

by: Rousbeh Legatis, Inter Press Service

http://www.truth-out.org/rising-sea-threatens-pacific-islands/1321454979

New York - As world leaders gear up to spend the coming weeks in South Africa haggling over economically bearable cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is already exacerbating environmental conditions and threatening the lives and livelihoods of thousands of Pacific Islanders.

Diversity characterises the Pacific region, with its approximately 30,000 islands – of which 1,000 are considered to be populated – scattered across the world's largest ocean, which covers nearly a third of the earth's surface.

"Right now, sea level rise is a reality but also a phenomenon which currently occurs in millimetres each year," pointed out John Silk, minister of foreign affairs of the Marshall Islands, at aconference [4] in May at Columbia Law School in New York.

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Bill McKibben - Obama’s Positive Flip and Romney’s Negative Flop

Posted on November 15, 2011, Printed on November 17, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175468/

Is Global Warming an Election Issue After All? 
By Bill McKibben

Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election, which may effectively kill the project, makes it clear that other issues will weigh in -- and that, oddly enough, one of them might even be climate change.

The pipeline decision was a true upset.  Everyone -- and I mean everyone who "knew" how these things work -- seemed certain that the president would approve it. The National Journal runs a weekly poll of “energy insiders” -- that is, all the key players in Washington. A month to the day before the Keystone XL postponement, this large cast of characters was “virtually unanimous” in guaranteeing that it would be approved by year’s end.

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Pat Garofalo - House GOP Classifies Pizza as a Vegetable

Tuesday 15 November 2011

by: Pat Garofalo , Think Progress

http://www.truth-out.org/house-gop-classifies-pizza-vegetable/1321458577

Earlier this year, the USDA made an attempt [4] to bolster the nutrition guidelines for the federal school lunch program. Under the new guidelines, for instance, school lunches would be limited to one cup of starchy vegetables a week and the ability of schools to count tomato sauce on pizza towards their fruit and vegetables requirement would be scaled back [5]. But House Republicans, in a new spending plan unveiled yesterday, have done away with those changes [6]:

The spending bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The department’s proposed guidelines would have attempted to prevent that.

The changes had been requested by food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers. Some conservatives in Congress have called the push for healthier foods an overreach, saying the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat.

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Alice Karekezi - How PTSD Took Over America

By Alice Karekezi, Salon

Posted on November 16, 2011, Printed on November 17, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153106/how_ptsd_took_over_america

In the past 30 years, post-traumatic stress disorder has gone from exotic rarity to omnipresent. Once chiefly applied to wartime veterans returning from combat, it is now a much more common diagnosis, still linked to traumatic events but now including those occurring outside the battle zone: the death of a loved one on a hospital bed, a car crash on the highway, an assault in the neighborhood park. Many would argue that this is a good thing: greater recognition of psychologically distressing events will lead to more people seeking treatment and a decrease in the preponderance of PTSD – a win-win.

Stephen Joseph disagrees. In his new book, “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” the professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham (in the U.K.) warns that our culture’s acceptance of PTSD has become excessive and has led to an over-medicalization of experiences that should be considered part of ordinary, normal, human experience. This has kept us from proactively working through our grief and anxiety: We’ve become too quick to go to the shrink expecting him to fix us, rather than allowing ourselves the opportunity to grow and find new meaning in our lives as a result of painful, but common, events. Joseph advocates for a push toward post-traumatic growth as therapy to treat the stress of trauma, which he distinguishes as being different from the hokey, blue skies and rainbows, pop psychology that he claims has exploded in our culture in the past decade.

Joseph spoke to Salon over the phone to discuss our misunderstanding of the disorders, the meaning and usefulness of suffering, and if some cultures are more prone to PTSD than others.

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Barry Grey - OECD Says Economic Slump Will Deepen Throughout the World

By Barry Grey 

Global Research, November 16, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27698 

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report Monday forecasting a further slowdown in the world’s largest economies. The Paris-based group comprises 34 countries, nearly all the major industrialized countries, but excluding China, Brazil and India. 

The OECD’s survey of composite leading indicators (CLIs) for September, which predicts economic trends some six months in advance, shows economic activity slowing in North America, Europe, major parts of South America and most of Asia, including China. 

The OECD report is the latest in a series of economic analyses and forecasts indicating that the anemic recovery from the financial crash and recession of 2008-2009 has run its course and is giving way to a new and even deeper global economic slump. 

The organization said the CLI index for its member countries—including the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand—fell to 100.4 in September from 100.9 in August. It was the seventh straight monthly decline in the CLI for OECD states. The measure for major developing countries outside the organization also pointed to a further slowdown. 

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[Video] Vaccines - The Toxic Truth by Gary Null

Learn the TRUTH about vaccination and the Big Pharma Coverup in this video compilation by Gary Null.

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