EU-DIGEST

Airbus to sell five A380s to Japan's ANA

Airbus is expected to sell five A380 superjumbo aircraft to All Nippon Airways Co (ANA), its first sale of the world's biggest passenger plane to a Japanese airline, the Nikkei business daily reported on Friday. A sale in Japan would be a big breakthrough for the European plane maker, a unit of European aerospace group EADS, as it has only about 4 percent of Japan's market, compared with a half share elsewhere.

The Coming Attack on Iran: A Perfect Storm of Madness- by Bernard Weiner

The question is not whether Iran will be attacked, but by whom and whether the bombing will commence within the next several months or shortly after the November election.The neocons argue that if Iran is not stopped now, America will lose all hopes of future influence and control in the oil-rich region. Iran would become one of the most powerful, and likely anti-U.S., players in the Greater Middle East, with all the military, economic and oil-based implications that such hegemonic power brings with it. In short, say the neocons, it's vital to stop Iran in its tracks now while the stopping is still possible. Once Iran has operational nuclear-tipped missiles -- which could be a mere ten years down the line, or less -- the entire equation would change.

RUSSIA'S NEW SOUL: by Mehri Madarshahi

Putin as President was interested in concrete actions. He believed in the free market as a good model for advancing the human condition and society. These traditions are expected to continue and even strengthen under the presidency of Medvedev who is facing the formidable challenges of maintaining the momentum of the last 8 years and to control the looming inflation. Russia’s high academic tradition, its cultural life, its huge natural resources, its energy technologies and its strategic and political power, have a lot to offer to the rest of the world. An engaged Russia as part of a multipolar world, could greatly facilitate international cooperation and give rise to a changed world. With incentives from its Western partners there is no reason to fear –as projected in some recent confrontational campaign posture- a lapse into cold war policies and rhetoric. To the contrary – engagement with the new Russia should be in the interest of a stable and predictable international system, an incentive that Russia cannot refuse!

Global Suprasociety and Russia. The Soviet Counter-Revolution: Large-scale Subversive Operation by the West- by Prof. Aleksandr Zinovyev

Today the global suprasociety, rather than a bunch of money-bags, actually governs the world. Of course, this suprasociety employs the financial machine of the Western world, using it as a means of ruling the West and the rest of mankind. But finance alone is not enough to control the West with its nearly billion people, let alone the rest of the world with nearly five billion. To do it, the suprasociety requires powerful armed forces, political machinery, secret services and mass media. It needs to have instruments to compel national governments to grant it free disposal of national resources of each country.In fact, all the Western societies, including the USA, are the field of the global monster's activity. Its head, 'the world government', is in the USA. This country therefore becomes the headquarters for exercising the world power, the chief recruiter of punitive armed forces, the forge of commanding and ideological executives of the world masters.

Big Oil's 'secret' out of Iraq's closet - by Pepe Escobar

It is not about the "war on terror". It is not about weapons of mass destruction. It is not about "freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people", or to the "Afghan people". It is not about "Islamofascism". It is not about a Pentagon-coined "arc of instability" from the Middle East to Central Asia. New evidence shows once again both George W Bush administration wars - in Afghanistan and Iraq - above all are about oil and gas. But now the US and European Big Oil majors that controlled the Iraqi oil industry up to the 1972 nationalization - today represented by Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron - seem to be back with a vengeance. Thus the New York Times, for instance, can redeem itself from printing Ahmad Chalabi-fed weapons-of-mass-destruction nonsense on its front page for months and actually engage in news that's fit to print. This past Monday, the paper reported that "a group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq".

It ain't over till the fat (oil) lady sings. But if the Bush administration "vision" of a perpetual Iraqi puppet regime, with its oil wealth confiscated and under the imperial boot, takes hold, alongside the Taliban having a long pipeline to play with in Afghanistan, the least one can expect is a lot more blood on the tracks.

Arrests fuel Turkey coup rumblings

A senior Turkish general called for calm yesterday after two prominent retired generals were detained in a widening police investigation into a suspected coup plot against the Government. "Turkey is passing through difficult days. We all have to be acting with more common sense, more carefully and more responsibly," land forces commander General Ilker Basbug, who is the second-most powerful general in the Turkish military, said yesterday. Police detained 21 people on Tuesday as part of an investigation into Ergenekon, a shadowy, ultra-nationalist and hard-line secularist group suspected of planning bombings and assassinations calculated to trigger an army takeover.

TURKEY - Court Challenge for Leaders

The deputy prime minister defended his party in court against charges that it was steering Turkey toward Islamic rule. Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, wants to disband the governing Justice and Development Party and ban Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and 70 other party members from politics for five years. Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek argued in the party’s defense. The party has been locked in a power struggle with secular groups supported by the military, the judiciary and other state institutions.

U.S. economy sheds more jobs

U.S. employers cut their payrolls by 62,000 jobs in June, marking the sixth straight month of job losses for the weak U.S. economy. The unemployment rate for June held steady at 5.5 per cent, the U.S. Labor Department said Thursday. Last month's job loss was slightly larger than the 60,000 reduction that economists had been projecting. They had also forecast the unemployment rate to ease to 5.4 per cent.

Controversial GM Bankruptcy Rumors Gain Steam

"General Motors Corp will need to raise as much as $15 billion in cash to shore up liquidity and bankruptcy is 'not impossible' if the U.S. auto market continues to slump," according to the Merrill Lynch analysis. "Other analysts have suggested GM, whose shares fell to a new 54-year low on Wednesday, needs to raise funds to ride out the downturn in the U.S. auto market through 2009." The London Times notes, "The warning by John Murphy, a Merrill Lynch analyst, follows an 18 per cent fall in GM’s sales last month and a cut in its planned production for the current quarter. The note from Mr. Murphy said: 'Bankruptcy is not impossible if the market continues to deteriorate and significant incremental capital is not raised.'"

The ECB Pulls the Rate-Hike Trigger citing inflation risks

Unlike the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank has one policy mandate: maintaining price stability. And the ECB put its money where its mouth is on July 3, raising its benchmark interest rate 25 basis points to 4.25%. The Swedish Riksbank also raised its benchmark rate 25 basis points, to 4.5%, earlier in the day. The ECB's move was widely expected by financial markets. Recent hawkish comments and the reaction to rising overall interest rates in the euro zone, along with stronger economic data, at least from Germany, had changed expectations to a rate hike in recent months.

Sex in Europe - European Sex and Prostitution - by Durant Imboden

Forget history and culture: To judge from what readers are ogling on my travel site, sex and prostitution are the main reasons for visiting Europe. Of the more than 2,500 pages at Europe for Visitors, only a few (perhaps a dozen) are about sexual topics. Yet those pages are among my most popular--a fact that probably shouldn't be surprising, since most guidebooks and online travel sites give short shrift to Red Light Districts and other topics that earlier generations might have termed "racy."

Colombia Frees Betancourt, US Hostages in Daring Operation - Betancourt thanks France

Colombian forces freed French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages from FARC rebels on Wednesday, July 2, after military spies tricked captors into giving them up without a single injury. Betancourt's captors were duped by a Colombian military team posing as rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Santos said the military intelligence agents infiltrated the guerrilla ranks and led the local commander in charge of the hostages, alias Cesar, to believe they were going to take them by helicopter to Alfonso Cano, the guerrillas' supreme leader.

Ingrid Betancourt said she will travel to France to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy now that she is free, as she credits her survival of the ordeal to efforts by the French to press for her release. First she will be reunited with her family in Colombia.

Bubbles, risk, crunch and war - by Cyrus Bina and Fernando Dachevsky

Cyrus Bina, distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and author of The Economics of the Oil Crisis, discusses with Argentinean journalist Fernando Dachevsky the "unique and universal" economic crisis confronting the world, from its underlying causes to the "practical joke" solutions offered to the oil crisis by President George W Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

The fallacy of supply-side economics and the myth of self-correcting markets, therefore, culminated in idealism of benign neglect and the straight-jacket practice of neo-liberal ideology. The resultant speculative bubbles in the US real estate, mortgage institutions, collateralized debt market, asset-backed commercial paper market, and debt-obligation insurance market sequentially burst in the face of US authorities, before they hit the public and surpassed the boundaries of the United States - via the transnational channels.

The European Union is now trying to deal with the aftereffect of the US financial debacle. European banks attempted to write down more than US$200 billion of debt obligation, following the US mortgage defaults, thus revealing the tiny tip of the liquidity crisis in view of tight credit market. To date, the write-downs for a few major banks in Germany and Switzerland are some $23 billion, and they certainly will increase by the time the dust settles.

Labels: EU Economy, Supply Side Economics, US Economy