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Friday, October 10, 2008 |
GlobalResearch: "Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday that Russia was shocked the UN and NATO had secretly signed a cooperation agreement without all UN member states reading the draft.
'Before such agreements are signed, their drafts should be submitted to member states for reading. But in this case this did not happen, and the agreement between the secretariats was signed secretly,' Sergei Lavrov told journalists after a CIS foreign ministers' meeting in Bishkek.
The Russian diplomat said he had asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon while at the UN General Assembly last month why such secrecy was needed but 'received no comprehensible explanation'.
He also said it was surprising that although the document implied cooperation between the two secretariats, its text contained provisions related to immediate prerogatives of member states, including the intention to cooperate in maintaining international security on the basis of the UN Charter and certain international directives.
'We asked both secretariats what this could mean and we are waiting for a reply, but we warned the UN leadership in the strictest fashion that things of this kind must be done without keeping secrets from member states and on the basis of powers and authority held by the secretariats,' Lavrov said.
He added that cooperation between the UN and regional organizations was in general a normal and necessary thing but said such ties must be transparent and arouse no questions.
Russia's envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin said late Wednesday that Ban Ki-moon and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer signed the declaration of cooperation between the secretariats on September 23 during the UN General Assembly in New York."
4:08:38 PM 
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SeattlePi: "The Dutch government said Friday it will buy the operations of Fortis NV in the Netherlands for 16.8 billion euros ($23.2 billion) after a previous bailout failed and the troubled bank teetered on the edge of insolvency.
His Belgian counterpart Didier Reynders said in Brussels that Belgium would continue to 'guarantee the solvability and the liquidity' of the remaining operations.
Fortis, once one of Europe's largest financial companies, has been in escalating trouble since it agreed to purchase the Dutch banking operations of ABN Amro last year for 24 billion euros ($33 billion) as part of a broader deal that was the largest takeover in banking history."
DeMorgen: The Insurance branch of Fortis Belgium is already holding a fête with the money for 50 of their customers in the most expensive hotel of Monaco.
BBC: "Dow Jones closes below 8,000."
USAToday: "Stock are down around the world."
Moratorium: "Demand that the first item in any emergency federal legislation be protection for the victims of this crisis, the millions facing foreclosures and millions of others who are seeing their communities destroyed by the foreclosure epidemic brought on by the predatory lending and fraud of the financial industry."
Respect: "Within a day of confirming £50bn to part-nationalise Britain's biggest banks, this figure was turned into £500bn. There was talk of another £50bn available to the eight largest banks and building societies, another £200bn for short-term borrowing to provide liquidity and a special company to provide up to £250bn in loan guarantees. Did the taxpayer ever get a chance to agree to this change? Or indeed the whole idea of bailing out the banks and the bankers? The short answer is no.
But part of the problem is, so far, 'recapitalisation' of the banking industry has done nothing to regain confidence in the markets, let alone being a 'bold and far-reaching solution' to the crisis, as Gordon Brown would have us believe. This is because nobody knows the extent of 'toxic assets' or where they are located, least of all the government. The FTSE index has lost nearly 19 percent so far this week, just short of the losses during the crash of 1987."
For once the capitalists are taking no risks, they have no confidence in their own system. They know what they have been up to, they know what their colleagues have been up to, and they know the extent of the bubble. They are leaving the sinking ship. They are taking their money with them, to safe havens, where they can continue to wine and dine at our expense.
4:00:16 PM
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© Copyright 2008.
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