Friday, September 30, 2011

Verizon Unions to Offer Health-Plan Consolidation to End Dispute

Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Verizon Communications Inc. unions representing 45,000 workers are preparing to propose the consolidation of health-care plans next week, as a step toward ending a labor dispute that began over the summer.

The unions will suggest putting their members on the same health plan, which would save the company money, rather than asking them to begin paying premiums, said Bill Huber, a business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Verizon and the unions haven’t been able to reach agreement on a new contract since the old one expired in August. Workers went on strike Aug. 7 and later returned to their jobs as negotiations continue.

The unions also plan to protest and pass out leaflets at Verizon Wireless locations and Apple Inc. stores next week, during the expected launch of the next iPhone. Workers will ask consumers to delay buying the iPhone 5 until Verizon agrees to a new contract.

“We have no illusions that just because we’re going to put a new proposal on the table they’ll say, ‘Great, accept it.’” said Bob Master, political director for the Communications Workers of America. “This is a big step up to intensify pressure on the company. We’ll use every tactic at our disposal.”

The proposal would be a step in the right direction, said Rich Young, a spokesman for Verizon. The company deals with more than 12 health providers, and workers in some regions can choose from as many as five plans, he said.

“As we strive to modernize, to change our wireline business, this is an area that could help greatly,” said Young. “It’s not cost-effective to have more than a dozen different plans in different states.”

‘Encourage’

Young declined to say whether Verizon would accept the proposal. He said the company still wants workers to contribute more towards their health-care costs, including by paying premiums. The company spends $400,000 an hour on employee health care, he said.

Verizon Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam said last week at an investor conference he was encouraged by the unions’ progress since they returned from the strike in August. He has said the company needs concessions from unions because of the landline division’s customer losses and eroding profitability. The company’s wireless business was largely unaffected by the strike.

Verizon’s revenue and profit fell last year as declines in the landline business offset growth in wireless. The number of fixed lines, including residential and business customers, slid 8.2 percent to 26 million at the end of last year, extending declines since 2003. During the same period, wireless subscribers more than doubled to 94.1 million.

--Editor: Peter Elstrom, Niamh Ring

Calif. Lettuce Recalled Over Listeria

California-based True Leaf Farms is recalling 90 cartons of chopped romaine lettuce as it may be contaminated with listeria, though no related illnesses have been reported.

Listeria is a frequent cause of U.S. food recalls but concerns over the bacterial contamination are heightened due to an outbreak linked to cantaloupes grown in Colorado, which has already killed 13 people and infected 72 people across 18 states.

There is no connection between the lettuce recall and the outbreak tied to cantaloupes, the Food and Drug Administration spokesman Douglas Karas said Friday.

It is the fourth listeria-related food recall since Colorado's Jensen Farms voluntarily recalled cantaloupes linked to the outbreak on Sept. 14. Only one of the four subsequent recalls -- of cantaloupes by Kansas food processor Carol's Cuts LLC -- was related to the outbreak.

True Leaf Farms, a processing arm of Salinas, California-based Church Brothers LLC, is voluntarily recalling romaine that was shipped between Sept. 12 and 13 to a food service distributor in Oregon, who further sent it to at least two other states, Washington and Idaho, the company said in a release posted on the FDA website.

The two-pound bags also made their way to Alaska, according to the state's Department of Environmental Conservation.

The romaine lettuce affected by the recall has a Sept. 29 use-by date, the company said in the release. Church Brothers was not immediately available for comment.

"Any time we find listeria in food we would consider that food adulterated and ask for a recall," Karas said in an email. "The finding of listeria in romaine lettuce was a result of an FDA research program to understand the prevalence of listeria in fresh produce, particularly lettuce and leafy greens."

Listeria rarely causes serious illness. For it to do so, the organism needs to get onto the food and grow to levels where it can cause disease. Because it can grow at low temperatures, that can happen anywhere along the food chain.

Listeria outbreaks are usually associated with deli meats, unpasteurized cheeses and smoked refrigerated seafood products, rather than fresh produce.

Previous food recalls this month included Queso Fresco's Del Bueno Casero Fresh Cheese in Washington state, Publix Super Markets' spinach dip in Florida and Fine Mexican Food Products Inc's avocado pulp and halves in California. (Reporting by Alina Selyukh and Ian Simpson in Washington; additional reporting by Yereth Rosen in Anchorage and Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; editing by Anthony Boadle)

© 2011 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.


Read more on Newsmax.com: Calif. Lettuce Recalled Over Listeria
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

Thursday, September 29, 2011

China Loan Shark Market Crashes; Scores of Chinese Business Owners Unable to Pay Black Market Loans Commit Suicide or Disappear

Here is an interesting email from reader "Kevin" regarding the crashing loan-shark market in China.

Hello Mish

I am a long time reader and want to bring to your attention on a new development in China: private business owners are disappearing or jumping off buildings because they can no longer pay off black market shark loans.

According to national new paper Economics Information (part of state media Xinhua), on 9/22, Hu Fulin, owner of the biggest eyeglass manufacture of the city of Wenzhou disappeared, leaving behind 2 billion RMB debt.

On 9/25, 3 more business owners in Wenzhou disappeared (owners of copper, steel and shoe manufacture).

On 9/27, owner of "Zhengdeli", a shoe manufacture jumped off of a 22 story building and killed himself.

Since April this year 29 private business owners have disappeared, all of them had over 100 million RMB businesses. 11 of the 29 owned shoe manufacturing businesses.

An analyst from China Investment (China's Sovereign investment fund) pointed out that it's because they are squeezed by a rapid increase of component and labor costs. A rising RMB is also a reason why many export oriented companies are hit. In August, Zhou Dewen, President of Wenzhou Small-Medium Business Development Association said the profit margin of Small-Medium businesses in Wenzhou has dropped to under 5% and absent of policy changes, 40% of businesses in Wenzhou will go out of business by next Spring Festival (late Jan 2012)

The complete article is here (in Chinese): http://www.jjckb.cn/2011-09/29/content_334954.htm.

Another article http://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/20110929/005910558780.shtml (titled: China's Shark Loans Crashing; "Grey Finance" Brewing the Chinese Crisis) states that most of those owners have borrowed "private" loans (typically 70% of all loans), with MONTHLY interest rate ranging from 3% to 10%.

About 89% of families/individuals and 59% of companies in Wenzhou participated in such "private loan" schemes. In Erdos (the ghost city you blogged many times), such "private loans" are more than 200 billion RMB with annual interest rate over 60%. Now they are crashing, causing rampant unfinished real estate projects in Erdos.

Note that Wenzhou is one of riches cities in China (No. 3 in disposable income per capita), and is considered the "Birthplace of China's Private Economy". Wenzhou people are among the first that got in trades, manufacturing, export, and in recent years real estate investment/speculation. The Wenzhou economy is considered the "weathercock" of Chinese economy.
Loan Shark Credit Crisis Brewing

Courtesy of Google Translate please consider Gray Chinese-style financial credit crisis brewing area
"Economic Information Daily" correspondent from the multi-confirmed the day before and then there were two causes of Wenzhou City, inability to repay loan sharks and jumping events. According to informed sources, the two business owners are the local shoe factory owner, debt of millions.

Since April this year, Wenzhou, missing more than 80 business owners, the company closed, the event staff pay talks, since September alone, there are up to 25 cases. A local lender told reporters, "At present, only the flight of capital Longwan area estimated to have 100 million or more, many SMEs liabilities, the banks accounted for 30%, accounting for 70% civil usury."

Crazy expansion of private lending market chaos

Some sharks can reach up to 180% per annum. ... "many companies debt snowball, private lending market has not been given attention now has about 25% local to 30% of companies in trouble, some in the suspension or semi-shutdown state, but by the end of this class companies are more likely accounted for 40% to 50%. "
Financial Earthquake Triggered by Loan Shark Business

Also courtesy of Google Translate, please consider loan-sharking business owners who jumped to escapeSeptember 22, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Jiang Xintai largest optical company chairman Hu Fulin liabilities 2 billion fled, triggering a major earthquake Wenzhou business. Wenzhou Zhou German SME Development Association president, said Hu Fulin liabilities involving nearly ten thousand people, dozens of companies, including upstream and downstream Nobuyasu and creditors, the incident is still fermenting, the impact will be further expanded.

Hu Fulin fled after the September 25 Wenzhou enterprises have three big boss fled; afternoon of September 27, Wenzhou shoe boss is profit because of debt problems from Wenzhou Shun Building, 22 Floor, Jin jumped to death.

Boycott Bank Of America Which Is About To Institute A $5 Debit Card Usage Fee

Just when we thought we had seen every imaginable form of stupidity out of Bank of America, they go ahead and stun us all over again. The latest shock is that starting next year, the repository of hundreds of billions in underreserved (apparently the SEC finally figured out what was obvious to Zero Hedge readers since October 2010) toxic Countrywide mortgages, instead of shoring up capital, will do the opposite and start charging anyone with a debit card $5 a month fee for said card usage. Needless to say, this is obviously a collusive attempt by all the big banks, who are so desperate to generate some revenue (with the 2s10s flatter than at any time in the past 2.5 years) they are willing to drive away millions of paying customers. The problem is that the bulk of depositor clients will simply walk away from Bank of America (which had $1,038 billion in deposits as of June 30), and any other institutions that piggy back on this (and from a game theory perspective, everyone has to do it, or nobody will do it), and instead pull cash out of any and all checking and time deposit account forms. As a result, the key buffer that big banks have had during the entire financial crisis, cash from deposits, is about to disappear. This comes at a time when every US bank is fighting tooth and nail against Basel III implementation which forces banks to have more not less tangible capital (read cash, up to and including deposit cash). Alas, doomed for failure such idiocy can only come out of the US banking system which should have long been insolvent and replaced, but instead the Fed's policy of intercontinental Moral Hazard continues to encourage such "survival of the anti-fittest" decisions with pride. It goes without saying that we urge any and all of our 5 million monthly readers to pull any funds they may have from Bank of America in retaliation for this insanity.

From Dow Jones:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the largest U.S. bank by assets, plans to charge customers a $5 monthly fee for making debit card purchases
starting early next year, according to an internal memo sent to bank executives Thursday.

The fee will apply to customers with various checking accounts during any month they use their debit card to make a purchase. The fee will not apply to customers who do not use their debit card to make a purchase or who only use it to make ATM transactions.

Bank of America is trying to cushion revenue losses it expects to incur from new caps on the fees merchants pay when a customer uses a debit card at their stores. In June, the Federal Reserve Board finalized rules capping such fees at 24 cents per transaction, compared with a current average of 44 cents.

Bank of America has said it expects the caps, which take effect Oct. 1, to erase $2 billion in revenue annually. Industrywide, the caps, which apply to banks with $10 billion and more in assets, could wipe out $6.6 billion in annual revenue for banks, according to an August report from Javelin Strategy and Research.

"The economics of offering a debit card have changed with recent regulations," a spokeswoman for Bank of America said in a statement Thursday.

The fee will apply to various consumer checking accounts but will not apply to customers in certain premium accounts, the bank's memo said.

"This new fee allows us to continue to offer the convenience of a debit card with the full range of added features customers have come to expect," including fraud protection and monitoring, special savings programs and other services, the bank's memo said.

Other banks have introduced or are testing new fees in response to the debit fee caps, which stem from a provision known as the Durbin amendment in last year's Dodd-Frank financial regulation overhaul legislation.

Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), said it will charge a $3 fee for debit and ATM cards in several states starting in October if customers use the
cards to make a purchase under a pilot program.

So, yes: if one is a preferred customer (read rich), they will be spared. 99% of the client base however won't be.

All joking aside, we give this retarded proposal about 2 months before it is buried in congressional hearings that make a mockery out of the executive who came up with it.

However, the take home message is that BAC is now willing to perform amputation in order to desperately raise capital. We are certain what little is left of the bank's shareholders will not fail to notice this...

White House Insider: “They Are Crumbling In Amongst Themselves”

After a prolonged absence, our longtime D.C. Insider sends us this message regarding the inner workings of the Obama White House, including an “eruption” from Michelle Obama, and an administration breaking under the strain of accumulating scandals and a disapproving American public.

Don’t have much time, on the road, but I’ll try and answer as many of your questions as I can.

Regarding the dynamics of the White House at this time it is same as it ever was which is batsh-t crazy 24/7 in there. There was an episode involving the First Lady and a member of her staff that shook up everyone. It was a big enough deal it reached folks in Congress, who forwarded it on to some donors, who then had calls into Plouffe’s office wondering WTF was going on. The First Lady is being prepped as one of the few assets for the re-election campaign but those inside know she is as big a potential liability as anything associated with the administration. They are using her in controlled environments only. That’s the word from on high. What went down between her and the staff member wasn’t just a tantrum, or some shouting. It was put to me as being “an eruption”. Talking full on screaming here. Not the first time this kind of thing has happened. I’ve shared a bit of that w/you before but this was on another scale apparently. Put the WH on security alert for a brief time. It was that bad. No mention of the president’s involvement or reaction. He was apparently AWOL during the whole thing. First Lady is complaining a lot these days. LOUDLY. To everyone. Apparently a very unhappy woman.

As for the president, he is simply seeking guidance. Any guidance. His moods are becoming more and more withdrawn once he leaves whatever stage they send him to. Here’s a description that came my way last week you might find interesting:

President Obama finished the speech, walked off the stage, was escorted to the back corridor where he collapsed into a seat against the wall. Both hands went to each side of his head which was leaning down almost between his knees. You could see marks on the sides of his face where the stage makeup had been rubbed off by his hands. He wears that stuff everywhere these days. A staffer walked up and leaned over the president and told him it was time to go. The president looked up, gave a little smile, and got to his feet slowly. Very slowly. The only word he said was “Yeah.” There was no excitement. No energy from him. The people around the president seemed to ignore his condition. They looked right through him until he started walking down the hallway toward the outside. They followed alongside him and seemed to kind of push him out the door. The president looked incredibly tired. Used up.”

That’s the dynamics of this White House. They are crumbling in amongst themselves. The donors, as I have been repeating to you for months, are getting more agitated and concerned each day. The president is being cornered and he doesn’t appear to have much fight left in him. Don’t take that as me being confident though. That makes him more dangerous than ever. He still has his hardliners around him. They will not give this up. Jarrett will break him apart if needed. Too much money on the line. They owe people. Pulling the plug is not an option for them. And while we have been working up the primary challenge against the president in the fall, I am hearing those bastards have been attempting to install a 3rd candidate scenario to split the vote. Not just idle talk, but actual negotiations having taken place. If they pull that off, well, I don’t know. We had not prepared for that scenario. It’s a long shot for them, but it put a scare in me. In all of us. Let our guard down there.

More importantly at the moment though is Fast and Furious. The Solyndra thing was an unexpected surprise. Had nothing to do w/that but happy to see it out there. If it continues to get attention from the public that’s great. The more the merrier when it comes to scandals against this administration. I continue to see Fast and Furious as the much bigger deal for this White House though. That has everyone running interference at a level only seen when something very big and very dangerous to a president is hovering over an administration. You keep asking about Issa. At this point I don’t know. Information has been effectively shut down from his office. That either means a deal has been struck and some stooge will take the fall, or they are preparing to go all in on this thing. A Watergate type moment. At this point it’s one or the other. Holder has openly insulated himself and the president. Doing it so openly means he’s either very confident or very afraid. I am hoping its fear that is motivating him to cover his tracks right in front of everyone. Been told there is a memo, or was a memo, tying Fast and Furious directly to some kind of proposed gun control legislation or plan. Not certain how developed it was. Something that was pending . The memo is a direct link between the program and the gun control issue. An entire coordinated effort that required people to be killed. It is being talked about, but I have not seen it or spoken with anyone who has. So who knows? If it does exist and if Issa or someone comparable to him has it, then it implicates the administration at an entirely new level of corruption here. We’re talking about people marching on the White House and throwing them out on their ass. Either way, if Fast and Furious is to break out completely against this White House, it needs to happen soon, so we will have our answer either way.

Will talk again. Not sure how soon.

http://theulstermanreport.com/2011/09/28/white-house-insider-%E2%80%9Cthey-are-crumbling-in-amongst-themselves%E2%80%9D-2/

Mayor Bloomberg’s Jihad TV Partnership

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s news company is teaming up with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal to launch “Alarab” next year, a 24/7 news network that is sure to reflect Alwaleed’s anti-Israel viewpoint.

Bloomberg will provide Alarab with five hours of financial-related programming. The focus of the network is to cover the Arab Spring with an emphasis on free speech and press. The manager of the network, Jamal Khashoggi, says it is “going to be to the left of Al-Arabiya and to the right of Al-Jazeera.” With an estimated networth of $19.6 billion, Prince Alwaleed will be in a position to influence the region like never before.

Alwaleed is the Saudi prince that sought to make a $10 million donation to New York City after the 9/11 attacks, only to have his check returned to him by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The mayor was offended at Alwaleed’s response to the disaster. He said, “At times like this one, we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. I believe the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause… Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek,” he said.

In other words, the “root cause” of the attacks was America’s alliance with Israel, and if future attacks are to be avoided, that relationship must be downgraded. After Giuliani turned Alwaleed away, the Saudi prince said the mayor had caved to “Jewish pressure.” Alwaleed apparently believes that the U.S. government is held hostage to the “Zionist lobby.”

In 2002, Alwaleed donated $27 million to a telethon on Saudi television for the families of Palestinian “martyrs.” The entire event brought in $155 million. This has led to reasonable allegations that Alwaleed was giving money to the families of suicide bombers, which is very possible. The Saudi government says this isn’t so, and that the “martyrs” were “Palestinians victimized by Israeli terror and violence.” He is also a co-owner of ART TV, a station that aired a fundraiser called, “Jihad in Palestine” that advocated violence.

Alwaleed has spent tens of millions of dollars to spread Saudi influence around the world, especially in the U.S. In many cases, this has benefited the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2002, for example, he donated $500,000 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations for a media campaign to defend Islam. The Islamic Society of North America got $1.5 million for a scholarship program. John Esposito, probably the Muslim Brotherhood’s top non-Muslim advocate, founded Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding with his support. Alwaleed’s foundation is run by the daughter of Dr. Abdul-Hamid Abu-Sulayman, called “one of the most important figures in the history of the global Muslim Brotherhood.”

Alwaleed does not disguise the fact that his donations are meant to change minds. He says that Arabs who boycott the U.S. are mistaken because “economic interests” bring more influence. “We have to be logical and understand that the U.S. administration is subject to U.S. public opinion…to bring the decision-maker on your side, you not only have to be active inside the U.S. Congress or the administration but also inside U.S. society,” he said.

In keeping with this strategy, Alwaleed is the second largest shareholder of News Corp., the parent company of Fox News Channel. He has boasted that when he saw Fox describing Muslim riots in France as, well, Muslim riots, he called Rupert Murdoch and had the terminology changed within 30 minutes. News Corp. owns14.5% of Alwaleed’s Rotana media group.

Alwaleed is known as a reformer by Saudi standards. He requires his female employees not to wear burqas or niqabs and gives them an allowance to buy other clothing. He wants to allow women to drive, and lets them do so on his private party even though Saudi Arabia bans it. He opposes the Ground Zero Mosque. “I am against putting the mosque there out of respect for those people who have been wounded there…The wound is still there. Just because the wound is healing you can’t say, ‘Let’s just go back to where we were pre-9/11,” he said. However, this doesn’t change the fact that his foreign policy beliefs will influence this powerful station.

The director of Alarab will be Jamal Khashoggi. He grew up as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, though he says he has left the organization. He became close friends with Osama Bin Laden after meeting him in Jeddah in 1987. Khashoggi tried to convince Bin Laden to mend ties with the Saudi Royal Family in the 1990s, and condemns his acts of terrorism. He believes that only a state can declare jihad, and not an individual. He is also a vicious opponent of Israel and America’s “unqualified” support for the Jewish state.

On the other hand, Khashoggi was fired as the editor in chief of a Saudi newspaper for printing criticisms of the security services and supporting women’s rights. The final straw came when it printed a piece against Ibn Taymiyya, but he says he was on vacation and did not approve it.

Mayor Bloomberg, despite being Jewish, is supporting a network that will be hostile to Israel and likely won’t counter the anti-American sentiments in the Middle East. This isn’t that surprising, given that Bloomberg supports Sharia-Compliant Finance and supports the Ground Zero Mosque. He said that the government should not investigate Park51’s finances and that it will be a “sad day for America” if the project is stopped.

Prince Alwaleed may be in favor of liberal reform in the Middle East, but his views will still contribute to hatred of the West, and his associations with the Muslim Brotherhood are worrisome. The U.S. needs friends to fight the ideological war against Islamism in the region, not another critic blaming America for the region’s ills.

Gaza and Gas

The Turkish-Israeli dispute over natural resources under the eastern Mediterranean’s seabed may soon enter a new and much more dangerous phase.

Last week, it appeared Turkey was going to make good on its threats to stop a joint Israeli-Greek Cypriot venture to explore for natural gas in Greek Cypriot waters and at the same time, militarily challenge Israel’s presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. But as the Texas-based Noble Energy company moved a rig from Israeli waters into position off of Greek Cyprus’ south-eastern coast to begin drilling, Turkish naval vessels and warplanes limited their actions to shadowing the transfer operation, keeping outside of Greek Cypriot waters and airspace. Turkey now appears resigned, at least for the moment, to halting the project through the offices of the United Nations (UN).

But the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood at the UN carries an even greater risk of igniting a Turkish-Israeli military confrontation. While the political consequences to Israel of a separate Palestinian state have been much discussed, a lesser known economic factor that is attracting Turkey’s attention also threatens Israeli security and regional peace and stability. Like in Greek Cyprus, that factor is natural gas.

“Deposits worth an estimated four billion dollars lie off the Gaza coast,” a German newspaper reported.

Four billion dollars in natural gas is probably something worth fighting over for an energy-poor country like Turkey. Analyst Boris Kalnoky, writing in the German newspaper Die Welt, believes the gas constitutes the main reason behind Turkey’s belligerence towards Israel regarding Gaza rather than any alleged Palestinian suffering. The supposed Palestinian distress is simply the excuse Turkey is using to justify its threats to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The Turkish government has said its warships would escort the next aid flotilla to the Palestinian enclave, thus risking war with Israel.

“That natural gas plays a central role in the dispute with Israel was indicated in a[n] additional comment of [Turkish Prime Minister] Erdogan: Turkey will not allow Israel to exploit ‘one-sided’ the giant natural gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean,” wrote Kalnoky.

And those gas deposits are truly gigantic. They are located in what is called the Levant Basin that stretches from Egypt to Syria and includes the waters around Cyprus. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the coastal areas from Israel’s border with Egypt north to Syria alone contain 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. They also may hold “an estimated 1.7 billion barrels of undiscovered, recoverable oil,” which, if true, would certainly add fuel to the current Israeli-Turkish tension.

Israelis reportedly joke that Moses took a wrong turn when leading his people out of the wilderness, taking them to the only place in the Middle East that didn’t have oil. But Israeli discoveries of natural gas offshore in Israel’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), described as the largest natural gas finds worldwide in the last decade, have helped make up for Moses’ sense of direction. Israel’s two big EEZ gas discoveries are the Leviathan and Tamar fields. The deposits in the Tamar field alone will make Israel self-sufficient in natural gas, thus increasing Israeli security. Deliveries are expected to begin in 2013.

And this couldn’t have come at a better time. Israel presently imports from Egypt 40 percent of its natural gas needs. But this source is becoming more and more unreliable due to Islamist attacks on the Sinai pipeline carrying the gas. As if to emphasise the fragility of this supply, the pipeline was blown up again by terrorists on Tuesday, making it the sixth attack since last February. Such interruptions only increase the importance and the blessing the Tamar field has become.

While the Tamar field will supply Israel’s domestic needs, the even larger gas deposits from the Leviathan field will be sold abroad starting in 2017. For the first three years, the Swiss bank UBS estimates this field will earn $3 billion a year for Israel. After that, the revenue for the gas will double to $6 billion annually, a very significant amount, making Israel an important gas exporter internationally.

“The exploration of its natural gas resources has become a strategic priority for Israel, particularly given the political turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa, and specifically in Egypt, which provides Israel with 40 percent of its gas-fired power needs and 20 percent of its electricity generation needs,” read the UBS report.

But it will be much more difficult for Israel to exploit offshore natural resources and increase its security if the Palestinian Authority manages to get recognition for a Palestinian state by the UN. The new state would lay an immediate legal claim to the 3.5 billion cubic meters of gas off its Gazan shore. This development would not only make Israel’s search for and use of gas deposits more problematic, it would strengthen the hand of Hamas, one of Israel’s most bitter enemies.

“Until now, Israel has always known to prevent any use of the gas deposits off Gaza, for it regards its utilization by Hamas as a threat to its national security,” writes Kalnoky.

By challenging Israel and threatening to break the Gaza blockade with its warships, Turkey obviously hopes to receive a share of those deposits from a grateful Palestinian government, much like France and Great Britain are the major recipients of oil deals in Libya for having helped the anti-Gaddafi rebels. Turkey’s insistence that Turkish Cyprus, which the Ankara government controls, receives benefits from the Greek Cypriot-Israeli gas exploration venture is also behind its opposition to that project. Turkey obviously wants a piece of the Levant Basin fields.

That is because Turkey badly needs energy resources and would probably risk war to get them. In its quest to implement its new neo-Ottoman foreign policy and become the major power in the Middle East, Turkey must challenge Iran and Israel. But these countries have oil or gas or both, the one ingredient missing in Turkey’s bid for regional dominance. Gaining a foothold in Gaza’s offshore gas fields would help level the playing field in this respect. And an internationally recognised Palestinian state that would grant Turkey this position would also help immensely. With Turkish support, further Palestinian claims to Levant Basin gas fields would be sure to follow.

So look for Turkey to send its warships with the next aid flotilla to Gaza. In contrast to its dispute with Israel and Greek Cyprus, there would be no American oil company in the way that could provoke an unwelcome confrontation with America’s Sixth Fleet. And since it is unlikely President Obama would place the Sixth Fleet between the two sides, a clash between Israel and Turkey would be highly likely with the status of regional power as the prize.

Apple fanboy blogger taking a close look at this new Amazon tablet thingamajig

Via Tech Crunch, easily the biggest news to hit the tech market since Apple rolled out its latest thingamajig.

The Kindle Fire marks a significant departure from Amazon’s norm. The most notable change is obviously the multitouch 7-inch LCD rather than an e-ink display, but moreover, the Kindle Fire is a complete storefront for the retailer rather than just an ereader. The tablet features apps for Amazon’s Android Appstore, Kindle store, Amazon MP3, and Prime Instant Video. Nearly all of Amazon’s recent news, Amazon Cloud Player, Amazon Cloud Drive, Kindle Cloud Reader, the streaming deals with Fox and NBCUniversal, were in preparation for the Fire. With these cloud services in place, the Kindle Fire is a legitimate iPad competitor.

But it’s more than just Amazon apps. Users are free to load apps from Amazon’s Android Appstore including Pandora, Twitter, Facebook, and, most notably, Netflix.

The Fire runs a custom OS build that completely hides its Android 2.x underpinnings. Amazon built, without the help of Google we’re told, an experience centered around all of Amazon’s retail and cloud services. This is an Amazon tablet and not just a Kindle.

No camera, no mic, no 3G, and the screen’s smaller than the iPad’s, but — it retails at just $199, fully $300 less than the iPad, and that comes with a 30-day trial of Amazon Prime. It also comes with a proprietary browser called Amazon Silk, which apparently makes surfing much quicker by outsourcing some of the process to Amazon’s servers rather than doing it all inside the device. Jeff Bezos claims that they’re not selling the Fire at a loss, as many expected they would with an eye to making back the lost revenue via the resulting spike in Amazon media sales. I’m not sure I believe that, but maybe that’s just the Apple fanboy in me talking. If Amazon’s capable of cranking these things out and earning a profit on each one at $199, hoo boy.

Normally this is the point in our gadget posts where I ask why someone would buy this. In this case, I’m wondering why someone wouldn’t buy it. All I use my iPad for, really, is Twitter, e-mail, a little reading, and the occasional game, all of which the Fire seems more than capable of handling. If you’re constantly on the go then the lack of 3G is a problem, but if you typically use your iPad as a lying-around-the-house device, why not buy this instead and apply the $300 in savings to media purchases? In fact, precisely because Amazon’s brand is so strongly associated with retail shopping of all sorts, I bet they’ll see a surge in their storefront revenue even above and beyond what they’re expecting to gain from new customers via sales of the Fire. Why go to Target when Bezos has already reeled you in with free shipping via Amazon Prime? Just order everything through your new omni-device and never get off the couch. Exit question: What now, Apple?

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/09/28/apple-fanboy-blogger-taking-a-close-look-at-this-new-amazon-tablet-thingamajig/
they have a video on how the kindle wire works


Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Solyndra Said to Have Violated Terms of Its U.S. Loan

Solyndra LLC had such steep financial problems in late 2010 that the company violated terms of its loan-guarantee agreement with the Department of Energy and technically defaulted on its $535 million loan, according to people familiar with the matter.

Report on Solyndra

See the Congressional Research Service's report on the solar-panel maker.


The failed solar-panel maker, which is under numerous criminal and congressional investigations, ran so short of cash in December 2010 that it was unable to satisfy certain terms of its U.S. loan agreement, these people said. The agreement required Solyndra to provide $5 million in equity to a subsidiary building its factory but cash-flow problems prevented those payments.

WSJ's Ryan Tracy reports a new Congressional report says warnings about Solyndra's competitive abilities came out before the government awarded the company a $535 million loan guarantee and the company's subsequent collapse.

The Energy Department ultimately restructured the loan agreement to help keep the company afloat and Solyndra continued to draw money from its loan.

Solyndra's cash-flow problems in late 2010 had previously come to light but it was not known that the company technically defaulted on its loan and violated its agreement with the U.S. government.

The company's financial problems prompted the Energy Department early this year to allow it to reshuffle its debt. Under the arrangement, private investors agreed to provide a new $75 million loan and won the right to be paid ahead of the government if the company was liquidated.

The default is the latest indication of the serious financial troubles afflicting California-based Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this month. It will likely add to questions surrounding the Obama administration's backing for the company even as its financial problems mounted.

Administration officials have defended the initial loan guarantee and subsequent restructuring, saying they were trying to protect taxpayers. Jonathan Silver, executive director of the loan program, recently told lawmakers the government faced the difficult choice of either forcing Solyndra to close its doors or approving the restructuring to give it "a fighting chance at success and the government a higher expected recovery on its loan."

On Tuesday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mary Walrath of Delaware cleared the way for Solyndra's assets to be auctioned next month.

The company was the first to receive a loan guarantee under a program begun by President George W. Bush and expanded as part of President Barack Obama's 2009 economic stimulus package. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of rushing the guarantee for political reasons, and emails have surfaced showing administration officials ignored warning signs about the company's health.

Solyndra's problems came to a head in November 2010 when it told the Energy Department it needed $150 million to make it through early 2012, at which time it believed its cash flow would improve. On Dec. 1, 2010, it was unable to make a $5 million payment to its subsidiary and technically defaulted on its loan.

The loan was officially restructured in February 2011, giving the company enough money to carry it through August. The company, which had drawn down $475 million of the U.S. loan as of Dec. 31, 2010, ended up borrowing $527 million before its bankruptcy.

Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida, who is heading the Republican congressional investigation into the company, said, "Solyndra ran out of cash in December 2010, yet DOE continued to ignore the red flags and astonishingly doubled down on a bad bet and restructured the loan, further putting taxpayers at risk for what could now be a half billion dollars."

Concerns about the program and its risk controls were raised several times by the Energy Department's inspector general, Gregory Friedman. In a March 2011 report, Mr. Friedman said his office "found that the Loan Guarantee Program could not always readily demonstrate, through systematically organized records, including contemporaneous notes, how it resolved or mitigated relevant risks prior to granting loan guarantees." A report in 2009 also faulted the loan-guarantee program's controls.

There are also questions about whether the Obama administration should have known about Solyndra's problems even before the loan guarantee was made. In a previously undisclosed Sept. 9 report, the Congressional Research Service said that by the time of the September 2009 guarantee one of the company's key advantages—the fact it didn't use high-priced polysilicon as competitors did—had disappeared.

Polysilicon cost more than $400 per kilogram in 2008 but dropped to slightly more than $50 per kilogram in September 2009, the report said.

White House officials received assurances from Solyndra as recently as May 2011 that its finances were solid, with the company dismissing concerns raised in media reports. Mr. Silver, in a radio interview in May, said Solyndra was employing more workers than in 2009 and added: "The story has been a little bit misunderstood."

—Ryan Tracy contributed to this article.

Write to Deborah Solomon at deborah.solomon@wsj.com

Android Just Got More Expensive: Microsoft Cuts Samsung Deal Read more: Android Just Got More Expensive: Microsoft Cuts Samsung Deal - 24/7 Wall St.

One of the attractions of Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android operating system is that it is open source. That makes it free to use for manufacturers. That advantages has begun to go away. Samsung just closed a deal with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to cover patents related to Android which are held by the world’s largest software company

“Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will receive royalties for Samsung’s mobile phones and tablets running the Android mobile platform,” Redmond said.

The concern that the many companies that use Android now have is that Microsoft will insist on similar deals. These could cost several dollars per handset for IP rights.

Android is, by most measures, the most widely used mobile OS in many countries. It just became a lot less attractive.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Obama's Euro-Crisis Lecture Is 'Pitiful and Sad'

US President Obama has given the Europeans a harsh lecture on the dangers of their ongoing debt crisis. Offended by the unsolicited advice, Europeans have suggested the US get its own house in order first. Obama's remarks were "arrogant" and "absurd" German commentators say on Wednesday.

Europeans are well aware of the seriousness of their ongoing debt crisis. But they don't, it seems, like to receive lectures from other countries -- especially the United States, which is struggling to deal with its own mountain of debt.

On Tuesday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble curtly rejected recent American criticism of Europe's approach to solving its debt crisis. "I don't think Europe's problems are America's only problems," said Schäuble, who has become increasingly sharp-tongued as the euro crisis deepens. "It's always easier to give other people advice."

Schäuble was referring to strongly worded comments made by US President Barack Obama and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in recent days. At an event in California on Monday, Obama warned Europeans that their inaction was "scaring the world." The Europeans, he said, "have not fully healed from the crisis back in 2007 and never fully dealt with all the challenges that their banking system faced. It's now being compounded by what's happening in Greece." He continued: "They're going through a financial crisis that is scaring the world, and they're trying to take responsible actions, but those actions haven't been quite as quick as they need to be."

Distracting From Problems at Home

Those comments came hot on the heels of Geithner's remarks over the weekend. Speaking in Washington Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Geithner warned that the European debt crisis represents "the most serious risk now confronting the world economy." He said Europeans needed to do more to create a "firewall" against further contagion and talked of the threat of "cascading default" and runs on banks. "Decisions as to how to conclusively address the region's problems cannot wait until the crisis gets more severe," he said.

German observers have reacted angrily to the comments, saying that the US is in no position to criticize other countries, given its own $14-trillion pile of national debt and ongoing wrangling over the country's debt ceiling. Others claim that Obama is just trying to distract attention from the US's problems and point out that the US president was in California to raise funds and voter support ahead of his reelection campaign next year.

But perhaps the Europeans simply don't like a taste of their own medicine. When a US default was looming back in July when Congress was unable to agree on raising the debt ceiling, European commentators were quick to weigh in and give Obama and the US unsolicited advice. "The global economy needs an American agreement," said a French government minister at the time.

On Wednesday, German media commentators slam Obama's criticism of Europe.

The mass-circulation Bild writes:

"Obama's lecture on the euro crisis … is overbearing, arrogant and absurd. … In a nutshell, he is claiming that Europe is to blame for the current financial crisis, which is 'scaring the world.' Excuse me?"

"The American president seems to have forgotten a few details. The most important trigger of the financial and economic crisis was US banks and their insane real-estate dealings. The US is still piling up debt … The American congress is crippled by a battle between the right and the left. The banks are gambling just as recklessly as they did before the crisis. The president's scolding is a pathetic attempt to distract attention from his own failures. How embarrassing."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"One needs to remember the context within which Obama's scolding of the Europeans took place. It was an event where the president was raising money for the Democrats and where he wanted to explain to voters why the US economy is much worse off than he and his economic experts had believed until recently. Hence his criticism of the EU was simple electioneering."

"The problem, however, is that the US president is absolutely right. For far too long, the Europeans -- including the Germans -- treated the financial crisis as a purely American problem. They have still found no solution for their own debt crisis. Now Europe's problems are having a negative impact on growth and jobs around the world, including in the US. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Europe is threatening Obama's already precarious chances of reelection in 2012. That is something that surely does not leave Obama cold. In that respect, it doesn't help much to point out that, once the Europeans have got their house in order, the financial markets will return their attention to America's debt crisis and its ailing political system. Financially, Europe is currently the most dangerous place in the world."

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"Dark clouds have gathered over the American president. The gloomy state of the economy is putting a dampener on Obama's future prospects. The optimism of the past is gone, replaced by a cheap search for a scapegoat."

"Obama thinks he has found one. He blames the Europeans for reacting too late to the debt crisis. We Europeans are apparently taking on too little new debt to get out of the crisis. But we are already feeling the wonderful effects of borrowing too much money."

The financial daily Handelsblatt writes:

"That's not how friends talk to each other. That applies particularly to friends who have themselves failed to get a handle on their own, self-made crisis. Barack Obama governs a country where, despite billions in state aid, the economy is stagnating, companies refuse to invest despite calls for patriotism, and which gets embroiled in one political trench war after another … Now this country is dispensing advice, suggestions and finger-pointing."

"These are suggestions that have already failed to work in the US: Money is supposed to save Europe -- quickly and in the largest quantities possible. US Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner has been trying for more than two-and-a-half years to suffocate his crisis with money. But aside from the lack of success, the collateral damage is immense. It manifests itself in a loss of government credibility, a loss of trust in the currency and the paralysis of any sort of dynamism -- because the crushing debt mountain is robbing the famously optimistic Americans of their confidence."

"The fact that Barack Obama, who is a brilliant thinker, knows full well that things are much more complicated in reality does not help. Indeed, it does the opposite. In the desperate battle for his re-election he'd rather construct myths, such as claiming that the Europeans alone are responsible for the American mess. Not only is this fundamentally wrong, but -- coming as it does from a friend -- it's downright pitiful and sad."

-- Kristen Allen and David Gordon Smith

France: Iran faces high risk of military strike. Russia practices Iranian reprisal

France's UN Ambassador Gerard Araud warned Wednesday, Sept. 28 that Iran runs a high risk of a military strike if it continues on the path to nuclear proliferation. "Some countries won't accept the prospect of Tehran reaching the threshold of nuclear armament," he said. "Personally I am convinced that it would be a very complicated operation …with disastrous consequences in the region."
Ambassador Araud's comment confirmed reports from debkafile's military sources in recent months that US and European sanctions against Iran had been ineffectual and the ayatollahs had no intention of slowing down on their drive for a nuclear weapon.
The French diplomat was not the only one to raise the alarm this week about regional war clouds circling over Iran.
Sept. 9-26, the Russian army, joined by Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, deployed 12,000 troops in a huge combined military exercise code-named Center-2011 which simulated an Iranian attack on Caspian oil fields operated by American firms in reprisal for a US strike against Iranian nuclear sites.

Russian intelligence postulated an instantaneous Iranian reprisal for this strike and based the war game staged by Russian-led Collective Rapid Force and the Collective Rapid Deployment Forces of the Central Asian Region –CSTO – on this assumption.
Our military sources disclose that the forces taking part in the exercise were briefed for a two-stage scenario:
Stage One: An naval attack on the Caspian Sea coast coming from the south (Iran).
Stage Two: A large-scale air and ground attack from the south by 70 F-4 and F-5 fighter-bombers, namely, the bulk of Iran's air force, along with armored divisions, marine battalions and infantry brigades landing on the northern and eastern shores of the Caspian Sea.
The Russian briefing conjectured that the Iranian offensive would single out the Kazakh oil field at Mangustan on the Caspian coast, a field which debkafile reports Exxon Mobile is operating.

Moscow clearly attached the highest importance to the exercise and extreme credibility to the hypothetical scenario. Russian chief of staff Gen. Nikolai Makarov personally commanded the drills and on Monday, Sept. 26, President Dmitry Medvedev toured the field commands and units.

Tehran was not idle: Tuesday, the day before the war game ended, Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, commander of the Iranian Navy, stated that Iranian warships would be deployed "close to US territorial waters," since the Islamic Republic of Iran considers the US presence in the Persian Gulf "illegitimate and makes no sense."

After Tehran rejected a recent US request to establish a "red phone" link between the countries to avoid unwanted confrontation between their armed forces in the Gulf region, Ali Fadavi, Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Navy chief, commented enigmatically: "When we are in the Gulf of Mexico, we will establish direct contact with the United States."

A significant remark on the intentions of another nuclear rogue government came from Peter Hughes, the British Ambassador to North Korea, when he stopped over in Seoul on his way home from a three-year tenure in Pyongyang.
"I have had discussions with high-level officials, who have made clear to me their view that if Colonel Qaddafi had not given up his nuclear weapons, then NATO would not have attacked his country," he said.

The ambassador therefore held out little hope of the long-stalled US-South Korea talks with the North resumed lately getting anywhere on Pyongyang's denuclearization.

All these ominous events – pointed comments by French and British diplomats and the large-scale Russian-Central Asian war game – add up to widespread skepticism about any chance of halting Iran's race for a nuclear weapon or disarming North Korea.

The Market Sends a Signal: Short Warren Buffett

As Obama campaign prop, Mr. Buffett has reached well beyond his area of expertise to embrace a bad political idea.


Every publication in the country has squirreled away in its files a canned obituary for Warren Buffett and every one of those notices carries virtually the same lede: "Warren Buffett, widely considered the greatest investor of the modern era, died peacefully last night at his modest home in Omaha, Nebraska."

Mr. Buffett should have left well enough alone.

Mr. Buffett's company, the legendary Berkshire Hathaway, is now experiencing what Mr. Buffett would describe in any other company as a crisis of leadership. After running off one "heir apparent" after another over the last twenty years, Mr. Buffett now sits alone atop the giant Berkshire portfolio with his longtime associate, Charles Munger. Mr. Buffett is 81. Mr. Munger is 87. Every time the two executives appear in public, there is appreciative attention for their market views and, let's be candid, acute attention to the impending actuarial reality. Analysts seem to have concluded that Berkshire Hathaway is experiencing precisely the kind of governance problem that Messrs. Buffett and Munger have never tolerated in any of the dozens of companies they own or co-own.

Berkshire stock closed last week at 66, down from its 52-week high of 88. That's cause for shareholder concern, but no more than transitory concern given Mr. Buffett's stellar record of investor returns. He has a knack, demonstrated repeatedly, for turning small setbacks into large advances and even at 81 he seems capable of doing it again. What's different this time is that Mr. Buffett has taken on a new public role that will not only distract him from the investment business, but will inevitably change perceptions of him among colleagues, investors, and perhaps even obituary writers.

Surprising to some, dismaying to many, the iconic Mr. Buffett has signed on with the Obama re-election effort to serve as a kind of campaign prop. Every time the President demands higher taxes on the rich, Mr. Buffett is cued to leap to his feet and exclaim, "Great idea, Mr. President!" Mr. Buffett plays this role with gusto and shows no sign, as distinguished from his audience, of either fatigue or boredom. (The role of Rich Guy Demanding That His Taxes Be Raised is, of course, a staple of the American political theatre and is usually played in road-company productions by Bill Gates Sr. or some particularly guilt-stricken Rockefeller descendant.)

What's surprising is Mr. Buffett's apparently unquenchable desire for attention at his late stage of life. He seems to exult in media turns as the slightly dotty, ukulele-strumming uncle, a kind of plush-toy version of an animated Fox-TV tycoon. What's dismaying is that Mr. Buffett has reached well beyond his area of expertise to embrace a bad political idea. This Obama-Buffett idea --to soak the rich in the current economic environment -- is so egregiously bad that, remarkably, it appears to be about neither the money nor the principle of the thing. According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, the so-called "Buffett tax" would have hit only 22,000 taxpayers in the most recent year for which data are available. If the taxes on those taxpayers had been doubled -- and assume for the moment that, for the first time in history, the rich would not have mobilized lawyers and accountants to avoid the tax -- the total additional revenue to the government would have been $19 billion. Back in his role as a financial analyst, Mr. Buffett would have scoffed at this "millionaires and billionaires" tax as a serious way to close a trillion-dollar annual deficit.

If it's not about the money, then, it must be about the principle of the thing, right? As far as I can determine, there has been no argument advanced by either President Obama or Mr. Buffett drawn from economic or political principle. They do not bother to contend that the "Buffett tax" will either raise significant revenue or incentivize employers to hire more workers or in any way revive a sick economy. Their argument for the tax-the-rich offensive, rather, has been based on "fairness," which is an emotional rather than an analytical term.

The number that all sides seem to agree on is that the top one percent of earners currently pay 40 percent of all income taxes. It would not be unreasonable to look at that number and say, "Uh oh, that's too high in a society that still pays formal allegiance to the principle of shared responsibility. That's got to be unhealthy for a middle-class economy." President Obama looked at the number and concluded otherwise: to him, 40 percent appears to be intolerably low and the rich should thus be made to "pay their fair share." And what might that be, their "fair share"? Would that be sixty percent? Eighty? One hundred percent? The answer for Obama is that the rich must be made to pay enough so as to give emotional satisfaction to their fellow citizens who pay no income taxes themselves. This is not about economics, remember. This is about the politics of division, the politics of bitterness. Obama is not appealing to our better angels, which is precisely why the angelic Mr. Buffett has been so useful to him.

In the fiscal debate now unfolding in Washington there are two statistical tent poles between which are strung all of the subsidiary arguments about tax policy. At one pole is that stunning 40 percent number. At the other is the fact that fully 50 percent of the 144 million tax filers pay no Federal income tax at all. To me, that is an even more stunning number. What it means is that -- in what we still like to think of as our middle-class society -- half of the middle class (along with a handful of rich guys) pays all of the income taxes while the other half pays none. The Jones family pays, the Smith family doesn't. Forget about economics. By what standard of "fairness" is that fair to the Jones family? President Obama would respond that the folks at the bottom of the ladder deserve a break, but the numbers are clear on this point: the tax filers in the lower half are not, most of them, anywhere near the bottom of the ladder. By definition, they are, most of them, smack dab in the middle and they are in the process of becoming a powerful and self-defining political class. Call them the non-tax-paying class and understand that, almost always, they will support both higher taxes on the other half and increased government services for themselves. Understand, too, that they have centered their natural enemies in the crosshairs of tax policy: not just the few rich but the vastly more numerous savers and scrimpers and people who play by the rules.

Over the course of his first term, and with its implications now marbled through his proposed reforms and early campaign rhetoric, President Obama has made a historic decision to stand for re-election as the representative of the non-tax-paying class. Depending on the outcome of the 2012 election, that decision could play out as farce, one hopes, or as constitutional strain, one fears. Americans have always had a problem with taxation without representation, and, with Obama reinstalled in the White House, the taxpayers would be effectively unrepresented in the Executive branch of the government.

For Mr. Buffett, the prospects are bleaker still. An old man who can't find a way to get off stage is always but a few uncertain steps from a farcical finale. We can only hope that he doesn't take a header into the orchestra pit. But the economic damage has already been done. Year after year for more than a half-century Mr. Buffett has faithfully paid his income taxes. Last year alone, he paid more than $6 million. Imagine if Mr. Buffett had invested those dollars in productive enterprise instead of giving them to President Obama to, oh, prop up the indefensible pension plan for government employees. Think of the jobs that went uncreated, the mortgages unpaid, the medical bills deferred, the college dreams abandoned.

Mr. Buffett claims that he wants to pay higher taxes. The rest of us should want him to pay lower taxes.

The Internet Ad Market Gets Worse by the Day

Several large internet-based media companies have said third-quarter advertising sales are soft. There is also the problem of Facebook, which now controls a quarter of all the online display inventory in the U.S. Industry analysts believe that Facebook sells this inventory at low prices, both because it has too much to command premium rates for all of it, and because it damages the ability of its competition to keep rates high.

One of the best ways to tell whether internet advertising has become weak is to look at the quality of clients buying the premium and most desirable display spots at the largest websites. More of that inventory is taken up by low-paying advertisers than the websites would like. Messages from free credit report sites are increasingly common. There are also more ads for incredibly low-priced mortgages.

When the inexpensive ads come out in force, it means a quarter or more of hard times for online sales revenue.

The end of Ahmadinejad. His cronies barred from election

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the driving force behind Iran's nuclear program and the most vocal of Israel's enemies, is on his last legs as president. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stripped him of most of his powers and shut the door against his having any political future.
debkafile's Iranian sources report his loyalists have been deserting him in droves since he went to New York to deliver an address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 23. The Supreme Leader used his absence for the coup de grace: The removal of the president's loyalists from the list of 4,000 contenders running for seats in parliament (the Majlis) next March.

That was easily arranged: Khameini handed his orders to Ayatollah Mohammad Kani, head of the Assembly of Experts, which In the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for screening all contenders for office. He was told to disqualify all the president's associates. So, in the next Majlis, Ahmadinejad will be shorn of a loyal faction and any buddies sticking to him when his second presidential term runs out in May 2013 will be out of a job.

The Supreme Ruler degraded the president very publicly with one humiliation after another.

He waited for Ahmadinejad to go on the air in a US NBC interview on Sept. 13 to promise the release of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, the two American hikers convicted of spying, before cutting him down by suspending their release until the Iranian president was being booed by protesters in New York for reneging on his promise.
Tehran's political, religious and military insiders were not surprised by his downfall, our Iranian sources report. For some time he had been getting too big for his boots, accumulating more powers than any president before him and only getting away with it so long as he was Khamenei's fair-haired boy.

But then, the favorite, whose election in 2005 and reelection in 2009, Khamenei engineered at the cost of violent anti-government protests in Tehran, rewarded him with ingratitude. He increasingly flouted the master and in some cases began chipping away at his authority - until Khamenei had had enough and decided to reel him in.

At the last minute, he cancelled a live Ahmadinejad interview on Iran's second television network wide publicized for the eve of his departure to the United Nations.
The affronts followed him home to Tehran, where waiting for him were serious criminal charges linking his name to the disappearance of three billion dollars from Iranian banks. The name of the embezzler has not been released but our sources in Tehran reveal him as Amir Mansour Arya, an entrepreneur who started a business five years ago with Ahmadinejad’s encouragement and whose fortune grew a thousand fold within a suspiciously short time.
Arya is accused of using his presidential connections to secure multi-billion dollar loans from Iranian banks and then spiriting large sums out of the country.

Ahmadinejad denies any complicity in the crime. He tried fighting back by threatening to publish within 15 days "dozens of names" of rivals he claims are guilty of financial crimes. The deadline came and went without publication.

The betting in Tehran is that the Supreme Leader will not actually sack Ahmadinejad but let him last out his term as yesterday's man, lame duck in political isolation.
debkafile's Iranian sources: Two frontrunners for future president most mentioned recently are two hardliners, Majils (legislature) Speaker Ali Larijani, a former senior nuclear negotiator with the West, and ex-foreign minister Ali Akhbar Veliyati, who is a member of Khamenei's kitchen cabinet as senior adviser on international relations.

A prayer for 5772 Caroline Glick

Upon his return to Ramallah from New York, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was greeted by a crowd of several thousand well-wishers. They applauded him for his speech at the UN. There, Abbas erased Jewish history from the Land of Israel, denied Israel's right to exist and pledged his commitment to establish a racist Palestinian state ethnically cleansed of all Jews.

Many of Abbas's supporters in Ramallah held posters of US President Barack Obama. On them Obama was portrayed as a monkey. The caption read, "The First Jewish President of the United States."

The fact that the Palestinians from Fatah and Hamas alike are Jew-hating racists should surprise no one who has been paying a modicum of attention to the Palestinian media and general culture. Since the PA was established in 1994 in the framework of the peace process between Israel and the PLO, it has used the media organs, schools and mosques it controls to spew out a constant flow of anti-Semitic propaganda. Much of the Jew-hating bile is indistinguishable from anti-Jewish propaganda published by the Nazis.

As for their anti-black bigotry, it is enough to recall the frequency with which Condoleezza Rice was depicted as a monkey and a devil in the Palestinian and pan-Arab media during George W. Bush's presidency to realize that the racist depiction of Obama was not a fluke. Moreover, and more disturbingly, it is worth recalling that like its fellow Arab League members, the PA has strongly supported Sudan's genocide of black Africans in Darfur.

To a degree, the willingness of African-Americans to turn a blind eye to Arab anti-black prejudice is understandable. Since the mid-1960s, oil rich Arab kingdoms led by Saudi Arabia have spent hundreds of millions of petrodollars in outreach to African-Americans. This outreach includes but is not limited to massive proselytization efforts among inner city blacks. The combination of a strong and growing African-American Muslim population and a general sense of amity towards Muslims as a result of outreach efforts contribute to a willingness on the part of African- Americans to overlook Arab anti-black racism.

Unlike African-Americans, Jewish Americans have been targeted by no serious outreach campaigns by the likes of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world. To the contrary, as Mitchell Bard documented in his book The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America's Interests in the Middle East, these Arab nations have spared no effort in anti-Israel lobbying in the US. Among the Arab lobby's goals is to undermine the legitimacy of American Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel.

Furthermore, the anti-Jewish atmosphere in the Arab world is far more comprehensive and poisonous than its anti-black prejudice. A Pew global opinion poll from 2008 showed that hatred of Jews is effectively universal in the Arab world and overwhelming in non-Arab Muslim states. In Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, between 95 and 97 percent of respondents expressed hatred of Jews. In Indonesia, Turkey and Pakistan between two-thirds and three-quarters of respondents expressed hatred of Jews.

Jew-hatred among Muslim minorities in the West is less overwhelming. But Muslim antagonism towards Jews vastly outstrips that of the general populations of their countries. According to a Pew survey from 2006, while 7% of British citizens express unfavorable views of Jews, 47% of British Muslims admit to such views. In France, 13% of the general population admits to harboring negative feelings towards Jews and 28% of French Muslims do. Likewise in Germany, 22% of the general population acknowledges anti-Semitic views and 44% of German Muslims do.

More dangerously, the quantity of anti-Semitic attacks carried out by Muslims in the West far outstrips their percentage in the general population. According to Pew data, in 2010 Muslims comprised just 4.6% of the population of the UK but carried out 39% of the anti-Semitic attacks. Moreover, according to the Times Online, in 2006, 37% of British Muslims claimed that British Jews are legitimate targets for attacks. Only 30% of British Muslims disagreed.

WITH THE overwhelming data showing that throughout the Arab world there is strong support for organizations and regimes which advocate the genocide of world Jewry, the American Jewish community could have been expected to devote the majority of its attention and resources to exposing and combating this existential threat. Just as the American Jewish community dedicated itself in the past to causes such as the liberation of Soviet Jewry and fighting neo-Nazi groups in the US and throughout the world, it could have been expected that from the Anti-Defamation League to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that major American Jewish groups would be using the financial and human resources at their disposal to defend against this violent, genocidal hatred.

But this has not occurred. Many leading American Jewish organizations continue to be far more involved in combating the currently relatively benign anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians than confronting the escalating dangers of Muslim anti-Semitism.

According to a Gallup poll released last month, 80% of American Jews have favorable views of American Muslims. Seventy percent believe that they are not supportive of al-Qaida. These data indicate that American Jews are second only to American Muslims in their support for Muslim Americans. Indeed 6% more American Jews than American Muslims believe that American Muslims face prejudice due to their religion.

American Jewish championing of American Muslims is disconcerting when compared with American Jewish treatment of the philo-Semitic Evangelical Christians. Matthew Knee discussed this issue in depth in a recent article published at the Legal Insurrection website.

In a 2003 Pew survey, 42% of American Jews expressed antagonism towards Evangelical Christians. In a 2004 American National Election Study, Jews on average rated Evangelical Christians at 30 out of 100 on a "feeling thermometer," where 1 was cold and 100 was hot.

A 2005 American Jewish Committee survey found that Jews assessed that following Muslims, Evangelical Christians have the highest propensity for being anti-Semites. And yet, in the same 2004 American National Election Survey, Evangelical Christians rated Jews an average of 82 on the 1- 100 feelings scale. Evangelical Christians rated Catholics at 80.

Consistent survey data show that levels of anti- Semitism among Evangelical Christians is either the same as or slightly lower than the national average. According to a 2007 ADL survey, the US average is 15%.

There is a clear disparity between survey data on anti-Semitism among various American ethnic groups and American Jews' assessment of the prevalence of anti-Semitism among the same groups. The AJC survey found that American Jews believed that 29% of Evangelicals are largely anti- Semitic. They assessed that only 7% of Hispanics and 19% of African-Americans are anti-Semites.

As it works out, their perceptions are completely incorrect. According to the 2007 ADL survey, foreign born Hispanics, and African-Americans, harbor significantly stronger anti-Semitic views than the national average. Twenty-nine percent of foreign born Hispanics harbor very anti-Semitic views. Thirty-two percent of African-Americans harbor deeply anti-Semitic views.

Like Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans and Muslims vote disproportionately for the Democratic Party. Evangelical Christians on the other hand, are reliably Republican. A 2009 survey on US anti- Semitism conducted by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco found that Democrats are more likely to be anti-Semitic than Republicans.

The Gallup survey from last month showing American Jews' deep support for American Muslims is of particular interest because that support stands in stark contrast with survey data concerning American Jewish perception of Muslim American anti-Semitism.

THE 2005 AJC survey showed that American Jews believe that 58% of American Muslims are anti- Semitic. That is, American Jews are Muslim Americans' strongest non-Muslim defenders at the same time they are convinced that most Muslim Americans are anti-Semites.

What can explain this counterintuitive behavior? And how can we account for the apparent pattern of incorrect Jewish perceptions of anti-Semitism among Evangelical Christians on the one hand and fellow Democrats on the other hand?

As Knee argues, the disparity may very well be due to partisan loyalties. The Democratic Party has openly engaged in fear mongering and demonization of Evangelical Christians in order to maintain Jewish loyalty to the party. Knee quotes then-Democratic national chairman Howard Dean's statement that "Jews should feel comfortable in being American Jews without being constrained from practicing their faith or be compelled to convert to another religion."

As for Muslims, Knee cites a press release from the National Jewish Democratic Council from March attacking Congressman Peter King's hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. In the press release, the council claimed that such hearings "can and will" harm religious tolerance in America. That is, the council implied that by investigating the radicalization of American Muslims - and its concomitant transformation of American Muslims into supporters of the genocidal Jew-hatred endemic among radical Muslims worldwide - Rep. King is endangering Jews.

If American Jews are most concerned with being able to maintain their loyalty to the Democratic Party, then it makes sense for them to wildly exaggerate Evangelical anti-Semitism. It is reasonable for them to underestimate African-American and Hispanic anti-Semitism, and ignore the higher rates of anti-Semitism among Democrats than among Republicans. Moreover, it makes sense for them to follow their party's lead in failing to address the dangers of global Islamic anti- Semitism.

None of this makes sense, however, if American Jews are most concerned with defending Jews - in America and worldwide - from anti-Semitic sentiments and violence.

On Wednesday evening we begin our celebration of the New Year. Rosh Hashana marks a period of soul-searching among Jews. We are called upon at this time to account for our actions and our failures to act and to improve our faithfulness to our people, to our laws and to God.

It is possible that American Jews are simply unaware of the disparities between reality and their perceptions of reality. But it is the duty of all Jews to educate ourselves about the threats that reality poses to ourselves and our people.

At the UN last week, Abbas received accolades and applause from all quarters for his anti-Semitic assault on Jewish history and the Jewish state. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's remarks were applauded by Israel-supporters in the audience in the General Assembly.

As Israel is increasingly isolated and Jews worldwide are under attack, it is my prayer for the coming year that the American Jewish community will come to terms with a difficult reality and the choices it entails, and act with the majority of their fellow Americans to defend Israel and combat anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.