Kerry offers $450 million to rescue Egyptian economy

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MARCH 4, 2013

Shortly before ending his first visit to Cairo, the new Secretary of State of the United States, John Kerry, said that in his meeting with President Mohamed Morsi he pledged to provide 450 million dollars (350 million euros) in aid to the Arabic country. With various regions declared in default, the government and the opposition unable to resolve their differences, and an economy on the brink of bankruptcy, the troubled Egyptian transition is going through one of its most delicate phases.

In a statement, Kerry linked financial assistance to the promise of the Islamist President to accelerate negotiations to close a loan with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) worth 4,800 million dollars. “In light of the dire need and confirmation of President Morsi who aims to complete the process with the IMF, the U.S. will now provide the first $190 million of our promise of $450 million in budget support”, read the text.

As we have already informed readers, the so-called Arab Spring was simply an attempt to seize non-aligned nations to bring them under the debt-based system that governs most of the world. Egypt is the first nation to succumb under the IMF plan to further destroy economies as it did with other third wold nations. The IMF plans to destroy economies was revealed by former insider, Joseph Stiglitz and reported on by investigative journalist Greg Palast.

The funds lent by the U.S. are said to come as rain in May for the Egyptian public coffers. The most populous Arab country has a soaring budget deficit exceeding 10%, and foreign exchange reserves have reached a critical level. Kerry described the aid as “a good faith effort to encourage reforms and help the Egyptian people at this difficult time.” But in reality, the loan is a down payment to guarantee American rights to exploit Egypt for all it has gotten.

During the past two months, the Egyptian pound has depreciated by 10%. If the country does not increase its foreign reserves soon, Egyptians believe the country will face a sharp devaluation of its currency, which could cause a social explosion. Egypt is the largest importer of wheat in the world, so a slump in the Egyptian pound would lead to a price increase of basic products such as bread. The decay of the Egyptian economy, just as it has been done with many other third world and developing nations is part of the calculated, preplanned and controlled destruction orchestrated by the IMF.

Besides a battered economy, Egypt suffers a serious political and social stability, as Kerry could experience in his own flesh. His departure from Cairo had to be delayed about two hours because a group of amateur football club fans of Ahly blocked the road leading to the airport. The action was intended to pressure the court which issued a verdict on the slaughter of Port Said Stadium, which resulted in the death of  74 fans. It is important to remember that Egypt’s current situation is a result of Western interventionism, after countries such as the United States and a handful European powers fully supported the overthrow of their former puppet Hosni Mubarak. The same script was followed later in Libya and is now being used in Syria.

Protests in Port Said are not new. In fact, the city has become the epicenter of a recent wave of protests. Yesterday clashes escalated  between police and protesters, leaving three civilians and two policemen dead and hundreds wounded, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Health. The port city has been experiencing a general strike for the past two weeks as a result of police brutality that claimed the lives of 40 people back in in late January.

The new head of U.S. diplomacy tiptoed by the country’s internal political conflict. “Clearly, we need to work harder and make compromises to restore unity, political stability, and good health of the Egyptian economy,” Kerry said at the end of a visit that has had a busy schedule. Besides President Morsi, the former senator met with the army chief, the Foreign Minister and representatives from the opposition and civil society.

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United States will increase support for Syrian Terrorists

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | FEBRUARY 28, 2013

Hillary Clinton was very blunt when she appeared before Congress to talk about the Benghazi affair. She said the U.S. would continue causing war and conflict all over the world. Days after, during his confirmation, John Kerry, the current State Department Secretary seconded Clinton’s words and reaffirmed the American interest to maintain political and military control of the world as it stood up until that point.

Now, as a sworn U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, confessed in Paris his desire to accelerate the “political transition” in Syria after two years of a conflict that has claimed more than 70,000 victims and hundreds of thousands of refugees. All indications are that the Obama administration plans to paint brush its policy toward Syria in a way that resembles a change in the way it has so far approached the civil war in the country. The new plan will be presented at a conference to be held in Rome with the Syrian opposition, who the U.S. and its European cohorts recognize as the governing body in Syria.

Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, backed up Kerry’s announcement during his press conference yesterday at the White House by saying that Washington will increase assistance to the Syrian terrorists in an effort to achieve a society that leaves behind the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

On Sunday, John Kerry began his first official trip as Secretary of State in a tour that focuses on the Syrian conflict. He visited London, Berlin and Paris. Today he will be in Rome and then travel to Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar before returning to Washington.

Since the start of his journey, the head of U.S. diplomacy has made indirect references to a change of direction from the White House and announced that “we’re not going to Rome just to talk,” Kerry said in London on Monday.

In Berlin, the Secretary of State said the White House desires “a peaceful solution” in Syria, adding that that outcome is something that Assad refused to negotiate and that such refusal resulted in the killing of more civilians. Kerry does not say, though, that it is the aid provided by the U.S. and the rest of its partners in the region and Europe, which enables the Syrian terrorists to kill innocent civilians. Men, women and children are either murdered in cold blood, or get caught in the fight between the Assad regime and the revolutionaries.

The one-day meeting with the Syrian opposition occurred after the leader of the National Coalition opposition, Moaz Ahmed al-Khatib, accepted to attend the discussions which he had labeled as “the international silence before the crimes”. John Kerry has been very clear with the Assad regime about its future. The failed Democratic presidential candidate said that the Syrian president will not remain in office by firing “shots”.

“He needs to understand that there won’t be a solution if he continues to use force, so you have to convince him of that, and I think the opposition needs more help to be able to do it,” Kerry pointed out in a joint press conference with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

The Obama administration is planning to provide the rebels with armored vehicles and combat equipment –such as body armor–. For a while, Washington provided what it called “nonlethal” aid to the Syrian rebels. Last summer, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the former director of the CIA today David Petraeus and former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta proposed a plan to arm the rebels, which was rejected by the House White saying he preferred to continue building a strong political opposition. Later, the weapons made its way to the Syrian terrorists anyways.

In Syria, the so-called opposition has attacked the refusal of the U.S. and other Western countries to provide even more resources to attack the Assad government. This of course is a ploy, since the rebels have been properly armed directly by the U.S. and indirectly by American allies in the region.

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A Tottering Technocracy

Here and in Europe, the financial meltdown exposes the hollowness of our elites.

by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review
August 9, 2011

We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics.

The house of a John Kerry, the plane of an Al Gore, or, in the European case, the suits of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn are no different from those of the CEOs and entrepreneurs who were as privately courted as they were publicly chastised. These elites were mostly immune from charges of hypocrisy or character flaws, by virtue of their background and their well-meaning liberalism.

The financial meltdown here and in Europe revealed symptoms of the technocracy’s waning. On this side of the Atlantic, Geithner, Orszag, Summers, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Krugman, and Christina Romer apparently assumed that some academic cachet, an award bestowed by like kind, or a long-ago-granted degree should give them credibility to advocate what the tire-store owner, family dentist, or apple farmer knew from hard experience simply could not be done — borrow or print money on the theory that insular experts, without much experience in the world beyond the academy or the New York–Washington financial and government corridor, could best direct it to productive purposes.

But now they have either left government or are no longer much listened to — and some less-well-certified accountant will be left with the task of finding ways to pay back $16 trillion. Abroad, at some point, German clerks and mechanics are going to have to work a year or two past retirement age to pay for those in Greece or Italy who chose to stop working a decade before retirement age — despite all the sophisticated technocratic babble that such arithmetic is reductive and simplistic.

In the devolution from global warming to climate change to climate chaos — and who knows what comes next? — a small group of self-assured professors, politicians, and well-compensated lobbyists hawked unproven theories as fact — as if they were clerics from the Dark Ages who felt their robes exempted them from needing to read or think about their religious texts. Finally, even Ivy League and Oxbridge degrees and peer-reviewed journal articles could not mask the cooked research, the fraudulent grants, and the Elmer Gantry–like proselytizing about everything from tree rings and polar-bear populations to glaciers and the Sierra snowpack. A minor though iconic figure was the truther and community activist Van Jones, the president’s “green czar,” who lacked a record of academic excellence, scientific expertise, or sober and judicious study, assuming instead that a prestigious diploma and government title, a certain edgy and glib disdain for the masses, and media acclaim could permit him to gain lucre and influence by promoting as fact the still unproven.

Higher education is no longer affordable for many families, and does not guarantee well-rounded, well-educated graduates. A university debt bubble, in Fannie and Freddie fashion — together with the rise of no-frills private online certificate-granting institutions — is undermining traditional higher education. The symptoms are unmistakable: tuition spiraling far ahead of inflation; elite faculty excused from teaching to publish esoteric articles in little-read journals; legions of poorly compensated part-time instructors and graduate-student assistants subsidizing the privileged class; political orthodoxy as an unspoken requisite for membership in the club. An administrator is deemed successful largely for promoting “diversity” — rarely on the basis of whether costs stabilized, graduation rates increased, the need for remediation declined, or post-graduation jobs were assured on his watch. This warped system, which grew out of the bountiful 1960s, is now a vestigial organ, an odd-looking thing without an easily definable purpose. When will the bubble burst? If the four-year university cannot ensure its graduates that they will necessarily have a better-paying job and know more than the products of an upfront credentialing factory, why incur the $200,000 cost and put up with the political indoctrination?

Kindred media elites in Europe and the United States lauded supposed technocratic expertise without much calibration of achievement. Indeed, to examine the elite media is to unravel the incestuous nature of power marriages and past loyal service to heads of state. Those who praised Obama as a god or attributed their own nervous tics to his omnipresence or reported on his brilliant policies often either had been speechwriters to past liberal presidents, enjoyed family connections, or were married to other New York or Washington journalists or powerbrokers. Their preferences about where to send a kid to school, where to vacation, and what to think were as similar to those they reported on as they were foreign to those who were supposed to listen to them. Like wealthy people in the Middle Ages who bought indulgences instead of truly repenting their sins, the more our elites preached about egalitarian politics for the fly-over upper middle classes, the less badly they felt about their own mannered conniving for privilege and status.

A generation ago, we were supposed to be grateful that a few gifted and disinterested minds were digesting our news for us each day on cash-rich ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, summarized periodically on weekend network discussion groups and in newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek. Now the market share of all these enterprises is shrinking. Some exist only because of government subsidy, rich parent companies, or like-minded wealthy benefactors.

The technocratic pronouncements from on high — that Barack Obama was “sort of GOD,” or at least “the smartest president in history”; that a Harvard-trained public-policy wonk alone knew how to save us from a roasting planet — are now seen by most as laughable. An education-age Reformation is brewing every bit as earth-shattering as its 16th-century religious counterpart.

There are also generic signs of the technocracy’s morbidity. It deeply distrusts democracy, most recently evidenced by John Kerry’s rant that the media should not even cover the Tea Party, and by the European Union’s terror of allowing the public to vote on its intricate financial bandaging. It is no accident that technocratic journalists love autocratic China — with its ability to promote mass transit or solar panels at the veritable barrel of a gun — while hating the Tea Party, which came to legislative power through the ballot box.

So the elites’ furor grows at those who seek and obtain power, exposure, and influence without the proper background, credentials, or attitude. How else to explain why a Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin earns outright hatred, whereas a Mitt Romney or John McCain received only partisan disdain?

There is an embarrassing lack of talent and imagination in the last generation of the technocrats. One banal memo about a “tea-party downgrade” or a “jihadist” takeover of the Republican party is mimicked by dozens of politicians and journalists who cannot think of any more creative phraseology. Calls for civility are the natural accompaniment to unimaginative slurring of those outside the accustomed circle. When Steven Chu exhorts us that gas prices should match European levels or assures us that California farms will blow away, should we laugh or cry? Do learned attorneys general call the nation “cowards,” refer to fellow minority members as “my people,” or really believe that they can try the self-confessed terrorist architect of 9/11 in a civilian court a few yards from the scene of his mass murder? Was Timothy Geithner really indispensable in 2009 because other technocrats swore he was?

We are living in one of the most unstable — and exciting — periods in recent memory, as much of the received wisdom of the last 30 years is being turned upside down. In large part the present reset age arises because our political and cultural leaders exercised influence that by any rational standard they had never earned.

As Predicted, Democrats Blame Tea Party for Downgrade

Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham said something diametrically opposite that does reflect reality: “The tea party hasn’t destroyed Washington. Washington was destroyed before the tea party got here.”

by Ben Wolfgang
Washington Post
August 8, 2011

While continuing to cast doubt on the credibility of Standard & Poor’s, several Democrats on Sunday said there is an even greater culprit in the downgrade of the nation’s credit rating: the tea party.

“I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade,” Sen. John F. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day that also saw mounting anxieties in world markets over the downgrade among myriad other economic woes worldwide. Some of the world’s top financial ministers issued a joint statement Sunday night committing themselves to preserve the stability of financial markets and their economies.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama, used the exact same phrase in dubbing the credit rating drop the “tea party downgrade,” as Democrats tried to position themselves as reasonable, pragmatic leaders and conservative Republicans as irresponsible ideologues who caused the downgrade by refusing to accept any new taxes.

That’s exactly the kind of blame game that led Standard & Poor’s, one of three key credit-ratings agencies, to strip the U.S. federal government of its AAA status Friday night and reducing it to AA+ for the first time in the nation’s history.

“Congress and the administration are jointly responsible for the conduct of fiscal policy. So, this is not really about either political party,” David Beers, the head of S&P’s government debt-rating unit, said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

In justifying its actions, S&P cited the political gridlock that continues to paralyze Washington. Although Democrats and Republicans eventually came together last week and crafted a compromise bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, S&P decided it wasn’t enough to save the nation’s AAA status, a rating still held by France, Sweden and other countries, and businesses such as Coca-Cola Co. and Microsoft Corp.

“Even with the agreement of Congress and the administration this past week … the underlying debt burden of the U.S. government is rising and will continue to do so most likely over the next decade,” Mr. Beers said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, defended the tea party and said that without the movement, trillions of dollars in spending cuts wouldn’t be possible.

“Thank God they’re here,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“This is the first time we’ve ever raised the debt ceiling where we tried to actually reduce spending. That’s a good thing, but we’re woefully short,” he said. “The tea party hasn’t destroyed Washington. Washington was destroyed before the tea party got here. The hope is that the tea party and middle-of-the-road people can find common ground to turn this country around before we become Greece.”

Democrats, who also had harsh words for S&P, said there’s enough blame to go around.

Lawrence H. Summers, former director of Mr. Obama’s National Economic Council, on Sunday called the agency’s track record “terrible.” He referenced S&P’s highly positive ratings for mortgage-backed securities that tanked in 2008, which many blame for the ongoing economic crisis.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, in his first public comments on the credit downgrade, told CNBC that S&P had shown “terrible judgment.”

“They’ve handled themselves very poorly. And they’ve shown a stunning lack of knowledge about the basic U.S. fiscal budget math,” he said.

Democrats weren’t alone in their stinging critiques of S&P. Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Steve Forbes, former Republican presidential candidate and CEO of Forbes Inc., said the downgrade was “outrageous” and “a political move.”

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Kerry and McCain want to legitimize Libyan Invasion

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 21, 2011

John Kerry, the Democrat Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, and John McCain, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, will introduce a resolution today in an attempt to legitimize Obama’s invasion of Libya.

June 19 marked 90 days since Obama called for U.S. intervention under a humanitarian pretense. According to the War Powers Act, the president must wait on Congress to pass a resolution after 90 days.

McCain took to the Senate floor and said the measure would authorize Obama to advance U.S. “national security interests” as part of an international coalition attempting to unseat and even assassinate Gaddafi. The authority would be limited to a year, according to the Associated Press.

Kerry and McCain introduced the resolution in order to head off an attempt by the House to defund the operation. The effort began after Obama ignored Congress and did not seek a formal declaration of war, as stated under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution.

Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war since the Second World War. The United States has formally declared war against foreign nations five separate times, each upon prior request by the president. Four of those five declarations came after hostilities began.

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