But Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who is now the head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, warned that the administration’s patience was growing thin. “What the Obama administration is saying is that, ‘Yes, we’re still committed to you,’ ” Mr. Levy said. “But if you don’t give us something to work with, we can’t continue to carry the rest of the world for you.”Mr. Netanyahu’s objections to a nuclear deal with Iran, and his decision to firmly ally himself with Mr. Obama’s Republican opponents in expressing his ire over the Iran talks, may well have hardened the president’s decision to push for an agreement, one Obama adviser said Wednesday. At the very least, Mr. Netanyahu’s opposition has done nothing to steer Mr. Obama away from his preferred course of reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions through an international agreement that would sharply limit Tehran’s ability to produce nuclear fuel for at least 10 years, in exchange for a gradual easing of economic sanctions. Mr. Kerry and Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, are continuing talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, this week with the goal of reaching an agreement by the end of the month.
Gary Edwards on 16 Dec 11Excellent summary of how deep the hole the Federal Reserve has dug for Americans. Walks us from the 2008 crisis to the Levy Economics Institute $29.616 Trillion Bankster Bailout. Incredibly well written commentary. excerpt: Bernanke argues we should look only at the lending at a peak instant of time. Think about it this way. A half dozen drunken sailors are at the bar, and the bartender refills their shot glasses with whiskey each time a drink is taken. At any instant, the bar-keep has committed only six ounces of booze. That is a useful measure of whiskey outstanding. But it is not useful for telling us how much the drunks drank. Bernanke would like us to believe that if the Fed newly lent a trillion bucks every day for 3 years to all our drunken bankers that we should total that as only a trillion greenbacks committed. Yes, that provides some useful information but it does not really measure the necessary intervention by the Fed into financial markets to save Wall Street. And that leads to the final way to measure the Fed's commitments to propping up our drunks on Wall Street: add up every single damned loan, guarantee and asset purchase the Fed made to benefit banks, banksters, real Housewives on Wall Street, fraudsters, and their cousins, aunts and uncles. This gives us the cumulative Fed commitments. The final important consideration is to separate "normal" Fed actions from the "extraordinary" or "emergency" interventions undertaken because of the crisis. That is easier than it sounds. After the crisis began, the Fed created a large alphabet soup of special facilities designed to deal with the crisis. We can thus take each facility and calculate the three measures of the Fed's commitments for each, then sum up for all the special facilities. And that is precisely what Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson have done. They are PhD students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, working on a Ford Foundation grant under my direction, titl
