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Just weeks after European leaders tamped down a banking crisis in Cyprus, troubles in the euro zone have again reared their head, this time in Portugal.

“The risks in the euro zone have increased markedly over the past six weeks or so,” wrote Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy, a London-based consultancy that assesses risk on sovereign debt. A critical moment for the latest trouble took place on Friday, when Portugal’s Constitutional Court struck down four of nine contested austerity measures that the government introduced as part of a 2013 budget that included about 5 billion euros, or $6.5 billion, of tax increases and spending cuts. The ruling left the government short about 1.4 billion euros of expected revenue, or more than one-fifth of the 2013 austerity package.

Specifically, the court, which began reviewing the legality of the government’s austerity measures in January, ruled as unconstitutional and discriminatory the government’s plans to cut holiday bonuses for civil servants and pensioners, as well as to reduce sick leave and unemployment benefits.

The exchanges need roughly 2.7 million healthy 18-t0-35-year-olds to sign up to be solvent.

The Israel Electric Corporation CEO Eli Glickman warned Israel's security chiefs in a letter sent Sunday that the company would have to limit electricity to territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority and the Jerusalem District Energy Company (JEDCO) – which buys electricity from Israel and sells it to various cities in the West Bank – because of a debt totalling NIS 1,700,843,315.

The letter noted that as of December 31, debt owed by the Palestinian Authority and the Jerusalem District Electricity Company amounted to more than NIS 1.7 billion, of which NIS 1,054,914,845 were from the JDECO, and NIS 645,928,470 from the PA.  

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has taken his campaign of violent incitement against Palestinians to new extremes with a call for those disloyal to Israel to have their heads chopped off. He also repeated his long-standing demands for expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel. “Anyone who’s with us should be given everything – up to half the kingdom. Anyone who’s against us, there’s nothing to do – we should raise an axe and cut off his head; otherwise we won’t survive here,” Lieberman said at an election event Sunday, in reference to Palestinian citizens of Israel. According to Israel’s Mako news website, Lieberman made his comments in an interview with journalist Udi Segal during the “Electing Democracy in 2015” conference at IDC Herzliya, an Israeli college.

There are about 1.5 million Palestinians, survivors and descendants of those who escaped expulsion from present-day Israel in 1948, who are nominally citizens of Israel. Palestinians commemorate this ethnic cleansing, which they call the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) every year on 15 May.

Mistrust between the Obama administration and Benjamin Netanyahu has widened even further in recent days because of U.S. suspicion that the Israeli prime minister has authorized leaks of details about the U.S. nuclear talks with Iran.

The decision to reduce the exchange of sensitive information about the Iran talks was prompted by concerns that Netanyahu’s office had given Israeli journalists sensitive details of the U.S. position, including a U.S. offer to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal. Obama administration officials believed these reports were misleading because the centrifuge numbers are part of a package that includes the size of the Iranian nuclear stockpile and the type of centrifuges that are allowed to operate. A deal that allowed 500 advanced centrifuges and a large stockpile of enriched uranium might put Iran closer to making a bomb than one that permitted 10,000 older machines and a small stockpile, the administration argues.

An initial report Sunday by Israel’s Channel 2 news that the administration had cut all communications with Israel about the Iran talks was denied by White House spokesman Alistair Baskey. Sources here said that Philip Gordon, the Middle East director for President Obama’s National Security Council, would see Israeli national security adviser Yossi Cohen and other senior officials on Monday. The discussion would include Iran policy, but U.S. officials aren’t likely to share the latest information about U.S. strategy in the talks.

President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away. Take a look at them. there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes–especially for the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty. Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.

Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments. The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.

Nicholas Stern, an eminent climate economist at the London School of Economics, said: “This very important analysis shatters the myth that fossil fuels are cheap by showing just how huge their real costs are. There is no justification for these enormous subsidies for fossil fuels, which distort markets and damages economies, particularly in poorer countries.” Lord Stern said that even the IMF’s vast subsidy figure was a significant underestimate: “A more complete estimate of the costs due to climate change would show the implicit subsidies for fossil fuels are much bigger even than this report suggests.”

The IMF, one of the world’s most respected financial institutions, said that ending subsidies for fossil fuels would cut global carbon emissions by 20%. That would be a giant step towards taming global warming, an issue on which the world has made little progress to date. Ending the subsidies would also slash the number of premature deaths from outdoor air pollution by 50% – about 1.6 million lives a year. Furthermore, the IMF said the resources freed by ending fossil fuel subsidies could be an economic “game-changer” for many countries, by driving economic growth and poverty reduction through greater investment in infrastructure, health and education and also by cutting taxes that restrict growth.

In the end, the abject fear of Ben Wagner got Jamie Dimon to cave.For much of 2013, Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of the formidable JPMorgan Chase & Company, was telling anyone who would listen that it was unfair and unjust for federal and state prosecutors to blame him and his bank for the manufacture and sale of mortgage-backed securities that occurred at Bear Stearns & Company and at Washington Mutual in the years leading up to the financial crisis. When JPMorgan Chase bought those two failing firms in 2008, Dimon argued, he was just doing what Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner had asked him to do. Why should his bank be held financially accountable for the bad behavior at Bear and WaMu?It was a clever argument—and wrong. Dimon's relentless effort to spin his patriotic story soon collided with the fact that Wagner, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of California, had uncovered evidence that JPMorgan itself was guilty of many of the same greedy and irresponsible behaviors. Piles of subpoenaed documents and e-mails revealed that JPMorgan bankers and traders had underwritten billions of dollars' worth of questionable mortgage-backed securities that Dimon had been telling everyone had originated at Bear Stearns and WaMu. Worse, the bad behavior had occurred on Dimon's watch.

The likelihood that the Justice Department would file Wagner's civil complaint last fall—exposing publicly for the first time the litany of wrongdoing at JPMorgan and threatening to push it off the perch that Dimon had so artfully constructed for it over the years—ultimately brought Dimon to the table. On September 26, just weeks after the Justice Department shared a draft copy of Wagner's complaint with Dimon, the two sides arranged for a summit meeting between Dimon and Attorney General Eric Holder. By mid-November, the bank had agreed to pay $13 billion in a comprehensive settlement of mortgage-related securities claims with various branches of the federal government and a group of states, led by the attorneys general of New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts and Delaware.It was the largest financial settlement of all time, and it kept Wagner's complaint away from the prying eyes of the public. One thing is clear: Dimon's claim that his own bankers and traders had done nothing wrong in the years leading up to the financial crisis wasn't true. "The investigators and the lawyers were uncovering very viable evidence," explains Associate Attorney General Tony West, who headed up the settlement negotiations on behalf of the Justice Department. "I think there was recognition that we had enough evidence there that would support the complaint and would support a robust lawsuit."

[A disclosure of my own: after JPMorgan Chase fired me as a managing director in January 2004, I brought—and lost—a wrongful-dismissal arbitration against the bank. Separately, I remain in litigation with the bank as the result of a soured investment I made in 1999.]

For Mitt Romney, it's one scary Halloween.  The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon (November 1) he will be charged by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and other public interest groups with violating the federal ethics in government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bailout. At a press conference in Toledo, Bob King, President of the United Automobile Workers, will announce that his union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)  have filed a formal complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics in Washington stating that Gov. Romney improperly hid a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney's so-called "blind" trust. The union chief says, "The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue. It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.” “While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.

The Romneys' gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a limited partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it.   The Romneys' windfall was originally exposed in Nation Magazine (and reposted on Truthout,) Mitt Romney's Bail-out Bonanza after a worldwide investigation by our crew at The Guardian, the Nation Institute and the Palast Investigative Fund.  

According to ethics law expert Dr. Craig Holman of Public Citizen -- who serves as an advisor on the charge -- Ann Romney does not have a federally-approved blind trust.  An approved "blind" trust may not be used to hide a major investment which could be affected by Romney if he were to be elected President.

I thought about that March night as the election results rolled in, as the New York Times forecast showed Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency plummet from about 80% to less than 5%, while Trump’s fortunes skyrocketed by the minute. As Clinton’s future in the Oval Office evaporated, leaving only a whiff of her stale dreams, I saw all the foreign-policy certainties, all the hawkish policies and military interventions, all the would-be bin Laden raids and drone strikes she’d preside over as commander-in-chief similarly vanish into the ether. With her failed candidacy went the no-fly escalation in Syria that she was sure to pursue as president with the vigor she had applied to the disastrous Libyan intervention of 2011 while secretary of state.  So, too, went her continued pursuit of the now-nameless war on terror, the attendant “gray-zone” conflicts — marked by small contingents of U.S. troops, drone strikes, and bombing campaigns — and all those munitions she would ship to Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen. As the life drained from Clinton’s candidacy, I saw her rabid pursuit of a new Cold War start to wither and Russo-phobic comparisons of Putin’s rickety Russian petro-state to Stalin’s Soviet Union begin to die.  I saw the end, too, of her Iron Curtain-clouded vision of NATO, of her blind faith in an alliance more in line with 1957 than 2017. As Clinton’s political fortunes collapsed, so did her Israel-Palestine policy — rooted in the fiction that American and Israeli security interests overlap — and her commitment to what was clearly an unworkable “peace process.”  Just as, for domestic considerations, she would blindly support that Middle Eastern nuclear power, so was she likely to follow President Obama’s trillion-dollarpath to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal.  All that, along with her sure-to-be-gargantuan military budget requests, were scattered to the winds by her ringing defeat.

Clinton’s foreign policy future had been a certainty.  Trump’s was another story entirely.  He had, for instance, called for a raft of military spending: growing the Army and Marines to a ridiculous size, building a Navy to reach a seemingly arbitrary and budget-busting number of ships, creating a mammoth air armada of fighter jets, pouring money into a missile defense boondoggle, and recruiting a legion of (presumably overweight) hackers to wage cyber war.  All of it to be paid for by cutting unnamed waste, ending unspecified “federal programs,” or somehow conjuring up dollars from hither and yon.  But was any of it serious?  Was any of it true?  Would President Trump actually make good on the promises of candidate Trump?  Or would he simply bark “Wrong!” when somebody accused him of pledging to field an army of 540,000 active duty soldiers or build a Navy of 350 ships. Would Trump actually attempt to implement his plan to defeat ISIS — that is, “bomb the shit out of them” and then “take the oil” of Iraq?  Or was that just the bellicose bluster of the campaign trail?  Would he be the reckless hawk Clinton promised to be, waging wars like the Libyan intervention?  Or would he follow the dictum of candidate Trump who said, “The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists.” Outgoing representative Randy Forbes of Virginia, a contender to be secretary of the Navy in the new administration, recently said that the president elect would employ “an international defense strategy that is driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council… Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot find it.”

Such a plan might actually blunt armed adventurism, since it was war-weary military officials who reportedly pushed back against President Obama’s plans to escalate Iraq War 3.0.  According to some Pentagon-watchers, a potentially hostile bureaucracy might also put the brakes on even fielding a national security team in a timely fashion. While Wall Street investors seemed convinced that the president elect would be good for defense industry giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, whose stocks surged in the wake of Trump’s win, it’s unclear whether that indicates a belief in more armed conflicts or simply more bloated military spending. Under President Obama, the U.S. has waged war in or carried out attacks on at least eight nations — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  A Clinton presidency promised more, perhaps markedly more, of the same — an attitude summed up in her infamous comment about the late Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”  Trump advisor Senator Jeff Sessions said, “Trump does not believe in war. He sees war as bad, destructive, death and a wealth destruction.”  Of course, Trump himself said he favors committing war crimes like torture and murder.  He’s also suggested that he would risk war over the sort of naval provocations — like Iranian ships sailing close to U.S. vessels — that are currently met with nothing graver than warning shots. So there’s good reason to assume Trump will be a Clintonesque hawk or even worse, but some reason to believe — due to his propensity for lies, bluster, and backing down — that he could also turn out to be less bellicose.

      Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in danger of being brought down, possibly soon, over what initially appears to be little more than an imprudent taste for Cuban cigars and pink champagne. In truth, however, the allegations ensnaring Netanyahu reveal far more than his personal flaws or an infatuation with the high life. They shine a rare light on the corrupt nexus between Israel’s business, political and media worlds, compounded by the perverse influence of overseas Jewish money. Of the two police investigations Netanyahu faces (there are more in the wings), the one known as Case 1000, concerning gifts from businessmen worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is most likely to lead to his downfall. But it is the second investigation, Case 2000, and the still-murky relationship between the two cases, that more fully exposes the rot at the heart of Israel’s political system. This latter case hinges on a tape recording in which Netanyahu plots with an Israeli newspaper tycoon to rig media coverage in his favor. Leads from both cases suggest that Netanyahu may have been further meddling, together with his billionaire friends, in the shadowy world of international espionage.

Netanyahu’s appetite for a free lunch has been common knowledge in Israel since his first term as prime minister in the late 1990s. Then, he was twice investigated for fraud, though controversially charges were not brought in either case. Police discovered along the way that he and his wife, Sara, had horded many of the gifts he received during state visits. More than 100 were never recovered. The clarifications that were issued more than 15 years ago, as a result of those investigations, make it hard for Netanyahu to claim now that he did not understand the rules. According to justice ministry advice in 2001, government and state officials cannot keep gifts worth more than $100 without risking violating Israeli law. The gifts Netanyahu received from one of the Israeli businessmen involved in Case 1000, Hollywood film producer Arnon Milchan, amounted to as much as $180,000. Netanyahu has argued that these presents, ranging from cigars to jewelry, were expressions of a close friendship rather than bribes to him in his capacity as prime minister. The problem, however, is that Netanyahu appears to have reciprocated by using his position as head of the Israeli government to lobby John Kerry, the then U.S. secretary of state, to gain Milchan a 10-year U.S. residency visa. He may have done more.

Also being investigated are his family’s ties to a friend of Milchan’s, Australian billionaire James Packer, who made his fortune in the media and gambling industries. Packer has similarly lavished gifts on the Netanyahu family, especially Yair, Netanyahu’s eldest son. At the same time, Packer, now a neighbor of the Netanyahus in the coastal town of Caesarea, has been seeking permanent residency and the enormous benefits that would accrue with tax status in Israel. As a non-Jew, Packer should have no hope of being awarded residency. There are suspicions that Netanyahu may have been trying to pull strings on the Australian’s behalf. Many of these gifts were apparently not given freely. The Netanyahus asked for them. Indicating that Netanyahu knew there might be legal concerns, he used code words – “leaves” for cigars and “pinks” for champagne – to disguise his orders to Milchan. Police are reported to be confident, after questioning Netanyahu three times, that they have enough evidence to indict him. If they do, Netanyahu will be under heavy pressure to resign.

Unfortunately, we can only go so far with this before realizing that the laugh is also on us. For just as the establishment right and center got Iraq and the economy wrong, the establishment left was indulging in its own fantasy world, and it was one which is now coming to bite us on the proverbial ass, namely the fantasy of Barack Obama. Plenty of ink has been spilled in recent weeks about “misjudgments” which caused the left to swoon over a candidate who rejected virtually the entirety of what the left (by any reasonable definition) believes.  And even more anguish is caused by the grim reality that Obama is now acting on his deepest beliefs: expanding the war on terror, torpedoing banking reform, extending Bush tax cuts, while demanding fiscal austerity in the midst of what appears to be a second great depression.

According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, Barack Obama now ranks among the least popular presidents in the last century. In fact, his approval rating is lower than Bush’s was in his fifth year in office. Obama’s overall approval rating stands at a dismal 43 percent, with a full 55 percent of the public “disapproving of the way he is handling the economy”. The same percentage  of people “disapprove of the way he is handling his job as president”.  Thus, on the two main issues, leadership and the economy, Obama gets failing grades. An even higher percentage of people are upset at the way the president is implementing his signature health care system dubbed “Obamacare”.  When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling “implementation of the new health care law?” A full 62% said they disapprove, although I suspect that the anger has less to do with the plan’s “implementation” than it does with the fact that Obamacare is widely seen as a profit-delivery system for the voracious insurance industry.  Notwithstanding the administration’s impressive public relations campaign, a clear majority of people have seen through Obama’s health care ruse and given the program a big thumb’s down.

Of course, Obamacare is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The list of policy disasters that preceded this latest fiasco is nearly endless,  including everything from blanket pardons for the Wall Street big-wigs who took down the global financial system, to re-upping the Bush tax cuts, to appointing a commission of deficit hawks to slash Social Security and Medicare (Bowles-Simpson), to breaking his word on Gitmo, to reneging on his promise to pass Card Check, to expanding to wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, to droning 4-times as many civilians as the homicidal maniac he replaced as president in 2008.

All told, Obama has been bad for the economy, bad for civil liberties, bad for minorities,  bad for foreign wars, and bad for health care. He has, however, been a very effective lackey-sock puppet for Wall Street, Big Pharma, the oil magnates, and the other 1% -vermin Kleptocrats who run the country and who will undoubtedly attend his $100,000-per-plate speaking engagements when he finally retires in comfort to some gated community where he’ll work on his memoirs and cash in on his 8 years of faithful service to the racketeer class.

The Minsky Journey is where investment goes from what Minsky called a hedge unit, where the investment is its own source of repayment; to a speculative unit, where the investment only pays the interest; to a Ponzi unit, where the only way to repay the debt is for the value of the investment to rise.