Some April Fools will meet tomorrow in London. But sadly the G20 meeting is likely to be a bad joke yielding no result.

But first via totoro in comments this:

Factory output is collapsing at the fastest pace ever. Here is the global roundup. The annualised figures for February are as follows: Taiwan – 43 percent, Ukraine – 34 percent, Japan – 30 percent, Singapore – 29 percent, Hungary – 23 percent, Sweden – 20 percent, Korea – 19 percent, Turkey – 18 percent, Russia – 16 percent, Spain – 15 percent, Poland – 15 percent, Brazil – 15 percent, Italy – 14 percent, China – 12 percent, Germany – 12 percent, France – 11 percent, US – 10 percent and Britain – 9 percent. This is a catastrophe.

Yes. This is a catastrophic failure of world markets. But what are the G20 going to do about it? Likely nothing.

At least three groups of countries have very different ideas of what should be the priorities.

The U.S., UK and Japan want a big global stimulus financed by more debt. The continental big-powers France and Germany want global regulation of all financial markets. China and Russia want a new global reserve currency based on a mix of currencies and gold and in the form of IMF special drawing rights.

I am unsure about other demands. What are Brazil and Argentine asking for? What are India's and South Korea's and Indonesia's plans? In case you know please let us all learn of it in the comments.

The likely results as far as I can tell:

• The IMF will get more money so it can support more countries in dire need.
• There will be some statement to keep world trade open and against protectionism but all involved will continue to implement some protectionist measures.
• There will be some symbolic steps to more regulation, but the real steps there will be taken individually.

In summary the G20 will do nothing important or needed. There is disunity on the diagnostic of how we got here, on the state into which we want to get and on the methods of how to achieve a desirable new equilibrium.

It is sad but a probably unavoidable bad joke. Then maybe the real bad joke was globalization and wild running free-market believe. If the world learns from this, we may be better off in future days. My hope for that is not great. There are still to many fools around.

• Billmon: Now the homeless unemployed have Mylar tents and air mattresses and plastic chairs for their camps, whereas in the '30s those things hadn't
  been invented yet.
  Modern Times
• Stan Marsh explains Treasury decision making (video)
• Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation = Plunge Protection Team – Pension insurer shifted to stocks
• IBM's patent application for offshoring jobs.
• At your doorstep: COIN against gangs
• Don't pee in my toilet: Space Station version
• IDF: We are an honest, moral army. Our soldiers are lying.

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

Douglas Macgregor is a now retired Colonel of the U.S. Army and one of its few strategic thinkers. (The currently faved COIN folks are mere tactical thinkers.)

Mcgregor just published a provocative piece in the Armed Force Journal arguing against the standard U.S. policy mindset of interventionist wars. Leaving out the ample historic references the gist is this (emph. added):

Despite the seriousness of the present economic crisis, the greatest danger to the future security of the U.S. is Washington’s inclination to impose political solutions with the use of American military power in many parts of the world where Washington’s solutions are unneeded and unsustainable.

After looking at the demise of the British empire after the first world war it did not need to join he concludes:

The lesson is a straightforward one: Will we continue to pursue global hegemony with the use of military power to control and shape development inside other societies? Or will we use our military power to maintain our market-oriented English-speaking republic, a republic that upholds the rule of law, respects the cultures and traditions of people different from ourselves, and trades freely with all nations, but protects its sovereignty, its commerce, its vital strategic interests and its citizens?

Those are either-or questions. The U.S. can not have both. The problem is a too mighty military under direction of too shortsighted politicians:

Cont. reading: Macgregor: Purpose, Method, End-state

Maliki sent out his army to capture Awakening leaders no longer payed by the U.S.:

The arrest of Raad Ali, who helped the Americans stabilize the west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya, came to light Sunday, five days after the Iraqi army picked him up in a midnight raid, his aides said.

The U.S. is actively helping in this:

A combined force of American and Iraqi Army troops and National Police descended on Fadhil, a Sunni neighborhood and former insurgent stronghold in central Baghdad, and arrested the head of Fadhil’s Awakening Council, Adil al-Mashhadani, on terrorism charges, according to Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Iraqi security forces in Baghdad. He said firefights broke out afterward.

This might well reignite a civil war, but with the Iraqi army now more capable, the chances are against the insurgents.

Parviz thinks that this is part of a U.S.-Iran rapprochement.That is certainly possible. The U.S. may have decided to defer to Iran in Iraq for cooperation in Afghanistan and to generally lower level the hostility level. 

On the other side it seems that the U.S. wants to leave Iraq and that alone is motivation enough. To leave Iraq in even greater chaos is not in U.S. interests. It is better to have a strong government there than a weak government and permanent civil war that could escalate into neighbor countries. 'Cleaning up' the opposition while the U.S. is still there in full force is thereby a necessity on its own.

In Afghanistan the U.S. now tries to repeat some aspects of the 'Awakening' movement by arming and paying local forces at the town level. Those forces should note how the U.S. is now betraying such 'allies' in Iraq. It is likely to happen to them too.

• Interesting – I need to think and write about this: The crisis of maldistribution
• Nonsense – Just because an IT attack comes through computers in China, does not mean the attack comes from China: China-based network caught in cyber-espionage
• Lesson – Never trust the U.S. as an ally. U.S. troops now help Maliki to clean up the ‘Awakening’ Sunnies they created: US-backed Iraqi troops quell Baghdad uprising
• Hierarchy – Banks are too big to fail, their bosses to important. Carmakers not so. GM’s Wagoner out. Peugot’s Streiff too.
• Predicted here – 20 dead, 25 hurt in Lahore police training school attack

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

Matt Taibbi AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We're Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right

Only a person with a habitually overinflated sense of self-worth could think he deserves a $700,000 retention bonus, even if it has to be paid by taxpayers, when in reality no one "deserves" that much money.

Financial crisis – NOT a black swan event

An argument against torture confirmed: It doesn't work.
Good, now lets proceed with this: Spanish judge accuses six top Bush officials of torture

U.S. Troops In Iraq Excited To Finally Return To Afghanistan

Sy Hersh gets emails from Syria's president Assad: Syria Calling – The Obama Administration’s chance to engage in a Middle East peace.

Another attack on NATO supplies in Peshawar

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

To see Simon Johnson, an ex-IMF functionary with a critical and pessimistic view on recent capitalist excesses in The Atlantic was welcome but not unexpected. To read the first few graphs of an op-ed by another ex-IMF functionary with a similar basic analysis on the neo-conned op-ed pages of the Washington Post was, at first, a surprise. But deeper into the piece it turned out to be as neo-conned/neo-lib as most of the other stuff WaPo publishes.

It is a typical case of using the correct analysis of a crisis to then, in disguise, present a solution that applies the same mindset and tools that brought up the crisis in the first place.

Desmond Lachman: Welcome to America, the World's Scariest Emerging Market

I still recall the shock I felt at a meeting in Russia's dingy Ministry of Finance, where I finally realized how a handful of young oligarchs were bringing Russia's economy to ruin in the pursuit of their own selfish interests …
…
Over the past year, I've been getting Russia flashbacks as I witness the AIG debacle as well as the collapse of Bear Sterns and a host of other financial institutions. Much like the oligarchs did in Russia, a small group of traders and executives at onetime venerable institutions have brought the U.S. and global financial systems to their knees with their reckless risk-taking — with other people's money — for their personal gain.

…
We delude ourselves that our banks face liquidity problems, rather than deeper solvency problems, and we try to fix it all on the cheap just like any run-of-the-mill emerging market economy would try to do.

…
[W]atching Goldman Sachs's seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs as well as the way that Republicans and Democrats alike tiptoed around reforming Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — among the largest campaign contributors to Congress — made me wonder if the differences between the United States and the Asian economies were only a matter of degree.

…

Up to here the argument seems fine – even populist and consistent with (and probably copied from) the Johnson piece and in my view correct.

But now follows the real intend and what the whole piece is constructed to aim for:

[I]nstead of laying out a realistic plan for increasing our national savings, we choose not to face up to the Social Security and Medicare crises that lie ahead, embarking instead on massive spending programs that — whatever their long-run merits might be — we simply cannot afford.

The right wingers are using the crisis for an attack on the few basic social programs the U.S. has. They of course never admit that these programs were created in the first place to attenuate the effects of such crises. They also have nothing to offer to replace these programs but deep poverty and early death for all people more poor then themselves.

The saving rate is already increasing quite fast. Social Security in the U.S. is financially well. Better indeed than equal programs in other countries. Alternatives like pension funds are doing much, much worse. Medicare/Medicaid financial problems could be solved with some decent price controls and anti-cartel action towards the pharmaceutical industry combined with a universal insurances scheme where everyone has to pay and gets. A well regulated single-payer health care system would also go a long way to better the international competitive situation of U.S. industries.

But the moneyed class would not like that at all. It would make it harder to fleece that money. Their trick now is to use this crisis as an opportunity to rob the masses even more than they are already doing. Imagine all the money going towards social security today being redirected towards Wall Street and the medicare/medicaid money to private insurance looters.

There have already been several attempts like this. Bush put a lot of energy into his Social Security reform campaign. It did not work back then. But now the crisis gives the wingnuts another chance. Expect many more of such op-eds. The correct analysis, recognizing the crisis for what it is, but with solutions that would only make it bigger. These will not only come from the far 'republican' right but also from the usual death eaters in the democratic caucus.

This WaPo Sunday op-ed is only preparing the ways.

The right sees the crises as an opportunity. They are right to do so. It is one for the left too. Let's use it.

• Berlusconi builds united fascist party

• Pfaff on Suicidal Capitalism
• Mavercon on looting: Moral hazard – lite and strong
• Soros: Britain needs IMF, G20 meeting likely to fail
• No bonuses? Ok, we have other ways. BoA increases base pay for investment bankers by 70%.

• Helena on the west's extreme casualty aversion
• Another attack on NATO supplys around Peshawar.
• The White House's very evasive answers: AfPak Plan Conference Call

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

Here is Obama's new strategy for his 'campaign against
extremists who wish to do us harm'  or CAEWWTDUH: full remarks, white paper (doc).

Short version:

Let's fight all Pashtuns and whoever helps them. This in Afghanistan but especially in Pakistan.

Likely outcome:

The Pashtuns in Afghanistan will continue to fight against the 'western' occupation and each increase in 'western' troops will automatically increase their numbers too. The civilians in the 'Public Protection Force' the U.S. is now arming in Afghanistan (after years of disarmament programs) will take U.S. money by day and turn against the occupiers by night.

Under pressure from U.S. drones many Pashtuns in Pakistan will move from the areas in the tribal lands into the cities and will eventually fight the Pakistani government there. Recent days already saw deadly clashes between internally displaced persons and the police. With the fighting brought into major cities, the Pakistani government will lose even more legitimation. A military coup followed by a compromise with the Pashtuns in Pakistan might end that. An alternative would be the election of some politician that will then have to break the alliance with the U.S.

Meanwhile the costs in life and monies will ever increase. The current plans are for 60,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, less than half as much as the 'surge' brought to Iraq. But the costs are projected as $3,2 billion per month, $53,300 per soldier per month and more as double the costs for a U.S. soldier in Iraq.

In the end the U.S. public will again exprience war fatigue and a retreat will become inevitable. But that may take years and a new president as Obama will not be willing to surrender in a war he has now committed himself to.

bigger

The chart is by James Kwak who writes at The Baseline Scenario.

He is also co-author with Simon Johnson, MIT professor and a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, of an important and depressing piece in The Atlantic: The Quiet Coup

In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.

Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia, struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs, corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of the powerful—letting them take things, legally and illegally, with impunity.

…
Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. … A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression … If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

I am not that pesimistic – yet. What do you think? Is Simon Johnson right?

Senate voted 90-8: Congress passes wide-ranging bill easing banking laws, NYT, 1999
How finance captured your government: The Quiet Coup, The Atlantic

Obama's War on AfPak: $4,444,444 per hour, WaPo
Minimum wage in Kansas: $2.65 per hour, McClatchy

The consequences of dumb editorials: The Times Plans Temporary Pay Cuts, NYT
More consequences of dumb editorials: Washington Post to Offer New Buyouts to Employees, WaPo

Afraid of getting jailed: Swiss banks ban overseas travel amid global crackdown on secrecy, FT
The return of A.W.Mellon: Republican Road to Recovery, (pdf)

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

Obama proposes to limit the tax deductibility of charitable contributions:

The proposed tax change would apply to married couples with incomes of more than $250,000 (and single people with incomes greater than $200,000). Under the law, such couples can deduct the value of their charitable gifts from their taxable income.

…
The administration's plan would limit the amount that high-income individuals could deduct to 28 percent of their gifts, down from 35 percent, even though their incomes would still be taxed at a higher marginal rate.

Obama should go much further.

To give to a charity fulfills the person goal of the donor. The state is about furthering the goals of the general public, not of specific individuals. While some charities support the general good others, like most religion based charities, often have restricted groups of beneficiaries and want to further their special interests and policies. Some charities even work against the general good and against the declared policy of the state.

As David Ignatius points out today:

[C]ritics of Israeli settlements question why American taxpayers are supporting indirectly, through the exempt contributions, a process that the government condemns. A search of IRS records identified 28 U.S. charitable groups that made a total of $33.4 million in tax-exempt contributions to settlements and related organizations between 2004 and 2007.

My general stand on this that if a charity provides for the general good, it should be supported by all taxpayers. If a charity wants to provide for some special interest, giving to it should not be tax-deductible at all. I recognize that this would be difficult to achieve.

But one should ask why some rich people are able to deduct much more from their taxes than poorer ones even make. That gives the rich an advantage in influencing policies in their class interest while the costs are settled on all others.

A democracy is about one-man-one-vote because we believe that all men are equal and should have an equal say in furthering policies. The amount of charity giving that is tax deductible, if one supports such deductibility at all, should therefore be limited to the same amount for everyone.

A decent limit would probably be 10% of the yearly median income per person. In current U.S. numbers that would be some $2,600 per year everyone could give and get some tax deduction for.

Anybody who wants to give more for a favored cause is of course be free to do so. But there is no sound reason for the state to further that by waiving duly owned taxes for some individual and by spreading their foregone tax load on the shoulders of the rest.

Even if he wanted to Obama would not be able to get rid of tax-deductibility for all charitable contributions. But a limit on each individual's amount that can be given and tax-deducted is a sound aim and he should push into that direction.

Israeli warplanes conducted air strike on arms smugglers in Sudan: CBS headlines Haaretz and Google shows 1,200 related news articles.

I believe these to be nonsense.

From the Jerusalem Post piece on this:

As Israeli troops battled Palestinian gunmen during Operation Cast Lead in an attempt to end the rocket threat to southern Israel, IAF warplanes conducted a mission with similar objectives far from the front in the Gaza Strip, a CBS report revealed on Wednesday.

The report quoted unidentified American officials as saying that in January, Israeli warplanes bombed a convoy of trucks carrying arms destined for Hamas through Sudan.

The CBS report was not really a 'report'. It was this blog post by CBS reporter Dan Raviv about a March 24 piece from the Paris-based non-profit (financed by whom?) Sudan Tribune website which has as its sole source an alleged report by the Egyptian Al-Shurooq newspaper which I do not find on the web. The Sudan Tribune writes:

The Egyptian Al-Shurooq newspaper reported this week that US planes destroyed a convoy heading towards the borders carrying arms believed to be on its way to Gaza strip.

The report said that the convoy consisted of 17 trucks carrying 39 passengers that were all destroyed in the operation. None of the people on board the trucks survived the attack.

Reading the Sudan Tribune piece which alleges that U.S. bombers hit something in Sudan, CBS' Dan Raviv asked the CBS national security correspondent David Martin:

[T]he semi-official American version of the story is very different.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin has been told that Israeli aircraft carried out the attack. Israeli intelligence is said to have discovered that weapons were being trucked through Sudan, heading north toward Egypt, whereupon they would cross the Sinai Desert and be smuggled into Hamas-held territory in Gaza.

'Has been told' by whom? There is no source named for David Martin's assertion that Israeli air planes did something in Sudan. Were these 'American officials' as the Jerusalem Post asserts? The CBS blog post does not say that at all. It says a 'semi-official American version' whatever that may mean. Was the source that gave the 'semi-official American version' American or from Israel?

Dan Raviv is known to have intelligence contacts:

Cont. reading: Israel’s Sudan Bombing Report Is Likely Nonsense

PNAC 2.0: Can someone find me a link to the plan William Pfaff writes about?

Thanks to a pro Israeli neo-conservative plan put forward in New York, designed to destroy Pakistan as the only Moslem nation with nuclear weapons, important circles in Pakistan now seem convinced that the United States intends to divide Pakistan into three new states, the largest one being a new Baluchistan in the southwest, where there have always been separatist tendencies.

Don’t believe Pfaff? Talibs have direct support from the Pakistani military, according to ‘U.S. officials’.

But how does that explain this? Suicide attack kills 11 in NW Pakistan.

Following the tubes: It’s all by about Pipelinistan
says Pepe Escobar.

Loose mouth: Geither takes $ down 1.3% within 10 minutes.

There is no market for ‘toxic assets.’ That’s a myth used to fleece the taxpayers.

The most moral army of war criminals: Israel accused of indiscriminate phosphorus use in Gaza

Unlikely to be true: Report: IAF struck arms convoy in Sudan in January

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

A Executive Vice President of AIG. Financial Products resigned and his resignation letter is printed as on op-ed in today's New York Times.

Wall Street insider Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture loves the letter as he, like the letter, argues against any bonus-cuts or high bonus taxation.

The resignation letter by Jake DeSantis claims that he is leaving AIG-Financial Products because his bonus was cut and because he finds that unfair as he had nothing to do with the CDS mess that took AIG-FP down. The last part may well be true but it does not matter and we will come back to that in a moment.

First the payment issue:

One has to be a blatant hypocrite to claim one worked for $1 dollar per year 'out of a sense of duty' when one expected and was assured to get a million or so in bonus payments:

Cont. reading: A Bad AIG Bonus Argument

A week ago the Neue Züricher Zeitung, a major Swiss newspaper, published a piece (in German) on how Iran allegedly financed a Syrian nuclear reactor program. The Associated Press and many others echo-chambered the report:

GENEVA (AP) — An Iranian defector told the West that Iran was financing North Korean moves to transform Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to the Israeli airstrike that destroyed a secret reactor, a report said Thursday.

The report, written by Hans Ruehle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry, details an Iranian connection and fills in gaps about Israel's Sept. 6, 2007, raid that knocked out Syria's nearly completed Al Kibar reactor.

Ali Reza Asghari, a retired general in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy defense minister, "changed sides" in February 2007 and provided considerable information to the West on Iran's own nuclear program, Ruehle said in his article in the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung.

I ignored the piece as Rühle has not been in official government service since 1988 and is known to be a publishing tool for far right-wing and often U.S. interests. Whatever he writes on Russia or the Middle East is usually bunkum this or that secret service fed to him.

But this time Rühle did even worse. As Jeffrey Lewis at the Arm Control Wonks finds:

Cont. reading: Another Iran Scare Story Debunked

• Success at Gitmo: A guard converts to Islam.
• How do they know? CIA: Most electronic voting isn't secure.
• Missile threat from Iran exaggerated says Rep. Ellen Tauscher. Tauscher is under consideration to be undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. Watch out for the lobby to take her down.
• Changing donkeys: U.S. Weighs Sharif as Partner in Pakistan
• A new excuse to stay? GAO: Withdrawal from Iraq more expensive than staying.
• Ugly: Japan's exports down 49% year-over-year.
• Agent Orange to be used at the Mexican boarder?
• Change:
  – Search for: 'Global War on Terror'
  – Replace with: 'Overseas Contingency Operation'

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

Barack Obama today has an OpEd in more than 30 international papers about the economic situation and on steps to take to better it. Headlined A time for global action Obama writes:

My message is clear: The United States is ready to lead, and we call upon our partners to join us with a sense of urgency and common purpose.

I am quite sure that people around the world do not want the U.S. to lead here. Why are those who essentially created the mess believe they are the best capable to solve it?

At home, we are working aggressively to stabilize our financial system. This includes an honest assessment of the balance sheets of our major banks, and will lead directly to lending that can help Americans purchase goods, stay in their homes and grow their businesses.

The Geithner plan is to subsidize the purchase of 'toxic assets'. That subsidy will lead to – again – miss-pricing of those assets. How can that further an honest assessment of balance sheets?

The G-20 should quickly deploy resources to stabilize emerging markets, substantially boost the emergency capacity of the International Monetary Fund and help regional development banks accelerate lending. Meanwhile, America will support new and meaningful investments in food security that can help the poorest weather the difficult days that will come.

Just what Africa and other poor areas need. More IMF pressure to 'open' their economies and more heavily subsidized U.S. agricultural products that destroy their local farming communities.

Rigorous transparency and accountability must check abuse, and the days of out-of-control compensation must end.

Then why does the Senate, under White House pressure, now stalls high taxes on bonuses in bailed out companies?

This G-20 meeting provides a forum for a new kind of global economic cooperation. Now is the time to work together to restore the sustained growth that can only come from open and stable markets that harness innovation, support entrepreneurship and advance opportunity.

"Open and stable markets …" So why did the U.S. president just signed a law that will, against the letters and intend of an international agreement, no longer allow Mexican truck drivers to ferry loads inside the U.S.?

Obama has lots of great words in that well written OpEd. But where are the actions that support those shiny words? 

Unless Obama walks the talk on this, and there is no sign that intends to do so, the world will not take him seriously.

Blackmail: Obama Dials Down Wall Street Criticism because the banksters are miffed.

The banks' message: If you want our help to get credit flowing again to consumers and businesses, stop the rush to penalize our bonuses.

The Treasury wants powers to seize non-bank financial companies like AIG and to break their contracts. Maybe time to update your insurances?

Secretary of the Treasury is Timothy Franz Geithner. The name Geithner is of south-German origin. The original spelling is Geissner or Geißner as the English 'th' is the consonance to the German sharp double-s also written as 'ß'. A 'Geiss' or 'Geiß' in south-German dialect is a goat. The 'Geissner' is the one who herds the goats.

Krugman rulez: The NYT editors come out in favor of bank 'nationalization'.

The great hope for democracy, Georgia's Saakashvili, is busy arresting opposition politicians.

Baghdad blogger Salam Pax is posting some of his notes from five years ago in a series of blog flashbacks.

A Pakistani muses about dangerous US plans for Baluchistan: Why aren’t we acting now?

Afghan leaders are condeming corruption. Don't worry folks, Richard Holbrooke will clear up the AfPak mess and especially the corruption problems. He has great experience as former AIG board member, as a former Lehman Brothers managing director and as a recipient of a cheap mortgage through the 'friends of Angelo' program. If that does not qualify …

Roger Cohen recently wrote a series of NYT columns with a positive view on Iran. Now the Israel lobby is out to get him fired.

The Guardian has a series of videos showing Israeli war-crimes.

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

The French president Charles De Gaulle once called the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar an "extraordinary privilege". Part of the privilege is that the U.S. can borrow in its own currency and later pay back the debt in its own currency even when the dollar by then decreased in value.

China and others are now pressing to end that U.S. privilege.

In 1965 De Gaulle threatened to take the Franc back from a dollar reserve covered currency to a gold reserve status. At that time the U.S. had a persistent trade deficit, small in today's terms, and De Gaulle feared the U.S. would devalue the then gold backed dollar. That indeed happened and when in 1971 Nixon unilaterally stopped the direct convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold.

The same fear De Gaulle had is again increasing around the world and a new attempt is now made to relieve the dollar of its privileged role. But this time the attackers on the dollar's reserve status are much more powerful than in 1965 when only France and Spain were the troublemakers.

The U.N. Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform will soon recommend a new reserve standard:

Persaud said the panel had been looking at using something like an expanded Special Drawing Right, originally created by the International Monetary Fund in 1969 but now used mainly as an accounting unit within similar organizations.

The SDR and the old Ecu are essentially combinations of currencies, weighted to a constituent's economic clout, which can be valued against other currencies and indeed against those inside the basket.

A new reserve currency was also discussed at a recent meeting of the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China:

The Russian source said Moscow was aware that the emergence of the new global currency would not happen overnight and said its goal was to initiate a discussion about it at the G20 summit in London on April 2.

The source said that India did not object to the discussion but was not prepared to take the lead. The source said South Korea and South Africa backed the idea, while developed nations were not "allergic" to it.

Today the Vice Governor of the People's Bank of China was send out to assure the world that China would, for now, continue to buy treasuries. But that was likely only to cover for a quite revolutionary  speech his boss Zhou Xiaochuan gave today. China Daily reports:

Cont. reading: The U.S. Is Losing Its Reserve Currency Privilege