Anticipate more unsubstantiated threats as the clerics flail desperately in an attempt to get oil prices back up.

LONDON (Reuters) – Iran’s state finances have come under unprecedented pressure and the resilience of ordinary people is being tested by soaring inflation as oil income plummets due to tightening Western sanctions and sharply falling oil prices.

Tough financial measures imposed by Washington and Brussels have made it ever more difficult to pay for and ship oil from Iran. Its oil output has sunk to the lowest in 20 years, cutting revenue that is vital to fund a sprawling state apparatus.

Already down by more than a quarter, or about 600,000 barrels per day, from rates of 2.2 million bpd last year, shipments of crude oil from Iran are expected to drop further when a European Union oil embargo takes effect on July 1.

Tehran is already estimated to have lost more than $10 billion in oil revenues this year.

Causing even more pain, oil prices fell below $100 a barrel last week to a 16-month low amid a darkening outlook for economies in Europe, the United States and China.

Read more here.

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With Detroit teetering over a monetary abyss, Mayor Dave Bing and the city’s new chief financial officer issued a clarion call Friday, warning bluntly that the city will run out of cash next week if a lawsuit challenging the financial agreement the city made with the state to avoid insolvency isn’t dropped.

Calling his frustration level “off the charts” and saying the lawsuit is creating an even worse financial situation than the city was already in, Bing said he has urged Detroit’s top lawyer, Krystal Crittendon, to drop the suit so the city can avoid losing a portion of $80 million the state is threatening to withhold if the lawsuit doesn’t go away.

But, Bing said, by law he cannot force Crittendon to drop the suit.

“I didn’t want to get into a lawsuit — it makes no sense to me, and nobody wins, as far as I’m concerned,” Bing said at a news media briefing Friday. “We’ve spent way too much time on this issue that keeps us from doing the things that we need to do to fix the city.”

The urgency of the financial situation and growing impatience in Lansing resulted in Bing’s push to get together with the council for a closed-door meeting Monday to try to come to some type of consensus.

“If our city runs out of money, there is no bigger crisis that we would have,” Bing said.

But City Council President Charles Pugh said he and many of his colleagues want Crittendon to stand her ground on her challenge of the consent deal. Pugh insisted Friday that it’s not out of brinkmanship, but concern that the city’s consent agreement with the state must be reviewed in court to determine whether it violates Detroit’s own laws governing the conduct of elected city officials.

Pugh said of CFO Jack Martin’s warning that the city will be broke by Friday: “We feel like that may be a bit of an exaggeration.”

Peter Letzmann, a former city lawyer for Detroit, Pontiac and Troy who teaches public administration law at Grand Valley State University, said he doubts Crittendon has the legal standing to pursue the case, which he predicted a judge will toss out.

“I’ve never seen this kind of chutzpah by a city attorney acting without the authority of the mayor or City Council,” Letzmann said.

“They’re turning out the streetlights in Detroit, but we’re spending city dollars chasing what is pretty clearly a frivolous lawsuit,” he said. “They’ve got to stop politicking here. They’re just pushing the city to bankruptcy.”

The battle ultimately could lead to an emergency manager if state officials deem the city to be in violation of the consent agreement. The deal gives the state significant control over Detroit’s finances but prevents, for now, the appointment of an emergency manager who could strip virtually all authority from Bing and the council.

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ZURICH (Reuters) – U.S. officials seem to want an end to a dispute over wealthy Americans with hidden Swiss offshore bank accounts before the U.S. presidential election in November, the Swiss finance minister said in a newspaper interview on Saturday.

“My impression at the moment is that the U.S. wants a solution by the elections. Both sides endeavour to find a solution in the foreseeable future,” Switzerland’s finance minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf told Basler Zeitung.

Eleven Swiss banks – including Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) and Julius Baer (BAER.VX) – are under investigation by the United States for aiding U.S. citizens suspected of dodging taxes with the help of offshore bank accounts.

Switzerland wants the investigations dropped, in exchange for payment of fines and the transfer of names of thousands of U.S. bank clients. At the same time, Switzerland is seeking a deal to shield the remainder of its 300 or so banks from U.S. prosecution.

Read more here.

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Cheers on your weekend !

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHTs6NqhHHg 450 300]

Former Assistant Secretary of Housing under George H.W. Bush Catherine Austin Fitts blows the whistle on how the financial terrorists have deliberately imploded the US economy and transferred gargantuan amounts of wealth offshore as a means of sacrificing the American middle class.

Fitts documents how trillions of dollars went missing from government coffers in the 90′s and how she was personally targeted for exposing the fraud.

Fitts explains how every dollar of debt issued to service every war, building project, and government program since the American Revolution up to around 2 years ago — around $12 trillion — has been doubled again in just the last 18 months alone with the bank bailouts.

“We’re literally witnessing the leveraged buyout of a country and that’s why I call it a financial coup d’état, and that’s what the bailout is for,” states Fitts.

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Turns out Obama has been caught in a rather substantial lie. Despite numerous protests to the contrary (backed up by the mainstream media Palace Guards) Obama was a card-carrying member of the socialist New Party. Kurtz provides unequivocal proof in a new article published today.

Read the article here.

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“As Greece sinks toward a financial abyss—and Portugal, Italy and Spain sit on the edge—can we in the United States consider ourselves safe?

Fundamental economic numbers offer little reassurance. At 8.6% of gross domestic product, the U.S. budget deficit is just under Greece’s (9.1%) and equal to Spain’s. U.S. debt, at 103% of GDP, is just below Portugal’s—which first asked for a European Union bailout in 2011—and 58% larger than Spain’s, which might soon need one.

Yet Americans should be concerned for a deeper reason. High deficits, high debt and unsustainable entitlements are symptoms of a common disease infecting Southern Europe and the U.S. That’s crony capitalism, a problem with which I, having lived in Italy, am unfortunately familiar.”

Full article

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Politicians are messing with the worlds paper wealth. Larry Fink says investors must be careful as markets have become tough to navigate.

Full article

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From BI

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He also leans more to the right than most would have ever of thought.

Full article

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Public Employee Labor Unions are absolutely destroyed after tonight. The results are truly shocking.

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Florida GOP Takes Voter Suppression to a Brazen New Extreme.

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Walker survives recall election in Wisconsin

Governor Walker’s Victory Spells Doom For Public Sector Unions

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“Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the election of Mitt Romney as president in November would “significantly” raise the odds of a recession because it would herald a shift to a much tighter budget.

History shows that the adoption of fiscal austerity when an economy is weak can have disastrous consequences, as happened in the U.S. in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression, Stiglitz told Bloomberg editors and reporters in New York. Republican candidate Romney risks making that same sort of mistake by backing a plan to slash the budget deficit, he said.

“The Romney plan is going to slow down the economy, worsen the jobs deficit and significantly increase the likelihood of a recession,” said Stiglitz, who served as chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997.”

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A special conference call will be held tomorrow to discuss how to fix this problem. The funny part is the problem can not be fixed other than the world getting a sense of full confidence that nothing will fail. More can kicking imo. At least no taxpayer money will be spent on caviar and champagne dinners.

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Splinter the party right into elections…

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MADRID (Reuters) – Spain, the latest combat zone in Europe’s long-running debt wars, urged the euro zone to set up a new fiscal authority to manage the bloc’s finances and send a clear signal to markets that the single currency project is irreversible.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said the authority would also go a long way to alleviating Spain’s woes which, along with the prospect of a Greek euro exit, have threatened to derail the single currency project.

It is not the first time a European leader has proposed creating such an authority but the problems and the size of Spain – a country deemed too big to fail – have prompted EU policymakers to hurriedly consider measures such as creating a fiscal and banking union ahead of a EU summit on June 28-29.

Germany, the paymaster of the euro zone, and others insist such a move can only happen as part of a drive to much closer fiscal union and relinquishing of national sovereignty.

Overspending in the regions and troubles with a banking sector badly hit by a property crash four years ago have sent Spain’s borrowing costs to record highs and pushed the country closer to seeking an international bailout.

The risk premium investors demand to hold Spanish 10-year debt rather than German bonds rose to its highest since the launch of the euro – 548 basis points – on Friday.

Read here:

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When i was a young pleb i would watch episodes of M*A*S*H* waiting for my mom to get home from work. Any way, the cast became a pseudo group of surrogate  parents and i would take lots of lessons to heart. The show was well written and witty.

I remember a saying from the show: “in order to understand what it means to be sane, one must be a little insane. You have to cross the line of sanity to know where it is.”

That is how i view this weeks documentary. There is good historical information to learn for those who are not up to speed with the gentlemanly knowledge that flies around these here interwebs. But some of you will say a tin foil hat will be needed to listen to these outrageous claims. I think that description is a way for people to deal with the world.

Put something in a box, label it, and you’ll always know how to deal with it. Bad philosophy imo. Once you do that, you leave it alone and never really examine it. Therefore if it changes you do not recognize it.

So call me what ever you like, but i enjoy exploring the outrageous and then going on a fact finding mission to discover how outrageous those claims are or not.

Cheers on your weekend !

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqrdHLzvIV4 450 300]

Megan ‘Verb’ Kargher are proud to present Vox Populi, Methods of Manipulation. It has become increasingly evident that large portions of the planet are descending with alarming speed into Orwellian police states. What is the New World Order and what are their plans for mankind? How can we stop the corruption now? Join me as I travel in search of what is really going on in the world in which we live. Featuring interviews with David Icke, Max Igan, Freeman, Jordan Maxwell, Dr. George Rhodes, Ben Stewart and Charlie Veitch.

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz5jIxzneMA 450 300]

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Public-employee unions in Wisconsin have experienced a dramatic drop in membership — by more than half for the second-biggest union — since a law championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker sharply curtailed their ability to bargain over wages and working conditions.

Now with Mr. Walker facing a recall vote Tuesday, voters will decide whether his policies in the centrist state should continue — or whether they have gone too far.

The election could mark a pivot point for organized labor.

Mr. Walker’s ouster would derail the political career of a rising Republican star and send a warning to other elected officials who are battling unions. But a victory for the governor, who has been leading his Democratic opponent in recent polls, would amount to an endorsement of an effort to curtail public-sector unions, which have been a pillar of strength for organized labor while private-sector membership has dwindled.

That could mean the sharp losses that some Wisconsin public-worker unions have experienced is a harbinger of similar unions’ future nationwide, union leaders fear. Failure to oust Mr. Walker and overturn the Wisconsin law “spells doom,” said Bryan Kennedy, the American Federation of Teachers’ Wisconsin president.

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House Republicans are releasing emails and documents that shed light on dealings between the White House and the drug industry as President Barack Obama maneuvered to move his health care overhaul through Congress.

The materials released Thursday cover a critical period in the summer of 2009 when the legislation was bogging down in Congress. An $80-billion financial commitment by the drug companies gave Obama some momentum.

The deal included better prescription coverage for Medicare recipients. Broad outlines were known at the time.

Drug makers succeeded in avoiding new requirements to pay rebates to the government for Medicare drugs. Ultimately, they were also able to preserve an existing ban against patients importing lower-priced medications from overseas.

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I wonder what would happen to me if I filtered a million non-profit dollars through a shell corporation to a glorified hooker…?

Greensboro, North Carolina (CNN) — A federal jury in North Carolina acquitted former Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards on one count of violating campaign finance law Thursday and deadlocked on the five other counts against him.

U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles declared a mistrial on the remaining counts, leaving prosecutors to decide whether to refile the charges against the onetime North Carolina senator.

Jurors said Thursday afternoon — their ninth day of deliberations — that they had reached a unanimous verdict on only one count, which involved allegations that Edwards had accepted illegal campaign contributions in 2008. Eagles ordered them back into the jury room to continue deliberating, but they returned less than an hour later to announce they were deadlocked.

“This was win for John Edwards, and there will be a lot of questions about why this case was brought,” CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said after the announcement.

Edwards had been charged with four counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions, one count of falsifying documents and one of conspiring to receive and conceal the contributions. The charges could have carried a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and a $1.5 million fine.

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