- Economy

In The Headlights

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:10:20 -0600

Source: Clusterfuck Nation

In the meantime, the managers of US polity, Mr. Barack Obama and Company, look to continue scattering goat innards on the new carpet in the Oval Office in their desperate seeking for a miraculous return to the non-stop celebration that was ringing through the nation a decade ago. Any moment now, the President will announce some new "program" aimed at propping up house prices -- in order, you understand, to allow banks to pretend that they are still solvent.

...

The so-called developed world is watching two giant forces race each other to put an end to business-as-usual for industrial civilization. These two forces are the catastrophe of debt and predicament of oil supplies. They had been running neck-and-neck for a few years, but now the catastrophe of debt is pulling slightly ahead. But even this is an illusion because these two forces are actually hitched in tandem, with the rickety cart of civilization bouncing perilously behind them, and whatever one of these forces does will affect the other. Bad debt will eventually cripple the global oil industry's ability to perform, and the failures of the oil industry will only amplify the killing force of debt. It's that simple.

And the simple moral of the story is that the only sane thing America can do is simplify itself, de-complexify its dangerously hyper-complex organs of daily life. I've stated them before but, briefly, this means simplifying the way we do farming, commerce, transportation, inhabiting the landscape, schooling, medicine, and banking. Everything we do to add additional layers of complexity to these already tottering systems will guarantee an eventual orgy of blood and material destruction to this land. Everything we do to prop up the unsustainable instead of reconstructing the armatures of everyday life will make American life a nightmare in a very few years ahead.

It must be the case that President Obama and the other denizens of high places do not have a clue what I might mean by all this -- though I am hardly the only one advancing this set of ideas and it is not really radical considering the alternatives. But our leaders' foolish intransigence insures a political convulsion that will follow the onset of an involuntary restructuring that can't be avoided anymore, because reality has mandates of its own, and is closer to God than all the hosts of our ridiculous politics.

The Colony: Chinese in Africa

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:33:27 -0600

Rusty Russian Gold Coins

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:46:39 -0600

Brazil: The Renewable Home

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:01:26 -0600

Overdose： The Next Financial Crisis

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:37:02 -0600

40 Million Americans Live On Food Stamps

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:48:45 -0600

Source: Press TV

A record number of people are living on government handouts in the US, as one out of six Americans now gets various anti-poverty supports, including food stamps.

A survey of state data by daily USA TODAY released on Monday showed that more than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid -- the federal-state program designed mainly to help the poor. That is an increase of at least 17 percent from December 2007, when the economic recession started.

"Virtually every Medicaid director in the country would say that their current enrollment is the highest on record," said Vernon Smith of Health Management Associates.

Government data for May indicates that the number of the people getting food stamps has surged to 40 million, a rise of almost 50 percent during the economic downturn.

What You Will Not Hear About Iraq

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 22:08:11 -0600

Source: The Peoples Voice

Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.

UN-HABITAT, an agency of the United Nations, recently published a 218-page report entitled State of the World’s Cities, 2010-2011. The report is full of statistics on the status of cities around the world and their demographics. It defines slum dwellers as those living in urban centers without one of the following: durable structures to protect them from climate, sufficient living area, sufficient access to water, access to sanitation facilities, and freedom from eviction.

Almost intentionally hidden in these statistics is one shocking fact about urban Iraqi populations. For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made progress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the opposite direction.

According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80 percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we translate the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.

If the United States had an unemployment rate of 25-50 percent and 121 million people living in slums, riots would ensue, the military would take over, and democracy would evaporate. So why are people in the United States not concerned and saddened by the conditions in Iraq? Because most people in the United States do not know what happened in Iraq and what is happening there now. Our government, including the current administration, looks the other way and perpetuates the myth that life has improved in post-invasion Iraq. Our major news media reinforces this message.

I had high hopes that the new administration would tell the truth to its citizens about why we invaded Iraq and what we are doing currently in the country. President Obama promised to move forward and not look to the past. However problematic this refusal to examine on the past — particularly for historians — the president should at least inform the U.S. public of the current conditions in Iraq. How else can we expect our government to formulate appropriate policy?

Canadian Government Collects Nearly $14-billion From Gambling

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:23:13 -0600

Source: The Globe and Mail

Net revenue from government-run lotteries, video lottery terminals, casinos and slot machines not in casinos totalled $13.75-billion in 2009, essentially unchanged from $13.67-billion the year before.

Statistics Canada says revenue from gambling levelled off at roughly $13.7-billion in 2007 after increasing steadily from $2.73-billion in 1992.

In 2009, casinos accounted for a third (34 per cent) of the net revenue from the gambling industry.

Silver On The Move

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:58:58 -0600

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US Mint Silver Eagle Sales Top 3 Million, Best Ever January

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Silver's a Severely Undervalued 'Investment Opportunity of a Lifetime'

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Silver Warcry!

Economic Collapse: Invisible People

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:14:23 -0600

Source: Invisible People TV

On the Way Down: The Erosion of America's Middle Class

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:32:29 -0600

Source: Spiegel

While America's super-rich congratulate themselves on donating billions to charity, the rest of the country is worse off than ever. Long-term unemployment is rising and millions of Americans are struggling to survive. The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever and the middle class is disappearing.

Ventura is a small city on the Pacific coast, about an hour's drive north of Los Angeles. Luxury homes with a view of the ocean dot the hillsides, and the beaches are popular with surfers. Ventura is storybook California. "It's a well-off place," says Captain William Finley. "But about 20 percent of the city is what we call at risk of homelessness." Finley heads the local branch of the Salvation Army.

Last summer Ventura launched a pilot program, managed by Finley, that allows people to sleep in their cars within city limits. This is normally illegal, both in Ventura and in the rest of the country, where local officials and residents are worried about seeing run-down vans full of Mexican migrant workers parked on residential streets.

But sometime at the beginning of last year, people in Ventura realized that the cars parked in front of their driveways at night weren't old wrecks, but well-tended station wagons and hatchbacks. And the people sleeping in them weren't fruit pickers or the homeless, but their former neighbors.

Finley also noticed a change. Suddenly twice as many people were taking advantage of his social service organization's free meals program, and some were even driving up in BMWs -- apparently reluctant to give up the expensive cars that reminded them of better times.

Finley calls them "the new poor." "That is a different category of people that I think we're seeing," he says. "They are people who never in their wildest imaginations thought they would be homeless." They're people who had enough money -- a lot of money, in some cases -- until recently.

"The image of what is a poor person in today's day and age doesn't fly. When I was growing up a poor person, and we grew up fairly poor, you drove a 10-year-old car that probably had some dents in it. You know, there was one car for the family and you lived out of the food bank," says Finley. "In the past, you got yourself out of poverty and were on your way up."

American Way Heads in Opposite Direction

It was the American way, a path taken by millions. "Today the image is you're getting newer late model cars that at one point cost somebody 40, 50 grand, and they're at wits end, now they're living out of the food banks. And for many of them it takes a lot to swallow their pride," says Finley.

Today the American way is often headed in the opposite direction: downward.

For a while, America seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed from the worst economic crisis in decades -- with renewed vigor and energy -- just as it had done in the wake of past crises.

The government was announcing new economic growth figures by as early as last fall, much earlier than expected. The banks, moribund until recently, were back to earning billions. Companies nationwide are reporting strong growth, and the stock market has almost returned to it pre-crisis levels. Even the number of billionaires grew by a healthy 17 percent in 2009.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and 40 other billionaires pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to philanthropy, either while still alive or after death. Is America a country so blessed with affluence that it can afford to give away billions, just like that?

Growing Resentment

Gates' move could also be interpreted as a PR campaign, in a country where the super-rich sense that although they are profiting from the crisis, as was to be expected, the number of people adversely affected has grown enormously. They also sense that there is growing resentment in American society against those at the top.

For people in the lower income brackets, the recovery already seems to be falling apart. Experts fear that the US economy could remain weak for many years to come. And despite the many government assistance programs, the small amount of hope they engender has yet to be felt by the general public. On the contrary, for many people things are still headed dramatically downward.

According to a recent opinion poll, 70 percent of Americans believe that the recession is still in full swing. And this time it isn't just the poor who are especially hard-hit, as they usually are during recessions.

This time the recession is also affecting well-educated people who had been earning a good living until now. These people, who see themselves as solidly middle-class, now feel more threatened than ever before in the country's history. Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.

Unemployment Persists

In a recent cover story titled "So long, middle class," the New York Post presented its readers with "25 statistics that prove that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America." Last week, the leading online columnist Arianna Huffington issued the almost apocalyptic warning that "America is in danger of becoming a Third World country."

In fact, the United States, in the wake of a real estate, financial economic and now debt crisis, which it still hasn't overcome, is threatened by a social Ice Age more severe than anything the country has seen since the Great Depression.

The United States is experiencing the problem of long-term unemployment for the first time since World War II. The number of the long-term unemployed is already three times as high as it was during any crisis in the past, and it is still rising.

More than a year after the official end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate remains consistently above 9.5 percent. But this is just the official figure. When adjusted to include the people who have already given up looking for work or are barely surviving on the few hundred dollars they earn with a part-time job and are using up their savings, the real unemployment figure jumps to more than 17 percent.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.

Even more unsettling is the fact that America, which has always been characterized by its unshakable belief in the American Dream, and in the conviction that anyone, even those at the very bottom, can rise to the top, is beginning to lose its famous optimism. According to recent figures, a significant minority of US citizens now believe that their children will be worse off than they are.

Many Americans are beginning to realize that for them, the American Dream has been more of a nightmare of late. They face a bitter reality of fewer and fewer jobs, decades of stagnating wages and dramatic increases in inequality. Only in recent months, as the economy has grown but jobs have not returned, as profits have returned but poverty figures have risen by the week, the country seems to have recognized that it is struggling with a deep-seated, structural crisis that has been building for years. As the Washington Post writes, the financial crisis was merely the final turning -- for the worse.

Where Did All the Money Go?

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Where did all the money go? All the enormous market gains and corporate earnings, the profits from the boom in the financial markets and the 110-percent increase in the gross national product in the last 30 years? It went to those who had always had more than enough already.

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Income inequality in the United States is greater today than it has been since the 1920s, except that hardly anyone has minded until now.

Little Chance of the American Dream

In America, the free market is king, and people with low incomes are seen as having only themselves to blame. Those who make a lot of money are applauded -- and emulated. The only problem is that Americans have long overlooked the fact that the American Dream was becoming a reality for fewer and fewer people.

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4-percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation.

So far, politicians have failed to come up with solutions for the growing social crisis. Washington is still waiting for jobs that aren't coming. President Barack Obama and his administration seem to be pinning their hopes on the notion that Americans will eventually pull themselves up by their bootstraps -- preferably by doing the same thing they've always done: spending money. Domestic consumer spending is responsible for two-thirds of American economic output.

But even though Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continues to pump money into the market, and even though the government deficit has now reached the dizzying level of $1.4 trillion, such efforts have remained unsuccessful.

"The lights are going out all over America," Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman wrote last week, and described communities that couldn't even afford to maintain their streets anymore.

The problem is that many Americans can no longer spend money on consumer products, because they have no savings. In some cases, their houses have lost half of their value. They no longer qualify for low-interest loans. They are making less money than before or they're unemployed. This in turn reduces or eliminates their ability to pay taxes.

Turning Out the Lights

As a result, many state and local governments are faced with enormous budget deficits. In Hawaii, for example, schools are closed on some Fridays to save the state money. A county in Georgia has eliminated all public bus services. Colorado Springs, a city of 380,000 people, has shut off a third of its streetlights to save electricity.

There are many discrepancies in America in the wake of the financial crisis. On the one hand, the Fed is constantly printing fresh money, and the government spent $182 billion to bail out a single company, the insurance giant AIG. On the other hand, the lights are in fact going out in some areas, because Washington, citing the need to reduce spending, is unwilling to provide local governments with financial assistance. "America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere," economist Krugman warns.

Chanelle Sabedra is already on that road. She and her husband have been sleeping in their car for almost three weeks now. "We never saw this coming, never ever," says Sabedra. She starts to cry. "I'm an adult, I can take care of myself one way or another, and same with my husband, but (my kids are) too little to go through these things." She has three children; they are nine, five and three years old.

"We had a house further south, in San Bernardino," says Sabedra. Her husband lost his job building prefab houses in July 2009. The utility company turned off the gas. "We were boiling water on the barbeque to bathe our kids," she says. No longer able to pay the rent, the Sabedras were evicted from their house in August.

Friends and relatives had few resources to help them. Now they live in a room at the Salvation Army homeless shelter in downtown Ventura, which is run by Captain Finley.

The sudden plunge into homelessness is a reality that's difficult to understand, given the images of America we are accustomed to seeing in television series and films. They always depict homes with well-kept yards and two-car garages with basketball hoops attached to them. This America still exists, but it's shrinking. And often those who are managing to keep the illusion alive can hardly afford to do so.

Americans have been struggling with a rising cost of living for the past 20 years. At the beginning of the decade, families were already paying twice as much for health insurance and their mortgages than the previous generation did.

"To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce," says Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, who President Obama appointed to chair the congressional panel to oversee the government's bank bailout program. According to Warren, the average family has spent all of its income and used up its savings "just to stay afloat a little while longer."

Spiraling Debt

Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.

Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck. As little as a single hospital bill can spell potential financial ruin.

Chanelle Sabedra's husband has found another job, this time as a warehouse worker for a company that makes aircraft turbines. But he doesn't earn enough to get the family out of the homeless shelter. "I haven't got a new job yet," says Sabedra. Her husband's job doesn't pay enough, and the couple has now joined the growing ranks of the working poor, for whom even two low-wage jobs are insufficient to feed their families. "We need the second income," says Sabedra. "Just the baby alone is $600 a month for half-day care."

In pre-recession America, she and her husband would have had two jobs each to make ends meet. They would have worked at the cash register at Wal-Mart during the day, flipped burgers at McDonald's in the early evening and perhaps spent half the night working as a security guard or cleaning buildings. These are all low-paying jobs, hardly careers, but the combined income is usually enough to keep a family afloat. In pre-recession America, life wasn't luxurious for Chanelle Sabedra, but it was doable if they were willing to work hard enough and sacrifice enough of their lives to stay afloat.

What kind of a job is she looking for now? "Anything right now. Mostly I'm looking for retail, or just anything to get me started, but there's just nothing out there," says Sabedra.

Canada's Potash Corp. Rejects Bid by Miner BHP

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 11:04:32 -0600

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton made an unsolicited $38.6 billion offer for the world's largest fertilizer producer, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc., in an aggressive wager that developing economies will drive up demand for the world's food supply.

Potash is an important nutrient that replenishes soil and increases farmland's crop yield. Global potash supplies are relatively limited, and Potash Corp., based in the prairies of central Canada, controls approximately 20% of the supply.

The offer is likely to set off a long struggle for the fate of the Canadian company, a crown jewel of the country's natural-resources-based economy.

Potash's board rejected the BHP offer of $130 a share in cash, a 16% premium to Potash's Monday closing price, calling it "grossly inadequate."

In trading Tuesday, the fertilizer company's shares soared far above the offer, a sign traders expect BHP to raise its bid or other suitors to emerge. Potash shares closed at $143.17, up $31.02, or 27.7%.

The company's chief executive, Bill Doyle, said the board wasn't opposed to a sale, "we just don't expect someone to come steal the company."

People familiar with the matter said BHP would decide in the next few days whether to take its offer directly to Potash shareholders, a move that would officially make BHP's unsolicited offer a hostile one.

Potash adopted a shareholder-rights plan on Tuesday that puts a 20% ceiling on any single stakeholder.

Such a "poison pill" may be less effective in Canada than in the U.S. because a hostile bidder can lobby Canadian securities regulators to have the target company eliminate its plan and allow a tender offer to shareholders.

BHP's shares closed Tuesday at $70.21, down $1.73, or 2.4%, in trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Wednesday morning in Australia, shares fell 3.7%.

Analysts speculated that mining rivals Vale SA of Brazil, and the Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto PLC could consider counteroffers. Vale, which not long ago made a $3.8 billion purchase of fertilizer assets, declined to comment. Rio Tinto didn't immediately return a call.

Mr. Doyle of Potash declined to say what might be a suitable offer. People close to the company, based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, said an offer would need to factor in Potash's record high of nearly $240 in mid-2008. The offer from BHP was made in a letter Aug. 12 that Potash disclosed on Tuesday.

Looming over any merger negotiations is a national debate in Canada about open markets and foreign takeovers.

Over the past decade, the country has seen most of its big natural-resources companies and many industrial ones taken over by buyers from the U.S., Europe and South America.

The deals included the sales of aluminum and nickel mines to Brazil's Vale and Switzerland's Xtrata, the purchase of Canada's biggest steel producer by U.S. Steel Corp., and the piecemeal sale of struggling tech giant Nortel Networks Corp. to buyers from the U.S. and Europe.

While demand for commodities has fueled Canada's economic growth, there is lingering worry among some that the country is losing its corporate mettle.

In 2009, Canada amended its foreign-takeover code, raising the size of deals that require scrutiny but allowing the government explicit power to veto deals thought to pose a danger to national security.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the government would review any transaction but otherwise declined to comment.

As the world's largest mining company, BHP has remained unbowed by a costly and ultimately unsuccessful attempt in 2008 to take over Rio Tinto, its big Anglo-Australian rival.

For BHP's chief executive, South African Marius Kloppers, a play for Potash fits into a broader theme of economic development, particularly in China and India.

"World GDP and GDP development is being driven by...new people entering the modern industrial age...by massive urbanization processes," Mr. Kloppers said in an interview in 2008. This, he said, is "having a huge knock-on effect in demand for our products."

A deal for Potash would represent a shift for BHP, which specializes in minerals and metals and has limited experience with customers who buy fertilizer. Potash is the common name for fertilizer derived from potassium, and includes potassium carbonate and other salts. It is one of the common fertilizers farmers use, along with nitrogen and phosphate.

There are plenty of reasons to expect rising demand for fertilizer. The world is projected to add an average of 57 million people a year between 2000 and 2050, leading to a population of 8.9 billion in 2050, according to United Nations projections. Rising incomes in growing economies will also push up demand for diverse diets, and fertilizer is a sure way to increase food production.

Such long-term global trends have turned Potash Corp. into a highflying stock that has soared since 2005.

BHP is also counting on China and other rapidly growing nations placing a premium on producing more food, to be independent from foreign suppliers.

Meeting such a basic need is critical, as vividly demonstrated in 2008, when a sharp rise in the cost of food kicked off riots in some parts of the world. This summer's scare over wheat supplies amid a Russian drought provided another reminder.

"It's just a bet that food is going to continue to be precious, and become more precious," said Emerson Nafziger, a professor of agronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's a bet that the whole world is going to need to replace nutrients in the soil as crops are removed."

China produces only about roughly half as much corn as the U.S. on a given amount of farmland. U.S. farmers generate more than 10 metric tons per hectare (2.47 acres), while China produces just over five and India just over two.

While there are various reasons for such gaps in production, including water and use of genetically modified seeds, fertilizer use is one of the factors.

USDA forecasts released last week show the world will likely consume more grain through next year than farmers are able to produce, which will inevitably shrink the globe's grain reserves again.

Greece to Endure Privatization at Hands of IMF

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:50:46 -0600

Source: Yahoo/AFP

Greece is in the grip of deepening recession, official data showed on Thursday, as a stinging austerity programme agreed with the EU and IMF in exchange for a debt rescue package begins to bite.

The national statistics office said the downward spiral accelerated in the second quarter as a barrage of wage and pension cuts plus tax rises sapped consumer demand.

A "significant" fall in consumption and lower investment saw the economy shrink 1.5 percent, it said, following a contraction of 0.8 percent in the first quarter to extend a recession that began in the middle of 2009.

The latest figures put the economy on track for a forecast contraction of 4.0 percent this year.

On a 12-month comparison, Greek output was down 3.5 percent in the second quarter after a fall of 2.3 percent in the first.

Worse still, and promising more pain to come, unemployment shot up to 12 percent in May from 8.5 percent a year earlier, with more than 600,000 people out of work, the statistics office said.

Athens agreed a 110-billion-euro (142-billion-dollar) rescue deal with the European Union and International Monetary Fund in May to cover its borrowing needs until 2012 as it was pushed to the brink of default.

The markets had turned against Greece whose public deficit and total debt had soared way past EU limits, pushing up its funding costs to unsustainable levels as the crisis appeared to threaten the whole eurozone project.

As part of the quid pro quo, Athens agreed to sweeping economic reforms and a draconian series of spending cuts and tax increases which sparked a series of protests across the country, including six general strikes.

Traders say a four-percent hike in sales tax between March and July, coupled with the highest inflation figures in 17 years, has had a disastrous effect on business.

"The government must urgently reconsider its tax policy," the chairman of the Athens chamber of commerce and industry, Constantinos Michalos, told Mega television station.

A leading trader association this week reported that 17 percent of businesses in central Athens have shut down because of the crisis.

A fresh round of social unrest in expected later this year when the government attempts to implement additional reforms to boost competitiveness by lifting decade-old restrictions in a number of sectors.

As part of the EU-IMF accord, Greece must liberalise the energy sector which is currently dominated by state electricity operator PPC and overhaul the state railways organisation OSE which is 10 billion euros (12.8 billion dollars) in the red.

Both PPC and OSE unionists have pledged to fight back.

Prime Minister George Papandreou acknowledged this week that the measures which have dented his administration's ratings are harrowing.

"The transition will not be easy but these changes are long overdue," he told the Christian Science Monitor in an interview.

"There is, of course, pain ... (but) the vast majority of Greeks recognise that such changes are necessary."

Papandreou also said Athens intended to return to markets as early as next year if possible.

Food Rots as Poor Starve Across India

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 23:44:28 -0600

Russia to Start Iran's First Nuclear Plant Next Week

nospam@example.com (Angelo) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 23:31:14 -0600