Former U.S. Cyber Command and National Security Agency head Gen. Keith Alexander has been lambasted by lawmakers and the media since his seven-figure cyber-security consulting fee got out — now he’s explaining the price. (RELATED: Congressman Accuses Ex-NSA Head Of Trading Secrets ‘For Profit’)
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from Steve Keen
What are your preconceptions about the author of a book with the title The Next Economic Disaster: Why It’s Coming and How to Avoid It? Academic? Leftist? Anti-capitalist? Anti-banker certainly?
Prepare to drop them all, because the author is none of the above. Taking the last first, the majority of his career has been in banking — and as a founder and CEO.
To put it in his own words:
“Starting in 1978, I came up the career ladder in the consumer division of a Texas bank. When that bank got into trouble through oil and gas loans in the mid-to-late 1980s, a colleague and I took our division private in a leveraged buyout in 1989. We named it First USA, took it public in 1992, and sold it to Bank One in 1997 for almost $7 billion. It was the top-performing financial stock on the NYSE during our tenure, returning almost 100 per cent per annum to its shareholders.
In 1999, in conjunction with former colleagues, I started a de novo credit card and internet bank called Juniper Financial, which we grew successfully and sold to Barclays in 2004. (That’s when the story I told you occurred.)
In 2007, I started yet another business with former colleagues, this time an energy business called Energy Plus that focused on electricity and natural gas. That business was quite successful and grew to almost $400 million in sales in four years — and we sold it to NRG in 2001.
As for my wealth, I make a point of never giving the details, but I have been very fortunate. I started with essentially nothing, could have retired at 40, but remain busier than ever because of a love for the areas in which I am active.
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Fidel Castro speaking in Cuba during the missile crisis. (photo: AFP)
27 July 14
In our era, problems are increasingly more complex and news is produced at the speed of light, as many know. Nothing happens today in our world, which does not teach something to those of us who wish, and are still able, to understand new realities.
The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.
We are political animals, as, not without reason, affirmed Aristotle, who perhaps influenced humanity’s thinking more than any other ancient philosopher through his almost 200 treatises, according to reports, of which only 31 have been preserved. His teacher was Plato, who left for posterity his famous utopia about the ideal state, which in Syracuse, where he tried to apply it, almost cost him his life. His Political Theory has endured as a designation used to describe ideas as good or bad. Reactionaries often describe both Marx and Lenin as theorists, without taking into consideration that their utopias inspired Russia and China, the two countries called upon to lead a new world which will allow for human survival, if imperialism does not first unleash a criminal, exterminating war.
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk announced his resignation in the Rada (Parliament) and that of the entire Cabinet on Thursday, July 24. This decision was taken following the withdrawal of two parties from the coalition government and the non-adoption of two important pieces of legislation, which had been demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
“Democracy marches on”
ukraine-coalition-government-collapses-as
The Ukraine government has collapsed and new elections will be called.
The collapse came when parliamentarians read the IMF terms sheet that required them, inter alia, to give their sole remaining asset, the gas pipeline complex, to Goldman Sachs.
The Ukraine military has collapsed.
The 2/3 of the Ukraine Navy has defected to Russia – in their ships, of course.
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Olga Ivshina, BBC
The original BBC Video Report was published by BBC Russian Service on July 23, 2014.
Why did BBC delete this report by Olga Ivshina?
Is it because the BBC team was unable to find any evidence that a rocket was launched in the area that the Ukrainian Security Service (“SBU”) alleges to be the place from which the Novorossiya Militia launched a “BUK” missile?
