have been behind a two year campaign of assassinations on their nuclear scientists well on choose day in bangkok what we've seen is a rainy and taken into custody by police. an explosion two explosions in bangkok injured several people there now israeli media very very quick to point the finger of terror towards that iranian man who's being detained there so this is all part of as i say a blame game that's ongoing between tell of the terror on. well look now at some other stories from around the world a radical muslim cleric with less thinks to al qaeda and said to be bin laden's right hand man has been released from prison on bail in the u.k. extremist preacher abu qatada has been locked up for six years but last week a tribunal ruled he should be free but officials say he poses a threat to the country's security but attempts to deport him back to jordan to face terrorism charges have been blocked by the european court of human rights.

serves in northern kosovo or holding a referendum on whether they accept the current will of the self-proclaimed republic they hope results of the two de veau will add the judean with each to their struggle to reunite with serbia belgrade though has condemned the referendum saying this will complicate dialogue with the breakaway state last summer serves in the north set up barricades to defy the kosovo government which has led to clashes with nato peacekeepers. but russia's central t.v. channels have come under criticism for alleged bias ahead of next month's presidential election a group of activists standing for a fair election say reports about the current prime minister and presidential candidate pledging their puter are too positive which undermines other contenders chances are she looks at how election hopefuls are making good use of their allotted airtime. right. here. so

far the most eccentric video in russia's presidential campaign urging to vote for the country's top populist legend famous for his showmanship and occasional fist fights with very little. so you will see that this little mangy donkey has become a symbol of our country so the whole country has come to a standstill like this animal if i become president we'll get moving again. less than a month to go and five candidates have plastered the streets with election posters desmond view is with t.v. promos heated discussions have become part of everyday life. i don't because in the race the billionaire businessman mikhail prophet of promise is their arrival of a new russia with a new president known for his quite riches and playboy past he's the only new face on russia's political scene formally and a tory his party animal his reputation was once dented by an international sex

scandal which has come back to haunt him on the web we are vegeta helping us with all our body and soul as for the elections will win them anyway you can buy anything so you can buy your victory to get the three main candidates out of them in the a crowd united to ban of the old time communist party leader has always relied on the pension of voters who form about one third of russia's population now his laurels all contest is once again middle of from a fair russia polity is the notion believes it can't even afford to milk now whether pensioners because. the competition has made zyuganov reach out to younger generation and offer them a brand new slogan there's always a choice bloody mad putin running for his that term has refrained from getting involved in the campaign directly he has controversially refused to take part in any t.v. debates sending his representatives instead and his promos never show his face or

when he doesn't go to television when he's part of st politics when he's a part of television coverage he's job as prime minister he is there is the only one let's say the the only can do that with so many resources so much media attention i think that he wants to show that he's the only real candidate precisely by not going. there as the campaign picks up steam it's expected so will the number of street protests both for and against putin and its likely election two thousand and twelve will be remembered as one that got russians on their feet however the latest opinion polls also show the level of support keeps on growing across the country despite the wave of opposition protests i think that brought us then to mobilize his core letter because when people. are saying that you know the social benefits from the cart that factories that are inefficient because

that stage would not interfere so much i think that the message that people get across russia is that we should keep. busy even a song and recent online suspicion praising the prime minister's virtues sung by supposedly migrant worker it claims to. be by his initials was sent to russia by gawd. the a. long time. by now let. go of the many say this song is clearly too much and is just a club the headaches in the meantime the electoral campaign will be sewn with more surprises likely along the way. party mosconi. the way it is now in the world of business with current.

hello and welcome to business the south thanks for joining me also the world's largest diamond mine up by alford's my so a fourteen percent stake an i.p.o. the flotation of the state owned company may take place in the second half of this year demand for diamonds has been picking up in asia and the u.s. as the main competitor to beers report a twenty seven percent increase in earnings for two thousand and eleven russian company itself and its. to show an even stronger performance you evolve from bank says the stock of a unique opportunity to invest directly into the donatists. from the company is in no hurry to attract money from the market but probably the i.p.o. for old also is a question for which is asian trading in russia a world the size is going to be a good. one billion dollars it will give free float comparable to other russian metals and mining stocks usually after

a public offering company instead of becoming more transparent more will say friendly to the public overall and to investors. well in terms of business and business development that. doesn't look at the markets now exchange rates for us the euro is trading lower against the dollar and the ruble that's after being down in early age and trading due to rating downgrade by moody's the move by the rating agency also weighs on the ruble which is saying moderate losses against the u.s. currency. oil's next crude prices and makes this hour that's up to the austerity plan approved by the greek parliament tighten sanctions on iran futures climbed over two percent after companies in control of more than one hundred tankers said they would stop loading cargo from iran. not exactly a valentine's day investors were hoping for wall street opens lower way down by disappointing news about january retail sales in the united states and continuing

economic struggles in europe. and stocks in europe are mostly high after german investor confidence unexpectedly posted its first positive reading since may but then stocks went down that spurred investors to take on more risk meanwhile rating agency moody's not two notches up spain's sovereign debt rating and warned make up the triple a rating france britain. here and russia markets closed with mild losses profit in this is down around ten of a percent as check on the index movers of the miles x. . around over one percent higher the company plans to invest twenty nine billion dollars in field development in the caspian sea by two thousand and twenty five we'll be back with worst early losses and point four percent and try to make a come out with a migraine gain is on rumors it made a deal where time. mother nature is once again playing tricks on russian crops just

a year after a severe drought the country's plantings are facing a cold test. has one. up to home for some russian troops may have been damaged by the extreme cold weather say we're informers it's only germany france and poland are also risk from sustained low temperatures which is minus thirty three in some polls that's expected to skyrocket prices for things like bread wheat futures have been of the ukraine russian government warned they may limit exports to guarantee the mystic supply both countries are usually big exporters of grain global we proceed eleven percent in the second half of january alone we will russia's top or never received suspended its grain terminal several times of the black sea froze over for the first time in thirty years a drought from july to november last year had already weakened crops the head of

russia's one company says fifty percent of the country's great crops could be damaged by heavy winds and the worst weather in a quarter of a century first. show one in three great finds have already been lost well that's the business is for this hour stay with us for headline news coming up right after this.

he. says.

here with r t live from moscow our top stories the u.n. general assembly prepares to vote on a resolution putting blame for violence in syria soley on the government the opposition claimed hundreds have been killed in recent days during an intensified assault on the city of home of the authorities insist they're finding armed terrorists operating in the city. the first wave of downgrade sweeps across the struggling euro zone of six nations kept their debt rating sconce by moody's all

this while greece faces further valid hurdles from the e.u. despite its latest harsh austerity plan backed costs public outrage and mass riots . and russia's military predicts the west might decide on a strike against iran before the summer and to rein in rhetoric in the world intensified after israel accused the islamic state of being behind monday's attacks on diplomatic personnel and today's blast in bangkok. up next artie's financial guru max kaiser reveals the latest lows from the world of high finance in the kaiser report. max kaiser this is the kaiser report oh what a week according to a court of the u.k. you can now refer to nate rothschild as a puppet master and it's not libelous but let's talk about banks and sharks and all

kinds of other flora and fauna of the global financial crack down stacy max well the banking terrorists have been causing tear gas and deja vu in my headlines. is foreclosure settlement deja vu all over again so this is isaac grad mina lawyer who specializes in mortgage backed securities and you writes today the attorneys general of forty nine states with oklahoma being the lone holdout announced a record twenty six billion dollars settlement with the nation's five largest servicers over false and fraudulent foreclosure practices like robo signing good news right max no no no he looks at the details only five billion dollars of the total consists of cash payments while another seventeen to twenty billion dollars consists of principal write downs and other aid to homeowners at risk of default what this means is that once again regulators have allowed banks to shift penalties based on their improper service and practices on to the bondholders that actually

own the loans so for every dollar you make selling fraudulent mortgages you have to pay maybe one or two pennies to the to the folks who pretend to be in charge of some kind of legal oversight group yes and my recommendation to for example the looters that we saw in the u.k. in london earlier this year just get your brokers license it's a series seven license it's easy to get i got mine in one nine hundred eighty two qualifies you do still and you have a legal license to steal money and this is what people should be doing there should be trying to reform the banking system they should get their brokers license and rape and pillage like the rest of everybody on wall street but again importantly here max the term is a bond holder in this case in the united states case when the five big banks do not own the bonds in that situation the bond holders are shellacked in europe where all

the sovereign bonds are held by the big banks bondholders will take no cut so this is what he is saying is that the deja vu in this case is a country. wide because when countrywide the biggest fraudulent purveyor of predatory fraudulent loans was caught committing fraud they signed a huge hoopla deal with attorneys general at the same time with great fanfare the a.g.'s announced in october two thousand and eight that they had reached an eight point six billion dollars settlement with countrywide and which countrywide would modify four hundred thousand loans what i soon realised was that this would not be a cash payment of eight point six billion instead most of that figure consisted of you guessed it principal write downs and other loan modifications of the credits so what happened is that actually countrywide didn't even own eighty percent of the so called loads it was mostly hedge funds and pension funds owned the bond the mortgage backed securities in that case and they were ones that were forced to

write down these loans oh it's regulatory arbitrage global regulatory arbitrage so depending on the territory you cheat the markets based on how you're able to subvert the regulations or lack thereof in any of these territories so the bond market in the europe would require one set of criminal activities of the bond market in the united states requires a different set of criminal activities that met all the money flows to the criminal syndicates the bond traders the money managers the rating agencies the accountants like ok p.m.g. or price waterhouse cooper and the regular people get their austerity measures stuffed up their spring training but as you had brought up max not rothschild was accused of being a puppet master and the courts found in fact that the daily mail had justification saying that in this case the puppet masters or whoever they get away with whatever these attorney generals or the law decides so in the countrywide and the attorney

general's case with all the mortgage servicers in the united states right now because the big banks are not the bond holders the bond holders lose in the sovereign debt case because the big banks all. holders of those bonds the bond holders do not lose there are billions hundreds of billions and trillions of losses generated by the shadow banking system in trading these bond markets in different territories around the world and it's on anybody who loses money they stuff it into a passive country like greece that's too weak to revolt or portugal and those people are stuck with the losses ultimately and we're going to find out what happens when you totally disenfranchise an entire country whether or not those people will take arms or not we'll find out now in the countrywide case so again why it's deja vu is that at the time politicians could argue well we had no idea about mortgage backed securities we had no idea that the banks actually didn't own it that in this case countrywide well there was

a huge lobbying campaign all of the connecticut hedge funds were went to washington and said hey you can't force us to take a write down on these because we have a contract with countrywide that says they won't renegotiate it well the banks the big banks response to this hedge fund bondholder campaign was to begin a massive lobbying effort that led to the passage of the service safe harbor in two thousand and nine a provision that in its original form said that banks could ignore its contract with investors in the interest of public policy that exact term did not pass in the final bill but this is what banks want so remember when they claim all the time that our contracts are sacrosanct they are actually lobbying politicians to say their contracts are not sacrosanct if we lose. as we've been explaining on this show any time a bank gets near having to pay off

a bad bet that they may or gets caught breaking the law they try to get a new law passed this is what i was told when i was working on wall street break any law you want we got lawyers that was the monster. when you work at a firm like paine webber or oppenheimer or alex brown as i did for many years just break any law you want we got lawyers and that's the montra and you see this all the time if that doesn't work then they put a gun to the market said they use high frequency trading and they crash the market as hank paulson did in two thousand and eight to weasel seven hundred fifty billion out of congress using financial terrorism well you're argument there that you're allowed to commit crimes and just do it we'll we'll deal with it the lawyers say that at these banks the top twelve reasons you should hate the mortgage settlement this is from the smith a naked capitalism and she says we've now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents it's two thousand dollars per loan it is less than the price of the title insurance that banks fail to get when they

transfer the loans for the trust it is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged it's a great deal for the banks because no one is that any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over three hundred years of real estate law well let me tell you a little to give you some perspective on this back in the one nine hundred seventy s. i was working as a magician in times square and i used to observe the three card monte dealers you know they have the three cards like this follow the red payson the head cetera et cetera now the thing about the three card monte dealers is when they get some chump in there some tourist with a wad of cash and they take all of his money they always let him win the last hand like a couple hundred bucks after they fleeced him for a few thousand why because that mentality the psychology of the person the chump is that they quote unquote one so here you have the same situation they have to pay a few bucks to to appease the the people who are on the brink

of lighting them up and sticking a pitchfork in their skull but in the minds of these people they're thinking we won . not taking on board the fact that they are huge losers it's all very psychologically programmed and it works very it's a con game and the rules of the con game are well known and established and this is a con game well exactly as i said grad man and eve smith point out this twenty six billion dollars deal most americans are going to look at the t.v. and say well gee that's a huge amount god we really stuck it to those banks but they both point out that only five billion is coming from the banks the other twenty one billion is mostly coming from fannie mae and freddie mac. which you the taxpayer watching that own. this. austerity in the united states as we say austerity in europe austerity as it's playing out in europe is coming to the u.k. first the camerons u.k.

is collapsing and then it'll move to the u.s. let's move on same as it ever was the federal reserve secretly selected a handful of banks to bid for debt securities acquired by taxpayers in the u.s. bailout of american international group so apparently a lot of guys are upset about this actual you know capitalists on wall street because they say quote the exclusivity by which the process has shut out smaller dealers is a little un-american it seems odd that if you want to get the best possible price that it wouldn't be open to anyone who wants to be the most competitive better says david castillo head of sales and trading a broker further elaine securities so as it is the new york fed chose goldman sachs credit suisse and barclays to be the only bidders at a close deal for these ai g. bonds quote the central bank switched to a less open process after traders blamed the regular more public disposals for damaging prices and twenty eleven max you created the virtual specials technology what does transparency do to prices would make it impossible for goldman to play

the role of pope along with the federal reserve and allocate favored pricing to their bodies as a poor part of a people indulgence and we saw that in the middle ages so no fair competition real competition that's long gone but exactly but like we said contract law is sacrosanct when applied to banks it is a terrorist act when applied to the population competition is bad for prices according to goldman sachs but as it's the only thing that you can live by but you know goldman is duplicitous by definition they call it market making their version of market making is heads we win. tails you lose. well speaking of deja vu here some images max from athens is that from two thousand and nine two thousand and ten two thousand and eleven or two thousand and twelve can you tell the tear

gas by any other year is still a sweep again the deja vu greeks approved tombstone austerity deal with troika so we see over and over there's a great deal there is not a great deal there's a great deal there's not a great deal you. on again off again there's a deal now there's the german we're cruising we're trying to milk you draw in still the elegant marbles but the u.k. already stole them but of course this is they already know the foregone conclusion whatever it is the banks the same ones that won in the attorney general case in america the same ones that won and the countrywide case the same ones that win every single time will win this time here's a headline from stock com i thought greek dramas concluded at some stage well i responded to that in a tweet i said i'm pretty sure the greek drama doesn't end until papademos has sex with his mother or in this case his month to a. very clever max you study greek tragedy at university i did i played the dead

guy in production of stuff anees the dead bankers. well i have a final poster here max debt wish he's back in new york bringing justice to the bankers that looks like you well this is a fantastic project umpire of my film dot com legal piracy site that's me playing reprising are all made famous by charles bronson in death wish or famous movie from the seventy's where he goes around and kills criminals vigilante style here i'm going to go after this film of course bankers in new york vigilante style and cut them down shoot them down in cold blood in broad daylight so that's the theme of the movie you can support. i going to pirate my film dot com and reserve shares today say sarah thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thank you matz don't go away much more coming away so stay right there. in the.

world with. its technology innovation all the developments from around russia we've done the future are covered. in the. skies are welcome back to the kaiser a part time now to go to upstate new york and speak with james howard kunstler of consular dot com james is an author a blogger and an urban architect james welcome to the kaiser report nice to be here max all right james councilor

a crony capitalist mortgage settlement deal has been reached to bail out the banks via the back door yet again your thoughts it is just amazing how they not only never run out of tricks but how the american people never seem to tire of being snookered among other things they've snookered the new york state attorney general into leading a task force for. in his state of the union message president obama announced he was forming a task force to look into mortgage fraud and he appointed the new york state attorney general eric schneiderman and the fact is we have a department of justice and a united states attorney general who. he may be leaking sawdust as he walks down the halls of justice i'm we're not really sure he's a real human being because he hasn't done anything in three years but the fact is they have a criminal division and they have done nothing to investigate mortgage fraud or any

of the associated shenanigans for the entire obama term so you know this is just really a new set of smoke screens to perpetuate what is coming to be a just a tremendous control for odd but what is it in the american character that makes them feel good about getting screwed my own theory is that american life is just so frantic you know with people struggling very hard to make a living and being distracted by every kind of you know electronic message and show and program and entertainment conceivable that there just you know the cognitive dissonance the collective noise in our brains is so immense that we can't really reflect on anything that's happening to us however of going back to some previous conversations we had where i scolded you for making revolutionary remarks i'm beginning to wonder whether we're going to get.