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RICO civil class action suit against Lebanon central banker and banks worrisome

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Riad Salameh, Banque du Liban (BDL), six Lebanese commercial banks and three international accounting and audit firms with Lebanese affiliates have been named as defendants in a class action case filed earlier this month in the United States District Court of New Jersey by a group of US citizen plaintiffs who’s money is stuck in Lebanese banks. The case is the first to allege violation of the RICO Act of 1970 (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) by claiming a conspiracy existed between the named banks (commercial bank conspirators) and BDL, a Lebanese government institution, in order to attract large sums of money from US citizens of Arab and Lebanese extraction before 2019 for the sole purpose of funding the Lebanese state and the purchase of food and medicines and other necessities after dollar remittances into the country began to dwindle in 2015.     The court document goes into detail stating that bank staff using email and other electronic means of communicati
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Iran's cheap and effective weapons threaten to bankrupt western militaries

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Probably the first time since the start of western colonial imperialist expansion in the 17 th century, formerly colonized and subjugated so-called third world countries are today breathing a little easier and many a sigh of relief can be heard if only in hushed tones. The formerly savaged, brutalized, invaded and robbed country of Iran now has a series of home-made weapons that pose a serious problem to the modern militaries of the west.   The proud and ancient Persia with a history stretching back thousands of years has been at the receiving end of unjustified western attacks since Alexander of Macedonia ploughed through the civilized eastern world with reckless and drunken abandon. In modern times, Iran was invaded and occupied in 1941 by the British and Soviets, its natural resources brazenly and illegally appropriated, its people condemned to poverty and backwardness, a democratically elected prime minister toppled in a CIA engineered coup in 1953, and when
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Linchpin Jordan: Battlefield of the Middle East or Facilitator of Peace?

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A water-poor land stuck between the fertile Levant and the oil-rich Gulf kingdoms but possessing neither economic nor natural wealth of any significance, a mesmerizing desert landscape unrivaled in the world some say and a few historic and holy sites, all this makes The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan a great place for tourists to visit, but a burden to run. My heartfelt sympathies to its ruling dynasty, I know first-hand what it’s like to run a small family business, my own father struggled with one for years as did we all along with him. Jordan not only needs water aid, it needs economic aid and lots of it, and the US recognized this early on and has since the 70s at least supported first King Hussein and later his son and heir King Abdullah II with political and economic aid.   Jordan, a stunning desertscape and a tourist hotspot   There is an important reason for this US strategic interest in Jordan, it’s simply because the Kingdom has the longest land border with Israel and has the l
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War now or War later: Levantine options are varying degrees of bad

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When good people do nothing in the face of great evil, evil wins. What is happening in Gaza today and has been happening almost nonstop for the past 80 plus days, is calculated mass murder, torture, and depriving human beings of food, medicine, warmth, security, dignity and life itself, with the goal of either evicting every last Palestinian from Gaza, or at the very least having Israel dominate the strip completely and replace the Hamas-led native government with an Israeli military regime. Such a regime would have one mission, to make local Palestinians’ lives so miserable that they would pack up and leave of their own volition eventually. The Gazan War’s end is being planned now in the corridors of power in the United States and Israel; a marriage of pure evil, two nations who have truly earned this moniker!  Part of that "deal" most likely includes buffer zones, some permanent Israeli military presence on the periphery, denial of any reconstruction material entering Gaza,
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Paving Gaza to put up a colossal trans-shipment hub and free zone

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Paving Gaza to put up a colossal trans-shipment hub    As the popular Joni Mitchell song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ goes “paving paradise to put up a parking lot”, Gaza also seems destined for a flatter future, gone soon will be the concrete jungles in which nearly 2.3 million Palestinians live, bombed to oblivion through the brutal efficiency of the Israeli air force, its people evicted or worse, killed off.    Gaza’s coastal location at the meeting point between Asia and Africa, its large tracts of flat terrain and easy sea access make it a tempting site for a mega trans-shipment facility and economic free zone for Israeli and international companies. Brand new purpose-built facilities set up after the dust of demolition settles to serve the anticipated needs of the  India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) , a multi-modal commercial corridor that aims to change trade patterns between India, Europe and the Middle East. Too big a deal to have it thwarted by the Hamas thorn in the side
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Lebanon searching for deliverance from the wolves of war, chaos and collapse

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There is little to do in Lebanon, little paid work to be done, and what work there is, is pointless and poorly paid. Here we live in the hope that we shall eventually be delivered from the monsters, the wolves of our Lebanese government, Cabinet and Parliament and all the power-brokers that manipulate our lives. I once asked a political science professor “why do politicians always wear suits and ties?” He answered jokingly: “so you don’t see their snake’s skin”, I guess if they wore hats it would be so we don’t see their devil’s horns, or is that meant only for men of the cloth…?   Regardless of which political side you ask about our country’s future, the answer would likely be the same, that things are looking bleak and the blame is always laid at the door of the “other side”, because your interlocutor will never make the mistake of accepting that his/her side shares any of the blame for catastrophe. Lebanese society remains highly polarized politically and ideologically. Archaic reli
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The Cult of Lebanon and the Lies that Sustain the Fiction

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It takes humans a while to realize they’re being brazenly manipulated, this is because most of us desperately want to trust someone or something, to believe in something that gives our existence meaning. To call one group of people gullible and trusting is to suggest another group may not be equally gullible and trusting. However, there are degrees of gullibility depending on the circumstances and the ethno-cultural ground upon which to build a truly gullible people. From my two decades-wroth of experience living in Lebanon, I can say that the Lebanese rank high on the gullibility scale.  One of the most notorious cult leaders, Charles Manson First, we have the almost cult-like devotion to our national homeland, although I appear to have been spared that particular affliction. Ask an Italian American or a transplanted Britt in the Antipodes or any eastern European calling western Europe home, ask them to tell you about their homelands, they’d likely just want to avoid the subject and t
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