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delft

Brigadier
Saudi Arabia to lower wages. From RT:
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Saudi Arabia braces for $39bn deficit, to cut wages due to low oil prices
Published time: December 26, 2014 03:56

The number one crude oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, has projected a $39 billion deficit in 2015. The impact of lower oil prices, along with the decision not to cut production, is putting pressure on the country’s finances.

The figure was part of the endorsed 2015 budget, which was made public in a statement read out on state-run television on Thursday.

The estimated trade deficit will be Saudi Arabia’s largest on record.

The Finance Ministry said the government will try to save some money by cutting salaries, wages, and allowances that represent around “50 percent of total budgeted expenditures.” But the move could anger Saudi youth, who are already struggling to cover the costs of living in the country.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), about two-thirds of the population works for the government.

The 2015 budget includes 860 billion riyals (US$229.3 billion) in spending and 715 billion riyals ($190.7 billion) in revenue. Saudi Arabia promised to cover the difference by digging into its reserves.

At the latest OPEC meeting in Vienna, Austria, the Gulf country opted not to cut the production ceiling of 30 million barrels per day, despite oil prices plunging nearly 50 percent since summer.

Saudi Arabia has also made clear that it is unwilling to cut down production, even if oil prices continue to fall further. Last week, the country’s oil minister, Ali Al-Naimi, said that output would not be reduced, even if prices fall to $20 a barrel.

The decision has been interpreted by some experts as trying to weed out new players from North America, who can competitively produce shale oil only at higher crude prices. However, lower oil prices also directly hurt the economies of countries like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.

Some economists fear that the deficit in 2015 might be even larger than projected, since Saudi Arabians have underestimated the figure in the past.

“I believe we are headed for a difficult year in 2015. I think the actual deficit will be around 200 billion riyals [$53 billion] because actual revenues are expected to be lower than estimates,” Saudi economist Abdulwahab Abu-Dahesh told AFP. “Spending in the budget is not in line with the sharp decline in oil prices,” he said.

According to the country’s Finance Ministry, the 2014 fiscal year budget is set to post a deficit of 54 billion riyals ($14.4 billion) – the first budget shortfall since 2009.
This is likely to do much damage to the stability of Saudi Arabia and probably all Gulf countries.
 
A Reuters op-ed piece which happens to summarize perfectly why everyone who cares to know as much of the truth as possible should know and diversify their news sources as much as possible.

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Earlier this month, the British Broadcasting Corporation, which sees itself as still the best broadcaster in the world, gave a well-bred expression of fear. Peter Horrocks, who has just stepped down as head of the BBC World Service, said “we are being financially outgunned by Russia and the Chinese (broadcasters) … the role we need to play is an even handed one. We shouldn’t be pro one side or the other, we need to provide something people can trust.”

Horrocks was saying that people could trust the BBC; they couldn’t trust the Russians and the Chinese; but that the latter were now real competition

The Russian broadcaster, Russian Today (RT) found that offensive. In a bad tempered exchange with CNN’s Christine Amanpour, RT’s presenter Anissa Nouai (who is American) said that her channel’s job was “closing the holes” in mainstream Western channels’ coverage — holes of misrepresentation, unchecked assertion and bias. She admitted – indeed proclaimed – that the Kremlin funded the channel: but it’s reason for doing so is that President Vladimir Putin “wants … Russia to be respected, mutually respected on an equal playing base, and he wants dialogue to prevail.”

RT has denied that it gets more funding than the BBC, and in a feisty reply to the charge, the broadcaster said that money did not account for its growing popularity; that is “happening because audiences around the world, including in the UK, have become inundated with the same talking points from the mainstream media and are looking for something fresh.”

But money isn’t the point. The Russian and Chinese English-language channels – RT and CCTV News – are provided by state broadcasters of the world’s two leading authoritarian states. The news and analyses they give to their own populations cannot do other than conform closely to the policies and priorities of the rulers of these states.

In the case of Russia, its two main state channels broadcast streams of material, especially about Ukraine, which is often unsourced and often plain made up – as Nouai of RT admitted to Amanpour, when the latter asked the former about a falsified image of a Ukrainian fighter shooting down the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in July this year. The broadcast, with images rapidly exposed as a bad forgery, prompted the on-air resignation of a presenter, Liz Wahl.

The explicit rationale for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these channels is the proclaimed belief that the West is besieging the defenseless people of Russia and China with mendacious words and images. An article in the Chinese journal Qiushi (Seeking Truth) in 2009, charged that “a small number of Western media have managed to dominate the international news and information order, masking the truth, disseminating prejudices, creating through human effort one after another ‘iron curtain’ and ‘vast divide,’ seriously impeding interaction, conversation and mutual understanding between peoples … (this) is now impelling a number of victimized nations to strengthen their capacity for projecting information internationally. This has become a matter of necessity.”

The Chinese and Russians have the more confidence that they can make a change in this non-level broadcasting playing field, because they have succeeded so well with their own populations. Xi Jinping has ordered much tighter constraints on his media (he does regard it as “his”) – and the results of a poll in China this month rated his performance a nine out of 10.

A Russian poll had similarly favorable results for that nation’s leader. Despite the condemnation of the world for its annexation of Crimea and the sponsorship of a bloody rebellion in eastern Ukraine, as well as the sanctions and plunging currency that followed, the latest poll puts Putin’s popularity at 81 percent. The former Russian prime minister, now in opposition to Putin, Mikhail Kasyanov, who took part in the interview with Amanpour and Nouai, said that state propaganda “is absolutely successful. People are fooled by state propaganda. All media are under full control of Mr. Putin. And this enhances adoration of him and his team.”

The technique has also worked well this past year beyond China and Russia. In Egypt, the new president, former military chief Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, imperiously demanded media loyalty – and got it almost unanimously from newspaper and TV editors, though with some dissent from their reporters. He’s still very popular: a poll four months ago showed him on 82 percent.

India is not an authoritarian state: but its media, now increasingly drawn under the aegis of big corporations who wish good relations with the state, swung mainly behind Narendra Modi – and he won the parliamentary elections hands down. Qatar’s Al Jazeera, a big channel for a tiny state, is a kind of half-way house: it’s increasingly sensitive to its paymaster’s concerns, but its English language service is enquiring, comprehensive and though anti-Western, it’s anti-Western lite.

Western media – that media which call themselves free – aren’t really ‘free’ in an absolute sense. They’re constrained by law, by taste, by proprietors’ interests, by audiences’ prejudices to which they will at times pander. But they’re free from state command: they have an ethic, usually quite strong, of holding power to account; they make mistakes but rarely knowingly lie.

These newcomers on the global news scene are different in principle. They proclaim that they wish to redress the balance, correct the mistakes, rebut the slanders. In fact they are an extension of their country’s power, drawing not on a tradition of independent, neutral and fact-based journalism, but basing themselves on deliberate bias and distortion. The BBC’s Horrocks is right: for journalism to serve free societies – and the world audience – it “needs to provide something people can trust” What good is it otherwise?
 

Miragedriver

Brigadier
Well I hate to be a doom and gloom person, but there is an interesting article about the increased possibility of war in Europe.

“…..The danger of war in Europe is higher than it's been for the last half century. Since the end of the Cold War, the continent has lacked a security doctrine, says DW's Christian F. Trippe.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, war between two European states has been practically unimaginable. But Russia is now forcing the allies in the European Union and NATO to think the unthinkable.
There is no shortage of scenarios in which a comparatively "small" regional conflict in eastern Ukraine could turn into a global crisis. Russia could find a reason to openly intervene in Donetsk, in response to its desperate humanitarian situation, or the US could begin supplying Ukraine with weapons - or even directly intervene with airstrikes on rebel positions and be pulled into the crisis…..

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I will now get back to bottling my Malbec
 

delft

Brigadier
Well I hate to be a doom and gloom person, but there is an interesting article about the increased possibility of war in Europe.



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I will now get back to bottling my Malbec
.... directly intervene with airstrikes on rebel positions and be pulled into the crisis….. is not "being pulled into the crisis" it is pushing oneself into it.
 

kwaigonegin

Colonel
Saudi Arabia to lower wages. From RT:
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This is likely to do much damage to the stability of Saudi Arabia and probably all Gulf countries.

I'm not so much worry about the ME as much as I am about Russia. They are the biggest loser in this. Coupled that with the trade sanctions and overall dismal economy of 2014 I see Russia being a very hurt mamma bear.. and you know what they say about a cornered and injured bear.

I'm no economist but I forsee terrible recession for the Russian people in the next few years much worst that we've seen so far. Russians for the most part support Putin but when it hits them directly in their pocket books for significant lengths that adoration may change quickly and that is not good from a world stability standpoint.

Who would've though cheap oil would bring so much pain and suffering to large portions of the world huh?
 

delft

Brigadier
A Reuters op-ed piece which happens to summarize perfectly why everyone who cares to know as much of the truth as possible should know and diversify their news sources as much as possible.

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From BBC that is rich. I have been listing to BBC WS and BBC Radio 4 since the Six Day War so nearly half a century and am well aware that BBC WS is financed by the Foreign and Commenwealth Office and Radio 4 by the central government, helped by TV licences. I'm well used to its biases.
Other broadcasters are also limited by their sponsors. And how does it come about that the questions I would have asked at say a press conference by a US President are always avoided?
 

kwaigonegin

Colonel
From BBC that is rich. I have been listing to BBC WS and BBC Radio 4 since the Six Day War so nearly half a century and am well aware that BBC WS is financed by the Foreign and Commenwealth Office and Radio 4 by the central government, helped by TV licences. I'm well used to its biases.
Other broadcasters are also limited by their sponsors. And how does it come about that the questions I would have asked at say a press conference by a US President are always avoided?

Surprisingly I have found Al Jazeera to be relatively unbiased especially when it comes to foreign news reporting and I'm far from liberal. Many Americans perhaps due to ignorance equate AJ to Al Queda LOL or some (towel head news network).
 
I'm not so much worry about the ME as much as I am about Russia. They are the biggest loser in this. Coupled that with the trade sanctions and overall dismal economy of 2014 I see Russia being a very hurt mamma bear.. and you know what they say about a cornered and injured bear.

I'm no economist but I forsee terrible recession for the Russian people in the next few years much worst that we've seen so far. Russians for the most part support Putin but when it hits them directly in their pocket books for significant lengths that adoration may change quickly and that is not good from a world stability standpoint.

Who would've though cheap oil would bring so much pain and suffering to large portions of the world huh?

while during today oil lost about two percents (according to
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and depending on what oil), Rubble to US$ much more:
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(in case it didn't show:
USD/RUB close:58.54114 low:53.83018 high:58.87861)
actually 8.0% (the low was when they opened :) so (1-53.83018/58.54114)*100)
 
Surprisingly I have found Al Jazeera to be relatively unbiased especially when it comes to foreign news reporting and I'm far from liberal. Many Americans perhaps due to ignorance equate AJ to Al Queda LOL or some (towel head news network).

That's true as long as it is something Al Jazeera's backers don't have a stake in.
 

no_name

Colonel
Surprisingly I have found Al Jazeera to be relatively unbiased especially when it comes to foreign news reporting and I'm far from liberal. Many Americans perhaps due to ignorance equate AJ to Al Queda LOL or some (towel head news network).

Al Jazeera has done some biased reports as well as inaccuracies regarding Chinese news in the past. (can't find specific examples right now)

But yeah still better than some others.
 
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