Whether the federal government spends money wisely or foolishly, the truth is that the vast majority of it still ends up in the pockets of the American people who then use it to buy the things they need for their daily lives. If the US government had not borrowed and spent an extra five trillion dollars that we did not have over the past several years, we would be in the middle of a rip-roaring economic depression right now.

So any talk that [Mr] Barack Obama is “improving the economy” is a total farce. It is a five trillion dollar lie. The reality is that [Mr] Barack Obama and the US Congress have been stealing trillions of dollars from future generations in order to make things tolerable in the present. If the federal government adopted a balanced budget next year, the debt-fueled prosperity that we are currently enjoying would start disappearing very rapidly and all hell would break loose in America.

At this point, the US national debt is over 15.7 trillion dollars. When [Mr] Ronald Reagan took office it was less than a trillion dollars. It took from the founding of America until 1995 for the federal government to accumulate 5 trillion dollars of debt. Under [Mr] Obama, we have accumulated more than 5 trillion dollars of new debt in just over 3 years.

[Mr] Barack Obama is prancing about the countryside touting his great “economic plan”, but the truth is that the only reason the economy has not totally collapsed is because he is stealing 150 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren. Sadly, most Americans don’t understand that the current level of prosperity that we are enjoying is a grand illusion. Most Americans still expect things to return to the way that they used to be, and they are increasingly becoming angry that it is taking so long to get back there.

In Afghanistan, the "SMART" North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is in fact bound for a humiliating escape. "SMART DEFENSE" IS CODE FOR "THERE'S NO MONEY". Only five among 28 NATO member states spend 2% of their gross domestic product on the military - as NATO would have it. One of them was - surprise! - Greece. Here's yet another crash course on weaponized neo-liberalism. First Greece was more or less forced to buy expensive submarines from the French and the Germans; then it was forced to make budget cuts. Call it the "food for subs" NATO relief plan.

The US pays for no less than 75% of NATO's bills - yet another graphic demonstration of NATO as the European arm of the Pentagon. Still, in 2011 European Union (EU) members spent no less than $180 billion on defense. Not anymore. There's no money. So it will be up to the Pentagon to keep it going. And keep it going it will - with relish. As expected, this Sunday in occupied Chicago NATO approved - better yet, US President Barack Obama and his allies "just decided" - to go with the first phase out of four of the US missile shield for Europe.

Those who believe NATO's spin - this shield is not aimed at Russia, but as a defense against "evil" Iranian missiles - may join Alice in Wonderland. For all practical purposes, Russian military chief General Nikolai Makarov has already said Russia is bound to respond by stationing short-range Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, near the Polish border. You can take NATO out of the Cold War but you can't take the Cold War out of NATO.

Neelie Kroes, the EU's Digital Agenda Commissioner, will present by the beginning of June a new legislative proposal which aims “to facilitate cross-border electronic transactions” through the adoption of harmonised e-signatures, e-identities and electronic authentication services (eIAS) across EU member states, according to an internal document seen by EurActiv. “A clear regulatory environment for eIAS would boost user convenience, trust and confidence in the digital world,” reads the paper. “This will increase the availability of cross-border and cross-sector eIAS and stimulate the take up of cross-border electronic transactions in all sectors.”

Brussels has long been trying to facilitate the emergence of a parallel system of electronic identification, on top of the the real-world existing documents. This has mainly been linked to the struggle for establishing a truly functioning single market, rather than on security grounds. Despite the EU's efforts to increase the security of e-signatures and the confidence in the emergence of virtual identities, citizens and governments have been slow to adopt electronic IDs.

The UK briefly introduced ID cards during the second world war but abolished them afterwards. The use that the Nazi regime made of identity documents to single out Jewish people and send them into concentration camps has been a powerful argument against introducing ID documents across the Channel.

That group of nuns - the Leadership Conference of Women Religious - has shot back at the Vatican, and is planning to protest in front of St Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan on Tuesday. They want Cardinal Timothy Dolan to ask the Vatican to take back this criticism.

What caused this schism between nuns and church leadership? In an assessment published in April, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that nuns were too "silent on the right to life from conception to natural death" and didn't promote "Church teaching" of reproductive health issues. To better understand what this means, a bit of context is necessary. The conference --which represents 80 percent, or 57,000 US nuns - was formed 56 years ago, at the request of the Catholic Church.

At that time, the Vatican wanted "a unified voice" for US nuns who helped the poor, nursed the sick, taught students, worked as missionaries, and fought violence, USA Today notes. April's assessment, however, criticized conference members as "radical" feminists for failing to condemn things such as gay marriage and birth control. The condemnation pretty much means that a church HQ appointee will take over the organization. At first, nuns mostly reacted with surprise. Many felt that their vows of obedience prevent them from openly protesting church policy.

They quickly changed tactics: They now say that the church's mandate is just a move to avoid addressing longstanding concerns over child molestation, and have since organized an online petition to rally support for sisters nationwide. So far, there are some 48,000 signatures.

'Airplane Hill' lies on the southern fringes of Jerusalem's city limits - rock-strewn land dotted with shabby, prefabricated bungalows and the occasional pine tree. Once a tranquil backwater, the area has become the focus of hectic activity in the last six months, with Israeli authorities releasing plans for 2,610 housing units and 1,110 hotel rooms.

With the approval process going more quickly than expected, building could start later this year, creating the first new Israeli settlement in 15 years among the sprawl of a modern Jerusalem that is spread out over many hills. If that happens, it would effectively cut off the city's mainly Arab neighbourhoods from Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, imperilling the Palestinians' prospects for establishing a coherent capital and with it their goal of an independent state.

There is only so much territorial abuse this tortured land can take before we kill the political options of saving the two-state solution," said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli attorney who monitors urban developments he thinks affect chances for peace. "What is happening at Givat HaMatos is a game changer," he said, his finger tapping a map of the area for added emphasis. "Events are careering out of control." Of all the obstacles blocking the way to peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, the status of Jerusalem is arguably the most intractable.

For Israelis, all of the city, including East Jerusalem and its West Bank suburbs captured in 1967, is their "eternal and indivisible" capital, the home the Jews dreamed of through 2,000 years of exile, and the site of their revered Western Wall. For Palestinians, there can be no peace until Israel cedes them control over East Jerusalem, a symbol of their national struggle and home to Islam's third holiest site, al-Aqsa mosque and the glittering Dome of the Rock.

The currency bloc's powerhouse set a zero percent coupon on a new two-year bond to be auctioned on Wednesday, the Bundesbank said on Tuesday - the first time this has happened on debt of such long maturity. However, analysts said the €5 billion of paper on offer should easily sell as investors seek to shelter their capital in top-rated debt before Greek elections next month.

"There is still a considerable demand for flight-to-quality assets, investors remain very uncertain and what you can't discount into markets is how (the Greek crisis) will play out," said Sanjay Joshi, head of fixed income at London & Capital, a $3.5 billion fund. "It's not Lehmans going under, this is a country that could go under... and it is an interlinked system across Europe." German government bond yields have sunk to record lows in recent days and, with euro zone inflation at 2.6 percent last month, investors are losing money in real terms.

But that has generally not deterred buyers worried that a new Greek government will reject the terms of the country's bailout, possibly forcing it to ditch the euro. Contagion from a so-called Grexit could pile pressure on other strugglers. Concerns over Spanish banks, some of which are riddled with bad loans and stuffed with their sovereign's debt, are also souring sentiment and Spanish and Italian bond yields have risen sharply.

"The capital volatility of (German bonds) versus the capital volatility of other European assets means there will be demand for this paper. It's a viable asset for those running benchmark funds," Joshi added. Demand for German bonds pushed two-year yields in the secondary market as low 0.28 percent last week and some analysts see them dipping below zero.

If Greece were to leave the eurozone, the immediate cause might be an ECB decision to pull the plug. Extensive use of “emergency liquidity assistance” (ELA) to help banks in the weakest economies has been one of the less-noticed features of the eurozone crisis. Separate from normal supplies of liquidity and meant originally as a temporary facility for national authorities to use when banks hit problems, ELA proved a lifesaver for the financial system in Ireland and is now even more so in Greece. As such, it has given the ECB — which has ultimate control over the facility — considerable power to determine countries’ fates.

Whether that power would ever be exercised is unclear. ELA is a subject on which the ECB is deeply reluctant to provide information — even on where or when it is provided. “You don’t say when you are in an emergency situation, because then you make the situation worse. SO I REALLY DON’T SEE THE USEFULNESS OF BEING MORE TRANSPARENT,” Luc Coene, Belgium’s central bank governor, explained in a Financial Times interview this month.

Nevertheless, ambiguity over how the ECB would really act gives it sway over eurozone politicians. An ECB threat in late 2010 to pull the plug helped persuade Ireland to accept an international bailout plan. No doubt, its governing council will hope to concentrate minds similarly in Athens.

Dimon is not the only banking executive to serve two masters. Along with Dimon, the New York Fed board includes CEO’s from Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, Solway Bank, heads of Macy’s Department Store, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and representatives from Columbia University. Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to see Dimon resign from the Federal Reserve Board.

She told CBS, “I’d like to see Jamie Dimon, for example, resign from his position as a Class A director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The banks cannot regulate themselves.” Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been calling for a revision of the Fed, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer “The conflicts of interest are so apparent that they’re laughable. Here you have the Fed, which is supposed to regulate Wall Street. Then you have the CEO of the largest Wall Street company on the board which [it] is supposed to be regulating. This is the fox guarding the henhouse.”

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 states that bankers should hold seats on the Fed’s regional boards. This addition was meant to allude to some semblance of decentralization of the Fed’s board members; however the clause has only served to bring the corruption closer to home.

Mr Obama is facing the prospect of not appearing on ballots in Arizona because officials there continue to question whether he was born in the American state of Hawaii in August 1961, as his birth certificate states. Ken Bennett, Arizona's secretary of state and a state co-chairman for Mitt Romney, Mr Obama's presumed Republican opponent, has repeatedly asked Hawaiian officials to verify the birth certificate.

Letters to voters released under freedom of information laws show that Mr Bennett believes that there may be reason to suspect that the certificate published by the White House could be a forgery. "If the State of Hawaii does not confirm that he was born in Hawaii, his name will not appear on Arizona ballots," Mr Bennett told another voter who wrote to him about the subject.

Exasperated Hawaiian officials, who have been inundated with requests to verify Mr Obama's birthplace over the past four years, have retaliated by demanding that Mr Bennett prove he has the authority to investigate it. Mr Bennett's intervention, which will not be welcomed by Mr Romney's campaign, gave voice to a residual hard core of so-called "birthers" who refuse to believe Mr Obama is entitled to lead the US.

"A lasting peace can only be made with a strong nation," Netanyahu asserted. "Without a united Jerusalem, the state of Israel will be a body with a weak heart. Our heart will never be divided again." Speaking at a Jerusalem Day ceremony on Jerusalem's Ammunition Hill, Netanyahu noted that wherever Jewish people pray, anywhere in the world, they do so facing Jerusalem – "the place that was always the center of our lives; the place that reminds us of our glorious past and serves as a focus for our future hopes."

"We will not turn our backs on those who faced Jerusalem throughout the ages," he said. "We will safeguard Jerusalem because Israel without Jerusalem is like a body without a heart – and it was on this hill that the heart went back to beating at full strength."

"ON JERUSALEM DAY, THE DIVIDED CITY BECAME WHOLE – AND IT WILL REMAIN THAT WAY."

"I have doubts, to put it mildly, that if we deposit the Temple Mount with foreign forces, we will not very quickly slip into a religious sectarian war," he said. "Only under Israeli sovereignty, the accessibility and freedom of worship for all religions is a certainty, and will remain a certainty. Only under Israel are peace and quiet maintained."

This is very strong language for the most famous personality on the most watched financial news channel in the United States to be using. In fact, if Cramer is not careful, people will start accusing him of sounding just like The Economic Collapse Blog. It may not happen in "the next few weeks", but the truth is that the European banking system is in a massive amount of trouble and if Greece does leave the euro it is going to cause a tremendous loss of confidence in banks in countries such as Spain, Italy and Portugal.

There are already rumors that the "smart money" is pulling out of Spanish and Italian banks. So could we see some of these banks collapse? Would they get bailed out if they do collapse? It is so hard to predict exactly how "financial anarchy" will play out, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the European financial system is heading for a massive amount of pain.

But what is Europe supposed to do? Even though "austerity measures" have been implemented in many eurozone nations, the truth is that they are all still running up more debt. Are European nations just supposed to run up massive amounts of debt indefinitely and pretend that there will never be any consequences? That is apparently what [Mr] Barack Obama wants. During the G-8 summit that just concluded, [Mr] Obama urged European leaders to pursue a "pro-growth" path. Of course to [Mr] Obama a "pro-growth" economic plan includes spending trillions of dollars that you do not have without any regard for what you are doing to future generations.

Germany has been trying to get the rest of the eurozone to move much closer to living within their means, but as the recent elections in France and Greece demonstrated, much of the rest of the eurozone is not too thrilled with the end of debt-fueled prosperity.

Sunnis rioted in the Lebanese capital after the killing of an anti-Syrian Lebanese cleric late Sunday night, leading to clashes with the military that left two dead and 18 wounded. Sheikh Ahmad Abdel-Wahid was shot dead on Sunday night by Lebanese troops when his convoy failed to stop at a checkpoint in north Lebanon.

The Lebanese military issued a statement expressing "deep regrets" for Sheikh Wahid's death after the incident. However, his death ignited simmering tensions after violent clashes between Sunnis and Alawites who support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Those clashes had left 10 people dead.

Syria's Arab Spring revolt has exacerbated deep political divisions in Lebanon. Beirut's Saudi-allied and Western-leaning opposition backs the movement to oust Assad, while the ruling coalition - dominated by the Hizbullah terror militias - supports Damascus. The fighting in Beirut was the worst since sectarian clashes in 2008 that pitted Sunnis against Shiites, and nearly plunged the country into civil war.

On a day when angry comments were exchanged over France’s call for eurobonds, Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, said it was undercapitalised lenders that were the real cause of the region’s woes and urged authorities not to be afraid of nationalising them if necessary.

“The source of current problems is not Greece ... The source of current problems in the eurozone is that various financial exposures we all have in the interbank market are not yet resolved because certain financial institutions are insufficiently capitalised,” Mr Posen told a conference in Tokyo.

His comments came as Spain revealed that the state-backed Bankia would need another €7.5 billion of equity, which would leave it almost entirely taxpayer owned and French President Francois Hollande sparked an angry exchange with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy by saying the rest of the sector should also be recapitalised. “If he said that, it must be because Mr Hollande has information that we don’t have,” Prime Minister Rajoy said.

President Hollande is pushing for a series of radical policies to boost growth and stem the eurozone crisis that are straining diplomatic relations across the single currency bloc. While standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Germany over the need for Greece to meet its austerity agreements, he has clashed with Berlin over his demand for the use of eurobonds.

Steffen Kampeter, a top German finance ministry official, said eurobonds were the “wrong medicine at the wrong time with the wrong side-effects”, while former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin adopted more inflammatory language, describing eurobonds as a penance for the horrors of the Second World War.

The package of measures includes an EMU-wide guarantee of bank deposits aimed at halting a slow bank run across southern Europe, as well as demands for full activation of the European Central Bank as a lender of last resort. They will propose eurobonds to finance an infrastructure blitz, a sort of Marshall Plan to revive confidence even if long-term benefits will take years to feed through.

While the moves are couched in diplomatic language, the clear aim of French premier François Hollande, Italian premier Mario Monti, and Spanish premier Mariano Rajoy IS TO WREST CONTROL OF THE EU'S GOVERNING MACHINERY FROM GERMANY. Mr Monti said over the weekend that Mr Hollande's "entry into the game" had changed Europe's political dynamics. He has an ally "on the same wave-length".

This is clear already in a spat over the next chief of the Eurogroup, the powerful club of EMU finance ministers. Mr Hollande is balking at the coronation of GERMAN FINANCE MINISTER WOLFGANG SCHAUBLE. "It is a litmus test. Hollande is flexing his muscles, showing that he is willing block the man seen as Europe's symbol of austerity," said Mats Persson from Open Europe. "The real battle is over the ECB. It is the only body that can act swiftly enough to underwrite the bond markets. But the crisis may have to get far worse before the Germans yield. It will take immediate contagion, far beyond Greece."

The simultaneous interpreters in the European Council building in Brussels have a difficult job, especially when Wolfgang Schäuble takes the floor at meetings of the euro-zone finance ministers. Last Monday was a case in point. Schäuble said something about a referendum that would have to be held in Greece now, but the interpreters had trouble following his words.

The minister is obsessed with a fierce ambition to speak English in the Euro Group, the 17-country panel that oversees Europe's common currency. But for those present at these meetings, Schäuble sounds more like he's speaking his native southern German dialect. "I don't understand Wolfgang," current Euro Group President Jean-Claude Juncker has said privately on several occasions. The Luxembourg politician has already tried addressing the finance minister in German at the meetings, but Schäuble still insists on answering in English.

The Brussels interpreters could have an even harder time of it in the future, because Schäuble wants to be Juncker's successor in what is one of Europe's most important positions. Who else among his fellow European finance ministers should do it, he has reportedly been asking recently. Schäuble has a low opinion of most of his counterparts. Some he sees as lightweights and others as completely unqualified for their jobs. For Schäuble, a man who take his obligations seriously, there is nothing left but to accept his fate.

Schäuble, the architect of German reunification, is driven by a personal mission. He likes being characterized as the last European in Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet, as he was when awarded one of the Continent's most prestigious prizes, the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen. "WE MUST NOW CREATE A POLITICAL UNION FOR EUROPE," Schäuble said during the ceremony last Thursday, though he would have preferred not to even mention the euro crisis. "It would be fainthearted for us to reduce Europe to nothing but questions of fiscal policy."