Jan 082021
 
 January 8, 2021  Posted by at 9:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


Joan Miro The tilled field 1924

 

Only In Your Imagination Was That An Attempted “Coup” (Tracey)
Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath (Greenwald)
Enough With The Outrage (PL)
Facebook, Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Nothing About Trump (IC)
US Capitol Police Say Reports Of Officer Death Not Accurate (R.)
Donald Trump’s Ruinous Legacy (Tracey)
The US and UK May Not Will Assange’s Death, But … (Cook)
Biden’s One-Two Stimulus Punch (Axios)
There Are So Many Covid Patients, Younger This Time (Anon)
Very Risky To Delay 2nd Dose Of COVID19 Vaccine – Former FDA Director (Hill)
British Scientists Develop World’s First Covid-19 Vaccine Smart Patch (Unilad)
Americans Need Federal Commission To Look Into The 2020 Election (Turley)

 

 

 

 

All I saw was a bunch of clowns.

Only In Your Imagination Was That An Attempted “Coup” (Tracey)

We are being told that a “coup attempt” no longer needs to be understood as constituting an “attempt” to seize control of the government — as had generally been the common understanding of the term before the events of yesterday, which have caused the entire political and media establishment to go completely haywire Is it unusual for a mob to breach the Capitol Building — ransacking offices, taking goofy selfies, and disrupting the proceedings of Congress for a few hours? Yes, that’s unusual. But the idea that this was a real attempt at a “coup” — meaning an attempt to seize by force the reins of the most powerful state in world history — is so preposterous that you really have to be a special kind of deluded in order to believe it.

Or if not deluded, you have to believe that using such terminology serves some other political purpose. Such as, perhaps, imposing even more stringent censorship on social media, where the “coup” is reported to have been organized. Or inflicting punishment on the man who is accused of “inciting” the coup, which you’ve spent four years desperately craving to do anyway. He’s already been effectively banned from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — a rubicon-crossing event in the suppression of political speech which, of course, is being cheered by all the usual suspects who otherwise claim to be stalwart defenders of enlightened liberal values. At no point yesterday was the American government at risk of being “overthrown,” as members of Congress have laughably suggested.

Per usual, our guardians of consensus can’t bring themselves to describe what unfolded with any degree of dispassion or calm. Instead we’re told by the incoming Senate Majority Leader, for example, that January 6, 2021 will now “live in infamy” right alongside December 7, 1941. Elected officials issued emotional notices that they were “okay,” like they had just narrowly avoided being crushed in an earthquake, or escaped the World Trade Center on 9/11. This is made all the more odd because the only person upon whom lethal force was committed appears to have been a Trump-supporting woman who was shot point-blank in the throat by a Capitol Hill police officer. She’s now dead. Congress was temporarily inconvenienced.

Journalists and pundits, glorying in their natural state — which is to peddle as much free-flowing hysteria as possible — eagerly invoke all the same rhetoric that they’d abhor in other circumstances on civil libertarian grounds. “Domestic terrorism,” “insurrection,” and other such terms now being promoted by the corporate media will nicely advance the upcoming project of “making sure something like this never happens again.” Use your imagination as to what kind of remedial measures that will entail. Trump’s promotion of election fraud fantasies has been a disaster not just for him, but for his “movement” — such as it exists — and it’s obvious that a large segment of the population actively wants to be deceived about such matters.

But the notion that Trump has “incited” a violent insurrection is laughable. His speech Monday afternoon that preceded the march to the Capitol was another standard-fare Trump grievance fest, except without the humor that used to make them kind of entertaining. Trump didn’t command that his followers physically breach the Capitol Building. In fact, after previously saying he would join the march, he seems to just have gone home to tweet and watch TV. So, basically his normal routine on a typical day, minus a trip to the golf course.

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“..striking at cherished national symbols — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol — ensures rage and terror far beyond body counts or other concrete harms.”

It’s about cliockbait, Glenn. Not reason.

Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath (Greenwald)

The U.S. Capitol remains a potent and cherished symbol even for Americans who are deeply cynical about the ruling class and political system. Its nobility is something continually engrained deep into our collective psyche since childhood, and that meaning endures even when our rational faculties reject it. It is therefore not hard to understand why watching a marauding band of hooligans invade and deface both the House and the Senate, without any identifiable objective other than venting grievances, reflexively engenders a patriotic disgust across the political spectrum. It is unhinged to the point of being obscene to compare yesterday’s incursion to the 9/11 attack or (as Sen. Chuck Schumer did last night) to Pearl Harbor. By every metric, the magnitude and destructiveness of those two events are in an entirely different universe.

But that does not mean there are no applicable lessons to be drawn from those prior attacks. One is that striking at cherished national symbols — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol — ensures rage and terror far beyond body counts or other concrete harms. That is one major reason that yesterday’s event received far more attention and commentary, and will likely produce far greater consequences, than much deadlier incidents, such as the still-motive-unknown 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 59 or the 2016 Orlando shooting that left 49 dead at the Pulse nightclub. Unlike even horrific indiscriminate shooting sprees, an attack on a symbol of national power will be perceived as an attack on the state or even the society itself.

There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses. This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions.

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“They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.”

Enough With The Outrage (PL)

Like pretty much all conservatives, I have consistently criticized riots and other forms of political violence for many years. That includes yesterday’s Washington, D.C. riot. You can’t say the same about liberals, however. Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie. You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded.

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters. Over the ensuing four years, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted countless times, bringing devastation to cities like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and Minneapolis. Did any Democrats denounce these riots? Not that I remember. Many Democrats endorsed them, or seemed to do so. Kamala Harris, for example, said about the riots in June: “They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.”

This was after 12 people had been killed in Democrat-sanctioned rioting, and billions of dollars in destruction committed. Have any Democrats denounced Black Lives Matter for its role in the riots? Not one. Has any Democrat denounced Antifa? Not that I know of, and some, like Keith Ellison, have specifically endorsed Antifa’s political violence. Democratic Party journalists have joined the party’s politicians in excusing riots. The New York Times, for example, published an admiring profile of Antifa. The Washington Post, likewise, has carried water for Antifa. The litany could go on for a long time. Yesterday’s assault on the Capitol was outrageous, but let’s not forget that last time out-of-control demonstrators interrupted business at the Capitol, shouted down senators and pounded on the doors of the Supreme Court, it was Democrats objecting to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And speaking of assaults on capitols, did any Democrats object when leftists occupied the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison for four months, destroying property, impeding public business and violently assaulting conservatives? Not a peep.

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Are we going to celebrate corporate power in politics now? Are we inviting censorship in through the front door?

Facebook, Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Nothing About Trump (IC)

The advertising industry is generally acknowledged as one of the most risk-averse and craven industries on the planet, with decision-making guided largely by attempting to be as inoffensive as possible to as many people as possible, taking a position on an issue only in the weakest, safest, most carefully hedged terms available. Though companies like Facebook and Twitter hold the unfathomable power to control the distribution of information to billions of people around the world and like to think of themselves as helping bring humankind to some next level of consciousness, they are still very much in the advertising business.

As advertising companies, cowardice runs deep in the souls of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, companies that have spent the past four years looking the other way, equivocating, and contorting themselves into pretzels in an attempt to justify Trump’s unfettered access to the most powerful information distribution system in world history. Despite perennial speculation in the press as to what might psychologically or ideologically explain Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s total unwillingness to meaningfully act, there is just one factor: money. Twitter and Facebook are only worth anything as businesses if they can boast to advertisers of their access to an enormous swath of the American market, across political and ideological lines, and fear of a right-wing backlash has been enough to keep Peter Thiel on Facebook’s board and Trump’s voter suppression dispatches on Twitter’s servers.

According to a Facebook moderator who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of employer retaliation, watching the company drag its feet, yesterday in particular, has been excruciating. According to internal communications reviewed by The Intercept, the Capitol break-in is now considered, for purposes of Facebook’s willy-nilly application of the rules, “a violating event,” and any “praise,” “support,” or even friendly “representation” is banned on the basis of the company’s “Dangerous Organizations” policies, which this moderator explained is typically applied to posts celebrating terrorist attacks, drug cartel murders, and Aryan street gangs.

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Not sure what is going on with this.

US Capitol Police Say Reports Of Officer Death Not Accurate (R.)

U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement on Thursday that media reports that an officer had died after the storming of the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump were inaccurate. The agency said that several officers were injured and some hospitalized after the unrest Wednesday, but that no officers had died as a result. Four people had died after Trump’s supporters swarmed the building on Wednesday in a failed attempt to disrupt efforts to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

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“..he can rest easy knowing that he successfully used Trump as a vehicle to achieve the generations-long dream of the conservative donor class — a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court..”

Donald Trump’s Ruinous Legacy (Tracey)

The stultification of Republican electoral strategy stems fundamentally from the fact that there has been no substantial intra-party public debate about the reasons for Trump’s loss. Even now, more than two months later, to merely state that Trump lost provokes profound rage among a large segment of the party’s voters. You can be mercilessly attacked online and threatened with career-ending repudiation for doing so; Purdue and Loeffler couldn’t deviate from this line, for fear of alienating fraud-believing Trump supporters in Georgia. But Republican turnout dipped anyway, most probably because conservative media had been completely inundated with accusations that the Republican-led state government of Georgia was complicit in a conspiracy to oust Trump. It turns out “fraud-pilling” one’s own voters might not be the most reliable path to victory.

The manic Trump-induced obsession with purported fraud thereby delayed any thoroughgoing public discussion of how Congressional Republicans over-performed in November, across many metrics, even as Trump went down to defeat. So instead of capitalising on those gains, Republicans jettisoned them. As for McConnell, it was one of the more astounding moves in recent political history to sacrifice his own Senate majority, which most of his professional life has been structured around preserving at all costs, because he was dead-set against sending out the $2,000 cheques. A figure which in the grand scheme of things, as Trump would say, is “peanuts”.

But even with the majority vanquished, McConnell will maintain a fair amount of power as minority leader. As of 20 January the Senate will stand as split 50-50 with future Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. The possibility of a few Democratic defections here and there means McConnell will have plenty of opportunities to exert legislative influence. And he can rest easy knowing that he successfully used Trump as a vehicle to achieve the generations-long dream of the conservative donor class — a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, as well as some corporate tax cuts.

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Where is the next appeal? And when?

The US and UK May Not Will Assange’s Death, But … (Cook)

[..] while denying the extradition claim, she supported all the arguments advanced by the US accruing to itself the right to prosecute Assange – and any other journalist – for the crime of doing journalism. She ignored the facts, the expert testimony presented in court and the legal arguments – all of which favoured Assange – and backed instead what amounted to a purely political case made by the US. She disregarded warnings from Assange’s legal team that acceptance of the political rationale for extradition amounted to an all-out attack on fundamental journalistic freedoms. She established a terrifying legal precedent for the US to seize foreign journalists and prosecute them for “espionage” if they expose Washington’s crimes. Her ruling will inevitably have a profoundly chilling effect on any publication trying to dig out the truth about the US national-security state, with terrifying consequences for us all.

But while she enthusiastically backed the political case for Assange’s extradition and trial, Baraitser at the same time got the Wikileaks founder off the hook by accepting the humanitarian concerns raised by medical and prison experts. They had counselled that extradition to the US could be expected to lead to Assange spending the rest of his life in a barbaric US super-max prison, exacerbating mental health problems and the risk of suicide. Her ruling, while deeply disturbing in its political and legal implications, did at least suggest that Baraitser was ready to take a compassionate approach in regard to Assange’s health, even if not his journalistic exposure of western war crimes. He should have walked free there and then, had the US not immediately said it would appeal her decision.

Given Assange’s discharge by Baraitser, his team hoped that bail – his release from a high-security prison while the lengthy appeals process unfolds – would prove a formality. They hurried to make such an application after the extradition ruling on Monday, assuming that the legal logic of her decision dictated his release. Baraitser demurred, suggesting that they prepare their case and make it to her more fully on Wednesday. It now seems clear the judge manipulated Assange’s defence team. Apparently like Assange’s lawyers, former British ambassador Craig Murray, who has attended and reported on the hearings in detail, was lulled by Baraitser into assuming that she wanted a cast-iron case from the defence to justify a decision to release Assange on bail.

There were good reasons for their confidence. Any move to prevent his release would look perverse given that she had decided Assange should not be extradited or stand trial in the US. They were deceived. Baraitser denied bail, effectively signalling that she thinks her ruling might be wrong and overturned in a higher court. That is extraordinary. It suggests that she has no confidence in her own judgment of the facts of the case. As Murray has noted: “There was little or no precedent for the High Court overturning any ruling against extradition on Section 91 health grounds.”

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$4 trillion. Green.

Biden’s One-Two Stimulus Punch (Axios)

Joe Biden is considering asking Congress to help suffering Americans in two steps: give them the balance of their coveted $2,000 coronavirus payments, followed by a $3 trillion tax and infrastructure package. Biden is confident he can get multiple packages through Congress after Democrats won both Georgia Senate elections. The president-elect’s team also wants to get cash in Americans’ hands as quickly as possible, according to people familiar with the matter. In July Biden rolled out his Build Back Better plan, which includes billions of dollars for caregivers, incentives for manufacturers and some $4 trillion for green jobs and infrastructure spending.

He proposed paying for this plan with a series of tax increases on the wealthy, including taxing capital gains as regular income and increasing the marginal tax rate for top earners to almost 40%. Democrats are concerned that if they miss early opportunities to combat COVID and reverse its broader effect on the economy, the twin problems could cripple the rest of Biden’s presidency. The first bite would come in the form of $1,400 payments that would be added to the $600 in cash Congress approved last month. Also included in this quick-hit package would be money for state and local aid, as well as funding for vaccine distribution. Biden’s push for a tax and infrastructure plan, which is part of his “Build Back Better” program, will slide to later in the spring and be considered under budget reconciliation rules.

They allow the Senate to pass measures with a simple majority, instead of a more challenging filibuster-proof 60 votes. Biden is essentially dusting off his pre-election plans, back when many of his economic and political advisers assumed that if he won the presidency, he would carry the Senate along with him. Those ambitions were thrown into doubt when Republicans ran strong in the Senate on Election Day and Democrats’ only hope for regaining the majority was if they won the two uphill runoff elections held Tuesday. Biden’s blitz for a quick spending measure could allow him to build goodwill with Senate Republicans for a bigger package in the spring, especially if it includes liability protection the GOP wants for businesses fearing coronavirus lawsuits.

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Britain is brutal. How much of the healthcare system has been budgeted away in the past 20 years?

There Are So Many Covid Patients, Younger This Time (Anon)

Truly, I never imagined it would be this bad. Once again Covid has spread out along the hospital, the disease greedily taking over ward after ward. Surgical, paediatric, obstetric, orthopaedic; this virus does not discriminate between specialities. Outbreaks bloom even in our “clean” areas and the disease is even more ferociously infectious. Although our local tests do not differentiate strains, I presume this is the new variant. The patients are younger this time around too, and there are so many of them. They are sick. We are full. There can be no debate: this is much, much worse than the first surge. We start the morning with 10 new patients to be concerned about. These are just the worst of them; we cannot worry about those who, though less unwell, would have had us scared in days gone by.

They are scattered on general wards around the hospital, being given as much oxygen as possible through a standard mask. Most are lying prone on their fronts, breathing rapid, shallow breaths, too breathless to talk, blood oxygen saturations alarmingly low. The eldest is in his 70s but most are much younger. All urgently need respiratory support. This is ideally given non-invasively using a Cpap mask or very high oxygen flows through the nose. Like most hospitals we have set up a new respiratory-led breathing support unit for this purpose, but it filled up with patients weeks ago. Our intensive care unit, able to deliver these therapies as well as invasive ventilation for the very sickest, is also full despite being stretched and pushed way beyond its previous capacity.

Our neighbouring hospitals are under the same pressures, or worse; even if patients were well enough to transfer out safely there is no space to receive them. We divide and conquer. Some of us rush through the morning ward rounds on the breathing support and intensive care units, desperately hoping to find patients that have improved enough to step down on to a normal ward or could be swapped between the two units according to their needs. Some of us go to assess the new referrals. We make sure that everything possible has been done to avoid the need for more support but our colleagues have already been thorough. They need to come to us, and soon. We initiate difficult conversations with some patients who were frailer before catching Covid and would therefore have less chance of benefit from additional breathing therapy.

We no longer have the luxury of “giving it a go”; we have to ensure that we select only those with the best chance of survival. Getting it wrong may occupy a precious high dependency bed for many days, often ending in a difficult and symptomatic death while preventing other patients from receiving the correct therapy. Conversely, identifying those who will not survive will allow us to ensure better symptom control and a kinder end to life. These conversations, often barely intelligible through our PPE, are draining, fraught, brutal. We must justify to patients and their families, and often our colleagues too, why we cannot offer these therapies to everyone.

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All on red. Casino.

Very Risky To Delay 2nd Dose Of COVID19 Vaccine – Former FDA Director (Hill)

Questions surrounding the deployment and quantity of available COVID-19 vaccine doses linger as inoculations continue, with vaccine reticence and concerns about dose availability dominating the conversation. For the current approved vaccines, two separate shots are required, and some European countries have opted to delay the administration of the second dose in a bid to cultivate broader immunity. Both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines require two shots administered intramuscularly roughly three weeks apart, which the U.S. is currently undertaking. As for whether or not the U.S. should follow the lead of countries like the U.K. and Denmark, Norman Baylor, former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), called the plan “very risky” on CNBC.

“I understand some of the rationale to do this, but again, it’s not really data driven,” Baylor said. “It’s a very risky venture because if it fails, you’re in worse shape.” Baylor, who previously headed the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, further elaborated that there isn’t enough data to fully illustrate the immunity benefits just one dose with a prolonged second dose will bring. While more people would receive a vaccination by increasing the time between when the administration of both doses, immunity may be different from what promising clinical trials suggest. “The concern though is that space, that time, and how vulnerable you are, because…we don’t have all the data in that will indicate what the duration of protection is,” Baylor said. “If it fails, you’re in worse shape.”

The need to vaccinate more people comes as a more contagious COVID-19 strain makes its rounds through countries including the U.K. and the U.S. The U.K. in particular has seen record new daily confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 403,914 new cases recorded over the past week, per national data. This represents a 42.6 percent increase.

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In 3 years time.

British Scientists Develop World’s First Covid-19 Vaccine Smart Patch (Unilad)

Scientists from Swansea University in Wales are striving to develop the first coronavirus vaccine ‘smart patch’. The patch will use microneedles to both administer the coronavirus vaccine and monitor its efficacy for the patient by tracking the body’s immune response. The research team plans to develop a prototype by the end of March, in the hope it can be put forward for clinical trials and ultimately released to the public, as part of the effort to tackle the coronavirus outbreak. Scientists at Swansea’s IMPACT research centre hope to carry out human clinical studies in partnership with Imperial College London with the aim of making the device commercially available within three years.


Using polycarbonate or silicon millimetre-long microneedles, the smart patch can penetrate the skin to administer a vaccine. It can be held in place with a strap or tape for up to 24 hours, during which time it simultaneously measures a patient’s inflammatory response to the vaccination by monitoring biomarkers in the skin. Once the vaccine has been administered, the device is scanned to produce a data reading that can provide an understanding about the efficacy of the vaccine and the body’s response to it.

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What are the odds?

Americans Need Federal Commission To Look Into The 2020 Election (Turley)

First, and most important, this was an unprecedented election in the reliance of mail-in voting and the use of new voting systems and procedures. We need to review how that worked down to the smallest precincts and hamlets. Second, possibly tens of millions of voters believe that this election was rigged and stolen. I am not one of them. However, the integrity of our elections depends on the faith of the electorate. Roughly 40% of that electorate have lingering doubts about whether their votes actually matter. Most of the cases challenging the election were not decided on the merits. Indeed, it seems they haven’t even been allowed for discovery. Instead, they were largely dismissed on jurisdictional or standing groups or under the “laches” doctrine that they were brought too late.

Those allegations need to be conclusively proven or disproven in the interests of the country. Third, there were problems. There was not proof of systemic fraud or irregularities, but there were problems of uncounted votes, loss of key custodial information and key differences in the rules governing voting and tabulations. We have spent billions to achieve greater security and reliability after prior election controversies. Indeed, we had a prior election commission that failed to achieve those fundamental goals. A real commission will take a couple years to fully address these allegations. It will be meaningless if it’s stacked by the same reliable political cutouts used historically in federal commissions. It should be formed on a commitment of absolute transparency with public hearings and public archiving of underlying material before the issuance of any final report. That way, the public at large can analyze and contribute to the review of this evidence.

[..] The main challenge, however, remains the same: Whether Congress can appoint a real federal commission without rigging the result by appointing partisan members. In 1877, to quote from a speech of Ohio Sen. Allen Granberry Thurman, “It was perfectly clear that any bill that gave the least advantage, ay, the weight of the dust in the balance, to either party, could not become the law of the land.” Nothing has changed. The stakes are too high to allow even a dust particle to tip the difference on the ultimate findings. The dust-free option requires a dependent, not independent, commission. Otherwise, the public will be the loser.

Read more …

 

 

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– G.K. Chesterton

 

 

 

 

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Nov 042020
 


Pablo Picasso Etude Pour Mercure 1924

 

The Democrats and the Presstitutes Will Not Admit a Trump Win (PCR)
Trump: Presidency Has Been ‘Mean’ And Filled With ‘Horrible People’ (Pol.)
How Violence Became A Forecastable Event In America (Turley)
Field Evaluation Of A Rapid Antigen Test For The Diagnosis Of COVID19 (medrxiv)
Radio Host Crushes Leading UK Epidemiologist’s Credibility (ZH)
No Matter Who Wins (Nate Hagens)
China Halts Ant Group’s Mega IPO (R.)
Jack Ma: Traditional Banks Are Operating With A ‘Pawn Shop’ Mentality (TC)
US Pushes Greece To Stop Acting As China’s ‘Dragon’s Head’ Into Europe (SCMP)
Refugee from Moria Camp Signs Professional Football Contract in Greece (GR)

 

 

Been following election news bits for hours now, and still nothing is sure. Both sides claim a win, both sides accuse the other of cheating.

I’d say Trump won, but then I just get more people claiming I’m a Trump supporter. Got another mail from an “ex-reader” asking me why I changed so much. Never occurs to these people that maybe they’re the ones who changed, not me. Sure, I’m not anti-Trump, but why should I? Everytime such mails come in, and the frequency has increased, there’s also always generous donations coming in. Balance.

Trump is doing much better then most of the pollsters said, but we’ll have to wait. There certainly is no landslide for either side. Some states just stopped counting mid-way in, and some counters took the ballots home with them.

I’ll cover this is a series of tweets I picked up along the way. I know it looks crap in mailing lists, but I still haven’t figured out why the tweets stopped appearing in mails. Something to do with javascript, but they did use to appear.

 

 

Trump wins in all demographics except white men.

 

 

@joelpollak “And so we have the anticipated scenario: on Election Night, it looks like a Trump victory based on votes counted so far, but there are enough uncounted states that Biden can tell his supporters that he will win. Media, lawyers, tech companies, and protesters will try to help him.”

 

 

Greenwald Biden Landslide

McEnany Rustbelt

@PpollingNumbers

Tucker zero credibility

Biden

 

 

Paul Craig Roberts from October 29. The documentary The Plot Against the President is no longer available on YouTube.

The Democrats and the Presstitutes Will Not Admit a Trump Win (PCR)

If Trump wins the election, unless it is an overwhelming victory that cannot be challenged, the Democrats and the American media will not admit that Trump won. The plan in place is to blame Trump’s win on fraud and to use the tactics of the “Maidan Revolution” in Ukraine, recently employed again in Belarus, to prevent Trump’s inauguration. The documentary, The Plot Against the President, explains the “Russiagate” plot by the FBI, the Democrats, and the media to remove President Trump from office. The venality and corruption of FBI Director Comey, the American media, and Democrats, such as Adam Schiff, is scary. That such an obvious plot against American democracy involving the country’s security agencies and one of the two ruling political parties could go on for three years without a single question by the media proves that the Establishment will not tolerate a non-establishment President or those who support him and that the media dares not cross the Establishment.

The fact that Comey is not in prison testifies to the power of the Deep State. Had it not been for US Rep. Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee the coup would have succeeded. The coup attempt is not over. The documentary, which consists of the testimony of members of the House Intelligence Committee, National Security officials, and outside experts, shows that both Democrats, especially Adam Schiff, and the US media simply denied that Independent Prosecutor Mueller and the House Intelligence Committee failed to find any evidence of the Russiagate charges. Adam Schiff stood before the American media and lied time and time again. The media knew he was lying and never called him on his lies. Not even once. The undeniable fact that Russiagate was a three-year hoax, an orchestrated deception to foreclose the Trump agenda, has not been admitted by Democrats or the presstitutes.

In other words, nothing is true unless the media admits it. And they don’t admit the truth. The Elite use the presstitutes to control the explanations and to keep the population in a false reality. As our Founding Fathers said, without a free and independent media, there is no liberty. The United States does not have a free and independent media. It has a propaganda ministry for the ruling Elite. Be sure you comprehend the implications, because you are about to see it again. If Trump wins the election, the media and the Democrat Party are not going to acknowledge the fact that Trump won–unless Trump’s win is so overwhelming that it cannot be challenged.

Virginia vote count stops, counters take ballots home with them.
https://twitter.com/JusticeMAGA/status/1323856601858494464

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Well, he’s been fair game for 5 years.

Trump: Presidency Has Been ‘Mean’ And Filled With ‘Horrible People’ (Pol.)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday offered a bitter assessment of his tenure in the White House, saying the experience has been “mean” and marked by “horrible people.” The comments came in an Election Day interview on “Fox & Friends,” after co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked Trump whether he has enjoyed being president and if the job has been “worth it.” “Well, it’s been mean. It’s been — you’ve dealt with horrible people,” Trump replied, adding: “You deal with people that are very deceptive.” Trump, who participated in five campaign rallies Monday, sounded noticeably hoarse throughout his phone interview Tuesday, and seemed relatively despondent compared with his previous appearances on his preferred cable morning news show.


Reflecting further on his time in office, Trump said that his friends “used to call me Donald, [but] now they call me president,” and he argued that the United States itself was more “difficult to deal with” than America’s international adversaries. “They’ll go, ‘Mr. President, tell me, who’s the country that’s most difficult to deal with? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is it North Korea? Sir, is it North Korea?’” Trump said. “And I go, ‘No. Well, by far, the most difficult country to deal with is the U.S. It’s not even close,’” he continued. “And they all say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ And I say, ‘No, I’m actually probably not kidding.’ We have very, very deceptive people.”

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So far so good. But then, both sides still think they can win.

How Violence Became A Forecastable Event In America (Turley)

Driving around Washington, D.C. a couple days ago was a shocking experience. Block after block of businesses are boarded up and anything throwable or movable has been removed from the streets. In the meantime, faculty, staff, and students at George Washington University (where I teach) have been told to stockpile medicine and food “as you normally would for a hurricane or a snowstorm.” The reason? We are about to have a democratic election. The expectation is that is, unless it is a landslide for Biden, there will be rioting and arson in Washington and other cities. A warm front moving in with “possible election related disruptions” is being reported like an electoral meteorological event.

When exactly did election rioting become as forecastable as inclement weather? The forecast for rioting with a chance of passing looting and arson is being repeated across the country as if it is now an inconvenient truth of the political version of global warming. The most likely disruption would come a close election or Trump lead. That risk is heightened after Democratic leaders like House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C. declared on Sunday that the only way Democrat Joe Biden could lose the election would be “for voter suppression to be successful.” Thus, if Trump is close or winning on election night, it can only be due to unlawful conduct. When President Trump made such statements about stealing the election, the media went into full alert over his laying the foundation for a coup.

Yet, the media seems entirely comfortable with Clyburn’s pre-election declaration that either Biden wins or the election is invalid. The fact is that the odds are against President Trump. However, the current polling shows a tightening of the race in critical states. The country remains sharply divided with even the best Biden polls still showing a solid 45 percent for Trump. Yet, Democratic members like Clyburn are already stating that either Biden wins or the election is stolen. No wonder officials are declaring a violent front moving into major cities with political doppler readings with developing protest vortexes and political depressions. Yet, rioting is not an act of God, but the criminal acts of those who only embrace democratic elections to the extent that they result in the “right” outcomes.

Read more …

“NEW terrific study on rapid tests The importance of this figure canNOT be overstated! Rapid tests caught 80% of PCR positives but all missed had very low viral loads. Thus, as expected it will successfully capture ppl most likely to be contagious.”

Field Evaluation Of A Rapid Antigen Test For The Diagnosis Of COVID19 (medrxiv)

Previous studies evaluating SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen test (RAD), tests either used retrieved specimens, which had been cryopreserved for a wide range of times, were conducted at central laboratories or both [3-7]. To our knowledge this is the first report on the performance of a RAD assay conducted at POC. As such, it may provide a realistic view of how implementation of RAD tests in clinical practice can contribute to the management and control of the COVID-19 pandemics. When compared to RT-PCR, the Panbio™ COVID-19 AG Rapid Test Device assay yielded an excellent specificity and a fairly good overall sensitivity (79.6%); the latter slightly improved when the time to testing was less than 5 days since the onset of symptoms (80.6%).

This figure is less impressive than that claimed by the manufacturer (93%); however it is close (86.5%) to that reported by Linares and colleagues [3] in a mixed cohort including patients attended at the Emergency Department or primary healthcare centers and centralized testing at the hospital laboratory. Sensitivity of SARS-CoV-2 RAD assays has been reported to vary between 45%-97% [3-7]; yet, direct comparison between studies is hampered by relevant dissimilarities regarding clinical characteristics and age of patients, site of testing, type of specimen processed, and time to testing, among others. Interestingly, the sensitivity was higher in adults (82.6%) than in pediatric patients (62.5%). Previous studies found no age-related differences in SARS-CoV-2 RNA load in the upper respiratory tract [8]. Although speculative, dating the accurate onset of symptoms could have been less reliable in children than in adults.

[..] In summary, we found the Panbio™ COVID-19 AG Rapid Test Device to perform well as a POC for early diagnosis of COVID-19 in primary healthcare centers. More importantly, our data suggested that patients with RT-PCR-proven COVID-19 testing negative by RAD are unlikely to be infectious. Further studies are warranted to confirm this assumption. The inconsequentiality of false negative RAD results, from a public health perspective [12], would support the implementation of a laboratory diagnostic approach which excluded confirmatory RT-PCR testing for negative RAD tests in non hospitalized patients, even when the pretest probability is high. This would certainly alleviate laboratory workloads while dealing with RT-PCR supply shortages.

Read more …

The costs and risks of having a lockdown vs NOT having a lockdown. Nobody’s done the math. They didn’t even try.

From John Day, TAE resident physician, a few days ago: “COVID-19 is here to stay [..] It has become endemic. It’s never going away. There is no way to make it go away. Immunity lasts something like 6 months, though some reinfections occur before that. A good vaccine will always be 6 months away. Then you will need another, different one in 6 more months, but the first one is still 6 months away. “

Radio Host Crushes Leading UK Epidemiologist’s Credibility (ZH)

In the most thorough demolition of an ‘expert’ epidemiologist who unabashedly advised the UK government of the desperate need for a second lockdown to “suppress” the virus, Independent SAGE member Professor Gabriel Scally was completely unable to respond when LBC’s Maajid Nawaz cornered him on how severely a lockdown would cost the nation. As LBC’s Seán Hickey reports, Maajid asked whether the member of the Independent SAGE considers “the potential cost and deaths from having a lockdown and weigh them up.” Professor Scally insisted that “you can’t have a response to this virus that doesn’t take into account the economic factors, social factors and the psychological factors” and his department would definitely take these factors into consideration.

He reiterated the over-used mantra that the bottom line is that “we have to stop the virus – we have to stop it spreading,” and a second national lockdown is the best way to do so. However, when pushed on the cost, Scally told Maajid he hasn’t seen it, to which Maajid asked the epidemiologist after explaining that the sum is £2.4billion a day whether such funds could be spent elsewhere. “I would imagine as a public health expert you would have some idea,” Maajid noted. And that’s when Scally lost all ‘science’ credibility and barked back at Maajid: “Oh, don’t be silly, you are really now being stupid…” Which Maajid did not take kindly to the President of Epidemiology & Public Health at the Royal Society of Medicine’s response.

“Is the scientific evidence for why we need to go into lockdown being compared with the scientific evidence for what happens if we don’t and then the death that can come from lockdown versus the death that can come from not locking down compared and the costs compared so we can have a holistic approach to it. Have you done that work?” “I would have done that work if I was a member of cabinet,” Professor Scally said, when Maajid Nawaz turned the screw.

Read more …

Long from my old friend Nate.

No Matter Who Wins (Nate Hagens)

Humans – during periods of growth – and contraction – self-organize around energy. Oil is central but our entire energy balance sheet is going to be a critical issue in the coming decade. Under a Biden win, various Green New Deal schemes will massively scale renewable energy. In many ways this is good news, because it will be good for GDP, it will create jobs, and grow our supply of low carbon energy. But there are many problems with this because it won’t be approached systemically. Briefly: 1) renewable energy isn’t renewable, it’s rebuildable, 2) only 20% of (current) energy mix is electricity which is the type of energy produced from most renewables 3) the higher % of RE in our mix the more important back up (NG and coal) become – and the US is facing an impending gas shortage as US drilling has plummeted. (the largest growth component of supply was the associated gas from tight oil production), 4) the full system cost of integrating RE into the grid is higher than consumers currently pay, weighing on the economy 5) all RE plans expect a LARGER economy in the future when (see above) most realistic scenarios using systemic inputs point to a smaller economy.

Still, renewables are our only hope – they are mature, robust and inexpensive vis-à-vis even a decade ago. The problem will be how to ‘add renewables to a smaller and more complex system’. No matter who wins the election, we will have to face a more complex and less certain energy future. One of the silver linings (if you will) of the pandemic is that now a great number of people personally are aware US GDP/ 330 million does not represent how well we are doing as individuals or as a nation. The constant media reminders that the SP500 and Dow Jones just made all-time highs is incongruous with most peoples real lived experience (and most of whom have zero money in the stock market).

Whether one understands or agrees with the risks of climate change, energy depletion or limits to growth, tens of millions of people are now hungry for living a decent life with access to basic needs, while doing something good. The coming decades – by definition but also by desire – are going to be more about well-being than they are about growing our consumption of stuff. No matter who wins the election, our nation needs to embark on a deep conversation about what our cultural goal is – we are going to need complementary metrics to the econometric measures quantifying how much energy we burned. What is all this energy for is a question that should be part of our national discourse.

Read more …

And people thought the US would do it.

China Halts Ant Group’s Mega IPO (R.)

China suspended Ant Group’s $37 billion stock market listing on Tuesday, thwarting the world’s largest IPO with just days to go, in a dramatic move that left investors and bankers scrambling for answers.

Fraser Howie, independent commentator and author of several books about china’s financial system: “It is embarrassing for Ant Group, it also looks bad for sponsors and the exchange and regulators.The SSE (Shanghai Stock Exchange) says the suspension is based on changes of structure which breach the listing disclosure rules. How could this happen? No excuse at all for such failings around disclosure. Or perhaps this is really politics at play, the state is reining in the private sector in the most embarrassing of ways but that I think is somewhat foolish an approach. Ant Group should be regulated as a financial company but China has made a major push to open its markets and welcome foreigners and then this happens. The world’s largest IPO, China’s most famous tech group and this mess. Everyone looks foolish.”

Dave Wang, portfolio manager, Nuvest Capital, Singapore: “For now, markets will sell off Alibaba and likely Tencent as well as other relevant exposures like HSCEI Tech due to anticipation of Ant’s listing. Chinese banks may be a beneficiary and given they are underowned, we could see a rally. More details will come and if this is an isolated incident to Ant, then the new economy stocks that have done well so far should be fine, which is the base case now. If not, markets may start to price in uncertainty on tighter regulations on private enterprises and we could see a significant pull back on Chinese growth stocks.”

Francis Lun, CEO of Geo Securities : “The Communist Party has shown the tycoons who’s boss. Jack Ma might be the richest man in the world but that doesn’t mean a thing. This has gone from the deal of the century to the shock of the century. Jack Ma got ahead of himself by criticising the commercial banks and the regulatory regime.”

Read more …

Some background to the Ant Group IPO fail.

Jack Ma: Traditional Banks Are Operating With A ‘Pawn Shop’ Mentality (TC)

Whenever Alibaba founder Jack Ma makes a speech, it often becomes a hot topic. This past week, the Chinese internet has been abuzz with a speech of his. This time though, he seems to have gotten more brickbats than praise. At the Bund Summit in Shanghai last weekend, while Ma self-deprecatingly said that he was an unofficial and non-professional member of the financial sector, he nonetheless criticised the financial supervision system in front of top financial leaders like Zhou Xiaochuan, former governor of the People’s Bank of China, and Yi Gang, current governor of the People’s Bank of China. His fiery speech quickly made the rounds on the internet and sparked debate in the financial circle.


In his speech, Ma referred to the Basel Accords – a set of internationally agreed banking supervision regulations – as a “club for the elderly” and stated that these regulations should not apply to China, which does not have a mature financial ecosystem yet. He also claimed that the world now “only focuses on risk control, not on development”. As a representative figure of innovation in China’s financial industry, Ma believes that innovation comes with a price. He said: “Risk-free innovations stifle innovation.” He also added this blunt criticism: “Your risk-free departments are putting the entire economy at the risk of non-development.” Ma further criticised traditional banks for operating with a “pawn shop” mentality, saying that they will be unable to support the financial needs of the future world.

Read more …

Still can’t read the name “Geoffrey Pyatt” without getting nauseous.

US Pushes Greece To Stop Acting As China’s ‘Dragon’s Head’ Into Europe (SCMP)

As Europe was fighting a seemingly unmanageable Covid-19 outbreak in September, Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis rolled out the red carpet for an inconspicuous foreign guest. Neither a state leader nor a health expert called in to fight the virus, Adam Boehler heads the US International Development Finance Corporation, created last year and hailed by Washington as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the multibillion-dollar Beijing plan to fund infrastructure projects and expand trade ties around the world. Fresh in his job, Boehler’s visit – quickly followed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – was a clear signal of Washington’s concern over China’s expanding interest and influence in Europe, especially Greece.

The country is home to one of the most iconic belt and road projects: the port of Piraeus, among Europe’s biggest and now controlled by China’s state-owned shipping giant Cosco. Greece may be on the fringe of the European Union geographically, but it has become a key focus in the intensifying scramble for global influence between the US and China, which has spilled over into Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. “China itself has identified [Greece] as the dragon’s head of the Belt and Road Initiative in Europe,” the US ambassador to Greece, Geoffrey Pyatt, told local newspaper I Kathimerini earlier this year. “We’re going to have a debate in terms of how we get the balance right in dealing with the challenge that China presents. China’s not going to go away.”

Boehler’s specific goal was to convince Mitsotakis that Greece’s second-largest but near-bankrupt shipyard in Elefsina – just 13km west of Piraeus – should accept investment from the US body, lest it “fall into the wrong hands”, according to a diplomatic source briefed on the matter, who declined to be identified. US companies are reportedly interested in buying controlling stakes in Alexandroupoli port, according to local media. Alexandroupoli is being privatised by the Greek state and, while much smaller than Piraeus, is strategically located near the border with Turkey. Washington has piled the pressure on Greece regarding the future of Piraeus, said to be the oldest port in Europe and just 12km (7 miles) from the capital Athens. That showed when Cosco found itself struggling to get approval from Greek authorities to build a fourth container terminal in the port.

The Chinese shipping giant has said it will invest 600 million euros (US$698 million) in the Piraeus port to make it the biggest commercial shipping hub in Europe. This would also allow it to boost its stake in the port to 67 per cent from the 51 per cent it bought in 2016 for 280.5 million euros under a deal with HRADF, Greece’s privatisation agency. Greek officials have reassured Beijing that the delay in expansion approval was caused by local opposition based on archaeological and environmental concerns, not global politics.

Read more …

Let’s end with some good news.

Refugee from Moria Camp Signs Professional Football Contract in Greece (GR)

The Historic Greek football club Panionios announced on Tuesday that a refugee from the West African nation of Guinea signed a contract to play with the team in late October. Twenty-two-year-old Alia Camara came to Greece on a boat from Turkey when he was just 17 years of age. He traveled to Turkey from his home country after he was promised a contract with a football team there. Since it had been Camara’s dream to play football, naturally he eagerly accepted the deal — which turned out to be a scam which left the teenager penniless. Upon arriving in Greece, Camara was sent to Moria, Greece’s notoriously overcrowded refugee camp, the largest in Europe, which burned down after a series of fires in September.

While in the camp, located on the Greek island of Lesvos, Camara explained his situation to everyone he could — including his love for football, the scam he fell victim to in Turkey, and his desire to play the sport in Greece. With the help of a Greek couple, whom he calls his parents, who heard his story, Camara was able to submit his papers to legally reside in Greece, and was put in contact with Panionios, the historic Greek football club. Panionios, the oldest such club in Greece, was founded in 1890 in Smyrna, in what is now Turkey. After the destruction of the city in 1922, the surviving Greek residents of the city, including the entire club, were forced to relocate to Greece as refugees.

Panionios, along with many refugees from Smyrna, found a new home in the Athenian suburb of Nea Smyrni (New Smyrna). The connection between Camara’s refugee status and the club’s history moved the owners of Panionios, who offered the talented young player a contract to play for the team.

Read more …

 

 

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Greenwald Corbyn

Panda dogs

Fish crossing road

 

 

 

 

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Aug 272020
 
 August 27, 2020  Posted by at 1:16 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Leon Levinstein Head of Man with Hat and Cigar c1960

 

 

A Pew Research Center poll that’s already a month old (and a lot happened since) concluded that violent crime is a major issue according to 59% of voters (almost as much as coronavirus): 74% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats. But during the DNC, held after the poll was already out, the issue wasn’t addressed at all. Democrats talked about police violence, but not riot violence.

At this week’s RNC, this situation is -of course- very different. The DNC pushes the GOP into the role of the party of law and order, and they’re all too willing to take up that role. But I was wondering about something else, or “bigger”, this morning. That is, Joe Biden et al are very light on policies, because in their view their most important issue is to get people to vote *against* Donald Trump, rather than *for* Biden.

And I’m thinking maybe that’s starting to boomerang, to blow up in their faces, whether perhaps people are beginning to lean towards NOT voting for Joe Biden, instead of NOT voting for Donald Trump, “at any cost”. In that context, it appears telling that according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, Biden saw no “convention poll bounce” in his numbers after the DNC, while ironically, Trump did.

Whereas according to a Zogby Analytics poll, Trump’s job approval numbers are now at record high levels. And I know polls -and pollsters- can be biased, and so can the press quoting them, but to see three in a row, Reuters/Ipsos, Rasmussen, Zogby, all reporting similar movement, may still be significant.

Trump Job Approval Rating Hits Record At 52%

Buoyed by blacks and independent voters, as well as urban dwellers shocked by the Black Lives Matter protest violence raging in some cities, President Trump’s approval rating has hit a new high, according to a survey heavy with minority voters. The latest Zogby Analytics poll just shared with Secrets had Trump’s approval at 52%. “The president has recorded his best job approval rating on record,” said pollster Jonathan Zogby.


What’s more, his approval rating among minorities was solid and, in the case of African Americans, shockingly high. Zogby said 36% of blacks approve of the president, as do 37% of Hispanics and 35% of Asians. Approval among independent voters is also up, to 44%. And “intriguingly,” said Zogby, 23% of Democrats approve of Trump.

It was the latest to show that Trump’s approval went up during the Democratic National Convention. Rasmussen Reports had it at 51% at the end of the convention. In a shock from past election years, Joe Biden got no convention poll bounce, according to a newly released Reuters/Ipsos poll. [..] Zogby, in his analysis, took a stab at the reasoning. First, he said, his and other polls are confirming that the nation is nearly evenly divided politically and that despite some showing a big Biden lead, the race is extremely close.


He suggested that the battle is for the “10%-20%” who haven’t made their minds up on whom to vote for and who likely won’t make up their minds until Election Day, just like in 2016. “We are as polarized a nation, on a level not seen since the Civil War,” said Zogby. He also said that the violence playing out in cities such as Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, are pushing urban voters to Trump.

A fresh Rasmussen poll about Biden’s lead in the polls (which reached double digits not long ago), indicates that there’s not much left of that lead. That, but the way, is similar to a CNN poll a number of weeks ago. Significantly, Rasmussen suggests that: Even if Biden’s now-slim lead in the polls were to remain frozen as of today, Trump would still have a clear path to an electoral college victory.

Biden’s Polling Lead Has Collapsed

Just a month and a half ago, Rasmussen Reports had Joe Biden 10-points ahead of President Donald Trump in the polls. Now he’s only ahead by one point, within the margin of error. Even if Biden’s now-slim lead in the polls were to remain frozen as of today, Trump would still have a clear path to an electoral college victory, as Hillary Clinton lead Trump in the popular vote by just over two points in the 2016 election. While it is impossible to know the exact reason (or reasons) for Biden’s polling collapse, it comes as the economy continues to rebound from the coronavirus, riots continue to ravage liberal run cities longer than anyone expected (to no condemnation from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris)..


[..] Rasmussen was among the closest mainstream pollster in approximating the popular vote in the 2016 election. Rasmussen had Hillary Clinton up 1.7 points over Trump on election day 2016, while she ended up winning the popular vote by 2.1 points above him (48.2% vs. 46.1%). The Real Clear Politics average of polls had Hillary up for six points. Unlike the other polls, Rasmussen correctly saw Trump had a path to victory in the electoral college.

Rasmussen

 

And of course Don Lemon warned yesterday on CNN that Biden has to start addressing the riots, because by remaining silent he’s letting Trump run away with the issue. But it’s not entirely clear how Biden would do that: the Democrats have supported BLM and protesters -as well as rioters- in general for most of the year, and now they would have to turn against them?

The sports boycotts that yesterday came seemingly out of nowhere all at the same time, look like they’re well intentioned but too late. There is too much news, and there are too many videos, out there to keep portraying what’s happening in the streets of Kenosha and Minneapolis and many other cities, as a one-sided problem. There is violence on both, or even many, sides.

Tonight, Thursday August 27, it’s Donald Trump’s turn to address the RNC, and the entire press, the entire nation, will pay attention. Nobody feels they can afford not to. Almost half the country will already have their minds made up about what a terrible person he is, while the other almost half will think he’s doing great. It’s the “10%-20%” who haven’t made their minds up that he must reach, and given how the country feels about violence in the streets, he may well succeed in reaching quite a few.

For which he can thank the DNC. “Orange Man Bad” may have once looked to be a winning strategy, but by now it feels mostly a limiting one.

 

 

 

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Jul 282020
 
 July 28, 2020  Posted by at 10:17 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Dorothea Lange Migrant cotton picker’s children, live in government tent, Shafter Camp, CA 1938

 

Barr To Come Out Swinging In House Testimony (Solomon)
How Did Russia Get A Possible COVID19 Vaccine So Fast? (RT)
China Reports 68 New Coronavirus Cases, Including Two In Beijing (R.)
Mike Rowe Explains That Reality Is Going To Win With The Wuhan Virus (AT)
How The Eviction Crisis Across The US Will Look (CNBC)
The Insane Leading the Blind (Kunstler)
Assange Defence Team Concerned US is Seeking ‘Improper’ Delay of Case (Sp.)
Oil Giants Help Fund Powerful Police Groups In Top US Cities (G.)
Post-Brexit Agrochemical Apocalypse for the UK? (OffG)
CNN’s Stelter Breaches Confidentiality Agreement With Sandmann (Fox)
Emus Banned From Pub In Outback Australia Town (G.)
Facebook Vows To Break Up US Government Before It Becomes Too Powerful (Onion)

 

 

“Low” new cases for the world and US. US deaths also lower. We can hope and pray.

Biggest show in town is Bill Barr being grilled in the House. All conclusions have already been drawn in advance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The biggest show in town today.

Barr To Come Out Swinging In House Testimony (Solomon)

Attorney General Bill Barr is planning a full-throated defense of his work inside the Justice Department and that of police nationwide when appearing before hostile House Democrats on Wednesday, condemning both the “bogus Russiagate scandal” and the senseless violence rocking U.S. cities. In prepared testimony released Tuesday evening on the eve of his House Judiciary Committee testimony, Barr declared that liberal activists’ “demonization of police is not only unfair and inconsistent with the principle that all people should be treated as individuals, but gravely injurious to our inner city communities.” “When a community turns on and pillories its own police, officers naturally become more risk averse and crime rates soar,” his prepared testimony states.

“Unfortunately, we are seeing that now in many of our major cities. This is a critical problem that exists apart from disagreements on other issues. The threat to black lives posed by crime on the streets is massively greater than any threat posed by police misconduct. The attorney general also lambastes liberal mayors for allowing serial violence to persist in their cities since George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and supporting efforts to undercut police department authorities and funding. “Unfortunately, some have chosen to respond to George Floyd’s death in a far less productive way — by demonizing the police, promoting slogans like ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), and making grossly irresponsible proposals to defund the police,” he plans to tell lawmakers.

Later he adds, “To tacitly condone destruction and anarchy is to abandon the basic rule-of-law principles that should unite us even in a politically divisive time.” Barr also directly challenges Democrats’ claims he has been a lapdog for Trump, declaring the president has not interfered in his decisions. “My decisions on criminal matters before the Department have been my own, and they have been made because I believed they were right under the law and principles of justice,” he said. Barr suggested Democrats’ criticisms may be aimed at undercutting his efforts to investigate abuses in the now-discredited FBI investigation of Trump-Russia collusion.

“Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal, many of the Democrats on this Committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the President’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions,” Barr is set to testify. “Judging from the letter inviting me to this hearing, that appears to be your agenda today.”

Read more …

No way Big Pharma will tolerate such a thing.

How Did Russia Get A Possible COVID19 Vaccine So Fast? (RT)

This month, Moscow’s famed Sechenov University announced that the first phase of clinical trials for a vaccine had been a success. Some 38 volunteers who took part in human trials have been released with little or no side effects recorded. Researchers will now push forward, testing the vaccine’s efficiency, and prepping it for registration with the Health Ministry. Other prototypes are to follow, with some about to finish phase-one trials – which usually demonstrates the new vaccine’s safety for use in humans. It’s fairly easy to grasp why Russia is so keen to get a Covid-19 vaccine. Having reported more than 811,000 cases and 13,249 fatalities, it is among the five countries worst affected by the epidemic.

But how did it make a vaccine so fast, given that the coronavirus – or its deadly, crown-shaped SARS-CoV-2 strain – wasn’t known to scientists before 2020? Russia has over 20 years of experience in developing technology for producing vaccines. This helped to create the unique Covid-19 vaccine in a very short period of time by normal drug-development standards, Vadim Tarasov, head of Sechenov University’s Institute for Translational Medicine and Biotechnology, told RT Arabic in a comprehensive interview. “Nothing can be done from scratch,” he explained. Virologists at the Sechenov Institute and the Gamalei Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology – another coronavirus research hub in Moscow – benefited from that “huge backlog” to decode the genome and structure of Covid-19 and quickly create a vaccine prototype.

The technology behind the Russian vaccine in question is based upon adenovirus, the common cold. Created artificially, the vaccine proteins replicate those of Covid-19 and trigger “an immune response similar to that caused by the coronavirus itself,” Tarasov revealed. In other words, getting immunized is slightly similar to having survived the coronavirus, but without its life-threatening risks. The vaccine, of course, won’t be a magical wand preventing everyone from getting sick. It may not stop the entire spread of coronavirus, but will make the symptoms much milder.

Read more …

Hong Kong over 100 several days in a row.

China Reports 68 New Coronavirus Cases, Including Two In Beijing (R.)

China reported 68 new coronavirus cases for July 27, up for the fourth consecutive day, including two in Beijing, the country’s health authority said on Tuesday. China is battling the most aggressive return of COVID-19 in months, driven by infections in the far western region of Xinjiang and a separate flare-up in the northeast. Of the new local infections for July 27, 57 were in Xinjiang, according to a statement by the National Health Commission. That brings the total number of cases in the region’s current outbreak to 235 since the first infection was reported on July 16. Xinjiang has yet to explain how patient zero, a 24-year-old woman who worked in a mall in its capital Urumqi, contracted the virus.


The northeastern province of Liaoning reported six new cases as of July 27. The current outbreak in Liaoning, which began on July 22, centred mostly on the port city of Dalian, east of Beijing. The first case in Dalian worked at a seafood processing company, and had not travelled out of the city in recent weeks. To contain the spread of the virus, Xinjiang and Dalian have tested millions of people for COVID-19, but the coronavirus is already on the move.

Read more …

Apparently many people experience panic and fear, induced by a faulty choice of media. I have no such thing. Maybe I should too. Rowe is mostly right. Get tested often, wear a mask where needed, and live your life. Rocket science it ain’t.

Mike Rowe Explains That Reality Is Going To Win With The Wuhan Virus (AT)

[..] for the last three months, I’ve been operating from the assumption that this is a year-round virus that’s eventually going to infect 100 million people and kill roughly 1/2 of one percent of those infected, conservatively. I’ve accepted those numbers. Unfortunately, millions of others have not. Many people have no sense of where this is headed, and I understand why. They’ve been betrayed by a hysterical media that insists on covering each new reported case as if it were the first case. Every headline today drips with dread, as the next doomed hotspot approaches the next “grim milestone.” And so, for a lot of people, everyday is Groundhogs Day. They’re paralyzed by the rising numbers because the numbers have no context. They don’t know where it will end.

But Dr. Osterholm says he does, and I’m persuaded that he’s correct. He might be wrong, and frankly, I hope he is, but either way, he’s presented us with a set of projections based on a logical analysis, and accepting those projections has allowed me to move past denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, and get on with my life with a better understanding of what the risks really are. Fact is, we the people can accept almost anything if we’re given the facts, and enough time to get evaluate the risk and make our own decisions. [..] don’t misunderstand. I’m not ignoring COVID, or downplaying COVID, or pretending the risks at hand aren’t real. Nor am I comparing COVID cases to car accidents – I’m simply comparing the fear of each to the other, and the fear that always accompanies uncertainty.

I don’t want to get this disease or give it to someone else, any more than I want to be in a car car wreck that injures someone else. But I’ve accepted certain things about the pandemic, and now, I’ve gotten used to the risk as I understand it. I take precautions. I get tested as often as I can, and if I can’t physically distance, I wear a mask – especially around higher risk people. Likewise, I wear a seatbelt, obey the speed limits, and check my mirrors before changing lanes.

Read more …

There’s an eviction stop in the new GOP proposal, far as I know.

How The Eviction Crisis Across The US Will Look (CNBC)

An unprecedented eviction crisis will soon hit the U.S. On Friday, the federal moratorium on evictions in properties with federally backed mortgages and for tenants who receive government-assisted housing expired. The Urban Institute estimated that provision covered nearly 30% of the country’s rental units. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Sunday that he would extend that moratorium, but these tenants are now unprotected from eviction. At the same time, some 25 million Americans will stop receiving the $600 weekly federal unemployment checks by July 31. And most of the statewide eviction moratoriums are winding down. The proceedings have resumed in more than 30 states. The moratorium in Hawaii and Illinois end this week, and in August, evictions will pick up in New York and Nevada.


By one estimate, some 40 million Americans could be evicted during the public health crisis. “It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen,” said John Pollock, coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. In 2016, there were 2.3 million evictions, Pollock said. “There could be that many evictions in August,” he said. Massive unemployment has left more than 40% of renter households at risk of eviction, according to a new analysis by global advisory firm Stout Risius Ross. Some states will be harder hit than others, Stout found. For example, nearly 60% of renters in West Virginia are at risk of eviction, compared to 22% in Vermont. People of color are especially vulnerable. While almost half of White tenants say they’re highly confident they can continue to pay their rent, just 26% of African-American tenants could say the same.

Read more …

But peacefully.

The Insane Leading the Blind (Kunstler)

In Louisville, Saturday, just after lunchtime, the self-styled Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC) was mustering for action and “inspecting firearms” (according to NFAC comandante Grand Master Jay) when one of said weapons accidently discharged and mowed down three NFAC warriors — nicely demonstrating the hazards of fucking around with loaded weapons. In Austin Saturday night, one feckless BLM mob marcher name of Garrett Foster brought his AK-47 to the street party. When he pointed it at a motorist trapped by the crowd, he got blown away to that great struggle session in the sky, the surprise of his life, I’m sure. In Portland, OR, police found a bag of loaded rifle magazines and Molotov cocktails in the nearby park that serves as the rioters’ marshaling yard. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler did not attend the evening’s frolics at the sore beset federal courthouse, having successfully subjected himself to ritual humiliation himself a few nights earlier. After midnight Sunday, police declared the Antifa actions “a riot” and made a few arrests.


Up Seattle way, a federal judge struck down the city council’s order against police using tear gas and pepper spray on rioters just in time for another weekend of rioting. SPD Chief Carmen Best declared, “In the spirit of offering trust and full transparency, I want to advise you that SPD officers will be carrying pepper spray and blast balls today, as would be typical for events that carry potential to include violence.” Hours later, after Antifas smashed the windows of ground-floor businesses, set fire to a construction site, and trashed the SPD’s East Precinct building, pepper spray and blast balls were deployed and forty-five of the mob were arrested (on rioting, assault, and other charges), while twenty-one SPD officers were injured. Down in LA, Antifas broke into the federal Bureau of Prisons Detention Center. In Richmond, VA, rioters set fire to a city dump truck used as a barrier to protect a police station.

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Next hearing August 14. “..despite its decade-long-head-start, the prosecution is still unable to build a coherent and credible case.”

Assange Defence Team Concerned US is Seeking ‘Improper’ Delay of Case (Sp.)

Julian Assange’s substantive extradition hearings are due to restart on 7 September at the Old Bailey, where it will be decided whether or not he should be sent the US to face up to 175 years in prison. Julian Assange’s defence team informed the court on 27 July 2020 that they fear Donald Trump’s administration may be seeking to delay the substantive extradition hearings until after the US elections in November 2020. Ed Fitzgerald QC attended the hearing in person for the first time since the implementation of COVID-19 restrictions. He told Judge Vanessa Baraitser at Westminster Magistrates’ Court that he is “concerned at a fresh [indictment] being brought [by the US government] at this stage, with the potential consequence to de-rail the proceedings”.

Mr Fitzgerald expressed his worry that the US attorney general is “doing this for political purposes” and suspected there is “some manipulation or some political motivation” on the part of the US authorities, something which he said would be wholly “improper”. The judge refused to discuss the matter further because the prosecution has, to date, failed to formally submit the superseding indictment upon the court. Joel Smith, the barrister who attended the hearing on behalf of the prosecution, told the court that he would “not able to commit to any time table” in terms of the second superseding indictment being formally served on the court and that it would “have to go through the usual channels” before he could say any more.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, followed the hearing remotely from Iceland. He told Sputnik that “the political nature of the entire thing is becoming more and more clear to everybody”. He described as “absolutely unacceptable” the fact that the US administration has failed to serve the second superseding indictment onto the court. “We were at least expecting this to be served in the court today and the fact that the judge has only heard of it through email exchange from the defence is of course outrageous”, Mr Hrafnsson continued. “The ‘new’ superseding indictment actually contains nothing new. All the alleged events have been known to the prosecution for years. It contains no new charges. What’s really happening here is that despite its decade-long-head-start, the prosecution is still unable to build a coherent and credible case.”, Mr Hrafnsson also said.

[..] Judge Baraitser listed the next call-over hearing for 14 August and confirmed that the second part of Julian Assange’s substantive extradition hearings should begin on 7 September at the Old Bailey. Judge Baraitser said she expected the entire process to last three weeks though Mr Fitzgerald reminded her that the defence had previously stated that they would likely require a fourth week given the latest developments in the case.

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Climate and racism at the same time. Sounds very convenient. So who else is funding the police?

Oil Giants Help Fund Powerful Police Groups In Top US Cities (G.)

Big corporations accused of driving environmental and health inequalities in black and brown communities through toxic and climate-changing pollution are also funding powerful police groups in major US cities, according to a new investigation. Some of America’s largest oil and gas companies, private utilities, and financial institutions that bankroll fossil fuels also back police foundations – opaque private entities that raise money to pay for training, weapons, equipment, and surveillance technology for departments across the US. The investigation by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit corporate and government accountability research institute, and its research database project LittleSis, details how police foundations in cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Washington, New Orleans and Salt Lake City are partially funded by household names such as Chevron, Shell and Wells Fargo.

Police foundations are industry groups that provide substantial funds to local departments, yet, as nonprofits, avoid much public scrutiny. The investigation details how firms linked to fossil fuels also sponsor events and galas that celebrate the police, while some have senior staff serving as directors of police foundations. The report portrays the fossil fuel industry as a common enemy in the struggle for racial and environmental justice. “Many powerful companies that drive environmental injustice are also backers of the same police departments that tyrannize the very communities these corporate actors pollute,” it states.

[..] Carroll Muffett, the president of the Center for International Environmental Law, said: “This report sheds a harsh light on the ways police violence and systemic racism intersect with the climate crisis.” A spokeswoman for Chevron said the firm is a “good neighbor” wherever it operates. “Across the world, Chevron invests millions of dollars and thousands of volunteer hours on numerous programs and partnerships, helping communities improve their lives, achieve their aspirations and meet their full potential.”

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“It is the industry that does the testing.”

Post-Brexit Agrochemical Apocalypse for the UK? (OffG)

The British government, regulators and global agrochemical corporations are colluding with each other and are thus engaging in criminal behaviour. That’s the message put forward in a new report written by environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason and sent to the UK Environment Agency. It follows her January 2019 open letter to Werner Baumann, CEO of Bayer CropScience, where she made it clear to him that she considers Bayer CropScience and Monsanto criminal corporations. Her letter to Baumann outlined a cocktail of corporate duplicity, cover-ups and criminality which the public and the environment are paying the price for, not least in terms of the effects of glyphosate. Later in 2019, Mason wrote to Bayer Crop Science shareholders, appealing to them to put human health and nature ahead of profit and to stop funding Bayer.

Mason outlined with supporting evidence how the gradual onset of the global extinction of many species is largely the result of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. She argued that Monsanto’s (now Bayer) glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and Bayer’s clothianidin are largely responsible for the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and that the use of glyphosate and neonicotinoid insecticides are wiping out wildlife species across the globe. In February 2020, Mason wrote the report ‘Bayer Crop Science rules Britain after Brexit – the public and the press are being poisoned by pesticides’. She noted that PM Boris Johnson plans to do a trade deal with the US that could see the gutting of food and environment standards.

In a speech setting out his goals for trade after Brexit, Johnson talked up the prospect of an agreement with Washington and downplayed the need for one with Brussels – if the EU insists the UK must stick to its regulatory regime. In other words, he wants to ditch EU regulations. Mason pondered just who could be pulling Johnson’s strings. A big clue came in February 2019 at a Brexit meeting on the UK chemicals sector where UK regulators and senior officials from government departments listened to the priorities of Bayer Crop Science. During the meeting (Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport Forum Keynote Seminar: Priorities for UK chemicals sector – challenges, opportunities and the future for regulation post-Brexit), Janet Williams, head of regulatory science at Bayer Crop Science Division, made the priorities for agricultural chemical manufacturers known.

Dave Bench was also a speaker. Bench is a senior scientist at the UK Chemicals, Health and Safety Executive and director of the agency’s EU exit plan and has previously stated that the regulatory system for pesticides is robust and balances the risks of pesticides against the benefits to society. In an open letter to Bench, Mason responded: “That statement is rubbish. It is for the benefit of the agrochemical industry. The industry (for it is the industry that does the testing, on behalf of regulators) only tests one pesticide at a time, whereas farmers spray a cocktail of pesticides, including over children and babies, without warning.”

Read more …

Pending suits vs “ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, NPR, Slate, The Hill, and Gannett, which owns the Cincinnati Enquirer, as well as miscellaneous other small outfits”.

CNN’s Stelter Breaches Confidentiality Agreement With Sandmann (Fox)

CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter may have landed himself in hot water, according to the attorney of Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann. Last week, Sandmann announced that The Washington Post settled the $250 million defamation lawsuit he filed over its botched coverage of a viral confrontation with a Native American elder that had portrayed the Kentucky teen as the aggressor. This followed the multi-million dollar settlement CNN made with the teenager back in January. However, Sandmann’s attorney Lin Wood spotted a retweet from Stelter of a tweet written by attorney Mark Zaid, who speculated about how much money the teen walked away with from the settlement.

“Those with zero legal experience (as far as I can tell) should not be conjecturing on lawsuits they know nothing about. What kind of journalism is that?” Zaid asked. “I’ve litigated defamation cases. [Sandmann] was undoubtedly paid nuisance value settlement & nothing more.” Wood accused the “Reliable Sources” host of breaching his network’s own confidentiality agreement with his client. “This retweet by @brianstelter may have cost him his job at @CNN. It is called breach of confidentiality agreement. Brian Stelter is a liar. I know how to deal with liars,” Wood tweeted with a screenshot of Stelter’s retweet. Sandmann knocked the media guru, tweeting “Brian Stelter just can’t learn some basic lessons over at CNN.”

“I can’t decide if it’s worse to be Brian Stelter or believe Brian Stelter. He was never in any court hearing or meeting I was. So why does he act like he knows anything?” Sandmann added. CNN analyst Asha Rangappa appeared to agree with Zaid as well. “I’d guess $25K to go away,” Rangappa wrote. Responding to Rangappa’s tweet, Wood wrote “Heads are going to roll at CNN or @N1ckSandmann is going to filing another lawsuit & reveal truth.” Wood leveled a similar charge against Washington Post reporter Dan Zak, who suggested on Friday that the Post settled “for a small amount… in order to avoid a more expensive trial,” later adding that it’s the “American way.”

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This is the sort of indepth quality reporting we want to see from the Guardian. They suck at everything else anyway.

Emus Banned From Pub In Outback Australia Town (G.)

It can’t be easy being an emu in outback Australia at the best of times what with the heat and the perennial droughts. But to be banned from your local pub for bad behaviour must now be added to the list of grievances inflicted upon the big birds. Such is the problem Kevin and Carol – two emus in Yaraka, south of Longreach in western Queensland – now face after an edict was passed down by the only hotel in town last week. Gerry Gimblett, who owns the Yaraka Hotel with her husband Chris, told Guardian Australia they were left with no other option after the birds’ recent “bad behaviour”. “They’ve been stealing things from the guests, especially their food. They’d stick their heads in and pinch toast out of the toaster,” Gimblett explained.

“But the main reason we’ve banned them is their droppings. They’re enormous, very large and very smelly, and they created great stains,” she said. Gimblett, who took over the pub after she retired as a teacher, installed a barrier – a piece of rope – across the hotel’s entrances last week after the “much-loved” emus began entering the pub and disrupting patrons. Gimblett said the emus had become a tourist attraction after several eggs were hatched at the end of 2018, and while at one point there were nine emus in town, most had wandered away from town or been hit in accidents. Just two large emus remain, Kevin and Carol, who circle the area around the pub.


[..] Despite the emu population shrinking to just two, Gimblett said they remained noticeable given there “are only about 16 other” human residents in Yaraka, which is about a 13-hour drive west of Queensland’s capital, Brisbane. “We love them as part of the Yaraka community, but they’re not welcome inside any more.”

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“Zuckerberg closed his remarks with repeated assurances that despite a likely legal battle ahead, no one government could stand up to the fortitude of Facebook.”

Facebook Vows To Break Up US Government Before It Becomes Too Powerful (Onion)

In an effort to curtail the organization’s outsized influence, Facebook announced Monday that it would be implementing new steps to ensure the breakup of the U.S. government before it becomes too powerful. “It’s long past time for us to take concrete actions against this behemoth of governance that has gone essentially unchecked since its inception,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, noting that while the governing body may have begun with good intentions, its history showed a culture of recklessness and a dangerous disregard for the consequences of its decisions. “Unfortunately, those at the top have been repeatedly contemptuous of the very idea of accountability or reform, and our only remaining course is to separate the government into smaller chunks to prevent it from forming an even stronger monopoly over the public.” Zuckerberg closed his remarks with repeated assurances that despite a likely legal battle ahead, no one government could stand up to the fortitude of Facebook.

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Oct 132019
 
 October 13, 2019  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Paul Gauguin Huts under trees 1887

 

All Foreign Forces Should Leave Syria, Including Russia – Putin (RT)
Domestic Politics, Idlib Sway Timing Of Turkey’s Syrian Operation (AlM)
Army Deployed In Ecuador As Protests Descend Into Violence (G.)
Ecuador Indigenous Group Says Will Continue Protests After Curfew Imposed (R.)
Johnson Will Speak To EU Leaders On Brexit Deal By End Of Monday (R>)
Labour Will Stop No-Deal Brexit ‘Whatever It Takes’ – Starmer (G.)
The Beginning of the End (Sven Henrich)
White House Accidentally Sends Ukraine Talking Points To Democrats Again (Hill)

 

 

Number of things on Turkey’s attack on Syria. First, Putin is right. Let Syrians return and let them be safe at home. Would solve many problems in one go.

All Foreign Forces Should Leave Syria, Including Russia – Putin (RT)

The territorial integrity of Syria must be fully restored and all foreign forces should withdraw, including Russia if Damascus decides it doesn’t need Moscow’s help anymore, according to President Vladimir Putin. “All the forces deployed illegitimately inside any sovereign state – in this case Syria – must leave,” Putin said in a joint interview with RT Arabic, UAE-based Sky News Arabia, and Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya broadcasters. This is true for everyone. If Syria’s new legitimate government chooses to say that they have no more need for Russia’s military presence, this will be just as true for Russia. Meanwhile, Moscow’s stance on the settlement in Syria remains unchanged and was already relayed to its partners Iran, Turkey and the US, the president noted.


“Syria must be free from other states’ military presence. And the territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic must be completely restored.” Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops from border areas in northeastern Syria, saying it was time to “get out of ridiculous endless wars.” Unlike the Russian military, which arrived in the country at an invitation of the government in Damascus, US forces have been in Syria illegally since 2016. The Syrian government has repeatedly blasted the American military presence as a violation of its sovereignty. Putin was also asked about Moscow’s attitude towards NATO’s eastward expansion and buildup near Russian borders. “We are not happy about it… and voiced our concerns,” he replied.

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Then some background from Al Monitor on 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey. The west doesn’t do anything to solve the situation, apart from some money now and then. But it was the west that caused the problems with its attacks on Syria, Lybia etc.

Domestic Politics, Idlib Sway Timing Of Turkey’s Syrian Operation (AlM)

Ankara is greatly concerned over the prospect of a new refugee influx from Idlib that would further entangle Turkey’s Syrian refugee problem. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned in September that Turkey cannot tolerate another refugee wave atop the 3.6 million Syrians it is already hosting. Besides putting strains on Turkey’s financial resources and social stamina, the Syrian refugee problem has proved increasingly costly for the AKP in terms of domestic politics. It is no coincidence that since the party’s rout in the June 23 rerun in Istanbul, government spokesmen have constantly touted the safe zone plan inside Syria as a way to expedite the return of Syrian refugees.

Across Turkey and in big cities in particular, most of the Syrian refugees live in close proximity to AKP voters, either in the same neighborhoods or adjoining ones. Under the impact of the economic crisis, tensions between locals and refugees have grown, contributing to a gradual disenchantment with the government among AKP voters. In Istanbul — the heartbeat, the spirit and the mirror of the country — 73% of some 479,000 registered Syrians live in districts where local administrations are controlled by the AKP. Out of the 10 districts with the largest refugee numbers, seven are held by the AKP. Similarly, eight of the 10 districts with the biggest refugee populations in proportion to the locals are run by the AKP.


While announcing the launch of Operation Peace Spring, Erdogan said the campaign would “lead to the establishment of a safe zone, facilitating the return of Syrian refugees to their homes.” The political motive underlying this pledge rests on the fact that the Syrian refugee problem is becoming unbearable for the government. If the campaign progresses as planned, leading the Turkish military and its Syrian allies to take control of a border stretch running 30 kilometers (19 miles) deep to the east of the Euphrates, the Syrians who could be forced to flee Idlib in the near future could perhaps be placed in tent cities in this “security belt” without being let into Turkey at all and instead transferred via Afrin and al-Bab, which are already under Turkish control.

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However, when it comes to Ecuador, the Guardian has an entirely different point of view. Not surprising, since they sided with Moreno against Assange. But my Twitter feed is full of videos of extreme Ecuador police and army violence against their own people, snipers on rooftops, the works. Looks just like the Turkish-led assault on Kurds. The Guardian, though, suggests in this case the protesters are violent.

Army Deployed In Ecuador As Protests Descend Into Violence (G.)

President Lenín Moreno ordered the army on to the streets of Ecuador’s capital Quito after a week and a half of protests over fuel prices devolved into violent incidents, with masked protesters attacking a television station, newspaper and the national auditor’s office. Moreno said the military enforced curfew would begin at 3pm local time in response to violence in areas previously untouched by the protests. Masked protesters broke into the national auditor’s office and set it ablaze, sending black smoke billowing across the central Quito park and cultural complex that have been the epicentre of the protests.

Later, several dozen masked men swarmed the offices of the private Teleamazonas television station, set fires on the grounds and tried to break into the building where about 20 employees were trapped. “They’re trying to enter the station, trying to break down the doors, we’re asking for help but the police aren’t coming,” one employee told the Associated Press. A journalist with the newspaper El Comercio told the AP that the paper’s offices were also under attack. The building’s security guards were seized and tied up and attackers were trying to break into offices where journalists were hiding.


Moreno appeared on national television alongside his vice-president and defence minister to announce that he was ordering people indoors and sending the army on to the streets. He blamed the violence on drug traffickers, organised crime and followers of former president Rafael Correa, who has denied allegations that he is trying to topple Moreno’s government.

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Moreno has turned into a right-wing US backed dictator, that much is clear. Guess we’ll never know what they have on him that made him turn 180º.

Ecuador Indigenous Group Says Will Continue Protests After Curfew Imposed (R.)

Ecuadorean indigenous group Conaie said late on Saturday that it would continue anti-austerity protests after President Lenin Moreno imposed a military-enforced curfew in the capital Quito and the armed forces said they would restrict movement across the country. The group suggested that its decision earlier in the day to hold direct talks with Moreno about a decree that cut fuel subsidies might be at risk by the military crackdown. Conaie has led protests against the law but has rejected vandalism that swept Quito on Saturday. “There’s no real dialogue without guarantees for the safety of indigenous leaders,” Conaie said in a statement on Twitter.


“We’ll carry out approaches to try to repeal the decree,” it added, “but we will hold protest actions nationally..exhorting the government to provide necessary guarantees.” It did not specify when it would hold protests or if it would do so in defiance of the curfew. Moreno did not say when the curfew in Quito would end.

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Was Boris only now advised about violence?

Johnson Will Speak To EU Leaders On Brexit Deal By End Of Monday (R>)

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will speak to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker by the end of Monday to urge the leaders to support his Brexit deal, the Sunday Times reported. Johnson will offer the three leaders the option to either help him deliver a new deal this week, or to agree on a friendly version of a no-deal Brexit by Oct. 31, the newspaper said, citing a source familiar with the conversations. “He’ll be talking to Merkel, Macron and Juncker by the end of Monday to see if there’s agreement on a ‘landing zone’ for Northern Ireland and customs,” the source was quoted as telling the newspaper.


“The alternative is to agree a friendly version of no deal and finish it that way.” Security chiefs have convinced Johnson that a no-deal Brexit will heighten the danger of extremist attacks in Northern Ireland and on the mainland, along with sectarian violence in cities such as Glasgow, according to the report. As a result, the British prime minister desperately wants a Brexit deal, the Sunday Times reported. “Any one of these risks we could cope with, but taken collectively they would be a massive challenge to the UK state and no one would choose to go down that route,” Johnson told a senior Conservative in a private conversation, according to the newspaper.

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is it election time already?

Labour Will Stop No-Deal Brexit ‘Whatever It Takes’ – Starmer (G.)

Labour will take action in the courts to prevent Boris Johnson from pushing through a no-deal Brexit against the will of parliament, Keir Starmer has pledged. The shadow Brexit secretary said that if the prime minister is unable to reach an agreement with Brussels by 31 October, he must comply with the Benn act and seek a further delay. In a speech at the Co-operative party conference in Glasgow, Starmer said: “If he can’t – or I should say won’t – get a deal we will take whatever steps are necessary to prevent our country crashing out of the EU without a deal. “If no deal is secured by this time next week, Boris Johnson must seek and accept an extension. That’s the law. No ifs, no buts. And if he doesn’t, we’ll enforce the law – in the courts and in parliament. Whatever it takes, we will prevent a no-deal Brexit.”


Starmer dismissed suggestions that the prime minister could circumvent the law by accompanying a request for an extension with a second letter to the EU saying he did not want one. “That’s the equivalent of attaching a Post-it note to divorce papers saying ‘only kidding’ – It’s a ridiculous idea,” he said. Officials are continuing talks in Brussels over the weekend after the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, gave the go-ahead on Friday for intensive negotiations to start. Starmer said that if the prime minister succeeded in getting an agreement, Labour would demand it was put to the public in a referendum.

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“And really Fed? You are throwing this $60B a month announcement out on a Friday with the $DJIA already up 350 points?”

The Beginning of the End (Sven Henrich)

They sure are trying their best. To do what? To goose markets higher. It’s been quite the spectacle all year, but this Friday sure took the cake. The entire week had been a giant jerk fest of sudden rips and dips as headline chasing algos were ripping through support and resistance levels unleashed like fat kids at the candy shop. But this Friday was something else, almost designed to have markets overdose on an insulin spike. Ever more hyped up on an impending China deal, every meeting, and movement of negotiators caused market spikes, a Trump tweet about “warm feelings”, a $82.7B repo operation by the Fed to keep things tidy, a sudden out of the blue $60B/month Treasury buying operation announced by the Fed, multiple Fed speakers to boot, what a scene.

And really Fed? You are throwing this $60B a month announcement out on a Friday with the $DJIA already up 350 points? What are you thinking here? The Fed knows this kind of announcement juices up markets. The Fed sheepishly claims it’s not QE. Oh piss off already. Expanding the balance sheet by $60B a month is a massive intervention any way you cut it or slice it. How big? Do the math. $60B per month is a run rate of $720B a year. And while they claim they’ll stop it in Q2 next year who really believe anything they say? Did you believe QT was on autopilot last year? Lol. Fool me once.


You know what else is $720B a year or $60B a month? The ENTIRE US MILITARY BUDGET. The largest military budget on the planet. Millions under arms, submarines, aircraft carriers, nuclear arsenal, bombers, fighter jets, military bases across the globe, satellites, drones, laser guided missiles, you name it. All of it runs at $60B per month. So lest everyone is blind to numbers these days as everything is so monstrous our eyes glaze over I trust this comparison highlights how massive the Fed’s announcement was on Friday. But not QE. Right. Believe it if you so choose.

Read more …

Accidental? You sure?

White House Accidentally Sends Ukraine Talking Points To Democrats Again (Hill)

The White House accidentally sent Democrats a list of talking points related to ex-Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s Friday House deposition, two sources with knowledge of the email told The Hill, the second time in a month the administration has sent its Ukraine talking points to Democrats. The email included guidance for Republicans seeking to defend the president from potentially damaging witness testimony from an ambassador who was removed from her post in May under controversial circumstances. In copies of the guidance shared with The Hill, the White House encouraged Republicans to adopt a series of messages designed to turn the tables back on Democrats, including attacks on House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s (D-Calif.) handling of the investigation.

Yovanovitch told House lawmakers that she was removed after “a concerted campaign” against her from President Trump and his allies. She also said in her opening statement that the State Department had “been under pressure from the president to remove me since the summer of 2018.” Yovanovitch’s ouster came two months before Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president — now at the center of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry — in which Trump asked Kiev to open an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading 2020 presidential candidate. “We are not concerned with any information Yovanovitch might share, because the President did nothing wrong,” the White House email meant for Republicans said.


“But we are concerned that Schiff is putting her in a precarious position by having her testify in secret without State Department lawyers be present.” “It raises serious questions about why Schiff is willing to put career officials in such risky situations while bullying them with legally unfounded threats of obstruction charges,” the email continued. It added that Schiff “is willing to ride roughshod over fair process and to use career officials to further a baseless political objective.” The email marks the second time the White House has unintentionally sent talking points to Democrats in recent weeks, after an administration official inadvertently emailed them suggested rhetoric defending the July 25 phone call.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Aug 082019
 


Edward Hopper Ground swell 1939

 

The US government has to come up with very very strong legislation for social media, and it has to do that very soon. Because if it doesn’t, it risks those same social media inciting a civil war (that’s no hyperbole, that is real) on American soil.

And beyond as well, but as Donald Trump said about European efforts to curtail Twitter, Facebook et al’s activities, they’re American companies and hence America’s responsibility. Well, cool, but that means you have to do your job, and you ain’t doing it. Those EU efforts by the way were all about financial issues, tax paying etc., not inciting civil wars or being undemocratic. In short, Brussels doesn’t get it yet either.

Now, the Automatic Earth was kicked off Facebook years ago and never received an explanation for why an account with 1000s of followers was just choked in the bud, so I can’t be expected to celebrate its great achievements for mankind. We still have a Twitter account, but how much longer after I post this essay? There’s no telling, and that is the heart of the entire issue. If I, or you, say anything that anyone at these companies don’t like, they can ban us.

Facebook and Twitter continue to operate on the notion that they are private companies who are entitled to ban anyone they don’t like. In the case of Facebook, that covers half the world population. It’s like running the UN as a private enterprise. And it’s not even the owners or the board, they don’t have time to check who they like or not. Instead, they have hired 10s of 1000s of young -because cheap- kids to do the (shadow-) banning for them.

The companies are all based in Silicon Valley, i.e. California, i.e. NOT Trump territory, and the cheap young kids hired to decide what people can and cannot say on their so-called private platforms reflect that territory and its ideas. But Washington can no longer tolerate that. It must act now. The question is: will it?

 

Why wouldn’t it? Because Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al have become the US Intelligence’s dream tools to spy on their own people as well as those abroad. The CIA couldn’t even ever have dreamt of a platform that encompasses 3.5 billion people. But Mark Zuckerberg handed it to them on a platter. My idea is Trump would love to go against them, because they go against him and his voters, but US Intelligence, CIA, FBI, may be holding him back from it. Bad, bad idea.

Picked up Charles Nenner on his war cycles at Greg Hunter’s USA Watchdog site, and I wasn’t terribly convinced at first sight, but that was before I read about Mitch McConnell being threatened at his own house.

 

Civil War Cycle Heating up in America

“Years ago when we talked about my war cycles, I said I am more worried about internal social war in the United States than outside wars. I think there is a bigger chance in the United States than in Europe. They say it’s Trump’s fault . . . . I say it’s the other way around. If the Democrats would just get things organized and people would not get that angry. . . . The media will always take the other side, so they will never solve it. I think it is the Democrats whose fault it is that all these killings are there and not the Republicans. . . .


So, there is a cycle of social unrest in the United States, which is 60 years old. So, you go back to what happened in the 1960’s. It could explode, and I think it is going to explode, and there is going to be a major problem. . . . I don’t know how bad it is going to be, but based on cycles, it has to be worse than the 1960’s. Each cycle always is worse. . . . WWII was worse than WWI, so every cycle becomes worse than the first cycle. . . . I don’t feel comfortable living in the United States anymore because people are so aggressive on everything.

Nenner also talks in that piece about how he visited Putin, who is interested in the war cycles idea, so maybe I should read up on those war cycles.

But that Mitch McConnell story interferes and disperses into the whole tale. There apparently were groups of people outside his home, caught on video, who were calling for him to be violently attacked. And when his campaign posted a video of these people on Twitter, the campaign’s account was shut down.

 

“Just Stab The Motherfu*ker”: Twitter Suspends McConnell Campaign For Posting Video Of Violent Threats

“I just want him to have a stroke, that is all,” the woman added. “One of those heart attacks where they can’t breathe, and they’re holding their chest and they fall backwards” “He’s in there nursing his broken arm. He should have broken his raggedy, wrinkled-ass neck,” she said at one point in the video. “Everybody needs to show up wherever this ho is at and make him just regret his fucking life, period,” she added. At one point in the protest, a male protester commenting on McConnell’s recent injury said that he may have been the victim of a “voodoo doll” curse. -Daily Caller


Kevin Golden, McConnell’s 2020 campaign manager noted that “Twitter will allow the words of ‘Massacre Mitch’ to trend nationally on their platform, but locks our account for posting actual threats against us.” Golden says that they appealed to Twitter, which stood by their decision, saying that the account will remain locked until they delete the video. Daily Wire reporter Ryan Saavedra was similarly locked out of his Twitter account for posting the video. “Twitter asked me yesterday to delete this tweet,” Saavedra recounted in a massive tweetstorm. “It showed a person allegedly calling for violence against Mitch McConnell. The person appears to be a BLM activist who has met with Elizabeth Warren.”

And I know, people are going to react to this saying: Oh, it’s Daily Caller, Mitch McConnell, Ryan Saveedra, it’s right wing, but that is so far beyond the point it disqualifies you from any conversation at all. Mitch McConnell, aka MoscowMitch or MassacreMitch, is very far removed from being my favorite person on the planet, but he’s the Senate Majority Leader, and as such an important part of the American political system.

If you don’t like that, there’s a mechanism to express that: the ballot box. Calling for him to be physically attacked right outside the place where he and his family live is not done. Unless perhaps you want the same to happen to you at your residence. But you don’t, do you?

This has nothing to do with left vs right anymore. This is about people who have convinced themselves they are so right in their ideas that anything at all is justified to get their views and their points across, including violence. Well, there’s the seeds of your civil war then.

Now, note that this started well over 3 years ago with the invention out of thin air of Russiagate. Now that that ‘theory’ has been debunked, where are the inventors, i.e. losers, going to hide? Apparently in front of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home.

And what’s next? Right-wing protesters setting up camp outside Mark Zuckerberg’s home, or Adam Schiff’s, Jerry Nadler’s, Elijah Cummings’? We may not be that far removed from that happening. And if it does, Facebook and Twitter will be crucial in organizing it.

Which is why Trump and AG Bill Barr must come up with very strong rules, very soon, defining what social media are allowed to do and what not. And barring Mitch McConnell’s campaign from posting direct threats to the man uttered mere feet away from where he lives doesn’t seem to be the way forward.

The Age of -corporate- Innocence that Zuck and @jack keep trying to hide behind while counting their billions has long gone. They have become bigger political players than the New York Times, CNN and Jeff Bezos. Stop them now or you risk the 2020 elections leading to outright warfare. Mr. Trump, sir, this is your responsibility more than anyone else’s. You have no choice. But you do have the power.

Not many Americans, far as I can see, take the threat of a civil war seriously, including you, Mr. Trump. But you really should. Take on the social media, and you’re halfway there to preventing it.

 

 

 

 

Jul 252019
 
 July 25, 2019  Posted by at 1:43 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Salvador Dali The knight of death 1934

 

 

Another article from Alexander Aston, from whom I published among other things the series Quantum, Dada and Jazz this past November.

 

 

“Dulce et Decorum est” is a poem written by Wilfred Owen during World War I, and published posthumously in 1920. The Latin title is taken from Ode 3.2 of the Roman poet Horace and means “it is sweet and fitting …”. It is followed there by “pro patria mori”, which means “to die for one’s country”.

 

 

“The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.”

– Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

 

Alexander Aston: If you have not read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August you should do so, it is one of the great, accessible works of history. Tuchman details with great clarity the diplomatic failures, miscalculations and political logics that ensnared the imperial powers of Europe into the cataclysm of the Great War. It was the book that Kennedy drew upon when navigating the Cuban missile crisis. Just over a century since the guns fell silent in Europe, and nearly fifty years since nuclear holocaust was averted, the world is teetering on what might very well be the largest regional, potentially global, conflict since the second world war.

The United States is a warfare economy, its primary export is violence and it is through violence that it creates the demand for its products. The markets of the Empire are the failed states, grinding civil conflicts, escalating regional tensions and human immiseration created by gun-boat diplomacy. In true entrepreneurial spirit, the United States has repeatedly overestimated its abilities to control the course of events and underestimated the complexities of a market predicated on violence. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century the American Imperium has proven itself as incompetent as it is vicious. After nearly two decades of intensifying conflicts, a fundamentally broken global economy and a dysfunctional political system, Washington has turned feral, lashing out against decline.

The points of instability in the global system are various and growing, and the only geo-political logics that the Imperium appears to be operating under are threats, coercion, and violence. It is at this moment, with the most erratic president in the country’s history, surrounded by some of the most extreme neo-conservative voices, that the United States has been belligerently stumbling across the globe. In the past few months we have witnessed a surrealistic reimagining of the Latin American coup, the medieval melodrama of Canadian vassals taking a royal hostage from the Middle Kingdom and British buccaneers’ privateering off the coast of Gibraltar. The Imperial system is in a paroxysm of incoherent but sustained aggression.

 

It has long been clear that if another Great War were to emerge, it would likely begin in the Middle East. Just over a century later, we have found ourselves amidst another July crisis of escalating military and diplomatic confrontations. European modernity immolated itself in the Balkans though miscalculation, overconfidence and the prisoners dilemma of national prestige. The conditions of the contemporary Middle East are no less volatile than those of Europe when the Austro-Hungarian Empire decided to attack Serbia. If anything, conditions are far more complex in a region entangled with allegiances and enmities that transgress and supersede the national borders imposed in the wake of the first world war.

The United States’ withdrawal from the JCPOA and the stated aim of reducing Iranian oil exports to zero has enforced a zero-sum logic between the American Imperium and Persia. With each move and counter move the two countries are further entangled into the dynamics of a conflict. Much like the run up to July 28th 1914, tanker seizures, drone shoot downs, sanctions, military deployments and general bellicosity reinforce the rational of the opposing sides and make it harder to back down without losing face and appearing weak.

Due to the asymmetry of the two powers the Iranians have the fewest options for de-escalation while the American establishment perceives the least incentive. This dynamic is further exacerbated by major regional powers agitating for a conflict they believe they will benefit from. Indeed, the slide to war might be inexorable at this point, the momentum of historical causality may have already exceeded the abilities of those in power to control. Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm were cousins that desperately wanted to avoid war and were nonetheless impotent to avert disaster. There is nowhere near such intimacy, communication and motivation in our current context.

If war with Iran erupts, the Pax Americana will come to an end and humanity will fully enter a new historical epoch. The most unlikely scenario is an easy victory for the United States, yet even this outcome will only exacerbate the decline of the Empire. The other great powers would expedite their exit from the dollar system and drastically increase investment into the means to counter American hegemony. Likewise, victory would further reinforce Washington’s hubris, generating more serious challenges to the Imperial order and making the US prone to take on even bigger fights. Ironically, easy military success would almost assure the outbreak of a third world war in the long-term.

 

War with Iran would likely ignite violence in Israel-Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, re-energise and expand the ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen as well as generate sectarian violence and domestic insurgencies across the Middle East. Under such conditions regional actors would likely utilise a dramatically intensifying conflict as cover for their own agendas, for example with a renewed Turkish assault on the Syrian Kurds. The conditions for rapid escalation are extremely high in which non-linear dynamics could easily take hold and quickly outstrip any attempts to maintain control of the situation.

Pyrrhic victory for either side is the most likely outcome, making the parallels to the Great War all the more salient. Global conflagration is a possibility, but with “luck” the fighting could be contained to the region. Nonetheless, amplified refugee crises, supply chain disruptions and immense geopolitical realignments will cascade out of such an event. Undoubtedly, there would be concerted efforts to abandon the dollar system as quickly as possible. Furthermore, rapid increases in the price of oil would all but grind the global economy to a halt within a matter of months, tipping citizenries already saturated with private debt into financial crises.

Furthermore, the entanglement of the military-industrial complex, the petrodollar reserve currency system and the omni-bubble generated by quantitative easing has left the Empire systemically fragile. Particularly, the bubble in non-conventional fuels precipitated by QE, depressed oil prices with scaled down exploration, R&D and maintenance makes the possibility of a self-reinforcing collapse in the American energy and financial systems extremely plausible. It is a Gordian knot which war with Persia would leave in fetters.

The most likely long-term outcome of a war with Iran would be the economic isolation and political fragmentation of the United States. What is assured is that whatever world results it will not look anything like the world since 1945. The first world war collapsed the European world system, dynasties that had persisted for centuries were left in ruins and the surviving great powers crippled by the overwhelming expenditures of blood and treasure. We are on the precipice of another such moment. The American world system is fundamentally dependent upon the relationship between warfare, energy dominance and debt.

 

Conflict is required to maintain control of the energy markets which prop up a financialised economy. A dynamic that puts the nation deeper in hock while amplifying resistance to financial vassalage. Losing energy dominance undermines the country’s reserve currency status and weakens the Empires ability to generate the debt necessary to sustain the warfare economy. Likewise, the system of national and international debt peonage parasitizes global populations to work against their own best interests. This fuels resentment and resistance which further drives the warfare economy. It is, in the inimitably American expression, a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

On August 3rd 1914, one week into the war, the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey famously remarked that “the lamps are going out across Europe and we shall not see them relit in our lifetime.” At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we face similar, terrifying prospects. Indeed, we could witness the collapse of democratic societies for a very long time to come. If we have any hope of averting calamity we need to generate loud opposition to imperialist warfare.

This does not mean some hackneyed anti-war movement based on past glories and the parochialism of domestic politics, but earnest effort to find common cause in resisting the insanity of those that seek profit in our collective suffering. This means working with people that we have very deep disagreements with by respecting our mutual opposition to the masters of war. It also means serious commitment to strategies such as tax and debt strikes as expressions of non-consent as well as other peaceful means of direct action. Indeed, it is from a place of agreement that we can potentially rebuild civil discourse and renew our trust in the ability of democratic institutions to mediate our quarrels. Perhaps it is too late to change course, but how sweet and fitting it is to face madness with dignity.

 

“What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? …power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand. ”

“Kings are the slaves of history.”

– Tolstoy, War and Peace

 

 

Just a thought from Beau of the Fifth Column:

 

 

Dulce et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

 

 

Alexander Aston is a doctoral candidate in archaeology at the University of Oxford and is on the board of directors with the Centre for Cognitive Archaeology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He has prior degrees in philosophy and history. His work lays at the intersection of Cognitive Archaeology, Deep History and Natural Philosophy, examining the relationship between ecology, material culture and social cognition. Alexander grew up between Zimbabwe, Greece and the United States.

 

 

 

 

Jan 302019
 


Jan van Eyck Madonna and Child at the Fountain 1439 (height: 7.4“, 19 cm)

 

It’s educational and even somewhat entertaining to observe the role of the western press in the ongoing erosion and demise of democracy in Europe. But while it’s entertaining, it also means their readers and viewers don’t get informed on what is actually happening. The media paints a picture that pleases the political world. And it it doesn’t please politicians to lift a veil here and there, too bad for the public.

The Shakespearian comedy that was performed last night in the UK House of Commons is a lovely case in point. Basically, MPs voted whether or not to allow PM Theresa May to change the Brexit deal she had told them about a hundred times couldn’t possibly be changed. Brexit has turned full-blown Groucho by now: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

It was exactly two weeks ago last night that lawmakers voted by a historic 432 to 202 count to reject May’s Brexit deal. And now they voted to a) let her change it and b) go talk to the EU about changing it though Brussels has said as often as May herself that it cannot be changed. Remember: the UK is set to leave the EU 59 days from now, and counting.

It’s like in a game of chess that has long turned into a stalemate or threefold repetition situation: you stop playing. No such luck in British politics. The only way the parliament could find ‘unity’ (in a narrow vote) was to agree to ditch the Irish backstop that is an integral part of why the EU accepted May’s deal to begin with.

There are/are even serious voices saying Ireland should leave the EU along with the UK, to make it easier for the latter to do what the former absolutely doesn’t want. That’s also part of the kind of mindset in which this plays out. Brexit has turned into a complete delusion, in which bickering and blame-games have been more important than practical solutions, for all sides.

A hard Brexit is used as some ultimate deterrent, and 59 days before the big moment it may actually turn into the disaster some Project Fear or another has been talking about for over 2.5 years. If that time has been used the way it should have, adapting deals, agreements, contracts, laws, all might have been fine(r).

What the role of May’s opposition in all this consists of is ever more confusing. It certainly never was to profile itself or come up with original ideas. In the process, Jeremy Corbyn appears to have hurt his reputation as much, if not more, than May. Quite the achievement. And now May says Corbyn “has no plan for Brexit”, but she does: only, it was voted down in the largest defeat in modern parliamentary history.

And then all of a sudden, as everyone is busy doing something else, Britain finds itself in a huge crisis of democracy.

 

Over Two Thirds Of UK Public Don’t Feel Represented By Political Parties

More than two thirds of the British public feel they are not represented by the main political parties, according to a new report on the divisions caused by Brexit. Research by campaign group Hope Not Hate found that the disconnect had increased from 60% to 67% over the last six months as Theresa May negotiated the EU withdrawal agreement.

The poll of nearly 33,000 people and results from focus groups also revealed that many felt they were being left in the dark or were “overwhelmingly bored” by the process. It has also seen an increase in the proportion of the public feeling pessimistic about the future – with very few believing that Brexit will address the frustrations and inequalities that lay behind the vote to leave the EU in 2016.

More people also believe that Brexit is feeding prejudice and division and taking the UK “backwards”, up from 57% in July 2018 to 62% last month. Just 20% of people said they could trust the government to deliver a “good Brexit”. Almost as many Leavers (66%) as Remainers (75%) said they do not trust the government to deliver a Brexit that works for them.

None of the options being considered by parliament have consensus support across the UK, according to the report, and 42% of people think that it would be sensible to delay leaving the EU by a few months so we can agree a better deal with the EU or hold a Final Say vote.

Perhaps that is the topic that should have been discussed yesterday in the House of Commons. But the MPS far preferred to regurgitate long discredited useless stalemate ‘moves’. That’s how much they all care for their own voters. They go from one election to the next, and why would they care about the time in between, what could possibly happen to them?

Well, for one thing, pitchforks could happen. Which methinks is a clean poetic link to another European country that finds itself in deep crisis and distress but refuses to recognize it. France.

 

The interwebs are full of video’s and photos of police brutality perpetrated during the by now 11 Saturdays the Yellow Vests have protested president Macron and their people’s overall situations. It didn’t start out with all that violence, and sure, part of it may have been in response to protests, but what’s gone on in the last few Saturdays is something else.

And the media once again are silent, or mostly. Macron gets more coverage for telling Venezuela’s Maduro to resign than for his own regime’s cruelty towards its own people. But the French people do watch those videos, social media trump traditional ones in these cases, so there’s something good about them after all.

And the Yellow Vests, though the people don’t like the violence, still very much have their sympathy. Seeing Macron’s police beating them up the way they have will only increase the resolve. People losing their eyes, their hands, hundreds if not thousands with less severe but still serious injuries, it’s all being added to Macron’s tally.

 

French Police Weapons Under Scrutiny After Gilets Jaunes Injuries

The French government is under growing pressure to review police use of explosive weapons against civilians after serious injuries were reported during gilets jaunes street demonstrations, including people alleged to have lost eyes and to have had their hands and feet mutilated.

France’s legal advisory body, the council of state, will on Wednesday examine an urgent request by the French Human Rights League and the CGT trade union to ban police from using a form of rubber-bullet launcher in which ball-shaped projectiles are shot out of specialised handheld launchers. France’s rights ombudsman has long warned they are dangerous and carry “disproportionate risk”.

Lawyers have also petitioned the government to ban so-called “sting-ball” grenades, which contain 25g of TNT high-explosive. France is the only European country where crowd-control police use such powerful grenades, which deliver an explosion of small rubber balls that creates a stinging effect as well as launching an additional load of teargas.

The grenades create a deafening effect that has been likened to the sound of an aircraft taking off. France’s centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, is facing renewed calls to ban such weapons after Jérôme Rodrigues, a high-profile member of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrators was hit in the eye on Saturday in Paris. He is said by his lawyer to have been disabled for life.

Rights groups say Rodrigues’s case is the tip of the iceberg. Lawyers estimate that as many as 17 people have lost an eye because of the police’s use of such weapons since the start of the street demonstrations, while at least three have lost their hands and others have been left with their face or limbs mutilated. Injuries have happened at demonstrations in Paris and other cities, including Bordeaux and Nantes.

The whole thing is utterly insane, but the craziest thing may well be the European Court of Human Rights rejecting a temporary ban on flash-balls last month. Go ahead, Emmanuel, we won’t tell a soul! Flash-balls being an improved -and ‘home-grown’- form of rubber bullets, which in turn have been ‘improved’ upon.

 

French ‘Flash-Ball’ Row Over Riot-Gun Injuries

Appalling injuries caused by French police riot guns during the yellow-vest protests have triggered anger and calls for the weapon to be banned. The LBD launchers known by protesters as “flash-balls” have left 40 people severely wounded, reports say. France’s human rights chief has called for the weapon’s use to be halted, but the government insists it is deployed only under very strict conditions.

Since the “gilets-jaunes” protests began in November, 3,000 people have been injured or even maimed and thousands more arrested. The LBD40 is described as a non-lethal weapon which in fact replaced the old “flash-ball” in France. But the old name is still widely used. It shoots 40mm (1.6in) rubber or foam pellets at a speed of up to 100m per second and is not meant to break the skin. However, some of the accounts of people hit by flash-balls have been shocking.

Volunteer firefighter Olivier Béziade, 47, was shot in the temple by a riot gun during a protest on 12 January in Bordeaux. Video at the time caught him running from police and then collapsing in the street, his face covered in blood. He was taken to hospital, treated for a brain haemorrhage and left in an artificial coma, from which he emerged on Friday. He was one of five seriously wounded on that day alone.

Many of those wounded have been young. One teenager called Lilian Lepage was hit in the face in Strasbourg on Saturday and suffered a broken jaw. His mother said he had been shopping in the city centre when a policeman fired at him. Two schoolboys were badly wounded by flash-ball pellets in separate protests last month. Campaigners say a dozen people have lost an eye ..

A lawyer for some of the victims, Étienne Noël, said many had been maimed. He said police did not have sufficient training in use of the riot guns and many victims had been hit in the head. Earlier this week police made clear the riot gun would be used only where security forces faced violence or if they had no other means of defence. Only the torso and upper or lower limbs could be targeted.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told the French Senate on Thursday that the use of force by police was always proportionate and under very strict and controlled conditions. “If the police hadn’t used these means of defence perhaps some of them would have been lynched,” he said. The European Court of Human Rights rejected a temporary ban on flash-balls last month, in a case brought by several people who said they had been hit by flash-balls.

There is also a grenade version of the flash-ball, named the sting-ball. Throw it into a crowd and everyone around gets hit by rubber balls at high speed.

But of course it’s not the weapons that cause the injuries and deaths, it’s the people deploying them. And the people deploying these people. The instructions to use excessive violence because the government feels threatened by its own citizens. And after that the pitchforks and guillotines, real or not. Yanis Varoufakis was right a few weeks ago, Macron is a spent force.

Only a blind fool would use these things against his own people. Or a dictator with absolute power, but Macron doesn’t have that.. By the way, when is Brussels going to condemn Macron for his use of violence?

And this is all before the European elections, and Merkel’s goodbye that will throw Germany into chaos, and and and. Europe, we never knew ya.

 

 

Dec 162017
 


Tamara de Lempicka The refugees 1937

 

Note: I feel kind of sorry this has become such a long essay. But I still left out so much. You know by now I care a lot about Greece, and it’s high time for another look, and another update, and another chance for people to understand what is happening to the country, and why. To understand that hardly any of it is because the Greeks had so much debt and all of that narrative.

The truth is, Greece was set up to be a patsy for the failure of Europe’s financial system, and is now being groomed simultaneously as a tourist attraction to benefit foreign investors who buy Greek assets for pennies on the dollar, and as an internment camp for refugees and migrants that Europe’s ‘leaders’ view as a threat to their political careers more than anything else.

I would almost say: here we go again, but in reality we never stopped going. It’s just that Greece’s 15 minutes of fame may be long gone, but its ordeal is far from over. If you read through this, you will understand why that is. The EU is deliberately, and without any economic justification, destroying one of its own member states, destroying its entire economy.

 

 

A short article in Greek paper Kathimerini last week detailed the latest new cuts in pensions the Troika has imposed on Greece, and it’s now getting beyond absurd. For an economy to function, you need people spending money. That is what keeps jobs alive, jobs which pay people the money they need to spend on their basic necessities. If you don’t do at least that, there’ll be ever fewer jobs, and/or ever less money to spend. It’s a vicious cycle.

We may assume the Troika is well aware of this, and that would mean they are intentionally killing off the Greek economy. Something I’ve said a thousand times before. Still, both the Greek Tsipras government and exterior voices continue to claim the economy is recovering. Even if that is mathematically impossible. There undoubtedly are sectors of the economy being boosted, but they are only the ones the Troika members are interested in.

The economy’s foundation, the ‘normal’ people, who work jobs if they’re lucky, are not recovering or being boosted. Quite the contrary. Half of young people are unemployed and receive no money at all. Most of those who do have jobs receive less than €500 for a full month of work. Mind you, this is while the cost of living is as high as it is in Germany or Holland, where people would protest vehemently if even their unemployment benefits were cut that low. Unemployment benefits hardly exist at all in Greece.

This situation, as also mentioned often before, means that entire families must live off the pension a grandmother or grandfather gets. As of next year, such a pension will be cut to net €480. Of which most will go to rent. And the cuts are not finished. There are plenty neighborhoods in Athens where there are more boarded-up shops then there are open ones. It is fiscal waterboarding, it is strangulation of an entire society, and there is no valid economic reason for it, nor is there a justification.

If Greece had access to international debt markets, if would perhaps pay a higher interest rate, but investors would buy its bonds. The Troika denies Greece that access. Likewise, if the ECB had not excluded the country from its QE bond-buying programs, the country would be nowhere near its present disastrous predicament. The ECB’s decision not to buy Greek bonds can only be a political one, it’s not economic. There is something else going on.

Here’s that latest pension news:

 

Greek Pension Cuts To Hit 70% Since The Start Of The Bailouts

The next batch of pension cuts, voted through in the last couple of years and set to come into force within the next two years, will take total losses for pensioners since the start of the bailout period in 2010 up to 70%. A recent European Commission report on the course of Greece’s bailout program revealed that the reforms passed since 2015 will slash up to 7% of the country’s GDP up to 2030. The United Pensioners network has made its own calculations and estimates that the impending cuts will exacerbate pensioners’ already difficult position, with 1.5 million of them threatened with poverty. The network argues that when the cuts expected in 2018 and 2019 are added to those implemented since 2010, the reduction in pensions will reach 70%.

Network chief Nikos Hatzopoulos notes that “owing to the additional measures up until 2019, the flexibility in employment and the reduction of state funding from 18 billion to 12 billion euros, by 2021, one in every two pensioners will get a net pension of 550 euros [per month]. If one also takes into account the reduction of the tax-free threshold, the net amount will come to 480 euros.” Pensioners who retired before 2016 stand to lose up to 18% of their main and auxiliary pensions, while the new pensions to be issued based on the law introduced in May 2016 by then minister Giorgos Katrougalos will be up to 30% lower.

More than 140,000 retirees on low pensions will see their EKAS supplement decrease in 2018, as another 238 million euros per year is to be slashed from the budget for benefits for low income pensioners. The number of recipients will drop from 210,000 to 70,000 in just one year. There will also be a reduction in new auxiliary pensions (with applications dating from January 2015), a 6% cut to the retirement lump sum, and a freeze on existing pensions for another four years, as retirees will not get the nominal raise they would normally receive based on the growth rate and inflation.

 

As half of the pensioners see their pensions cut to €480 a month, they’re not the worst off in the country. There are about a million unemployed who get nothing at all, and 580,000 who do have ‘jobs’ but ‘earn’ just €407 a month. And that’s if they’re lucky enough to get a contract. Many don’t, and work for even less. Yeah, that’s how you keep unemployment numbers down; Americans should know all about it.

 

Unemployment Decreases, Yet 580,000 Workers Earn Just €407 Per Month

Greece’s jobless rate fell to 20.2% in July-to-September from 21.1% in the second quarter, data from the country’s statistics service ELSTAT have showed. About 75.6% of Greece’s 970,000 jobless are long-term unemployed, meaning they have been out of work for at least 12 months, the figures showed on Thursday. Greece’s highest unemployment rate was recorded in the first quarter of 2014, when joblessness hit 27.8%.

Athens has already published monthly unemployment figures through June, which differ from quarterly data because they are based on different samples and are seasonally adjusted. Quarterly figures are not seasonally adjusted. At the same time, part-time employment has been constantly increasing. According to latest data, 580,000 workers earn just 407 euros per month. An amount that is for sure not enough to help people come through the month. And this data refers to declared work contracts. In undeclared work market people earn even 200 or 300 euros.

 

While all these Greeks don’t make enough to feed themselves and their families, the Troika-induced tax rises keep on coming like a runaway train with broken brakes. Every single day, more people are added to the list of those who simply can’t afford to pay their taxes, under the guise of going after ‘strategic defaulters’. There is no way out if this other than large scale debt forgiveness, debt restructuring, debt write-offs. Consumer spending is what keeps economies alive, but in Greece that is what’s shrinking day after day.

 

Greeks Crushed By Tax Burden

Tax authorities have confiscated the salaries, pensions and assets of more that 180,000 taxpayers since the start of the year, but expired debts to the state have continued to rise, reaching almost €100 billion, as the taxpaying capacity of the Greeks is all but exhausted. In the month of October, authorities made almost 1,000 confiscations a day from people with debts to the state of more than €500. In the first 10 months of the year, the state confiscated some €4 billion, and the plans of the Independent Authority for Public Revenue provide for forced measures to be imposed on 1.7 million state debtors next year.

IAPR statistics show that in October alone, the unpaid tax obligations of households and enterprises came to €1.2 billion. Unpaid taxes from January to October amounted to €10.44 billion, which brings the total including unpaid debts from previous years to almost €100 billion, or about 55% of the country’s GDP. The inability of citizens and businesses to meet their obligations is also confirmed by the course of public revenues, which this year have declined by more than €2.5 billion. The same situation is expected to continue into next year, as the new tax burdens and increased social security contributions look set to send debts to the state soaring. Notably, since 2014, there has been a consolidated trend of a €1 billion increase each month in expired debts to the state.

There are now 4.17 million taxpayers who owe the state money. This means that one in every two taxpayers is in arrears to the state, with 1,724,708 taxpayers facing the risk of forced collection measures. Of the €99.8 billion of total debt, just €10-15 billion is still considered to be collectible, as the lion’s share concerns debts from previous years, in many cases of bankrupt enterprises and deceased individuals.

 

Lately, a narrative is being force-fed into, and by, western media about Greece becoming some sort of paradise for investors. But why would anyone want to invest into an economy that clearly is no longer functioning, not even viable? Well, in such an economy, all kinds of things can be bought on the cheap. And because Greece is very beautiful, and has beautiful weather, why not buy it all and turn it into a tourist colony owned by foreigners and the odd rich Greek?

One tiny thing: they would prefer a different, even more business-friendly government. As if Tsipras hasn’t crawled up the Troika’s where-the-sun-never-shines parts enough. That’s the context into which to place for instance Kyle Bass’s comments:

 

Kyle Bass: Investors to Pour Billions into Greece after Political Change

Hedge fund manager Kyle Bass believes that Greece will come out of the crisis and investors will pour billions into its economy once the government changes, according to a CNBC report. The founder and chief investment officer of Hayman Capital Management; which manages an estimated $815 million in assets, is closely following the course of the Greek economy and political situation, and has invested in Greek bank stocks.

Bass says that foreign investors are waiting on the sidelines for a political shift to take place in 2018. “My best guess is a snap election for prime minister will be called between April and September of next year and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will lose power. When that happens, there will be a massive move into the Greek stock market. Big money will flow in as investors feel more confident with a more moderate administration,” Bass said.

“It’s going to take Kyriakos Mitsotakis; president of New Democracy, the Greek conservative party, to be voted in as prime minister to reform the culture and rekindle investor confidence,” the investor said. “I have no doubt 15 billion euros in bank deposits will come back to Greek banks if he’s elected. The stock and bond markets will also jump following the election.” Bass says that global investors are waiting for the political change in order to invest in real estate, energy and tourism.

So far, the hedge fund manager noted, Greece has proceeded with privatizations of its main port; regional airports; its railway system; the largest insurance company, and there are more important ones to be completed within the next two years. “There is so much potential in Greece,” Bass said, noting that investors are waiting for the right moment to enter, the CNBC report concludes.

Kyle Bass and all his ilk are lining up for the goodies for pennies on the dollar. If only the desolate pensioners and unemployed young are desperate enough to believe that, and vote for, a right-wing government is good, simultaneously, for both their interests and that of international vultures and hedge funds.

 

Funds Take Positions Ahead Of Government Change In Greece

Brevan Howard Asset Management, one of Europe’s biggest hedge funds, revealed to Bloomberg on Tuesday that it has set up two investment funds whose exclusive targets are assets in Greece such as real estate, enterprises and securities, and is aiming to collect 500 million euros from private investors. Co-founder of Brevan Howard and head of one of the two funds Trifon Natsis said that some 250 million euros has already been collected. The company was co-founded by four others, including Alan Howard, in 2002. “After eight years of crisis and recession that’s hit Greece, we’re at a point where the tail risks have disappeared and the country is stabilizing at a low base,” he said.

“We anticipate a material uplift in the Greek economy and asset prices.” “The likely political transition over the next 12 to 18 months will add momentum and reinforce that process,” Natsis said. Brevan Howard seems to be in agreement with Hayman Capital, whose head Kyle Bass said a few weeks ago that the brewing change in government in Greece within the next 18 months will benefit the market: “You’re starting to see green shoots, you’re starting to see the banks do the right things finally in Greece, and you’re about to have new leadership,” he stated recently.

My personal assessment after spending much of my time over the past 2.5 years in Athens is that they will be disappointed. Not only does a country, to make it attractive for foreigners, need a functioning economy, which Greece no longer has even at a “low base”, but the anger that has been building up here, which was held in check by Syriza and its ultimately empty promises, is bound to explode when some right winger manages to seize power.

Athens is the most peaceful city you can imagine, the only violence is between ‘anarchists’ and police, and it mostly takes place at set dates and places. Violence among people is virtually non-existent, despite all the deception, the betrayal, the poverty and the youthful testosterone energy that has nowhere to go. But that’s not going to last, I’m afraid.

 

And that will also be because many Greeks understand the contents of the following, devastating, interview by Michael Nevradakis for Mint Press News with Nicholas Logothetis, former member of the board of the Greek Statistical Authority (ELSTAT). Greece has been set up. And many people here know it. They have put their hopes in the democratic process, in voting into power a different government from the same old clique they have seen for many decades.

The likely winner of the next elections is New Democracy, led by Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the man the hedge-funders want in. Mitsotakis, a banker, is very much part of the old Greek elite, his father was a prime minister. If he gets elected things are not very likely to remain peaceful. Says my gut.

 

Update: while I was writing this article, the following came out. Eurogroup head Dijsselbloem admitting the first Greek referendum had nothing to do with helping Greece, the reason always provided for why it happened. Instead, it was always, as we’ve said so many times, meant to save German and French banks. And now that he’s leaving the job, Dijsselbloem, who obviously feels untouchable, just lays it out there. After having played a large role in destroying the country, the society, the economy. It’s almost hard to believe. But only almost. Because the Troika doesn’t answer to anyone. Then again, Greece has an independent judicial system.

 

The Aim Of The First Memorandum Was To Rescue Investors Outside Greece, Dijsselbloem Admits

The main aim of the first Greek memorandum, especially, was to rescue investors outside Greece, outgoing Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem admitted in the Europarliament on Thursday. “There were mistakes in the first programmes, we improvised. The way we dealt with the banks was expensive and ineffective. It is true that our aim was to rescue investors outside Greece and for this reason I support the rules for bail-ins, so that investors aren’t rescued with tax-payers’ money,” said Dijsselbloem in reply to independent Greek MEP Notis Marias.

Dijsselbloem noted that it had been a huge crisis because the fiscal sector had faced the risk of a total collapse that would have left many countries with a high debt. However, he pointed out that banks had only needed €4.5 billion in the third programme because the private sector had a huge participation. Referring to the non-performing loans, he said that a private solution that did not once again place the burden on tax-payers was near. He also pointed to measures being taken in Greece for the protection of the socially weaker groups, to make sure that they were not the victims of the auctions.

Referring to the early payment of the IMF loans with the remaining money of the programme, the Eurogroup chief said that this made sense financially, given that the IMF’s loans were more expensive than those of the Europeans. However, from a political point of view, the Eurogroup prefers that the IMF remain fully involved in the Greek programme, with its own responsibilities, he added. In any case, he noted that the final decisions on debt relief will be made later, when the programme is concluded and the sustainability of the Greek debt has been examined.

 

As an introduction, a piece of that interview with former Greek Statistical Authority bioard member Nicholas Logothetis (see the rest below). Greece being set up is not just some fantasy idea.

In my opinion, joining these medieval memorandums, which have brought about this economic crisis that Greece is still experiencing, was beyond any doubt pre-planned and predetermined. This arises not only from Strauss-Kahn’s own admission that the IMF had been preparing every detail of this with Papandreou, it also arises for other reasons that subsequently became known – that Greece was chosen by the designers of the European Union to become the guinea pig for the implementation of harsh austerity and other forms of economic punishment, set up for all as an example to be avoided, in the context of a new EU economic policy for handling the member countries with fiscal problems.

Indeed, the policy of the memorandums gave the opportunity not only to the IMF to put a foot in Europe – until then its activities always were, with devastating consequences, limited to developing countries in Africa and Latin America – but also gave the opportunity to the French and German banks to get rid of their so-called toxic bonds, that were loaded onto the Greek people by turning a private debt into a state debt.

In order to achieve all of this, of course, they had to plant the appropriate person in ELSTAT at a time when certain statistical adjustments were required, in order to support their treacherous plan. Where did this lead eventually? To the bankruptcy of the Greek state.

This is some story. It’s being denied in what just about amounts to a full blast PR campaign by many of those involved on the Troika side. Their narrative is: how dare the Greeks attack, and drag into court, their own unblemished ex-IMF statistician (who’s not even a statistician)? Whereas the actual question should be: how dare the Troika et al attack the Greek judicial system?

They’re getting away with it so far, but there are still court cases pending. And as Nicholas Logothetis says, he is confident that the Greek court system is the only party that has the power and the independence to set this straight.

I wanted to take bits and pieces out of this, shorten it etc., but it’s just too good. Sorry, Michael, sorry MintPress! It reads like a crime novel. And you can never again say you didn’t know. We can only hope that the Greek court system will hold Europe to task.

But while they can probably call on Papandreou to stand trial, what about Strauss-Kahn or Lagarde? Or Schäuble and Dijsselbloem? What if they can even prove Greece was set up, who’s going to pay the damage done to the Greek population, society, and the Greek economy, over a decade?

It’ll take many decades for the country to recover from what has been perpetrated upon it. And this could only happen because western media have been too lazy and compliant to question what has been going on. 90%+ of what you’ve been reading about Greece has been fake news. Note: I always put everything I quote in italics, but this is an exception to that rule:

Here we go:

 

The Trials of Andreas Georgiou and the Fraud That Drove Greece into Austerity

The mainstream narrative regarding the cause of the severe economic crisis Greece has experienced is that the Greek people and Greek state were irresponsible with their finances, lived “beyond their means” at the expense of EU taxpayers, and provided overly generous social benefits and pensions to an underproductive, uncompetitive, and lazy populace.

These characterizations have then been used to justify the successive memorandum agreements, or “bailouts,” and the austerity measures that have been imposed in Greece since 2010, as the country’s “just deserts” — the “bitter medicine” that must be prescribed to correct Greece’s previous ills.

A different view exists, however — one that is based on allegations that Greece was driven into the memorandum and austerity regime not by economic incompetence and cultural deficiencies, but by a fraud that was perpetrated against the Greek people and the country of Greece.

In this interview, which aired in November on Dialogos Radio, Nicholas Logothetis, a former member of the board of the Greek Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), describes allegations that have been made against Andreas Georgiou, ELSTAT’s former president, and against EU statistical authority Eurostat, regarding how Greece’s deficit and debt figures were illegitimately inflated in 2010, providing the rationale to drag Greece under a regime of austerity and extreme economic oversight.

Logothetis details how debt swaps and other questionable financial dealings were added to Greece’s debt and deficit, as well as the consequences of these actions, the criminal and civil convictions against Georgiou, and the court cases that are still pending.

 

MPN: Let’s begin with a discussion about Andreas Georgiou, the embattled former president of ELSTAT, who oversaw the augmentation of the Greek deficit and debt. Describe for us Georgiou’s background prior to taking on the role of president of ELSTAT. Was Georgiou even a statistician?

NL: No, he wasn’t. The operation of the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), as a continuation of the initial National Statistical Authority, as we called it, officially began in late June of 2010. This was the time that the members of ELSTAT’s management board were selected and approved by the conference of parliamentary presidents, with the required supermajority of four-fifths.

Georgiou has been working at the International Monetary Fund since the late 1980s. For a few years before he came to Greece, he was deputy head of a division of the IMF’s statistics department, the financial institutions division. However, the Greek Ministry of Finance announced the appointment of ELSTAT’s board of directors through a press release to all Greek newspapers. In that press release, it presented Georgiou as deputy head of the entire IMF statistics department, a very big department in the IMF and a very important one, hiding his actual organizational position in the IMF, a position of an economic nature rather than a statistical nature, in a subordinate division of the statistics department.

Obviously, the objective of the Greek Minister of Finance was to present Georgiou as an experienced statistician with a significant management position at the IMF, who supposedly left America and came here to “save” Greece by putting in order all of its statistics. In fact, this gentleman was not only unable to run an important institution such as ELSTAT, with over 1,000 employees, but he wasn’t even a statistician, with no academic publications and no knowledge of statistics.

Moreover, for at least six months after assuming the ELSTAT presidency, Georgiou still held his organizational position at the IMF, something that was explicitly forbidden by ELSTAT’s founding law.

 

MPN: What were the actions undertaken by Georgiou as president of ELSTAT? In other words, how were the Greek deficit and debt figures manipulated and in what other ways were Greece’s official economic figures altered?

NL: First of all, Georgiou’s first moves were to remove from the other members of the board any ability and initiative to propose discussion topics or to be involved in the calculation of the deficit or the debt. They were forbidden even to communicate with the remaining staff of ELSTAT! This behavior of Georgiou was not only due to his inability to act as a manager but also due to the fact that he understood from the very beginning, even from the second meeting of the board in September 2010, our refusal to adopt the deficit and debt calculation procedures he wanted to follow. He knew that eventually, the majority of the board members would not approve his deficit figures to be officially published before the end of October 2010.

 


Andreas Georgiou, stands outside the headquarters of the Statistics agency, in Athens, Greece. (AP/Petros Giannakouris)

 

Shortly after the last meeting of the board in early October 2010, the final silencing of the whole board followed and we were never convened again, thus leaving the way free for Georgiou, always under the auspices of senior Eurostat executives, on the one hand, to change the founding law—as he always wanted, to turn ELSTAT into one-person authority—and on the other hand, to inflate the 2009 figures. Exactly how he did this became clear later, but we had suspected soon enough what he was going to do.

My first disagreement with him was when I realized he would add to the deficit figures and to the national debt of Greece the Simitis swaps — that is, the swaps that former Greek prime minister Costas Simitis had made use of in 2001 in order for Greece to get accepted to the Eurozone. Allow me to briefly explain what these swaps are, as they indicate clearly an activity typical of the statistical mishandlings that had always been used and are still taking place in our country, every time the government’s leaders want to achieve something with communication or financial benefits for themselves or for third parties. Swaps are a type of a bond, a banking derivative or simply a stock exchange bet, a currency exchange bet. Many countries do it, even now they are doing it, converting their existing debt into currencies of other countries, say in Swiss francs or Japanese yen, betting that the value of that currency will rise and at the maturity of this debt, the owner will gain from the difference in the value of currencies.

In a way, what happened in 2001 is that much of Greece’s debt was converted into yen, but at the value that the yen had in 1995, which was higher than that of 2001! Remember, the swaps were made in 2001, but the price of the yen in 1995 was the one used for this swap. We can put a big question mark here because I don’t know how legitimate this was, to consider as valid the exchange value of the yen of six years ago. But anyway, this was what happened.

From this action, Greece was theoretically gaining an amount of 2.8 billion euros, which theoretically reduced our debt by this amount, and also reduced the annual deficit below 3%, thus meeting the requirement of the Maastricht Treaty for Greece’s entry into the Eurozone. But let us not forget, however, that this was a bet. It’s not unlike, say, a bond that matures and is redeemable after 30 years: at the time of the swap, there was no applicable European regulation allowing the “bond” to be cashed in prior to maturity, and therefore the swaps were of indeterminate value.

However, Walter Radermacher — at the time the general director of Eurostat, the EU’s statistical authority — decided only for Greece and only for that time and while the value of the yen had collapsed, that this swap value had to be included in our total debt, thus raising our national debt by 21 billion euros because of the losses of the yen. So we found ourselves with an additional fiscal debt of 21 billion euros.

Radermacher’s additional act was to instruct Georgiou to divide this amount by four and to include what came out of it in the deficits for the years 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006. So eventually, for 2009 and all the three previous years, we found ourselves with an additional deficit of about 5.5 billion euros. But I’m pointing out again that swaps should not be used in any way before their maturity, in order to manipulate negatively or positively the fiscal debt, let alone the yearly deficit.

Another illegal augmentation of our deficit made by Georgiou included the addition of 3.6 billion euros in hospital costs that were not even approved by the Court of Auditors. The Court of Auditors is one of the three institutions of Greek justice, along with the Supreme Court and the Council of State. With regards to this cost, as it turned out later, no one committed to it and no one was paying for it. And finally, the major swelling of the budget deficit was accomplished by the overnight inclusion of the deficits of 17 public utilities, violating many Eurostat criteria and rules. That alone added 18.2 billion euros, equivalent to 20 billion dollars, to the fiscal debt of Greece.

As a result of all the above, Greece ended up with a huge deficit for the year 2009 — 36 billion euros, or equivalently, 15.4% of GDP. This legitimated the first memorandum, paved the way for the second and worst memorandum, and justified the imposition of these cumbersome austerity measures, such as the pension cuts, social insurance and healthcare, and the tax increases — huge tax increases — measures that we are still suffering today.

 

MPN: Dominique Strauss-Kahn himself, the former president of the International Monetary Fund, has gone on the record as saying that he met with George Papandreou to discuss an IMF “bailout” of Greece in April 2009. This was several months before Papandreou was elected as prime minister and at a time when Papandreou was saying, while campaigning, that plenty of money existed to fund the social programs he was promising to Greek voters. Do you believe that the economic “crisis” in Greece was pre-ordained or pre-planned?


Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, right, shakes hand with the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, during a joint news conference in Athens, Dec. 7, 2010. (AP/Thanassis Stavrakis)

NL: Yes, I do. In my opinion, joining these medieval memorandums, which have brought about this economic crisis that Greece is still experiencing, was beyond any doubt pre-planned and predetermined. This arises not only from Strauss-Kahn’s own admission that the IMF had been preparing every detail of this with Papandreou, it also arises for other reasons that subsequently became known — that Greece was chosen by the designers of the European Union to become the guinea pig for the implementation of harsh austerity and other forms of economic punishment, set up for all as an example to be avoided, in the context of a new EU economic policy for handling the member countries with fiscal problems.

Indeed, the policy of the memorandums gave the opportunity not only to the IMF to put a foot in Europe — until then its activities always were, with devastating consequences, limited to developing countries in Africa and Latin America — but also gave the opportunity to the French and German banks to get rid of their so-called toxic bonds, that were loaded onto the Greek people by turning a private debt into a state debt.

In order to achieve all of this, of course, they had to plant the appropriate person in ELSTAT at a time when certain statistical adjustments were required, in order to support their treacherous plan. Where did this lead eventually? To the bankruptcy of the Greek state.

 

MPN: Andreas Georgiou is no longer in Greece, despite the fact that various legal cases and judicial decisions are outstanding against him. Where does Georgiou find himself today and what is he presently involved with?

NL: He’s away, because he knows what he’s faced with, with trials and legal cases. Georgiou is currently in his comfortable villa in Maryland. He left Greece in the summer of 2015, one month before the end of his five-year term as ELSTAT chairman. Coincidentally, this was shortly after the call from the House of Parliament to testify before the examination committee that had been formed at that time to investigate the reasons for our accession to the first memorandum. He never came to the examination room, pretending to be in the hospital with “pneumonia.” Who on earth has ever heard of a pneumonia case in the middle of the Greek summer?

Anyway, immediately after his “discharge” from the hospital, he left for America. I repeat, one month before the end of his term and without requesting a renewal of the chairmanship position for another five years. He could have done that, but he didn’t, apparently having realized that he could not have avoided the imminent court hearing on the prosecutions for breach of duty and for the felony of inflating the deficit figures — which in the legal language is expressed as “felony of false certification at the expense of the state” together with the “aggravating order for public abusers,” a very impressive legal phrase. This is a legal category that leads to life imprisonment.

I presume that he’s engaged at this time in preparing his defense, through statements via his lawyers in Greece, while he remains absent, missing from every trial that has taken place regarding him.

 

MPN: A few months ago Georgiou was found guilty by the Greek justice system. What were the charges for which Georgiou was convicted and sentenced?

NL: There are two convictions Georgiou had this year. In March, in a criminal court, he was convicted for libel and for written defamation, and he was given one-year imprisonment with a three-year suspension. He appealed through his lawyers, but the Penal Court of Appeals condemned Georgiou again, giving him the same sentence.

Georgiou’s crime was that, in an official ELSTAT news release, he accused former ELSTAT board member Dr. Nicholas Stroblos of being a statistical swindler, obviously trying to divert guilt from himself for statistical fraud. I’m pointing out here that Dr. Stroblos is the former director of the national accounts department of ELSTAT, whom Georgiou illegally replaced with one of his now co-defendants. Consequently, Stroblos sued him in both criminal and civil courts and, apart from the one-year imprisonment imposed by the criminal court, the civil court fined Georgiou 10,000 euros for damages resulting from libel.

Georgiou’s most recent conviction is concerned with one of the three accusations included in the prosecution for breach of duty. The first accusation was related to the fact that he was in parallel for several months, from July to November 2010, as head of the statistical authority in Greece but also as an employee of the IMF, a duplication of employment explicitly prohibited by ELSTAT’s founding law 3832 of 2010. That law required him to work exclusively and with full employment in the ELSTAT board. Georgiou deluded the Greek parliament about his ongoing post with the IMF — and note that the IMF is one of the lenders of Greece — while at the same time he had accepted the post as president of ELSTAT’s board. He would not have been selected as ELSTAT president, not even as a simple member of the board, had the parliament known about his double post.

The second accusation concerned the fact that Georgiou did not convene the ELSTAT board for a whole year, violating the law that required meetings at least once a month.

The third accusation, and the most important of all three, concerned the fact that the decision to endorse the revised figures for 2009’s deficit was taken only by Georgiou, without the agreement of the other members of the board — which had been selected, I remind you, and approved exactly for this purpose by the conference of the parliamentary presidents with a majority of four-fifths. For this accusation, he was convicted in the context of breach of duty, and this had to do with the publication of deficit figures without our approval, as required by law. Georgiou appealed this conviction to the Supreme Court, and we are waiting to see what the Supreme Court will decide.

Georgiou was acquitted on the charge that he did not timely convene the ELSTAT board, although this is intimately interconnected with the non-convening of the board for the approval of the data, for which he was convicted. So we ended up with a paradoxical situation here. He was also acquitted of the charge that while he was a member of the IMF — that is to say, a servant of the lender — he was also chairman of ELSTAT — that is, a servant of the borrower — something that is inconceivable worldwide and yet happened in today’s occupied and economically enslaved Greece.

Naturally, the people who were present in the courtroom were annoyed and protested these acquittals, but when they heard the announcement of his conviction on the third charge they were relieved, of course, and for this charge he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with a three year suspension — without being granted, of course, any mitigation.

I, together with fellow whistleblower and former ELSTAT board member Zoe Georganta, filed an objection against the court judgment for the two accusations for which he was acquitted, and we expect a Supreme Court decision as to whether or not Georgiou will go to a new trial for these new accusations. At the moment, the two acquittals cannot be considered irrevocable. But it is true that the most important accusation, for which Georgiou desperately wanted to be acquitted, was the one for which he got convicted.

Indeed, the fact that Georgiou published the inflated elements of the deficit without approval by the ELSTAT board not only proves his guilt of the second accusation, of not convening the board as he should have, but it also implies a deception, because he knew that his swollen deficit figures would never be accepted by a majority of the board members. He further recognized that such a disagreement would sooner or later become public and reveal the irregularities he used with the help of Eurostat itself. Such a revelation would result in the failure of the plan to legitimize the first memorandum and thence to impose onerous austerity measures on Greece. That was not acceptable by the initiators of this plan, who I believe had to use Georgiou and instructed him to silence the rest of the ELSTAT board.

 

MPN: Following the guilty verdicts against Georgiou this past spring, a barrage of positive coverage and PR in favor of Georgiou appeared in the Greek and international media — including Bloomberg, the Washington Post and Politico. We also heard numerous statements of support from major political figures in Greece, the European Union, and elsewhere. These statements criticized the supposed lack of independence of the Greek justice system in the verdicts against Georgiou. How would you describe or characterize Georgiou’s network of support within and outside of Greece, and these arguments made in his favor?

NL: Yes, indeed, various statements have been heard and continue to be heard in support of Georgiou, trying to sanctify him, to elevate him as a serious personality and as an honest scientist. All this in order to justify everything he did illegally as ELSTAT president. All that has been said rests on myths that have been circulated by the domestic and foreign supporters of Georgiou, who are desperate that the case not be brought to the court of justice — the major case of the inflation of the deficit figures.

But this also proves their own guilt in the matter. If they really believe that Georgiou is innocent and that we are the slanderers and the liars, why don’t they let Greek justice do its job and prove his presumed innocence in a court hearing? I would even expect Georgiou himself to be the first to grab this opportunity to be redeemed. This furious effort of all his supporters to prevent the case from being brought to trial reveals their panic as well as their guilt, because they know very well that in the forthcoming court hearing all the evidence will be revealed proving that Greece has suffered the greatest national betrayal since the time of the Thermopylae treason, 2500 years ago, when Efialtes betrayed the Greek army which was fighting the Persian invasion.

The participation of all those major political figures in Greece and the European Union in the betrayal perpetrated by Georgiou will also be revealed. Indeed, the core of this support network includes first and foremost Eurostat, whose senior staff advised Georgiou on how to inflate the 2009 deficit and also how to change ELSTAT’s founding laws in order to neutralize the rest of the board.

Imagine therefore what impact Georgiou’s conviction would have on Eurostat’s image! Eurostat’s political chief is the European Commission, Brussels — that is, one-third of the troika — with all that implies, of course, for many high-ranking political figures in the European Union and beyond. So one can clearly understand why high-level managers from Eurostat and major political figures from the EU itself are continuing to build a wall of protection and support for Georgiou — in the hope that the government and the Supreme Court of Greece will believe all these myths they are promoting.


Greece’s Statistics agency employees walk past the logo of the agency in Piraeus, near Athens. (AP/Petros Giannakouris)

The first myth is that in recent years Georgiou was acquitted many times but the persecution against him continues. That’s what they say. The supporters of Georgiou claim again and again that Georgiou was acquitted, but it’s not true. The acquittal may occur only after the irrevocable final judgment in a court trial, or after an exonerating court order is accepted by the Supreme Court. As appeals against all rulings in Georgiou’s case have been filed with the Supreme Court, he has not been acquitted irrevocably for any charges brought against him.

On the contrary, he has had an irrevocable conviction for defamation, as I said before, and a conviction for one of the three accusations for breach of duty — regarding which the Supreme Court decision is awaited, whether or not it will become irrevocable. But the other two accusations for breach of duty for which he has been acquitted, as I have already said, for these we have filed a complaint and they cannot, therefore, be considered irrevocable or a final acquittal. So it’s in keeping with due process that the prosecutions against him still continue.

The second myth goes as follows: Georgiou took over the presidency of ELSTAT after the first memorandum. He cannot, therefore, be regarded responsible for the memorandum and the economic crisis that followed. Well indeed, when Georgiou took action in ELSTAT, we were already under the first memorandum. If you remember, our entry into the first memorandum was announced by George Papandreou in his speech made on the Greek island of Kasterllorizo in April 2010, and the reason for this was allegedly the high level of the 2009 deficit, which was put by Papandreou at 13.6% of GDP. That’s equivalent to about 30 billion euros.

However, it was not the actual deficit, but the prediction by Papandreou of what it would be after all relevant calculations took place. Papandreou did not have the right to take such an important decision, one that would affect Greek society so much, based only on a prediction that had not even been approved by the Court of Auditors. We would be the ones, as ELSTAT’s management board, to supervise the calculations of the actual deficit, to approve it and publish it in October 2010, six months later.

Actually, if we had been given the opportunity to do that and found these deficit figures to be less than 10%, we would have been able to denounce the first memorandum and cancel it! And of course, the rest of the memorandums that followed. But obviously, this would not be something that the designers of the first memorandum wished to happen, and so the appropriate person must be found who, with specific statistical adjustments, could make the deficit of 2009 “confirm” the “validity” of Papandreou’s deficit “forecast” in April 2010, and fully justify our entry into the first memorandum. This is what they wanted.

Furthermore, in order to avoid any controversies with the rest of the board that could endanger their plan, it was decided to neutralize not only the dissidents on the board but the whole of ELSTAT’s board. As a result of all these unlawful actions, the first memorandum was legitimized — and the door opened for the second and worst memorandum and obviously the rest of the memorandums that have followed, and for the austerity measures that have been imposed since then. Therefore, it’s perhaps wrong to say that the first memorandums was due to Georgiou. It’s more appropriate to say that all memorandums and their related medieval austerity measures that we still have on our backs are actually due to Georgiou!

The third myth: since Eurostat has approved Georgiou’s practices and figures, they must be right, they must be correct. But would it have been possible for Eurostat not to approve these statistics, provided by Georgiou, and the methods of administration that he was using? It was Eurostat’s director himself, Walter Radermacher, who gave orders to Georgiou as to what data to add to the deficit. Correspondence has been revealed, from Radermacher to Georgiou, that shows how to add this amount of debt that was incurred by the Simitis swaps, how to add it into four years’ deficits until 2009 — prior to the expiry date, as we previously explained, and although no European regulation existed at the time that would allow this.

Also, it was the permanent representative of Eurostat at ELSTAT, Hallgrimur Snorrason, who — with the assistance of Eurostat’s legal adviser, Per Samuelson — advised Georgiou on how to change ELSTAT’s founding law in order to transform ELSTAT into one-man authority. It’s hardly surprising therefore that Eurostat approved the practices and the deficit figures of Georgiou. Of course, that does not mean that they were correct.

The final myth that I want to mention is that his proponents are saying Georgiou applied all proper European regulations. On the contrary, most European regulations and Eurostat’s own criteria for the deficit and debt calculations were violated by Georgiou and his advisers from Eurostat, in order to justify the unjustifiable integration of deficits of many public utilities into the 2009 deficit — a decision that would require a thorough study of several months for each public utility. You can’t just decide to include the deficit of a utility in the public debt; you need a thorough study, for several months, six months. So what kind of European regulations did Georgiou actually apply, I wonder? No one knows.

 

MPN: What is plainly evident is that there is a very extensive and very powerful network of support for the likes of Andreas Georgiou, a network that includes powerful media voices, major politicians and political figures, major centers of power and influence and decision-making. How can such a powerful and seemingly unified network of political and media forces even be countered by the Greek people?

NL: Indeed, Georgiou’s support network, composed of high-ranking political figures — domestic and foreign — is powerful. But no matter how much influence this network can have on political affairs in Greece, I think that it is not in a position to influence the Greek justice system, which I consider impartial. The fact that the case has reached up to the level of the Supreme Court, which so far has justified many of our objections and appeals against Georgiou, gives us hope that ultimately the systemic power network that exists supporting Georgiou can be successfully dealt with.

At the end of the day, our justice system, perhaps the only irreproachable institution in our country, seems to have borne the burden of this matter. I believe that the truth will soon be revealed, no matter how many powerful political and media forces try to force an acquittal of Georgiou.

 

MPN: What are the judicial cases still outstanding regarding the ELSTAT case and Andreas Georgiou? What are the charges which Georgiou is still facing? And what is your expectation regarding the outcome of these cases?

NL: Most importantly, the cases of the false inflation of data and of the breach of duty by Georgiou, involve crimes of public document forgery and violation of ELSTAT’s founding law. As I have already said, Georgiou was convicted of one of the more important accusations related to the breach of duty — that of the publication of the 2009 deficit figures without the approval of the ELSTAT board. He has been acquitted on the other two charges — the duplication of his appointment in the IMF and ELSTAT and the non-convening of the board — but we have appealed these two verdicts, and we hope that the Supreme Court will decide to repeat the trial for these two related charges.

If this affair is remanded back to the trial courts, we certainly expect Georgiou to be convicted, because the evidence we have against him is rock solid and undeniable. This is what Georgiou’s supporters know. That’s why they push as hard as they can to prevent the case from reaching the high court of justice.

 

MPN: In what way do you believe the verdicts that will be reached by the Greek justice system concerning the ELSTAT and Georgiou cases impact the future of Greece, particularly with regard to the austerity policies and memorandums that are being imposed and the non-serviceable public debt of Greece?

NL: I agree with you that Greek debt is non-serviceable. Even if we get away from the memorandums, we don’t get away from the related loan agreements, and we will continue to be under supervision by the EU until we pay 75% of our debt, something impossible for the next 60 years!

If, however, as we hope, there is an irrevocable conviction of Georgiou for the act of inflating the deficit figures, this will prove that all these medieval memorandums were imposed on the basis of false figures — which gives Greece the right to claim compensation from the European Union for the damage we suffered in the last seven years of the financial crisis.

Article 340 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union gives us the right to claim this compensation, and we have even estimated the financial loss since Georgiou set foot in Greece, a cost that may well exceed 210 billion euros. A compensation of this magnitude would certainly overturn the disgraceful economic situation we are experiencing today. However, I emphasize again that a necessary condition is an irrevocable conviction of Georgiou regarding the felony of inflating the deficit figures.

And what about these instigators who used Georgiou to carry out their treacherous plans? Even Grigoris Peponis — the impeccable investigator who proposed the criminal prosecution of Georgiou in the first place — has suggested that the possible existence of certain instigators within the Greek and European political systems, who directed Georgiou on what to do, has to be taken into consideration. These are the ones who do not want the case to reach an open court hearing — the ones who are so desperate for the acquittal of Georgiou as early as possible, in order to cover their own involvement in the above crime, because they’re well aware that we have evidence of their unlawful intervention in inflating the deficit and also in transforming ELSTAT from an independent authority into one-man authority.

If the Supreme Court sends Georgiou to trial in the high court of justice, all his supporters know that this will mean a likely conviction for him. The support network will then collapse, and they will find themselves accused for their betrayal of their homeland and crimes against its citizens. Our country will then pass from an underprivileged position of a beggar, to the strong position of a challenger, on the basis of specific articles of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union itself.


Protesters hold a banner during a rally in Athens, Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016. (AP/Yorgos Karahalis)

As far as we are concerned, we do not really care about the strict or non-strict punishment of Georgiou, who is now a pensioner of the IMF. What interests us is to prove his guilt and thereby to remove the injustice that has been committed against Greece through the false inflation of the public debt and deficit of 2009, and also prove the criminal involvement of the European Commission and Eurostat. This will only be done when the case is referred to an open court hearing, in which Eurostat and Georgiou will have to be present, in order to testify under oath whether or not they have falsely inflated the statistical figures of Greece, and the reasons for doing so.

I do not know when and if this will happen, and how many battles we have to give from now on in order to achieve this. Some tell us that there’s no point in continuing to fight, as it seems that with such a front of support for Georgiou by strong decision-making centers, the battle has already been won against us. We reply by saying that if we stop fighting, there will simply be no other battle — something we don’t want, because let’s not forget what Bertolt Brecht said once: “He who fights, can lose. He who doesn’t fight, has already lost.”

 

MPN: Looking at the situation in Greece today and the economic claims that are being made by the Greek government — that the country has returned to economic growth, that Greece has turned a corner — do you believe that the Greek statistical figures today are credible, or are they perhaps still being manipulated?

NL: Unfortunately, the statistical figures have already been exploited by any government in power so far in Greece. We have seen this happen with the alchemies of swaps in order to get into the Eurozone. By the way, I wish that we had never gotten into the Eurozone in the first place! Our economy was not in a position to handle such a strong and competitive currency. We saw another exploitation of the statistical figures, of the deficit, this time. They became the reason for an economic crisis of the past seven years.

I cannot say what is happening these days with the statistical figures, as I am not in ELSTAT. But we will find out sooner or later what is happening. The truth always comes out for any case of mishandling of statistical figures. We’ve seen this happen. But unfortunately, as long as there is no reliable team to correctly manage the handling of the statistical data in the Greek Statistical Authority, I’m afraid we should again expect irregularities and alchemies of the data.

 

 

Jan 252015
 
 January 25, 2015  Posted by at 11:31 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Theodor Horydczak U.S. Supreme Court interiors, Washington DC 1931

With The Greek election in full motion, and first results perhaps 12 hours away, It would seem useful, no matter how the Greeks vote, to lay to rest a few misconceptions, and to expose a few ‘conceptions’ that have – largely – remained buried to date.

The first misconception is that the Greeks borrowed like crazy and therefore deserve to be thrown into a pit of suffering and misery. It is simply nonsense, a mere political narrative. Besides, most of what was borrowed went to the utterly corrupt ‘oligarch system’, not to the people in the street. Something the EU was certainly aware of when it accepted Greece as a member. But corrupt regimes can be of great use.

A few days back, in Bunch Of Criminals!, I made the point that the EU, and its members, have no right to do to a fellow member country what they did to Greece – and want to continue doing -.

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras said this week that he will not negotiate with the Troika, but directly with EU officials. And there is a very solid reason for that. In today’s Observer, Helena Smith interviews Greek sociologist Constantine Tsoukalas, who understands what has been happening to his country, and – rightfully – frames it in terms of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.

What has happened to Greece is what Klein describes was done to South America and – later – Eastern Europe. Disaster capitalism. Bringing entire countries to their knees by enforcing predatory economic policies, and then using the ensuing chaos and smouldering ruins to take full control over their political, economic and social systems. Helena Smith:

Is Greece About To Call Time On Five Punishing Years Of Austerity?

For Professor Constantine Tsoukalas, Greece’s pre-eminent sociologist, there is no question that, come Monday, Europe will have reached a watershed. I first met Tsoukalas in January 2009, in his lofty, book-lined apartment in Kolonaki. For several weeks Athens had been shaken by riots triggered by the police shooting of a teenage boy. The violence was tumultuous and prolonged.

Looking back, it is clear that this was the start of the crisis – a cry for help by a dislocated youth robbed of hope as a result of surging unemployment and enraged by a system that, corrupt and inefficient, favoured the few. Tsoukalas knew that this was “the beginning of something” although he could not tell what. But with great prescience he spoke of the degeneration of politics – both inside and outside Greece – the rise of moral indignation, and the emptiness of a globalised market “that was supposed to put an end to ideology but, in crisis, has instead created this moment of great ideological tension”.

Six years later, following the longest recession on record, he is in little doubt that anger has fuelled the rise of Syriza. On the back of rage over austerity, the leftists have seen their popularity soar from 5% before the crisis to as high as 35% – more than the combined total of New Democracy and left-leaning Pasok, the two parties that have alternated in power since the restoration of democracy in 1974.

The European policy towards Greece, to a large extent, has been determined by the will to experiment with the feasibility of shock therapies,” says Tsoukalas. “It worked, but the reaction is going to be a leftwing government. Europe cannot survive as it is. The rise of fascism … should be sufficient [evidence] to everyone that it has to change.”

If Greece’s rebellion was to occur in a coherent way, Tsoukalas, who is being fielded by Syriza as an honorary candidate, believes it would be only a matter of time before it was replicated in other parts of the continent. “These elections are important because they are a reminder to the people of Europe that there is another way out,” he insists. “That neoliberal orthodoxy is not an immovable problem.”

[..] at 28 Veikou Street, Syriza runs the Solidarity Club – initially set up as a food bank in March 2013 when stories began to surface of malnourished children fainting in schools. In recent months, its staff have focused on providing medicines. “That’s the big problem now because so many are uninsured, without any access to the health system,” says volunteer Panaghiota Mourtidou. “People don’t have the money to go to doctors. If they have a toothache, they get terrified, because how the hell are they going to pay for a visit to the dentist?”

With its Che Guevara posters, Italian Euro-communist flags, chaos of boxes and tins, and makeshift furniture, there is something of a field-camp feeling about Veikou Street. But its army of volunteers are tireless. This, they say, is a battle to be won, a huge victory for the left that Greece will set in motion. “We are conscious that we have managed to unite in a way that the left elsewhere has failed to do,” says Angeliki Kassola, a theatre director. “I’ve met lots of once-strident New Democracy supporters who say they will be voting for us because they are attracted to Syriza’s vision of democracy, justice, dignity – all the things that have been taken from us in the crisis.”

There will be plenty who don’t agree with an analysis like this. Just as there will be plenty who insist that the Greeks brought it all upon themselves. They should take a look at what my friend Steve Keen, presently “Professor of Economics and Head of the School of Economics, Politics and History at Kingston University London”, wrote this week in Forbes Magazine. That should cure a few lost souls of their foolish fantasies. And then they should take their new found insights and ask themselves: wait a minute, what is going on here? Why is Greece being squeezed the way it is? Deep down, you already know, don’t you? Steve:

It’s All The Greeks’ Fault

I fully expect most commentators to take a line like that in my title. After all, it’s common knowledge that the Greeks lied about their levels of public debt to appear to qualify for the EU’s entry criteria, which include that aggregate public debt should be below 60% of GDP. Though there’s an argument that Goldman Sachs, many of whose ex-staff are now leading Central Bankers, helped the Greeks make this alleged lie, the responsibility for it will be shafted home to the Greeks, and that in turn will be used to argue that the Greeks deserve to suffer.

The story, in other words, will be that the Greeks were architects of their own dilemma, and that therefore they should pay for it, rather than making the rest of the world suffer through a write-down of their debts. Emotion will rule the debate rather than logic. So to cast a logical eye over this forthcoming debate, I’m going to consider who is really to blame for the Greek dilemma by considering another country entirely: Spain. Today, Greece and Spain are in very similar situations, with unemployment rates of well over 25%—higher than the worst the USA recorded during the Great Depression (see Figure 1). But unlike Greece, Spain before the crisis was doing everything right, according to the EU.

More importantly still, Spain’s government debt when the EU imposed its austerity regime (mid-2010) was still well below America’s, even though both had risen substantially since the crisis. Spain’s government debt ratio was 65% of GDP then, versus 78% for the USA. The whole purpose of the EU’s austerity program was to reduce government debt levels. Reducing government debt was the political topic du jour in America as well from 2010 on, but the various attempts to impose austerity came to naught: instead, after shooting up because of deliberate policy at the time of the crisis America’s budget deficit merely responded to the state of the economy.

Politically paralyzed Washington talked austerity, but never actually imposed it. So who was more successful: the deliberate, policy-driven EU attempt to reduce government debt, or the “muddle through” USA? Figure 2 shows that muddle through was a hands-down winner: the USA’s government debt to GDP ratio has stabilized at 90% of GDP, while Spain’s has sailed past 100%. The USA’s macroeconomic performance has also been far better than Spain’s under the EU’s policy of austerity. Comparing the USA’s unemployment rate to Spain’s has to account for the fact that it was higher before the crisis—at 8.5%, Spain’s unemployment was 1.75 times the USA’s when the crisis began. It is now about 4 times the USA’s.

So simply on the data, the prima facie case is that all of Spain’s problems—and by inference, most of Greece’s—are due to austerity, rather than Spain’s (or Greece’s) own failings. On the data alone, the EU should “Cry Uncle”, concede Greece’s point, stop imposing austerity, and talk debt-writeoffs—especially since the Greeks can argue that at least part of its excessive public debt ratio is due to the failure of the EU’s austerity policies to reduce it.

But I know that data isn’t enough to sway the public opinion—let alone the bureaucrats in Brussels. So we need to know the why: why did austerity in Europe fail to reduce the government debt ratio, while muddle-through has stabilized it in the USA? Here I return to my hobby-horse: the key factor that I consider and mainstream economists ignore—the level and rate of change of private debt. The first clue this gives us is that the EU’s pre-crisis poster-boy, Spain, had the greatest growth in private debt of the three—far exceeding the USA’s. Its peak debt level was also much higher—225% of GDP in mid-2010 versus 170% of GDP for the USA in 2009 (see Figure 4).

The second clue comes from the change in debt data: the factor that Greece and Spain have in common is that the private sector is reducing its debt level drastically—in Spain’s case by over 20% per year. The USA, on the other hand, ended its private sector deleveraging way back in 2012. Today, Americans are increasing their private debt levels at a rate of about 5% of GDP per year—well below the peak levels prior to the crisis, but roughly in line with the rate of growth of nominal GDP.

The third clue? I’ll leave that for my next post—this one is long enough already. But the conclusion is that Greece’s crisis is the EU’s fault, and the EU should “pay” via the debt write-offs that Syriza wants – and then some.

Read more …

Austerity is something that doesn’t work, but it does fit in great with the will to experiment with the feasibility of shock therapies. Austerity, in the way it’s been applied to Greece, is a tool to gain greater power over people and their social structures. It is economic warfare, plain and simple. That is to say, the EU has become a ‘union’ where the people in weaker member states can be strangled, and ‘economically conquered’, with impunity.

If you live in a EU country, and you don’t like that these things are carried out in your name, this is the time to make your discontent known. Because now you know. Don’t let the Greeks fight this battle on their own. I don’t care what you say, but you’re not innocent if you let it happen. If they lose, it’ll be on your conscience.

Oh, and if they win, heed Helena Smith’s words: “if Greece’s rebellion was to occur in a coherent way, [..] it would be only a matter of time before it was replicated in other parts of the continent.” But don’t think ‘they’ will let it happen peacefully. They’ll organize huge social unrest, inject violence, and then try to use it to clamp down on the population and reinforce their grip on power. This won’t remain confined to Greece.