Feb 222017
 
 February 22, 2017  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,


DPC Launch of battleship Georgia, Bath, Maine, Oct 1904

 

Finance as Warfare: IMF Lent to Greece Knowing It Could Never Pay Back (CP)
Will EU and IMF Finally Offer Light At The End Of The Greek Debt Tunnel? (G.)
France Exiting The Euro Would Be Largest Sovereign Default In History (CNBC)
EU Tax Chief Admits Le Pen Win Would Be The End Of The European Project (CNBC)
Marine Le Pen’s Party’s Headquarters Raided Over ‘Fake Jobs’ Scandal (AFP)
Revised Trump Travel Ban Will Face Legal Hurdles, Too (BBG)
The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You (Wired)
US Car Loans, Delinquencies Hit Record Levels (Q.)
‘Trapped Wealth’ Drives Toronto’s Speculative Real Estate Dilemma
China’s Central Bank To Shine Regulatory Light On Shadow Banking (SCMP)
Tech CEOs Back Call For Basic Income (CNBC)
Monsanto and Bayer’s Chemical Romance: Heroin, Nerve Gas and Agent Orange (AN)
Canada Will Not Halt Illegal Border Crossing Despite Opposition – Trudeau (R.)
Canada To Welcome 1,200 Yezidi Refugees From Iraq (AFP)
Europe Wrote The Book On Demonising Refugees, Long Before Trump Read It (G.)
Bodies Of At Least 74 Migrants Wash Ashore In Western Libya (G.)

 

 

Michael Hudson speaking. “..when Greece fails, that’s a success for the foreign investors that want to buy the Greek railroads. They want to take over the ports. They want to take over the land. They want the tourist sites.”

Finance as Warfare: IMF Lent to Greece Knowing It Could Never Pay Back (CP)

I take issue with one thing that you said. You said the lenders expect Greece to grow. That is not so. There is no way in which the lenders expected Greece to grow. In fact, the IMF was the main lender. It said that Greece cannot grow, under the circumstances that it has now. What do you do in a case where you make a loan to a country, and the entire staff says that there is no way this country can repay the loan? That is what the IMF staff said in 2015. It made the loan anyway – not to Greece, but to pay French banks, German banks and a few other bondholders – not a penny actually went to Greece. The junk economics they used claimed to have a program to make sure the IMF would help manage the Greek economy to enable it to repay. Unfortunately, their secret ingredient was austerity.

Sharmini, for the last 50 years, every austerity program that the IMF has made has shrunk the victim economy. No austerity program has ever helped an economy grow. No budget surplus has ever helped an economy grow, because a budget surplus sucks money out of the economy. As for the conditionalities, the so-called reforms, they are an Orwellian term for anti-reform, for cutting back pensions and rolling back the progress that the labor movement has made in the last half century. So, the lenders knew very well that Greece would not grow, and that it would shrink. So, the question is, why does this junk economics continue, decade after decade? The reason is that the loans are made to Greece precisely because Greece couldn’t pay.

When a country can’t pay, the rules at the IMF and EU and the German bankers behind it say, don’t worry, we will simply insist that you sell off your public domain. Sell off your land, your transportation, your ports, your electric utilities. This is by now a program that has gone on and on, decade after decade. Now, surprisingly enough, America’s ambassador to the EU, Ted Malloch, has gone on Bloomberg and also on Greek TV telling the Greeks to leave the euro and go it alone. You have Trump’s nominee for the ambassador to the EU saying that the EU zone is dead zone. It’s going to shrink. If Greece continues to repay the loan, if it does not withdraw from the euro, then it is going to be in a permanent depression, as far as the eye can see. Greece is suffering the result of these bad loans. It is already in a longer depression today, a deeper depression, than it was in the 1930s.

[..] when Greece fails, that’s a success for the foreign investors that want to buy the Greek railroads. They want to take over the ports. They want to take over the land. They want the tourist sites. But most of all, they want to set an example of Greece, to show that France, the Netherlands or other countries that may think of withdrawing from the euro – withdraw and decide they would rather grow than be impoverished – that the IMF and EU will do to them just what they’re doing to Greece. So they’re making an example of Greece. They’re going to show that finance rules, and in fact that is why both Trump and Ted Malloch have come up in support of the separatist movement in France. They’re supporting Marine Le Pen, just as Putin is supporting Marine Le Pen. There’s a perception throughout the world that finance really is a mode of warfare.

Read more …

Suggestion: lock them up until they have an agreement. Then let Greeks vote on that.

Will EU and IMF Finally Offer Light At The End Of The Greek Debt Tunnel? (G.)

Simon Tilford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, a thinktank, said he believed the IMF and eurozone would find a compromise, whereby the fund signed up to the 3.5% target for a limited period of time, as the price of stabilising the eurozone in an election year. “My feeling is they will largely settle for a fig leaf. It will be made to look as if the pace of austerity has been eased, ie that the eurozone will agree that the size of the primary budget surplus will be reassessed at some specified point in the future.” “All we are going to see us another round of extend and pretend.” He added that this would not do anything “significant to alleviate the pressure we see on Greece”. He pointed out that even a primary budget surplus of 1.5% (favoured by the IMF) “would still mean ongoing austerity in Greece”. The IMF’s reforms may also prove politically difficult to sell to a population reeling from nearly eight years in the EU’s bailout regime.

One of the IMF’s key demands is an overhaul of the Greek tax system to ensure more middle-class professionals pay their dues. More than 50% of Greek wage earners do not pay income tax, compared with 8% in the rest of the eurozone. But the low tax take partly reflects the economic collapse that has pushed down wages and squeezed people out of regular work. Reforming pensions, another IMF priority, may also run into trouble. The fund wants to rein in “extremely generous” Greek pensions that absorb 11% of national income. But Greek pensions have already been slashed since 2010, with 43% of pensioners living on €660 a month, compared with an average annual income of €20,000 for over-65s in other eurozone countries, according to government figures. Many Greek pensioners are also supporting unemployed children and grandchildren, as other benefits have been cut. With these politically tough reforms ahead, the light at the end of tunnel looks dim and distant. “Greeks are facing ongoing austerity into the foreseeable future,” Tilford says.

Read more …

Sorry, but fearmongering no longer works.

France Exiting The Euro Would Be Largest Sovereign Default In History (CNBC)

A few days ago, David Rachline of the far-right National Front party in France said that “the debt of France is about €2 trillion, about €1.7 trillion are issued under French law, which means that it can be re-denominated.” The economic program of the National Front specifically calls for the exit of the euro and the creation of a new currency, the French franc, which would be “closely” linked to the euro while allowing the government to undertake “competitive devaluations” making the transition in an “orderly way”. There is only one problem. It does not work. There is no “orderly exit” from the euro. It is an oxymoron. This would be the largest credit event in history and would create a massive contagion effect throughout the euro zone. The euro, obviously, would suffer from the break-up risk, so the fallacy of the “closely linked” second currency is simply a joke.

Both would collapse in tandem. The risk is already evident. The French-German yield spread has reached the highest level since 2012 despite the ECB’s massive quantitative easing. The ECB has bought more than €255 billion of French bonds. This mirage of an “orderly exit” ignores that the French financial system, which carries assets more than three times the size of France´s GDP, would be severely damaged from the impact of the credit event. A financial system that already suffers from weak net income margins and more than 160 billion euros in non-performing loans, would collapse as these bad loans escalate and the losses in the banks’ bond portfolios eat away their core capital. This would inevitably lead to Greek-style capital controls and bank runs as the entities would lose liquidity support from the ECB.

Read more …

“I think the rise of Le Pen is a result of the disappointment in other candidates..” Eh, no, it’s disappointment in the EU.

EU Tax Chief Admits Le Pen Win Would Be The End Of The European Project (CNBC)

A win for far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen would spell the end of the EU – but the French are not crazy enough to let that happen, insists European Commissioner Pierre Moscovici. “I’m confident. I know my citizens and my compatriots well and know they are not going to elect a candidate who is proposing France exiting (Europe). That would be the end of the European project,” Moscovici, who is European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, told CNBC Monday. In a clear nod to the rising populist movements in Europe, the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and the U.K.’s EU referendum, Moscovici, said he believes common sense will prevail as France goes to the polls in the two-round election this year. “I cannot imagine 50% of the French are crazy enough to vote for her,” he said.

“I’m quite convinced that she cannot win … she never even ever won a regional election in France – never ever.” Moscovici appealed, however, to the other presidential candidates, who include Independent Emmanuel Macron and Republican Francois Fillon, to prove themselves to the electorate and, ultimately, make a stronger case for remaining in the EU. “The other candidates need to have a stronger campaign and show that they are credible to propose a future that is likeable for the French. “I think the rise of Le Pen is a result of the disappointment in other candidates, so I urge them to make a strong proposal for France, and as well for Europe, and for France in Europe.”

Read more …

It’s amazing that they haven’t tried more of these tactics to make her look bad (they will, though). “For the second time, a raid took place at the same offices, over the same allegations, which confirms that the first raid amounted to nothing..”

Marine Le Pen’s Party’s Headquarters Raided Over ‘Fake Jobs’ Scandal (AFP)

French investigators probing an alleged fake jobs scam by the far-right National Front (FN) raided the group’s headquarters outside Paris on Monday, the party said. The raid is the second in a year by investigators trying to determine whether the FN used European Parliament funds to pay for 20 assistants presented as parliamentary aides while continuing to work for the party elsewhere. “For the second time, a raid took place at the same offices, over the same allegations, which confirms that the first raid amounted to nothing,” the party said in a statement. The group accused investigators acting for the Paris prosecutor’s office of a “media operation” designed to disrupt the presidential campaign of FN leader Marine Le Pen. Le Pen, who has led the anti-EU party since 2011, is a member of the European Parliament which accuses her of defrauding it of nearly €340,000.

She is riding high in polls ahead of the two-stage presidential election on April 23 and May 7 election, and has denied the claims, describing the investigation as a vendetta against her. According to a report by the EU’s anti-fraud office OLAF, leaked last week, the parliament paid out 41,554 euros towards a contract for Le Pen’s bodyguard Thierry Legier who was falsely presented as a parliamentary assistant. The allegations against Le Pen have been drowned out by a fake jobs scandal engulfing her conservative rival Francois Fillon. Fillon’s campaign has been adrift since it emerged that his wife netted at least 680,000 euros for a suspected fake job as a parliamentary assistant over a period spanning 15 years. He has denied the allegations. Polls currently show Le Pen winning the first round of the election, but failing to garner the more than 50% of voters needed for victory in the second round.

Read more …

I still think it’s a good thing the US is having this conversation. But the upcoming ugliness is terrible. You need to always take care of individual people first.

Revised Trump Travel Ban Will Face Legal Hurdles, Too (BBG)

President Donald Trump is poised to announce a redrafted executive order on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. Will it pass legal muster? Or will the courts once again thwart the president’s will? Early reports suggest that the new order will be drafted to avoid many of the legal problems that were posed by the earlier version, and to make judicial review harder to obtain. But the crucial question is whether the courts will consider the political context in which the order was drafted to conclude that it is still a Muslim ban under another name. Whether the court should do so turns out to be a close legal question. But Supreme Court precedent suggests that it should – in which case the new order could well be blocked like the original. The expected fixes in the new order would improve the administration’s legal position.

For one thing, the new order is expected to exclude legal permanent residents with green cards, who were included in the original order according to the administration’s early guidance, then excluded by a later interpretation. In its decision upholding a temporary restraining order by a federal judge in Seattle against enforcement of the first travel ban, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit treated the executive order as covering green card holders. That mattered because, as the court said, green card holders have a stronger constitutional claim to be covered by the due-process clause of the Constitution than do other visa holders. By excluding green card holders, the new order would force plaintiffs to identify different people who are harmed by the order.

Another smart revision would be to omit the provision that said religious minorities in the seven countries – which is to say, almost certainly Christians – would be given preferential treatment when refugees are once again let into the U.S. That provision was the only part of the text that could be used to suggest that the order unconstitutionally favored one religion, Christianity, over another, Islam. The Trump administration would also be smart to phase in the new order to avoid trapping visa holders who are in transit, which creates sympathetic plaintiffs detained at the airports. But that’s not the end of the game, constitutionally speaking. Even if due process is omitted from the case entirely, plaintiffs could still allege once more that the order discriminates on the basis of religion in violation of the free-exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment.

Read more …

Paint a strong picture of something that’s not the norm.

The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You (Wired)

Americans born in the United States are more murderous than undocumented immigrants. Fighting words, I know. But why? After all, that’s just what the numbers say. Still, be honest: you wouldn’t linger over a story with that headline. It’s “dog bites man.” It’s the norm. And norms aren’t news. Instead, you’ll see two dozen reporters flock to a single burning trash can during an Inauguration protest. The aberrant occurrence is the story you’ll read and the picture you’ll see. It’s news because it’s new. The problem here is not just that this singling out creates a distorted, fish-eye lens version of what’s really happening. It’s that the human psyche is predisposed to take an aberration—what linguist George Lakoff has called the “salient exemplar”—and conflate it with the norm.

This cognitive bias itself isn’t new. But in a media environment driven by clicks, where politicians can bypass journalistic filters entirely to deliver themselves straight to citizens, it’s newly exploitable. You know who else isn’t as likely to commit murders in the US as native-born citizens? Refugees. Or immigrants from the seven countries singled out in President Trump’s shot-down travel ban. Or for that matter, immigrants at all. According to numerous studies, increased immigration correlates with lower violent crime rates in a community. Yet next week, Trump is promising a revised travel ban in the name of safety. In the past, the president has also promised to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. What he hasn’t promised to publish is a list of crimes committed by Americans. That’s not news.

But his list is likely to create the false impression that undocumented immigrants are especially prone to commit violent crimes—an impression in which the human brain is complicit. Lakoff, a University of California, Berkeley linguist and well-known Democratic activist, cites Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” as the signature “salient exemplar.” Reagan’s straw woman—a minority mother who uses her government money on fancy bling rather than on food for her family—became an effective rhetorical bludgeon to curb public assistance programs even though the vast majority of recipients didn’t abuse the system in that way. The image became iconic, even though it was the exception rather than the rule. Psychologists call this bias the “availability heuristic,” an effect Trump has sought to exploit since the launch of his presidential campaign, when he referred to undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists.

Read more …

Slaves.

US Car Loans, Delinquencies Hit Record Levels (Q.)

Last year, Americans bought more new cars than ever before. Given that auto sales make up around a fifth of all retail spending, 2016’s banner year is being hailed as a sign of burgeoning consumer confidence across the country. But something else is revving up, too: auto loans. The US closed out 2016 with just shy of $1.2 trillion in outstanding auto loan debt, a rise of 9% from the previous year and 13% above the pre-crisis peak in 2005, in inflation-adjusted terms. The number of cars and trucks on the road, meanwhile, rose by only 1.5% last year, and 9% since 2005, according to US transportation department data.

Total household debt levels are now a hair under their 2008 peak, with some of the fastest growth in recent years down to auto loans. If America’s car-buying bonanza is being fueled by cheap credit, is consumer sentiment really as robust as it might seem? And is it sustainable? There are reasons to wonder. While car purchases and financing have leapt since 2009, wages have picked up only slightly over the same period. Meanwhile, the average loan taken out to buy a new car has risen steadily.

Read more …

TO learned nothing from Vancouver.

‘Trapped Wealth’ Drives Toronto’s Speculative Real Estate Dilemma

Toronto’s housing boom is unrelenting. Prices in Canada’s largest city surged more than 20% over the past year, the fastest pace in three decades, data released last week show. Some of the city’s neighboring towns are posting even bigger gains. It’s become a matter of considerable alarm. Stability is one concern: if the market tumbles, so will Canada’s economy. Pricier real estate also drives away less-affluent, younger people and boosts the cost of doing business, eroding competitiveness. “I don’t think anybody is cheering,” said Doug Porter, the Toronto-based chief economist of Bank of Montreal, who used the dreaded “bubble” word last week to describe the market. “I don’t see who benefits other than real estate agents. It’s trapped wealth.”

So, what’s driving the boom? The housing industry – builders and brokers – claim lack of supply is the main culprit. Others, Porter included, see demand as the problem. Lately, evidence is mounting that speculation is behind the jump. Builders say they are being held back by everything from regulations to prohibitive taxes and land restrictions. Ontario’s greenbelt region around Toronto is one example. This is no doubt true for one segment of the market: single-detached homes. Just over one-quarter of the 176,000 homes built in Toronto over the past five years were single-detached. That’s well down from the 1990s, when they accounted for almost half of all construction. Supply constraints don’t explain the price gains for condominiums, which have seen a flood of new completions. The average sale price of a condo is up 15% year-over-year. That’s after builders completed more than 54,000 apartment units over the past two years, easily a record supply for Toronto.

Canada’s recent census results, released this month, also provide some evidence against the shortage argument. Occupied private dwellings have risen by 7.2% in Toronto over the past five years, faster than population growth. The census, however, doesn’t say what type of homes are being built. Plus, there is also the recent puzzle of disappearing listings. New listings in Toronto fell 17% in January from a month earlier, the biggest one-month decline since 2002. Sales as a share of new listings rose above 90%, smashing the record. Is this a sign of a bubble? Are sellers holding off putting their homes on the market to see where prices settle? Has supply become so tight that potential sellers are pulling out of the market altogether since they have nowhere to move to? “The market is thinning out basically, you know what that means,” said David Madani, an economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, said in a telephone interview.

Read more …

They keep on announcing this. And the shadow system keeps growing, rapidly.

China’s Central Bank To Shine Regulatory Light On Shadow Banking (SCMP)

China’s financial watchdogs are considering casting a huge new regulatory net over the country’s vast shadow banking sector. The central bank has spearheaded the drafting of new regulations to tame China’s 60 trillion yuan “asset management” industry. According to people who have seen the draft regulations, the rules would bring the various kinds of asset management products and investment schemes offered by all kinds of financial institutions under the one regulatory umbrella. Oversight for the flourishing sector is now split between the securities, banking and insurance regulators. China Minsheng Banking chief analyst Wen Bin said regulatory standards differed between watchdogs and a unified system would help regulators cut systemic risks and financial leverage.

“China’s financial innovation has grown quickly in the past few years and the blending of financial operations through asset management products has challenged the fragmented regulatory system,” Wen said. Mainland financial institutions, including banks, mutual fund firms, brokerages and insurance companies, have rushed to set up asset management schemes, raising funds from clients and then investing in a range of markets and projects. These schemes are usually beyond the watch of regulators and harbour growing risks for the country’s financial stability, something the leadership is determined to eliminate ahead of a big power reshuffle due late this year. If rolled out, the rules would ban financial institutions from promising clients a minimum or fixed return from their products. Institutions would have to contribute 10% of their management fees to a risk reserve fund, and funds in one “asset management product” could not be used in another, except in authorised cases.

Read more …

These people really think they will rule the world. But what happens when the economy collapses? When the S&P falls 50%+? Are robots going to grow your food?

Tech CEOs Back Call For Basic Income (CNBC)

It’s 2067 and robots have wiped out millions of jobs, AI is rampant, and unemployment is on the rise. Technology companies and CEOs have become public enemy number one. This portrayal of the future is one tech executives are keen to avoid and has driven a growing chorus to support the idea of a universal basic income (UBI). “There is going to be backlash when it comes to jobs,” Sayantan Ghosal, an economics professor at the University of Glasgow who has written about UBI, told CNBC by phone. U.S. technology firms have been investing heavily in research and development of AI. Tesla with driverless cars, Amazon with workerless shops, and the likes of Google developing smarter-than-human software. Even Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, recently stated that he was “surprised” by the pace of AI developments.

Over the past few months, major technology executives have come out in support of a UBI. In an interview with CNBC in November, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk backed the idea. “There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation,” Musk said. He reiterated his thoughts last week at the World Government Summit in Dubai, in which he said a UBI would be “necessary”. Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, warned of AI creating “digital refugees”. At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in January, Benioff said there was “no clear path forward” on how to deal with the job displacement that will occur. Other tech executives talked up the industry’s responsibility. “We should do our very best to train people for the jobs of the future,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at Davos.

Read more …

The dark side of the man.

Monsanto and Bayer’s Chemical Romance: Heroin, Nerve Gas and Agent Orange (AN)

Fifty years ago, the Monsanto and Bayer corporations were forced to separate in order to avoid violating basic antitrust regulations. U.S. courts declared that the two chemical giants, when operating together under the name Mobay, stymied market competition and comprised a monopoly that could not stand. But that was then. Today, under a much different regulatory climate that all but rubberstamps such corporate monopolies, the Germany-based Bayer’s $66 billion offer to purchase Monsanto is being fast-tracked by U.S. regulators. The proposed mega-merger, or re-marriage, will result in nearly 30% of all worldwide pesticide and seed sales being controlled by the new partnership. The merger faces federal antitrust scrutiny before it can be finalized, a process currently underway.

It already passed its first test in January when it got the blessings of President-elect Donald Trump, who held an exclusive meeting with the CEOs of both corporations and emerged—not surprisingly—with his thumbs up. Trump’s exclusive meeting with these corporate titans came well before he had even bothered to name his selection to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a not-so-subtle acknowledgement of where the true power lies when it comes to the politics of food. In addition to market control, Bayer’s proposed purchase is aimed at steadying a reeling Monsanto, which is mired in turmoil from a long list of objectionable activities involving toxic pesticides and its increasingly unpopular genetically-modified organisms.

Ironically, given its own sullied past that includes Nazi sympathizing and marketing heroin-laced cough syrup for children, Bayer is being portrayed as the one riding to the rescue of Monsanto’s poor public image. If anything, it’s a sign of just how low the Monsanto brand and reputation has plummeted, forcing it to try and improve its image by sidling up to Bayer, a participant in some of the cruelest crimes in human history. While these types of mergers are nothing new to the agribusiness sector, where consolidation has been king for decades, last year’s proposed mega-mergers shattered the record for such deals. There were $125 billion worth of proposed agri-chemical mergers in 2016, nearly doubling the previous record of $65 billion in 2010. In addition to the proposed Bayer/Monsanto deal, there are also pending mergers between Dow and DuPont as well as Syngenta and the Chinese National Chemical Corporation.

Read more …

Canada continues to set the standard. But protests begin.

Canada Will Not Halt Illegal Border Crossing Despite Opposition – Trudeau (R.)

Canada will continue to accept asylum seekers crossing illegally from the United States but will ensure security measures are taken to keep Canadians safe, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday. The number of would-be refugees crossing into Canada at isolated and unguarded border crossings has increased in recent weeks amid fears that U.S. President Donald Trump will crack down on illegal immigrants, and photos of smiling Canadian police greeting the migrants have gone viral. Opposition Conservatives want Trudeau’s center-left Liberal government to stem the flow of asylum seekers from the United States because of security fears and a lack of resources to deal with them.

“One of the reasons why Canada remains an open country is Canadians trust our immigration system and the integrity of our borders and the help we provide people who are looking for safety,” Trudeau told parliament. “We will continue to strike that balance between a rigorous system and accepting people who need help.” Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen also said Canada would continue to honor the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, which requires it to turn back refugees if they make asylum claims at Canadian border crossings with the United States. Refugee advocates have argued this drives asylum seekers to cross illegally at isolated locations, risking their lives in frigid weather. Amnesty International and other groups are pressuring the Canadian government to abandon the agreement, arguing the United States is not safe for refugees.

Read more …

Very smart move. They will contribute a lot to the country. Stong, hardened, intelligent and grateful.

Canada To Welcome 1,200 Yezidi Refugees From Iraq (AFP)

Canada will resettle 1,200 Yezidi refugees who faced persecution by the Islamic State group, the immigration minister said Tuesday. Some 400 have already been airlifted to this country. “Our operation is under way and individual survivors of Daesh have been arriving in Canada for resettlement in the last number of months and this began on October 25, 2016,” Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, using an Arabic name for the Islamic State. “Our government will resettle approximately 1,200 highly vulnerable survivors of Daesh and their family members in Canada,” he added. The initiative follows Parliament’s resolution last fall to take in Yezidis facing “genocide” in Iraq at the hands of the Islamic extremist IS group.

The original aim was to bring over women and girls at risk, but Hussen told a news conference that Ottawa had learned that “Daesh has also deliberately targeted boys and as such we are helping to resettle all child survivors of Daesh.” Hussen said the migrants are arriving on commercial flights at a “controlled pace” to avoid overwhelming Canada’s refugee system. The operation is expected to cost Can$28 million (US$21 million). Since coming to power in late 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has resettled 40,000 Syrian refugees. The Yezidis taken in have been subjected to comprehensive security checks and medical examinations, Hussen said. Yezidis are a Kurdish-speaking minority with a pre-Islamic religion thought partly to have its origin in the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia. They are neither Arab nor Muslim and IS considers them polytheistic heretics.

Read more …

And don’t you forget it.

Europe Wrote The Book On Demonising Refugees, Long Before Trump Read It (G.)

It has become an article of faith among liberals that Donald Trump is the world’s biggest enemy to refugees and Muslims, while the EU somehow offers them a safe harbour. After all, with the words “We can do it” Angela Merkel invited a million Syrian refugees into Germany, while Trump’s travel ban has slammed shut America’s door to some of the world’s most vulnerable displaced people. In today’s liberal mindset, it is Brexit that has stirred up hostility against migrants, while the EU is a bulwark of civilised values, protecting refugees from the threat of a resurgent far right. If you were a migrant in a leaking boat approaching Lesbos, however, the treatment you would receive from Frontex, the EU’s border patrol, would be no less hostile than anything Trump could inflict.

In Tunis last week a video showed Tunisian border police whipping cowering migrants from elsewhere in north Africa. This brutality was EU-sponsored. Like Libya, Morocco, Turkey and Egypt, Tunisia receives funding and training from Brussels through the European neighbourhood policy (ENP). Under a broader framework of “development” and “reforms”, these ENP countries serve as a buffer zone, making sure that refugees are intercepted and turned back – or, in Libya, locked up and tortured in refugees’ prisons – before these desperate people can reach the EU’s shores. The idea that the Europe of Merkel and Theresa May is more welcoming to refugees than Trump’s America simply isn’t borne out by the facts. The EU’s deal with Turkey, condemned by humanitarian agencies, ensures that refugees arriving in Greece – regardless of their point of departure – will be sent to Turkey.

Turkey now has the largest refugee population in the world, at about 3 million people. This month Britain reneged on its promise to admit 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees. Concerned that the Balkan route is a weak link into Europe, Austria has mobilised aspiring EU members including Macedonia, Serbia and Kosovo into a Balkan frontier defence project to fortify the refugee entry points of the “Balkan corridor”. Last year Macedonian police used tear gas, grenades and stun guns against Iraqis and Syrians attempting to get through a razor-wire fence and into the country.

Read more …

“..traffickers came and removed the engine from the boat and left the craft adrift..”

Bodies Of At Least 74 Migrants Wash Ashore In Western Libya (G.)

The bodies of at least 74 people, believed to be migrants, have washed ashore on the Libyan coast in the latest tragedy at sea for people fleeing to Europe to escape war and poverty. The Libyan Red Crescent said on Tuesday the bodies had been found the previous morning on the coast of the city of Zawiya, and aid workers had spent six hours recovering them, with more dead believed to be in the vicinity. A spokesman for the organisation, Mohammed al-Misrati, told the Associated Press that a torn rubber boat was found nearby and it was likely that more migrants had drowned in the incident, as such vessels usually carry about 120 people.

The Zawiya coastguard later posted a video that showed the migrants’ boat with no engine. Joel Millman, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), told Reuters a local staff member had reported that “traffickers came and removed the engine from the boat and left the craft adrift”. “This is not a only horrible number of deaths in one incident but it strikes us as something that we haven’t really seen much of, which is either deliberate punishment or murder of migrants,” Millman said.

Read more …

 

 

Home Forums Debt Rattle February 22 2017

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #32768

    DPC Launch of battleship Georgia, Bath, Maine, Oct 1904   • Finance as Warfare: IMF Lent to Greece Knowing It Could Never Pay Back (CP) • Will EU
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle February 22 2017]

    #32770
    John Day
    Participant

    “We should do our very best to train people for the jobs of the future,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at Davos.

    That would be some subsistence farming close to your cooking area, and any other skill you can market a bit of in the collapsed “salvage-economy”.
    https://www.johndayblog.com/2016/07/liberty-garden-central-texas-climate.html

    #32772
    Nassim
    Participant

    “The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You (Wired)”

    Yes, Wired is a real source of wisdom to silicon-heads

    Thanks El Niño, But California’s Drought Is Probably Forever

    I can’t help thinking that it is Wired that suffers from Cognitive Bias. 🙂

    #32775
    TonyPrep
    Participant

    “I cannot imagine 50% of the French are crazy enough to vote for her,”

    Hah! I guess that’s what many said of Trump. He didn’t get 50% of the vote but he didn’t need that under their system. This is beginning to sound like the serious denial we saw in the US, where the unimaginable actually happened.

    #32785
    Dr. Diablo
    Participant

    In both cases, the most predictible outcome ever. I still can’t figure out what tower pundits are locked in that they don’t see it coming.

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.